ONE OF THE MOST important events in my late-life reconversion to religion and guarded confidence in human reason was reading the statement of a Rabbi whose name I wish I remembered that "reality is real." It was a response to some, probably, pop-Buddhist assertions but reading it it put into an aphorism kind of woke me up. Having always realized that materialism was a road to complete nonsense, I might have gotten here by another route but reading that phrase put a lot of things together for me and led me out of the absurd and cowardly agnosticism I'd been stuck in.
Another step was reading the atheist and early computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum who noted that all knowledge, even that of mathematics was, in the end, dependent on persuasion, on the choice to believe in early childhood what we go on to consider the basis of knowledge.* Arthur Stanley Eddington's observation that the direct experience of our own consciousness is the primal educational act in our lives, all else being inference based on that may have completed the basis for most of what I've thought since I was in my early 50s.
Mentioning eliminative materialism the other day, it is, actually, about the nadir of academic intellectualism in service to ideological scientism, as decadent as could possibly be imagined. Since you don't seem to know what that is, here.
Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all [underlining by me] of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist and have no role to play in a mature science of the mind. Descartes famously challenged much of what we take for granted, but he insisted that, for the most part, we can be confident about the content of our own minds. Eliminative materialists go further than Descartes on this point, since they challenge the existence of various mental states that Descartes took for granted.
I will say in passing that it eliminates much of what one of the founders of modern science based his scientific philosophy on is significant in appreciating the decadent degeneracy of that ideological production.
That it is held as a respectable intellectual stance in modern universities, expensive, tax-exempted or supported educational institutions supposedly dedicated to the cultivation and elevation of and educations of the very minds that eliminative materialism wants to dismiss as either insignificant or really existing at all, should be held as discrediting them as honest brokers. It is an intellectual position that means that the very activity of the university is meaningless, INCLUDING WHAT IS DONE IN THEIR SCHOOLS OF SCIENCE, THE VERY CLAIMED INTELLECTUAL BASIS OF ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM, it sort of takes the cake in terms of intellectual absurdity. Yet the holders of that position are well paid, even honored faculty members in some of our best universities and regularly presented in both academia and the media as having an honorable, even favored intellectual position. Always suspect that behind a pose of respectability in such instances, there will only be more pose based on appearances. I attribute a lot of that to the gross ignorance of science among the college-credentialed who run those things. Including many of those employed in those schools of alleged science who are, as well, philosophically inept.
You would have to give me a lot of evidence to convince me that anything in the most benighted aspects of medieval universities could begin to match it for the most absolute of intellectual decadence right now in the alleged enlightenment, modern period. Materialism is the most absurd ideology which could only possibly be true if it were false, it is always bound to produce decadence. Being amoral, empowered in human history, it produces oppressive violent amorality, whether fascist, national-socialist or Marxist or capitalist.
And it is, actually, an intellectual position born of that displacement of the merely methodological rules of science done to observe and describe the motions of planets, later smaller objects, still later atoms and their combination into molecules and, much later, subatomic particles, from being a method that isolated what was needed to efficiently describe those limited aspects of them, a displacement of that methodological efficiency into an all-encompassing ideology that claimed those methods, or, rather, what was increasingly turned into a parody of it was an all-encompassing explanatory framing that could not only explain everything but to also exclude from existence anything it could not explain. Human consciousness escaping the nets of the methodology of science, it had to go even as the pseudo-scientific extension of that parodistic "methodology" in psychology and, even more irrationally, ethology, was a profitable business in university "science". When you call it "science" it is granted a presumption of validity that even its history of catastrophic failure disguises for purposes of funding and mendacious utility to power. If Galileo had foreseen his tool for seeing and describing the moons of Jupiter would be turned into an all-encompassing hegemonic ideology pretending to see what cannot be seen (even that producing some of the least valid and durable of any "science," though treated as if it were classical physics) and dismissing what it couldn't, of the sort science has been distorted into in the subsequent period, I am certain he would have been appalled.
If you don't come up with something that says why that position and the several rest-areas of modern pseudo-science and modern degenerate philosophy in their way to it follows the actual methodology of science or why institutions that are allegedly in the business of elevating and improving what those degrade into a deterministic meaninglessness or non-existence, human minds, are not benightedly degenerate and, worse, dishonest, you got nuthin'.
* The pretense that there is a hard line between what is believed and what is known is an illusion, as many of the imaginary bright lines dividing up our mental lives are. Another of those is the idea that sincere belief is something that happens involuntarily to us which is unrelated to an act of choice, that what we "choose to believe" is different than what "we really believe." I think agnosticism is related to a choice to believe that what we "know" is some kind of natural process which has no element of volition involved, that it just happens without our intention being involved. I think that is a delusion based in something like the choice to believe scientific methodology is an all encompassing tool for determining everything. When you hear that said by someone like Bertrand Russell who certainly knew his scientism was intellectually unsupportable, the power of that elite delusion on some of the most acute of minds is quite impressive.
Update: The biologist and champion of classical scientific method, Rupert Sheldrake's challenge to debate the Harvard CSI(COP) champion of ideological pseudo-science, Steven Pinker, is worth reading in regard to the trashing of honest intellectualism and even scientific method by the "science" faculties of our most esteemed universities.
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