I don’t think you’re accurately representing what materialists think of the brain and mind. I can’t imagine many materialists actually saying “The brain doesn’t have any control over anything that happens in the body.”
Materialism states that human body is just a complex machine. It works as it is supposed to work. Internal temperature is defined by the natural laws governing the cells behaviour inside us, not by our own free will. It is not the same as “I decide to raise my arm”…
Presumably according to materialists, raising your arm is governed by natural laws as well, at every step of the process. I don’t see why it’s necessarily different. The only apparent difference is that raising your arm is generally a conscious process, and raising your body temperature is, as you said in your OP, done by unconscious processes.
So apparently some people figured out a way to consciously control a process that was previously thought only controllable by an unconscious process. That doesn’t have anything to do with materialism in particular, as far as I can tell. It has to do with just being incorrect about what things can be controlled consciously, and not just unconsciously. That mistake doesn’t seem unique to materialism.
Actually it is the other way around: Science needs Philosophy! Without knowing what you are looking for, you will never find it. If you think dogmatically that everything is matter, then NO MATTER what you see you will never be able to “see” consciousness or Free Will…
Hey man, saying everything is made of matter doesn’t mean that one thing made of matter can’t control another thing made of matter, or that the parts of one thing, all of which are made of matter might interact in certain ways. I don’t think speculations in psychology about what constitutes, “subconscious” should be given any credible consideration. 90% of the shit they call science wouldn’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny and come out as anything other than a semantic re-write of something that was already clearer.
The laws of physics have to control all things that are physical by definition. So if you catch a physical object doing something and it seems to defy your understanding of that kind of thing, just know that the laws are being followed, and it’s now your job to figure out how you were wrong about what they were.
The best way to silence objections if you wanna be a materialist is so say…
“Look, at the very base of our best representations of physical laws there are fundamental things that appear across all instances in those representations. Those things are identities.” “I think the brain is identical to the mind.” I believe that since the brain is a physical object that at the core of our understanding of it there will be some kind of identity relation which will parallel those fundamental to physical propositions or laws or whatever you wanna call em." “I believe that anything that you might attribute to the mind, I could bring back around and attribute to the brain instead, even if there is a mind, because I’ve constructed a set of parallels between the two into which all things I might consider about either can be categorized in accordance w/ those identities at the base of the physical laws and what have you”.
Man I forgot how hard this is to explain. I hope I’m making sense.
The idea is that we all know you can’t prove there’s no mind so you map the brain and you quantify and logic-ify the whole thing to where you can find a change in the brain every time you find a change in the behavior and then you can be like, “look so maybe there’s a mind but we don’t need it I got this whole explanation based on the brain, since my explanation is so much more robust you can shove the mind thing up your ass.”
Or if you wanted to be nice you could say, “look maybe there’s a mind, but if there is then it’s indistinguishable from the brain in any functional way and therefore for all intents and purposes they are the same, and so we can dispense with one of the terms and sorry but it’s gonna have to be the one associated w/ hokey nebulous bullshit”.
Maybe that’s not even nice. I dunno. I just don’t know how to be nice about this whole circle-talking about dualism and all.
All I have to do to raise my body temperature is think about someone I hate. If someone wants a simple book that explains all this very effectively read Descartes’ Error, probably written in the 90s.
The brain as a physical object has been seriously studied for maybe 150 years. Everytime a respected neurologist said something about the brain in that time it was taken as God’s truth by many people. If you believe something hard enough it will come true. So, now 150 years later the culture has grown to where the neurological studies of the last 150 years are ‘true’ whether they were originally or not. The dynamic of studying the brain and those reading about those results has a cultural feedback in a sense.
I’m not even partial competent at anything, and not long ago I could hardly say what the materialist position is (I knew it very well, I just didn’t associate the ideas with the word “materialist”). In other words I knew of the conscepts involved, I had considered them briefly by myself and left them behind soon after, but now I realize that this footnote in my ‘philosophical development’ (I know, I know) is actually held by many people. It’s a more narrow minded and philosophical naive position than any religion I know of. Now if I were about to get brain surgery I wouldn’t tell the surgen all this, but then I certainly don’t think people as a whole owe any kind of debt to science. And either way science would be much more effective if it’s philosophy wasn’t held to like the type of simplistic religion I would image that the neanderthals may have.
I’m not against the scientific method, though the way it is discribed is ridiculous; ‘verifiable results’. Hey everyone scientists have found a way to verify something, a cow is a cow, a dog is a dog, a collie is a coll… wait a collie’s a dog too, damnit that lasted about three seconds…
But, describe it as this; ‘define/categorize your results in a way in which the majority of respected (that is the one’s who can get their way or have the power) scientist wouldn’t laugh at’ and I understand it’s purpose, that is so that we can live a higher quality of life with through a standardized sytem for developing technology, after all younger people have no idea how boring life was in the 90s.
Then even still, results are results, I’m using the damn internet after all aren’t I? But, why do scientist who don’t even think about philosophy decide to make there own? So you’re right Smears, a stoned, partially competent philosopher could knock it out easily, hell let anyone raised in a world without modern technology give it a try, they could get piss drunk and annihilate the position in the time it takes to hurl all over my new white carpet.
Materialist believes everything follows the laws of physics.
The laws of physics are fundamentally self referential, at least in any formal or quantitative representation or whatever.
So long as something can be explained by a method that is fundamentally the same as the above, then for all intents and purposes we can say it’s physical or material and dispense of whatever doesn’t fit that mold.
The trick is that mold fits everything. So you can have this kind of air tight and perfectly defensible materialism which is capable of explaining all phenomena, but you have to face facts that you’re going to be using it, at times at least to describe things that are clearly not solids liquids or gasses.
Materialism as a world-view that everything is one of the above three is a very, very archaic view. I don’t believe that moderately educated materialists from today would limit their view to ‘solids, liquids or gasses’. Materialism means something different, vastly different.
Yo man did you read my the whole post? There’s the hokey idea that a materialist has to throw out the mind or the soul or whatever’s being cast as that which stands apart from the biology.
I think that view is silly because materialism is just taking it that the laws that describe the interactions of matter are both suitable, and the best possible laws by which do describe everything, even stuff that might not be matter. So you don’t even really have to throw out the mind or the soul or whatever because you can just say that it follows physical laws too. You just gotta keep reducing the “physical law” until it’s vaguely defined as something like “a recursive proposition”.
So as I was saying, you can have a proper materialism, but if you wanted to become a materialist because you were mad at god or a church or something, then this kind of materialism wouldn’t work cause you’d be stuck with a criteria that even a soul could meet.
Dunno. I know that Theists like to think that this is why people become atheists. I’d imagine it’s true for at least some atheists. Idk if I agree that it’s ‘common’ though.
Theists like to think that because it’s a sort of subtle way of strengthening their own faith. “Oh yes, even atheists know there’s a God, everyone knows there’s a God, atheists are just angry at him because he lets children die.” Atheists are just angry, you see. Like toddlers throwing a temper tantrum because something happened that they didn’t like. What better way to affirm your faith than to paint everyone who disagrees as someone who actually DOES agree, but is just temporarily acting like a cunt because they’re angry?
Yeah. But if a kid is dressed in black and holding beyond good and evil and checking out the pop atheism books by guys like Dawkins and all, you can probably be assured that he’s not going to describe a materialism that would allow for a soul.
I’m not a theist man. I’m just making fun of a common theme that I happen upon.
Well it all depends on how you define ‘soul’ in the first place. If ‘soul’ is defined in such a way that it’s immaterial in the first place, then…no materialism allows for a soul. And I think most people DO think the term ‘soul’ necessarily means something immaterial. So I don’t see that as much of a problem.
I think my kind of materialism would say to the guy who believed some things were immaterial that he was crazy and that there were no such thing.
Or I could sugar coat it and be like, “sure man there’s a soul but it follows the same patterns of the brain so I’m just gonna ignore it and look at this brain that soul is all you playa!”
