YOUR OBJECTION TO MY apparently unanswerable questions (you don't answer them) as to how, according to the materialist-atheist-scientistic "brain only" dogma,
a. brains would even begin to "know" that they needed to build a new structure to be a specific idea not already in such brains since there would be nothing in the brain before such a structure was there to give it such an idea. The idea that it needed to make the structure in the first place IS AN IDEA,
b. how brains would know what elaborate structure they needed to build to be that idea which by MAS dogma COULD NOT already in there to inform it,
c. how brains would know how to build that novel structure,
d. how they would know that whatever resulted from it making something was the right structure to place that idea in such a "brain-only" brain- if it was not the right structure then the right idea could not be inside the head even then, and,
e. HOW ALL OF THAT COULD HAPPEN IN THE TIME TO ACCOUNT FOR OUR EXPERIENCE OF HAVING NEW IDEAS, and to account for the obvious general correctness of most of the most exigent of new ideas we need to avoid catastrophic injury or accidents before we've been awake for even two hours any day. Many of the imaginary leisurely cogitations of scientists and philosophers, in real life which is conducted in real time, could be said to be life-threatening if they were too late or wrong. We have scores or hundreds of novel ideas any given day which, too late or inaccurate, would end up with us injured or dead.
and such a materialist brain-only mind would have to do all of those while staying within the rigid monistic materialist ideological framing that their atheist faith depends on.
Without an explanation of how all of those happen which accounts for a thinking person's experience of how their own consciousness works, no rational person of any honesty could possibly accept the materialist framing or, even more stupidly, debunking our conscious experience. To accept that model would be about the stupidest thing anyone could possibly believe in their ideologically addled mind. Materialists are generally just that stupid.
I have been posing those questions, off and on, for years and I've never had a materialist-atheist-devotee of scientism come up with anything that was at all plausible except if you accept just throwing words at the problem without any care to their actual meaning. I have found that on such habits the entire, required modern allegedly thinking class orthodoxy seems to stand.* There was a time not that long ago when I would have exempted "real science" from that but I've come to see that pretty much the entire culture of science, world-wide, though perhaps especially acutely in the English language, is saturated with exactly that habit of uncritical inspection of even its most outlandish creedal statements.
"DNA" is a perfect example of that kind of dogmatic slogan which, even within those deemed to be scientists it is a non-explanation constructed to be used polemically in the most incompetent ways. DNA is a molecule that functions in a complete cell as part of an extremely elaborate molecular level operation which produces proteins, on its own it does nothing. It relies on other molecules in cells to function, some of which are certainly not, themselves, encoded with in DNA such as lipids. And after the construction of a long chain of atoms and component molecules there is the time consuming issue of correct protein folding which in itself takes too long to have that as a credible explanation of our experience of consciousness, not to mention the even more difficult issue of how the resulting molecules become part of biologically active structures in the brain. If there is one thing that is obvious, it doesn't all happen by random chance or trial and error. I don't think it's credible to believe if it happened through those life jackets for materialist ideology, I'd love to get someone to give an honest estimate as to how even any single cell organism could reproduce within its lifetime if it happened by trial and error. Not to mention the enormously more complex lives and reproduction of us multicellular organisms.
The cartoonish view of how DNA "works" that you may have absorbed if you were paying attention in 10th grade Biology is just that, a cartoon that is now considered entirely unrealistic, as science has looked more closely at how cells actually work. But, then, so much of the high school and, possibly worse, university level biology my age cohort learned has been superseded. In other words, it was wrong. That is, I suspect, the pattern when science is done about such complex and often unobservable phenomena.** DNA can tell you a lot of things but the idea that it, in itself, could possibly do what would have to be done to support the MAS ideology of "brain-only" dogma in regard to even the simplest level of the experience of human consciousness is a grotesque absurdity.
I will break in to ask a question I've never heard asked before, how the various component molecules of that elaborate cellular "machinery" "know" how to do their functions with such precision, where is the information needed to make them do what they do within them? I would like to know if there is any such complex chemical reaction that has ever been observed outside of living cells. I'm not aware that's ever been adequately explained in material terms that could withstand skeptical criticism. It would require a lot of information that I doubt can be located within the molecules, themselves. As to how any of it would know what to do to "make" the substrate of a novel idea they'd never synthesized before - some of our ideas certainly never having existed in the natural world before a human had them and certainly not within our own brains, it would seem not to be able to account for. Which indicates the depth of folly that bottom up reductionism of the kind such "brain-only" ideology depends on is.
The answer "Natural Selection" is even more incompetent for a myriad of other reasons, my favorite right now being that there is absolutely no evidence that there is any such a thing as natural selection, it is an ideological construct which, problematically enough for any materialist, not to mention an atheist who would want to grab on to it as a universal explanation of everything THERE IS NOT THE SLIGHTEST EVIDENCE IN THE WORLD THAT NATURAL SELECTION HAS ANY KIND OF MATERIAL EXISTENCE. If you want to claim that it is a "law of nature" such as those considered to be the foundation of physics, is natural selection supposed to have come about at the Big Bang, as currently the "laws of nature" are supposed to have come into existence. Did the Big Bang anticipate the rise of life and provide it with such a "fundamental law of nature" in anticipation for the rise of life, perhaps billions of years after that came about? Just where is it supposed to have come from? I would point out that in that case Big Bang would have to have the same attributes as God is believed to have under theism.
If you want to posit that such a thing is in control of our conscious experience which you want to insist is an epiphenomenon of physical structures in brains leaves you with exactly the same problem that Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia posed to Descartes, how does a non-physical entity move the physical brain. Darwinism has a ghost in the theory, it just doesn't admit that it does. So does every other expression of materialist-atheism I've ever examined. What the atheists who tried to answer me did was put up "DNA" or "natural selection" or "computers" as creator gods without having the self-critical honesty to admit that is what they did. Atheists are always setting up gods and they don't even know that they're doing it.
We know from our own experience of everything, including the physical world, that consciousness is the most fundamental reality of anyone's lived experience. You have to believe in and trust your own conscious experience to even begin to operate as an observing, measuring, analyzing and reasoning creature, despite what some of the most ideologically stupid of current university based philosophers would like to have it. Any philosopher who doesn't believe that consciousness is real would be drummed out of the profession if it had any kind of intellectual honesty in late 20th and 21st century academics. Though if you've got a PhD and an interest in upholding a decadent ideology, you can simply choose to ignore that fact and you'll seldom or never get called on it within academia or science.
Far from being a foundation of our experience and so thinking, Natural selection is something made up by British scientists on the ideology of entirely artificial 18th and 19th century British class-system economics. It was probably the most serious introduction of materialist ideology directly into the mainstream of science in its history, the subsequent permissions of allowing similar ideology resulted in some of the rankest of pseudo-science being granted the same status as physics and chemistry and actual scientific biology had. And, unsurprisingly given its substance, it was almost immediately in need of major patching to maintain its viability within the even such ideologized science. The most serious of those patch-jobs was the "modern synthesis" in which the naive view of genetics around 90 years ago was rather artificially attached to it. That synthesis, as most human made synthetics, seems to be seriously degraded, especially due to new observations about living organisms and the cells they are embodied in. One of the most serious problems, from what I see, for the "modern synthesis" is that it is now pretty obvious that as Darwin believed, in addition to genetic inheritance, epigenetic inheritance based on acquired "traits" is a real thing. That, in itself, along with other theorized and more explanatorily sound "forces" such as genetic drift, would seem to me to pretty much refute that synthesis. As H. Allen Orr pointed out in his refutation of the Darwinist fundamentalism of the meat-headed Daniel Dennett in the 1990s, without strict particulate inheritance as classical genetics posited, natural selection has serious problems. So, along with the enormously more complex reality of how genetic structures operate in living cells, genetics seems to me to be another huge source of trouble for Darwinism, which is the theory of natural selection, not evolution which I certainly haven't questioned as a fact while admitting that the enormous percentage of forever-lost information about it, is questionable as a rigorous science.
The rest of those things atheists have clung onto like "computers," "probability" and "random chance" are more incompetent than the two out of biology. Computers are human made models that can simulate a rather narrow conception of what our experience of conscious activity is imagined by some of us to be. It is no more a "brain" than the stuffing in the head of a dummy is. If it looks like it's doing something our minds do, well, that was the idea behind them all along but the analogy only goes one way, computers can't tell us anything about how our minds work, certainly not our brains. We stupidly attribute intelligence to computers through some of the most naive misuses of language in the modern period. That was, I am certain, largely a product of materialist-atheist-scientistic reductionism which started out with a stripped down definition of consciousness and, especially, intellectual activity which like the absurdities of classical "abiogenesis" is entirely motivated in ideology, though as computers quickly became real and profitable, making money seems to be a major motive in the area of computer science.
Probability and random chance are practical opposites of what our experience of consciousness is, what our thinking and acting are. Both are posited and calculated to test for conscious or "unconscious" bias in experimental science, random probabilities or chances being taken as having no consciousness behind them and so were a basis for measuring the possibility of something happening aside from human volition or accidental bias.
As its theoretical opposite, how they could account for consciousness is a question I'd like to find out if anyone has asked of such "science." The hypothesized natural forces being looked for are certainly defined as excluding the products of our conscious choice in many instances. If you had to depend on probability or random chance to control your mind you probably would never have never survived early childhood. You'd have eaten something that would have killed you long ago or died in an accident as your brain sifted through a fatally sufficient number of the probabilities it would have to go to to recognize a car you'd never experienced before it appears on some side of you and that you should get out of the way.
I'm coming to doubt that there is such a THING as "random chance." The more I think about it, the less I think it's possible to even define what it means. If it is truly random, how could you possibly define what it is at any given point? Does it have predictable, testable or definable qualities, is it in some sense uniform? If it is uniform how could it be random? Does it exist in the physical universe or is it just a mathematical concept? If it doesn't have a material or physical basis, that would leave its use in science rather up in the air in the same way that Princess Elizabeth's question to Descartes left his dualism in. If I had the time I'd like to research the history of it as a human concept. And if that's true, even just that it's undefinable, the implications of that for even math are worth considering. It could be a real thing and entirely escape the possibility of genuine human thinking due to its being, well, random. Though I'd suspect that if pressed hard, they'd come up with some novel definition of "randomness," so much of this game is based in just such convenient redefinition of words.
I doubt it's that materialist-atheist-devotees of scientism think slowly enough to match their experience of consciousness with their idiotic attachment to "brain-only" schemes that all fall apart when they are looked at with even the kind of informal criticism I've brought to them. Though in the hard cases, Dennett, the Churchlands, maybe that is why they don't see the problems with it. Perhaps their desperation to prop up their ideology takes up time which would be better spent on thinking more critically. But I think it's more probable that they are so emotionally attached to their hatred of the idea of God or religion or specific religions that that short circuits any of the critical activities that are necessary to separate ideas that work from those that don't whenever they sense that God may be a viable explanation for something. They simply hate religion, they hate God, they hate anything that violates their absurd ideology of materialism - I can say absurd exactly because of the materialist insistence that consciousness is either a mere secretion of brains (as Darwin's bull dog, Thomas Huxley had it) or, that having not exactly worked, that consciousness is a delusion, as that puddin' head Dennett and the even weirder Churchlands have it. Any ideology that negates the foundational basis of that ideology, whether it is materialism or atheism or scientism or any combination of them, which are all dependent on human consciousness must be obliterated in their minds and as a topic of consideration in their professional and social milieu, including consciousness, itself. Such materialist-atheism is an example of the ultimate in intellectual decadence.
We can see that modernism, exactly from its materialist basis, is just such an example of intellectual decadence. I think it's an inescapable conclusion that the alleged "scientific" and most murderous of human political regimes, the Marxists, the fascists, the Nazis, etc. are a product of exactly that ideology. When you believe as Trump does, that People are just objects there to be used or discarded, People get killed, often in large numbers. Trump probably killed half-a million American in order to try to win the 2020 election through Covid inaction and that has been just AOK with his vulgar materialist supporters. Even the "Christians" among Trumpzis are materialists, as the implosion of a nightclub mega-church franchise based in New Hampshire shows, that is how degraded Christianity is under the forces of modernism.
The way out of that decadence isn't into some past, you can't get the past back, it's done, gone and certainly not much like you imagine it to be - especially if you depend on fiction and movies to form your idea of it. The only way out of the decadence of modernism is to move on into the future. You can learn from the past a lot of what is recorded of the past is very useful, you can't possibly revive the past and you shouldn't want to. It's cowardly and unrealistic. The modern period is over, it is in its dying throws, its death rattle is in the mouths of the materialists as they spout such stuff. I think either materialism as the dominant ideology dies, or we, as a species, very likely will.
* You're right but not so much as you think you are. I am somewhat familiar with Michael Behe who seems to me to be considered to be a working scientist. I haven't looked at his publications record or his CV but he has long been employed as a scientist in an accredited University. I don't think his somewhat extra-scientific thinking in regard to the appearance of intelligent design in living organisms and their genetic and molecular foundations is any more illegitimate than the ideology of materialist-atheism which is regularly inserted directly into the literature, the teaching and the intellectual practice of science. From the pseudo-sciences such as psychology to the quasi-pseudo sciences that make pretty fMRI pictures of brains and make ridiculous assertions about them (generally in line with the ideological preferences of those making them and, if not them, then the general ideology of their field) to the quicksands of evolutionary speculation and even into some of the more solid life sciences, that ideology rules and is inserted directly into its literature. It is beyond the competence of science to introduce God into the literature of science but it is certainly as beyond it to insist that there is no God who directed things to be as they are. One of those has certainly been excluded, to the extent that, as I pointed out, cosmologists and ideological editors of preeminent science journals have been insisting that the "Big Bang" wasn't as valid a scientific theory as the seemingly unworkable "steady state" universe that materialist-atheists preferred because of that gol-durned Genesis account and things like the cosmological argument for a Creator.
I think anyone who regularly gets published in reputable journals of science has to be taken to be a working scientist. That's not to say that whatever they get published has to be believed, lots of the stuff published in such journals turn out to be wrong and not a little of it gets through even when it turns out to be rather transparently fraudulent. Though I'm sure someone who has the intellectual cooties that Behe has been declared to have, his publications get probably the highest level of critical review, something that is generally true of the controlled research into psychic phenomena, which is certainly more valid scientifically than anything else that gets published on the topic of human consciousness. It is one of the most startling things about science which I learned by reading the ideologues of the Jeffrey Epstein- Ghislaine Maxwell financed Science Blogs is how many of them act like they're 12 in the mean boy and gal gang in jr. high. I think spending a lifetime in school isn't necessarily a guarantee of emotional maturity.
Anyone who doubts that science is shot through with the ideological preferences of those who produce science is ignorant of or uncritical of the history of science. Considering the topic of this post, it is a supreme irony for the scientism of the reductive materialist, devotees of scientism to a person, that human minds are the only known location of science. Science is a product of human consciousness. If you debunk or even demote human consciousness, you impeach the validity of science. Even Charles Darwin openly worried that that would be a consequence of his theory, though he had a particularly crude, Brit-Victorian view of the minds of animals behind his worry. In the case of such speculative fields as the theories about evolution and cosmology, I think those alleged sciences could use a lot more impeaching than they get. I've come to be entirely skeptical of the scientific character of any science which cannot actually see and observe what they are allegedly studying. I think that the actual foundation of the study of evolution has more in common with lore than it does science and cosmology is not much less tied to faith than it was in the middle-ages, only it's atheist faith it's tied to these days. Physics is a lot less finished than physicists like to believe it is.
** What If Michael Behe Is Right That Life Is Intelligently Designed?
It is worth asking just how much faith anyone should put into the science surrounding these ideologically fraught areas, how much of what even those at the top of their field is actual knowledge and how much of it will be, soon or later, overthrown, often by actual observations and measurements and analysis that shows that it was anything from slightly to fundamentally wrong. When even a good science program such as NOVA presents things as definite knowledge they are often overlooking the critics of them within the profession of science, itself.
Since you brought up Michael Behe, I didn't, it might be a fun exercise to consider if he's right that life was intelligently designed by God then science, as the rules of it stand now, COULD NEVER GET CLOSE TO AN EXPLANATION OF MANY ASPECTS OF BIOLOGY AND EVOLUTION. By the rules you are not allowed to make that speculation within science but if he is right, and I think he has given many plausible examples to think it's not unreasonable to think he might be at least on a better track than the materialists, then the rules of science would be as much an inhibition of making progress in accurate knowledge as laws against teaching evolution would inhibit making progress in places where such laws are enforced. Of course, the science around evolution in the 1920s was in many instances entirely wrong, it was thoroughly steeped in racism, ethnic, class and gender bigotry. I have pointed out that the very textbook that John Scopes was accused of teaching evolution out of (he didn't, actually, as even some of the kids who were witnessed in the trial admitted) was saturated with all kinds of stuff that if a scientist held them today would get them laughed out of the profession. It is about as accurate as flat-earth geography. Yet it is the science championed on screen, on stage and in many a BBC-PBS style sci-costume drama which constitutes the sum total ersatz knowledge of so many of those credentialed by colleges.
Just how does the "public understanding of science" such as Richard Dawkins was assigned with lording over deal with that scandalous reality, that much of that understanding is overturned, though the worst of it, such as the mythology surrounding Darwinism, is so embedded in the culture of the ruling class that even anti-evolutionists spout ideas founded in On the Origin of Species and, from bad to worse, The Descent of Man.
Since you slam it, theology, these days, is generally far more modest about its claims. If there's an area of Western culture that has been through the critical wringer, it's Christianity and Judaism.
Afterword: I had a discussion with a young LGBTQ+ person the other day in which I told them about having lived through the AIDS epidemic among Gay men in the 1980s which, despite whatever some ass like Andrew Sullivan will tell you, has hardly ended. The area of promiscuity was a sore point, I had to tell them that whatever anyone wanted to think, promiscuity was the main reason that the virus spread so rapidly and widely among gay men, through unprotected sex with those who had been infected by someone else.
I have mentioned before how when that was addressed by public health officials, including someone I truly consider a saint, Dr. Fauci, that the angry, infuriated response by many Gay activists and just other Gay men was like a prelude to Trumpzi responses to what he said about Covid-19 so recently. Much of what they said at the time was speculative, though it was certainly much less speculative than probably most of the "new scientific findings" in the news is. The issue of authority in science is as fraught as it is an any other area but we frequently have no choice but to provisionally accept what they think is best to deal with a crisis. That is when such science is not under pressure from ideologues such as those who pressured scientists or administrators in the Reagan-Bush I administrations or the Bush II and Trump regimes. And the science of those at the CDC or the WHO are often far more based in actual observation and analysis than the bullshit surrounding materialist motivated cognative or neuro science.
I hold it as enormously ironic that one of the most ideological of biologists at the time, the inventor of Hamiltonian "altruism," a creation of materialist ideology as pseudo-science if there ever was one, died as a result of his quest to prove that such scientists as actually looked at HIV without an ideological bias were wrong as to its etiology. I have recently found out that Lynn Margulis, who, though a critic of Darwinism could be pretty ideological, herself, had another rather wrong theory of its origin. I don't know as much about that as Hamilton's folly.
Our faith in science is not always rational or reasonable but automatic distrust of science is catastrophic, as well. We need to proceed with caution, looking at the quality of the science but, also, the knowable ideological biases of those claiming to find them. I mean those that can be known on a better basis than the lies told by Republican-fascists in the media and in governments.
