Tuesday, June 6, 2023

I don't think we can base such a morally consequential question on the musings of materialist particle physicists.

MY ALCOHOLIC RELATIVE  I wrote about a week ago is at the end and, as I said, I'm one of the ones taking care of him.   I'm hoping to write more soon.  In the mean time, here's the estimable but not unlimited Sabine Hossenfelder again attempting to debunk free will, the sum total of her argument hinges on her ideological choice of materialism and materialist reductionism.   Despite all of the rather clever though not especially deep reference to "emergence" - I will say she does a better job than most English language and French materialists I've encountered - and other assorted materialist framings, her choice doesn't answer any of the questions I've asked on the topic which deal with accounting for our experience of consciousness, which encompasses our earliest conscious, pre-language moments to the most rigorous and comprehensive proofs of mathematics and, on a lower level of human structured thinking, physics and chemistry.   I'd be tempted to throw in that I'm a lot more impressed with the rigor of some theological writers.   They don't deal with with radically limited topics that physicists and chemists deal with but, then, physics and chemistry are entirely incompetent to deal with those aspects of human experience that theology takes as its subject matter.  I think that's one of the reasons that when I listen to the Evangelical apologist William Lane Craig, when he is refuting the claims of the likes of Sean Carroll and other militant atheists, he's impressive though I often disagree with him on topics proper to theology and Scripture study.  


Notice that her too pat dismissal of the idea that the mind is not material and so could not be limited to the web of material causality that her subject matter has as its only proper area of competence, physical objects and energy as those can be discerned from their (perhaps partial) presence in humanly perceived or reasoned networks of causation.   It's not surprising that someone so invested in physics would insist that the entirety of reality is governed by the rules People have discovered (or perhaps invented) to explain those to themselves is the sum total of reality.   To a carpenter everything looks like a nail, is the cliche.   

I'd like to see her explain why anyone should have any more confidence in the non-apparent ideas of elite physicists, chemists, theoretical biologists, etc.  have any more connection to reality than the freedom of choice that materialist atheists with a devotion to scientists are so ready to reject because it can't be made into an aspect of their framing of reality.   Every idea of mathematics or physics or any science is as fraught with the question of choosing to believe everything from our earliest notion of numbers or logical thought right up to the latest seemingly confirmed products of a particle accelerator or from an orbiting telescope.    We mere human beings can never, ever remove ourselves and our minds from the products of those minds, that's as true of even observable physics as it is from religious Scripture.

As a political blogger my concern about materialism is the fact that whenever People and other living beings are seen as material objects having no transcendent characteristics that make them more than objects, the consequences are a moral catastrophe.   The failure of academic intellectualism - apart from some of post-WWII theology and other areas of non-reductionist thinking - has failed to address the fact that whenever that view of human beings are mere objects, in part or in total, the dominant view of those with power, lots of people suffer the most terrible oppression, use, destruction and murder.  That is the consequence, whether under Marxism or Nazism, whether under European fascism or its American traditional form in white supremacy, etc. whenever People, in part or in total, are seen as objects, no more than that and that, as Nietzsche understood to be the consequence of scientific materialism, if you could get away with using, exploiting or killing one of millions of People, then there was no reason not to do it if you liked doing it.   That is a real-life proven consequence of the demotion of human beings into objects, whether it is Native Americans, Black People, Jews, LGBTQ+ or Women,  I don't think we can afford to allow someone to not address those consequences of their ideological assertions under the guise that when People invented science they decided to exempt it from questions of moral consequences.   I don't think we can base such a morally consequential question on the musings of materialist particle physicists. 

I know that the companies that put out cheap vodka in handles and "bum wine" know they are marketing to alcoholics.  In short, they see the alcoholics they market to as objects for profit even as it's obvious that they have abandoned their ability to choose to save themselves to a molecule.   They know they're making money off of killing People.    Just as I know the member of my family dying of COPD was marketed to by the tobacco industry and Hollywood when she was a teenager.   Surrendering your ability to choose to molecules seems to me to be that hazardous to your health.   It's as hazardous to believe someone who has spent so much of their life seeing molecules, atoms and subatomic particles as the ultimate reality can really account for our experience of our lives.   Much as I like Ms. Hossenfelder when she's talking about her topic of competence, she's pretty useless when she insists that's all there is to reality.



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