Hate Mail - Your Faith Is Not Hanging By A Thread That Thread Snapped A Long Time Ago

One of the materialist arguments against old-fashioned dualism was the question of how a non-material mind would have an effect on a physical object - the now quaint idea of the body as an object - if the mind was not material.

Though it has had the satisfied acceptance of many materialists for a few centuries, now, the materialist debunking of a non-material mind rested in the illogical expectation that a non-material mind would, necessarily, be limited to the kinds of interactions that are observed in physical objects. But any non-physical entity would not rationally be expected to be limited by those observable kinds of interactions.  The characteristics that define physicality would not logically be assumed to limit the realm of the non-physical.  If those physical characteristics were to limit  a non-physical realm then it wouldn't be non-physical, it would be, by any rational definition, physical.   So the materialist rejection of the classical definition of mind-body dualism is based in a naive, self-serving and irrational and deficient analysis of the problem.  I find a lot of atheist argument rests in the self-serving creation of a deficient definition for the entities they want to make go away.   It would seem to be a defining habit of atheism.

But the materialists' framing of that problem also comes back to haunt their "brain-only" model of minds because it would be impossible without a powerfully effective non-material entity, the information that is contained in ideas.   As posed in my challenge, under their "brain-only" model. the creation of ideas and, ultimately, the content of our minds, would have to be motivated by non-physical information contained in ideas which cause the brain to create physical structures in which that information resides within the brain.  And that's not only true for one or a few ideas considered in thinking about the implications of their "brain-only" model, but for, literally, every single idea, every fleeting thought, every discarded, idea, every modification in every nuance, conscious and not articulated, which exists in our experience.   All of them would have to be motivated by non-physical information, that is, especially, true of highly abstract ideas and ideas which we cannot experience through observation.   Considerations of things such as the hidden structures of objects and the implied connections and ordering of events are not products of observation but are the creation of non-physical ideation.  The idea would have to be what informs and motivates the brain to create a physical structure, at all of its levels, and the idea, itself, couldn't do that if it were a physical entity because it couldn't exist in the brain before the brain made it.

I doubt that the old mind-body model is accurate, I think it's probably too simple and too naive but it is not as simplistic and naive - not to mention self-serving -  as the materialist model of minds.