Friday, April 21, 2017

Materialists Don't Believe Their Nonsense Themselves - Old Business Before New Business

I don't have any interest in anything alleged lefties who could read that the Holocaust should be the subject of stand-up comedy without objection say about anything.  I went back and looked after I wrote about that and I didn't see that any of them questioned the idea.  They're a bunch of jerks.  Anyone who wasn't has obviously not stuck around there.  If I have anything to say about Eschaton it will be about what Duncan Black writes, which means I'll be writing very little about it because he doesn't write much worth engaging.

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Someone has been looking into my archive and came across my challenge to materialists that I mentioned the other day.

There really isn't any question but that unless they can do the impossible, materialism, physicalism, naturalism - really all the same thing, are invalid and believing them is a superstition.  The "brain only" materialist-atheists of neuroscience and cognitive-science and all of the other insertions of atheist religion into science that maintain that our minds are merely the epiphenomena, the by-product of physical structures of some kind in the organ in our skulls.  They can't hold that our minds are anything but a result of those physical structures or there is something in the universe except matter and energy and - most clueless of all - the physical laws that govern them is not only real but the most basic and salient fact of human existence.  And if that's the case then they will have to account for how a brain makes a new structure to be a new idea before the structure to be that idea exists in the brain.  The brain has to blindly, on no information contained in the brain before that structure is there, build that structure, it has to:

- Know it needs to build a new structure
- Needs to know the nature of the structure it has to build to "be" the right idea
- It has to know how to make that structure with no information to guide it
- It has to know it has made the right structure to be the right idea.  Which is particularly hard to explain because if it built the wrong structure that would be the only physical structure to "be" the idea present in the brain.
- It has to do all of that by a credibly verifiable physical process, in the real time to match the experience of thinking new thoughts.  Maybe atheists think slower than other people but it would have to be mighty fast to match the normal experience of thinking. 
- It would have to explain how the brain does that feat of magic hundreds, thousands of times a day, in a continual process so as to account for the experience of consciousness.  

I originally figured that if they were ready to accept some kind of clairvoyance and telepathy they might salvage their "brain only" faith but I don't think that really gets them anywhere because those experiences would, also, need to be the product of physical structures so it doesn't get them out of their difficulty.  If the ideas are present in the brain as something other than a physical structure, their model short-circuits, immediately.

They can slice and dice brains, make pretty color pictures all they want, unless they come up with something to explain how that happens their model can't work.

Of course, if they're right then what any of us think isn't up to us so they shouldn't be upset when people disagree with them.  That they get so worked up when people don't believe what they do proves that they don't really believe it themselves.  If they did they wouldn't spend their time trying to convince people they're right.  There is no more obvious proof that they don't believe what they claim to know.

Update:  Why do I care that they believe it?   Because materialists who view other people as mere objects, that freedom, equality and the moral obligations to respect those in other people are delusions of material processes ("DNA" "natural selection" etc.) have no incentive to not be total assholes to people and other living beings if they want to be.  And so many do.

1 comment:


  1. "Because materialists who view other people as mere objects, that freedom, equality and the moral obligations to respect those in other people are delusions of material processes ("DNA" "natural selection" etc.) have no incentive to not be total assholes to people and other living beings if they want to be. And so many do. "



    Whereas no religious believers ever disobey the tenets of their own faiths. That would be just unpossible. Especially in this country, where all the major religions have their own police forces to ensure compliance.

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