Friday, July 5, 2013

Friday Night Fun From A Current Fight

You have proposed a materailistic, "brain only" model of consciousness, in which consciousness is an epiphenomeon of chemistry and physics present in the brain, entirely dependent for its existence and content on that chemistry and physics.

But, if that's the case, then materialism doesn't exist as a coherent entity.  In order for any of what you said to be more than an ephemeral illusion, your brain would have to maintain a constantly identical chemical and physical identity, the chemistry and the state it is in, held in a constant state of stasis.  Any change in that would produce a different "materialism".  For materialism or atheism or any holding of science to exist as a coherent concept, an impossible, static brain would have to contain them and for more than one "brain-only" brain to contain the same idea, they would have to maintain exactly the same conditions in the same state of stasis.

But, a static chemistry and physical state would mean that brain was dead.  Dead, dead, dead.  Even one "brain-only" brain would be unable to maintain its peculiar materialism because a living brain is constantly in flux.  Your materialism that you began reading this comment with would be a different materialism now.  The materialism you began this sentence with is a different materialism than what you have now.  And, wait, it just changed again.  How long does one of your constantly changing materialisms have to last to have an actual existence when it changes constantly?  How long does it have to exist to have a coherent existence?  How long does that materialism last before it changes into the next materialism?  What are the chances that the exact, same conditions that produce one of them will ever exist again?  Brains are rather large and complex entities, constantly changing.   How can you talk about materialism if, at any point in time, the materialism you are talking about will never be present in your mind and, very likely, the universe ever again?  And which of those vast numbers of materialisms is the real, true one?   If they are all true, how can that be?  In order for your materialism to merely exist, it would have to transcend the physical and temporal boundaries that you set for its possible existence.  And I haven't even brought up the impossibility of assigning the quality of being a better idea than any other product of a peculiar brain chemistry and physics.  How can materialism, your preferred ideology, be better than any other product of a specific chemistry.

You love to fall back on natural selection, well, natural selection would have produced the brain and its chemistry that produced Biblical fundamentalism, and for natural selection to be relevant, it would have to produce a greater number of more successful offspring to be a successful adaptation.  By your own ideological position, the repulsive "quiversfull" cult would almost certainly be biologically superior to atheism -atheists generally produce fewer children and atheists die younger.   So, your ideology is a failure all round.

Now, that was fun.  Your turn.

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