That point I made on Saturday, that if our experience of free will is merely an illusion masking the reality of chemical and physical determinacy that all of our thinking is, as well, debased by that holding, is one that really interests me. It is is undeniable that it is a pressing issue for atheists that our minds be entirely less than our experience proves to us that they are. Despite that widely held belief among atheists, and though they have to rely on what they, clearly, believe to be their superior minds to do that debunking with, they MUST do that or their philosophical basis in materialism falls apart, leaving their cherished belief with no intellectual underpinnings at all.
If there is one thing that the period of neo-atheism has shown, it is that atheists are in love with the idea that their minds are better than the minds of the vast majority of human beings. They are so in love with that idea that it generally enrages them when someone refuses to go along with their assertions regarding that. Then they complain that people don't like them. It is a minor irony of the myriad of ironies that arise in neo-atheist assertions that the man who they falsely claim as one of them, Benjamin Franklin pointed out that a man who falls in love with himself will have no rivals. Goes for men who collect themselves into groups, too.
In several of his talks and writings, Rupert Sheldrake points out how the materialist, mechanistic ideology that is enforced among materialist scientists blinds them to some of the most obvious of observable experiences. One of the things he mentions is "The Cambridge Declaration" a few years back in which, "a prominent international group of cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophisiologists, neuroanatomists and computational neuroscientists gathered at the University of Cambridge to reassess the neurobiological substrates of consious experience and related behaviors in human and non-human animals." Their conclusion was that, shockingly, to them, at least, it turns out many mammals, birds and possibly even octopi are conscious. Yes, and, well, I guess they had to pretty much hold that we humans are conscious, as well. Though I'm sure they find some way to diminish human consciousness, exempting themselves and such things as science, of course.
Sheldrake points out that what took these big brains decades into the lives of their specialties, a major conference and much debate and consideration to discover, is obvious to anyone who has ever kept a dog or cat or bird as a pet, anyone who has observed other animals, including those not on their list, in the wild, that animals are conscious. Apparently their vast and extensive educations in science blinded them to what even the most uneducated of "bronze age goat herders" could have told them.
And, let it also be pointed out, there is angry criticism of their declaration by others in their fields and in others. And not just for reasons of science but for out of professional interest. They don't want anything that could possibly even raise questions about their use of animals in their professional pursuits.
The reason all of this is controversial is because the reigning dogma of traditional science was that all of life is mechanical, based in unconscious matter. That was never supported by research before it was adopted and what findings that support it are, generally, achieved by ignoring the obvious fact that animals considered to not have consciousness, such as dogs, obviously behave, they obviously can understand language, sometimes to a great extent, and they are quite capable of responding to our unexpressed emotions and conditions, sometimes even before we are aware of those and, certainly, are able to express their own desires and needs to us. The typical meaningless dismissal of that is that it was "reflex" or some such thing was always obviously a load of bilge but such is the strength within science of atheist ideology that it was the enforced way of talking about such phenomena.
The Cambridge Declarers tie their granting of consciousness to animals to neural structures and as the product of evolution. I went into that earlier this year, looking at claims by one of the hardest of materialist ideologues, Daniel Dennett using the clear behavior in response to an external stimulus of photo taxis in bacteria, which clearly don't have brains yet they clearly demonstrate a consciousness of light and a response to it.
This week I came across this article about Erythropsidinium, a single-celled organism which scientists have decided has an 'eye' which it uses to hunt down other tiny creatures which are not visible.
Now it appears that the tiny owner of this eye uses it to catch invisible prey by detecting polarised light. This suggestion is also likely to be greeted with disbelief, for the eye belongs to a single-celled organism called Erythropsidinium. It has no nerves, let alone a brain. So how could it "see" its prey?
Fernando Gómez of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, thinks it can. "Erythropsidinium is a sniper," he told New Scientist. "It is waiting to see the prey, and it shoots in that direction."
Erythropsidinium belongs to a group of single-celled planktonic organisms known as dinoflagellates. They can swim using a tail, or flagellum, and many possess chloroplasts, allowing them to get their food by photosynthesis just as plants do.
Others hunt by shooting out stinging darts similar to the nematocysts of jellyfishMovie Camera. They sense vibrations when prey comes near, but they often have to fire off several darts before they manage to hit it, Gómez says.
Erythropsidinium and its close relatives can do better, Gómez thinks, because they spot prey with their unique and sophisticated eye, called the ocelloid, which juts out from the cell. "It knows where the prey is," he says.
How can anyone who observes or reads about such a creature that "knows where the prey is" conclude that it isn't exhibiting what is clearly conscious behavior? If you want to attribute the general ability ascribed to some kind of genetically based "reflex" (and does that word even make sense in the absence of a central nervous system?) at any given point the knowledge of the location of a specific prey organism can't be held to be the result of a reflex, every time it does that it has clearly learned something it didn't know before, where that specific prey organism is at that time. To put it in the same terms I used earlier this week, where is the physical existence of those individual ideas within that one-celled organism? Where does the thinking that must underlie every one of those individual hunting events arise from within the organism, where does it reside, how does it happen as an internal, physical manifestation in the materialists' ideological claims? And, again, how does the organism know how to generate the specific idea of the location of a specific prey animal if the idea wasn't already present in it? That would have to be answered if the materialist practice of reducing such things to objects is to stand.
In the angry response to the Cambridge declaration, the, clearly professionally-interested scientist at "Speaking of Research" said, "Of course, there are animal activists that had already reached the conclusion that animals are conscious simply by staring into their eyes..." But the scientists who insist and insisted that animals were not consicous did so by closing their eyes to what they obviously saw and they did it for reasons that are every much as ideological as those of the animal rights activists that such scientists so love to mock. It was professionally inconvenient and violated the ruling ideology of their field to admit that they saw the clear signs of consciousness in animals which behave purposefully in response to external experience. And they did it for centuries, beginning with such non-atheist mechanists as Descartes. He was able to exempt people from being machines made of meat by his dualism, which became anathema to atheists in later generations. They, producing their science with their conscious minds, of which they were so arrogantly proud, were forced to frame that as a hard problem which had to be explained away in service to their ideology. So strong is their emotional need for everything to have a material explanation that is at least theoretically treated with science, that they tied themselves up in knots of contradiction, denying what was as clear empirical evidence of consciousness as anything they published in their research.
From my numerous encounters with atheists online over the past dozen years I have no doubt it is a question of emotion for them, not of reason. There is no scientific reason for them to maintain their willful blindness. They want materialism to be true and for most of them it is because they hate the idea that religion might have something to it. Religion is a bogeyman to them, something they attribute all sins to, including those which have been created by their own science - Steve Weinberg, I'm pointing at you - and those which properly belong to entirely worldly authorities in pursuit of material wealth and power. Scientists have promoted an enormous number of myths in support of their ideological war on religion, they've even had to turn their own minds into myths, that is when they aren't conveniently forgetting that they are mere animals, as well.
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