Secrets of the Immaterial Mind

Merriam-Webster's online dictionary defines immaterial as: not consisting of matter.

Ideas are immaterial but they depend for their existence on the substrate of a functioning material brain.

Humans have no experience with any other kind of idea. In human experience ideas require consciousness and consciousness is the means of discovering that which exists. As Ayn Rand puts it: consciousness is consciousness of something.

Humans give expression to their ideas via the material universe employing such media as print, voice, art, music, plays, cartoons, TV, the internet and physical structures. This list is not meant to be exhaustive.

We know that Mickey Mouse was given public expression by Walt Disney somewhere around 1928 and before that MM was known only to the mind of his creator. Mickey was created for entertainment and it is easy to tell that Mickey is a fictional character. We know there is no walking, talking anthropic mouse named Mickey under contract solely to the Walt Disney company.

More nebulous are reality claims for characters such as Big Foot, Susquatch, the Abominable Snowman and the Loch Ness monster. Here we probably lean to the fictional category because of the quality of the evidence so far presented for belief and our knowledge of the propensity for some mischievous humans to commit hoaxes and create urban legends.

Less obvious is the claim made by some that their favorite deity is real, i.e., that there is an external referent for the concept of God heretofore left undefined.

It would seem to me that either the stated deity is made of something or it is made of nothing. If it is made of something then we have the quandary of explaining the origin of that something. Is there yet another being behind the scenes of the worshipped one?

If the assumed deity is made of nothing then what exactly are we talking about? Why make much ado about nothing? It can't affect us in any way. Paraphrasing Delos McKown, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University: the immaterial and the non-existent look very much alike.

The secrets of an immaterial mind have been exposed. It is made of nothing and hence it doesn't exist except in the minds of living self-conscious creatures called homo sapiens. Note the irony.

We don't have a universal definition for the deity because it is a creation of many human minds. We can make a god into anything we want and in theological history it could be claimed that we have done just that. Of the thousands of gods that we now reject we try to focus on one and come up with a self-consistent concept for what it could be.

Unless this god shows up in modern times as he is reported to have done in the past he must be relegated to the plethora of fictional characters that the human mind has conceived throughout its history.

Neither god as nothing nor god as something can predate existence. Existence is the starting point and any call to account for the universe is a question belonging to the same category of meaningless queries as what is north of the north pole.

How could it be otherwise? If ever there were absolutely nothing we would not be here to discuss it.

This is the real secret of the immaterial mind and has proven very difficult for most humans to grasp and accept as the implications are too daunting for minds conditioned by Sunday sermons.

After all, where would morality come from if not from an immaterial mind?

Perhaps from the material minds that created Him?

There are not too many of us that would enthusiastically enforce Exodus 35:2.¹ This verse makes God both irrelevant to our age and an abomination before us. We have left Him behind. Some of us have just not realized it yet.

Q: Prove God doesn’t exist.
A: That’s a tough one. Show me how it’s done by proving Zeus and Apollo don’t exist, and I’ll use your method. ~from Pat Condell

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1. Exodus 35:2 clearly states that anyone working on the Sabbath should be put to death. You really going to feel good about enforcing that one?" -- Penn and Teller on the Bible