Monday, March 14, 2016

You've Got One Month To Rescue Your 19th Century Faith

Hate Update:  They've produced snark, no answers. Materialists are some of the most absolutist of credulous fundamentalists. You've got to go the most febrile fundamentalists to find that level of automatic refusal to engage opposing idea.   They can't do anything else, their ideology is brain dead. 

Materialists-atheists, "naturalists" and, especially "physicalists" you have about a month before I declare, by fiat that you have failed, utterly and completely and, I will hold, comprehensively, to rescue your failed ideology from a definitive debunking.  I am referring to the challenge I made eleven months ago for you to explain how your model of human minds, as the epiphenomenon of the material substance of the brain could even begin to work to form a new idea.  Here is how I laid out the problem a few months ago in renewing the challenge.

I am pretty tired and won't be writing anything new today.  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 the brain know what to make for a new idea before that idea exists in the brain to tell it what to make or, even, that some new idea needs to be made?   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.

I have, as of yet, had no one propose any kind of work around for this problem and I believe it is impossible for materialists to do so without, as well, invalidating materialism on other grounds.

Arthur Stanley Eddington declared about ninety years ago that physics had invalidated materialism in the sense it was understood at that time, as, in fact, even the universal validity of causation seemed to be in trouble.  I find it puzzling how so many in the sciences, not to mention the simple laity of the materialistic faith of scientism, have yet to make their peace with the discoveries of physics that Eddington based that declaration on.  As far as I've been able to gather, those discoveries in quantum physics and, though he didn't mention it, mathematical logic are still considered valid.  Yet even very sophisticated scientists are going on as if the fixed materialism of the 19th century was as solid as the Young Earth Creationists hold that their literal, six-day creation concept is.

I really would like someone to tell me how their ideology of materialism, which resides nowhere but in human minds, can possibly be valid if the very basis of it cannot be sustained by a materialistic explanation of it.  Without a means of brains being able to "know" exactly what physical structure to "be" a new idea is without the information in the idea already being physically present in the brain BEFORE that structure is made, materialism is an illogical absurdity.  And, as mentioned, if the idea is there before their theoretical structure is, then their insistence that the physical structure IS the basis of the idea in our minds is not only tautological, its necessity is disproved.  There is no way for the brain to even know that it needs to "make" the structure if that information isn't already present in the brain.

And, as I have also mentioned, the proposed mechanism for this construction of physically imbodied information has to work in the real time of human experience of thinking in all of its facets.  I will be bold enough to say that there is no way for that model of minds to stand all or, indeed, any of the challenges to the idea.

I will give you guys a month to come up with something other than the magical thinking of the atheists such as chanting the words "natural selection".   "Natural selection" isn't an answer to the question because those new ideas couldn't be passed on through either genes nor any other mechanism of physical inheritance.  If that were an answer then the human species could never come up with new ideas, science, itself, materialism, itself, could never have arisen as a new idea if that were the answer to the problem.  Those began well after the establishment of human beings as a new species, no Just-so story will do in explaining how they began.

If you are beginning to suspect that the obituary of materialism will be forthcoming, we'll see.  As far as I've seen from the response of this challenge, it seems to be stuck in rigor mortis rather permanently as its doddering true believers are stuck in the Victorian era of thought. 

3 comments:

  1. "their ideology is brain dead. "

    How could your brain possibly know that?

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    Replies
    1. My mind knows that because I do something you find exotic and mysterious called "thinking".

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    2. Oh, and you can tell the assembled Eschatots that I find their inability to come up with anything mildly encouraging. Only mildly encouraging because I really didn't think they'd come up with anything else. Anyone who could have gotten farther with it left a long time ago.

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