Is the Filter Theory committing the ad hoc fallacy and is it unfalsifiable?

Looking a bit at the discussion Merle linked and other threads on christianforums.net I would say the debate sections are pretty toxic, with militant atheists and christians often using personal attacks with insults against each other such as "woomonger" and arguments such as saying ID enables climate change denial. The atheists seem to be more agressive while christians "passive"

If the brain is Material/Physical in the way Materialist/Physicalist define those terms, as in made up of some stuff that has no fundamental mental character, it cannot have thoughts or memories or subjective feelings or utilize logic. Even you seem to recognize this when you note that nails don't have Consciousness, you just need to realize the same problem of getting Consciousness from Matter extends to brains.

I disagree. Brains can and do have thoughts, memories, subjective feelings, and utilize logic.

Monkeys have thoughts, memories and utilize crude logic. They also appear to have subjective feelings.

Do you or do you not think a monkey has to have a soul to do what it does? If it doesn't need a soul to do what it does, your argument falls apart. For then monkeys do these things with their brains without a soul. If instead, monkeys must have a soul to do these things, where do you draw the line that below which actions can be strictly physical?  That argument tends to move the entire world into a state of animism where the world is filled with souls manipulating it.

So either way, you lose. So what will you do? Avoid the question, hoping it goes away, and nobody notices what you are doing?

If you want to get around this, you'd have to give us an actual metaphysical picture of the physical that gives us a convincing reason to believe the material brain can do the things Tallis & Rosenberg say is not possible - have thoughts about anything.

Sure. Here is a video of cats doing cat things. It seems obvious to me that the brains of these cats are thinking thoughts and that cats have memories.  Do you agree?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FQsIfE7sZM&t=23s

As for laws of physics - Where are they? How do they work? Why don't they change?

No God, No Laws by Nancy Cartwright


Do Physical Laws Make Things Happen? by Stephen Talbott

Regarding the question in the title of your second link, refer to Betteridge's Law of Headlines.  The answer is "no".

Both links misunderstand what physical laws are. Physical laws are not commands. God did not tell protons they need to have a positive charge or they will go to hell. No, "physical laws" is just the name we give for the way things work. We live in an orderly world which can be understood by realizing that certain things act certain ways. That does not require a lawgiver.

As for the accusation of believing in "magic", I think that arguably applies more to the varied times you've waved away problems by saying "I don't know" while insisting that Souls Need Brains ->

Magic versus metaphysics by Feser

Excuse me, but I am not accusing, I am asking. I told you that before. Can you please tell me how belief in a non-material something that does what you claim is different from saying it is done by magic? I note that you have given us no answer. Again, if it is true that no physical thing can have conscious thoughts--an assertion you have not proven--then how would a soul doing this impossible thing be different from magic? If you cannot tell us how it differs from magic, why not?

Again, there are many things that science does not know. When we get to that, we should answer, "I don't know". There is nothing wrong with that.

When we come to things that we don't know, we can assume one of two possible answers:

1. 1. There is some physical explanation that may or may not involve new physical principles and may or may not ever be known that explains this, or 2. "God of the gaps" that is, we find a gap in physics, so we need a god or soul or some other entity to fill in the gap.

If #1 is the correct answer, then there is no magic. If #2 is the correct answer, then we are in your boat, where the answer is virtually indistinguishable from magic.

My money is on option 1. 

"God of the gaps" has been used to explain many things in the past. And yet the gaps keep getting smaller, and physics takes over more of the space once credited to gods. If you want to insert souls or gods into any place where there is an unknown, then prepare to do a lot of moonwalking, appearing to walk forward but constantly going backwards.

That is the difference between our views. I am confident that the answer is #1, but I am not absolutely certain that sometime we might have to fall back on option #2, in which my view would look as much a magic as your view does to me. 

But my money is on option 1.

Sure. Here is a video of cats doing cat things. It seems obvious to me that the brains of these cats are thinking thoughts and that cats have memories.  Do you agree?

Are you deliberately avoiding the real issue or do you not understand the point at all?  Our brains certainly process information but that does not imply consciousness as unconscious computers do that.  What we want from you is an explanation of how unconscious matter can be responsible for consciousness.  Comparing us to animals does not answer the question.

Finally, I think it's worth noting that he is explicitly arguing for free will here!

I don't know if what he is arguing for would be considered free will as most of us understand that term.

I do think it gets a bit confusing since Kastrup, as I understand him, also thinks ultimately there is only the Single Subject at the Ground of Being level and all other minds are ultimately illusory in some way. The Absolute Idealism claim.

Are you deliberately avoiding the real issue or do you not understand the point at all?  Our brains certainly process information but that does not imply consciousness as unconscious computers do that.  What we want from you is an explanation of how unconscious matter can be responsible for consciousness.  Comparing us to animals does not answer the question.

Merle's main issue is with Survival instead of how consciousness is created, which is why he is open to "immaterial brains" but not to survival due to brain damage affecting consciousness...

Oh, I see. I still disagree: I think that the crucial element in such arguments is the (supposed) causal impotence of consciousness rather than epiphenomenalism as such, and so, any type of physicalism that doesn't in some way deny consciousness in the first place is subject to these arguments (that of Titus and that in the essay to which you linked and on which I commented).


We do know at least though that it places primary and sole causal powers in the physical, and thus denies all causal power to consciousness (where it even recognises the existence of consciousness), which is what makes the arguments in question successful (to the extent that they are, indeed, successful).

From what I gather the Mind-Identity Theories try to get around epiphenomenalism by saying when some material event happens that just is the mental even happening...As Feser says this seems to be nothing more than the illusion of plausibility as why would we think two things that are so different as mental events and physical events would be the same thing?

But I agree there does seem to be a huge gap when it comes to explaining behaviors. Pain and Pleasure, for example, seem to be necessary to influence the behavior of an agent and in that line of thinking it makes sense why they would be used in selection pressures...but the Materialist has to cash out all such talk in some comprehensible way. I don't think that can be done.

Are you deliberately avoiding the real issue or do you not understand the point at all?  Our brains certainly process information but that does not imply consciousness as unconscious computers do that.  What we want from you is an explanation of how unconscious matter can be responsible for consciousness.  Comparing us to animals does not answer the question.

Glad you replied, thought I was on "Crazy Pills" for sec there!  

Merle's main issue is with Survival instead of how consciousness is created, which is why he is open to "immaterial brains" but not to survival due to brain damage affecting consciousness...

But that wasn't the point you were pretending to answer.  If you can't explain something, you seem to jump around it instead of giving a relevant answer.

Looking a bit at the discussion Merle linked and other threads on christianforums.net I would say the debate sections are pretty toxic, with militant atheists and christians often using personal attacks with insults against each other such as "woomonger" and arguments such as saying ID enables climate change denial. The atheists seem to be more agressive while christians "passive"

I find such stuff is tiresome, a growing sentiment IMO as it seems there's a more cordial atheist-theist discussion put forth by atheists like Emerson Green & Justin Chieber and the group at Capturing Christianity.



I'm not really in either camp, pretty agnostic on the God question but I probably fall somewhere in the "Limited God" (see Goff's Aeon essay) and "Nagel Zone*" landscape.

*Meaning there's no God but "Axiarchism" where things like consciousness, teleology, moral values have their place in reality.

But that wasn't the point you were pretending to answer.  If you can't explain something, you seem to jump around it instead of giving a relevant answer.

Yeah it seems like a Catch-22:

- Talk about whether a material brain can create consciousness and you're told the real discussion is whether Souls Need Brains.

- Talk about why you think Souls Need Brains is false and you're asked why you believe in souls, how animals don't have souls, how you believe in "magic" (whatever that means). The problem being that if we're talking about Souls Need Brains we're all assuming souls exist for the sake of the argument.

In any case I would say Souls Need Brains is false because the stuff that makes a nail makes up a brain, and we've been told thinking a nail is conscious makes one "dumb as a nail".

Reading the writings of atheists Harris, Tallis, and Rosenberg I don't think the matter that makes up a nail, in greater volume with different arrangement, negates the reasons given why we don't think a nail has consciousness. Just as a nail doesn't have thoughts, subjective feels, rationality, or memory I don't think the brain can have those either.

That we or animals have any aspects of consciousness is a key indicator that there has to be something more than what can be explained by the descriptions provided by current physics. In fact Rosenberg's reasoning for thinking brains can't have thoughts is that nothing in current physics offers us a kind of matter than can point to / be about / signify anything else. As such I don't think positing the soul having cognitive faculties is believing in "magic", which in any case is an odd accusation to make as the Souls Need Brains claim requires accepting souls for the sake of the argument.

Thus I don't think the Souls Need Brains claim holds. This doesn't mean there has to be a soul, just that the assertion is weak because there is no good argument for it to hold.

For me to even consider the idea that Souls Need Brains, I would need a convincing explanation for why the stuff that makes up a nail can produce the varied aspects of consciousness when it's making up parts of a human or parts of some animal.

Ideally stating it this way leaves no more loopholes to exploit about "believing in magic" or "believing in animal souls". I've also tried to avoid the terms Materialism and Physicalism.