IF OUR MINDS are merely the product of brain chemistry, our ideas merely a side-effect of chemical and physiological structures physically present in our brains then that means the brain must build those structures to produce our every conscious thought. That is the essence of the "brain-only" materialist model of the mind in all of its epic naivety. The old saying that the unexamined life isn't worth living is certainly manifested in the unexamined assumptions of the materialist ideology and in no area is it worth less than in the materialist-atheist-scientistic ideological assertion of what minds and consciousness must be in order to fit into the confines of their belief that there is nothing but the material universe. That's as true of quaint 18th and 19th century atheist-materialist ideology as it is the superficially updated version of that in "physicalism." Or as some MAS true-believers would have it, "naturalism."
As I pointed out in response to Jeffrey Kaplan's praise for the letter of Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia's supposed knee capping of Descarte's perhaps naive dualistic theory that separates mind and body, her widely accepted and praised question carries with it the question begging of insisting that the mind would have to somehow move the body, the brain and nervous system and the entire body in exactly the way the physical objects physically move other objects. It insists that the mind would have to be limited to having exactly and only the same qualities and capabilities that physical objects do. It insists, from the start that the proposed non-physical mind would have to be exactly the same thing as a physical object is as it is studied by physics or, perhaps, as science developed, chemistry or electromagnetism and, for the love of Mike, those humanly invented imitators of what they are then turned around and proposed to be a model for, computers. Holding the inability of those who hold with a non-material mind to physically describe how it could move the body over the assertion as if that inability to explain something was proof of the falseness of the idea. If that's true then it's pretty much a capitulation which will invalidate science, mathematics and even logic.
But materialism is notably incapable of producing a purely physical model of the mind that has much of any power of explanation or any durability as a uniformly recognized entity. It cannot account for even more basic aspects of the experience of consciousness, thinking, perceiving or even the mental modeling that is the most basic act of science and of materialist, atheist, scientism. Materialists are far more apt to create the most absurd theories that they push within psychology, evo-psy, sociology, anthropology, cog and neuro-sci and in the popular so-called understanding of science culminating in the epic absurdity of eliminative positivism which claims that consciousness doesn't exist, that it is a delusion, that we merely think we're thinking. It's not really any intellectual advance on the way cults work. I knew an old lady who in her late eighties was brought to an EST (remember EST?) seminar by her well meaning but cult influenced granddaughter. She was asked what she thought of it by the one conducting the seminar, as an unusually old person to get attracted to the cult, she must have stood out. She said she didn't understand the purpose of it. "To find real happiness," she was told. She said she felt perfectly happy as it was. The answer to that was "You only think you're happy." To which she asked what was the difference between feeling you were happy and being happy. Her granddaughter didn't stay with it for much longer after that.
Several years ago, while I was wasting too much time brawling with the rump of the new atheist fad of the 00's I got into a fight over these issues. I have written several times about coming to something of a breakthrough moment on a secular, anti-Christian, anti-religious "anti-woo" blog when one of the ol' hard livin' hard-drinkin' barroom style atheists declared one afternoon that "science proves that free will is bunk." That was something I realized I'd heard in such venues before. Which I then immediately saw as a problem for virtually every political assertion made on even the degraded "left" of secularism, secular liberal democracy, and was certainly fatal to any assertions that any claim of freedom or even rights such as which were the alleged purpose of the blog and, really, the entire American and Western "left". Once you're convinced you're a "lumbering robot" as their then darling, Richard Dawkins so infamously put it, then what's the difference if you're controlled by a dictator or your selfish genes? Materialism is almost a guarantee of the eventual demise of democracy, it's no shock that you could remain respectable on the American secular left while being, in order, OK with Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc. and briefly (on the command of Stalin, even switched to wanting to do business with Hitler). And so many of those who weren't fanboys and gals of Stalin were huge fans of the equally putrid Trotsky. The Trots were infamous for, after Stalinists gave him the ice axe and he couldn't gain power, making the switch to capitalist fascism. That other darlin' of the new atheists of the 00's Christopher Hitchens maybe the last actual known Trot to take that profitable baby-step of shame before his boozing likely caught up with him.
I think that happened about 2004. I know I was writing about having had that experience in 2006. It was one of the key moments that set off my rapidly developing apostasy from the secular left and the ideologies of secularism and had the far from typically expected effect of driving me into something far more radical than I started off that decade with. That's what happens when you base your thinking on the Gospel, The Epistles, The Law and the Prophets instead of materialism.
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When I was still interacting with that bunch here, I posed some questions about the "brain-only" brainles
sness by asking about the origin of a new idea which an individual "brain" had never contained before. I asked:
How would a brain know it needed to make a new structure to be the physical basis of that specific, new idea? If that structure were not already present in the brain then there would be no possible representation, under their ideology, of the idea for the brain to be informed by.
How would a brain know what it needed to make to be the physical structure of that specific idea without that idea being present in the brain so as to inform it of what it needed to make?
How would it know how to make that specific structure before that idea could possibly, under the materialist "brain-only" ideology, be present in the epiphenominal mind because such a structure was not present in the brain to produce it?
How would the brain know that it had produced the correct structure to lead to the right idea since it would only have with it produced there which could only possibly be the "right" idea on a vanishingly unlikely chance basis? Brains, under that model, produce all kinds of ideas, those held to be "right" and those held to be "wrong." Once a wrong idea had a physical substrate in the brain whereas THE right one wouldn't, how would it be able to discern that the "wrong" idea was wrong?
I noted that such an apparatus to be at all credible it would have to specifically answer those questions and it would have to happen fast enough to account for the incredibly rapid and incredibly accurate huge number of novel thoughts we have in even our day-to-day life, probably dozens if not hundreds of them before we've been awake for even one hour, that would allow people to navigate their bodies, their vehicles, etc. in the world without us dying rather fast. I noted that "trial and error" would have to be so fast that it couldn't possibly be involved in most of the most consequential novel ideas - a car coming at you which you didn't notice before as you walk to work, for example - before the consequences killed you.
The few materialists who took up the challenge came up with exactly what I figured they would and in the process I learned that while claiming to reject God atheists elevated any number of quite mundane things to have exactly the same role of God or gods or spirits which they despise with their entire being.
One of the stupidest of the college-credentialed materialists' explanation was "DNA" which was said as if by rote with no explanation. Which I pointed out only produces proteins and it doesn't really produce proteins but is merely part of an elaborate and time consuming process of protein production within cells. Protein folding into a biologically active form, only one of the things that would take up too many minutes to account for the experience of consciousness. I could ask how, if that was their answer, "DNA" could surmount those questions any better than their "brain-only" brains could. They'd merely dodged the question by elevating DNA into a creator god, as a substitute for the material brain.
They resorted to another of the gods of materialist, atheist, scientism, "natural selection" which was even more inept. Natural selection, along with DNA would have to be omniscient in order to create physical structures to act as a proposed substrate which would produce the myriads of novel ideas humans continually have. Some of our ideas are certainly unprecedented in the history of life on Earth. How did "natural selection" which is proposed to have such a limited area of activity come up with those things and how does it act to produce those novel physical structures in brains? At one point I listed a large number of such ideas, both those with rather obvious factual substance and those of absolutely no evidenced reality, which natural selection would have to miraculously produce when all it's alleged to be is an undefined and mysterious mechanism that selects out novel biological features so as to allow others to produce more offspring.
I learned from that that the ideologically required dogma of natural selection is held onto like a chicken-wire and terry-cloth surrogate mommy by materialists when someone's posing of "the hard question" gets too hard for them. Since then I've come to believe it is one of the worst ideas anyone has ever come up with which gained such universal acceptance, even many of the creationists who totally reject evolution, nevertheless, hold with some vulgar or more vulgarly developed form of natural selection. It is the economic ideology of the Republican-fascist right.
Then there were those who favored a computer as the model of how the brain worked. Which was perhaps even stupider since all a computer is is a humanly made model which is supposed to imitate -albeit far more rapidly- some of the more basic activities of human minds. That to mistake a metaphor - which computing is- for the thing it imitated was especially naive and incompetent. It's only slightly less naive than a very young child believing their teddy bear was conscious. I was also able to point out that in order for computers to do anything at all human beings had to have the ideas to make them do it in the first place and that they were notably prone to breaking down in ways that human minds didn't often do. Unless, peehaps wedded too strongly to an ideology as inept as materialist, atheist, scientism.
Those questions I posed are not frivolous if you want to get into the business of creating a materialistic model of minds. If you can't answer them with your proposed mechanism, it simply doesn't work and is only considered credible by chumps and true-believers who believed it or its motivating ideology to start with. I think elminative positivism is a product of the true believers in materialism such as Dennett and that weird Churchland couple who can't give it up when it becomes obvious that even a modestly functioning mind such as theirs can't be made to account by its few and simple ideological claims for reducing reality (only knowable as it can be to our minds) to their material ground of being. That such nonsense has reigned in academia for so long is proof that we have been brought by materialism into a period far more decadent than almost any that preceded the modern period.
As I've mentioned before, the 1976 statement of the Sociobiology Study Group, which included many a secular materialist, got it right when they noted that Sociobiology and Evolutionary Psychology would lead to a resurgence of the crudest and most dangerous forms of biological determinism and eugenics, the subsequent forty-seven years have proved they got at least that right. Though eugenics was certainly not entirely dependent on those two theoretical scaffolds, it had been resurgent in Neo-Darwinist biology, among prominent scientists, all along.
It is matched in quotidian secularism by the resurgence of biological racism, eugenics, assertions of inequality and supremacy, fascist political activities, and a whole host of other fungi of decay that feeds on the rotting body of brain-dead brain-only materialism. If its putrescence merely matches that of religion which is wedded to worldly power it will as certainly have discredited materialist, atheist, scientism as it does that kind of religiosity. I think in things like eliminative positivism and the claim that "science proves free will is bunk," it has surpassed even some of the most corrupt predestinarian cults in modern period "Christianity" and some of the worst sects of Eastern religions. I think whenever you include even the academic stratification of worth in defiance of a moral obligation to consider all of us as equal, you can even count on the putative virtue of education to reinforce those, no matter what else they may teach. Look at what the Ivies, the may-as-well-be ivies and the other factories of DeSantises, Cruzes, Hawlies, etc. turn out. I've come to consider academia as being pretty much all-in on the decadence as any other institution, these days.
It is certainly far worse than believing we are morally obligated to do to others as we want done to us and "by their fruits you will know them." I think that last one is an especially effective means of knowing the truth, the truth alone being what will make us free, that is if we include the other rule of life just mentioned.