October 25, 2008

Creationists declare war over the brain. [Via]
  • Ironic that they advocate the abdication of the mental faculties.
  • Ironic Typical that they advocate the abdication of the mental faculties. FTFY No irony here, just typical Fundie crap. Believe what we tell you. No thinking on your part required.
  • Dear creationists: Jebus put yer brain in there 'cause he kinda hoped you'd, y'know, like USE it.
  • Geez, you can do this with any poorly-understood corner of science. "We don't understand quantum mechanics so that PROVES GOD EXISTS!" "We don't understand what's going on with DNA over time so that PROVES GOD EXISTS!" You start to run into trouble with things like, "Because we can't prove Fermat's last theorem, that PROVES GOD EXISTS!". Oops. In fact, there's a whole series of these oopses heading back through light, magnetism, motion of the planets, fire, even water of you look all the way back to Thales. The more subtle and difficult to refute position is "God loves us and wants us to understand our world and that's why he gave us these interesting and difficult problems to figure out". But that position takes actual hard work. And thinking. So you don't see it in certain churches too often.
  • I thought they declared war on the brain!
  • Ha! Cartesian dualism beats Cartesian method!
  • I say *When the Mind goes on holiday, the Body feels the pain!* So Roryk is right to favor Cartesian dualism over the Cartesian method. Dualism works, only too well. Yet the Cartesian method falls short of that because, after all, it requires us to think that (given a good God) our perceptions could NOT be an evil dream inspired by a demon...
  • But since a demon inspired dream might cause just as much pain as going out of one's mind... The two schema might finally conflate. *Bwa, ha, ha, HA!*
  • Or not...
  • Jebus put yer brain in there 'cause he kinda hoped you'd, y'know, like USE it. Not so. Jebus put the brain in your head for the same reason he put fossils in the ground: to test your faith.
  • Guess I'll hafta break the news That I got no mind to lose Guess I'm gonna hafta tell'em That I got no cerebellum Ramones, "Lobotomy"
  • Roryk is right to favor Cartesian dualism over the Cartesian method. Dualism works, only too well. Really? I always thought that the host of questions, concepts, and entities engendered by Cartesian dualism were far more trouble than the explanations provided by dualism were worth. And why the hating on the Cartesian method? If Descartes made any worthwhile contributions to the world of philosophy surely this epistemological rule-of-thumb must count among them: "I shall at least do what is in my power, viz, [suspend my judgment], and guard with settled purpose against giving my assent to what is false..." (Meditation 1) Three cheers for skeptical doubt.
  • David Chalmers, originator of the phrase 'the hard problem' for the qualia issue, comments Check out that amusing link he mentions, eh?
  • The body pays for the mind's mistakes, but mind and body are not really separable, except as data fields or logical categories. So his dualism isn't the greatest way to run a person's life. But neither is his skepticism... Cartesian skepticism sounds good as an abstract ideal, but his conclusion was that the utility of science depends on direct perceptions not being distorted, which he had faith a good God wouldn't allow. So his skepticism falls short, I think. His method and his results are BOTH unreliable, and so in that sense they conflate. My problem is that I want to agree with horn*star and Roryk, both, and with Chalmers too... Or not. *Skepticism is like fly paper, it sticks to everything*
  • I'm wholeheartedly behind Chalmers here. Thanks, Plegmund.
  • I was being flippant in my earlier comment. I think the "Cartesian method" has been much more influential than Cartesian dualism. They're also quite separate. I'd agree with Chalmers that << the "hard problem" does nothing to suggest that consciousness doesn't lawfully depend on physical processes >>.
  • I hope you all understand that Cartesian dualism came about precisely because Descartes forgot all about his method, when he started taking God's existence for granted.
  • ♫ Lock the door  and throw away the key. There someone in my head   and it's not me. ♫
  • David Hume's brand of skepticism really WAS rigorous. He only credited a welter of perceptions where Descartes imagined that he found a certainly existing self. If a coherent self doesn't follow (as in cases of dementia?) then it's even possible that Descartes forgot to apply his stated method from the very start, immediately after he formulated it...
  • I am reminded of something... ah, yes... Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God. The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing." "But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D." "Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic. "Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing. Most leading theologians claim that this argument is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolon Colluphid from making a fortune with his book Well That About Wraps It Up For God. I have always thought that the best argument against gods are the people that believe in them.