Flack is still coming in over my contention that in order for a "brain only" materialist model of minds to work that some kind of extrasensory perception would have to be part of it. Such a thing could not be material in any conventional sense of the word, certainly not in the crude, outdated concept of materialism that is the substance of such "brain only" brainlessness.
The contention of materialists is that our minds, our ideas, even our cultures and ideologies exist as material structures, either in tissues or in some vaguely asserted imaginary equivalent of random access memory.*
In order for those physical ideas to exist in our brains they would have to be made within our brains by biological action, every idea that is in it would have to be created or recreated where it had never been before.
I will repeat that last point because it is where the materialist model falls apart. In order for us to have an idea in our mind, "in our brain", it would have to be manufactured where it never had been before. Our brain chemistry would have to create the idea with total accuracy, it would have to know how to begin that process and perform some extremely complex construction of a very specific nature.
And, since the idea it was creating wasn't physically inside of our head, anywhere before that happened, it would have to start in the right way without any idea of how to start doing that since the idea wasn't present as a physical entity before it started making the idea.
In order for our brain to do that it would need the idea to already be there as a model, a blueprint or some form of information before, under the materialist model, the idea existed as a physical structure in the brain. Without that, there would be no way for the brain to know what kind of idea-structure, out of the vastly varied possible kinds of such structures to BEGIN making so as to end up with it being the right idea. That would be true even if you propose a "trial and error" process because the first idea in that series would have to be compared to something to judge its status as a good structure or one that still needs work.
The idea that our brains can engineer any kind of idea relevant to an external reality without it existing in our brains already is, clearly, absurd. We can't even use them to make the simplest things in real life, far less complex than the "brain only" guys propose are made by physical processes in our brains, without those ideas already being "in there".
The metaphor of making things for thinking misleads the people who make up such models. For one thing they don't take into account the speed with which ideas come into our head. If an idea is a specific physical structure then every variation of every idea would have to have its own unique physical form which would be different from every tiny variation of similar ideas. The alpha model would be quite different from the beta and within I'd guess two minutes, most of us manipulating a thought would run out of Greek letters to name those variations, there probably aren't enough characters in any language to name them. And it happens with such speed and with other things going on in our minds at the same time that I doubt anyone could come up with any kind of an adequate description of the process.
And it all happens in real time, lightning speed compared to the imaginary speed of materialist descriptions of thinking. I don't know how fast materialists think but what they're talking about isn't how it works in my experience.
So, you sciency materialists would seem to have to include some kind of direct, nonmaterial and, most deliciously of all, psychic ability to be present that would put the idea in our minds so our brains would know how to construct the physical existence of every idea we have. What you propose would require precognition in the most literal meaning of that word, it would have to be known before it could be known. It would require a far more powerful psychic ability than any scientific researcher in that topic has ever postulated in my reading, and it would have to be constantly and accurately working. I don't think the most extravagant claims of stage mentalists could suffice to account for even the most banal mind, not to mention those of greater ability.
I would welcome anyone who can tell me how the "brain only" model could work any other way.
* In order for them to persist I don't think the materialists can possibly avoid having to turn them into flesh at some point. I doubt our brains are like computers that never get turned off. Memories persist in the minds of people whose brain activity has ceased during certain forms of surgery or in comas. I don't think the computer model of human minds works at all.
Update: "The ideas are introduced into the brain through the senses."
Ah, no. What you're proposing is analogous to how a photographic negative is made, in that case the image isn't manufactured in the camera, it's in the camera, projected onto the photographic film in order to cause a chemical reaction. The film doesn't recreate the image, the image causes a reaction in the chemicals on the film. One square centimeter of the image doesn't have anything to do with any other square centimeter of the image, they could be entirely different than they are and the image would still be an image. The image isn't integrated in the way that what we might consider "parts" of an idea are. Ideas are integrated, any "parts" are dependent on other "parts" or it is a different idea. And the ideas are not merely direct expressions of sensory experiences, they wouldn't function in the ways ideas do, being modified both as an idea and in relating them with other ideas.
Update 2: Without the idea present in the "brain only" brain to start with, what would motivate the brain to construct the idea? What would start the process of construction of proteins, other structures or "circuit pathways" (whatever that's supposed to mean) if the idea wasn't already there to motivate it? I don't see any way to conclude that a physical basis for ideas can be sustained because of the impossibility of the idea to be there before the physical structure alleged to be its basis was created.
This question of epistemology is as old as Plato, and there's a reason we've never really gotten around it.
ReplyDeleteA reason you've put your finger on.
Plato reasoned that we know too much from birth to have learned it all from mere experience/exposure to stimuli. His example was the slave never taught mathematics (by law) who understood the principles of geometry. How is that possible? Well, as you say, unless it comes from biology, where did it come from? And so Plato posited the soul which loses at least conscious memory of this knowledge, only to recover it in living, and recovering enough such "true" knowledge (a la Socrates) returns to the "Good."
That's as brief as I can put it. Locke tried to challenge this with the "tabula rasa," the 18th century version of "software." Central problem still stood: what wrote on this blank slate, what did it write with, and what language did it use?
Modern linguistics argues that we acquire language (we can't be born speaking Mandarin and English and Spanish and Tagalog, etc., and just lose all but one of 'em) through a "Language Acquisition Device" in the brain. A magic box, in other words.
All explanations, even Plato's, still resort to magic, in other words. And frankly, in several thousand years, we're still writing footnotes to Plato; whether we realize it, or not.
I'd thought of Plato's questioning the slave boy - typical aristocratic arrogance being necessary for anyone to buy his assertion - but the materialists aren't good with anything with even that level of contextual complexity. Though they can more than match Plato for arrogance.
ReplyDeleteI would be interested in what someone who isn't a materialist who looks into these things would say about this idea. Rupert Sheldrake's hypothesis of morphic resonance would work better than the crude materialism of a Pinker or a Blackmore or even the almost as crude materialism of neuro-sci. But Sheldrake isn't a materialist and he's got no problem with telepathy, having demonstrated it in some rather ingenious and published experiments. Though not of the strength demanded by the crude materialist model of "brain only". We can come up with highly accurate ideas at a far higher rate than could be accounted for by those studies, statistically and probabilistically impressive as they are.
Regarding your update: so an "idea" has a separate corporal existence which the senses can perceive and understand?
ReplyDeleteReally? Because if that were true, it would make teaching, of any kind, a whole lot easier. Learning, too.
That it doesn't work that way, that ideas are not "things" perceptible to the senses and taken in as such, is so obvious as to make repudiation of the assertions unnecessary.
I think one of the habits of thought of these materialists is that they want there to be some level at which we just ignore that ideas are ideas and, according to their ideological claims, those ideas wouldn't have to be made by our brains. That's where the proposed "trial and error" method of making ideas falls apart. There would have to be some idea to compare what your brain makes as a trial idea in order to judge it and that idea for comparison would have to be the same idea as the brain was trying to make.
ReplyDeleteSomeone once said materialism comes down to give me one miracle, the Big Bang in the current thinking, and I'll explain everything else. I think it has to work that way with materialism on a clunky erector set model of that kind and that model doesn't work very well at all. I don't think the formation of proteins and tissues work like that, they don't even work like modeling clay. Even that kind of analogy, like natural selection, takes generations not the fractions of seconds that it takes for new ideas to come to you and for you to start working on them. Even every new application of an idea is a modification of the idea and would require its own physical form under materialism.
Chomsky, no spiritualist he, posited the "LAD" (Language Acquisition Device) because it was the only way to explain how children could grasp the language they were born into so quickly. It's a magic black box that allows children to grasp the grammar of their parent's tongue within a remarkably short time just by listening.
ReplyDeleteA perfect example of a Chomsky-ite locution was my daughter's phrase "I'm full of hands." She meant her hands were full, she couldn't pick up anything else. Her usage was not wrong, but it wasn't something she'd heard, either; it was her own invention, the very type Chomsky says children use as they learn the "correct" usage of language. There's nothing grammatically wrong with my daughter's phrase, but it's not idiomatically correct. Indeed, she sounds more like a non-native speaker than anything else; well, in that instance, anyway.
LAD is the only possible explanation for how children learn something as complex as a language within so short a time just by listening. It's basically Platonism for language: we have an innate grammar which allows us to grasp language in whatever form it comes, an ability which obviously disappears for most of us as we age (especially if most of us are Americans; I know many Europeans who learned English as adults and speak it as well as I do; why I can't learn their language as efficiently seems to be a matter of expectation, not innate ability).
The point is, there is simply too much to learn so rapidly. The tabula rasa is appealing from an ideological point of view, but it explains nothing, and even Chomsky implicitly rejects it. So what is this biology which makes language as innate as breathing and learning by observation (the primary way children learn, until formal education takes over)?
Why, indeed, do we innately learn by observation? And how? Again, what writes on the tablet, in what medium, and most importantly, in what language? When telepathy was a popular topic in science fiction half a century ago, the popular explanation was that "thought" was somehow universal, not in language at all, so one who could project their thoughts would "speak" in some universal tongue.
It's all bosh, of course, because we can't imagine thought without language. We can think outside language (Godel's theorem is a rough and ready explanation here), as artists in the plastic arts do, or musicians/composers. But can we think without language?
And where does language come from? How is it mere meat can acquire something so complex and abstract so easily?