THOUGH I HOLD that it was a largely destructive, extremely damaging exercise in ignorant pop cultural fashion, the atheist fad of the 00's was something that I benefited from enormously. Seeing the unedited thinking of many thousands of ideological atheists online, in articles, blog posts, comments left in the commentage of the web, I found, over and over, confirmation of something I'd only had an inkling of in the ink-on-paper, babble on radio culture I lived in before going online, that atheists are generally not very deep thinkers or careful thinkers and, in an impressive number of instances, are not honest thinkers. Even those who are not superficial or particularly dishonest, as the common run of that is, such as Bertrand Russell will, eventually, be forced into it by their ideological choices.*
That's not something you can say is exclusive to that ideological camp, I've come to think that it is typical of any strongly held ideological framing, but, probably through an association with academics, atheists also were once held as being better than that, largely by other atheists in academia, the publishing and scribbling profession and the reliably anti-religious cooky-cutter production of fiction and, especially, fiction acted out on stage and screen (theater about real people is inevitably full of lies). And if you didn't know that they were a cut above everyone else, you could depend on them to make that assertion before much time passed.
That's an introduction to my answer to a claim made to me by a sciency ideological atheist with credentials that what we have "in our brains" is the same thing as what the external universe is, that any other claim is "post modernist bull shit" and "anti-scientific". Furthermore, that my arguments against his argument that what he alleged is "all made by our brains," depended on "meaningless questions." Which, I asserted, was a superficial though popular atheist dodge of 1930s era logical-positivists who had no better answers and so wanted to make perfectly meaningful questions go away or be disallowed, in itself some of the most transparent shallow thinking in the modern era.
The person arguing with me didn't have an answer for even the crudest argument that I brought up. He made a statement that for any meaningful question of science, "what our brains made" was the same as what was out there in the "real world." I asked him if that meant that when we thought of dimethylmercury that was present in our brains. I had to explain to him why that extremely dangerous nerve-toxin being present in anyone's brain was a guarantee of a slow and terrible death as it destroyed the brain, relating the tragic incident of that which happened at Dartmouth a couple of decades back (perhaps before the callow, shallow ideologue was born). That anyone who didn't understand the difference between our idea of it and the real thing was a superficial thinker. He seemed to only understand that he'd dug himself into a position that he couldn't support and he was was too immature to back out of. I'm not saying that atheists used to be smarter than this but along with the enormous educational opportunities that came with the internet, I think it's had the general effect of making more People stupider than such People used to be.
Materialism is a brain-dead, dead end. Atheism is, too.
I've been extremely busy this week catching up on garden work that my recent adventure with the medical industry put off - to disappoint my enemies, which to say I was sorry for would be a lie, I didn't have a relapse - or I'd comment on this at greater length.
The argument I had reminded me of another of H. Allen Orr's essay-book reviews that I read in the Boston Review, this one answering E. O. Wilson's absurd and philosophically inept claims in one of his perhaps lesser known books, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. I will say that E. O. Wilson was a pretty good scientist when he was talking within his narrow area of expertise which was describing ant behavior, like Carl Sagan, when he stuck to what he really knew, he could be pretty good but like Sagan, when he ventured even a little outside of it, the shortcomings of his narrow training and those mandated by his materialist-atheist-scientistic ideological commitments had a rapidly increasingly destructive effect in the results. Though I think Wilson's specialties have guaranteed minefields in it than Sagan's, which is more in line with the classical physical scientific tradition.
I think that in this passage Orr (who I disagree with about some things while admiring his thinking) hits a number of relevant nails on the head. I was reminded of it when my opponent mentioned above made recourse to the idiotic idea that "artificial intelligence" was going to come to the rescue of his "brain only" diminution of consciousness which he seemed to not be that confident in as the argument progressed.
The second general problem plaguing Wilson’s book is one of philosophical naiveté. We scientists are, of course, notorious for thinking all philosophical problems straightforward. Scientists tend to swagger into town, confident that a bit of straight shooting will set all aright. Though typically modest, Wilson slips into this cowboy role all too easily. A number of philosophical problems– mind-body, free will, the failure of logical positivism– pop up in the course of his book. And Wilson guns them down at a staggering rate. Unfortunately, his solutions are often surprisingly superficial. In the end it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Wilson often just doesn’t see the problem. He sees half of it, or less than half of it, and sets diligently to whittling away at some corner of it. When he announces his solution–often in a one-liner–he seems mildly astonished that no one previously saw so simple an answer.
Let me give an example. As a champion of unity of knowledge, Wilson is anxious to explain away the demise of that last great unification craze, logical positivism. The positivists believed that by formalizing scientific language and by following a few formulaic guidelines (e.g., verificationism) scientists could “close in on objective truth.” But logical positivism crashed and burned. And Wilson thinks he knows why: “Its failure, or put more generously, its shortcoming, was caused by ignorance of how the brain works. That in my opinion is the whole story.” But the good news, Wilson assures us, is that neurobiology and artificial intelligence are coming to our rescue. Once they reveal how the brain works–once they show us how to correct the distortions our nervous systems impose upon reality–“the grail of objective truth” might be ours.
It’s hard to know where to start with this sort of argument. For one thing, the idea that absolute objective knowledge can be built on a foundation of brain sciences faces an obvious problem: our knowledge of the brain must itself remain uncertain, tainted by the very subjective distortion and outright error that Wilson is trying to get rid of. For another, there’s more standing between science and the “ultimate goal of objective truth” than ignorance of the brain’s blueprints. Almost all scientific truths take the form of universal propositions reached by induction and are therefore permanently subject to doubt. As Russell said somewhere, induction for a chicken means the farmer comes to feed him each morning. But one morning the farmer comes and wrings his neck. The point is that most scientific truths are logically fated to remain un-absolute. And none of this goes away no matter how well you understand the hypothalamus. Unfortunately this is not an isolated incident. Much of Wilson’s book consists of such superficially attractive–but ultimately just superficial-philosophical talk.
If I had time I'd go back over the series I did going through A. S. Eddington's lecture on The Concept of Structure in which he gave a pretty detailed mathematical description of the mental modeling of things within modern physics, the very thing which such atheists as E. O. Wilson and their fan-boys online believe is the way to get to absolute knowledge. The problem is that while the scientific and mathematical analysis is enormously impressive, it cannot help but draw you into the fact that compared to the real thing, the mathematical-scientific generalization is both intimately involved in our understanding of the external universe but, also, ever more distanced from the specific facts of our most intimate experience of the external universe. Eddington pointed out far more simply that the experience of our consciousness is the most primitive fact we have access to, it preceeds ALL subsequent knowledge or thought. To downgrade consciousness is to undermine everything that comes after it. Which, I'd guess, a scientist of Eddington's eminence and accomplishment who is not an ideological atheist will have no problem with but which one who begins from that ideological starting point will never be able to entirely repose in, unless, like Wilson, they simply ignore the problems their ideological committment forces on them.
As Orr points out when someone specializes in something like "behavior" or "neuro" or "cognative" anything those problems are even more embedded in an intimate manner than someone who wants to describe the movements of electrons.
"our knowledge of the brain must itself remain uncertain, tainted by the very subjective distortion and outright error that Wilson is trying to get rid of"
While the scientist whose claims that gave rise to the argument is someone I admire when she limits herself to what she really knows - and what she knows is definitely more than what someone like Sagan or Wilson knows, she was educated in German universities - her ideological commitments have a similar effect on her when she wanders far outside of the particle physics she specialized in. I may respect her when she speaks on what she knows, especially when she doesn't use her position and credentials to push her materialist ideology, when she speaks nonsense, I'm not going to ignore that.
One of the downsides of ideological materialist-atheist-scientism is it lacks any tradition of humility as it has an deep, deep commitment to intellectual hubris and overselling what science can ever do. In that they have more in common with the biblical and other scriptural fundamentalist traditions in religion. It's one of the more interesting ironies of life how the bitterest intellectual opponents end up thinking in similar ways.
* I don't think that's inevitable. H. Allen Orr's intellectual grandfather, the teacher of his teacher, Richard Lewontin, is someone whose rigor and intellectual honesty I've praised over and over again. As I do Orr's even as I have no such respect for the link between them, Jerry Coyne who embodies what I've said above to the extent that one of his ideological buddies in the Jeffrey Epstein sponsored Science Blogs era said, "Jerry Coyne, he's 12."
