Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[bennyboy]

What it's -made- out of isn't.  Would you like to pick up that banner though, and continue the brilliant objection to materialism, of the existence of music?  I sincerely hope not.

It's the same old song and dance.  I say music is made up of ideas, which represent the mental experiences and feelings of a subjective agent, and that all the physical apparatus, including the brain, is a carrier for the ideas.  You'll say there's no such thing as an idea without a material system which makes it.

It's easy to see that different brains have different ideas.  The reason is clear enough- different people have different experiences of life which inform their ideas.  It's also easy to see that one brain has different ideas at different times.  That's because the environment is dynamic.

Some ideas are ingrained in us via instinct.  It's likely that those ones precede conscious awareness.

The point is that ideas are all imprinted on the brain from its relation to outside sources.  i.e. the brain is a carrier for ideas, which may therefore interact on that medium, rather than a machine capable of creating ideas ex nihilo. This is why ideas can be said to be medium-independent, and that they therefore have an existence in their own right: the same ideas may be imprinted on a variety of mechanisms-- something with which you would strongly agree, I think.