IF I HAD A DOLLAR FOR EVERY TIME an ideological atheist of the sciency kind, the Coynes, the PZs etc. their fan-boys and other assorted Sci-Rangers had cited the Libet experiments as a reinforcement of their debasement of human minds to a state of mere physical determinism I might not be able to buy a luxury car but I'm sure I could buy a Raspberry Pi 400 if not the whole kit and various accessories. My experience of the internet in the atheist fad of the 00s was full of those citations.
Those experiments whose positive results may well be nothing but an ideological misinterpretation of noise assigned a significance they don't have in reality - such as is and has been the habit of the alleged scientific study of human and other minds since the start of it - figure very highly in the efforts of the atheists BECAUSE FREEDOM OF THOUGHT IS NOT EXPLAINABLE IN AN IDEOLOGY THAT MAINTAINS ALL OF REALITY IS FOUNDED ON PHYSICAL CAUSATION as discerned and defined through science. I have noted the extreme irony of the Free Thought Blogs being full of the denial that free thought was a possibility, I'm sure ol' rip-roarin wild-man tap-room atheists like "Woody Guthrie's Guitar" would be ready to report that "science proves that free will is bunk" on almost any secular lefty blog and get no blow back from the allegedly freedom loving secularists because they never really think about what they're saying.
They really are more than a little bit willing to destroy the basis for egalitarian justice, self-government as an expression of the choice of The People as a whole because its basis in freedom of thought and conscience and the presumption of good will and the truth being more likely to be expressed in the will of most of the People instead of individuals with power and self-interest cannot be real if their ideology is true.
That is part of what is at stake in this issue which you claim to believe is unimportant even as you rail against my refutation of it.
I will state that the article at the Atlantic and the disconfirming study that it is based in is something I doubt as highly as I did the results of the experiments form the early 1960s, a presumption of physical causation as an origin of our minds.
I have gone over and over and over why I think that idea doesn't hold up just on the basis of the experience of having new ideas constantly and seemingly instantaneously when any materialistic articulation of that as a product of structures in the brain can't get past the need for the idea to have been present as a physical structure in the brain before the idea that was an epiphenomeon of that structure being there. That is literally the case, in order for the brain to make the new physical structure to be the basis of an idea, it would have had to have known many different things about the idea before the structure was present in the brain to do that could have been there. Unless materialists can solve that paradox, their model for the mind cannot be true.
I don't think minds, human or animal are susceptible to legitimate scientific methods for a large number of reasons, which, among other things, accounts for the rather ramarkable and continual failure for such allegedly scientific endeavors to produce enduring and reliable information of the kind they allegedly find. Psychology and sociology and, heaven help us, economics and anthropology are pseudo-sciences, neruo-science and cognitive science, unless they stick strictly to physiological descriptions on much more careful observation and measurement and a far more rigorous regime of listening to critics, internal and external than they are used to aren't much more legitimate. All of those fields are riddled with ideological interests, most of them exactly of the kind I critique for their endangerment of egalitarian justice, the common good, self-government by free People of good will, I doubt any of them could ever be freed from those ideological interests and habits without rebuilding them from the ground up, honesty about the limits of possibly doing what they claim to do built in from the start. That's not going to happen in my lifetime.
The disease of ideological invasion of science is far more widespread, cosmology and theoretical physics are rife with it as is the scientific study of the most complex phenomenon science has ever pretended to study, the evolution of species in the complexity of life. That that ideological invasion is most seriously done in those areas in which the science is allowed to do everything from absurdly extrapolate the meaning of scanty physical evidence out of all reason to making stuff up to support their ideology - today's theoretical physics and cosmology as well as all of those alleged mind sciences named above - is not a big surprise when you realize that they made adequate observation FROM NATURE a requirement for something to be accepted as science for a reason, it can, sometimes, if done honestly and carefully, reign in the desires of those doing the alleged science from determining what's published. The decadence of science follows like the wheel of a wagon does the ox pulling it from the sought and obtained, self-granted permission of those allowed to call themselves scientists when they exempt themselves from its requirements. There's nothing surprising or even hard to understand in it. No one has ever observed a mind at work, no one can access any information about a mind except through the self-reporting of the organism experiencing the mind and there is absolutely no possibility to check on the accuracy or veracity of what they report. There is absolutely no way for us to access the truth about any animal's mind that can possibly match the requirements of the physical sciences. I reject all of it as being anything more than lore that should be regarded as having the loose reliability of all lore.
No one who makes claims about what is happening in the mind of someone else has a legitimate claim to know that mind superior that of the person who experiences their own mind does. They don't have to believe that what the person who does make claims about their own mind says about it is being accurate or honest but they have no more possible knowledge of it than the person whose mind it is has. Yet all of the so-called mind and behavioral sciences are based on the lie that third-person reports of that have a superior access to the truth about that when it is absurd to think that is possible. When they use fMRI and the kind of primitive technology that seemed cutting edge in 1964 to do it, that does nothing to enhance an ability that doesn't exist to start with.
I'm a lot more impressed with the insights of those who wrote the Psalms, to tell you the truth about my experience. And whoever Isaiah was.
P.S. One of the most destructive things that the pseudo-science of psychology did in the 20th century was to lead many, those with alleged educations, those influenced through the make believe of psychology influenced novels, movies, TV shows, etc. to distrust the reliability of their own minds. Whether or not that was justified. I think one of the results of that was a choice to stop trying, among the causes of the decadence and cynicism of modernism.
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