Thursday, January 02, 2020
Egnor misses part of the point
Egnor discusses the failures of mind-less science:
Panpsychists and cosmopsychists like Goff are right about this: Consciousness of some sort permeates the universe and is at the core of our humanity. Materialism is a kind of madness — it is the denial of the most undeniable thing about reality. But the universe itself is not conscious, nor are inanimate objects. Whether plants are conscious in any sense is doubtful, I think, but it is at least debatable. Animals are obviously conscious, as are we. What cosmopsychists like Goff see correctly is that fundamental reality is more like a Mind than it is like mindless matter. Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas, and countless other philosophers have made the same point.No major argument there, just one quibble. I don't think you can leave plants out of the mind circle; they use sensory inputs and memory to make decisions. The only externally observable evidence of awareness is REM sleep, so complex animals like vertebrates and cephalopods are the only provable mind-owners. This doesn't exclude other living things.
Modern materialism, from which our denial of consciousness springs, was formulated by Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and his immediate predecessors in the early modern era. They denied the reality of formal and final causes in nature. They argued that science could only deal with material and efficient causes — stuff hitting stuff, basically. This is a diminished view of nature, as quantum mechanics has made painfully obvious. It is also entirely unnecessary. Scientists who wish to focus their research on material and efficient causes are free to do so. They can do good (if not profound) science with these impoverished tools.Here Egnor misses the real problem with recent science. Engineering and some parts of biology are properly and simply materialistic. In all the theory-based parts of Big Science, especially physics, materialism is gone. Gaia has replaced God. Everything is driven by Gaia, an intelligent goddess who uses the tiny micropercent of CO2 to create purposeful and complex effects. This is not materialism, it's fallacious spiritualism. It's witchcraft or homeopathy, attributing all action to a tiny fractional SINFUL IMPURITY with massive spiritual power.
Labels: defensible spaces, Leth, Smarty-plants
¶ 5:38 AM
