Filling the world with Ideas

You have stated that the statement “words have meaning” is true when and only when words can exist without the material universe. This is an unusual opinion, to say the least. Consider: If we lived in a Buddhist universe where matter turned out to be some sort of illusion, we could turn to each other and say, “Buddha was right” and our words would have meaning. If we lived in some dualistic universe that had both matter and spirit as Descartes proposes, we could turn to each other and say, “Descartes was right” and our words would have meaning. If we lived in a world where the relation of matter to meaning was unknown, but a priori categories of thought required both determinism (in the material sciences) and indeterminism (in the humanities) along that lines that Kant described, we could turn to each other and say, “Kant was right” and our words would have meaning.

 

Indeed, the only universe in which our words could not have meaning is the universe proposed by a thinker like Marx or BF Skinner, who asserted that the content of the human mind was a material output of a mindless and inhuman material process. In that case, one phonograph could indeed created pressure waves in the air, and that waves could impress motion to the microphone of a tape recorder, but the pressure waves (even if a human might have heard them as words, had he been there) would not be words, and would carry no meaning.

 

I also notice that you have grossly misunderstood my point. The ink-marks written on the page are indeed physical things, made of ink, and occupying space, having mass and extension and other material properties. When the ink marks are arranged in a meaningful way, they are also words, and they also carry meaning to the reader. The physical mechanism whereby reflected photons carry images of words to the eye, and the mechanism whereby reflected photons carry images of meaningless ink-shapes to the eye, is the same. The only difference is that the first is meaningful and the second is not. The meaning is not found in the physical description of the ink. It is not a conclusion of science.

 

“We learn our language by interacting with the world, learning words for things and learning words associated with causes and effects.”

 

This is not even remotely true. We learn language from people. There is nothing in inanimate nature that forms anything like a language, a sign, or a symbol. Inanimate objects do not even have mating cries or warning calls.

 

If by “the world” you also include people and their ideas, the truths or mathematics, the laws of logic, the nature of justice, ideas of love and various other abstract, non-material, non-physical, but overwhelmingly obvious realities, then you are expanding the word “the world” to mean the opposite of what your philosophical position requires.

 

The nonmaterial mental parts of the world cannot be analytically reduced to the nonmental material parts of the world because the act of analytical reduction is itself a mental act.

 

 

How do you explain me, who once was an atheist and am now a theist? You cannot possibly say I did not understand the atheist position: I understood it better than the atheists I run across these days, for I argued it without making simple mistakes in logic. You cannot say I do not understand the Christian position: I am myself a Christian. Both world views make perfect sense to me, and I understand how they proceed each given their axioms. I have studied them both for years. One of them is based on a false axiom.

 

No material circumstances were different before and after my conversion. The number of atoms in my body before and after were the same. The location and position of cells in my brain one second before and one second after my conversion were the same. Nothing physical in the room around me had changed. No memory and no experience in my past had changed or could change, since it was the past.

 

Don’t you see that this entirely explodes your theory? My upbringing was the same one second before and one second after my conversion. 

The same. 

If my upbringing made me an atheist, how could the same upbringing make me a theist?

Your conclusions are unscientific. In science, we cannot say A causes B in cases where A exists both when B is present and when B is absent.

 

Your conclusion is also un-philosophical. You are not paying attention to crucial distinctions. If I say I came to the conclusion that my former conclusions were false, that falseness could not be communicated to me from the outside material world, because the idea of ‘true’ and ‘false’ are not ideas that can be reduced to mass, length, duration or any other material properties. ‘Red’ is a property I can glean from the material world because my eye can see redness. I can hear loud and soft, shrill or bass, but I cannot hear trueness and falseness: these are not properties atoms have, either singularly or in groups.

 

‘True’ and ‘false’ indeed are words used to describe the relation between words and the things those words represent, some of which are material things, known through the senses, some ideas, known through the reason. ‘True’ and ‘false’ do not exist in a world composed merely of inanimate objects, any more than observations can exist without an observer.  

 

 

Psychology, except for the specific science of neurochemistry, never attempts to reduce human beliefs and actions to efficient causes. Instead, psychology attempts to reduce opinions about the causes of human behavior to another order of formal and final causes: a man smokes a cigar because it has an abstract MEANING for him, a symbolic meaning, relating to childhood trauma touching his incestuous lust for his mother, etc. Indeed, this type of reasoning is more abstract, more purely conceptual, less to do with material motions, than ordinary speech. If I say I ate a banana “because” I am hungry, my act can be reasonably associated with a physical circumstance: the motion of stomach atoms that produce a nerve-message of hunger. If the psychologist says I ate a banana because of my latent homobananaphobia, he is DISASSOCIATING my action with any real material circumstances, not tying it more closely to the material circumstances. 

If you are attempting to understand my ideas, and instead you start playing the amateur psychologist, and try to discover trauma in my past to “explain” the conclusions of my logic, you are indeed moving FURTHER AWAY from understanding my position. Instead of understranding it, or treating it seriously, you are reducing the conclusions to an epiphenomenon: mere words without meaning. 

If any psychologist were to say “Oh, that man is  atheist because he is in rebellion against all father-figures, and he associates God with an trauma relating to a domineering dad.” that psychologist has left the arena of rational argument. He is not listening to the atheist, he is dismissing him. He treats the atheist’s closely-reasoned argument as we might treat a meaningless dream, a series of images devoid of any relation to external reality. Instead, to the psychologist, the argument is nothing more than ‘rationalization’ which is,  indeed,  the by-product of an irrational mental process. Bringing psychology to bear on any argument merely insults the philosopher, for it says his ideas have no truth value. Nothing treats ideas with less seriousness than this. 

The world has not “filled my head” with ideas: you have it exactly backward. I fill the world with ideas.

 

I wrestle with ideas, I hunt them, I encounter them, I create them. If the ideas in my head were the product merely of atoms of the world bouncing against my eyeballs and eardrums, then my brothers, raised in the same environment as I, would believe as I do. I myself would believe the same thing from year to year.

 

Besides, ideas cannot come from the motions of dead atoms because ideas do not exist in atoms to begin with.