The other day my friend, RMJ, at his fine blog, Adventus, noted the superstition flowing from the materialist "brain only" dogmas about human minds and intelligence. That it will be possible to "download" human minds into computers and, in the most absurd and brainless assertions of the idea, that "we" can assume immortality as computer programs, or something is a firmly believed in given among the sci-rangers these days. The idea has many problems of basic illogic and rests on the wildest of baseless assumptions about our brains being like computers, an idea which is one of the worst misunderstandings of metaphor ever committed by even genius level scientific inventors such as Ray Kurzweil.*
I have pointed out the problem of scientists and others not understanding that computers, including computer programs, are based on a human model of human minds and a very sketchy, abstract definition of what is taken to be an adequate representation of what "thinking" "knowledge" and "information" and their various uses are. They are all metaphors, not even close reproductions of those, though frequently mistaken as something more. Yet people who consider themselves quintessential examples of sophisticated thinking then think the metaphor of human minds can tell us things about the real minds they are a metaphor for. It's equivalent to basing the study of the internal anatomy of birds on pictures of imaginary birds or the behavior of bears on teddy bears. Only, when it comes to human minds and it's in service to materialist ideology, it's allowed and the pretense that it's science, encouraged.
But, even if they don't want to pretend that computers are the equivalent of human minds, there are huge problems of trying to turn our minds into material objects. I've dealt with the frequently and ignorantly made claim that minds and thoughts arise from our DNA, claimed as a product of natural selection, in a previous post, doubting that the action of constructing proteins happens fast enough for it to be involved in creating our thoughts. It just simply doesn't happen fast enough, with the flexibility in variation that would be required for it to happen. Each and every one of our thoughts, including those which have nothing to do with anything real in the universe, many of them unique for all time in the known universe, would have to have an accurately constructed molecule or physical structure that would be the physical origin of it. And those would have to be the product of an evolution which couldn't have possibly dealt with things like them. The assertion that the thoughts of modern people are the product of natural selection is the quintessential example of using that phrase like a magical talisman.
The greatest problem of insisting that our thinking is a material entity is that even if you want to insist that our ideas are like random access memory, based in a physical structure of electrical connections instead of proteins, is that, somehow, our minds would have had to construct exactly the correct pattern of connections or other structure BEFORE THE IDEA EXISTED IN THE SAME BRAIN MAKING THE IDEA. For our "brains" to construct exactly the right physical structure which would be the actual physical object that comprises a thought, it would have had to know what the results would be before it started constructing the physical structure that comprised the idea. Otherwise it would have no idea of what structure to make and it couldn't make the right structure to comprise the thought. The physical object which is our brain would have to have a psychic ability that is anathema to the very people who invented the materialist dogma of our minds as material objects. It would have to know what the correct object to make was and how to make just that object-idea before it began making it.
I think the dogma that our minds, our thoughts, our each and every idea, perception and observation of the external world and our internal thinking is a physical thing would face the same problem no matter what the claimed nature of that physical structure is. If every idea is a protein or a structure made of of proteins - what our DNA does** -, the formation of which is hardly instantaneous or the building of physical structures which would have to be of incredible precision and of effectively infinite variety and, also, absolutely accurate, our minds could only do that if they knew what they were making before it knew what they were making. And every single idea in the process of forming a final conclusion would have to have its own, absolutely accurate physical structure. There can be hundreds of attempts before coming up with the final result and a lot of those will persist in the memory even as they are discarded.
It should be insisted that materialists explain how our minds would know how to make exactly the right idea before it knew the idea which would be the thing it was making and how it would know how to make exactly the right physical structure before it contained the idea of what that was.
I don't think that the metaphor of our building things and our making things is a very useful metaphor for what happens in our thinking. We use the words and language of our making things to talk about what happens in our minds but I think the problems that leads to when we forget that our words are metaphors for something we really don't understand and we begin to make believe that those words actually explain it and by doing that they seriously mislead us. Which leads to problems, problems that you have to think about rather harder than is usually done to even notice them. The results ain't science.
* It's a shame that they don't require a critical reading of the myth of Pygmalion in computer science programs, emphasizing that it is a myth and that nothing short of divine intervention made his creation a real person in that story. Those guys who came up with such stories, who the fans of the idea of transhumanism would probably disdain as "ignorant iron age" goat herders, would seem to have that level of sophistication over our university trained geniuses, these days. Ovid put the story in a collection of some of the wildest tales of impossible transformations, more far fetched than anything I can think of this morning from the Hebrew scriptures. The nearest thing I can recall this morning is the relatively non-fantastic tale of Jacob's sheep and their markings. Our science informed geniuses don't seem to be able to negotiate the difference between science and make believe as well as those people their fan boys disdain.
** Actually, the role of DNA in the formation of physical structures in our bodies is hardly a solved problem. There are those who doubt that DNA plays much of a role in it other than generating the chains of amino acids that form into proteins.
Update: I talked about ideas having the status as "final conclusions" only out of convention, there is no actual thing as a "final conclusion" as even established ideas are constantly modified in applying them to different situations, exigencies and new experiences. The idea that we have "final conclusions" are something of a myth, a convention we resort to in order to pretend that ideas exist as discrete entities of a fixed and definite character, a cog in a machine of thinking, when they're nothing like that in real experience. The idea that even ideas as defined as laws of science mean the same thing to everyone thinking about it is problematic as disputes among the greatest of experts in the fields using them demonstrate. Even more so the vague and highly controversial "law" of natural selection, which so much of this assertion is based in. I'm rather convinced that the extent to which a scientist takes assertions about our minds as physical objects, the product of natural selection and, so, inevitably coded in our DNA is the extent to which they are demonstrating their lack of reflection on what it is they're asserting and, in some hard cases, an appalling lack of understanding of what DNA does and can do. [That wasn't the link I intended to provide, but it's such a good one I'll leave it in. This is the fine lecture I wanted to link to.]
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