Culture In a Eutrophic State: Where Intellectuals Debunk The Intellect

I've been dealing with the "Moving Naturalism Forward" discussion of free will and consciousness during a week ill suited to my writing about it.  It being allergy season, I've been typing under the influence of Benadryl for the past week.   Worse, I've been listening to the bizarre and frequently incoherent materialist wrecking crew using their intellectual resources to tear down the equipment with which they are trying to wreck it.   I can't get an image of the Ship of Fools out of my mind, and I don't think it's just the Benadryl.

Ususally, when I talk about materialism or its more modern guises of "naturalism" or "physicalism" I call it an ideology.   Often to objections by materialists who don't like the idea that they are ideologues. You see, they've got the truth.  Science tells them so.  But, after reading and interacting with materialists during this past decade, when atheism has been fashionable, it would be just as accurate to call it a faith.   Even worse, to them, perhaps, it is a religious faith with its own oracles of truth and its own moral code of conduct and nagging, scrupulous prohibition squad.

If taken as an intellectual stand, materialism has to count as one of the most decadent of those in the recorded history of culture.   That is obvious in what has to be given up to believe in materialism.  As can be seen in "Moving Naturalism Forward",  modern materialism, allegedly based in science,  is most effective in denying the reality of things.  It has been used to deny the reality of morality, free will, even consciousness, itself, the most basic thing which our experience can know is real through its self-awareness.  It holds that people, even those who have never been accused of irrationality,  can't trust their own perceptions or their own conclusions about those.   It denies that our minds are anything but epiphenomena of chemistry and, ultimately, physics, the results of which are entirely dependent on the determinism of chemistry and physics, not on the truth of that product.   But you can't debunk peoples' minds without debunking its products, the articulations of those minds or the perceptions on which those articulations are based.  And you can't exempt your own thoughts while insisting that is the case.

As I've pointed out, the "laws of physics" are the products of human minds, through human observation  Yet these same people who spend so much of their thinking time debunking all other aspects of human thought present those "laws" as being superior and in control of the minds which construct them from those observations.  Obviously there is a problem with that idea. It is far more of a  problem than the original Hubble Microscope mirrors having been miscalculated and unable to present a clear view of its subject.   There is no way to selectively separate the validity of the product of human minds into the good and the bad on the basis of these science-based mind- debunkers' preference.  No subject of thought, including those of these materialists, can be exempt from their proposed origin of thoughts.  Materialist determinism of our minds is an absolute system, admitting no exceptions.  To exempt the laws of physics from it would be to entirely negate the ideology.

I'm sure all of these collected debunkers would scorn people who disbelieve that evolution is true.  The scorn of evolution deniers is an absolute requirement of intellectual respectability, perhaps even an act of merit, if not a moral requirement.  Which is, perhaps, as should be.  Evolution is true if any part of science is, as Stephen J. Gould said, it is the idea in science most massively supported by evidence in many different areas*.

But while ridiculing those who find it hard or impossible to believe in evolution, we ignore that when we talk about evolution we are talking about a human idea not based in direct observation or experience.  It is an obscure natural phenomenon  happening over time periods that preclude any direct human observation or experience.   Evolution - the human science, not the natural phenomenon-  is hardly visible or susceptible to human experience.  It is, entirely, the product of human thinking based on a number of indirect human observations, many of those based in rather tenuous analysis and expressed in metaphors.

And evolution is very far from vitally important to anyone who doesn't work in biological topics related to that study.  For most people, who these materialists hold MUST BELIEVE IN EVOLUTION, it is as important as some of the more esoteric topics of mathematics or Etruscan history. For all of the ideological strife over it, it is a less important topic for a high school biology class than how to avoid spreading and contracting infectious diseases, what the organs  in their bodies that might become diseased are and how those function, etc.   I have never heard much outrage expressed by these sciency types at the massive ignorance of biological topics that might lead to actual harm to the lives of real people.

Yet these same, highly credentialed, people, who endlessly mock and ridicule people over something none of them could experience insist that they disbelieve their own lives, their own experiences, to disbelieve that they make their own decisions and choices, insisting that they distrust their perceptions and their own conclusions.   And they rage furiously when most people refuse to find materialist-atheist-"Skeptical"  debunkery more credible than their own experience.   All while they obviously exempt their own, materialist, ideas from the necessary conclusion drawn from their own ideology.

A lot of the time was spent in these discussions pretending that we know that dualism is wrong when that is not known but is believed on the basis of materialism.  The idea that we may have minds independent of our brains is repugnant to these true believers.   But in doing what they do they create a dualism between minds which are not to be trusted, belonging to other people and their minds, but only when it suits the materialists to hold that.   Their opponents, those who believe their experiences and come to conclusions these guys don't like are the dupes of faulty chemistry and biology and environmental influences.   But those who, like them, hold virtuous ideas, see things clearly.  It doesn't seem much different from the same kind of dualism in the scriptures of Zoroastrianism, dividing the universe of human thought between the light and the dark.

In their zeal to insist on THE TRUTH of materialism, though, the materialists have to exempt many ideas - from the "laws of physics" on up  - from the vississitudes of their "brain only" model.  Those ideas they like, those perceptions they approve of, cannot escape their debunkery except among other true believers and those too ignorant to understand the problem.   Most of the atheists I've encountered over the past ten years would certainly fall into the second category, though, after listening to these big thinkers of "naturalism" I wonder if all of them might not belong there as well.   They don't seem to be aware of the full implications of their ideology and their negligence in applying it to their preferred ideas.  Among those is the inevitable undermining of science which can't rise above the minds which produce it.  And I don't think it's the Benadryl that is leading me to that conclusion.

* I, of course, accept that evolution is true as a natural phenomenon accounting for diversity of life.   I am far more skeptical that the state of knowledge in what is, undoubtedly, about the most massively complex phenomenon that scientists propose to study on the extremely fragmentary evidence available, is at more than a preliminary stage.  I find that the more I think about natural selection, the more I read about it, the more skeptical I am of the belief it is an actual thing, an actual force of nature on the same level as physical law.   I simply do not believe that any law could cover every life of the billions and billions of organisms that either did or didn't successfully leave a line of descendants is reducible to an economic analysis.  I believe that natural selection probably acts as a filter and a directive channel that forces even very tenuous assertions of natural selection while excluding other possibilities from even getting a hearing.  I believe that a large part of the reason for that is the widespread use of natural selection to attack religion, beginning with debunking the stories in Genesis but continuing down to the denial of morality and the debasement of consciousness into a mere mechanism at the service of natural selection.   I think evolution is a far, far more complex reality than human culture could ever master.

-----
Notice that Bosch put a monk in the boat.   During his time universities were religious institutions, monks were far more likely to have been educated than even members of the relatively affluent class.   It makes me think of Paul Feyerabend's famous statement
The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach, and so on.  But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth.
I wouldn't accuse any of those at the Naturalism workshop I'm familiar with of being in the same category as Bohr, Einstein or Schrödinger .  Or Feynman, for that matter.