Ten Years And Not An Answer To These Ideology Obliterating Questions - A late summer rerun with a bit of editing.

I'm posting another summer rerun which has an interesting comment thread on it.  It's been ten years since I challenged the materialists to answer these questions which,  I hold even more so today,  defeat their materialist-atheist ideology.   

Note that you can find the blog brawl that this caused at the link, I think it's worth reading through.   "Tlaz" was and maybe still is one of the Eschaton blog rats,  she never engaged honestly in any argument I ever had with her and didn't risk coming here unlike a couple of her buddies.   I often brawled with "JR" who also went by the name "Freki" and unlike most of them,  I actually had some respect for her intelligence, though not always her honesty.  "Skeptic tank" was and, for all I know, is still an ass.  One who apparently had a career in university-based science. 

Materialism in any form I've thought out can't account for our most basic and secure of experiences, our own experience of our own conscious existence.   Without an answer to these questions,  their materialist basis of consciousness just simply can't work.   I will note that this is also a problem for most of the so-called sciences that allegedly deal with minds, individually, in groups and in societies, because science can only deal with such things as material objects and that simply doesn't work.  

If any materialist-atheist of the scientistic kind wants to take on those questions posed here, for about the nineth month running that year,  try your best.  I deal with a couple of the more intelligent - well "JR" was more intelligent than your average blog-rat atheist "Skeptic-Tank" wasn't - which only shows that they inserted words and not ideas into the discussion.  The claim that "DNA" or "natural selection" was an answer to it is exactly the kind of thing that I'm familiar with in your typical atheist discourse but, as you present the problem with it - it only forces the observation that all they've done is take the problem it is for "brain-only" models of consciousness and handed it over to the even less obviously capable "DNA" or "natural selection" without answering the questions.   I've found that that is not only typical of blog-atheists, it's typical of materialist ideology universally.   

Maybe you'll find it as fun as I did to re-read this. 

Friday, September 18, 2015

An Open Challenge To Materialists Since April And Counting

All ideas are preceded by mind; they have mind as their chief; they are mind-made. If one speaks or acts with an evil mind, pain follows him just as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the cart.

Dharmapada, verse 1.1 

I am pretty tired and won't be writing anything new today. [Note from 2025, it was allergy season then, too.]  I will, though, remind everyone of my open challenge for materialists, the "brain-only" type to clear up a problem with their model of the mind as the epiphenomenon of physical structures in the brain, the "real" things, physical objects and structures that are the ideas our minds contain and work with.  

If that is the case:

- How does it know it needs to make a new physical structure to BE the basis of a new idea? 

- How does the brain know what to make for a new idea before that idea exists in the brain to tell it what to make?   

- How does it know how to make the physical embodiment of just the right idea without that idea already being in our head?  

- How does it know it has made the right idea or, if it makes the wrong structure to be that idea?

- How does it know that that idea, which is, then, in the brain is the wrong idea since the "right idea" isn't in there but the wrong one is? 

All that is at stake in this is the entire edifice of materialism because it it can't account for our minds it has to fall.  For materialism, and with it almost all of what most people hold as atheism, to stand they have to explain how our brains could do what they so obviously wouldn't know how to do if the "brain-only" model of the mind is real.  

The only mechanism I can think of that could save the "brain-only" model is for there to be some form of psychic information that could tell the brain what to make, since the idea isn't, physically in the brain.  But, then, the idea would be real in a non-physical form and that would, as well, invalidate materialism.  

Update:  If Her Coprophagous Highness, Tlaz, would like to answer the challenge I promise to post her attempt with commentary.