I don't drive anymore so the get out the vote effort isn't one I can participate in so I can answer some backed up hate mail.
In my attack on eliminative materialism I pointed out that the entire thing was based on promissory notes of materialism, guarantees made by supposed scientists and philosophers of what will be found by science in some unspecified future about the nature of some very complex phenomena of and around consciousness that can't be seen and everything about which, including that science involving alleged brain mapping is highly subject to being governed by, not the a priori knowledge of those doing and interpreting the research but the a priori attitudes and preferences of those doing it. Even the imaging, itself, is a product of choices in what settings and ranges to set their machinery to based on what outcomes are desired. Which, I've got to say, is probably about as likely as random chance to happen to come to the full and final conclusions about it. Whenever the human predilection of the scientist becomes part of your experimental model, those predilections will inevitably become part of the results. They can't be filtered out, once included.
The confident, arrogantly made and guaranteed value of the promissory notes that the atheist-materialist scientists and philosophers do actually base their conclusions on are in no way guaranteed, I think in the reversion of many atheist philosophers, perhaps scientists, into the atheist-animistic dodge of panpsychism - the holding that all of matter is "conscious" or possesses something which the philosophers and, perhaps, scientists don't define and can't relate to the human experience of our own consciousness - is evidence that among their own, many of them are realizing the bogus nature of those promissory notes is becoming apparent. Panpsychism is, itself, based in promissory notes such as the one mentioned, that somehow something within atoms and molecules and larger structures of matter is the primitive "thing" that gives rise to our consciousness, buying their ideological line depends on the faith that somehow, in some future science will define that something and make those connections to our own experience of consciousness.
How that is an advance on the idea that what is behind the forces of nature and the structure of material substance isn't its own conscious volition but the will of God, I'd love to hear the panpsychists explain. But not today.
In a comment the other day I noted another huge load of conjecture you have to buy in order to believe the atheist-materialists of eliminative materialism, you have to have the same childlike faith that such allegedly hard core atheists believe that whatever their promissory notes are going to deliver in some unspecified future will be the real, final word on the topic instead of a mere and transitory conventional consensus among those predisposed to buy such knacks before it, too, falls into the boneyard of discontinued, not discussed science.
That last one is the most ridiculous of the promises made about the promissory note because if there is anything we can be certain of in all of the human endeavor to understand minds and mental function and behavior, it is that nothing they've produced has stood the test of time, the test of durability. Since the promises in these promissory notes depend on the unspecified theories of PSYCHOLOGY they guarantee are coming, anyone who depends on them being more durable than any of the major schools of psychology have been is probably too naive and gullible to take seriously. I mean, Freud, Jung*, Watson, Skinner, etc. all had actually produced what later turned out to be bogus. There is some little safety in making guarantees of the scientific reliability and durability on things which have yet to be produced and are merely promised to be coming, that is until people understand they've bought a pig in a poke and for now the poke is entirely empty and there is no guarantee the bag will ever be opened. That is what the entire dodge of issuing promissory notes of materialism depends on. It is an atheist version of promising pie in the sky, as the old line of old time atheists snarked about religion. The irony is that they fall for the same stuff, only they call it "science" and not religion.
* I find it hilarious how Jung, foremost disciple of Freud, the guy who loved to assert just about everything was illusion, primitive remnants of dark ages and inner darkness, religion, most of all, is primarily a figure of the most vulgar level of occultism. The publication of his book a few years back was most eagerly awaited by occultists. Bertrand Russell, desparing over the findings of quantum physics and relativity physics in the 1920s, which he was smart enough to realize debunked, rather definitively, his materialist faith, predicted that science would devolve into something like the occult obsessions of the late Renaissance - which was where so much of what gets derided as medieval superstition actually gets to us through. I think in panpsychism in string and multi-verse theory that's coming true. Though maybe it's a character of what inevitably happens when you try to build science around things too complex and unobservable to actually do science around and enough schools of a topic rise and crumble. How long can you keep setting up things as the real view of the truth to watch them fall before people figure out you're whole thing is a con game.
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