Different in degree or kind: An essay captures Adler (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, November 16, 2015, 13:29 (3084 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Consciousness and abstract thought are not immaterial? Really? Then what are they? -dhw: That is not what I wrote. As you know very well, the question is whether the SOURCE is material or not.-DAVID: The brain is material. Each human controls his brain and he is the source of its produced thoughts. Material under controls. Dualism, I think.-What part of each human controls the brain is a mystery. It's the usual business of pots and kettles. You object (in my view quite rightly) when someone assumes a material source for thought, or a material control mechanism for the brain, but I must repeat: “Anyone who states categorically that the mind (intellect, will etc.) is immaterial is offering subjective opinion as if it were fact.” -DAVID: Frankly, it is fact to me. Our ideas here are presented in written material, BUT they are ideas. Touch one and show me that you did. You can't. The content and meanings of thought are totally immaterial.-Of course thought itself is not tangible, but we are talking about the SOURCE of thought. The author categorically states that the intellect is “wholly immaterial”. If he only meant the products of the intellect, he should have said so. But he tells us that “a human being is material and immaterial - a composite being.” Apes “have material powers...that are instantiated in the brain and wholly depend upon matter for their operation.” That is precisely what materialists believe is the case with the human intellect. Nobody knows the source of thought, and so although I would agree that our intellectual powers set us apart from other organisms, we cannot claim that we have an immaterial faculty whereas all other organisms are wholly material. That is a purely subjective opinion masquerading as fact, and so once again I would argue that our mental superiority denotes nothing except our mental superiority.-dhw: Incidentally, it's a great shame the lawyer does not acknowledge that evolution is not in itself a materialistic theory - an omission that you have rectified in your comment. But perhaps he has an agenda of his own.
DAVID: I think he does have an agenda. Evolution is a process (material). The theory as to how it works is immaterial, an obvious difference. I don't think you confuse the two ways of approaching thought about evolution.-That is not what I meant. My point is simply regret that the lawyer's diatribe against materialistic (which I suspect means atheistic) evolution did not make it clear that the theory itself is neither materialistic (atheistic) nor immaterialistic (theistic). The provocative question “Is Darwinian Evolution a fact?” makes it difficult to separate the attack on materialism from an attack on the theory. That is why I suspect that his legalistic verbosity is a cover for a personal agenda. Regardless of your reservations about aspects of the theory, your own belief in some form of “theistic evolution” restores the balance that is strikingly absent from his article.