The Breach In The Defense of The Foundations of Egalitarian Democracy

For anyone who wasn't reading my blog a couple of years back,  I made a year long challenge to atheist-materialists of the "brain only" type, the type who claim that all of our minds, our mental states, our ideas are the mere epiphenomena of physical structures made by and contained in our brains - either in the form of molecular codes, some kind of unspecified and specialized structure or some proposed analog to "neural circuitry" analogous to the voltage control in a computer -  to explain several things about how this was supposed to work in real real minds, in real time in the creation of new ideas.

My original challenge to their always vaguely defined physical structure models asked how BEFORE THE BRAIN HAD BUILT SUCH A STRUCTURE TO COMPRISE AN IDEA:

- The brain could know it needed to make a new idea.  Where did it get the idea that it needed to build a new idea before that idea was physically present in the brain. 

- How it would know what it needed to build TO BE that specific idea before the idea could exist in the brain.

- How it would know how to make what it needed to make before that idea was present in the brain. 

- How would it know that it had made the right "thing" to be that idea in the brain before that idea could be there to confirm it had done the right thing.

I pointed out that such a model would have to work in the real time that it is is known for such proposed solutions to that puzzle to work.  In the case where the phony proxy of an answer was "DNA" I said that it would have to work in the time it took for DNA to produce amino acid chains and for those to be folded into just the right shape in order to be biologically active and effective (just to let you know, it can't do that to match the real-time experience of thinking).  Where the proposed "DNA" answer was then modified to include some kind of trial and error method, that only makes it worse because the time it would take to work through even a miniscule number of possible molecular shapes to find the right one by random trial and error would outpace the entire age of the human species.  And it still wouldn't get you to the point where the materialist "brain only" brain would know it had done the right thing.  

There were lots of other problems that came up in the scanty attempts for atheist-materialists to back up their claims with even a slight defense against those questions.  When the pantomime substitute, non-answer was "natural selection" that didn't do anything to explain any of it.   It's like the abiogenesists who kick the problem of how living organisms arose on Earth down the road into the past by claiming that they came here from somewhere else - putting the problem of how life arose by spontaneous generation somewhere long ago and on a planet or asteroid or something, far, far away. . It's no answer at all.   The use of those, "DNA", "natural selection"  and some similarly used terms is nothing but the invocation of magical formulas that are supposed to stop the questioning because most people are flummoxed by what they mean.  So much of the atheist invocation of the pieties and shibboleths of scientism work that way, to throw up fog instead of elucidate.  

Anyway, I've got a really, really busy day today and instead of going into something new, I thought I'd point out that materialist-atheists have never begun to answer the problems of their dismissal of consciousness which really do invalidate democracy and equality and everything else real liberalism exists to assert.   And the atheist erosion of liberalism, which gained the upper hand in the last fifty years of liberal failure, is among the most serious foundational problems we face.  I think the future of liberalism depends on dumping materialism and this is a good place to start.  

I really do think for the traditional form of liberalism which generated the idea of egalitarian democracy, equal rights, the moral obligation to observe and respect those rights, universally, depends on dumping the materialist model of the mind and, especially, the denial of moral absolutes and moral obligations of that sort.  Nothing I've read in the past two decades of neo-atheism has done anything but make me more convinced of that.