3, Materialism Means Pretending You Know Things Are True That Materialism Makes Impossible

I have been thinking really hard about E.O. Wilson's article, trying to figure out how, at every turn, his rigid insistence on materialism leads him to make entirely unfounded and insisted on assumptions that he already knows the nature of consciousness and free will and that those, unsurprisingly, are held to be in line with his ultimate framing of materialism.   At one point he almost seems to admit that his practice is not based in scientific methods but it doesn't even last two sentences.

You have to have faith to be a neuroscientist.  We don't know where consciousness and free will may be hidden --- assuming they even exist as integral processes and entities. 

What neuroscientists don't know, what they must take on faith,  is much more than that, beginning with not even really understanding that the problem they propose to solve with science could well never be treatable with science.   The history of science making thought the subject of its inquiry has shown, over and over again, the ability of scientists to make claims of knowledge which are widely accepted on the basis of the repute of science, scientists and the academic establishment, only to have those exposed as delusions when not outright deceptions.  I would guess that no other area called science has produced more dramatic examples of that kind of thing and I believe it is because what they propose to study can't be directly observed or reliably observed indirectly.   Whenever you supposedly use the methods of science to study things that can't be observed, you can sell the results to a gullible public as science for a long time but the history of such science is that it falls and crashes rather dramatically.   In these questions of consciousness, including free will, the danger of that scenario recurring, repeatedly, is even more reasonable to expect.

If consciousness or free will were not material entities, they would  not be susceptible to science or even reliably assumed to be subject to causation, which is only known through the consideration of the physical universe. I certainly think that since the human conception of causation is known through consciousness, which must precede the concept of causation,  as indeed everything of the external world which can be articulated does, that there is good reason to believe that instead of the conscious mind being the result of causes, at its most basic level, that causation is the product of the mind addressing its external world, while not, itself, necessarily being subject to causation.

The powerful sway that materialism has on Wilson is demonstrated by his willingness to assert the possibility that  consciousness and free will may not, "even exist as integral processes and entities".  I would point out that viewing consciousness and free will as "integral processes" presumes we can safely assume they conform to the behavior of entities in the physical universe when we have no reason to believe that.  But for scientists or any other human beings who are capable of articulating thought to entertain the notion that consciousness is not an entity is clearly not thinking clearly.  It is one of the more persistent delusions among atheists that they are not conscious as they are consciously debunking the idea of consciousness.  The surprising frequency and enthusiasm for that clearly irrational and unaware claim, disproved by its own articulation,  leads me to conclude that materialism, atheism, is likely to produce that particular form of mental pathology.   I'm unaware of any person who believes in God who denies that they are using what they must use to think and talk about God, or to talk about anything.

------

As I've already mentioned, consciousness may be of  a nature that will entirely escape the nets and method of science.   Considering what the experience of consciousness is, that, at its most basic level, it is not known to be a material substance or the byproduct of chemistry and that, by definition free will could not be both free and subject to material causation because it would cease to be free if it were, neither of them can comfortably co-exist with materialism.   Materialist monists have dealt with that inconvenient truth by a number of means:

-  Denying that either could exist because they are untreatable with science, the methods of doing that, unfortuantely, contain assumptions that, as also mentioned before in this series, negate the meaning of all mental activity, including that of science, thus impeaching its results.

- Redefining the terms "consciousness" and "free will" in order to turn them into something they can pretend that must be a result of chemistry.  In so doing they don't address what every articulate person experiences as their own consciousness and their ability to come up with ideas on the basis of their own thinking.*  Daniel Dennett is one of the foremost academic practitioners of that bait and switch.

-  Accusing people who refuse to deny the reality of their conscious experience and the clearly manifest importance of free will of delusion, superstition, irrationality and, in the most common practices of atheist polemics.

Because this last one is the easiest, least intellectually taxing of the rejections of what consciousness and free will are held to be, it is important to admit that this most common of materialist practices comes down to is a jr high level of social coercion due to a desire to avoid being labeled as being infected with cooties.  I believe that even within rather high levels of academia, this materialist orthodoxy is enforced by just such methods.   Wilson is more subtle than your average professional skeptic or blog atheist but his article is subtly seasoned with that familiar ingredient that permeates so much of even today's scientific literature.

As already mentioned,  if someone insists on pressing the necessary conclusions of their claims, they would have to accept the inconvenient result for their own academic product, the removal of the qualities of significance or even truth from it, but that is seldom pointed out to them.  It should be pressed whenever these claims are made.

------

Considering that Wilson, earlier in his article, said that the human brain is the must complex entity in the known universe, it is rather stunning for him to claim the level of progress for its study that he has in this article.  Most of those claims are based in the faith put into brain imaging and, to a lesser extent, dissecting as a means of bypassing the more basic difficulties in even defining terms.

The basic goal of activity mapping is to connect all of the processes of thought - rational and emotional; conscious, pre-conscious, and unconscious;  held still and moving through time - to a physical base.

Which generally means getting subjects who can be convinced to undergo imaging to say something within the set range of responses as to what the researchers want them to say was happening as conscious experience while the desired areas of the brain light up.  Ultimately to come up with a statistical result they can convince a reviewed journal to publish.  I'll insert, reviewed by other researchers who follow the same procedures and who have a real interest in not questioning those.

I would like to know how they propose to do that when the "activity" is "pre-conscious, and unconscious," whatever those two terms mean.  How could they distinguish such vaguely definable concepts and their variable components without the report of the subjects**.  Not to mention that all of this confronts the unreliability of the indirect "observation" already mentioned, the vagueness of terms, the variability in words people use to describe their conscious experience, the variable reliability in people reporting their conscious experience - even when they have no desire to shade that, the necessity of researchers to radically narrow the possible responses to questions and the limits of the questions considered and items included in the experiments, themselves.  The subject who reports their experience is the ultimate editor of that material, there is no possibility of reporting on human experience without that filter, there isn't even that access to the experience of animals who can't report their ideas about their experience.  Though science regularly ignores that glaring and relevant fact.  I'll go into that a bit more.

Anyone who reads his article in Harpers should consider how much you have to overlook in order to accept what he says in it.   And I'm not talking about merely things such as the real possibility that the relationship of fMRI images to alleged mental states is a mere artifact of the methodology chosen by the researchers mixed with their control of the vocabulary the people they use as subjects are forced to choose from in reporting their experience.  Peoples' reports of even their quantifiable behavior is known to be unreliable and that is something they could, actually, report accurately.  And, notice in the example of people reporting numbers of sex partners that are a mathematical impossiblity, that the results are reported by researchers who know the reports cannot be true and widely accepted and cited even by scientists who should certainly know better.

There is every reason to believe that peoples' reports of their internal, undefined and unobservable experience is even less reliable.  And there is no reason to believe that scientists desiring to report those reports will be any more rigorous or honest in their professional behavior than those who report and use the irrational reports mentioned above.

And everything we can know about the experience of consciousness is entirely dependent on the reports of those who experience it.  Every person is the one and only possible expert on what their internal, conscious experience is.  Any discrepancy between their reports and external reality merely shows that they can either be mistaken or that their reporting may be less than accurate but no one can tell them that they didn't experience what they experienced.  

Dogmatic materialists are always railing against people who choose to believe their experience when it directly contradicts materialist theory or when that experience is inconveniently damaging to it.  Yet they are the first to claim the absolute reliability of people reporting their experience when the results support their desired ends.   In order for them to try to force compliance with their materialist faith, they are reduced to claiming people who show no unusual level of irrationality in their conduct of expression must be the victims of a pathological level of delusion and self-deception.  In few other areas of life is it as possible to observe the self-appointed materialists and rationalists fundamentalism as when they confront consciousness and such questions as free will.  You can see that in history.

I sometimes wish that I had my grandparents longer, long enough for me to ask them things like what they thought when they first heard of Freud and his theories which were new when they were young adults.   I am curious to know what rational, educated people, with no desire to be up to date and in line with the thinking of the smart set made of his insane assertions about their lives and their thoughts.  We know what those who wanted to believe in his, now debunked, theories believed about them, though why their reputations isn't as damaged by buying that as those who were devoted to the likes of Aimee Semple McPherson is worth considering.  I think that is more a matter of social position of those who accepted the "science".  Clearly, with Freud's thinking, it wasn't because his ideas were sounder, they weren't, many of them had absolutely no basis for believing them to be true even as they were accepted as science.   That Wilson briefly skates over the problem as he continues in the same paragraph, only shows how much he insists you buy because it promotes his faith.

... It won't come easy.  Bite into a lemon, fall into bed, recall a departed friend, watch the sun sink beyond the western sea.  Each episode comprises mass neuronal activity so elaborate we cannot even conceive of it, much less write it down as a repertory of firing cells.

Reread that and ask yourself, if, as Wilson admits, the complexity of the brain is matched with the further difficulties that even he admits, how he is so confident that each of those experiences "comprises mass neuronal activity so elaborate we cannot even conceive of it".  The fact is that he begins with an insistence that consciousness be a physical process when there is no evidence that is what it is.

Even materialists, don't really believe their conscious experience conforms to the absolutely inescapable requirements of their own materialism.  If they did they would have to conclude that their own thinking was merely chemistry working itself out and that other ideas were merely the result of other chemical components making slightly different proteins and neuronal connections.  But they don't, they insist that their ideas have value as the truth, which is fundamentally inconsistent with materialism.   Wilson's article as persuasion or even just as information is a contradiction of his own fundamental foundations and his insisted on framing. Only, as is so often the case, they cut themselves exemptions from their own claimed reality.

*  I would propose that the most important aspect of whatever it is we call free will is its role in politics and social interactions.  The assumptions of free will as real and a positive good and the denial of either its existence or that we are bound to respect people's exercise of their free will - subject to restraints where those impinge on others ability to reasonably exercise their freedom -  make among the most dramatic of real differences in real life that we can see.

Those who deny the reality of free will and consciousness as THE essential aspect of human beings, who, at bottom hold that people are essentially mere objects, flasks of chemical reaction,  remove any restraints on those who desire to treat them as exploitable objects which can be disposed of when they are not useful or when their abuse and deaths are so desired.  Molecules  destroying each other, robbing each other of atoms and ions aren't held to be morally responsible.  Materialist monism is a complete negation of the reality of morality or other entities that exist entirely within our minds.

Since Wilson is a biologist,  there is nothing within natural selection that means you are morally bound to reproduce or even allow another generation of your species to be born.  Materialism could not accuse someone who tried to kill off the entire human species of having done something they shouldn't.   Reproduction isn't a moral requirement of natural selection, which is amoral. Though, from the start even its most orthodox proponents expressed both an imperative for reproduction and the attempt to defeat and kill competitors into a sort of moral obligation.  You can read that in Charles Darwin, certainly in Haeckel, Galton and virtually all other proponents of his theory up till the post-war period and even some today.

That is the great unmentionable lesson of the atheist regimes that have existed in history from the later 18th century up till today.  As I have mentioned a number of times, governments professing Christianity or other religions that forbid that kind of violation of rights and life must violate their stated intellectual and moral holdings to commit evil acts.  If they acted consistently with the teachings of Jesus, they would not commit those kinds of evil.  Though history shows the barrier to evil that claiming to believe that Jesus was divine is not always a guarantee of even a lesser level of evil behavior.

But materialism doesn't even contain that barrier to enslaving and murdering one person or tens if not hundreds of millions of people.  It is one of the unspeakable truths of contemporary and modern orthodoxy to admit that lesson and that it is an entirely predictable, eventual result of the adoption of materialist monism, and materialism under all of its various aliases, always and inevitably,  rigidly and inescapably devolve into a monism. Which is hardly surprising, considering the determinism that is an essential component of materialism.   For that reason, with that history, I have concluded that materialism is one of the most dangerous faiths people have ever devised.

**  Ironically, the work of such scientist heritics as Dean Radin and Daryl Bem might indicate there is something that might be called "preconsciousness" in their much replicated experiments showing an "unconscious"physiological response in an entirely isolated receiver when another person is subjected to a randomly chosen stimulus.  Not only while the stimulus occurs but, quite surprisingly, in a highly statistically significant period before the stimulus is randomly chosen by computer.  I would submit that this can't be considered to match Wilson's use of the terms.  I suspect that is not true even on the level of Wilson accepting that Radin's and Bem's results are valid though they are far more reliably demonstrated than what he bases his article on.  He and the materialist establishment reject their rigorously conducted experiments on the basis of their materialism.