Think of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all you really were there at the time, weren’t you? How else could you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren’t there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place …. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that does not make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.” – Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Prof. Dawkins has an unshakable belief in the materialistic paradigm and evolutionary biology. Because of his great belief that matter and energy are all there was, is, or ever will be, Dawkins makes an amazing discovery, or rather, comes to an astounding conclusion. Since your original matter and energy was not really present at the event of a children memory, yet you retain that memory, there must be a mechanism for the transference of this memory. Because he rejects the obvious implication of dualism, he asserts that matter, flowing from place to place, has some unknown hidden trait that carries with it memories of events that it passed through. Of course if this were true, I should be able to remember not only my own personal memories but I should have memories of all events my matter has passed through from the beginning of its existence.
For simplicity sake, monism as used here means that reality is composed of a single strata or substance, that is matter (or matter and energy) and is akin to materialistic atheism. Dualism, such as was common to the belief of the ancient Greeks or Hebrews, states that reality is composed of both mind and matter and that these two things are distinct. So when I say Dawkins in a monist I mean he believes in a single layer of reality. This means that Dawkins has to explain how matter can acquire the attributes of the incorporeal, i.e., of mind.
Dawkins attempts to do this with the concept of the MEME he proposed in “The Selfish Gene”. Never mind that there is not one iota of evidence for it except for the use of large words used in a way to make them sound scientific. Never mind that He uses the canned Neo-Darwinian mechanism to explain how memes operate.
Memes do this through the processes of variation, mutation, competition and inheritance, each of which influence a meme’s reproductive success. Memes spread through the behaviors that they generate in their hosts. Memes that propagate less prolifically may become extinct, while others may survive, spread and (for better or for worse) mutate. – Wikipedia
To keep things squarely in a materialist framework and avoid the more obvious conclusion of theistic dualism, Dawkins has to invent quasi-evolution constructs like memes. There is no basis for this in the evidential world in which Dawkins claims to live. He simply does not know how to explain memory, fashion, or social habits that are found in all cultures. He certainly knows of no explanation for why a hunk of matter, like yourself, should find art, music or architecture of any interest at all. After all, dirt is not musical. It is not moral, it has no memory, contains no blue print or plan. Matter does not choose a set of symbols and organize them to create the syntax and grammar needed by a sender and a receiver to communicate intentions. Matter is not in and of itself information baring, nor does it impose upon that information syntax and grammar.
We use matter in many ways, to pave streets or forge into tools or light up houses and keep warm. What we don’t do is assume it can make moral choices or have unsatisfied desires. My granite counter-top does not pine away wishing it were back in the old mountain it was dug from, at least, not to my knowledge. Such a belief would be considered idiotic. The average, normal, rational person, driven by the evidence all around him treats matter as distinct from mind. The normal assumption of anybody free of materialist atheism that arises out of evolutionary pollution is to treat the world as dualistic rather than monistic.
Memes and replication really explain nothing at all, least of which is now matter acquires the attributes of mind. Of course, to Dawkins, mind is brain. But mind is not brain. Brain is matter. As an analogy we could use a television. Now I realize no analogy is perfect but they can be instructive.
Say a person is siting at home watching “Happy Days”. The cable or satellite or TV antenna is picking up the signal and passing it through the matrix of circuits that is the television. Then, something goes wrong. Prehaps the sound goes out, or all the reds drop out of the picture, or focus is lost. What happened? The signal is still there, with all the information is has always contained. The other TV in the bedroom is still seeing the picture fine. So, a repairman is called. He replaces a part. Then another, then another. Finally the show can be viewed properly again. But the television has new parts that were not in the original configuration. Shouldn’t that make a difference? Not at all because those parts that were needed to see the show properly are completely independent of the signal carrying the show itself.
The same is true of the soul or mind or spirit. The brain may not always work right but it is mere interface for the mind. Memory, desire, values, decisions, free-will, analysis, sorrow, guilt, wonder, amazement, fear, hope, love, hate, purpose, appreciation, gratitude, composition of literature or of music, devotion, ideas, beliefs, and rationality are not found in matter but in mind.
To believe that the love of architecture is merely a signature of some combination of matter and energy is to believe that the effect can be greater than the cause. No rational person believes that. It is akin to saying that books create authors or that I can pour one gallon of water into an empty five gallon bucket expecting it to overflow. It is like believing that 2 + 2 will always be greater then 4. It is a position of extreme irrationality in the presence of the evidence of all reality. What Dawkins and all materialists do is attribute properties to matter that matter does not have and that there is zero evidence for. According to the materialistic atheism of Dawkins, matter desires and remembers those desires and thinks about them using the laws of mind like identity and non-contradiction and excluded middle. Matter has never been observed to possess any of these properties. Matter has never been observed to possess ideas or logic or deductive reasoning. These things are far beyond the pour capabilities of matter. Matter has never been demonstrated to possess these things and no evidence exists for such conclusions. Such a simple thing as a category fallacy sends very bright people into this maze of stupidity.
Yet, Dawkins, Dennett and a great parade of Oxford dons and Cambridge apostles array these beliefs as rational. They tell us with sophisticated language and complex theorems that matter can create mind. It is easier to believe that books create authors. They want us to believe that they are the rationalists among us while the foundation of their beliefs are nitwittery.
Is it any wonder Dennett and Provine claim free-will is an illusion? How could they not if they believe that all mental interactions are just collisions of electric forces governed by physical law. But how does matter come to have the capacity of illusion? How is the matter in our bodies self-aware enough to be even concerned about such an illusion? How is illusion a construct of matter rather than mind? In Dawkins’ world it must be so because mind really doesn’t exist, just matter flowing here and there with unknown magically memes recording everything. After which it becomes me or you for a short time. For that short time we are drones living an illusion and we then think deep thoughts and have unlimited desires and make billions of choices only to disappear again and flow somewhere else. An this is called science?
While being a drone, devoid of free-will may make one a prefect candidate for the state collective, many people, common people, reject Dawkins’ atheistic materialism and evolutionary biology not because of ignorance or evil, but because its foundation forces upon them a belief in the absurd. Dawkins’ monist worldview is not rational but irrational to the point of silliness, it is certain men professing to be wise when they are fools, it is a belief that the effect is always greater than the cause, it is saying that if you want to be considered a brilliant thinker by the elite pundits of the world you have to begin from a base of irrationality.
Why is it that those who believe in a reality of matter and energy only use non-material means such as ideas and language and argument to convince us we should dispense with our common sense and follow their light into darkness?
“Since your original matter and energy was not really present at the event of a children memory, yet you retain that memory, there must be a mechanism for the transference of this memory.”
I am not quite sure if you’re joking. If you replace each brick of a house, brick for brick, with other ones, does there have to be a mechanism for the transference of the house form? No, of course not. If you take out one brick, it’s still more than enough of the house, so replacing one brick doesn’t change the form at all. Same thing with memories: Taking out a single atom from the brain does not change the memories at all, so replacing all matter of the brain piece by piece does not need some “mechanism” to transfer the memory into the new one. The new form is simply the same form as before, thus the same neutral structure, thus the same memories – just not the same matter.
And I’m not quite sure if you understood what a meme is supposed to be, either, otherwise you would not confuse it with an individual memory.
You missed the entire point of the article. It has nothing to do with replacing bricks or of memory that may or may not lie in the an individual’s brain or the transmission of cultural memories and information via the flow of matter from one place to another. I used Dawkins’ own definitions as noted in the links. If you cannot understand what I write, do not comment. Better yet, leave college now and save some of your rational processes to survival the economic collapse that is coming.
BTW: Information does not arise because of a structure, although information can be preserved by structure if no integrity is lost. However, that is not remotely possible in Dawkins’ proposal. Matter flows from one place to another to use his words, but it does not remain in tact and combines into various forms, not on its own, but by guidance via some form of information and mechanisms that can utilize this information to build biological or mechanical structures. The structures created, be they biological or mechanical, are rarely the same material and biologically are usually quite different at the micro level from their predecessors.
As to structure itself, the human brain starts out with little structure and no information of acquired cultural norms. There is no evidence that the information and memories and individual will acquire over a lifetime flows because of the movement of matter over time. Ideas are incorporeal at their core. There is no evidence that when I acquire a new idea and I take efforts to memorize it then regurgitate it to others that some structure altering event occurs. Of course there is no evidence that ideas arise out of matter or matters structure. There is no evidence that news ideas and conclusions imprint upon some material structure while at the same time this structure is fixed so information can be passed along and also adapts and changes because of selective pressures. It is a retarded and contradictory assertion. It is mere speculation as Dawkins grasps for straws to suggest that because we have similar general brain configurations (structure) it is this mechanism that allows us information transference from one generation to the next. The brain my be a necessary item to have to interact with our world, but is still like a computer without software. It needs a soul or it is dead matter.
There was no point. You started with nonsense and then it got worse. I just picked the first obvious things, to allow you cleaning up your basics. But you are obviously not even able to do that.
I guess you were afraid to finish the article. Your materialistic bias renders rational discussion unless. I dislike doing this but you are wasting my time so I will not be taking any more comments from you. People like you are mere distractions seeking to consume the life out of reasonable people by obfuscating simple truth with pseudo science and hum-buggery. Stop being a parasitical organism and actually try thinking through things rather than reacting to them from bias.
The objectives of the article were clear enough.
1. Because Prof. Dawkins is a monist he postulates that you couldn’t have really been at a childhood event.
2. Because you have memories of that event something else must be present to carry forward those memories. Since Dawkins rejects all but materialistic reality, he needs to account for this in the context of his evolutionary biological framework.
3. To account for this he has coined the term “meme” in an attempt to put forward some evolutionary mechanism to explain the transference of culture, memory, information and behavior. One speculation is that the same structure is maintained while the matter undergoes an ongoing replacement.
4. There is no evidence for memes what so ever. It is all unsubstantiated belief in a construct that has no known basis in reality. It is part of his “religion” as he defines the term.
5. Although I did not cover this, Anti-Christian evolutionary junkies like Dennett and Blackmore pushed this further and created another “scientific” field of study (called memetics) driven by their own beliefs and not on any evidence.
6. Dawkins has simply constructed a magic unknown and unverifiable materialistic unit (the meme) and then asserts it can do non-materialistic things and calls it science. It is not.
7. Dawkins commits the category error or fallacy. By ascribing attributes to things that do not possess them he confuses the issue between the corporeal and the incorporeal. Examples of a category error would be what does the color blue taste like or what does light smell like.
8. Because of his materialistic bias, Dawkins must infuse matter with many incorporeal attributes it does not have and there is no evidence for, e.g., ideas, information, desire, appreciation, altruism, rationality, self-awareness, morality, etc. This is the category error.
9. Dawkins takes it further and commits the most egregious scientific error possible. The irrational belief that effects can be greater than the cause. This is never observed in the real world nor is there a shred of evidence for its violation. It is only postulated in the fantasy world of pseudo-science such as evolutionary biology or cosmology.
10. Dawkins, like most other materialistic atheists, base the assumptions of their worldview, NOT on reason, but on a system of beliefs that are grounded solely in wishful thinking and also very likely their hidden malice towards the idea of morally accountable to a supreme being.
11. Dawkins and other practitioners of evolutionary pseudo science carefully grouch their theorems in layers upon layers of scientific jargon never noticing the irrational basis at the foundation of their worldview.
12. So much minutia has been built up over time and our education systems is in such a deplorable state that Dawkins lacks the philosophical tools to analyze the foundation of this own “religion” (His devotion to the materialist paradigm). This in spite getting a D.Phil from Oxford (or perhaps because of it).
13. Dawkins faith (materialism) does not match reality, it has no evidence for its claims, it cannot explain ant of the incorporeal phenomena that is ever present with us without resorting to errors in thinking and vivid use of imagination.
14. His irrational faith is often rejected by the common man because they sense its basis in absurdity.
Yes, I think the point of the article was clear enough.