Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Here's a great passage from Frank Knight , brought to my attention by the Murphmeister himself: "The dictatorship of the [Communist] Party once established, and given a monopoly of propaganda, the problem of controlling the proliferation of romantic myths, of unifying and stabilizing and concentrating on one system at a time should be simple in the extreme. One of the greatest of modern scientific developments is waiting to serve the regime in this regard and save the world from turmoil. I refer, of course, to psychology in its applied aspect. In this connection we may thrill with patriotism as well as hope. No other country has approached our own in the succession of peerless psychologists we have given to the world. To name but a few: P.T. Barnum; Jay Gould; Mrs. Mary B.G. Eddy; Mrs. Aimee S. McPherson (notice the due representation of both sexes); Billy Sunday; Goat-gland Doc Brinkley; and coming to our own home town, our own dear Big Bill Thompson, Balaban, and Katz, an...

Let's say "anti-materialists" point to EPR effects  to try to demonstrate that materialism is an incomplete description of reality: E, P, and R devised their thought experiment precisely to show that the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is unsatisfactory, because it implies that "spooky action at a distance" exists, contradicting materialism (as it was then formulated). But when experiments seem to show that there is "spooky action at a distance," then materialists simply say, "OK, well then that is part of material reality as well." In other words, materialism is a completely non-falsifiable thesis, since: 1) To defease non-materialist ideas, materialists say, "Well, show me how (God / angels / spirits / the soul / etc. ) can show up in an empirical, measurable way." (We won't go into the matter of whether that is a good test for truth or not: let's just accept the materialists's challenge for argum...

When TV show that introduces some spooky element wants to portray a character as "rational," the character says something like, "You know ghosts don't exist." Why is dogmatically asserting this supposed to be "rational"? There is all sorts of testimony to the existence of ghosts, across many different cultures in radically different times and places. There is nothing wrong with being skeptical of such testimony: "Let's see the proof!" is a fine attitude. But that is a very different attitude from, "It is already known that no such proof is possible." First of all, what about "can't prove a(n empirical) negative"?  "Empirical" because we can, I think, "prove" that, say, perpetual motion machines don't exist, since we can show they are impossible.  But no one has shown ghosts are impossible: how could they, when it is not even clear what, precisely, ghosts are supposed to be? If they a...

One of David Wootton's contentions in The Invention of Science is that the Scientific Revolution is the most important even in human history since the Neolithic Revolution . So it is, per Wootton, more important than, for instance, the Axial Age , the discovery of monotheism, or the rise of Christianity. I suspect that if Wootton were challenged on this thesis, he would point to the material transformation of the human world occurring in the wake of the Scientific Revolution. But why should that be decisive? "Importance" is itself not a material concept, and thus Wootton certainly cannot indicate material reasons for giving material transformations priority over spiritual ones.

of massive frustration. Modern forms of superstition, such as materialism and scientism, are apparently completely immune to reason. And the people who embrace the myths put forward in establishing these superstitions hold to them with a tenacity that exceeds that of any Young Earth Creationist. Consider: The Ancient Greeks thought epilepsy involved possession by a spirit. Today, we "know" that epilepsy occurs when physiological processes X, Y, and Z take place. So this contradicts the Greek view, correct? It is almost unbelievable that people think that with such assurance, since there is absolutely no logic supporting the conviction. What?! Don't these views posit mutually exclusive explanations for the same thing? Of course they do not. It is a symptom of the complete confusion people have been put into by the rise of scientism and positivism that anyone even suspects that they do. Let us first imagine what an ancient Greek thought, and then see if we c...

Every time I hear someone suggest the above, it turns out that they actually have a materialist metaphysics. But they don't have any way of defending it, so what they really want to do is to declare out of bounds all discussion of metaphysics, and just assume materialism.

As Ed Feser notes , is that it cannot explain moral obligation. Perhaps we can get a perfectly satisfactory materialist, evolutionary explanation of the cause of every one of our moral beliefs. ("We think incest is wrong due to the fact incestuous breeding weakens the gene pool," "We believe stealing is wrong because groups that don't respect property rights failed to prosper," and so on.) What we would now have is not a theory of moral obligation, but a theory of why moral obligation is an illusion . To illustrate: let us say I convince my son of the truth of "evolutionary morality," and he responds, "Great, that's all it is? I thought there was something wrong with stealing, but now I see that thinking that is a kind of trick that our genes have played on us. Well, personally, I don't give a hoot about the survival of the group, and I'm taking up stealing!" It should be pretty obvious that the believer in such a materia...

There is a very odd way of "dismissing" experiences that points to neurological evidence, and says, "See, it is really just a change in brain state!" We see this in "scientific" accounts that attempt to explain away, say, love: "We have detected that people in love are really just experiencing altered neurological states!" But how about the neurologist who made this finding? Wouldn't we detect that his brain state had altered upon seeing this evidence? So why aren't his findings dismissed in the exact same way? "He thought he had just performed an important experiment, but really he was just experiencing an altered brain state." Oh, you respond, others can duplicate his experiment? Well, altered brain states for them, too. I ran across an amusing example of this recently, where the author states: It is now believed that instead of the brain becoming more inactive during the final moments of life, brain activity actu...

"By materialization of the external world we mean the misappre­hension that the structure of the external world as it is constituted in the system of mathematized physics is the ontologically real structure of the world. "The tendency of mistaking the laws of mechanics for the structure of the world makes itself felt strongly even by the middle of the seventeenth century under the influence of Galileo’s discoveries and even more so under the influence of Cartesian physics... "To a spiri­tually feeble and confused generation, this event transformed the universe into a huge machinery of dead matter, running its course by the inexorable laws of Newton’s mechanics." -- Eric Voegelin

Consider these quotes : In his new book Free Will , Sam Harris says, "This [neuroscientific] understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet." Jerry Coyne asserts in a USAToday column: "The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we’re characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we’re puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics." At least these fellows understand the logical implication of reductionist materialism: if reductionist materialism is true, consciousness is both useless and inexplicable. "Evolving consciousness" certainly cannot aid a "biochemical puppet" in any way whatsoever: his consciousness will have no influence whatsoever on what his body actually does, and so cannot possibly give him an evolutionary edge. As you can see from these quotes, this is no straw man I have invented: those are the words of two of the very leading lights of...

if he can't do anything? Let's say a manufacturer's rep tells you his company has developed an automobile that it entirely self-operated: in fact, there is not even any mechanism by which a human could intervene in the car's operations. But when he shows you the vehicle, there is someone sitting in the "driver's" seat. "What's he there for?" "Well, he could prove useful." "How is that?" "In case something goes wrong." "But you told me the car is a causally closed system: there is no way for something from outside the car itself to guide its operations." "That's right." "So how could the driver be useful?" "You know, he can reflect on what is going on. Be aware of the environment. Spot dangers." "So then he could take control of the car, based on the trouble he spots?" "Oh, no, impossible. The vehicle runs completely automatically....

non-reductionist materialism tends to wind up being not materialism : The question is whether they can reject reductionism consistent with maintaining a position that can in any interesting sense be called “naturalistic.” In particular, non-reductionistic versions of materialism have a tendency to collapse into either property dualism -- the sort of view defended by Chalmers -- or a quasi-Aristotelian commitment to formal and final causes -- which (as I noted in my own review of Nagel) is essentially what Nagel is defending. So, if one rejects both Chalmers’ and Nagel’s views (as, of course, Dupré does) it is no good to note that most naturalists are no longer reductionists, and leave it at that. One needs to show that this anti-reductionism doesn’t effectively put these naturalists precisely into either Chalmers’ camp or Nagel’s; and Dupré does nothing to show this. Note: This is Feser's response to John Dupré's complaint that Nagel shouldn't be addressing reducti...

I don't in the least mind intelligent objections to my posts on this blog: after all, I continually post comments from many readers who object to this or that view of mine. However, I have found that when I post something on the topic of materialism, I am flooded with comments that are so dumbfounding to me that I am not sure how to rationally continue to converse with the commenter. To cite just one example: faced with the challenge to the materialist view of explaining what makes vastly different physical implementations of a "single" algorithm "the same" other than the non-physical idea of the algorithm, one commenter claimed that it was that all such implementations produced the same neural patterns in our brains. And the same thing is true of all of our categorizations: for example, all the furry little critters we call "squirrels" are so called simply because each of them causes similar firings of our neurons. When someone says something ...

Now, don't get me wrong: I love materialists. Some of my best friends are materialists! But they actually seem to think that idealists, dualists, panpsychists, etc. are unaware of the existence of neurons! So conversations with them go roughly like: Non-Materialist: [Spends a paragraph explaining Whitehead's panpsychism.] Materialist: Neurons! NM: Yes, I am aware of neurons. [Spends a paragraph explaining how Aquinas would have understood the relationship between the brain and our thoughts.] M: Neural firing patterns! NM: Yes, I know, there are neural firing patterns associated with our thinking. [Spends a paragraph showing how Berkeley would have fit this into his metaphysics.] M: Synapses! NM: OK, I'm not posting any more of these. M: Close-minded coward! [By the way, you might think that comments are closed on this post, but that is just some faulty neural wiring causing you to believe that.]

It is always fascinating when one can detect an irrational obsession in an otherwise smart person. I have no doubt Brad DeLong is smart. But when it comes to any questioning of reductionist materialist dogma, DeLong just loses it. For instance, in "responding" to Steve Landsburg, he starts his post off as follows: "Someone who claims to be a 'friend' makes me aware that others are joining Alvin Plantzinga and Gene Callahan on the side of Thomas Nagel's creationists..." (Is 'friend' perhaps in quotes here because DeLong has no friends and knows this person must be making the claim up? Hahaha, just kidding, Brad, I'm sure you have at least one friend!) 
Here, we have hit upon the Paretain "residue" that drives DeLong's irrational rants: he hates creationists. Now, Nagel is not a creationist, I am not a creationist, and Landsburg is not a creationist, but DeLong is afraid, very, very afraid, that some creationists might like ...

Ken B. makes an interesting point in the comments, although not, perhaps the point he intended to make! The question is, what do we make of an algorithm? Well, if we are true materialist reductionists, we would have to say that an algorithm really just is its physical manifestation, e.g, the microchip on which it is running and the electrons moving about in there: this is what it means to be a materialist reductionist, after all. But now consider a particular algorithm, say, the Sieve of Eratosthenes . That algorithm can be implemented on an old-time mainframe built with vacuum tubes, on a iPad, with a large set of hot and cold water taps, or even in my brain. These physical structures are about as different as can be, and yet Ken admits that it is the same algorithm implemented on each of them. Therefore, what is the same in these wildly physically divergent cases (which I would call the idea ) must, necessarily, be something not physical. So there are parts of reality ...

A very curious claim I just came across is that a good argument for materialism is its track record of successful predictions. 1) Materialism itself is a claim that "There exists nothing but matter." (Or matter and energy, or whatever other moving target materialists choose to shoot at this decade.) To the extent it ever predicted anything, it was that matter is an inert substance behaving in a mechanistic way. Quantum physics wrecked that prediction, but materialists simply shrugged and changed what materialism meant. 2) The person who said this probably meant the predictive success of science, but that is simple confusion: materialism does not equal science, and vice versa. For the first two hundred years after the Scientific Revolution, every major scientist of which I am aware was either a dualist or an idealist. Many of them took their understanding of matter to be proof of dualism! Furthermore, successful prediction in the physical sciences may be  about  "...

P.S. Huff notes how many prominent 20th century philosophers have rejected materialism... and the majority of them are not "religious" in any usual sense of the term. (Bertrand Russell, for example, was a strident atheist.) One reason is there really has never been forwarded any decent argument for materialism, while it introduces many well known difficulties. Evidence of this lack of good arguments for materialism is the frequent resort of many advocates of materialism to sheer name calling, the most typical name invoked being "spooky," with "magical" perhaps running a close second. Anyone who says, as, for instance, Chalmers does, that consciousness must somehow be a fundamental component of the universe, is accused of invoking "spooky" entities in his metaphysics, and calling upon "magical" causes. The silliness of this tactic can be readily understood by how easily it is turned around on its practitioners. The universe was orig...

These paragraphs from Ed Feser lay out the case so clearly that I will quote him at length: Now, Nagel’s point is not that there is something wrong per se with overthrowing common sense in this way (as Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Locke etc. did).  It is rather that whatever value this method has, it cannot coherently be applied to the explanation of conscious experience itself.  If the reductive method involves ignoring the appearances of a thing and redefining the thing in terms of something other than the appearances, then since our conscious experience of the world just is the way the world appears to us, to ignore the appearances is in this case just to ignore the very phenomenon to be explained rather than to explain it.  Consciousness is for this reason necessarily and uniquely resistant to explanation via the same method scientific reductionism applies to everything else.  For the application of the method in this case, writes Nagel, “does not take us nea...

You see, because he once reasoned wrongly about a situation he found himself in, that proves that Thomas Nagel is dumb! When you find yourself calling one of the greatest philosophers of the last half century dumb, something has gone wrong. And in this case, the problem is that Nagel has trampled upon DeLong's religious faith, which is materialism. This is naturally a shaky faith, since there is not a single shred of evidence in favor of its truth. So when a prominent, non-religious philosopher like Nagel notes that besides lacking any evidence in its favor it seems very implausible, there is nothing for it but to declare him stupid, so he can be safely ignored and the faith can be protected.