Monday, October 29, 2007

If I only had a brain--how do you materialists explain this one

Oh I know. The report comes from Fox News, so it must have been made up.

6 comments:

solarblogger said...

I'm not a materialist, but I think there is a good natural explanation.

It doesn't take much brain to do a lot. Jeffrey Satinover's book The Quantum Brain explains some of the amazing things very small neural networks are capable of doing.

I would also suspect, however, that the measurement of intelligence is rather shallow. Long term familiarity might show that another person with the same IQ might be able to do more.

Anonymous said...

More confirmation that you don't really need a brain to be a good Christian :-)

What is the brain for? Very little, as we don't use it for producing thought. How could we? The idea that the brain produces thoughts went out with Descartes

Jason said...

The article is actually from http://www.physorg.com/ so that wouldn't hold. haha
Don't you think that it's far too early to judge that materialism is necessarily false simply because of one incident?

Bill Snedden said...

I'm thinking it's most likely that Vic is having us on. This is obviously no threat whatsoever to the physicalist position and I'm quite sure he knows it...

Victor Reppert said...

I was asking how materialists explain this one. Bill is right--I wouldn't make an argument out of this. Though I sometimes wonder, given methodological naturalism, what kind of evidence would refute materialism.

Adam Gonnerman said...

Over ten years ago in General Psych I learned about a young woman in England who grew up with all of her higher though functions running through the visual center of her brain. There was hardly anything else left of her brain, much as was the case of this man in the article you linked. In her case, however, she did quite well and even got a PhD.