A CRACK IN CHINA'S ATHEIST EDIFICE?
The best thing the Chinese government is doing is not cracking down on Christianity. Cracking down would tie Christianity to the struggle for freedom from state repression and thereby ennoble it, make it modern and "enlightened," and encourage its growth. Letting Christianity run its course should lead to its eventual fall from its tendency toward decadence and corruption and its vulnerability to a science-driven decrease in "gaps" for God to fill. Then it would be replaced by atheism as is happening in Europe. Or, it will morph into evangelical science and reason denialism and somehow be usurped by conservative politicians as we have seen happen in the US, for now but hopefully not forever. Enlightenment science, reason, and humanitarianism may be slow to spread and take root but they are proving to be highly potent in the long term. Let's hope the long term is long enough.
HOW AMERICA FAILED
This interview, especially the book How America Failed it
focuses on, presents a serious challenge to freethinking humanism as received
from the Enlightenment. Science, reason, and humanitarianism may, repeat may,
be succeeding globally in the long term but they are clearly failing in the US.
What, if anything, can be done when the best ideas and methods Western
civilization has produced for governance and social life are willingly and
knowingly rejected by the majority in the most powerful, wealthiest, and most
highly "educated" country in history? I tend to agree with the book's
author, Morris Berman. Nothing. We're screwed. The blind thundering herd of
selfish greedy individuals is taking us all over the cliff and into the abyss.
Not so, you say? Please explain.
What the self-person-soul is in a material sense is an
important subject for science. That it is an "illusion created by the
brain" does not warrant declaring it useless and relegating it to a
dead-end dustbin of woo. The brain creates it for practical purposes to allow
us to integrate and make manageable and useful the complex amalgam of images,
consciousness, and memory of our experience. It also has value in representing
us in and connecting us to our world of others - past and present, locally and
globally. It is a very useful, necessary, and real part of each of our lives.
It is no mere illusion that is misleading us about what and who we
"really" are. It is the most basic entity of our personal, social,
cultural, historical, and evolved humanity. Discounting or discarding it
reduces us to protoplasmic meat sans meaning, purpose, and humanness.
Below is a very good essay with good links within the text.
The use and abuse of the self-person-soul in society and history is a great
discussion topic. Here's an excerpt:
"Let me pause here to note that while I side with Sam
Harris on matters of spirituality and find the notion of the eternal “soul”
somewhat problematic as a delusory salve for our chronic dread of our own
impermanence, I side most of all with Carl Sagan, who wrote in history’s most
lucid treatise on science and spirituality: “If we ever reach the point where
we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will
have failed.
"The point, of course, is that the mystery of what we
call the “soul” — the stuff of Hannah Arendt’s elegant case for “unanswerable
questions” — need not be resolved in order for the concept itself to be a
useful one in advancing our understanding of and compassion for ourselves,
right here and right now, in this blink of cosmic time that is our
existence."
THE NEUROSCIENCE
BUBBLE
Happy to see Patricia Churchland, a Canadian
neurophilosopher (her term for a neuroscientist and philosopher) many describe
as a strong materialist, post this cautionary article criticizing exaggerated
and premature claims about neuroscience findings and their potential
applications. I'm reading her latest book Touching a Nerve: Our Brains, Our
Selves which is a very good balance of objective descriptions of
neuroscientific results, advocacy for pluralistic and multi-level analytics,
and admonishment against exaggerated and premature neuroscientific claims and
journalistic reporting. Her public-targeted book and the cautionary article
below are examples of good descriptive science and are good for science. I
recommend her book.
SECULAR HUMANISM IS A
RELIGION, JUDGE RULES
If this judgment holds up, humanist orgs should logically
expect tax exemptions akin to what religious orgs and churches get, no?
QUANTUM BIOLOGY
This essay makes me rethink much of the fundamental
knowledge scientists have developed about biological life. There's much more to
it at the quantum level - from the molecular, to the mind, to the evolutionary
- that we know very little about. The scientific study of such is promising and
encouraging.
A deep, detailed understanding of the quantum aspects of
physics, chemistry, and biology, if one is every developed, will be
revolutionary, to say the least. Such a thorough knowledge could answer most if
not all our questions about matter and behavior in a unifying way that could
leave us with little else to study. Or, the pursuit of such unifying knowledge
could reveal the futility of our efforts to develop a complete, absolute
understanding of the universe.
Given our cultural evolutionary history, we are certain to
try and find out which it is. Imaging our humanity from that point onward, in
either direction, I tend to want us to succeed in creating that deep knowledge
and am hopeful we will be humane in our use of it. On the other hand, failure
to develop such deep, unifying knowledge would not surprise me nor would a
humane response to it. How we accommodate such ultimate knowledge or dead-end
ignorance will surely redefine who we think we are and what our fate will be.
ARE WE FREE?
Of all the scientific and philosophical positions on free
will and determinism I've come across, Daniel Dennett's view that a certain
specifically defined free will is compatible with determinism remains most
persuasive to me.
If it became a FF discussion topic notions of
"free," "will," and "determinism" would have to
first be clarified in a way to account for the range of definitions they have
been given in the free will/determinism "dispute" context. Notions of "self," "person,"
"mind," "consciousness," "context," and
"illusion," plus perhaps a very few other terms, would also need a
similar treatment. Then, I suspect, the discussants could arrange the various
claims of whether we have free will or not on a a continuum from yes to no,
based on how our terms of reference are defined. The discussants could then
choose (freely?) which argument(s) they think best represent the human
condition in nature, past and present.
I am very doubtful that an absolute truth would emerge from
this approach, that is, a settling of the matter once and for all. But it would
provide a more accurate, "it depends," understanding of the issue and
the scientific and philosophical arguments on each side. This would be
preferable to the current dividing up into two camps, yes versus no, and
stubbornly (me being among the most stubborn) arguing past each other using
different terms of reference.
It would also provide the discussants with modest but
effective understandings for evaluating new strident neuroscientific and
journalistic pronouncements, and new dismissive or supportive philosophical
arguments on both sides of the issue.
Looking for, through dividing up the leadership of the
various sessions of the discussion, and perhaps arriving at an outline of such
a provisional, conditional truth about the issue might be fun.
Discussing Alfred Mele's new book reviewed in the link below
by Dennett (Mele's Templeton affiliation acknowledged), and Dennett's own book
on the subject (Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting), among
other books and essays, especially those by Sam Harris and Massimo Pigliucci,
would be helpful.
An excerpt from Dennett: "What a coup it would be if
your neuroscience experiment brought about the collapse of several millennia of
inconclusive philosophising about free will! A curious fact about these forays
into philosophy is that almost invariably the scientists concentrate on the
least scientifically informed, most simplistic conceptions of free will, as if
to say they can’t be bothered considering the subtleties of alternative views
worked out by mere philosophers.
...
"In recent years a growing gang of cognitive
neuroscientists have announced to the world that they have made discoveries
that show that 'free will is an illusion.' ... Their ingenious experiments,
while yielding some surprising results, don’t have the revolutionary
implications often claimed."
ATTENTION
I think Desimone would benefit from spending some time
across the MIT campus chatting with fellow scientist Alan Lightman....
"How does a gooey mass of blood, bones, and gelatinous
tissue become a sentient being? How does it become aware of itself as a thing
separate from its surroundings? How does it develop a self, an ego, an 'I'?
Without hesitation, Desimone replied that the mystery of consciousness was
overrated. 'As we learn more about the detailed mechanisms in the brain, the
question of ‘What is consciousness?’ will fade away into irrelevancy and
abstraction,' he said. As (MIT neuroscientist Robert) Desimone sees it,
consciousness is just a vague word for the mental experience of attending,
which we are slowly dissecting in terms of the electrical and chemical activity
of individual neurons."
RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND
SOCIETAL HEALTH
Great article on religion being harmful
to societies.
A THEORETICAL
PHYSICIST EXPLAINS WHY SCIENCT IS NOT ABOUT CERTAINTY
Brilliant essay by a physicist (not a philosopher) on what
science is and isn't....
"Science is about finding the most reliable way of
thinking at the present level of knowledge. Science is extremely reliable; it’s
not certain. In fact, not only is it not certain, but it’s the lack of
certainty that grounds it. Scientific ideas are credible not because they are
sure but because they’re the ones that have survived all the possible past
critiques, and they’re the most credible because they were put on the table for
everybody’s criticism."
