Friday, November 12, 2004

The Origin of Mind

This quote sums up some things about specialists using jargon, too. It is like Stephen Hawking inventing "imaginary time" and then surrounding it with mathematical language that few understand. But the whole foundation of what he is communicating in a fancy way, is still....imaginary. He even admits this nonsense. Yet his statement, "What place then, for a Creator?" was made and published.

How this pattern can surround the issue of the mind:
"If the evidence for the existence of the mind is so fundamental in our experience, why are so many scientists materialists? According to Sir John Eccies and Daniel Robinson, it was Darwin who misled succeeding generations of scientists with his naïve assertion that thought is a secretion of the brain much like gravity is a property of matter. Although no scientist now ac cepts this view of thinking, materialists have kept inventing arguments to defend the unproven idea that our mental experience is material in nature. These new arguments, based as they were on unverifiable speculation, have eventually died at the hands of everyday experience. C.D. Broad once said that Behaviorism, a variant of materialism, belongs to a class of theories that are so “preposterously silly” that only “very learned men” could have thought of them. The theories gain acceptance, he went on to say, because they are presented in highly technical terms by learned persons who are themselves 'too confused to know exactly what they mean.'"
(The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Scienceto the Mind of God
by Roy Abraham Varghese :310)

That is very true. That is how you get mythological narratives like this:

"Once upon a time, a group of mammalian ancestors flopped themselves out of the sea. They just kept flopping because that's what they did. So some died and some lived....they started losing one lil' fish scale, then another. Then their fins began to turn into one lil' leg, then another and another. Then their lungs...."

Etc. I will cite a maverick biologist about this again. Then, perhaps I will cite a maverick geologist about some things too. I like mavericks, enough with all the groupies.

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