Ten Years And Not An Answer To These Ideology Obliterating Questions - A late summer rerun with a bit of editing.

I'm posting another summer rerun which has an interesting comment thread on it.  It's been ten years since I challenged the materialists to answer these questions which,  I hold even more so today,  defeat their materialist-atheist ideology.   

Note that you can find the blog brawl that this caused at the link, I think it's worth reading through.   "Tlaz" was and maybe still is one of the Eschaton blog rats,  she never engaged honestly in any argument I ever had with her and didn't risk coming here unlike a couple of her buddies.   I often brawled with "JR" who also went by the name "Freki" and unlike most of them,  I actually had some respect for her intelligence, though not always her honesty.  "Skeptic tank" was and, for all I know, is still an ass.  One who apparently had a career in university-based science. 

Materialism in any form I've thought out can't account for our most basic and secure of experiences, our own experience of our own conscious existence.   Without an answer to these questions,  their materialist basis of consciousness just simply can't work.   I will note that this is also a problem for most of the so-called sciences that allegedly deal with minds, individually, in groups and in societies, because science can only deal with such things as material objects and that simply doesn't work.  

If any materialist-atheist of the scientistic kind wants to take on those questions posed here, for about the nineth month running that year,  try your best.  I deal with a couple of the more intelligent - well "JR" was more intelligent than your average blog-rat atheist "Skeptic-Tank" wasn't - which only shows that they inserted words and not ideas into the discussion.  The claim that "DNA" or "natural selection" was an answer to it is exactly the kind of thing that I'm familiar with in your typical atheist discourse but, as you present the problem with it - it only forces the observation that all they've done is take the problem it is for "brain-only" models of consciousness and handed it over to the even less obviously capable "DNA" or "natural selection" without answering the questions.   I've found that that is not only typical of blog-atheists, it's typical of materialist ideology universally.   

Maybe you'll find it as fun as I did to re-read this. 

Friday, September 18, 2015

An Open Challenge To Materialists Since April And Counting

All ideas are preceded by mind; they have mind as their chief; they are mind-made. If one speaks or acts with an evil mind, pain follows him just as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the cart.

Dharmapada, verse 1.1 

I am pretty tired and won't be writing anything new today. [Note from 2025, it was allergy season then, too.]  I will, though, remind everyone of my open challenge for materialists, the "brain-only" type to clear up a problem with their model of the mind as the epiphenomenon of physical structures in the brain, the "real" things, physical objects and structures that are the ideas our minds contain and work with.  

If that is the case:

- How does it know it needs to make a new physical structure to BE the basis of a new idea? 

- How does the brain know what to make for a new idea before that idea exists in the brain to tell it what to make?   

- How does it know how to make the physical embodiment of just the right idea without that idea already being in our head?  

- How does it know it has made the right idea or, if it makes the wrong structure to be that idea?

- How does it know that that idea, which is, then, in the brain is the wrong idea since the "right idea" isn't in there but the wrong one is? 

All that is at stake in this is the entire edifice of materialism because it it can't account for our minds it has to fall.  For materialism, and with it almost all of what most people hold as atheism, to stand they have to explain how our brains could do what they so obviously wouldn't know how to do if the "brain-only" model of the mind is real.  

The only mechanism I can think of that could save the "brain-only" model is for there to be some form of psychic information that could tell the brain what to make, since the idea isn't, physically in the brain.  But, then, the idea would be real in a non-physical form and that would, as well, invalidate materialism.  

Update:  If Her Coprophagous Highness, Tlaz, would like to answer the challenge I promise to post her attempt with commentary.   

When Thiel's Bitch Vance Is President He'll Be A Less Druggy Musk - Things We Need To Know

 

Tabloid Culture That Produced Trump As A New York City Phenomenon Was More Than Matched By What The Cabloids Did To The US

But Hollywood is what sold us America's Hitler. 

STILL ILL so here is another video I watched which was enlightening in a totally different way from the last one posted.  Of all the Youtube Legal AF programs, I prefer the one with Sean Wilentz and Sidney Blumenthal.  It didn't occur to me till this morning that that could be because of all of them, they're not lawyers.  

This discussion with Jonathan Mahler about how New York City in the 70s to today produced Donald Trump is full of reminders and the kind of insights that come from the honest study of history.   It was, in fact, the tabloid culture of New York, which I would say has to include the New York Times as well as the little papers, is what taught the crafty but vapid, sly but stupid and, most of all privileged straight, white, affluent Trump how to turn his criminal sleaze,  his real-estate wealth, into the kind of celebrity and power that became the stock in trade of not only that city but the national media which followed it into the cesspool that America has become largely due to the mass media.  

I do think that concentrating on the moribund ink on cheap paper media -which was admittedly important in the period and was the spear point in dragging us into the sewer - is a mistake because if that was important electronic media, hate-talk radio and cabloid news - which were also getting going in the biggest way at the same time - has been far far more important.   

The time period that they concentrate on, from about 1980 on, is notably the exact same period that produced several phenomena, most notably the Hollywood B list actor Ronald Reagan's presidency.   It should not be forgotten that his presidency, following on the Nixon-Ford presidency with the relatively clean Jimmy Carter presidency as a brief intermission produced what was, till Bush II and Trump the most criminal administration in American history with the most members of it convicted of felonies while in office.    Like Trump as a politician,  Trump is a product of the American free press,  certainly the entertainment division of it but also the "news" division of it.   Trump is a media phenomenon far more so than he is a product of the organized-crime saturated NYC real estate world.   And as such he is a direct product of the libertarian Supreme Court rulings flowing from the Warren Court's disastrous interpretation of the First Amendment.  

I think the location of the media that produced Trump as a political figure being located in New York City is largely incidental to his national presence,  though it's certain that a figure like Trump in most other cities would never have gotten the attention from that media as he got as a product of that stupendously corrupt, celebrity and pop-kulcha infested city.   Trump as a national figure is far, far more due to Hollywood than he is New York.   And most of all he is a product of the fact that our indigenous form of fascism,  white supremacy, was also ascendant at the same time.   

Stacey Abrams, in that last video I posted,  mentioned the role that "white evangelicals" played in the destruction of Jimmy Carter's administration,  certainly meaning the Arlington Virginia based Jerry Falwell and the other racially motivated TV hallelujah peddlers who the media also started promoting as "Christianity" largely through cable TV in the same period.  And,  I will say as a positive fact, for largely the same reason,  that they were a useful weapon to destroy a Democratic president and attack any Democrats who endangered their owners wealth.    That was certainly something taken up by the NYC based media but it didn't start there.   They used "reborn Christians" to bring down probably the most Christian president in American history in favor of the adulterous, divorced, remarried, and corrupt Reagan.   The combination has given us today what would once have been considered a bizarre phenomenon of "white evangelicals" supporting the very thing that they were alleged to oppose the most,  a sex criminal,  Antichrist,  given to serial blasphemy and self-worship, a crook and cheat, someone who has repeatedly and publicly broken every single commandment,  including murder, now.   And someone who has done in the most extreme possible way what the very same white-supremacist "evangelicals" railed about for generations,  sending federal troops in to take over against the objections of state and local governments.  In every way Trump exposes both the "trad-Catholics" (I won't go into that here) and the Protestant "white-evangelicals" as pseudo-Christianity,  but what the media has promoted as being "Christianity" for the past half century - I say due largely to the real thing being no more congenial to their wealth than the presidency of the moderate Democrat Jimmy Carter was. 

I think the areligious media culture of the US, many of its major figures certainly hostile to Christianity has made common cause with "evangelical" Antichristianity and it was certainly helped along in the effects that has had in American life and politics by those on the alleged left who shared the media figures' disdain for religion with an overt hatred of Christianity.  The role that the American "left" has played in the rise of Republican-fascists - never forget the role the Green Party and Ralph Nader played in the election of Bush II and Trump I and others in the sandbagging of Biden - is a minor but important part in this.  The American left - largely college credentialed in its most public face - has been incredibly stupid, that is if what they claim to want in government is what they actually find most important.  And I doubt that they do, certainly not as compared to their self-satisfying conceit    They've got more in common with Trump than they'd ever want to contemplate of have a thought criminal bring up. 

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Someone asked what I was sick with.  It's allergy season, goldenrod and ragweed, etc. I always get a bad cold during allergy season and I don't work as well through it as I used to.   So, sorry, nothing fatal except being over 70.  Which is fatal enough to be getting on with. 

Keep Getting Sick This Year - This Made Me Feel Better This Morning

Hadn't known that Stacey Abrams has a podcast.   I listened to the one posted three days ago and it faces the hard issues we're facing but her conversation with Bishop William Barber and Fr Greg Boyle feels like a health tonic.  I'm a subscriber now. 

Christian nationalism is an extremist, anti-democratic ideology rooted in the belief that the United States should be a nation for Christians to the exclusion of all others. In modern times, the Trump administration and its Republican allies have wielded this ideology as a weapon to divide Americans and implement an agenda via plans like the infamous Project 2025 that eviscerates the rights of immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community, questions the rights of women to vote, restores a freedom to discriminate against others and targets reproductive rights. This week, in response to a listener question asking what Christian nationalism has to do with the central tenets of Christianity, Stacey shares her own experience as a progressive, democratic Christian, pulling back the curtain on a core truth: the malice and hatred preached by right-wing religious leaders who shape our politics has nothing to do with Jesus’s actual teachings. She’s joined by Bishop William Barber, president of Repairers of the Breach, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, and professor at Yale Divinity School and Father Greg Boyle, Jesuit priest, founder of Homeboy Industries, and author. Together, they break down the threat Christian nationalism poses to democracy and show how faith, at its best, can be a powerful force for justice and progress. This inspiring conversation has so much to offer all our listeners, whether they come from a Christian background, some other faith background, or no faith at all.