How I Practice Skepticism - A response

MUCH AS I RESPECT him and contrary to what you claim,  I don't agree with everything Rupert Sheldrake says, we disagree about at least one major issue.  He believes in natural selection and I am a deep skeptic of that theory of evolution.  I don't have any doubt that evolution happened and suspect, if human science and technology and greed don't end all life on Earth, will continue as long as our kind of life continues.  I am entirely skeptical that natural selection is the explanation of how that happened and am as skeptical that natural selection is a real thing in nature.  I think every citation of natural selection I've ever heard of is no more than an unevidenced explanation of things in evidence or the creative basis on which things which are not evidenced or even mathematically coherent (Hamiltonian "altruism", for example) are promoted.  And, all too often, those are the product of a desired economic, racial or ideological motive.  Sometimes what is desired is merely a scientific seeming explanation of something within science, a "Just-so story" which is not really different from the methods of the ancient and classical era naturalists, crypto-zoologists and proton-scientists.  I think that desire in biology was what led to the quick adoption of natural selection in science, controlled by wealthy, white, males of the dominant group wherever they were and other dominant groups later.  We can become so used to how an ideological creation is used that we hardly notice when it really isn't explaining how or why anything happens.  I haven't yet gotten around to studying the later 19th and early 20th century scientific skepticism of natural selection but I would like to read what its scientific skeptics said about it.  There was a crisis of faith in it among scientists who certainly had legitimate questions about it at that time, I just haven't looked into the primary evidence of that, yet.

My skepticism of natural selection is not the same kind of thing as the "skeptics" pseudo-skepticism over the existence of psychic phenomena.  What first led to my study of natural selection, Darwinism, was its role in inspiring eugenics.  What I read in the primary literature and beyond that is what led to my skepticism that it was even a real thing,  It only started in understanding the consequences of the faith in natural selection, eugenics, the most extreme though logically inevitable consequence of a belief in natural selection, the "eugenic" genocides of the Nazis and others motivated by a belief in natural selection.   As I've noted here a number of times, I was hardly the first to notice those consequences of a belief in natural selection.  The early British feminist, antivivisectionist, and radical Frances Cobbe wrote a remarkably informed and insightful essay on the moral depravity and atrocity that was likely going to come from a belief in natural selection soon after Darwin's On The Origin of Species was published.  Darwin himself, in The Descent of Man, condescendingly and patronizingly pooh-poohed her fears which turned out to be entirely justified and impressively insightful.  Darwin and his wife knew Cobbe, it's reported that Emma Darwin was especially impressed with her.  As with the closing speech that William Jennings Bryan prepared for the Scopes trial, the history of the dogma of natural selection in application proved its critics far more right than its champions in that regard, both Darwin and Clarence Darrow in those cases.  Considering the depravity of the Nazi period, first and foremost the Shoah, the Holocaust and other eugenic genocides, but the rest of it, up to and including the Lebensborn breeding program and the degrading of human life in terms of economic and military utility, Cobbe's prediction that a belief in natural selection could lead to a level of amorality such as Mandeville imagined was born out in a very real test of time.  Exactly in the way that natural selection, itself has never been observed in real life.  She said that if natural selection were a proven scientific fact that we would have to deal with that but it has not been proven as a scientific fact. 

When a scientist comes up with a theory about a complex phenomenon in nature they cannot come up with anything like an exact discription of how it happens in nature,  you have to actually see it happening IN NATURE to really understand that.   Making stuff up, theorizing, is no substitute though that has not kept the neo-Darwinists from making up the most ludicrous, irrational and even mathematically incoherent and contradictory claims and having those believed as science.

And that's were  my disbelief in the existence of natural selection starts,  in the fact that no one has ever seen, never mind documented an instance of even one, single species coming about through natural selection.  No one has ever seen individuals of any species having greater reproductive success due to passing on specific "traits" through many generations, their line of life coming to dominate within that species, eventually giving rise to a new species which is different from and reproductively incompatible with members of the original species.  I am deeply skeptical of theories of complex phenomena that are accepted without actual, visual evidence in nature sufficient to demonstrate what that theory claims.  In the case of what is claimed of natural selection producing new species, sufficient evidence would comprise a massive and verifiable line of fossil remains of direct descendants to prove that it was natural selection that accounted for a line within a species dominating and swamping other lines in the same species, producing a new species.  But that would not be enough because natural selection would require life histories and environmental knowledge sufficient to show that outside forces killed, prevented from leaving offspring of other individuals set up as their competition in a "struggle for existence" and no such evidence will ever be had because it leaves no physical evidence in the fossil record.  No such evidence has ever been produced, nor is it even a plausible claim that such a line of evidence could ever be had.  Such information is irretrievably lost to the normal course of of time, organic decay and geological grinding.   The genetic evidence of relationship that impressively shows just that, relationship, does not prove that natural selection is the engine that produced the separate species that are demonstrated to be related.  It cannot demonstrate that any "struggle for existence" produced the different species that are demonstrated to be related instead of just biological change in species over time.  The idea that long "extinct species" "died out" when every present day species is the direct descendant of myriads of "extinct species" is illogical in the extreme.  There's all the difference in the world between human activity destroying all of the individuals of a species, cutting them off from the future, leaving no descendants and those species of which all present day species are their living descendants.  I do not believe that absent actual observational evidence of a complex theory that we can have any actual knowledge of what such a thing would be like in reality instead of conjecture.  The more complex the proposed theory and phenomenon, the harder it is to accurately predict the actual results in nature.  Yet natural selection is the required framing within biology of probably the most complex phenomenon that science has ever claimed to deal with. 

As of now there is no theory of how the evolution of new species happened which has that kind of evidence and it would seem that none ever will, which may make evolutionary scientists unhappy but that's just too bad.  There doesn't seem to be any kind of air-tight or even less air-tight scientific verification of many ideas, cultural, ideological, religious, scientific, even mathematical and it doesn't seem that human beings as we presently are will have such verification, ever.  If you choose to make claims about the forever lost past then you had better be prepared to be disappointed if you want to have the same verification of those as is had about readily checked ideas about present day phenomena.  

My skepticism continues through the reading of Darwin and his disciples and seeing how they presented merely seemingly plausible evidence for it in things like animal husbandry giving rise to named varieties of plants and animals, in the case of dogs, for example, having enormously varied "traits" which might appear to mimic what appears to our eyes as different species in nature.  But dogs, for all their variety and difference are still members of the same species.  I'd question the idea that they are even a different species from the wolves they were selected from BY HUMAN INTENTION, with whom dogs can breed and have very viable, successfully reproducing offspring.  

That widespread substitute for evidence of natural selection has some real problems as serving as evidence for it and the scientific support the theory in general.  Especially as that is ideologically defined in the present day para-scientific manner.  A partial summary of my reasons include:

1. What is done in human husbandry is not natural, it is an example of choices made by human beings, often for intentional purposes towards intended or hoped for ends. Nothing could be farther from how Darwin and his disciples claimed natural selection works, especially those materialist-atheists who reject the idea that there is teleology in nature.   I haven't come across a single one of those in or out of science who has done what they are always ready to do when they suspect someones motives is to imply intelligent design and teleological ends of God in evolution, notice that those forbidden motives such as assigning teleology and intelligent intent to nature are rampant in Darwinist literature.  Rupert Sheldrake correctly identifies such claims in the just-so stories of genes by the atheist-fundamentalist Richard Dawkins.   Yet nothing could be more obvious in that use of animal husbandry in arguments for natural selection from the time that Darwin introduced it as an ersatz substitute for evidence of natural selection in nature.  Since, as I've also pointed out before, Darwin, himself cited his inspiration of Malthusian economic dogma as giving him the idea of natural selection, the matter of human choices of the most artificial kind with obvious self-interested ends embedded into them came into the theory of natural selection at its inception, attributing those to supposedly non-interested, non-teleological nature.  The intentionality of human beings cannot be removed from the results gained by human action.

2. None of those substitutes for natural selection has produced a new species.  Not those done by plant and animal breeders, not by those done by equally intelligently designing biologists and geneticists with equally teleological motives in labs.  There are such intelligently designed experiments that have produced hybrids but hybrids are notorious for their inability to reproduce their own kind or to maintain their stability when subjected to the possibility of interbreeding with other plants.  They are hardly a substitute for what Darwinists claim to have happened during evolution to produce the who knows how many millions or billions or more species that arose without intelligence and intention.  In fact, if you insist that those are evidence for natural selection you'd have to conclude that human type intelligence and intention may well HAVE HAD TO BE part of it.  

3.  And there is the fact that the concept of "biological fitness" from the start, through examples of plant and animal breeding by humans is so deeply entwined in human concepts of economic utility when economic utility is hardly the same thing as the ability to survive in a wild environment and to produce reproductively successful offspring.  Many of the artificially produced varieties in the Darwinists' "evidence" have a hard time surviving, never mind leaving a thriving line of offspring in their close image in the wild.  The concept of economic utility saturates all Darwinist thinking through its inspiration in Malthusian economics, especially in the Malthusian assignment of economic value to human beings, lives and bodies.  It's no wonder the early adopters of the theory of natural selection turned so immediately to eugenics putting their own aristocratic class at the top in such schemes of worth.

4. So many of the terms involved in the theory of natural selection have such vague and inspecific and often illogical definitions.  I doubt  that one of those among the most vague and inspecific and illogically used terms "traits" has any meaning specific enough to stand up to real testing (except in a few very specific genetic abnormalities or disabilities) or to be made accountable for the reproductive success or failure of any line of life producing a new species.  No surviving "trait" of genetic disabilities within a species can be demonstrated to be an engine of speciation.  Don't forget, natural selection is supposed to have speciation as its consequence, what must be demonstrated to happen to verify its validity, something which just about every Darwinist loses sight of.

One of the most troublesome aspects of identifying and telling tales about "traits" is that they are treated as if they are separate from the many other "traits" held in different combinations by differing individuals in the same species who might be said to possess or not possess such a "trait."  "Traits" don't reproduce, organisms do.  Many such "traits" specified in lines of lore promoting a belief in natural selection can hardly be said to exist alone within whatever species they're found in, well after speciation occurred.  Setting up some other "trait" as being opposed to it in Darwin's imaginary "struggle for existence" is a pretty dodgy thing.  I doubt they could find "traits" that would render individuals exhibiting the opposing "trait"  unwilling or unable to have offspring with the imagined retrograde individual.  The schemes of reproduction imagined by those imagining natural selection so often seem to be peculiarly aristocratically choosy in that regard.  Dogs, for example, don't seem to be unwilling to reproduce across the most incredibly varied body forms and appearances.  I recall on campus in my first year of college, there was a huge unnutered St. Bernard-whatever else cross who tried to breed with a pure bred basset hound.  The irresponsible student keepers of the two animals allowed them to make a real spectacle of themselves outside of my dorm to much puerile commentary.  

I will not go again into such tripe cited as support for natural selection as the ubiquitously repeated "speckled moth evidence" which was such a dodgy and scientifically invalid "study" that it was long ago debunked as scientific evidence.  Though, as is typical of the scientific lore and just-so style propaganda of natural selection, that skeptical critique of it is simply ignored by the theories supporters especially in their propaganda to the general public.  The "study" was so much the result of manipulation to get the results wanted that it could stand as a very real life example of what the "skeptics" accuse others of without any evidence of wrong doing, at all.  It was science theater, not science.   And no new species resulted from the alleged phenomenon it purported to explain.  That kind of fakery is hardly absent from the science supporting natural selection.  

5, I have a real problem with the identification of "traits" deemed to be either salubrious or dysgenic and as to whether or not they matter in what the theory of natural selection claims, that many or even any of those produce an inherent reproductive advantage or disadvantage in regard to the numbers of decedents having them.   

And there is the frequently made nonsensical claim that natural selection isn't progressive, that it doesn't assign value to one trait or another or, more to the point, individuals AND GROUPS OF INDIVIDUALS when Darwininsts' themselves, do that continually, either explicitly or by implication and through their claimed evidence.  Their denial that they're doing that is one of their most obvious examples of dishonesty.   Some of the most brutal and bigoted expressions of that can be found in what Darwin wrote and what those of his most ardent and orthodox disciples said and still say.  Today some of the worst of that is found among those who practice "evolutionary psychology" the specialty which reintroduced levels of antisemitism and racism into published, taught science which had been somewhat suppressed since the crimes of the Nazis and their allies in World War II made it impolitic to say such things.  

6. There is so much double-speak among the Darwinists.  I first noticed that when I noticed Darwin, himself, would attribute reproductive advantage to what he claimed were dysgenic traits among human beings in The Descent of Man.  Claiming that poor people (who he clearly held to be biologically inferior to the rich) had more children than the aristocrats who he said, specifically, were their superiors, fretting that the poor unless starved and deprived and unvaccinated into early deaths, were a reproductive drag on the human species.  And that was the British poor he specifically complained were being kept alive by the notoriously cruel and homicidal standards of Victorian British public "charity."  Including the British death camps, the work houses, the murderous New Poor Law, the incredibly stingy provision of food and medical care.  

And as well claiming that the Irish, who he declared biologically inferior and morally depraved as compared to their close biological cousins, the Scots, had more children than the "virtuous" Scots and would quickly out-breed Scots.  In that case he produced an unwitting and astoundingly unconsidered refutation of his claims of natural selection because, unlike the Scots, the Irish population had been subjected to the most harsh and cruel and murderous culling under the potato famine during Darwin's adulthood.  By his own theory, such culling should have produced biological superiority among the survivors.  Darwin, himself, was involved in potato breeding experiments at the time to produce strains of blight resistant potatoes.  He may well have known that famine had been preceded by another such famine in the 18th century which killed many Irish, entire families as that of the 1840s.  Only the one in the 1840s was made far worse by the "enlightenment" British government under the influences of "science" allowing the export of grain and other food from Ireland during the famine for the profit of Darwin's fellow aristocrats and to keep food prices lower in England and, I'd guess, Scotland.  If there was any population that should have been made "superior" through the kind of culling that Darwinism excitedly imagines is the engine of improvement of a species, the Irish in the 1870s was just such a population during the period in which Darwin assigned them inferiority.  It is an interesting thing to notice that Darwin's assignment of biological inferiority to any number of groups, such as the "Turks" has so much to do with the imperial and economic interests of the British upper classes.  And his list of those who were doomed to extinction due to their assigned biological "inferiority."  

Darwin made the explicit argument that while the children of the poor were dangerous to the future of the human species, those he identified as the "useless drones" bred by the aristocracy were held by him to be no danger at all.  Which you can imagine an aristocratic Brit who was a hypochondriac who, never the less, had many children WITH HIS COUSIN, exempting his own class from his "struggle for existence" in that manner.  Nor did he believe that the very things he said were a terrible danger to the human species when done for the poor, the providing of food, clothing, housing, health care, etc. when given in such meagerness as it was to the British poor, the same and more when provided in grotesque  abundance to the British rich and aristocracy produced the crown of creation.   Despite his own hypochondria, he never failed to exempt his own reproduction of offspring from his own declarations of hard science, nor have I ever seen that in his great wealth he failed to have his children vaccinated or provided healthcare or food or clothing or housing.  Nor himself nor his wife.  I've never seen a true believing advocate of natural selection or its logical conclusion, eugenics, subject themselves their loved ones, or those in their class and above to the forces of culling they advocated for those they targeted for removal from the human future.  I have never read anyone within science, especially an advocate of natural selection point out that grotesque inconsistency in Darwin's reasoning about his ersatz examples of natural selection.

7. Related to that is the extreme absurdity of his citation of items in human proto-history, myth and anthropological lore,  such as what he alleges to have been the biological superiority of the classical era Spartans due to their reproductive habits, but most of all to their practice of infanticide.  The alleged superiority of the Spartans in war making, while it can be expected to excite the imagination of a whimpy Brit aristocrat and supporter of British imperialism of the 19th century, educated in the concepts and methods of British imperialism and racism (Darwin was enthusiastic about both) and the class system, is not scientifically established.  If that were true then you would have expected a different history of the Spartans under their quite artificial regime of military despotism and "superior breeding" than what history shows.  You would have seen them come to dominate all others who didn't practice their same way of life.  But that's not what the history of the Spartans in regard to the ones Darwin's scheme would set up as their rivals in a "struggle for existence."  It would be interesting to see if Darwin ever expressed himself on the biological ranking of the Athenians or other more cultured political and economic rivals of the Spartans and how he explained where their superiority came from.  Though, since the practice of infanticide was widespread throughout the classical Mediterranean, it would be hard to pin that down as a producer of reproductive success.  I think he, as well as his closest disciple and colleague in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, used legend and lore as phony  scientific evidence in their promotion of a devaluation of human life.  What else is a reasonable reader to conclude is their intention?  In the case of those like the Spartans,  I would guess that the helots, the many slaves held by the Spartan aristocracy. who, no doubt, as the poor are, would be held as the inferiors of the warrior-aristocrat class,  were not infrequently raped by their enslavers, such as seems to be the habit wherever People are held in slavery, and had more than a bit of the biological heritage of what Darwin imagines as a separate and superior people, in them.  The example of how Darwin uses the lore and legend of the Spartans to promote a belief in natural selection among People is hardly the only such example and none of them has any validity as scientific evidence.  Not that that has been pointed out by any more modern Darwinist I've ever come across in the two decades I've been studying Darwinism and the consequences of its promotion and belief.  I doubt that there was all that much biological dissimilarity among the various competing groups in the Eastern Mediterranean region to enable any real scientific validation of natural selection to come from arguments made of them.  I doubt that can be demonstrated across the entire human population of the Earth.

And, since what he said about natural selection in the human species was, according to him, supportive of his theory in general as imposed on all of life, the defects in his thinking in The Descent of Man must be assumed to be present in his theory in general.  The history of the science of eugenics* proves that to be the case.

I could go on numbering the reasons I am skeptical that natural selection is a real thing and was the sole or even a major driver of speciation in evolution.  But I think I've established that my criteria of how to do it are more exacting that what the "skeptics" do and make money off of.

That's an entirely different form of skepticism from that practiced by the "skeptics" in regard to the scientific demonstration of psychic abilities under the most rigorous regime of testing and replication of testing I'm aware of, not only in the alleged behavioral science but in pretty much the rest of science.  The "skeptics" start from an ideological position of declaring it impossible and they either disregard the experimental evidence or they deny its rigorous methodologies or make up reasons that the very same mathematical analysis of data they like is, magically, invalid when it comes to data they don't like or, like James Randi and C. E. M Hansel, and, Martin Gardner, they lie about how the experiments were done or in other ways.  I'm skeptical of natural selection BECAUSE OF THE FAILURE OF SCIENCE ON BEHALF OF NATURAL SELECTION,  they're refusal to acknowledge the validity of the rigorously produced evidence is done despite the scientific evidence produced and a double standard of judgment, I prefer a single standard and admission when the rules are followed and when those are not followed.  They rely on ideological conformity and coercion to maintain an appearance of agreement with their ideology, I rely on the legitimate standards of critical analysis to make my arguments.  

One of the most eminent statisticians in the country, Jessica Utts, long ago pointed out that those conducting  the controlled research into psychic phenomena had long before surpassed the standards of having the validity of what they were researching admitted.  She followed on Dr. Burton H. Camp, President of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics  predecessor decades before,  who, when asked to look into the statistical methods used by J. B. Rhine said that there was nothing wrong with his analysis of his data.  Rhine was one of those who very early on followed rigorous methods to prevent any kind of intentional or unintentional cheating or "information leakage" in his various experiments, one who was faced with critics of his method and, instead of resisting their criticisms, included them in his further experimental designs.  His critics, faced with his scientific rigor slandered him and lied about the methods of him and his colleagues.  Their lies are what you'll find repeated even today, though those lies were long ago exposed to be lies.  Dishonesty lies at the heart of the ideology, the habits and lore of "skepticism" as that word is misapplied to those who have no skepticism in regard to what they want everyone to believe.  They refuse to look at the evidence or, as in the case of one of the less dishonest among that clique, Ray Hyman, be reduced to making inspecific criticisms of the impossibility of the validity of what was shown, even though he couldn't even define what was wrong with the procedures or analysis.  Hyman was a psychologist, a member of the psychology faculty of a university, no doubt one who upheld the scientific validity of myriads of claims in psychology which were never, once subjected to the level of rigorous scientific experiment which he rejects in that one specific area of research.  He clearly practices a double standard in such matters, he's even been known to try to suppress mathematical analysis when it doesn't serve his ideological purposes.  And he's one of the more honest of the "skeptics."  Most of them find nothing wrong with the lying, slander and misrepresentation of the likes of a James Randi.  Some of them do the same thing, as can be seen in the "skeptics" cover-up of the "sTARBABY" scandal.  

Since the advent of the new atheist fad of the first decade of this century, the 00's as I call it, I've had the opportunity to do what you'd never have had a chance to do before the internet, read the unfiltered, unselected thinking of a lot of different people identifying themselves as belonging to this or that ideological group.   One of the consequences of that is that I've had to face the fact that people having college-credentials is no guarantee that they are really educated.   Another is that even those with a graduate degree in the sciences seldom practice scientific methods in their thinking, the amount of sheer prejudice among them seems to me to be about the same as that of the general population.  But most of all I've had to come to the conclusion that those who don't believe in sin or that sinning is consequential for the one doing it will have little hesitation to lie.  That's true of those who claim to be religious, especially those who claim to be Christians who certainly should believe that lying is a sin and bearing false witness is highly consequential for the one doing it.  But if even what Scripture says in that regard is a weak inhibition to lying when someone doesn't believe that it's morally prohibited and consequential, there's nothing to keep them from telling any lie they feel like telling except, perhaps, a residual cultural remnant of a a previously religious habit of regarding lies as wrong.  Atheist-materialism has no such inhibition to lying in it and I have noticed that self-declared atheists have at least as high a propensity to lie as Trumpian "Christians" do when it suits them.  And among those the ones who I've noticed are most prone to lie are what Rupert Sheldrake calls "militant atheists."  The self-identified "skeptics" are among those who are most prone to lying of any group I've interacted with online for the last twenty years.  And along with that there is a decided laxity about self-questioning ideas and statements and would-be facts among such people with such a casual regard for the truth.   They don't tend to be at all rigorous in trying to find out what is true.  I think that's reflected in the various crises that science is in these days, the replicability crisis, the rampant fraud and lack of rigor in even formally submitted scientific papers which pass the review of their colleagues in the same field, what I will not call a "discipline" because a lot of them show no discipline at all.  

Your personal beliefs really do matter in whether or not you will be bothered with trying to tell the truth after finding out what the truth really is.  AND SCIENCE AS IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE ABSOLUTELY DEPENDS ON TELLING THE TRUTH.  I think that's been a problem at least since Darwin started cutting corners in support of his theory of natural selection, it got far worse among his would-be disciples in pseudo-scientific things such as the alleged behavioral sciences.  With such innovations as "evolutionary psychology" the combined dishonesties of two of those mated and produced some of the most dishonest claims as science ever made.  Such stuff, taught as science,  gains currency in the mainstream of even honestly attempted science and it can't but help to make that less honest.  One of the most honest biologists I ever knew admitted to me that he made use of evolutionary psychological claims in his quite unrelated field-work.  I couldn't help but be astonished that he'd fall for that stuff when he was so careful with his work.  And with such dependency comes defensiveness and a suspension of skepticism.  The results aren't good for much but telling just-so stories and promoting such things as scientific bigotry and things like eugenics.  


Post Script:  Reading this over for a last edit before I post it, I decided to change the term in that last sentence from "scientific racism" to "scientific bigotry."  If there has been something rampant in psychology it has been a general attack on religion and those who are religious, turning religious belief into a pathological condition such as eugenics turns belonging to different races, ethnicities, economic classes into pathologies to be eradicated.  The science among the "four horsemen" of new atheism certainly did that, there has been a general attempt to do that within the framing of "evolutionary psychology."  And religion is hardly the only thing about human beings which has been subject to that kind of united effort by the pseudo-scientific within the set of those considered to be scientists.  That doesn't include the refutation of things like six-day creationism or its more wrong and extreme form of "young earth" creationism, but that's far more the work of actual physical science with physical evidence doing that.  That's entirely legitimate.  The imagining up "religion genes" and plausible sounding natural selection claims of how religion arose and persists among people is entirely not scientifically legitimate, it is motivated in an ideological agenda by atheists as so much in such other non-evidentiary sciences is.  That is it's not legitimate if the claimed methods and purposes of science mean anything to anyone anymore.

Sociologically, those who practice religion are said to generally exhibit a healthier life, more happiness, and a longer life.  Rupert Sheldrake has pointed out that if the statistical research on a new medicine or medical treatment was found to have the same results it would be lauded around the world as a wonder-drug.  I'm the one who is skeptical of sociology but if you're going to use that make arguments when you like its results, you can't discount its results when it produces supports a point of view you don't like.  As I said last week, I support a single standard, not one that accomodates the likes and dislikes of those who allege to apply it.   

* As Marylin Robinson pointed out, if religion in general is answerable for bad religion then science has to be answerable for bad science, especially in that science is far more powerful economically and, so, politically, socially and legally than religion is or long has been. The fact that eugenics never was suppressed by science, it has been present under the radar for the entire post WWII period, having its isolated advocates advocating eugenics measures even during that period, such as Francis Crick and James Watson.  It has been resurgent since the late 1960s in overt forms, from Arthur Jensen's and William Schockley's scientific racism and eugenics,  gaining enormous strength through the already mentioned innovation in "evolutionary psychology" and in its politically effective and hugely damaging form through the publication of The Bell Curve and other neo-eugenic, scientific racist publications that were hugely promoted and influential in the backlash against the Civil Rights era progress towards equality.  Darwinism inevitably gives rise to scientific bigotry and racism and attacks on those with less money because that's baked into it from the start.  

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Tennessee Williams - Five Plays

Five Plays

Out of curiosity after finding that recording of The Glass Menagerie posted yesterday,  I wondered what other audio or radio productions of Tennessee Williams plays might have been done during his lifetime, most likely with his approval.   I found this collection from the BBC at archive.org with five from his earliest period, including one from the 1930s that was never published before it was found in his papers after his death.   There are two plays in it I've never seen or read.   I haven't listened to them yet, though I've downloaded them and will probably go through them over the next few weeks - planting season doesn't leave me with much time to listen to plays.   I hope you find something worth listening to in it. 

Suddenly Last Evening - With A Comment About Stormy Daniels' Testimony

I VISITED SOMEONE yesterday night while they were watching that old movie of Suddenly Last Summer, the one with Katherine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Montomery Clift.  She said she was avoiding listening to the news, don't we all do that a lot these days.  

You have to distinguish the original one-act play of Suddenly Last Summer, which Williams wrote for the stage and what he and the experienced Hollywood screen-play writer Gore Vidal made from it.  I doubt Vidal, even in collaboration with Williams was capable of improving on Williams alone.   Gore Vidal had no poetry in him and little humanity.

I haven't seen a Tennessee Williams play in decades.  Not on stage.  And not one of the movies they made of one since they had Cat On A Hot Tin Roof with Jessica Lange, Tommy Lee Jones and Rip Torn on PBS.  Lange was great as Maggie, really great.  Yesterday night it struck me how dated Williams's plays seem now, when they seemed so new when they were new.  That shouldn't be surprising, just about all of the plays that made his reputation are old, now.  Their daring topicality, as well.  I hope that LGBTQ+ liberation continues to make them seem increasingly incomprehensible to younger People now and more so to future generations just as we have to have so much about Renaissance plays explained to us.  Though like America's perennial theme of racism and white supremacy progress made by my minority group will prove to be as vulnerable as the progress in racial equality has proven to be.  It's so telling how vulnerable such progress is in the hands of our imperial Supreme Court under the corruptions their "free speech" rulings have allowed to propagate in the mass media and, so, our politics.  It will be really terrible if the topical theater of the 1950s and 60s becomes topical again.

That possibility of reliving that awful history has become topical since the Court has, since the time that Williams was having premiers, used the First Amendment to insure corruption in our society and politics under the slogans of "free speech," "free press," in no small part on behalf of the industries of stage and screen.  If they hadn't included political speech and so-called journalism, it might have been less topical, now.   How foolish (or corrupt) they were not to make a distinction about the right of the struggle for equality to tell the truth and the privilege they grant to those who oppose equality to lie us into perpetual inequality.  Readers of this will know that's become one of the major themes of this blog.  It has to be because that is one of the main venues through which our indigenous fascism, white supremacy thwarts and turns back progress towards equality.  I will add that, given their place in that kind of malignant anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic politics we have another indigenous fascist force in our national life, the one virtually every country has, the influence of millionaires and billionaires.  Even as there was a marginal and influential force in the legal profession and the judiciary that somewhat and quite mildly favored equality, the millionaires and billionaires, seeking to harness the white supremacist tradition, promoting that, has been successful in turning aside the progress of the 1960s and early 70s through the court.  The combination of the two forces explains a lot about how we are so in danger of the facade of liberal democracy crumbling away.  The recent and transparent lies of one of Trumps minor flunkies that if he gets a second regime they'll abolish porn is absolutely in no danger of happening, if for no other reason than so many of the Trump supporting billionaires make money off of it,  the Murdoch clan for a start.  And it would prove mighty unpopular with his base, so many of whom live in the highest porn viewing states and among those whose lives are a living expression of what porn merely imitates.  Exploitation, cruelty, sexism, racism, every negative stereotype there is.  That's as true of gay porn as it is straight porn in every way.  

But back to the movie.

One of the things that stood out for me, aside from Tennessee Williams style of going from poetry to the sewer and back in rapid succession, was the different acting styles of the three principle actors.  Katherine Hepburn's old-line style as contrasted to Elizabeth Taylor (back when she was still making an effort to really act) to Montgomery Clift whose acting seemed the most natural of the three.  To some extent that could be because of the different roles but I don't think that was all there was to it.  It's been a long time since I watched a Hollywood movie and saw how the production so often swamps the story.  The use of filmed depictions of Taylor's flashback monologue was especially distracting, it would have been a lot better if they'd just left it to her, closeups of her face (well, maybe the makeup could have been a little more subdued)  and the text to paint the picture.  Though maybe audiences trained by movies and TV from the 50s couldn't imagine it anymore.  These days I always wonder if it would be more effective as a radio play because the imagined scene tends to be less distracting than what some director or producer or actor provides by way of visuals.  They always want to get artsy with the camera and sets.  Hepburn did a better job of extending her usual style of just playing herself in the role, I think she was trying, too.  And since the role of the evil, psychotic wealthy aunt was sufficiently baroque, her acting suited it.  Maybe it was having Montgomery Clift there instead of her usual Spencer Tracy or Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart.  It would have been interesting to see what she'd have become if she'd had a better actor than Tracey to form a duo act with.  Or if she'd stuck to the stage, more.  

Since acting is an art that's at the mercy of directors and producers, not to mention other actors, especially in an old-line Hollywood movies, it's too bad we can't see how they'd have acted the parts in another production or on stage.  Of the three I think that Montgomery Clift was probably the best actor, if he hadn't had such a tragic end to his life or or gotten off the bottle he might have been really great.  I recall reading that it was when he returned to the stage after his car accident that ruined his beautiful face some woman in the audience loudly expressed shock at how he looked and that finished him.  Audiences bear the ultimate responsibility in the arts, the credit and the blame.

But it's remembering the plays that leave me feeling cold.  Having binged on Eugene O'Neill recently, Tennessee Williams doesn't measure up.  Considering that we had being gay in common, that's a little surprising.  And it's not just Williams from the days of my youth.  I haven't seen a production of Edward Albee in a long time but I think his work would leave me even flatter now.  Elizabeth Taylor playing Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf might have been the last time she really put her all into a role but I have to say that Richard Burton as George really didn't do it for me.  Richard Burton has struck me as even more over-rated than Spencer Tracy but seeing that movie of his Hamlet on Youtube might prejudice me against him.  Watching him play Hamlet as Hamlet warned the players not to act inoculated me against his reputation and honeyed voice.  Becoming a star isn't good for a lot of actors, it's too easy being a star.  Same thing happens to singers and musicians, stardom isn't healthy.  

Once I read someone commenting on how Williams' play-writing petered out in no small part due to him being gotten addicted to drugs by the infamous "Dr. Feelgood", claiming that his short stories were still good.  I tried them and couldn't stand them, all I saw was decay and pathology.  I still like some of his best plays, the discipline of having to make something presentable on stage back when there were limits might have worked for him a lot better than having no limits did.  Having limits removed might go a long way in explaining how things got so bad in American lit after the Courts said there were no limits.  I'm not advocating that all the limits of the 50s be reimposed, at least not except in regard to the mass media lying us into fascism and billionaire domination, but I'm pointing out there are consequences for allowing the country to have its mind saturated in lies and shit.  Some of those consequences prove the program of libertarian First Amendment interpretation as imagined by elite lawyers and judges and "justices" are worse than the Hollywood Production and Broadcasting Codes.  

I read the exchanges between Trump's rape-defense style female lawyer and Stormy Daniels and could see immediately that Daniels was, in every way, the smarter of the two.  And more moral.  It's tragic that a mind and spirit like hers was forced by circumstance into a career in porn, she'd have been a great member of Congress.  I can't say that I respect porn, though I think those who act in it are the last ones to be blamed for what they do, but I respect Stormy Daniels.  I just wish she hadn't taken the bribe and exposed Trump when it might have prevented the catastrophe of having him in the presidency putting the intellectual and moral inferiors of her on the Supreme Court.  To join those Bush I and II put there, before them.  I strongly suspect she now wishes she had, too.  

You might like to listen to an audio-production of The Glass Menagerie with Clift as Tom,  Jessica Tandy as Amanda and Julie Harris as Laura.   I'm not sure if this is the same as the radio version of it that Clift was in. 

Exhibit 1 In The Case Against The Mechanistic View Of Life And Its Relation To Fascism

THIS ARTICLE by Scott Hurd contains so much information relevant to my recent posts in such a condensed form that I have to recommend you read the whole thing.  Here's a sample of what the consequences of the old line mechanistic view of life comes to. 

Then there's Peter Thiel, billionaire mentor to Altman and Meta/Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, past Trump megadonor, doomsday prepper, scorner of women's suffrage and disturbingly a primary investor in Hallow, the popular Catholic prayer app. Thiel insists that democracy and freedom are incompatible and is unconcerned with alleviating present-day poverty. Yet he's keen to advance the transhumanist agenda, insisting that death is simply a disease to be overcome by tech. Never mind St. Paul's insistence that Jesus already destroyed death, the "final enemy" (1 Corinthians 15:26). Thiel has other plans.

Recently, Thiel helped establish an alternative Olympics that allows doping by athletes and the use of "ergogenic aids." Why should competitors be limited by mere human strength and skill, when that can be surpassed with tech? As "combat" will be a featured contest in these "Enhanced Games," we can anticipate fights between wannabe Captains America and Six Million Dollar Men, replicating a popular toy from my childhood — Rock 'Em Sock 'Em robots — in which scowling buff bots pound each other until one's head pops off. Vulgar entertainment on par with the recently anticipated Musk-Zuckerberg "cage match."

Thiel could argue that new technologies already blur the line between human and machine, and bake us into computer ecosystems: goggles or headsets that warp our vision, scanners that decode our thoughts and monitor our feelings, "smart" glasses that whisper in our ears and earbuds that harvest our brainwaves. Given this and what's on the horizon, one Washington Post cartoonist depicted the progression from computers on our desks to computers in our hands to computers on our heads to computers in our brains, threatening, as Pope Francis warns in Fratelli Tutti, to make us "prisoners of a virtual reality" who "lost the taste and flavor of the truly real."

Since I've critisized him repeatedly for his advocacy of exactly the ideology that is behind this view of life, Hurd makes this point:

None of what I've said is meant to diminish the advances that have led to life-changing assistive devices for persons with disabilities, such as those used by Stephen Hawking, the famous cosmologist, physicist, best-selling author and longtime member of the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences. His mechanized wheelchair and interactive computers allowed him to continue his scientific pursuits while living with ALS. He most certainly appreciated the benefits of advanced tech. At the same time, he warned that one new technology — AI — could "spell the end of the human race."

Since the only thing they care about is their real god, Mammon, it's no surprise that the big money behind this kind of thing hates Pope Francis, which is the reason his major encyclicals are required reading, Catholic, non-Catholic or religion hating.   Apropos of that is the enthusiasm that that iconoclaystic atheist, religion mocking physicist Richard Feynmann had for Pope John XXIII's Pacem in Terris.  

Scott Hurd's article at NRC is full of links to things he refers to.  It reminds me of the best thing there is to online writing, links.  

If Minds Are Immaterial Then Expecting Either Science Of Western Philsophy To Find Them Is Likely Never To Work - Another response

IT'S NOT UNUSUAL for some would be wit among the college-credentialed class of the English speaking People to make some snarky reference to "angels dancing on the head of a pin" whenever something approaching the topic of theology comes up.  The imagined bit of erudition holding that such things were all Christian theologians talked about in the middle-ages when the fact is that line was likely invented by a minor English writer in the early modern period in order to dishonestly characterize Catholic scholastic theology.  Most college-credentialed wits who echo that probably never read any medieval theology or philosophy or they'd know that Catholic theologians of that period, in fact, produced some of the more important philosophical and proto-scientific texts in history.  

The same wags of a little learning will often make perhaps entirely ignorant reference to one of them, William of Occam, he of the famous razor that they know they're supposed to approve out of learned sloganeering but probably don't understand at all.  It was one of the stupidest things said in the popular American media of my lifetime that some magazine scribbler said that the habitual liar and fake champion of science, James Randi wielded Occam's razor like a switchblade when all the idiot did was spout the kind of ridicule that this paragraph is about.  I have read and heard loads of Randi's bilge and I never found an instance where he applied it.  When Randi had the chance to show his science ability in the sTARBABY scandal, when he couldn't fake it anymore, he had to admit he didn't have a clue about the statistical basis of the science of the matter in question and, as I pointed out, he did nothing after that to remedy the gaping hole of ignorance that rendered him a scientific and philosophical fool of a "skeptic.'  

He wasn't alone in that,  Paul Kurtz and several others alleged to be promoting science and reason proved they were as ignorant as he was, though the scientists who clearly did understand their scientific, mathematical and logical mistake didn't act as if it was at all important so they may as well not have known what they did.  The internal criticism of "skepticism" and materialism and, so, most atheism is far, far lower than the internal criticism of parapsychology or theology, for that matter.  The most exigent and knowledgeable critics of theological writings and teachings are other theologians.  In the lapses of science I've been going over, what's clear is that science has been following the "skeptics" in so far as their own internal criticism goes in far too many cases for science to retain its reputation.  Which is a real problem for us all.

Given the widespread adoption of the real ideology of "skepticism", atheism and materialism and scientism by scientists, maybe that's got a lot to do with those lapses in internal criticism.  Among those atheist-materialists who had and have an ability in the methods of science, those who are working scientists, it is incredible how much of the time and funding and teaching positions have been spent on those whose primary career focus has been on the support of, not scientific knowlege or even scientific practice but on supporting their religious faith in atheism and materialism.  Entire fields of scientific study have largely, sometimes it seems entire careers are entirely focused on supporting atheism against religion.  The late cosmologist Stephen Hawking certainly did some of that, especially in the later stages of his career, explicitly in The Grand Design.  He has been quoted as calling cosmology a religion for atheists.  Though there are certainly many successful cosmologists who would reject that, George Ellis, Georges Lamaitre, . . all the way back to Copernicus.

These days cognitive science and neurobiology seem to have a large faction within those fields who are focused on the central problem of materialism, the sciency seeming ideological basis of modern atheism.  The fields of Sociobiology and so-called Evolutionary Psychology through Hamiltonian so-called "altruism" seem to me to have been motivated by little else with a more explicitly Darwinist orientation.  Reading through Science Set Free again - a danger of quoting from a well written book is the temptation to reread the whole thing - Rupert Sheldrake said it very well.

The central doctrine of materialism is that matter is the only reality.  Therefore consciousness ought not to exist.  Materialism's biggest problem is that consciousness does exist.  You are conscious now.  The main opposing theory, dualism, accepts the reality of consciousness, but has no convincing explanation for its interaction with the body and brain.  Dualist-materliast arguments have gone on for centuries.  In this chapter I suggest how we can move forward from this strile opposition.

The section of the book I typed out, posted and commented on the other day is what comes right after this section in the book.  But his laying out of the problem of materialist-atheists' own consciousness, what they use to choose what to focus on and convince others of, says it well in a short time so I'm going to type the rest of that out.  I do that even if I'm rather skeptical of panpsychism, the solution he proposes on the basis of the opacity of proposed consciousness of non-living entities.  Such a "consciousness" is certainly unlikely to be defined or found scientifically (science can't even account for the experienced human consciousness that produces science, how can it be done in the consciousness of atoms or subatomic particles or molecules or larger "self-organized" objects.  Philosophy hasn't had any more success.  I think that's because philosophy will try to use the modes of thought surrounding material objects and causal interactions of those is required for that thinking.  In the same way science cannot deal with consciousness, modern philosophy hasn't exceeded the limits of that kind of causality even before the classical Greeks fixed that as the focus of philosophy.  Materialism and the model of scientific thinking has done nothing to further penetrate such things in the past four hundred fifty years.  I strongly suspect human experience, focused as it largely is on observing material objects, governs our language and modes of communication so maybe such things can't be successfully talked about in much detail.  Much of the literature of mystical experience will eventually talk about the inadequacies of language when dealing with the experience of consciousness directly.  If they're right then science and philosophy, which are conducted through words and logical rationality, won't ever really be able to crack consciousness so as to explain it.  Maybe it's due to me being raised a Catholic but I have no problem with admitting that much of experience, as Luke Timothy Johnson has said, is a mystery to be engaged and not a problem to be solved.  

Scientific materialism arose as a rejection of mechanistic dualism, which defined matter as unconscious and souls as immaterial,  as I discuss below.  One important motive for this rejection was the elimination of souls and God.  In short, materialists treated subjective experience as irrelevant;  dualists accepted the reality of experience but were unable to explain how minds affect brains.

That failure of the dualists was because all they could imagine was that an immaterial mind was limited to the type of causation that physical objects seem to exhibit.  The irony of that is their imagination and their desire to present things in the language of science or geometry required them to limit immaterial objects to the knowable properties of material objects when they could have said that immaterial entities could be expected to have properties that material objects don't exhibit.  If they didn't they'd be indistinguishable from physical objects.  That inability is, I think, not due to their personal inadequacy but is a product of the character of our own experience and the language we have which deals primarily with our observations of material objects and embodied living beings.  And, after all, consciousness of the kind they were trying to explain is known to exist only in living beings, not unliving objects and consciousness is capable of actions, choices that aren't exhibited in non-living objects.  But it was the power and repute of infant science that it had already made coming up with a seemingly scientific answer to the problem obligatory.  We haven't faced that problem when considering what's wrong with that approach to such obviously existing and significant entities as our own consciousness without which science would not exist, or at least an be known to exist as it exists in no known place except within some human minds.  I will add that the mateialist panpsychists have a very similar problem which I don't think they can overcome.

The materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote a book called Consciousness Explained (1991) in which he tried to explain away consciousness by arguing that subjective experience is illusory.  He was forced to this conclusion because he rejected dualism as a matter of principle:

"I adopt the apparently dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs.  It is not that I think I can give a knockdown proof that dualism, in all its forms is false or incoherent, but that, given the way that dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up [his italics, here underlined]"

The dogmatism of Dennett's rule is not merely apparent;  the rule is dogmatic.  By "giving up" and "wallowing in mystery,"  I supposed he means giving up science and reason and relapsing into religion and superstition.  Materialism "at all costs" demands the denial of the reality of our own minds and personal experiences - including those of Daniel Dennett himself, although by putting forward arguments he hopes will be persuasive, he seems to make an exception for himself and those who read his book.

The first thing to notice is that Dennett, himself, admits he can't come up with a disproof of dualism.   The second thing to consider is how much academic mileage Dennett gets out of what is essentially the emotional pique he feels in regard to "mystery."  That despite him admitting that the solution to the problem is sufficiently unknowable to keep him from doing what he claims to do, rejecting dualism in the process.  Just by getting into the issue he cannot avoid "wallowing in mystery."  What he really wants instead is for everyone to say religion and religious People of have intellectual cooties, it really is more in line with the coercion to conform on a 4th grade playground than intellectual honesty and rigor.  That is typical of the career in academic philosophy that Daniel Dennett has made for himself.  This is hardly his only instance of insisting on his point of view on the playground basis of name-calling and stigmatization.  He's hardly alone in that and it's hardly confined to academic philosophy.   His irrational and extreme extension of what Stephen Jay Gould called "Darwinian fundamentalism,"  extreme even for that was largely based on Dennett's accusation of his adversaries looking for "sky-hooks" (and most of those he applied that to by name were his fellow atheists)  and wasn't based in any intellectual content much more adult than that. 

As you can see, Rupert Sheldrake's critique does for Dennett's claims what Dennett should have thought of himself, considering he was writing a book to persuade others, the persuasive power of which should be short circuited by the argument made by Dennett, himself, if is readers exercised any kind of critical analysis to it.  But he's not alone in that among materialists of a sciency disposition because whenever they try to persuade someone of the non-existence or the insignificance or the asserted illusion of consciousness or minds or thinking they subject it, to use a phrase that Dennett rather stupidly asserted in his universal extension of Darwinism, to a "universal acid" that dissolves every such assertion of every kind.  As Sheldrake points out, they must demand, if not explicitly then tacitly, an exemption for their own claims and assertions.  That is something which comes up over and over again in the literature of materialism.  It is more destructive of the persuasive power of atheist-materialist ideology than the noted contradictions between the Commandment not to kill and the claims that God told the Children of Israel to wipe out entire nations of People, down to the children and animals.  Though, as can be seen in those who insist on the literal truth of all of the Bible and claim it, as an anthology, is internally consistent at all points, transforming it into a dogmatic monism instead of a product of many different viewpoints,  materialists are alwso always ready to cut themselves exceptions from the rigid uniformity of their rigid monistic ideology.  

If anything, that gets worse when it's brought from philosophy into science by the generally less philosophically apt sci-guys.

Francis Crick devoted decades of his life to trying to explain consciousness mechanistically.  He frankly admitted that the materialist theory was an "astounding hypothesis" that flew in the face of common sense. "'You,' your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."  Presumably Crick included himself in this description, although he must have felt that there was more to his argument than the automatic activity of nerve cells.  

One of the motives of materialists is to support an anti-religious worldview.  Francis Crick was a militant atheist, as is Daniel Dennett.  On the other hand, one of the traditional motives of dualists is to support the possibility of the soul's survival.  If the human soul is immaterial, it may exist after bodily death.

Scientific orthodoxy has not always been materialist.  The founders of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century were dualistic Christians.  They downgraded matter, making it totally inanimate and mechanical, and at the same time upgraded human minds, making them completely different from unconscious matter.  By creating an unbridgeable gulf between the two, they thought they were strengthening the argument for the human soul and immortality, as well as increasing the separation between humans and other animals.  

This mechanistic dualism is often called Cartesian dualism, after Descartes (Des Cartes).  It saw the human mind as essentially immaterial and disembodied, and bodes as machines made of unconscious matter.  In practice, most people take a dualist view for granted, as long as they are not called upon to defend it.  Almost everyone assumes that we have some degree of free will, and are responsible for our actions.  Our education al and legal systems are based on this belief.   And we experience ourselves as conscious beings, with some degree of free choice.  Even to discuss consciousness presupposes that we are conscious ourselves.  Nevertheless, since the 1920s, most leading scientist and philosophers in the English-speaking world have been materialists, in spite of the problems this doctrine creates.

The strongest argument in favor of materialism is the failure of dualism to explain how immaterial minds work and ow they interact with brains.  The strongest argument in favor of dualism is the implausibility and self-contradictory nature of materialism.  

The dualist-materilist dialect has lasted for centuries.  The soul-body or mind-brain problem has refused to go away.  But before we can move forward, we need to understand in more detail what materialists claim, since their belief system dominates institutional science and medicine, and everyone is influenced by it.

Rupert Sheldrake had personal experience with Francis Crick (and Richard Dawkins and a number of the other big names in atheist-materialism), unlike, I'd guess, most of us who read what he said about him.  In a part of the book he titles "The credibility crunch for the "scientific worldview" he said.

In 1963, when I was studying biochemistry at Cambridge University, I was invited to a series of private meetings with Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in Brenner's rooms in King's College, along with a few of my classmates.  Crick and Brenner had recently helped to "crack" the genetic code.  Both were ardent materialists and Crick was also a militant atheist.  They explained there were two major unsolved problems in biology; development and consciousness.   They had not been solved because the people who worked on them were not molecular biologists- or very bright.  Crick and Brenner were going to find the answers within ten years, or maybe twenty.  Brenner would take developmental biology, and Crick consciousness.  They invited us to join them.

Both tried their best.  Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on the development of a tiny worm, Caenorhabdytis elegans.  Crick corrected the manuscript of his final paper on the brain the day before he died in 2004.  At his funeral, his son Michael said that what made him tick was not the desire to be famous, wealthy or popular, but to "knock the final nail into the coffin of vitalism." (Vitalism is the theory that lifing organisms are truly alive, and not explicable in terms of physics and chemistry alone.)  

Crick and Brenner failed.  The problems of development and consciousness remain unsolved.  Many details have been discovered, dozens of genomes have been sequenced, and brain scans are ever more precise.  But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone.  

I'll note that Sheldrake has said that while he was at Cambridge as a student he, as well, was an atheist because he figured that was a part of being a scientist with a scientific world view.  

I would bet that, if pressed, many if not most of the college credentialed population would say that science had either figured that out or was on the verge of figuring it out when the two decades since Crick died has gotten no farther than he did.  

It is one of the remarkable things about science how much of what gets claimed as science, especially those areas of science which are the most dodgy and removed from the strict practice of scientific methods, is explicitly or, if not admitted then obviously motivated by a desire to prop-up and promote atheism through supporting materialism.  It really has been a major focuses of the one field of human culture which is supposed to, by the rules, NOT be led by ideological interest anymore than it's supposed to be led by religious belief.  It is especially remarkable in the context of late 20th century cosmology because a lot of it has been motivated by an unjustified suspicion that Georges Lemaitre snuck in support for a literal reading of Genesis into it by noticing the implications of Einstein's science that pointed to an absolute and finite beginning for the entire universe in what one of his atheist-fundamentalist detractors called The Big Bang.*    Atheist-materialist ideologues like Lawrence Krauss and Sean Carroll seem to be largely motivated by explaining that away, coming up with claims that can not be tested and almost certainly never will be testable with science and putting that directly into the formal literature of science and also into the informal and often credulity based "public understanding of science."  

As I've stated many times, I'm a political blogger, one who believes in and struggles for egalitarian democracy.   I first got into the atheist-religious brawl which I'd tried to avoid when I was on a lefty political blog and one of the village barroom style atheists on it made the declaration to the assembled lefties, all asserted to be true believers in freedom and rights and reason and science, that "science has proven free-will doesn't exist."  In my surprise and realization that he'd just thrown some of that "universal acid" on the entire political program of those assembled I think I pointed out if that was true we were all wasting our time promoting what such a discovery would destroy, the very foundations of democracy.  At the time I hadn't come to a nuanced enough political conception that made a distinction between "liberal democracy" and the only kind of democracy worth struggling for, egalitarian democracy or I would have pointed that out.  I recall realizing or at least sensing the difference between that kind of largely white, largely middle-class or affluent, college-credentialed style of "liberalism" and the liberalism of Martin Luther King jr and the struggle of largely Black, largely religion based People for equal rights and I probably realized which of the two had a track record of making a difference, a difference which, as can be seen in the declarations of materialists such as Crick, Dennett, Dawkins, etc. is meaningless because we're all just assemblages of molecules under the influence of material causation, going back to the start of modern materialist theory, nothing more than a product of how atoms coalesced and started whacking into each other by chance at the start of material existence (or in the preferred atheist steady-state, which for now doesn't seem to have been right) and nothing more.  I don't think I thought especially about Francis Crick on that occasion though, when I got around to going over it in the subsequent years of brawling, his covert campaign, which I did know about, to support Arthur Jensen's scientific racism and neo-eugenics among his scientific colleagues didn't surprise me.  Materialism and a credulous belief in natural selection makes that inevitable, especially when there is no countering religious morality to defeat it.  

But as soon as I read "WGG's" blog-barroom atheist declaration of scientific faith, I immediately started losing my faith that the differences between atheist lefties and the religious left could be bridged.  It was still a couple of years before practical political matters made me really understand how significant that chasm is through the experience of interacting with the then fashionable atheist materialists in the 00 years.  The entire and insane self-defeating infatuation of so much of the secular left with the brutal anti-democratic ideology of Marxism suddenly started to make complete sense to me starting about twenty years ago.  Science isn't the only thing that has been distorted by atheist materialism, it has transformed the secular left into a self-defeating and democracy destroying machine.  
And it is on behalf of their foundational ideology in atheist materialism, in the end.  And you don't have to be a Marxist to have it eat away everything on you.  

* It is doubtful that Lemaitre, as a well-educated Jesuit would have held with a literal reading of scripture, that is far more a Protestant practice than a Catholic one. Though I doubt most atheists know that.  When a 1950 encyclical from Pius XII came close to insisting on the literal truth of the Adam and Eve part of Genesis, it was a major embarrassment to many Catholics, including theologians.  

Note:  Unless I want to make fun of what is said, I don't post comments that make gratuitous digs about other people.  Leave that out and you might get posted.   There might be other reasons I don't post comments but that's sure to leave what you want to say in my blog's trash bin.

The Variable Uses And Abuses Of Calling Out Bigotry And Racism - An answer

IT REALLY IS TELLING how the abominable expression of antisemitism on college campuses in the aftermath of the atrocities of the Netanyahu regime, carried out by the Israeli military are getting such fevered and universal coverage EXACTLY IN THE WAY THAT THE FAR MORE WIDESPREAD AND FULLY PRESENT ANTI-BLACK RACISM ON CAMPUS NEVER HAS GOTTEN.   Almost as telling, though it's been talked about a bit is the obsession with the American media about the small percentage of college aged kids (and non-student agitators) disrupting campuses, especially on the Ivy level INSTEAD OF CONCENTRATING ON THE ATROCITIES HAPPENING IN GAZA.  The media did the same thing during the widespread student protests against the war in Vietnam which are the obvious models for today's would-be student radicals.   The romanticization of that previous, failed,  counter-productive debacle which didn't end the war, though it brought Nixon to power, is a criminal use of free press privileges.

And even more telling about the American "free press," the media, the laughably self-congratulating and glorified business of "journalism" has made that antisemitism the fault of antisemitism rejecting Democrats and, especially, Joe Biden while not attributing it to a man who  regularly spouts the old chestnuts and lines of the crudest antisemitism, Donald Trump and his racist, not infrequently antisemitic Republican-fascist part.  The corporate media's motives in this could hardly be more transparent than they were in 1968 when they actively but tacitly supported the election of Nixon.

The stupidity of the reaction against the crimes against humanity of the Israeli government and military which risks putting the tool of Netanyahu (and, so, I'd argue Putin and, ironically the Iranian government) Trump back in power doesn't shock me, now.  Americans, whose "educations" has long been in the hands of the mass media aren't equipped to even begin to grasp the reality of the situation.   While I'd have to do something I'd be loathe to repeat, re-reading the writing and words of the big-name student "radicals" of my youth to find out,  I have the feeling that fifty-years on in the dumbing of America by the media that today's media presented student "radicals" sound atl least if not as stupid as my generation's student radical.  And I was one of those radical who has become, if anything, far more radical than I was then.   

I would favor giving the Israeli government an ultimatum, either stop the war crimes and genocides and, I have every confidence this might turn into, another land-grab in Gaza or they are cut off.   I have no patience for the argument that the Israeli population wants to dump Netanyahu and his corrupt government because they've had literally decades of supporting that fascist at this point as they supported his fascistic godfather, Menachem Begin.   The fact is that for the last half century of Israel's existence, it has been mostly in the hands of those who have more than a tendency towards fascism,  as I've pointed out here for many years now,  when, at the start of the Israeli government, Begin was touring the United States looking for funding and support for his faction,  a group of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals warned in the New York Times that Begin and his gang were fascists with a record of terrorist violence and murder.   That same gang in the form of the Likud party* has, in fact, dominated Israel for most of its existence, now.  

But it can be pointed out that the factions governing Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere are hardly any better,  Hamas committed a crime against humanity in its attack on Israel which gave Netanyahu his excuse for his far larger crimes against Palestinians in Gaza and humanitarian workers carried out by the wrongly idolized Israeli military.   That Hamas certainly did that at the urging of the Iranian fascist-theocrats and with training widely reported coming from the big boss of current fascism, Vladimir Putin certainly does nothing to raise the moral status of the Hamas government.  There is, however, a difference between its relationship to the population they dictate to and that of Israel to the Netanyahu government, they have regular elections in Israel and Hamas followed that tragic pattern in so much of the third word where there's one free election then not another after that.  It's the same pattern that Putin retains power through, as well as the Iranian theocratic-fascists.   There is a lot harder case to make that the Netanyahu government lacks legitimacy through the support of the majority in Israel, though at this point it's quite possible he is merely kept in place through the corrupting inertia of political process.   I think another condition of continued aid from the U.S. is that there be an immediate referendum on the fascists in Israel, that aid being conditioned on them not being returned to power.  If the Israeli population puts it back in out of anger at that condition, that's their choice but it should not govern the choice of the American People or our government.  

Back when the odious antisemite and otherwise bigot Louis Farrakhan was much in the news, back in the 90s, it became the practice in the American media to demand that any Black Person being interviewed be required to condemn him, even those who had absolutely no connection with or previous association with him or the Nation of Islam.   Even those in show biz and the entertainment industry, having nothing to do with politics or religion.   That became so ubiquitous that I remember the poet Gwendolyn Brooks pointed out that she'd been the target of that phenomenon in one of her talks about her work. 

I never remember any similar requirement that members of other groups be required to automatically condemn the far more often expressed anti-Black racism, anti-Latino hatred, or other far more widespread and demonstrably murderously   consequential tidal-waves of such ethnic and racial hatred in the United States.   I don't remember anyone in the same business being required to condemn Andrew Dice Clay or Jackie Mason or John Wayne or even David Duke by those in the media.   I don't even remember the racists and bigots in the media such as Lou Dobbs being the focus of such an on-demand degradation ritual.   

I'm not complaining about the media calling out antisemitism when the topic or person being interviewed has some relationship to it or to a legitimately identified antisemitism - there is certainly more than enough blatant antisemitism and enough blatant antisemites  without unjustly or dishonestly assigning that lable where they aren't in evidence.  I'm pointing out the dishonest political uses to which that particularly potent political label by the corporate media, the social-disease of social-media (ironically, the primary spreader of such diseased thinking today) and not a few would-be more legitimate authorities. 

I've pointed out that distinguishing between different groups of targeted people to put a variable value on their lives and bodies is exactly how Nazis thought,  declaring that I refused to think like a Nazi does, to behave like Nazis did.  That isn't restricted to Nazis, it's how white supremacists or any other species of bigots think and act.   That is, though, demonstrably, how the American media behaves in its actions and words.   I think it does that because there is nothing to prevent them from doing it, things such as anti-hate talk laws in other countries.  While those might not work perfectly, especially in this age of the social-disease of "social" media, not having them is a certain guarantee that hate talk will flourish and double-standards of valuation among different human groups and different human beings will become the standard default of thinking, talking and action.   

It has long been astonishing to me when the members of any group targeted for bigotry takes up bigotry instead of realizing they are on the same side as those who are targeted.  That used to be true of Irish Catholics in the United States, it isn't anymore, not much.   I think that the less that a formerly targeted group experiences that kind of bigotry, the less likely they are to allow that experience to impinge on their habits of thoughts and what's left of their moral discernment and sense of obligation.   I think there are far too few People who know the experience of real, dangerous discrimination in the media, certainly too few of those in charge of the media, which I think accounts for all of the above.   I don't know if being a gay man was what saved me from that kind of hypocrisy, maybe it did, it's clear that among gay men who can pass that's no kind of a reliable inoculation against it.  Lindsay Graham, Andrew Sullivan, those fascist and neo-Nazi gay boys that Trump has to dinner, getting a pass from the media and political punditry.  

* In line with my critique of 18th century, libertarian style "liberalism" it should be pointed out that Likud organized by a number of smaller fascistic parties styled itself as an expression of "liberalism,"  the National Liberal Movement.   No liberalism which rejects equality will avoid devolving into fascism,  I suspect.  

this particular denial is the strangest thing that has happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy - A response

RUPERT SHELDRAKE, unlike many of his critics, is a working scientist who does some of the most ingeniously inexpensive and simple experiments that rigorously fulfill the requirements of scientific methods and some of his experiments actually do get that rare replication that seems to have become a non-requirement in late stage science.   He is regularly published going into his ninth decade, he continues to do groundwork in asking questions and gathering evidence from the public.  Just last week he made such an appeal to the public for information in regard to the possibility of inherited traits in animals.    He has been a fellow at Cambridge University, until 2010 he as a director of a project at Cambridge University, he was a research fellow of the Royal Society,   He did groundbreaking research in biology and agricultural science in India and Malaya, some of his work there has probably been more important in the lives of more People than that done by just about any of his critics, some of his basic work in studying auxin and related topics is among the most important science of the 20th century.  So there's no doubt about it, he has every right to be considered a scientist.  That he is unafraid to do what I said the "skeptics" obviously don't,  trust scientific methods to discern the truth even when they show things that are controversial is obvious.  

Unlike most of his critics, as well, Rupert Sheldrake has done serious graduate work and continuing reading and study of philosophy.  If there's one thing that is remarkable about those educated in science, it is how many of them are less than novices in that area of thought.  That used to not be a rarity among scientists, especially those from Europe and Britain but it has been among scientists, especially in the English speaking People for quite some time, now.  I think it's one of the reasons that he thinks and writes with a clarity and consistency that is unusual.  He clearly does what even some of his critics renowned for their writing ability, such as Richard Dawkins, fails to do, he is a critic of his own ideas as well as theirs.  Which is one of the reasons that I have every confidence that Dawkins' evolutionary psychology and its associated ideas will go onto that scrap-heap of discarded science where you can find Freudianism and Behaviorism, both credentialed science of their time and, Lord help us, still having rump communities that believe in them.  Some of them allowed to keep shop as practitioners.  

It's planting season and I don't have the time to write what I'd like to have so I'm going to type out some more from Rupert Sheldrake's book Science Set Free.  Right before a section titled Minds that deny their own reality, he says:

The strongest argument in favor of materialism is the failure of dualism to explain how immaterial minds work and how they interact with brains.  Te strongest argument in favor of dualism is the implausibility and self-contradictory nature of materialism.  

The dualist-materialist dialect has lasted for centuries.  The soul-body or mind-brain problem has refused to go away.  But before we can move forward, we need to understand in more detail what materialists cliam, since their belief system dominates institutional science and medicine, and every one is influenced by it.

I have pointed out that an immaterial mind - one which is not composed matter of or the consequence of material causation, could be expected to have qualities and abilities that aren't covered by the properties of matter and material causation.  An immaterial mind could not be subjected to scientific discovery because of that, science is structured only to discover things about things that exist within the properties of matter and material causation.  It is irrational to think that science could do more than notice discrepancies between physical systems and such minds, they couldn't even go far in explaining much about those discrepancies.  Materialists, rigidly holding with a rigidly monistic ideology that insists everything that exists must be restricted to the properties of material existence and the human made "laws of nature," insist that their promise that all will be explained even as they have failed to explain it for centuries, now.  Someone who believes minds surpass the qualities and limits of such a conception of matter and existence should realize that science can't handle the idea of such a mind, though they have certainly been trying to answer the question of how minds influence or control brains or our bodies in the same way instead of admitting that their idea can never have a scientific explanation.  They shouldn't feel bad about that because the materialists have never fulfilled that major promissory note they keep issuing, generation after generation, century after century, I'd argue for millennia, now, only they've structured things so their creditors are suckered into never calling for payment.  

Going on to his discussion of the materialists' irrational and decadent declarations that minds are, to one extent or other, illusory, he says.

Most neuroscientists do not spend much time thinking about the logical problems that materialist beliefs entail.  They just get on with the job of trying to understand how brains work,  in the faith that more hard facts will eventually provide answers.  They leave professional philosophers to defend the materialist or physicalist faith.

Physicalism means much the same as materialism, but rather tan asserting that all reality is material, it asserts that it is physical, explicable in terms of physics, and therefore including energy and fields as well as matter.  In practice, this is what materialists believe too.  In the following discussion I use the more familiar word "materialism" to mean "materialism or physicalism."

I'd add to that that recently some materialists have used the dodge of declaring themselves "naturalists" (which previously meant nudists, as I recall) which is just a ruse as it means pretty much the same thing as the other labels.  I interpret that to mean that even some of the slightly more philosophically astute materialists feel if not realize that there are deep problems with their ideology but they don't want to admit that or give it up.  Covering up their naked materialism, sort of.

Among materialist philosophers there are several schools of thought.  The most extreme position is called "eliminative materialism."  The philosopher Paul Curchland, for example, claims that there is nothing more to the mind than what occurs in the brain.  Those who believe in the existence of thoughts, beliefs, desires, motives and other mental states are victims of "folk psychology," an unscientific attitude that will in due course be replaced by explanations in terms of the activities of nerves.  Folk psychology is a kind of superstition, like belief in demons, and it will be left behind by the onward march of scientific understanding.  Consciousness is just an "aspect" of the activity of the brain.   Thoughts or sensations are just another way of talking about activity in particular regions of the cerebral cortex;  they are the same things talked about in different ways.  

Of course such eliminative materialists exempt their language about their own unevidence talk about these things from the rigid model they have created when, by their own claims, what they believe about all of it, from their academically snobbish and insulting labels for the ideas of those who disagree with him to their declared faith in the not yet reached triumph of science, to the very science they ask us to put our faith into, must all fall within the same countentless, purposeless chemical and material causation which cannot be anything but a huge crap shot at a hugely improbable picture of what is really true.  Such academic scribbleage and babblage gives away its own disbelief in that by even making the attempt to convince other People that their favorite line of belief is what they should believe because such a materialist faith would hold that none of it is meaningful, including their desire to be believed.  It cannot have more legitimacy than any other aspect of "folk psychology" only they insist that while most of humanity swims in that self-deceiving ignorance, they and their allies, alone, can, somehow, escape from it.  Many of those who hold university professorships and chairs in departments of philosophy aren't especially rigorous in their own criticism of their own ideas, especially those who hanker after the repute and status that is given to scientists.  That last thing is ubiquitous among those with college credentials in the humanities, in my experience.  It reached absurd lengths even among some of the more astute composers of the 19th and 20th centuries who should have known better.  

I think any university or college or school which hires and pays someone who denies the reality of or significance of consciousness, teaching students that what the university is in the business of providing them is, in effect, meaningless, is guilty of consumer fraud.  They, despite their desire to appear properly sciency, are promoting the ultimate act of intellectual decadence.  There's a lot of that in this late state of eutrophic modernism.  That is what materialism can be counted on to produce because it is, ultimately, a self-refuting and undermining ideology.  

Sheldrake continues:

Other materialists are "epiphenomenalists": they accept rather tahn deny the existence of consciousness, but see it as a functionless by-product of the activity of the brain, an "epipenomenon," like a shadow.  T. H. Huxley was n early advocate of this point of view, and in 1874 he famously compared consciousness to "the steam whistle that accompanies the work of a locomotive engine. . . without influence upon its machinery."  He concluded, "We are conscious automatons."  People might just as well be zombies, with no subjective experience, because all their behavior is a result of brain activity alone.  Conscious experience does nothing and makes no difference to the physical world.

Again, you have to wonder why someone who believes that would not only make an attempt to discern anything, never mind spend a lifetime in science, but to issue polemical statements, declarations, books, to convince other such minds of anything because, in the end, none of it makes any difference to anything and has an absurdly remote possibility of coming to an accurate description of reality.  Everything they come up with and believe would have as much of a chance as any other of finding reality on the basis of chemicals and physical structures which were a product of random chance in their particular situation.  You have to wonder how such a person accounts for the possibility that any two such organisms would contain the physical basis of that they could agree on anything.  How any two brains could make precisely the same structure to give rise to the same epiphenomenon - how brains would know how to do that is a question I've been posing, off and on, to materialists for a number of years now and I have never had any response that wasn't an expression of atheist materialist faith lacking any real explanation of how it is supposed to work.  

A recent form of materialism is "cognitive psychology," which dominated academic psychology in the English-speaking world in the late twentieth century.  It treats the brain as a computer and mental activity as information processing.  Subjective experiences, like seeing green, or feeling pain, or enjoying music, are computational processes inside the brain which are themselves unconscious.  

I've discussed that before, how computers are a deliberate creation made to mimic BY ANALOGY modeling of human mind, of humans thought, they have a relationship to minds as an anatomical statue made of sculptures of human organs, bones and other structures have to human bodies. To claim that human bodies function like anatomical models is about as astute as claiming that computers can serve as a means of understanding human minds.  Circular reasoning and inapt analogies flourish when science and philosophy are governed by materialists ideology.

Some philosphers, like John Searle, think that minds can emerge from matter by analogy with the way that physical properties can emerge at different levels of complexity, like the wetness of water emerging from the interactions of large numbers of water molecules.  In nature, there are indeed many different levels of organization (Figure 1.1)*, each of which has new properties that are not present in their parts alone.  Atoms have properties over and above nuclear particles and electrons.  Molecules have properties over and above atoms; the molecules of water, H2O, are fundamentally different from uncombined hydrogen and oxygen atoms.  Then the wetness of liquid water is not explained by water molecules in isolation, but through their organization together in liquid water.  New physical properties "emerge" at every level.  In the same way, consciousness is an emergent physical property of brains.  It is different from other physical processes, but is is physical nonetheless.  Many non-materialists would agree with Searle that consciousness is in some sense "emergent" but would argue that while mind and conscious agency originate in physical nature, they are qualitatively different from purely material or physical being.

Apart from the extremely fuzzy and, it seems to me, diffuse idea that so many different dissimilarities there are between larger physical entities and the properties of their component physical entities on lower levels of organization can be reified into the same kind of thing, this idea doesn't seem to explain much about minds.  Does water have wetness except as a product of perception, an action of minds?  And it would depend on what you define "wetness" as being, which is another action of minds.  Often a scientific definition of some phenomenon is created to limit what aspects of it will be under scientific discussion but I'd be surprised if science can come up with a definition of something like "wetness" or the perception of a color that will really encompass everything that's meant by the word when we use it.  I would question how anyone could really determine that all of the various such experiences which are called "physical properties" are connected except as they are experienced by living beings' minds.  Given the recent biology of such scientists as James Shapiro and Denis Noble, I think it makes at least as much and more sense to think that bodies are epiphenomena of minds.  

This last one was one of the things that those who tried to answer me with on those questions of how brains could make the physical structure(s) to give rise to an idea could be physically present in that brain, structures that would be entirely novel to that brain, structures that would need to be extremely precise and complex enough to give rise to a new idea in any particular brain, before the materialists' model of "brain only" minds would have any possibility of even knowing the brain needed to make a new structure - not to mention the problem of how it would know how to make that structure in that case.  Only the answer "natural selection" was no answer at all.

Finally, some materialists hope that evolution can provide an answer.  They propose that consciousness emerged as a result of natural selection through mindless processes from unconscious matter.  Because minds evolved, they must have been favored by natural selection and hence they must actually do something;  they must make a difference.  Many non-materialists would agree.  But materialists want to have ti both ways; emergent consciousness must do something if it has evolved as an evolutionary adaptation favored by natural selection;  but it cannot do anything if it is just an epiphenomeon of brain activity, or another way of talking about brain mechanisms.  In 2011, the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey tried to overcome this problem by suggesting that consciousness evolved because it helps humans survive and reproduce by making us fee "special and transcendent."  But as a materialist Humphrey does not agree that our minds have any agency;  that is to say, they cannot affect our actions.  Instead our consciousness is illusory;  he describes it as "a magical mystery show that we stage for ourselves inside our own heads."  But to say that consciousness is an illusion does not explain consciousness;  it presupposes it.  Illusion is a mode of consciousness.  

My guess would be that the psychologist Nichols Humphrey would take enormous offense of some skeptic of psychology and materialism such as myself would brush off his entire professional and academic work in the very terms that it must, itself, brush off every product of every conscious mind, only I'd do it on the basis of the central and basic logical disconnect that is baked into the entire field of academic dismissal of minds and consciousness in favor of atheist-materialist ideology, that it's clear that those academics pushing it don't really believe it when it comes to their own minds, their own consciousness and what they choose to believe and insist that others believe.    A point Sheldrake made earlier in the chapter about the published declarations dismissing consciousness by the pudding-headed Daniel Dennett.  I call him "pudding-headed,"  Rupert Sheldrake has much better manners than I do.   It's entirely legitimate to critique the behavior of the eliminative materalists of academia because everything about their actions proves they don't really believe it when it comes to them and their own meaningless burps and noises coming from those random molecular actions in their brains.   I'd bet if someone cribbed them for sale they'd assert in court that they were more than meaningless and not really attributable to their creativity. 

If all of these theories sound unconvincing, that is because they are.  They do not even convince other materialists, which is why there are so many rival theories.  Searle has described the debate over the past fifty years as follows:  

"A philosopher advances a materialist theory of the mind . . . He encounters difficulties . . . Criticisms of the materialist theory usually take a more or less technical form, but, in fact, underlying the technical objections is a much deeper objection; the theory in question has left out some essential features of the mind. . . and this leads to ever more frenzied attempts to stick with the materialist thesis.

The philosopher Galen Strawson, himself a materialist, is amazed by the willingness of so many of his fellow philosophers to deny the reality of their own experience;
 
"I think we should feel very sober, and a little afraid at the power of human credulity, the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith.  For this particular denial is the strangest thing that has happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy."  

I am unaware of any materialist whose primary motivation is anything but their attachment to atheism, though some may have been led to atheism through a naive conception of materialism, the two seem to be linked pretty firmly in most minds that hold those ideologies.  Though  that would be those who consider the matter at any higher level of thought.  Materialism can be held even by non-atheists on the basis of conformity to the ambient requisite thoughts of secular culture, as a default, respectable, reputable and profitable mode of going along with that to get along.  I don't think most atheists or materialists really think about it very deeply at all, no more than those who maintain a naive, primitive, even quite mistaken notion of Darwinism, natural selection or, as many even college-credentialed folks abbreviate that "evolution."   I don't think most materialists, atheists or true-believes in scientism hold those on a particularly deep or sound basis, I think most of it is a product of wanting to fit in with the kind of People taken to have higher status in a secular, materialist, atheist, scientistic milieu.  I doubt most of the media figures, including some of those "public scientists" I ridiculed to such objection the other day are especially intellectually engaged with their own adopted ideology.  As I mentioned, even those as fully engaged as the eliminative materialists don't engage with the logical consequences of their own claims for the intellectual legitimacy of those very claims.   Materialism is one of the most philosophically inastute conceptions ever held and it is ubiquitous in our decadent stage of materialism as vulgar materialism has almost always ruled in those who gain power.  

Francis Crick admitted that the "astonishing hypothesis" was not proved.  he conceded that a dualist view might become more plausible.  But he added.

"There is always a third possibility;  that the facts support a new alternative way of looking at the mind-brain problem that is significantly different from the rather crude materialistic view that many neuroscientists hold today and also from the religious point of view.  Only time and much further scientific work, will  enable us to decide."

Yeah, there could be a third possibility or it could be that minds are non-material and, so, will never be able to be directly discerned by analogies to the properties of material causation.  It may be just a hard fact that we, in our thinking which is so tied to the experience and analysis of material objects and experiences, will never be able to articulate more than a vague sense of minds and consciousness.  It could be similar to the speculation by A. S. Eddington that there are laws of nature which our minds are not capable of discerning and will never know because of that.  If other species on some other planet, somewhere, may be able to conceive of those, it would be interesting to think about how we'd deal with that.  I'd imagine that materialist scientists on Earth would deny that those properties of matter which their minds could not comprehend could possibly exist.  But that's just speculative imagining on my part.  Maybe they'd learn the kind of humility and acceptance they figure non-sci-guys should practice in regard to their incomprehensible claims.

Before going on in the next section to discuss the latest fashion (or desperate resort) in panpsychism, the idea that matter has consciousness as an intrinsic property and our minds emerge out of that subatomic, atomic . . . consciousness, Rupert Sheldrake says, "There is indeed a third way."  

How panpsychism isn't just another from of the very fuzzy and vague notion of emergentism, I'd need to have explained to me.

I would point out to the panpsychists that there is religious precedent for their materialistic last resort, in fact it's in Scripture.  Jesus told the religious high and mighty of his day that God could raise up children of Abraham from rocks (Matthew 3:9} and, during his dramatic entry into Jerusalem that if the crowds didn't proclaim him the stones would do it (Luke 19:40).  Not to mention the scriptures tell us we are made of Earth (Genesis 2:7). The dualism of matter and spirit in some of Christian philosophy and theology was an artifact of Greek pagan philosophy, not the Hebrew tradition, certainly not as that was extended so drastically through the Gospel of Jesus and the theological explanations of the Glorified Jesus after his death by Paul and the Catholic Epistles.  The mind-body dilemma that has given rise to the ultimate decadence of brain sci-guys and their philosopher groupies in consciously denying the existence of significance of consciousness may well be attributable to pagan proto-science, perhaps as filtered through atheist materialism, of the classical period atomists (as popularized by a deeply flawed book by Stephen Greenblatt that was all the rage a while back) and was never much more than a product of that ideological assertion irrationally retained in the ideological basis of science.  

I am extremely skeptical of panpsychism, for a start the idea that any molecular, atomic, subatomic, "consciousness" any consciousness of rocks or crystals or other non-living entities could ever be conceived of in a way that connected them to the consciousness that we experience is as fraught with problems as the other materialist's ways of dealing with consciousness.  And it has the same problem as my rejection of ethology, the supposed science of animal behavior) as anything but lore passed off in the guise of science - and with a particularly nasty association with Darwinist eugenics.  The hard fact is that we have no way to consult even animals who are living as to what their experience of consciousness is, what any explanation of their own behavior is, we can't even know if human reports of that are accurate or honest.  How are we supposed to verify that for rocks and atoms?  How are we to even define what that would be?   I think it's just the latest or perhaps last straw of old-line materialism among those who have thought honestly enough about all of those other schemes of it to realize they are bunk but not being willing to admit that minds, consciousness, must well surpass the limits of material causation, to give that property to atoms does nothing to change that, to give it to subatomic particles does no more to remedy that problem.

I will say that there are ways to scientifically study some animal behavior as Rupert Sheldrake rather ingeniously does in his study of animal behavior to study such phenomena as animals who seem to know when their human companions are going to come home, but even that has its limits because no animal can tell us that's what they're doing and what motivates them to do it.  Sheldrake is one of the great living shoe-string practitioners of basic science research.  He said he learned a lot about how to do that kind of science among the scientists in India where there wasn't money to do fancier science.  His books are some of my favorite science reading as his talks, lectures, dialogues and conversations are in online listening.  His work is an example of the possibilities of using scientific method and intellectual searching  when it's freed of ideological straight-jacketing and the requirements to conform to the dominant materialist-atheist-scientistic hegemony in decaying modernism.

*  I don't have the book with me as I'm editing this, but I think it was an image that looked like this one I found online diagramming such a hierarchy.