Occams Hatchet and Is Materialism "Special"

[The Grand Nudger]

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 is fine..but I;ll be able to quantify sound, and "it's made of ideas" is as far as you have or ever will..get. 

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.

Is music music if no one is there to hear it.  If I put an mp3 player in the desert, and no human being, indeed no "subjective agent" -whatsoever...no brain, no mental experiences or feelings are present or occur...is the sound emanating therefrom suddenly not music, suddenly not bach?  OFC it's still music, still bach, and this is why your criteria for what music is made out of fail on their very own terms.  Music, as asked and in this discussion, is nowhere near inexpicable or unaccountable by a materialist description. You are trying to bundle things you -think- materialism can't account for into a fairly mundane subject.

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.

Propose a mechanism at any point, in all of this. How do ideas idea ideas to ideas?

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.

You understand that you're describing a computational "idea architecture". Since we can't find any of these free floating ideas...since we can't seem to dig up evidence that the world is, indeed "made of ideas"...since we both agree to some sort of computation...since material computation does demonstrably exist....and since we demonstrably have demonstrably material brains with demonstrable computational ability, I'm confident discarding your suggestion on the basis of parsimony alone.

You have stolen the entire material concept, added an un-evidenced variable you call (but fail to describe in any meaningful way) "ideas", and then proceeded to argue against the very framework upon which your stolen concept depends. You'll need to make up your mind. If idea interactions are capable of producing some sort of computational mind then so to are material interactions capable of producing some sort of computational mind. If material computation -could not- produce a mind...than neither could "idea computation". -They;re the same damned thing, you're just referencing a proposed medium -for- computation. Well, we don;t need you to propose one. One exists. Every single -bit- of data on a computer (as in, the machine kind) comes from it's environment as well, what's this ex nihilo shit..the next bale of straw you'll expect someone to schlep out of your way?