M
MindOverMatter
Guest
I’m inclined to think that even if you believe in God, we are ultimately dealing with innate ideas. To clarify what “I” mean by innate ideas, let me explain it in this way. If the materialist wants to believe that the taste of an orange is intrinsic to the existence of the orange, rather then due to brain functions, then he is faced with a problem. A teleological problem. If an orange really tastes like an orange, then this would suggest that the brain evolved for the “purpose” of experiencing things as they truly are. By rights, there is no natural reason for “true-experiences”, since the brain is blindly interpreting reality for us. It is not us that is interpreting, since the “eye” first has to see before we know. The brain cannot possibly know the intrinsic taste of something outside the bounds of its experience, at least not to the extent that we should experience things exactly how they are. If one is a materialist, one must admit that we have an “automatic brain” and an “experiential brain”; and that the automatic comes before the experience. When we sense reality, objective output is reduced to electrochemical stimulus. But what happens to the image? Like in a computer program, “Zeros and Ones” can represent an actual image, however the image itself exists separately from the ones and zeroes. Ones and zeros by them selves mean nothing and only serve to actualize the image. In order for an image to be actualized coherently on the screen, certain processes have to be directed by an intelligence which “created” the “pattern” that one is trying to reproduce. Otherwise everything will be a jumble, and even if by luck my image does appear on the screen, it is only because the image already exists in relation to a specific combination of numbers. In order for the automatic brain to blindly reproduce output, so that it can present to my receiver a sufficient and coherent image of reality (at any time), the brain would have to make coherent sense of a reality which exist outside of its ability to comprehend. which doesn’t make sense; and it would be an extreme coicidence that there just happens to exist, in time and space, a specific combination of chemicals that will insure an accurate subjective perception of an objective reality. If it is instead the receiver that is making sense of reality, then by what natural process does it acquire an accurate subjective depiction of an objective reality? A precise interpretation of the intrinsic-qualities in nature, suggests that the universe was prepared for somebody to experience it. Of coarse, a person could try to escape this by reducing everything to chemicals; for example, a thing isn’t really salty, we just experience it that way. But then why do we experience specific things as having various tastes in relation to its object and atomic structure? Only purpose can makes proper sense of this phenomenon. It would seem that, whether or not taste is purely an experience, we would have to interpret reality by a program in the brain which imposes a particular experience (an innate idea) on that which is sensed; each image actualized in relation to a combination of zeros and ones. But where do these experiences come from in the first place?