Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "On Obama, Immigration, and Islam (Pt. 3) | Dinesh D'Souza | POLITICS | Rubin Report" video.

  1. Don't like dualism? Well you can't throw out consciousness: We all experience consciousness in a mode that makes its denial meaningless. And materialism can't account for it. There is nothing in materialism that allows for consciousness even as an epiphenomenon. The notion that consciousness arises from matter is a category error. Not a simple error, like 2+2=5, but a category error, like 2+2=blue. You can do sums on integers till the sun goes nova and your answer will always be an integer. Someday, Lord willing, I will write a book on this. So, being a skeptic about the immaterial consciousness is to hold a world view that excludes, well, YOU! The only option for rejecting dualism is to reject MATTER as a fundamental reality on par with mind. This can be thought of as a variation on the simulation hypothesis, where our world is a sim running not on a computer, but in a MIND. This obviates any supposed interaction problems. Note, that I don't have any problem with mind/matter dualism, myself. But if you do, this is the only viable alternative. A more complete response to materialism is in my post on the +Bill Smith thread below.
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  2. If any of you is unaware of the vast body of evidence for theism, you have not looked. As for "unprovable", Christianity, for example, does have some tenets that are hard to test in the lab, like "God is love." It also has historical claims, for instance, that are subject to historical verification/falsification in principle. It is not that it is unprovable in principle, it is that a lot of folks have tried real hard to disprove it and failed.
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  3. There is nothing in physics that allows for the production of a subjective observer. In a purely physical universe, consciousness would never arise. The notion that it does is a category error. Not a simple error, like 2+2=5, but a category error, like 2+2=blue. You can do sums on integers till the sun goes nova and your answer will always be an integer, not a color. "But muh materialism." The base of materialism has always been a special pleading thing against the supernatural. "I have this rule that I just made up that says nothing outside space/time/matter can influence it (in most variants because nothing outside it existed)." Materialism is dead. Big bang cosmology killed it. No explaination can be offered for why something exists rather than nothing. Yet, this should not give us pause because SOMETHING DOES EXIST. If in the link of causality there was ever a node where NOTHING EXISTED, then of course, nothing would exist forever thereafter. Anything which BEGINS to exist must be caused by something else. It follows that any account of origin must either have an infinite regression, or a closed loop, or a ground of being. Most theists claimed that God was outside of time, and ground of being. The Atheists of the Victorian era countered Matter was eternally pre-existant, thus did not begin, thus required no agent of origin. They claimed Matter was Ground of Being. But starting in 1924, Edwin Hubble painstakingly developed a series of distance indicators to galaxies. This allowed him to estimate distances to galaxies whose redshifts had already been measured, mostly by Slipher. In 1929 Hubble discovered a correlation between distance and recession velocity—now known as Hubble's law. Lemaître had already shown that this was expected, given the cosmological principle. In the 1920s and 1930s almost every major cosmologist preferred an eternal steady state universe, and several complained that the beginning of time implied by the Big Bang imported religious concepts into physics; this objection was later repeated by supporters of the competing steady state theory. The rub is that Big Bang means that matter had a beginning, and thus cannot be ground of being. This undercuts the logical underpinnings of atheism/materialism. Materialist dogma is that nothing outside space/time/matter can exist or affect it. Big bang cosmology proves that something outside it does exist and did affect it. Materialism was never compatible with consciousness. Now it is not compatible with known cosmology. Materialism is dead.
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  4. This is based on materialism, and materialism is proven false, see my post in the +Bill Smith thread above.
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  5. All this notion that nothing outside the continuum of space/time/energy can influence it is simply the dogma of materialism, whether stated in philosophical terms or the language of physics. This dogma has been discovered to be wrong as the big bang has been proven. Something did, therefore something can. This is why so many cosmologists had to be dragged kicking and screaming from steady state to big bang, because of the undesirable theistic implications of the latter. In steady state, matter can be ground of being in an infinite regression. In big bang, it can't. A more complete response to materialism is in my post on the +Bill Smith thread below.
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  6. The mind is not-physical because there is no aspect of matter or physics which allows for the existence of a subjective observer, yet here we are. The notion that mind emerges from matter is not a simple error, like 2+2=5, but a category error, like 2+2=blue. You can sum integers till the sun goes nova and the answer will still be an integer.
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