Of and frog when juggle blue

Why materialism is false

I asked my son (who speaks French) if he could translate something for me. He agreed, and then I told him what I wanted him to translate:

“Of and frog when juggle blue.”

Naturally he didn’t say anything for about two seconds, and then instead of a translation I got, “What?”

“Are you having trouble?”

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Well, here, let’s try the translation app on my phone.” Siri didn’t hesitate:

“Here’s the point,” I told him. “When you translate a sentence, you do something very different from what the computer does when it translates. You start by interpreting the meaning of the English words, and then you put that same meaning in French words. When I gave you a jumble of English words without any meaning, it threw you for a loop.

“The computer, on the other hand, has no concept of meaning. It just uses a bunch of rules that tell which French words and grammatical structures correspond to the English ones. When it gives you a translation, it still has no idea what it’s talking about. For the computer, a meaningless sentence is just the same as a meaningful one.”

~

This is a problem for people who believe that nothing exists outside of matter and energy. If they’re right, then the human brain is simply a complicated machine that causes the body to act in various ways in response to stimuli from the eyes and ears and other senses. When I say “Of and frog when juggle blue,” this causes my son’s eardrums to vibrate. Those vibrations are passed as an electrical signal to the brain which causes a whole chain reaction of neural activity which in turn produces signals to the muscles in his mouth to make certain movements. Everything is mechanically determined, a series of cause and effect driven by the laws of chemistry and physics.

Which isn’t thinking. It’s what a computer does.

Nowhere in that process is the meaning of the words an issue. Material processes have no access to meaning, because meaning is entirely immaterial. What’s more, a brain that functions entirely based on mechanical cause and effect, can’t also function based on the laws of logic. Either the answer produced by my brain depends on physical laws governing the movement of electrons, or it depends on logical rules, but it can’t be both.

Which means that if the brain is merely a material machine, it is incapable of rational thought, and then we have no reason to believe that any of what it produces is in any sense true. (It’s no use objecting that we know brains are capable of rational thought because of experience. If brains are irrational, they are just as incompetent to interpret memories (also unreliable) as they are to do any other rational task.)

And so, if materialism is true, we have no reason to believe that brains are capable of the rational thought that produced the idea of materialism in the first place. Therefore materialism is false.