S
Sciborg_S_Patel
Let's see what materialists/physicalists themselves have to say about the paradigm:
1) Puppets are Conscious Entities (and remember Patricia Churchland thinks this theory of consciousness is brilliant):
2) There are infinite multiverses coming to being at each moment, at an exponential rate - an extraordinary claim so lacking in extraordinary evidence Carroll has to cheat to give it plausibility:
3) An admission about how Dualism stacks against Materialism by materialist Lycan:
4) An admission by the physicist Richard Lewontin about the materialist faith influencing scientific research:
5) The materialist Searle admitting materialist theories are chosen not necessarily because they are good but because they are seen as combating dualism associated with religion:
"I believe one of the unstated assumptions behind the current batch of views is that they represent the only scientifically acceptable alternatives to the antiscientism that went with traditional dualism, the belief in the immortality of the soul, spiritualism, and so on. Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives."
-John Searle, "What's wrong with the philosophy of mind?"
6) There are no thoughts, as stated by materialist Alex Rosenberg in The Atheist's Guide to Reality:
1) Puppets are Conscious Entities (and remember Patricia Churchland thinks this theory of consciousness is brilliant):
“It seems crazy to insist that the puppet’s consciousness is real. And yet, I argue that it is. The puppet’s consciousness is a real informational model that is constructed inside the neural machinery of the audience members and the performer. It is assigned a spatial location inside the puppet. The impulse to dismiss the puppet’s consciousness derives, I think, from the implicit belief that real consciousness is an utterly different quantity, perhaps a ghostly substance, or an emergent state, or an oscillation, or an experience, present inside of a person’s head. Given the contrast between a real if ethereal phenomenon inside of a person’s head and a mere computed model that somebody has attributed to a puppet, then obviously the puppet isn’t really conscious. But in the present theory, all consciousness is a “mere” computed model attributed to an object. That is what consciousness is made out of. One’s brain can attribute it to oneself or to something else. Consciousness is an attribution…
2) There are infinite multiverses coming to being at each moment, at an exponential rate - an extraordinary claim so lacking in extraordinary evidence Carroll has to cheat to give it plausibility:
‘It’s trivial to falsify [MWI],’ boasts the Caltech cosmologist Sean Carroll, another supporter: ‘just do an experiment that violates the Schrödinger equation or the principle of superposition, which are the only things the theory assumes.’ But most other interpretations of quantum theory assume them (at least) too – so such an experiment would rule them all out, and say nothing about the special status of the MWI. No, we’d quite like to see some evidence for those other universes that this particular interpretation uniquely predicts. That’s just what the hypothesis forbids, you say?
What a nuisance.
3) An admission about how Dualism stacks against Materialism by materialist Lycan:
Being a philosopher, of course I would like to think that my stance is rational, held not just instinctively and scientistically and in the mainstre5)am but because the arguments do indeed favor materialism over dualism.But I do not think that, though I used to.My position may be rational, broadly speaking, but not because the arguments favor it:Though the arguments for dualism do (indeed) fail, so do the arguments for materialism.And the standard objections to dualism are not very convincing; if one really manages to be a dualist in the first place, one should not be much impressed by them.My purpose in this paper is to hold my own feet to the fire and admit that I do not proportion my belief to the evidence
4) An admission by the physicist Richard Lewontin about the materialist faith influencing scientific research:
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
5) The materialist Searle admitting materialist theories are chosen not necessarily because they are good but because they are seen as combating dualism associated with religion:
"I believe one of the unstated assumptions behind the current batch of views is that they represent the only scientifically acceptable alternatives to the antiscientism that went with traditional dualism, the belief in the immortality of the soul, spiritualism, and so on. Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives."
-John Searle, "What's wrong with the philosophy of mind?"
6) There are no thoughts, as stated by materialist Alex Rosenberg in The Atheist's Guide to Reality:
Now, here is the question we’ll try to answer: What makes the Paris neurons a set of neurons that is about Paris; what make them refer to Paris, to denote, name, point to, pick out Paris?...
The first clump of matter, the bit of wet stuff in my brain, the Paris neurons, is about the second chunk of matter, the much greater quantity of diverse kinds of stuff that make up Paris. How can the first clump—the Paris neurons in my brain—be about, denote, refer to, name, represent, or otherwise point to the second clump—the agglomeration of Paris?...
A more general version of this question is this: How can one clump of stuff anywhere in the universe be about some other clump of stuff anywhere else in the universe—right next to it or 100 million light-years away?
...Let’s suppose that the Paris neurons are about Paris the same way red octagons are about stopping. This is the first step down a slippery slope, a regress into total confusion. If the Paris neurons are about Paris the same way a red octagon is about stopping, then there has to be something in the brain that interprets the Paris neurons as being about Paris. After all, that’s how the stop sign is about stopping. It gets interpreted by us in a certain way. The difference is that in the case of the Paris neurons, the interpreter can only be another part of the brain...
What we need to get off the regress is some set of neurons that is about some stuff outside the brain without being interpreted—by anyone or anything else (including any other part of the brain)—as being about that stuff outside the brain. What we need is a clump of matter, in this case the Paris neurons, that by the very arrangement of its synapses points at, indicates, singles out, picks out, identifies (and here we just start piling up more and more synonyms for “being about”) another clump of matter outside the brain. But there is no such physical stuff.
Physics has ruled out the existence of clumps of matter of the required sort...