The Three Words That Materialists Find It So Hard To Say "I Don't Know"

After giving quite a long, rambling,  somewhat snarky, and quite typically materialist debunking of the idea of free will, in which he makes any number of quite firm, quite definite, definitive, statements about the nature of consciousness and the origins of our thoughts,  Jerry Coyne did something rather weird and clueless.  He put up a slide of his proposal for a replacement for the idea of free will.

Modest Proposal

Replace notion of free will with this statement:

“My decision was caused by internal forces I do not understand”

Having suffered through his presentation, over a number of slides containing both logical errors and some pretty unfounded assumptions to back up his very definite claims about free will* being a delusion, Coyne's insistence that everyone else admit that they don't know where their decisions come from is way past the limit.   Apparently Coyne and his fellow "incompatiblists" know where peoples' thinking comes from but other people can't possibly know anything about the experience that they have.   Considering that everything that anyone can know about someone else's experience of their minds comes from their articulation of it,  if you begin by impeaching their reliability, your entire effort is short-circuited.   Coyne's proposal makes everything else said in the discussion rather ridiculous.  In the end, his big fight with Dennett and other "compatibilists" at the end of three and a half hours of talk boils down to whether or not they're going to tell a useful lie about free will which none of them really believes is possible, because people will be inclined to act badly if they believe they don't have free will.

One of the remarkable things about the situation I just described was that not one of the other materialist big thinkers seems to notice that basic and fatal incoherence of Coyne's presentation.  I would find it hard to imagine the same number of elite lawyers getting together to contentiously discuss something in which at least one of them wouldn't almost immediately jump on that point  to draw attention to the incoherence of that conclusion with the case that was just made and to blow it out of the water.   But these academics apparently didn't even notice the problem that was basic to all of what they said.

Which only goes to support my contention that materialists are like all other fundamentalists, true believers who mistake what they believe for knowledge.  And, as all materialists do, they exempt their ideas and their beliefs and their own minds from the effects of their ideology.

Their ideology is entirely founded in and dependent on the network of causality we all believe in, based on our observations of the physical world and, most importantly, comprise the total subject matter of science and on which all assertions of science, those which stand as reliably true and those discarded as mistaken are based in.  Considering how much of the materialist assertion on this topic is based on the least reliable or extremely young and largely untested areas called science, psychology, neuroscience,  considering the once accepted logical validity of that discarded science would seem to be wise.   I think the basic difference between materialists and most of humanity is in the ability to consider there might be more than the product of that analysis.  I think that is an ability which is trained out of us through the basic aspects of academic culture and, especially these days, the derisive coercion practiced by materialists.


After making several attempts to address the rest of what these materialists said, I'm going to take a different way, considering the excerpt from Eddington posted yesterday.   By free will, I mean free will is an aspect of our minds that operates free of a network of causation but which is able to have effects that we would analyze as a network of physical causation.   To use Eddington's analogy of a fish net that can't catch fishes less than two inches long,  the materialists' frame of reference,  consisting of a rigid network of causal relations and admitting only things conceivable in those terms,  it couldn't contain the consideration of such an entity.

Like  Biblical fundamentalists who begins by choosing their own mechanism for catching what is possible - their imagined perfect original text of The Bible which contains God's blueprint for reality - materialists merely replace that with their own imaginary mechanism, the perfect net of causality which holds together and contains all of reality.  In neither case does what they imagine is so comprehensive in its ability actually exist even as a single definable, coherent idea among fundamentalists or materialists.  There is no perfect original text of The Bible, there is no perfect all encompassing and totally comprehended scheme of causation.

Given the little that is definitely known about questions of free will and consciousness, what these materialists have to say on the topic is almost entirely speculations based on their assumptions, not on evidence.  I'm sure that many if not all of them would mock what their ideological opponents said out of other assumptions as being "theology", misapplying the word as atheists will at least nineteen out of twenty times.  But their common practice of doing exactly the same thing is held to be "different".  It generally is with fundamentalist ideologues.


What I am talking about when I talk about free will can only be imperfectly defined or described because our language is caught up in our observation of the physical universe which we have been thoroughly trained to see and analyze in terms of causation.  Every single metaphor I've tried to apply to it is deceptive because it is of a physical entity or force that is deemed to be part of a causal network.

For these materialists who claim to believe that people are no different from other animals to believe that human minds are capable of understanding their own nature in terms of human language is a rather interesting phenomenon.   So much of their creed is based in people not understanding the nature of their own experience and their own thinking,  at least when it suits them to say that.   If the strangeness of a person's own experience to themselves is assumed it is a rather large leap for them to then assert an understanding of the minds of other people, only that is a power they have no problem with assuming they have by virtue of their higher erudition.

The existence of free will might be just a hard fact of human consciousness.  I believe it is.  We might be able to analyze those physical effects in the usual way because we can see them, either with our eyes or with the secondary analytic tools of mathematics, physics and other sciences.  But as to the connection between those physical acts and the mind that produced the decision to act in a way to cause those effects,  that is entirely invisible and the products of speculation.   If you have the predisposition, through your personal preference and academic training, to refuse to consider the possibility of anything other than through finding - or, I would assert, making up - causal relationships, you couldn't possibly find anything that can't be.   Your chosen net can't contain them.

Materialism, even in its latter day guises as "naturalism" or "physicalism" is a fundamentalist faith in the entirely human and, especially, the academically cultivated habits of considering all of reality as part of a causal network.  Pretending that mathematics, with its descriptive and abstract graphs and statistics, are a reproduction of all possibility is one of the most ingrained habits among scientists and the academics who aspire to scientific reliability.   Leaving aside the social and professional status one can gain from pretending this and the motives that generates,  it is an extremely bad idea to ignore that fact.

This topic is unusually productive of ironies and there is none so certain as that ignoring the very platform from which the discussion of consciousness  and our minds is made, confidently excluding ideas and  reported experiences as you go, making definite statements in the way that was done by those materialists makes the results less likely to be accurate.   As Eddington said, in the next section of that chapter "Generalisations that can be reached epistemologically have a security which is denied to those that can only be reached empirically   Ignoring that even the most detailed and enduring uses of causality couldn't address the idea of free will might make your statements about it accepted by those who agree with you, they can't do much more than that.

I didn't find much of anything to agree with in the many hours of  repeatedly going over these discussions, other than the idea that people who are relieved of believing that they are morally obligated will be prone to being selfish and depraved  will be more inclined to do what they want to do not caring about their results and that the Libet experiments don't show what the popular atheists claim they do.  And I knew the second of those long ago.  Even Libet doesn't claim what can be read about his experiments all over the place.  And that his methodology is as flawed as every other experimental attempt in this area I'm aware of has been.  I'm unaware of Libet agreeing with that observation.

* Not to mention Coyne's straw man presentation of what "religious" people think on these topics, not that he was alone in doing that.  The entire series of discussions was haunted by the need to  turn an enormously complicated body of thought by religious thinkers into a parody created for the purpose of being dismissed.   That is a practice I associate with people having a bad argument that needs that kind of thing.

Note:  Coyne seems to have had  secondary agendas based in his CV and his side in extraneous issues.

Being a Darwinist as well as a materialist fundamentalist, Coyne resorts to the belief that our minds are the product of natural selection, something which is, as well, based in faith instead of science.   He shares that with at least two others at the table, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. It is a conjecture based on the belief that everything about us is the result of natural selection, though he gives himself a bit of an out by mentioning the possibility that aspects of our minds might be spandrels.   I suspect that he said that, as he did so much of what he said, to mock and provoke Dennett and possibly Dawkins.  I'd love to have known what went through their minds.  Richard Lewontin, who co-authored The Spandrels of San Marcos with Stephen J. Gould was Coyne's teacher, it is a direct challenge to the ultra adaptationist ideology championed by Dawkins and Dennett.   H. Allen Orr, one of Coyne's students wrote a major criticism of Dennett in which spandrels figured prominently and led to a rather heated and enlightening exchange  with Dennett which is well worth reading.  I will point out that Coyne doesn't match either his teacher or his student in maturity or intellectual rigor, both of whom are far more reasonable and modest in their thinking and discourse.