HAHAHAHAHAHA!

I will admit I only read the first half of this--but that was surely enough. While Mr. Signorelli touts his education by denigrating that of other, I am quite secure in my own. The point it that I read Dawkins' meme theory, and Dennett's analysis of same. Only difference between Mr. Signorelli and myself is that I UNDERSTOOD IT.

What kind of an emag would publish such drivel from an unqualified but unnecessarily vapid failed poet? Have you no shame.

As to the paragraph you quoted from E O Wilson on genes perscribing brains, I would suggest you read it with more care. You obviously did not understand the gist of the passage. I suggest you read Antonio Damasio; ' Decarte's Error. ' This will give you a superficial grounding in a subject you obviouly know nothing about.

                                                               John Henry McCann

ps I find you authencation code rather telling

Richard Dawkins is not a nihilist.

"Christian Brothers Academy". One step above a degree mill, and one step below clown college. 

If this article was meant to demonstrate that you are not a spiteful, deluded, mean-spirited wanna-be, it failed.

The people who constantly call Richard Dawkins "shrill" and "strident" should read this piece to learn what "shrill" and "strident" really look like.

Signorelli betrays his utter lack good faith or understanding -- or both -- when he starts his screed by calling Dawkins a "nihilist," which, whatever one thinks of his views on religion, Dawkins clearly is not.  Signorelli obviously isn't interested in informing the reader, but only at hurling invective at Dawkins and anyone who shares Dawkins' views, such as Daniel Dennett.

Signorelli only doesn't take memes seriously, he doesn't even display any understanding of the idea -- why any "journal" would accept such a poorly written, "foaming at the mouth" attempt at a hatchet job completely escapes me.

This piece reads like a parody of an academic essay in the Onion.  It would take a longer essay than the orginal one to straighten out every confused sentence, but let's just make a few random corrections.

1.   Calling Dawkins a nihilist is simply factually incorrect.

 2.  Dawkins does not confuse biology with culture; rather, he says that natural selection, which explains biological evolution, could also explain other phenomena.  This is actually non-controversial; for example, some physicists think that are universe might have arisen in such a manner, and our universe is not a life-form.

3  If Signorelli accept that a gene is a unit of biological transmission, which I take it he does - although it's hard to extract many coherent thoughts form his rambling mess of an essay - then he cannot dismiss the idea of a unit of cultural transmission out of hand.  In both cases, we are dealing with information transfer, nor is it as easy to point to or identify or measure the length of a gene as Signorelli apparently imagines; there's serious debate about what a gene (not DNA, but a gene) precisely is.

4. Signorelli's depiction of the standing of Dawkins and Dennett in their fields is false; they are both highly regarded and have been honored for their work.

 5.  Nothing Dawkins says about genes could be understood by any fair-minded reader as meaning that his definition of a meme is "that which sticks in Richard Dawkin's head, and nothing more".  The remark quoted by Signorelli to the effect that Dawkins' enjoyment of Beethoven has been hampered by the appropriation of his work is a joke.  This shouldn't have to be explained, but Signorelli seems to be spectacularly clueless.

6.  To say that the ideas of stiletto heels and Jewish philosophy can be transmitted in similar fashion is not equivalent to saying that those ideas are identical.  Eg they can both be explained in books, but that does not mean they are identical.  Does this really have to be explained to Signorelli?  Can he really be this stupid?

And I could go on and on, but it's really not worth the trouble.  I would be very interested in reading a critique of the ideas of Dawkins and Dennett in the New English Review, but I think that at a minimum the critic should be required to have at least a rudimentary understanding of their work.  It would also help if he could write coherent prose.

John Henry

Well put. Looking for Spinoza is good, too.

As for Mr. Signorelli, I humbly suggest he keep himself out of print to avoid further embarrassment.

Cheers

JHJ

And . . . 7 & 3 = 10, right?

Someone should test the author of this piece to find out if he is legally brain dead, or just incredibly ignorant.

I tried very hard to get through the whole article and I nearly succeeded. And I have to say I was tempted to give up after the first ten words.

Signorelli presumably believes Nihilism is some form of philosophical position akin to atheism, because we all know, do we not, that without God life has no meaning. I suspect that his poetic tendencies led him to choose the word for its alliterative quality so it would neatly follow the word "noted". I'm guessing, but if the quality of his poetry is similar to the intelectual quality of this piece, then "noted nihilist" might well have sounded quite good to him, despite its inaccuracy.

Of course, seeing as there are about as many definitions or varieties of nihilism as there are dodgy religious "educational" establishments in the US alone, he has left himself some wiggle room.

Coming from a man who seems to believe (and in paraphrasing him I hope I do not do him an injustice) that because Darwinism cannot (in his mind at least) explain the emergence of "art" or the role it plays in human society then "goddidit" then a certain amount of intellectual fogginess must be expected.

What are we going to get next, a defense of the catholic church in relation to the sexual abuse of children? No, I guess Mr. Signorelli might find that beyond his intellectual capacity.

Of course, it must be difficult to go through life as an intellectual lightweight; this leads to a tendency to over-complicate what one writes, in an attempt to seem cleverer than one actually is, accompanied by a sneering attitude to the intellect of one's betters. Two traits clearly evidenced by this particular article.

 Was this just an academic exercise in formulating a critique ?

The basic idea of a 'meme' is that ideas endure my passing from person to person. A little common sense shows this to be a fact. And the brain's evolutionary predisposition to certain ideas (eg. religion, fear of the dark, snakes, etc.) amplifies this.

Mark, I seriously believe you might have read something you either don't, or don't want to, understand. Stick with it - the penny will drop. 

It's inevitable that as the supply of sensible religious believers dries up, those theists who are left will increasingly be drawn from the shallow end of the gene pool. Unfortunately there are just as many teaching, marketing and administrative positions to fill for the Church as there always were, and the result is that we find people promoted to positions for which they are spectacularly unqualified. The wisest thing these people can do is put their pens down and keep their mouths shut; but of course the wisest thing is exactly what they are unlikely to do. For what it's worth I offer this as a meme, and Mr Signorelli as a prime example of it.

Oh, dear! This is riddled with untruths. What is at work here? Lying for Jesus or deliberate ignorance?

ummm...

The article reads like a very long swear word, if the author really wanted to be taken seriously I suggest he cuts out all the laughably lame sideswipes-

we know you X-ians don't like Dawkins but you must try to come up with cogent arguments against atheists

If you don't understand meme theory, and you don't understand the significance of selfish genes, then by Wotan, don't pretend that you do, and don't try to teach what it is to others.

Is Mr. Signorelli deliberately misrepresenting the meme concept or does he actually lack the acumen to grasp it?

Why is it so hard to understand that extragenic information and behaviors may be replicated from organism to another, one brain to another?  “Monkey see, monkey do” was hardly a new idea when I was a child. 

Why is it so hard to understand that in the process of replication the copier may inadvertently or otherwise make minute but distinguishable alteration to the information or behavior?  Does Signorelli have no grasp of information theory?  He doesn’t address it in the sections to which I subjected myself, so maybe/maybe not.

 There may yet be no objective way to quantify discreet units of extragenic information or behavior.  But they are subject to being copied, to being repeated.  Is there a name for these analog bits (pardon the equivocation) of information and behavior?  Thanks to Dawkins, there is.  And the process by which these memes and their subsequent versions (or perhaps subversions?) are spread (or not) among by various means of communication is highly analogous to asexual reproduction or viral pathology and also somewhat analogous to sexual reproduction.  (Preexisting memes may interact with new memes to produce something like a hybrid.)

 They are also subject to not being copied, of going extinct.  For example, in thirty years Dawkin’s books and other writings will likely be available in libraries and online.  Signorelli’s?  Probably not.  But the main driving force for replication is interest… how interesting the meme is.  That which is interesting is more likely to be repeated/replicated.   Factuality and utility may factor into how interesting a meme is.  But Cinderella, moon walking (the dance) and (insert your least favorite deity or prophet here) are all fictional and (arguably) lack utility.

But memes, like ideas are not tangible.  We can observe an example of an idea but not “ideas” themselves.  And while information may be digitized ideas are a little more slippery.  And to use the gene/meme analogy, it is generally a lot easier to identify physical peptide chains that correlate to phenotypes than it is to quantify and display discreet units of replicable analog cultural information.  

But to get back to the original question: Is Mr. Signorelli deliberately misrepresenting the meme concept or does he actually lack the acumen to grasp it?  While I would like to give Signorelli the benefit of a doubt the vituperation he applies to Dawkins and Dennett suggest a prejudice.  It is possible Signorelli only scanned the source material for opportunities to disagree.  It is possible that his only exposure to the source material was through a disingenuous third party, perhaps the Discovery Institute?  If he was genuinely attempting to refute the theory he has failed.  Even the “straw man” he attacks is largely unscathed.  The only real damage is to those who are first exposed to the idea of memes through his writing.  Well, his own credibility is damaged as well.  So while I do not think Signorelli is technically lying, I suspect if he were actually capable of understanding the simple idea of “monkey see, monkey do” or the game of “telephone” that he would still do his best (don’t laugh) at trying to refute it.

Mark Signorelli, you're an idiot.

Boys and gals, calm down! This is clearly a poe. Nobody could be so shallow and lame!

As Karel de Pauw points out at richarddawkins.net, Signorelli is a perfect example of a phenomenon pointed out by Peter Medvar:  a person who's been educated beyond the level of his analytical skills, and has learned thusly to express his poorly-thought-out prejudices in high-flown language.  Jos Gibbons does a nice point-by-point takedown of Signorelli's pretentious piece-of-crap article at Dawkins' website as well.  By the way, could Signorelli tell us what a "faux concept" is?  I mean, if he thinks the concept of the meme is poorly thought out, or a concept of little utility, then let him make some sort of sensible argument to that effect (you won't find one in his essay here), but, er, the concept of the meme IS a concept.  Calling it a faux concept really is a pretty clear indication that Signorelli is incapable of clear thought; he just strings together big words in a vaguely plausible imitation of an academic essay.  I think it would be fair to call Signorelli's piece a faux analysis, since it's really just an exercise in snarky self-gratification; there's not really any appreciable analytical content.

I was afraid there would be no commments and that I might have to reread this article in order to trash it. Fortunately many others have accurately critiqued it so I can just call it the hateful, inaccurate, poorly written, vaccous, anally extracted piece of crap that it is. The writer is clearly out of their intellectual league so resorts to personal insults, misrepresentations and outright lies about the works of Dawkins, Dennett, etc.

Since you clearly dont understand the scientific method, please look up "hypothesis" and apply it to the concept of memes. Dawkins offered memes as a "POSSIBLE" explanation of how ideas spread. It is a suggestion, supported by observations and data, not a declaration of fact.

I have never read New English Review but if this is an example of their material I certainly havent missed much.

 That's a lot of hate and not much love - for a Christian.

“In his book The Selfish Gene, noted nihilist Richard Dawkins” –I’ve never seen him mischaracterised so quickly in a piece; sadly, it’s a long one. (My response’s length is somewhat diminished, however, by my passing over insults to deal with the arguments. Then again, it is somewhat lengthened by the repetition forced upon me by the original; forgive me.) Be warned that, the citations aside, it is quote mining through and through.

“[memes as units of culture] is exactly like referring to a unit of literary theory, or a segment of talent, or a yard of affection”Either self–replicating entities are involved or they’re not. Don’t simply say memes are unreal; defend that. In fact, they exist: words are an example.

“[RD] cozened his way into authorial fame by attributing a common psychological state to tiny globs of amino acids, and then swearing up and down that he was doing no such thing”That’s not what “selfish gene” means. I’m not going to spell out how this author is making the same mistake as Mary Midgley; it suffices to say the metaphor is analogous to physicists saying particles “want” to occupy lower energy levels.

“[RD] freely professes to employing a “verbal trick” to illustrate the nature of memes.”You need to see that in context to note it is by no means a trick in the sense of ploy, but rather trick as in sense of method.

“[RD introduces memes] in despite of common sense, and he will invoke the laws of science for his justification”Science beats common sense.

“culture and beliefs cannot possibly come under any biological laws, since they are in no respect alive, in any sense which the word “alive” commonly bears (though this of course will not prevent Dawkins from inventing and insinuating some new definition) “We may also argue about when a law is “biological”. The law of interest to Dawkins is that of selection of self–replicators that outcompete rivals. That this law is so is not dependent on taxonomy. Culture and beliefs involves self–replicators, e.g. words, and these must show the changes over time a Darwinian account expects. Culture and beliefs may or may not also involve things that do not self–replicate; Dawkins certainly hasn’t claimed they do, and memetics is not his work, even though he gave people the idea for it (or at least one technical term in the whole subject). No amount of character assassination of him will ever tell us how much self–replicators matter in culture.

“Nor, for that matter, can culture and ideas be explicable by the laws of physics, since they are quite obviously not physical entities, lacking as they are in extension and location.”Angular momentum lacks extension and location, and so do many other things that are explicable under physical laws. Our brains are made out of particles. What else do you expect will happen within them?

“he offers no empirical evidence”If you want to see the empirical evidence for the specific claims now made by memeticists, go to the experts, not a brief mention of the idea in a book predating the field. In TSG the meme issue was introduced purely to illustrate that Darwinism as an explanation of adaptive complexity has nothing in principle to do with the specific molecular layout of nuclear acids; indeed, had he written a few years later, he would have rather used the example of computer viruses.

“our first criteria of what constitutes a discreet* meme is “that which sticks in the head of Richard Dawkins, and no more.”“Anything that is “catchy” to people is a self–replicator, and operates as such in a Darwinian manner, and it is no way limited to the mind of RD. (* I’m not going to correct this guy’s repeated spelling errors.)

“in even discussing a component A and a component B, Dawkins is assuming the existence of discreet memes, the basis of which is the very thing his argument is meant to explain. So he is simply begging the question.”He is giving an example of what he means when he talks of discrete (note the correct spelling) memes. He is not trying to argue for their existence in that point.

“he is capable of making no significant distinction between, say, Kant's theory of the categorical imperative, and a codpiece. ... Stiletto heels and Jewish religious laws - the same things, entirely explicable in the same way.”Diverse things can have similarities that have overlapping explanations, a fact repeatedly used in the history of science to explain enormous numbers of facts with a handful of axioms.

 ”One might try saying to Dr. Dawkins: "Look, you are in the phone book, and they print millions of copies of the phone book - right? But now you don't believe, do you, that you are there millions of times over 'in the form of' printed letters, or 'realized in' the chemistry of ink and newsprint?"“There is a difference between thinking Richard Dawkins has been duplicated and thinking “Richard Dawkins” has been duplicated – one is a man and the other is a phrase.

“Several chapters in Darwin's Dangerous Idea are devoted to the defense of memes, marked from beginning to end by that ... digressive style which has become Dennett's calling card... a tangential journey which passes through tales about ... West Side Story ... the propensity of scientists to employ acronyms”Those are examples of memes; they are not in the least bit tangential.

“None of this, of course, has the least bearing on ... whether or not memes actually exist”Giving examples of them has exactly that bearing. 

“he discourses on memes as though their existence were simply to be taken for granted”Dennett sought to apply memetics, not to establish it. If you want to see that done, seek out memeticists.

“he insists that biological laws can be applied to non-biological entities. “See my earlier taxonomy point.

“If Dawkins and Dennett have evidence of their memes, then produce it for the scrutiny of the world”To repeat: examples have been given, ask a memeticist if you want more, neither RD nor DD is here to establish memetics for the memeticists.

“what word can we find to adequately characterize our illustrious philosopher after he confesses, in a footnote, to citing a quote from Mozart which he knows to be counterfeit, simply because he finds it so congenial to his theory”It is not the content of the quote whose reality (which fails) would be required to service memetics; it is the fact that its popularity is out of proportionality with its veracity that does that.

“genes are invisible only in the sense that they cannot be perceived without the use of advanced instruments, whereas memes are invisible in the sense that they cannot be perceived at all.”WORDS!

“he writes that "as with genes, immortality is more a matter of replication than of the longevity of individual vehicles," which of course is not what the word "immortality" means at all”Dennett’s point is that the immortality of INFORMATION is more a matter of the COPIES’ replication than of their longevity. The definition of immortality only requires that the thing to which it ascribes lasts. Information outlasts copies of it.

“Apparently one of the first things dissolved by the "universal acid" of Dennett's Darwinian fanaticism is the law of non-contradiction, since he can so casually, in the space of a mere three sentences, insinuate that memes are at once things which unconsciously manipulate men, and things which are consciously manipulated by men.”There is no contradiction in saying men consciously manipulate something that unconsciously manipulates them. If a logician feels a need to correct me, she is welcome (for it is people rather than men that should have been relevant here).

“Cultural traits cannot have an advantage, any more than artistic movements can have preferences.”The “advantage” here is the same as that of a gene, i.e. whatever attributes of its phenotypic effects on the world cause it to spread as effectively as it does. No mentalistic concept is present herein. 

“Such passages would be a scandal to all standards of academic integrity, were it the case that a single university upholding serious academic standards remained in the western world.”If they let in quote miners, or people who don’t know what counts as a contradiction but claim to, or people who use this much vitriol amidst dealing with arguments, or who pick the wrong people of whom to ask the wrong things with the wrong quotations, or who assess a proposition in the ways shown herein, perhaps universities do indeed lack useful academic standards. 

 ”what makes the absurdity of the whole meme scam so especially delicious is that these two loudmouths, Dawkins and Dennett, have achieved a considerable notoriety over the last several years by parading about their atheism, and maintaining that there is no evidence for a belief in God. In the sense which they attribute to evidence - that is to say, purely empirical evidence - then it is quite obvious that there really is no evidence for this belief, since God is, by the common consent of all sensible persons, an unphysical entity. But then again, no sensible person ascribes a purely empirical significance to the word evidence, or believes that purely empirical evidence is the only type which is rationally compelling. “I am a sensible person (if I do say so myself; forgive my arrogance) who ascribes evidence a purely empirical significance. What alternatives does this author envisage? 

“Dawkins and Dennett have propounded the existence of a physical entity, without providing the least shred of empirical evidence”RD introduced them as a thought experiment to highlight that Darwinism is not in principle limited to nucleic acids. DD takes the generally accepted consensus amongst evolutionary psychologists that RD was on to something bigger than RD intended, then runs with it. What happened in between, which is where the evidence for memes was obtained, is where this author ought to be going if he wants to see a defence offered of them. Yet even here a small amount of it has occurred, enough to prove some memes exist.

“there are no such things as memes, and anybody who believes in their existence is a blithering fool.”WORDS!

“According to the prevalent "evolutionary synthesis," the only available vehicle of transmission for traits are genes”Or rather, the evolutionary synthesis doesn’t discuss other ways. One may as well describe the Standard Model as anti–gravity. Indeed, such a comment would be on firmer ground.

“[Memetics] constitutes an ... admission that Darwinian theory, in its exclusively genetic form, can never account for the human propensity to act according to belief, and therefore can never account in any satisfactory manner for human behavior in general. “Yes, but why be exclusively genetic? Darwinism only needs to assume self– replicators in order to work.

“the vast majority of Darwinians subscribe to the conviction that beliefs can be transmitted by segments of protein”No; they say that susceptibility to the formation of certain types of beliefs, and in particular fallacious biases of thinking, can emerge from the influence of proteins on the brain. The details of the beliefs are much more a matter of historical contingency.

“few Darwinians state any of their convictions outright, or without contradiction and equivocation”What they do is to clearly distinguish between otherwise easily misunderstood concepts. Clearly, they’ve not done that enough yet.

“an explanation of behavior in terms of hormones and synapses is not an explanation of belief-motivated behavior, but of the appearance of belief-motivated behaviour ... Here is but one more example of the ambiguity between reality and resemblance which plagues all aspects of Darwinism.”Darwinism explains the causal relations between the phenotypic effects of a genotype and that genotype’s fitness, and consequently which phenotypic effects will become commonplace over time. The summary is as thus: what propagates well is what is seen, no matter why it propagates well, so long as it is due to that which self–replicates. The link between a gene and a behavioural pattern can be an arbitrarily opaque black box without inhibiting the power of Darwinian explanation. The issue is not of conflating reality with resemblance; rather, there are ways in which mechanisms will have equivalent implications if they prove indistinguishable.

“ one may flip almost at random through the pages of any significant sociobiological theorist and discover passage after passage in which the genetic heritability of beliefs is assumed and implied, without any attempt whatsoever to "translate" such assumptions into the language of physiology.”You also seldom see a detailed attempt to explain how genes cause fingers to take the shapes they do. It does not matter. We hope to eventually know, of course, but out of curiosity per se, not out of any need for those details in understanding in Darwinian terms (the only workable terms of which we know) why adaptive complexity is seen, and indeed what “adaptive” means. (For example, it has an element of kin selection one would not otherwise expect.)

“one does not cultivate a habit of self-command unless one thinks a habit of self-command is worth cultivating; this is a belief, and beliefs simply cannot reside in merely objective matter.”We do not know these claims about how minds work are correct; indeed, we know from neurological sciences that brains are in many ways silly. 

“there just are no bio-chemical means for the transmission of values “We know that is false. Why do I like a particular situation in which I find myself? Several chemicals can be listed which influence my mood – serotonin, dopamine, and so on. We can even force people to have certain feelings with these molecules. Just as the values we have in a moment are linked to our present biochemistry, they are also linked to the biochemistry of our embryological development, which determines many aspects of our susceptibilities to subsequent details of biochemistry by virtue of effects on brain structure.

“to trace that belief to some “instinct of sympathy” is to imply that it is transmittable by bio-chemical means. Which it cannot be.”Why not?

“One simply refers to justice as a “sense,” though everybody recognizes that it is a concept, and our beliefs regarding justice can be placed on a similar genetic basis as the other senses of sight, hearing, etc.”That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of both “sense” and the point being made with it. We do have numerous judicial concepts, but this does not preclude us from having an innate basis around which such concepts are liable to organise. Note in particular just how many of these concepts are cross–cultural.

“academic practitioners of game theory (and was there ever a phrase which so perfectly captured the frivolity of modern academia)”What’s wrong with naming it after games? Would “war theory” really be more worthwhile? At any rate, names need not be as bizarre or abstract as in cases such as “ring theory” (why do mathematicians call it a ring? I swear they name these magmas as they go along.)

“the optimal strategy for winning this game is something called Tit-for-tat”There are several technical errors with that summary, but they’re not worth covering here.

“each player simply exercises the option last exercised by his opponent in the previous round”Except in the first round, where the player using the strategy (they need not both use it!) cooperates.

“Darwinists speculate that if this is a strategy which maximizes one's chances of survival, then it would have been favored by selective forces throughout evolutionary history”This is no speculation; the maths rigorously demonstrates it.

“a strategy is a type of belief”In this context, it means a systematic pattern in behaviour, and it should be noted an evolutionarily stable strategy is the average behaviour of the whole population; indeed, Darwinism places no constraints on any other moments of the distribution.

“it is absurd to ascribe a knack for strategizing to each denizen of the piscine realm, but it is about a million times more absurd to attribute such a talent to something called “evolution,” since at least the fish are things in the world, whereas evolution is just a general concept.”No; the rules obeyed by natural selection are such as to imply as a mathematical theorem that, after many generations, the gene pool’s make–up will be such that its phenotypic effects are those calculable by the ESS algorithm.

“what would be the “translation” for the Tit-for-tat strategy? There is considerable evidence that a man's level of aggression is influenced by the genes which control the production of testosterone, but of course the strategy calls for selective aggression, alternated with selective gentleness; how can both of these traits be transmitted together by the genes when they are, according to the Darwinists' own theory, but mutually exclusive alleles at the same locus of the DNA? And what about the foresight and capacity for impassive calculation required of the strategy? Is there a particular brain structure that correlates to an increased capacity for both of these things? And is there any reason to suppose that the genes for these traits would unexceptionally combine with the genes for the proper levels of aggression and gentleness, such that they would all together form a unit of transmission, to be selected by that great tactician, evolution? The issue is not whether the fish, or the genes, are conscious of the strategy they are enacting, as Ridley irrelevantly worries, but just how such a strategy could be said to exist “in” the genes at all, for on their theory, the strategy must be carried “in” the genes in some manner. And this is true of whatever “strategy” we wish to assign to the genes; so Dawkins writes of the evolutionarily stable strategy: “To write the strategy out as a set of simple instructions in English is just a convenient way for us to think about it. By some unspecified mechanism, the animal behaves as if he were following instructions.” Undoubtedly, that “unspecified mechanism” lies languidly beneath the same gum-drop tree as his memes, far-off in the same dream-land. It is simply inconceivable.”Genes build brains which, like computers, respond to stimuli in various complex circumstance–dependent ways. This is why we are suddenly able to command great quantities of adrenaline for accelerated movement in times of danger. To take an even less emotive example, it is the reason the stomach can respond to an unusually heavy binge by producing extra digestive agents. The stomach is influenced by genes in much the same way as genes are: it is built in advance? How well will it do? That depends on the environment on many, many genes, but natural selection improves the quality and the cooperability of the genes in the gene pool over time.

“there is no reason to accept the picture of the evolutionary process as one in which animals and humans are equipped with fine-tuned mechanisms for identifying the actions that would maximize their inclusive fitness and for behaving accordingly. Pop sociobiology has no reason to prefer that picture to the rival view on which evolution equips us with certain cognitive capacities and basic propensities, which combine in the social environments that we experience to produce the beliefs, desires, and intentions that we normally attribute to ourselves. Thus there is no evidence to lead us away from the natural idea that, given the traits with which evolution has equipped us, we are able to set ourselves personal goals and to perform actions that detract from our inclusive fitness. It is possible to take the evolution of Homo sapiens seriously and yet to deny that natural selection has fashioned dispositions to behavior that lead us always (or almost always) to maximize our inclusive fitness.”Natural selection’s end–products are somewhat suboptimal, but we must not read too much into this.

“The game-theoretical paradigm has become so central to the Darwinian project of explaining away altruism under the farcically paradoxical label of “reciprocal altruism” that it may fairly be called one of the pillars of their theory, though, as can be seen, the whole thing is but subterfuge and nonsense.”Are enormous numbers of scientists thick? Or did you just understand neither the maths nor scientists’ efforts to summarise it in English? “Reciprocal altruism” is not the least paradoxical, once you understand altruism in the technical sense RD defines it in TSG (where it no longer has any mentalistic definitions). It becomes just a set of claims about some numbers called b, c and r.

“genes do certainly shape our brain structure; we use our brains to think, and when we think, we often form beliefs. Hence, genes shape our beliefs. This is precisely the form of argument employed by Edward O. Wilson: “Culture is created by the communal mind, and each mind in turn is the product of the genetically structured human brain. Genes and culture are therefore inseverably linked.”^[39]  But such a line of reasoning is about as relevant and persuasive as arguing that because genes shape the anatomical structure of our feet, the Confederate soldiers under Pickett's command at Gettysburg were compelled by their genes to take to their feet under the withering fire of the entrenched Union forces. Obviously, genes help shape the sort of physical creatures we are, but the sort of physical creatures we are possess the capacity to act according to conscious beliefs, which are adopted in the absence of all genetic efficacy.”The genes with which we are conceived do not entirely guarantee to any actuary which beliefs we will obtain and act upon during out 80–year lives, but it does have a role to play in the probabilities, and therefore in the large–scale pattern of society, since frequencies are proportional to probabilities in large populations.

“Edward O. Wilson [refers] to “gene-culture coevolution,” which obviously implies the efficacy of genes in the role of “idea-transmitor.”“Actually, what it means is that which genes and which aspects of culture were favoured historically by the selective pressures applicable to them each depended on the pool of the others in existence, and some of these relations resulted in positive feedback. This is akin to the relation between genes influencing the performance of two species in an evolutionary arms race.  Here, the memes transmit ideas, although the genes influence the probabilities for their successes in being transmitted to or from* specific individuals. (* Let us not forget this side also; there may be a genetic component to how effectively you persuade others of your opinions, or how much you care to try.)

“Wilson quite strenuously denies that he advocates this ... [in] a blatantly self-contradictory manner ... No “serious scientist” would ever propose that genes prescribe culture, and yet, via physiology and natural selection, “genes will do the prescribing?” ... If one is asserting that genes prescribe culture, one is asserting that genes prescribe culture.”Judging by the context, it seems to me Wilson was asserting genes prescribe some aspects of the phenotypes of the bodies in which they reside, and in turn will influence (not necessarily prescriptively) a smaller fraction still of the aspects of culture. The prescription is on the individual

“he is as false as an author can be when he tells us that no one is suggesting such a thing, for every page of his is covered with references to “gene-culture coevolution,” which obviously suggests some sort of causal relationship between culture and genes. “In this case, a relationship involving feedbacks, not prescription of culture by genes. Bear in mind also that these feedbacks are not the complete causal process; if anything prescribes culture, it is a combination of things including genes in an interacting manner. In turn, the genes in turn are prescribed (if at all) by culture and then some.

“Wilson is convinced that there is such a thing as “cultural evolution,” which is somehow analogous to biological evolution ... despite the fact that he openly acknowledges that culture is shaped in a manner entirely foreign to biological evolution: “Lamarckism has been entirely discounted as the basis of biological evolution, but of course it is precisely what happens in the case of cultural evolution.” So if a process unfolds in a “Lamarckian” way, it is not evolution, not in the scientific sense, and the persistent use of the term “evolution” as applied to culture is then merely a deceptive trick to imply an identity where none exists. “It is a contingent fact, not a corollary of definition, that genetic evolution lacks a Lamarckian component. Genetic evolution is defined as changes over time in the gene pool, i.e. as historical trends in the frequencies of those self–replicators called genes. More generally, evolution is historical trends in the frequencies of any self–replicators. It may well be that Lamarckism has a role to play for some, all or no self–replicator types; apparently, it is some.

“it is exactly like saying that the gravity of a Buddhist monk can be properly understood through Einstein's equations.”The monk does exert a gravitational influence.

“were one to flip through the pages of all the Darwinians ... and replace the phrase “cultural evolution” with “cultural development” or “cultural change,” the entire argumentative force of the Darwinians' cultural theories would dissipate in an instant. “Any logical argument would appear to lose its force if synonyms were used in the latter stages so as to obscure the fact that the premises imply the conclusion. “All elephants are fat. Nelly is a pachyderm. Therefore, Nelly is plump.” Logical? Actually, given that certain words are synonyms, yes. One needs a more careful analysis of how words are defined to deal with the culture case at hand. I have tried to offer herein the beginning of such an analysis.

“Organisms change in one way, cultures in an entirely different way, and there is simply no one methodology which can generate an explanation of both forms of change. “As I have said before, as many dissimilarities as there may be between two things, there may be overlaps in their explanations. I hope I have at least explained what the claims are in the gene–culture case, whether or not I have convinced anyone they are true. At any rate, I should have shown they are not self–contradictory.

 ” what follows from a conviction that beliefs reside in the genes? Quite obviously, eugenics. Our genes are inalienable to us, and if our beliefs were genetically caused, then they too would be inalienable. So if I discover a society of men, or some segment of society, who hold a particularly pernicious dogma, then of course, on the Darwinian account, I will consider rhetorical means of persuasion to be perfectly futile; the only recourse left to defeat the dogma is the destruction of those genes – with their host organisms - which are alleged to cause it.”Genes’ influence is not deterministic. We still have a chance to influence people. Also, why do opponents of an evolutionary idea act as if it implying the reasonableness of eugenics (not that it ever does) would render it any less plausible? You don’t infer truth from ethics; you infer ethics from truth.

“ Wilson's defense of “cultural evolution” culminates in a call for a eugenic program:

The genes of the Sisyphean combinations are probably spread throughout populations. For this reason alone, we are justified in considering the preservation of the entire gene pool as a contingent primary value until such time as an almost unimaginably greater knowledge of human heredity provides us with the option of a democratically contrived eugenics.

Setting out from absurdity and incoherence, Wilson arrives in quick time at outright villainy. “I don’t read Wilson as advocating groups be killed to wipe out their ideas in that paragraph. Am I missing something here? 

“Stephen Jay Gould ... parted from his confrères on the notion of cultural evolution and gene-transmitted beliefs. He perceived that cultural development occurs in the total absence of any correlative evolutionary development ... He too perceived that cultural development necessarily assumes the transmission of acquired characteristics, which is strictly forbidden in modern evolutionary theory”Read what Gould writes more carefully to notice that he provides a demonstration that genes cannot account for the most recent and rapid developments of our culture, and that the correct alternative explanation may have a Lamarckian side. But this does not mean self–replicators are ruled out; think memes. The gene–culture coevolution process is proposed by its defenders to have occurred longer ago than that. It is therefore not an idea contradicted by Gould’s observations.

“the point is that we need not cite the testimony of Kitcher or Gould against sociobiology; we need not cite any of its adversaries at all. We need simply appeal to the two great authorities of sociobiology, Dawkins and Dennett, and their unconscious admission – in the form of their meme reveries - that beliefs, and the cultural developments driven by beliefs, cannot be adequately explained by Darwinian theory. And anyone who dips into the pages of their brethren - who do wildly and futilely pursue such explanations - will find ample confirmation for the truth of this confession.”To repeat, they said that a genetic Darwinism is insufficient. But Darwinism is much bigger than that. Contrary to this author’s suggestions, that was all RD intended to observe when he first discussed memes. It was the one thing this author needed to understand; he did not.

Nihilist it is?

http://www.kilala.nl/Images/Blog/Nihilists.jpg

Taking Mark Signorelli seriously.

No, I'm sorry. It can't be done.

Mark's lack of understanding makes jebus rofl.

Would be good to see Mark reply to all this criticism, but I doubt he has the mental capacity to answer the maths authentication problem required to comment.

:^/

The ignorance and dishonesty displayed in this article is simply breathtaking.

Mr. Signorelli's essay demonstrates without question his profound inability to comprehend matters of biology, logic and science. Surely this pseudointellectual work is a cry for help.

Mark Signorelli & New England Review,

This is Mark Myers.

I am a landscaper. I read as much as I can.  You display an impressive command of the english language.  I had to look up a few of the words you selected.

When I speak or write, I choose the words I hope will best convey my thoughts to my intended audience.  Assuming you are doing the same, rather than just trying to impress readers like me with your vocabulary, you apparently aim for an intellectual audience. 

I can only imagine how silly your statements appear to readers more educated than myself.  Surely this is an embarrasement also to the New English Review.

I'm amazed that someone with your limited intellect and obviously stunted comprehension was able to write such a long article! Congratulations for sheer length! You even manage a few large words! Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear you actually know what most of them mean. From the beginning it’s blatantly clear you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about and it only gets worse from there. More likely, you have strategic and Machiavellian reasons for constantly presenting yourself as pathetically ignorant – which is to say that I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt because the other option is that you’re clearly an idiot and I wasted valuable time I can never get back bothering to read this nonsense.

Mad props on being willing to attach your name to this article, though. That shows moxie, which I can pretend to respect. Frankly, I’d have been too embarrassed – but, then, I’m not a fan of making myself look like an imbecile and it appears you don’t especially mind.

Have a lovely day.

Mark Signorelli - you are wrong.

In fact you are so wrong that you are exhibiting something known as fractal wrongness.

This means that you are not just simply wrong, but you are wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. Zooming in on any part of your worldview finds beliefs exactly as wrong as your entire worldview.

That is why people all around the world are laughing at you now.

Cyberguy (New Zealand)

Breathtaking. Who is this guy? Who did he sleep with to get this published?

'So what else can this passage possibly imply except that there are genes which bestow a belief upon men, specifically the belief that generosity is admirable and stinginess reproachable? Which implication, obviously, is laughable'

Mr Signorelli knows and understands nothing about evolution. This is yet another embarrassment for those who say that Christian objections to evolution are reasonable.

Take the above sentence. This is in fact quite a feasible thing. There is very good evidence that behaviour is affected be by genes. This means behaviour can be selected for. I'm not sure if generosity has shown to be one of these behaviours - but it is certainly possible. Mr Signorelli believes that only physical attributes can be selected for by evolution. This is not the case.

The other thing that I think Mr Signorelli is that memes were not intended as a serious scientific concept when Richard Dawkins introduced them. He was having fun.

Hopefully, Mark Signorelli will be sufficiently humiliated by the numerous criticisms in the comments to take more care to understand concepts such as memes, evolution, and nihilism before he opens his mouth and more inane drivel pours out. If not, it will only be further testament to his ignorance.

Crikey, the meme-mongers are out in force.

Who needs God when you've got Dawkins?

Mary, many people do "need" a god regardless of Dawkins.  Thankfully, the concept of a god, faith therein and conformation bias are sufficient substitutes. 

The subject and conclusion of this essay were probably assigned to Mr. Signorelli by an anonymous third party.  It is as though he’s been instructed to castigate a sculpture and the sculptor without ever looking directly upon the work. 

Try to have an excuse ready in case he tries to sell you his book at the symposium.

Mary

Believe me, the criticism here has nothing to do with meme-mongering. It is simply the case that Signorelli understands little about philosophy, biology, science, memetics or, in particular, evolution whilst seeking to portray an extensive knowledge of all of these; something profoundly evident from virtually every paragraph of this tedious essay.

The man teaches English Literature at a male-only catholic school. His prejudices are evident from his writing. This essay is not a criticism of any particular scientific theory (for a start, he'd have to understand the concept of such a theory in the first place and then move on to understanding the specific theory he wishes to critique) - it is more a series of personal insults (exclusively of individuals more qualified, experienced and intellectually agile than he) interwoven with woeful analysis wrapped up in a style one would mark "F" if it came from a senior student.

Really, it is a poor piece of work. It is verbose, poorly structured and contains so many outright misunderstandings that the man is either stupid, ignorant or mischievous.

I suggest you fiond something else more worthwhile to defend.

It would seem that there are few would would spring to the author's defence. He had obviously had a very bad day.

To be fair, if one accepts that humans are freely-willing contra-causal agents then reasoned empiricism will appear to be such a mortal threat that any argument must be used to counter it. Regardless of how ad hom, unreasonable, emotional or incoherant it may be. Indeed, our very souls are at risk.

Ooh, ooh, let me!  It looks fun.  Ahem...

My nan knows more about memes, evolution, philosophy, etc., than this guy.  All that stupid fat idiot did in this wasteful article is insult people, the moron.

He clearly believes in some invisible fairy in the sky, so is intellectually bankrupt from the start.  Not only does this article remove any shred of credibility he might have had (though I doubt it!), it is an embarrassment for New English Review to have published it.  Even my PC was embarrassed to display such dross; I may have to throw it out.

I won't be reading anything else on this site, as it's probably equally poor - New English Review, let this be a lesson to you.

(Darn it, they've changed the authentication question.  Perhaps because someone posted the answer to the previous one in the comments.  Where's my calculator?)

A very unpleasant article. Mr Signorelli should learn some politeness and temperance. Dawkins, Ridley, and Dennet and others make serious points that deserve to be treated carefully and seriously, not with vicious contempt and poor puns ('clown prince'). I didn't get very far into the article before ceasing to read, feeling rather soiled by it.

Yes, this is a horrendous work of staggering foolishness.  Mr. Signorelli should stick to poetry, where nobody can call him on his astonishing lack of comprehension.  Well, lack of comprehension is one thing, but lack of EFFORT - it's clear he hasn't made the slightest effort to understand what he is talking about, and is simply spinning wool. 

Goodbye, New English Review.  God help anyone else who has to follow this guy.

Astonishing.  Nearly every response has been an ad hominem, and a fair number adduced "empirical evidence" not contained in the essay.  Nowhere, for example, did I read where the author claimed that artr exists because "goddidit," or even so much as mention such a being.  Prominent critics of the meme-scam and sociobiology/Social Darwinsism -- like David Stove, J.S.Gould, Mary Midgley, et al. -- are so far as I know, atheists themselves. 

Nor, obviously, do they deny the efficacy of Darwinian mechanisms in biology.  Certainly, the author did not.  But just as not all physical motion is explained by the law of universal gravitation - electromagnetism plays a role, too - not everything in history is explained by Malthusian natural selection.  (This was at the root of Popper's complaint that Darwinian theory was not falsifiable,)  Surely, if one says that gravity does not explain the motions of charged bodies, one is not thereby saying that goddidit.  It is no more true in this case.

The author merely questioned whether what is no more than an inept extended metaphor could be a meaningful scientific hypothesis.  As Midgley pointed out, ideas no more come in "units" than do ocean currents.  But the atomistic metaphysic has had considerable power.  It has given us the atomic individual of social contract theory, the "nuclear" family, and so on.  So when, instead of talking about "ideas" or "beliefs," we pun on the term "genes" and talk about "memes,"  we get the warm and fuzzy feeling that we are somehow "talking scientificially."  And never mind that we are relying on a 19th century metaphysics abandoned by physicists themselves for a hundred years? 

As to the observation that ideas seem to exist independently of the particular people who espouse them, that is obvious.  It was known as the "problem of universals" and Plato demolished the "genetic" interpretation a very long time ago.  They cannot possibly be physical entities.  And then Aristotle demolished Plato's version of "memes" (the Platonic ideals) a generation later.  Everything old, it seems, is new again. 

As for Dawkins nihilism, I think it may stem from his flirtation with eliminative materialism.  In The God Delusion, he quotes Steve Grand approvingly:

[Think] of an experience from your childhood. Something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place...  Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important.

And then he goesa on to compare human consciousness with a barchan a quasi-permanent sand dune pushed across the desert by the wind. 

Don't know about the others here, but anyone who denies that his own mind "really" exists counts as something very close to a nihilist. 

From Mike:

"The author merely questioned whether what is no more than an inept extended metaphor could be a meaningful scientific hypothesis."

Oh, that's what all those words were about! How could I have missed it.?

Piffle.

Dear Dawkinoids,

"But the most important piece of advice I can offer to any of you – and this is something I can hardly stress sufficiently- if you want to attack an author for his work, make sure you can demonstrate some comprehension of his central thesis."

Tis a poor workman who blames his tools.

from Mike:

"The author merely questioned whether what is no more than an inept extended metaphor could be a meaningful scientific hypothesis."

JHJEFFERY

Oh, that's what all those words were about! How could I have missed it.?

Because the words were too big?  Let me suggest Mary Midgley's essays in The Myths We Live By for a thorough humanist thrashing of the meme "meme."  (And for those who so evidently fear religion cooties, Midgley isn't.)  Making a pun on "gene" simply to enable one to "talk scientifical" about ideas does not make any of it real. 

The fact that "angular momentum" or "gravity" are not themselves material entities, yet are undoubtedly real in some sense, is why many materialists have been redefining themselves as "physicalists."  But this was an issue dealth with more than half a millennium ago.  The maxim was "There is no 'white' without a white thing."  That is, the form of 'whiteness' did not exist in itself.  There had to be something that was white - Socrates' beard was popular; but snow, fleece, etc. will do.  White is what is called an accident of the matter and has reality insofar as the matter is real.  The same is true, e.g., of 'gravity.'  What is material, what is empirical, is the motion of falling bodies.  'Gravity' is a story we tell ourselves in order to make sense of the motion.  But there is no gravity in the absence of matter.  (Energy is a form of matter; so, yet, a beam of light has gravity, however slight.)  Gravity is rather a form which matter takes on.  Technically, it is a particular state of the Ricci tensors.  However, it is what is called an 'essential' form rather than an accidental form.  Fleece can be other than white (we could dye it); but matter cannot be other than gravitational. 

Much of this has been forgotten over the centuries; which is why, after 400 years of philosophical squid ink, postmoderns and die-hard moderns are so confused about simple matters that they must make up pseudo-scientific sounding words like "memes."

Just as a Pacific Islands cargo cultist would make earphones of coconut shells and air traffic control towers of bamboo, so too do we suppose that by imitating the outward forms of real science we can call down knowledge as from the treasure houses of the gods. 

Mark Signorelli,

As the sole user of the word "moron" in the preceding comments, it appears you have quoted me, among others.  Sorry if you took offence from my comment, as none was actually intended to you.

I am neither a Dawkinoid, nor Dawkinsian of any kind.  I am a regular NERd (if I repeat it enough, it might catch on...), and my comment was meant to be humorous, nay even ironic, mocking those preceding comments which failed to recognize their own hypocrisy and lacked any form of rational argument.  As I remarked in a follow-up post, I guess I was too subtle.  I shall try to be more obviously outrageous in the future.

Regards.

"Because the words were too big? "

Yes. Damnit! You have scored again, you genius!

Next time try keeping the words itty bitty enough for those with only three post bac degrees can understand. Like me.

Thanks

Your pal

JHJ

Just on the point of what 'nihilism' means, you said:-

"Many of you were angry that I called Dawkins a nihilist, and accused me (but I don’t hate you for it) of dishonesty on this account. But he has written: “the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” Folks, that’s nihilism. That’s what the word means."

Actually no. Nihilism is:

1.

total rejection of established laws and institutions.

2.

anarchy, terrorism, or other revolutionary activity.

3.

total and absolute destructiveness, esp. toward the world at large and including oneself: the power-mad nihilism that marked Hitler's last years.

4.

Philosophy.

a.

an extreme form of skepticism: the denial of all real existence or the possibility of an objective basis for truth.

b.

nothingness or nonexistence.

5.

(sometimes initial capital letter) the principles of a Russian revolutionary group, active in the latter half of the 19th century, holding that existing social and political institutions must be destroyed in order to clear the way for a new state of society and employing extreme measures, including terrorism and assassination.

6.

annihilation of the self, or the individual consciousness, esp. as an aspect of mystical experience.

 

(dictionary.reference.com)

 

None of which apply to Dawkins.

 

This is admittedly just an online dictionary, not the OED, but it conforms to what I always understood it to mean.

Actually, StephenA55, number 4.a. is what Mr. Signorelli described in his quotation of Dawkins and is, by your very example, the definition of nihilism. Dawkins' attack on the reality of mind and the reality of values amounts to a promotion of nihilism. I really don't understand the objection to this characterization.

Here is the Merriam-Webster online definition:-

Perhaps Mr Signorelli takes the first meaning above to apply here. Atheists consider religious teachings to be unfounded, of course.

However this is not to say that some teachings are not necessary. Only that they are unfounded insofar as they are supposed to be of divine origin. Atheists believe in law and order, but prefer to derive it from more rational sources.

No nihilism in that.

Rebecca,

This is confusing.

So 4a says skepticism is nihilism. But it does not say skepticism of God; if that were it then it would be a fair description.

Instead we read:  the denial of all real existence or the possibility of an objective basis for truth. I'm sure that Dawkins does not deny any of these things. He devotes his career to discovering objective truth, as opposed to various types of myths.

I have never heard or read  where Dawkins has attacked the reality of mind or values. Of course he has his own mind and values. Not so different from those of most people except for the lack of belief in God. Surely it takes more than that to be a nihilist?

Dude, he has denied the existence of his own mind, and ascribes to a radically incoherent metaphysic.  You can't get much more nihilistic. 

Do not rely on dictionaries of common usage when discussing technical terms used in a technical sense.  Consider, for example, that in topology, a maze is a "simple" curve and a figure-8 is a "complex" curve. 

Perhaps you are confusing philosophical nihilism with political nihilism.  There is some discussion of nihilism here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-moral/

and here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/monism/

IT'S A TRAP! CAN'T YOU SEE? You fell right into his spindly web. Like lemmings from a cliff you leaped blindly. You may have read the article for the sole purpose of denigrading it; though, you still read it.

Astounding that Mark complains about ad-hominem comments, given that in his article nary a paragraph drivels by without an ad hominem attack in place of any actual sound reasoning.  Please, explain how "the image of Dennett's brain as a pile of worm-infested shit will strike the reader as remarkably apropos" should be regarded as the work of a sophisticated mind, and why after several paragraphs of such crude childish snipes anyone should feel the need continue reading, or take any of this seriously?

Sadly, based on his comment (thanks so much for condescending to interact with us uneddicated masses!), I don't expect Mark to self-reflect and realize his hypocrisy.  Complaining about Dennett's use of West Side Story as an illustrative example, then himself bringing up some random passage from Huck Finn to demonstrate...what exactly?  Claiming Dawkins is a con-man?  If he had attentively read The Selfish Gene, he would realize that Dawkins brought up the idea of a meme as an aside, backing the main point that any system of replicators acted upon by selective pressures is subject to evolution in similar fashion to biological systems.  From which an entire field of legitimate study has taken form, with journals and research far more compelling than "show me an MRI of a meme!"  A field in which, incidentally, Dawkins plays little role and certainly receives little profit, so calling him a con-man is simply disingenuous. 

So again, what is the point of this article?  Attacking someone for coming up with a hypothesis 30 years ago, which has since picked up on and advanced by many other smart people?  Sounds like trite jealousy to me.  By all means, Mark, continue to write poorly argued tripe on these topics which you clearly have little understanding, and ignore those who patiently try to help bring you up to date with what they are about.  Just don't expect anyone to take you seriously.

And Mike retorts:

"Dude, he has denied the existence of his own mind, and ascribes to a radically incoherent metaphysic"

Dogdamnit! You strike again--informing me on subjects I should have known about. I've been following Dawkins for years and did not know that! Jeez! I feel so stupid, hiding in the shadows from the bright light of your knowledge about Dr. Dawkins' belief system.

I feel a kinship with Dawkins however--empathy, perhaps--because I deny the existence of your mind.

Cheers

Stephen A55,,

I'm afraid you're missing my point. The radical atheists like Dawkins contend that matter is the only reality. Mind is the product of the electrochemical processes of the brain and truth as a reality apart from man does not exist. In this viewpoint then, truth can never be more than relative and always suspect. It is very hard to see how civilizational values can possibly be maintained under this kind of thinking and anarchy is the natural result. If we think of ourselves as nothing but our bodies and morality is some kind of evolutionary trick unmasked by Dawkins et al. then civilizational decay and fall will be the inevitable result. This is nihilism, pure and simple. There is no other word for it.

Dear blahh,

Your comment has been deleted. This thread has degenerated quite enough. Any more personal attacks will be deleted as well and may lead to the closing of comments on this article.

Rebecca, Mike,

I see what you mean about material versus mystic or spiritual reality, but you are getting away from the point about nihilism.

As I understand it, Dawkins believes that the conscious mind and what we call the soul and other abstract ideas are products of the material world, ie of our neurones and natural biological processes of brain chemistry.  Our ideas that arise therefrom including ideas on morality are devised by our own intelligence. When written down and agreed upon, they become tangible reality, before that they are just ideas. Before that they don't exist. God is probably just an example of one of these ideas that has become tangible in this sense out of shared  thoughts.

To say matter is the only reality is to say reality is the only reality. That includes everything except magic. Which doesn't exist.

Our laws, morals, conscience, goodness itself are all ideas batted around and agreed or not between ourselves. To be a nihilist you would have to ignore all these things. Instead, most of us want what is best for our society, because we have evolved a persistent concern for the essentials of a decent society. Otherwise we would probably have died out by now. If we relied on God for our rules, we would still be in the iron age. The only reason we advance is that we know better than the biblical God and use our own judgement to discard the bad old stuff in Leviticus etc. We do not need a real God because we have survived thus far with our own imaginary one and with the rules which Moses, Mohammed, Joseph Smith etc., 'received' from him.

Atheism will not lead to anarchy, no reason why it should, and truth definitely does still exist. Nor is it relative or suspect, though it may be elusive and complicated.  We may not have an afterlife but one life is more than we have a right to expect. Ain't it grand?

@JHJeffrey

It was the part of The God Delusion where he asserted through his positive citation of Steve Grand that, regarding remembered past experiences: "you weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place..."

He clearly confuses his conscious being with a collection of "atoms."  Instead of drawing the obvious conclusion, he concludes that "he" does not exist save in the sense that a barchan sand dune exists.  This is eliminativism, and falls squarely in the bucket of philosophical nihilism.  I very much doubt that Dawkins realizes this any more than do his disciples, as he is not very good at philosophy. 

+ + +

@stephen55s

Rebecca, Mike: I see what you mean about material versus mystic or spiritual reality

I said nothing about "spiritual" reality.  Please to not ascribe thoughts to me without empirical evidence.   

To say matter is the only reality is to say reality is the only reality. That includes everything except magic.

In logic, that's called "begging the question" or "circular reasoning."  It is also empirically false.  There are many real things that are not composed of matter. 

• The Pythagorean theorem is real. 
• Justice
• Rabbit
• Gravity
• The proposition "Snow is white"
• Life

Regarding "Life": All material bodies have weight.  It is, per Galileo, one of the "objective" qualities which are the proper object of science.  People weighed at the moment of death show no detectable loss of weight.  Therefore, life, which they had before but no longer have, weighs nothing.  Therefore, it is not a material object.  Yet, life is demonstrably real. 

Regarding "rabbit":   This rabbit has material existence, and that rabbit has material existence, and that other rabbit has material existence.  But the universal "rabbit" does not exist as a material object.  Rather, it is a concept abstracted from the concrete singulars of material rabbits.  Yet there really is such a thing as "rabbit."

Regarding "gravity."  Gravity itself is not a material body; rather it is an abstraction from the behavior of actual material bodies in motion.  Yet, gravity is real.  [Technically, it is an essential form of matter-energy.] 

Dawkins believes that the conscious mind and what we call the soul and other abstract ideas are products of the material world, ie of our neurones and natural biological processes of brain chemistry. 

The notion that "rabbit," "Pythagorean theorem." "Newton's first law," and other abstract ideas are no more than products of our brain chemistry is deeply weird. 

The Latin word we translate as "soul" is anima, which means "life."  Thus, to ask whether a man or a cat or a petunia has a soul is to ask whether it is alive.  Next question. 

Materialism is inadequate to account for matter.  Both sodium and chlorine are composed of the same parts: protons, neutrons, electrons.  But what makes one a flammable metal and the other a poisonous gas is the number and arrangement of those parts; that is, the form of the atom. 

For living beings, the "form" is called "anima" [soul].  Animate forms differ from inanimate forms in a variety of interesting ways.  If triangles were alive, "geometric figure" would be its matter and "three-sided" would be its soul.

So Dawkins' confusion may be nothing more than a problem of English vocabulary.  It's like saying the roundness of a ball is the "product" of the rubber. 

Our ideas that arise therefrom including ideas on morality are devised by our own intelligence. When written down and agreed upon, they become tangible reality, before that they are just ideas. Before that they don't exist.

According to Dawkins, our ideas do not arise from our intelligence, but are the result of parasitical memes infesting our brains. 

If the idea that s=0,5at^2 or that the interior angles of a plane triangle sum to 180 deg did not exist until someone wrote them down, both triangles and the motion of faling bodies must have been very peculiar prior to the invention of writing.  

This  undermines the ideas of both science and mathematics!  If our ideas are simply neurons and "brain chemistry," then none of them have any necessary truth value.  In a purely material universe there are no values, let alone truth values.  Dawkins recognized this, but then asserted [illogically] that it was "up to us" to create those values.  But how we could do so when we ourselves are nothing but matter animated by external forces lacking values?  This contradiction struck me on reading The Selfish Gene, lo these many years ago, even while I had found much of the rest of it persuasive. Dawkins is at his best when talking biology; but when he ventures into metaphysics, he is amateurish. 

Dawkins' whole point is that these "memes" do have some sort of reality outside the material bodies which think them.  Except fot the pseudo-scientific nomenclature - ["memes" sounds oh-so-much more scientifical than "concepts"] - this is nothing but the old problem of the universals.  "Memes" are simply Platonic Ideals dressed up in a phony white lab coat. 

These "memes" cannot be neurons or brain chemistry because they exist independently of any particular brain.  A rabbit that exists in two collections of matter is not the same rabbit, but rather two different rabbits.  A proton that exists in two distinct atoms is not the same proton, but two different protons.  This is observably true for material objects.  Yet the Pythagorean Theorem is the same theorem even when instantiated in two different brains or written down in two different langauges.  Likewise,the proposition that "Snow is white" is the same even when written as "Schnee ist weiss" in different ink or in phosphors on a screen.  Ditto, the idea of rabbit, etc. 

Obviously, there is something that persists despite the changes in the underlying matter.  And that is the form. 

Dear StephenA55,

I agree with Mike above about the undermining of science because the basis of science is that truth exists and can be increasingly approximated if not realized as an absolute. I would like to address the question of whether nihilism leads to anarchy. I think the evidence is all on my side here. When we look at Europe and England, the loss of a common belief in the transcendental, has surely led to the societal unraveling we are witnessing now, which in turn has led to increased government control as government becomes the only source of control. The former internal controls (honor, duty, service) are collapsing and thus society tends toward anarchy, even if government totalitarian control evolves as a reaction to this.

Dear Rebecca Bynum,

Mike says that science and mathematics are undermined because I supposedly caimed that the laws of gravity and geometry do not exist until written down.
This is of course, nonsense. He has taken my statement that our ideas are intangible until they are written in a material form to mean that the actual reality which the ideas refer to cannot exist until written down.
He must know this was not my meaning. This is one of several examples of deliberate mis-statement of the ideas of others to try to win an argument.
I do share your worries about societal unravelling in England and Europe. I see it happening and some of the causes but I am sure that Richard Dawkins is not an example of a nihilist. Nor are his theories widely enough known to be very influential upon the masses even if he were.
The history of the planet in the last 2000 years has been remarkable for the great number of wars fought. Perhaps a belief in the transcendendent is a necessary crutch for hapless footsoldiers with short life-expectancy. We all know how the lure of an erotic afterlife worked to motivate the minions and descendants of Mohammed in battle.
Perhaps there would have been fewer bloody revolutions and wars if it had not been for the clash of religious beliefs and the willingness of troops to be martyred.
That is one way of looking at the effect of common belief in the transcendental. Another is to focus on the benefits of religion as a societal mutual support system. I know these things can be very profound and not to be under-estimated. I grew up in a religious household and community and valued it highly. The net effect for or against is anyone's guess.
We need to find substitutes  for the benign effects of religion for secular societies. There are other ways of fostering community spirit. Our Governments have been positively destructive in so many ways, we must get rid of those who fail us and campaign for better Gov. for a start.
I am convinced that religion must go, eventually. Not by banning but by gradual falling away.

Mike,

Dawkins may not be much on philosophy, but I am. Your last post is straight out of Plato for Dummies. I don't have the time or inclination to correct all of that, but maybe a survey course at your local college would help.

Leave your religion outside of the classroom.

Bye

JHJ

Mike,
I do think you have a tendency to misconstrue the statements of others. I mean here we are discussing all these deep questions about the nature and meaning of life, and without engaging in long disquisitions on precise definition of terms used, we have to trust to the good faith of one another not to wilfully misinterpret every assertion so as to spin in one's favour.
For example you said, I think to me, referring to Dawkins:
"Dude, he has denied the existence of his own mind, and ascribes to a radically incoherent metaphysic.  You can't get much more nihilistic. "
It turns out you are referring to a passage in the God Delusion. A quote describing how every part of the body is replaced by new cells, piecemeal over a period of years.
Does this mean that our minds and bodies have no real existence?
Of course not. Our existence is continual, unbroken, and the renewal of worn-out parts is not a threat to our identity, which persists through amputations, false teeth, heart transplants, everything but  a brain transplant.
I re-read that passage from the God Delusion. At no point does Dawkins deny the existence of his own mind, as you claim. In fact the point of the item about renewal is one of a series of examples of how unexpectedly strange is the objective reality of our world compared to our very subjective view of it.
You followed up with: "He clearly confuses his conscious being with a collection of "atoms."  Instead of drawing the obvious conclusion, he concludes that "he" does not exist save in the sense that a barchan sand dune exists.  This is eliminativism, and falls squarely in the bucket of philosophical nihilism.  I very much doubt that Dawkins realizes this any more than do his disciples, as he is not very good at philosophy. "
Can you not see the real message here? How this is no more than a trivial illustration of one of the surprising ways nature maintains her organisms. An 'interesting fact' (see E.L. Wisty)

"There are many real things that are not composed of matter."
Yes, as I've already said, there are abstract things that may be real, like your justice or 'snow is white' or a 'universal rabbit'. ( could be a universal squid or anything really). In the sense that one has such a concept it exists in that mind(s) and nowhere else. If a man dies then his mental universe dies with him because there is no lifeboat for his ideas to escape into after the blood flow to the brain has stopped. If you know otherwise then you need to explain how life can persist after the body expires.
Your example of gravity as being real yet immaterial is disproved by your own words. You say: "Technically, it is an essential form of matter-energy" Which side are you on? You just shot down your own argument.

As for theorems and natural laws which we discover; of course I'm not saying those laws spring from our brain. Only our recognition and understanding of them. Another willful misunderstanding.
Another example:
You say:- "If the idea that s=0,5at^2 or that the interior angles of a plane triangle sum to 180 deg did not exist until someone wrote them down, both triangles and the motion of faling bodies must have been very peculiar prior to the invention of writing."
As if  I suggested that the actual laws of geometry do not exist until we discover them. Yes, and it's well known that apples always used to fall up into the sky until Newton discovered gravity.
Then:- "If our ideas are simply neurons and "brain chemistry," then none of them have any necessary truth value.  In a purely material universe there are no values, let alone truth values"  You say 'simply' as if to say 'merely', yet our ideas are often very powerful and valuable - wonders of nature, even. They may or may not be true. Luckily we are smart enough to test for that (now that we are no longer fooled by religious dogma).
You say: "Dawkins recognized this, but then asserted [illogically] that it was "up to us" to create those values.  But how we could do so when we ourselves are nothing but matter animated by external forces lacking values?"
How hard can it be to create our values? We've done it before, we can do it again. And what we are is exactly what we were when we thought we were created. That is to say, homo sapiens produced by 3 billion years of  unbroken evolution. Capable of exploring our solar system, building great cities and discovering the meaning of life, the universe and everything (perhaps).
You say:- "The Latin word we translate as "soul" is anima, which means "life."  Thus, to ask whether a man or a cat or a petunia has a soul is to ask whether it is alive."
Indeed. Animated matter strikes me as a good description of life. So why do we talk of soul as meaning some kind of mystical repository of immortal self.?
You say:- "Materialism is inadequate to account for matter.  Both sodium and chlorine are composed of the same parts: protons, neutrons, electrons.  But what makes one a flammable metal and the other a poisonous gas is the number and arrangement of those parts; that is, the form of the atom."
What part of this do you call inadequate? This sounds adequate to me, so far as it goes.  
You also invoke Platonic ideals and metaphysics, as if out of desperation. We've moved on a little since Plato at least in Biology, which is what this is really about.
Appeals to metaphysics is like the theologist saying to the biologist - 'Hey get off my lawn!'


 

Stephena55,

Before you conclude that the elimination of religion would be a universal good, I hope you take a moment to ponder the fact that during the Twentieth Century, a time when religion was at its lowest ebb, more human beings were killed than during all previous wars and social upheavals put together. Communism alone killed some 100 million, Nazism racked up a good 50 million and neither of these philosophies (which created their own societal "values" remember), were at all religious. It is certainly correct to criticize religion - it needs it constantly, but I would be circumspect about cheering on its demise.

Rebecca, before I go, I must point out that your historical facts are all wrong, both in number of victims and attachment to Christianity. Hitler was a Catholic and his army was definitely Christian. What do you think made them kill the Jews? But that is not the point. The question is, or should be, is religion true, not is it useful.

Mike,

Try crawling into the right millenium with Looking for Spinoza by Demasio, or How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. Stephen is right, Plato is a little dated.

"Hitler was a Catholic and his army was definitely Christian."

Good God, do our young people know that little? Or think so little?

This is neither the time nor place to deliver a lecture on the Nazi movement, but suffice to say, that were you to take a few years in order to study that history, I doubt your enthusiam for social Darwinism would remain as keen.

JHJeffrey,

Sorry for mistaking you for a hot-headed youngster. I apologize.

It was only a matter of time, I guess, but here we are again.  From "Hitler was a Christian", "religions cause the world's problems", right down to the willy waggling of age and qualifications.  And just as it was getting interesting...

The world, I must inform you, is materialistic. The mind, as Steven pointed out, is nothing more than the energy systems that operate within the brain. PTP, but you need to get your mind around this. It is not nearly as scary as you have been (mis)led to believe.

Dear JHJeffrey, I do have my mind around that, I simply think it's wrong. (I hope you will allow me.)  A better model of reality, it seems to me, would include mind as a reality, not merely as an illusion as per your model. I would also pose that mind is the primary "mover," rather than matter. I'm sure you are familiar with the Allegory of the Cave - just because we cannot see the cause of the shadows, doesn't mean that cause does not exist and the shadows are all that exist and therefore they must have created themselves. The funny thing is. we do perceive mind, we just pretend that our minds our uniquely ours and not simply a portion of Mind,,or the perceived interaction with Mind through the mechanism of the brain.

stephena55�
[Mike] has taken my statement that our ideas are intangible until they are written in a material form to mean that the actual reality which the ideas refer to cannot exist until written down.� He must know this was not my meaning.

Most every materialist flinches when the obvious reality of immaterial entities is pointed out.� Even Dawkins "memes," if they were real, would be examples.� I am always curious, when folks say that only material bodies have real existence, if they have thought through what material bodies are and what they are not,�

I am sure that Richard Dawkins is not an example of a nihilist.

I think you are still confusing philosophical nihilism with political nihilism.�
+�+�+
The history of the planet in the last 2000 years has been remarkable for the great number of wars fought.

Even more remarkable in the past 500 years - and they have grown steadily more destructive.�

Perhaps a belief in the transcendendent is a necessary crutch for hapless footsoldiers with short life-expectancy.

It is doubtful that such beliefs motivated Pompey's legions.� Most footsoldiers have fought for things like loot, glory, defense of their homes, and so on.� The only transcendental religions were Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.� I'm not sure how many footsoldiers cared a rat's patootie if their deity were outside of space-time or not.�

We all know how the lure of an erotic afterlife worked to motivate the minions and descendants of Mohammed in battle.

I take it you don't know many muslims.�

A quote describing how every part of the body is replaced by new cells, piecemeal over a period of years.
Does this mean that our minds and bodies have no real existence?� Of course not. Our existence is continual, unbroken, and the renewal of worn-out parts is not a threat to our identity, which persists through amputations, false teeth, heart transplants, everything but� a brain transplant.

There are no brain transplants, so we do not know empirically what would happen as a result.� Let's not belief things by blind faith, without any proof.�

As for the rest, the significance is this: if "our existence is continual" despite the wholesale turnover of our matter, then our minds cannot be simply matter.� That is what Dawkins meant when he said in this connection that "you" were not there at the remembered event, because the atoms that made up "you" had been exchanged.� Dennett certainly holds to eliminativism, and has said so directly.� But then Dennett is a philosopher and Dawkins is not.� He simply does not follow the consequences.�
+�+�+
There are abstract things that may be real, like your justice or 'snow is white' or a 'universal rabbit'....in the sense that one has such a concept it exists in that mind(s) and nowhere else. If a man dies then his mental universe dies with him because there is no lifeboat for his ideas

But it is quite clear that these things exist independently of any mind.� If they were only patterns in a brain, then they could not possibly be the same ideas in your brain as in JHJ's brain.� Because any material entity instantiated in two distinct collections of matter comprises two distinct entities.� "Rabbit" in this matter and "rabbit" in that matter are two different rabbits.� But the proposition "snow is white" in your brain and the proposition "Schnee ist weiss" in Hermann's brain is the same proposition.� Therefore, they cannot be material entities.�

Your example of gravity as being real yet immaterial is disproved by your own words. You say: "Technically, it is an essential form of matter-energy" Which side are you on? You just shot down your own argument.

My apologies.� I wrote unclearly.� I did not mean that gravity is a kind of matter-energy, but that it is a "form," rather than "matter."� The distinction may be seen in the plane triangle.� The matter is "figure", the form is "three-sided."� We can abstract the form of three-sidedness from the particulars of any concrete individual triangle.� These triangles may have other forms applied to them: white, for example, if it is drawn with chalk.� But "white" is not essential to a triangle.� It can be a triangle even if cut out of green felt, or drawn clumsily with a pencil.� These forms are called "accidents."� But if the figure is not three-sided, then it is not a triangle; so that form is called "essential."�

Thus, gravity is not matter, but a form that comes to matter or is immanent in matter.� It is one of four defining forms, the others being electromagnetism, nuclear, and weak.�

How hard can it be to create our values?

Very hard, if you believe a) matter has no inherent values and b) the mind is nothing but matter.� All three statements cannot be true.� Nihilists, of course, deny that there are objective values in the universe and tend to talk about "blind" forces and "pitiless, uncaring" universes.�

Animated matter strikes me as a good description of life. So why do we talk of soul as meaning some kind of mystical repository of immortal self.?

I�have not done so.� I theorize that it is because most people have no more accurtate a notion of the soul than they have of the atom.� Most folks think the latter consists of little bb's spinning around a cluster of balls.�

+�+�+
You also invoke Platonic ideals and metaphysics, as if out of desperation.

Actually, I have invoked nothing of the sort.� Dawkins has, only he calls them "memes" and seems to think they are physically real.�
#######################

JHJEFFERY

Dawkins may not be much on philosophy, but I am. Your last post is straight out of Plato for Dummies. I don't have the time or inclination to correct all of that, but maybe a survey course at your local college would help.

Yet you are wrong.� That was not Plato's theory of forms at all.� (Although as I've said, Dawkins memes are very Platoinic.)� Perhaps you ought to brush up on that book you recommend.�

Leave your religion outside of the classroom.

Which religion?� Outside of which classroom?

#

I must point out that your historical facts are all wrong, both in number of victims and attachment to Christianity. Hitler was a Catholic and his army was definitely Christian. What do you think made them kill the Jews?

Race Science and racial hygeine.�

There are also some excellent histories of the period that may give you a non-mythical understanding.� I have in mind Lukacs, Evans, and Kershaw.�

The inscription on the belt buckles of the Nazi army translates as "God is with us."

It read "Gott mit uns."� It also means "God be with us."� That was the inscription on the belt buckles of the Imperial German Army and of the Weimar Republic long before the National Socialists came to power.� The Party did not have the mojo to force the Wehrmacht to change it.� For the Party attitude toward religion, see the song of the Hitler Youth in Evan's book The Third Reich in Power.�

The religion of Mr. Signorelli, "Mike" and yourself show throughout your thinking. I hope you don't think it doesn't.

My goodness!� Is that like "Jew physics" that the "Aryans" saw in Einstein's work?� I suppose it was the contrast between the ad hominems and vituperartion of the First Responders here, and the attempt at reason on my part.� It's a give-away every time.� But OTOH, two of the most trenchant critics of Dawkins' meme mythos -- Stephen Gould, David Stove or Mary Midgley -- are atheists.�

Here is Midgley on memes, after Dawkins has written "A cultural trait may have evolved in the way that it has, simply because it is advantageous to itself":

So, apparently, if we want to study (say) dances, we should stop asking what dances do for people and should ask only what they do for themselves. We shall no longer ask to what particular human tastes and needs they appeal, how people use them, how they are related to the other satisfactions of life, what feelings they express or what needs cause people to change them, Instead, presumably, we shall ask why dances, if they wanted a host, decided to parasitize people rather then elephants or octopuses. This is not an easy question to handle for dances, but it will be still harder for scientific theories. Dawkins explicitly includes them as memes, so that the proper way to enquire about them seems to be, not to investigate their truth or any other advantage which they might have for the people using them, but to study the use they make of people. Here, to be frank, Dawkins blathers, and no wonder.

http://web.archive.org/web/20051031044810/http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/ articles/article.php?id=14
+�+�+
The mind, as Steven pointed out, is nothing more than the energy systems that operate within the brain.

Whatever that may mean.� How exactly did he "point it out"?� Energy systems.� A suitably vague charism of faith.� But let's not try to get too empirical by pinning that down any more specifically. Pinker is entitled to his own religious beliefs, I suppose; though I don't much cotton to rejecting the idea of human dignity.� Too much of liberal democracy would go with it.� In factc, I am not too enamored of the neo-Social Darwinists. in general.� We didn't have much luck with them the last time around.�

Hey, where'd everybody go?

Rebecca,

"Before you conclude that the elimination of religion would be a universal good, I hope you take a moment to ponder the fact that during the Twentieth Century, a time when religion was at its lowest ebb, more human beings were killed than during all previous wars and social upheavals put together. Communism alone killed some 100 million,
Nazism racked up a good 50 million and neither of these philosophies (which created their own societal "values" remember), were at all religious. It is certainly correct to criticize religion - it needs it constantly,but I would be circumspect about cheering on its demise."

I like your last sentence and can agree with you. I have more of a problem with Islam than with other faiths, I see it as an aggressive malignant form which presents great challenges to our open Western societies.
As others have noted, no-one ever went to war in the name of atheism. On the other hand Stalinism and Fascism, Maoism, Kim il-Sung and the Khmer Rouge are all absolutist, totalitarian and modelled on the same lines as monotheism: eg surrender one's will to the service of the
supreme leader, adore that leader uncritically, obey him unquestioningly and be prepared to kill and die for him as if for a noble/sacred cause.
In light of these observations, and speaking from the viewpoint of an inhabitant of a tiny crowded island in a world of growing population, dwindling resources and resurgent extreme religious radicalism, I turn to the hard factual reality of science.

We need a dose of reality.

If supernatural faith systems can be rigorously and convincingly debunked following acceptance of the findings of scientists applying impartial scientific method in the process then one major cause of conflict may be neutralised.
Incidentally your casualty figures do not include those for the Muslim conquest of India. K.S. Lal estimates these in the hundreds of millions.

 

Mike,

You still maintain that Dawkins is nihilistic as in: 'the denial of all real existence or the possibility of an objective basis for truth'

This is not stated or implied anywhere in his work. Why have you not quoted any of his work to this effect? All we have is your bald assertion.
The most we can infer from the work of RD on the mind and on life is that these things can be described in strange and surprising ways in the light
of new discoveries which may make us think about new definitions.
Reality of mind is not in question. Only the reality of God is questionable, and that because there is now hardly any role left for him.
You say: "Most every materialist flinches when the obvious reality of immaterial entities is pointed out.  Even Dawkins "memes," if they were real, would be examples.  I am always curious, when folks say that only material bodies have real existence, if they have thought through what material bodies are and what they are not,"

You seem to have difficulty with the concepts of abstract nouns, concepts and other non-material things vs actual material objects. Also the difference between 'something' and 'nothing'. Your persistent mystification of the mundane cannot conceal the pure simplicity beneath.

You say: "It is doubtful that such beliefs motivated Pompey's legions.  Most footsoldiers have fought for things like loot, glory, defense of their homes, and so on.  The only transcendental religions were Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  I'm not sure how many footsoldiers cared a rat's patootie if their deity were outside of space-time or not."

Pompey's legions too had their Gods. Soldiers fight for many reasons; the prospects of glory, martyrdom and heavenly rewards are still significant  among them.

Then: "I take it you don't know many muslims. "

Try reading Ibn Ishaq 'Life of Mohammed' for countless vivid examples of this. Also the various hadith collections.

And: "if "our existence is continual" despite the wholesale turnover of our matter, then our minds cannot be simply matter. "

Well the clever thing is that every new cell that is created to replace an old worn-out cell is endowed with it's own copy of the DNA molecule containing all the coded information required to continue the work of the old cell. The process must be imperfect because memory lapses and we deteriorate with age. Anyway, there is nothing simple about matter and no reason why organic computers called brains should be made of anything other than matter. What else is there?
Otherwise you continue with more mystification of the mundane, all to prove that there is something supernatural going on that is mysteriously invisible, undetectable and isn't made of anything.
Sounds like nothing to me.

 

Dear Stephena55,

I'm sure Mike will have more to say, but I would just like to take a moment and compliment you on keeping your cool and actually engaging in conversation. You seem to be the only one of all the initial posters who has done so. So, well done and all the best from New English Review.

Rebecca

Dear Rebecca,

Thank you.

I enjoyed the debate. I take it you are still of the same mind?

On a lighter note, this'll make you smile:

What do you think of this Christian site which I found courtesy of a Jihad Watch story :-

http://www.promiseofgod.com/pumpkin/

"It is like being a pumpkin.
God picks you from the patch,
brings you in, and washes all the dirt off of you.

Then he cuts off the top and scoops out all the yucky stuff.

He removes the seeds of doubt, hate, greed, etc.,
and then He carves you a new smiling face
and puts His light inside of you to shine for all the world to see."

I had never looked at it like this before.

This was passed on to me from another pumpkin.
Now, it is your turn to pass it to one of your pumpkin friends.

Sums it all up nicely!

I'll second Rebecca's comment.  You alone of the horde of ill-reasoned ad hominems have tried to engage the topic reasonably, although with a tendency we all have to go off on side issues. 

+ + +

I turn to the hard factual reality of science.

As indeed you should -- in those areas where natural science is competent.  But science can only make observations and measurements of the course of syphilis; it does not tell us that treatment should be withheld from black men used as study objects in the Tuskegee experiments.

+ + + 

If supernatural faith systems can be rigorously and convincingly debunked following acceptance of the findings of scientists applying impartial scientific method in the process…

The methods of science are no more suited to the evaluation of “faith systems” than they are to art or justice or other things that are not matters of precise measurement of material bodies.  To suppose that "unprejudiced science" can define items of thought and culture like species of flora verges on magical thinking.

The idea that we can recreate the rigor of the real sciences by imitating the outward forms of science, wearing white lab coats, and using pseudo-scientific jargon [like “memes”] to talk about objects whose very definition is already a matter of interpretration and prejudice is rank cargo cultism. 

+ + +

…then one major cause of conflict may be neutralised.

Not really.  If they can fight over a tuppence difference in the tariff on lace, they can fight over anything.  No one has ever gone to war over the doctrine of transubstantiation or charged the barricades crying out the homoousia.  To seize Silesia or Nanking, yes.  But no one has fought because of religion, any more than the Americans fought the Japanese because they were “yellow-faced, slanty-eyed, buck-toothed bastards.”  We must divorce the rhetoric of conflict from the empirical reality. 

+ + +

Reality of mind is not in question. Only the reality of God is questionable, and that because there is now hardly any role left for him.

If you say so.  I wasn’t talking about God.  He seems to be on your mind, though.  You seem to think that God is supposed to be a material efficient cause in rivalry with other efficient causes.  This is a common error made by the likes of Behe and Dawkins.  But I have been arguing only that “memes” are pseudoscientific claptrap.  Compare the “discovery” of “memes” to Mendel’s discovery of genes, or Ampere’s study of conducting bodies, or even Maxwell’s study of dielectric bodies.  That was real science, with real empirical bases. 

+ + +

You still maintain that Dawkins is nihilistic This is not stated or implied anywhere in his work.

OK.  Let’s call him a philosophical egoist, as Midgley does.  [But do not confuse this with egoTist.]  It may be only that he is incoherent in his reasoning.  A friend of mine once said that Dawkins is a Calvinist preacher.  

+ + +

You seem to have difficulty with the concepts of abstract nouns, concepts and other non-material things vs actual material objects.

I’ve only pointed out that they a) have real existence and b) are non-material.  Hence, not everything real is material.  I suspect from your phrasing that you are a nominalist; but nominalism is internally incoherent.  These things are not merely names, but realities existing independently of human minds. 

+ + +

Pompey's legions too had their Gods. Soldiers fight for many reasons; the prospects of glory, martyrdom and heavenly rewards are still significant among them.

Moderns often project modern, transcendental beliefs onto the ancient Roman culti.  Pompey’s soldiers were not motivated by the hope of heavenly rewards – check out the Roman concept of the afterlife – and no self-respecting Roman was interested in martyrdom. 

The Christians did hold out the hope of heavenly rewards; but they held them out to everyone.  The Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches formally recognize “saints,” and those few soldiers among were not recognized for their soldiering (cf. the Theban Legion).  More typical is Jean Baptist de la Salle, who came up with the notion of systematic education of working class children, an idea that has caught on even among the non-religious. 

Soldiers needed assurance that they would not lose heaven by killing their fellow man.  In the Middle Ages, soldiers and knights had to do penance after a battle, even in a just cause, and there were rules to define a justified war and proper soldierly conduct.  (Rules gradually discarded during the Modern Age.) 

+ + +

How does this ensure the continuance of identity?  Identity is a property of the whole organism and is thus not encoded in the DNA for any particular cell. 

Suppose I clone myself, would the clone be me just because his cells contain all the same “coded information” as mine?  [In fact, the genome alone is insufficient information, as has been demonstrated scientifically.]   

+ + +

 there is … no reason why organic computers called brains should be made of anything other than matter. What else is there?

a) Neither mind nor brain are “computers.”  We use the metaphor only because computers are today’s sexy new tech.  In the 19th century, the imagery was mechanical and the mind was imagined as a “machine.”  (And we still use 19th century metaphors, like “genetic engineering.”)  But Searle showed that mind cannot be reduced to computation. 

b) What else is there?  There is also form.  “Every thing is some thing.”  Form is not reducible to matter; nor matter to form.  And it is form that gives properties to matter.  As Poincare said, a pile of bricks is not a house.  Sodium and chlorine atoms are made of the same matter: protons, electrons, neutrons.  But their forms - the number and arrangement of the parts - give them different “emergent” properties: e.g., metal or gas.  Whole things have properties not explicable from their components' properties. 

+ + +

all to prove that there is something supernatural going on that is mysteriously invisible, undetectable and isn't made of anything.

I haven’t tried to prove anything supernatural.  I’ve only noted that not everything real is made of matter.  They are no more supernatural than justice or art or person; no more [or less!] mysterious than quantum mechanics.  Nor are they undetectable.  "Everything known is known through the senses."  It just doesn’t stop with the senses, but passes on to the reason. 

Mike,

Thank you, too. I appreciate it.

I get a sense of backpedalling going on...?

"As indeed you should (turn to hard reality)-- in those areas where natural science is competent.  But science can only make observations and measurements of the course of syphilis; it does not tell us that treatment should be withheld from black men used as study objects in the Tuskegee experiments."

---Yes, that was shameful, and I see what you mean about side issues.

"The methods of science are no more suited to the evaluation of “faith systems” than they are to art or justice or other things that are not matters of precise measurement of material bodies.  To suppose that "unprejudiced science" can define items of thought and culture like species of flora verges on magical thinking.

The idea that we can recreate the rigor of the real sciences by imitating the outward forms of science, wearing white lab coats, and using pseudo-scientific jargon [like “memes”] to talk about objects whose very definition is already a matter of interpretration and prejudice is rank cargo cultism."


---Biology, as a real science, is the study of life forms, not of faith. However it is evident that study of one subject can often cast light on another subject. The validity of the idea of memes as replicators seems established as it has been taken up in other disciplines, but is not central in biology as I understand it.

"But no one has fought because of religion"

---except for the crusades; those wars commanded by God in the Old Testament, eg - (When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou; Deut.7:1) 

2And when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them.;

...... and the scores of Islamic wars in the prophets own lifetime, or the hundreds more since then? Don't they count?


"I wasn’t talking about God.  He seems to be on your mind, though"


----I was being pre-emptive.
 
 
"OK.  Let’s call him (RD) a philosophical egoist, (not nihilist)  as Midgley does.  [But do not confuse this with egoTist.]  It may be only that he is incoherent in his reasoning.  A friend of mine once said that Dawkins is a Calvinist preacher."


----I just call him a biologist - and a good egg.


"Moderns often project modern, transcendental beliefs onto the ancient Roman culti.  Pompey’s soldiers were not motivated by the hope of heavenly rewards – check out the
Roman concept of the afterlife – and no self-respecting Roman was interested in martyrdom. "

----Very advanced, those Romans. They were so well trained and armed that it was generally their enemies who needed to resort to some justification for being slaughtered.


"The Christians did hold out the hope of heavenly rewards; but they held them out to everyone. "


----How very generous of them.

 
"How does this (copying DNA) ensure the continuance of identity?  Identity is a property of the whole organism and is thus not encoded in the DNA for any particular cell."

----Well DNA IS the identity, and as copying is known to occur for DNA so why not for other information stored in the brain to preserve memory. Note to self: find out more.

"Suppose I clone myself, would the clone be me just because his cells contain all the same “coded information” as mine?  [In fact, the genome alone is insufficient information, as has been demonstrated scientifically.] "  

---- a: no.   b: You mean like it's been proved that bees wings are insufficient for flight?

"a) Neither mind nor brain are “computers.”  We use the metaphor only because computers are today’s sexy new tech.  In the 19th century, the imagery was mechanical and the mind was imagined as a “machine.”  (And we still use 19th century metaphors, like “genetic engineering.”)  But Searle showed that mind cannot be reduced to computation. "

---- Right.

"b) What else is there?  There is also form.  “Every thing is some thing.”  Form is not reducible to matter; nor matter to form.  And it is form that gives properties to matter.  As
Poincare said, a pile of bricks is not a house.  Sodium and chlorine atoms are made of the same matter: protons, electrons, neutrons.  But their forms - the number and
arrangement of the parts - give them different “emergent” properties: e.g., metal or gas.  Whole things have properties not explicable from their components' properties. "

----All basic science. Nothing transcendental here. No mind with a capital M. No substance other than matter.

" I haven’t tried to prove anything supernatural.  I’ve only noted that not everything real is made of matter.  They are no more supernatural than justice or art or person; no more [or less!] mysterious than quantum mechanics.  Nor are they undetectable.  "Everything known is known through the senses."  It just doesn’t stop with the senses, but passes on to the reason. "

---- So there are material things, and abstract things.... and.... that's all folks!

Thank you and good night.

Biology, as a real science, is the study of life forms, not of faith. However it is evident that study of one subject can often cast light on another subject. The validity of the idea of memes as replicators seems established as it has been taken up in other disciplines, but is not central in biology as I understand it.

In what other “disciplines” have memes been “taken up”?  Since they have no real existence and are incoherent in principle, it can only be on the Internet that they have become popular.  When I first read of them in The Selfish Gene and later in Calder’s Timescape, the concept looked intriguing.  I even wrote of them myself.  But there was no “there” there.  You cannot say anything interesting or useful about culture in meme-talk that you cannot say more fruitfully about “ideas” or “concepts.”  The attraction of “meme” is that is gives an aura of “talking scientifical-like” about these matters.  Dawkins’ notion that memes “use” people to replicate themselves is just plain loopy; as Midgley showed by using a concrete example – dance.  Lots of things about X sound good in the abstract but fail when you insert something real for X.  

Your statement that “study of one subject can often…” is a case in point.  It matters a lot what the subject is and what light it casts.  Hydraulics was very helpful to electrical engineers.  Voltage was analogous to a waterfall; current to current; and so on.  But one should not plug one’s toaster into a nearby stream.  But both hydraulics and electrics dealt with real things.  In the pair “memes and genes” one of them is totally made up.  An act of faith, so to speak. 

+ + +

"How does this (copying DNA) ensure the continuance of identity?  Identity is a property of the whole organism and is thus not encoded in the DNA for any particular cell”

----Well DNA IS the identity, and as copying is known to occur for DNA so why not for other information stored in the brain to preserve memory. Note to self: find out more.

DNA is a molecule.  It contains =in a manner of speaking= the “information” that the organism uses to construct itself.  Outside the organism, DNA does nothing, or we’d have clones growing in every crime lab in the country.  DNA enables the construction of various proteins and these in turn build various organs of the body.  Magic is the belief that material objects have powers beyond their natures [i.e., super-natural.]  To suppose that material molecules somehow generate something non-material – the Identity – is to cross over from the empirical to the mystical woo-woo. 
+ + +

"Suppose I clone myself, would the clone be me just because his cells contain all the same “coded information” as mine? 

---- a: no.

Then copying the information in the DNA does NOT copy the Identity. 

[In fact, the genome alone is insufficient information, as has been demonstrated scientifically.]

---- b: You mean like it's been proved that bees wings are insufficient for flight?

The field of epigenetics arose when it became evident that the organism did not build itself from the DNA alone, but from the DNA in context with its environment.  One typical experiment: Two cloned populations of helmeted water fleas were raised in separate tanks.  In one doped with the chemical signals of a predator fish, the fleas developed their characteristic helmet.  In the other tank, lacking fish signals, the fleas did not develop the helmet.  The DNA/genome was identical for the two populations.  Therefore, the DNA/genome alone is insufficient to determine the phenotype.  When I say something has been “demonstrated scientifically,” I mean with empirical data, not by mathematical or computer models. 

+ + +

"b) What else is there?  There is also form.  “Every thing is some thing.”  Form is not reducible to matter; nor matter to form.  And it is form that gives properties to matter.  …  Whole things have properties not explicable from their components' properties. "

----All basic science. Nothing transcendental here. No mind with a capital M. No substance other than matter.

a) I never claimed anything transcendental, whatever you mean by that.  I said matter was not everything.

b) Modern science claims to have dispensed with formal causes (and final causes), so “form” is not “basic science.”  Of course, science denies formality and finality while at the same time relying on them.  Scientists are babes in the philosophical woods.

c) Matter alone is not a substance.  Form alone is not a substance, and neither is it matter.  A substance is a compound of matter and form.  But the matter need not be physical.  A novel comprises a subject matter and a form of story-telling.  A triangle comprises a plane figure and three-sidedness.  A living being comprises a body and soul.  But soul [anima] is not a substance – it is not a “ghost in the machine” – it is only whatever it is that it means for a body to be alive.  [A dead petunia is made up of the same matter as a live one.  But it behaves very differently.  Clearly something is different, and it is not its matter.]  It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that the mind is a power of a particular kind of soul [form] and has no more material existence than does the “three-sidedness” of triangles.  In the same manner, gravity is a power of the form of inanimate matter.  Like mind, gravity is not itself a substance and not itself composed of matter, even though it is embodied in a material object. 

The trap of Baconian science was to suppose that by subordinating physics to mathematics, the conclusions of physics would be as absolutely certain as the conclusions of mathematics.  But this also led to the problem that “if the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”  The project of Bacon, Descartes, and the rest meant that only those aspects of nature that could be measured could be studied; but this quickly mutated in to only those aspects of nature that could be measured should be studied; and from there to the notion that anything and everything could be studied with the hammer of science.  That is, everything was a nail: a measurable property of a material body. 

Since science could not measure sound and touch and smell and so on, they were dismissed as “subjective” and were said to take place only in the mind.  (cf. Galileo, The Assayer)  They focused on waves in the air rather than sound, because compression waves could be measured.  But all the analysis of compression waves and vibrating strings and reeds and such will not tell you what it is like to listen to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony.  The whole essence of subjective experience is that it IS subjective.  To equate the pain with the nerve impulses is to equate the journey with the footprint.  See, e.g., http://www.artboy.info/teach/reference/bat/ThomasNagel.pdf

I don’t know why you think mind should be spelled with a capital M. 

---- So there are material things, and abstract things.... and.... that's all folks!

All reasoning begins in the senses, but it does not end there.  It may be possible to reason one’s way outside the physical, not only to the mathematical but to the metaphysical.  You lumped both these ways of knowing into “abstract things.”  But while a metaphysical proof has more in common with a mathematical proof than either proof has with a scientific demonstration, metaphysics isn’t the same as mathematics.  Lumping “all those things that are not physical” into a single category does not necessarily define a coherent object of study. 

For four hundred years we have been sweeping the qualia under the rug of the mind without worrying about their ontological status.  The effort to define the mind as a purely physical brain, is in effect a declaration that there never was a rug – so all the things previously swept under it are now totally unaccounted for. 

The ear cannot hear itself.  The eye cannot see itself.  Perhaps the mind cannot conceive itself. 

Rebecca,

Open that mind wide and watch and listen who really  understands

Mike,

Just a few odd thoughts.
 
"The ear cannot hear itself.  The eye cannot see itself.  Perhaps the mind cannot conceive itself.  "

----Well perhaps if the ear were to make a sound? When I waggle my ears I can hear a faint noise. Does that count? When I look in the mirror I see my eyes. My mind, such as it is, is not inconceivable to me.

"Suppose I clone myself, would the clone be me just because his cells contain all the same “coded information” as mine?

---- a: no.

Then copying the information in the DNA does NOT copy the Identity."

----- In the sense that one can make a copy of an orginal, they can be identical but separate entities. Like identical twins. If this is supposed to be a 'gotcha' to my earlier point, then you seem to have  mistaken my meaning. Copying the DNA does not copy the identity in the sense that the clone would be you, merely that you would have a copy of you complete with a copy of your identity.

"[In fact, the genome alone is insufficient information, as has been demonstrated scientifically.]"

------You illustrate this with an experiment which shows waterfleas expressing or suppressing  different genes in response to their environment.
This is interesting but not unusual. Many animals are capable of 'switching' genes on or off according to various stimuli. 'The Ancestors Tale' has some more on this. Your implication that outside information is required apart from that in the DNA molecule is misleading as all the necessary information is contained therein - except for the interaction with the environment.

Your ruminations on form and matter are all very well but a bit of a red herring. When you say that not everything that is real is material you seem to be about to reveal some great hidden truth, - not something that is already well known and understood, which is only about the shape or arrangement of matter after all.

"Scientists are babes in the philosophical woods"

----It's tempting to say that er, - philosophers are babes in the scientific woods, but that would be unworthy. So I won't. Honest.

One general remark: there seems to be an underlying tendency in the comments here. I am referring to the implicit idea that mind, life, intelligence, the flowers and fruits of intelligence and that rare human quality, genius, are all too fine to arise out of anything so impure and grubby as just 'matter', hence there must be more to life. Hence the inference that materialism is reduction of greatness to baseness.
This to me is to look through the wrong end of the telescope. Since Newton revealed the enormous energy contained within matter ( one Kg of any matter is enough to power a 100 watt lightbulb for about 28.5 million years)*  we should stand in awe of the power and majesty of simple matter. Nuclear and quantum physics are revealing ever more extraordinary details about
the nature of our universe that make the old religious and philosophical ideas seem quaint and archaic.
It really is a far more exciting prospect to inquire into the progress of ideas at the scientific cutting edge than to cling to the past. Just think, once we forget about God (who always stands in the way, because he can never be explained), there is a real possibility of seeing a solution to those big remaining questions.
*http://www.btinternet.com/~j.doyle/SR/Emc2/Equation.htm


JHJ,
I might 'see' you over at RDNet (I pose as 'Inquisador' there occasionally)

 

Correction,

For Newton, read Einstein.

Rebecca, Mike,

Maybe you too might like to cross swords with some of those at RDNet.

Pay them back for their incivility here and have some entertainment.

I wonder if anyone is still reading this thread?

I'm still reading this thread...

It did get interesting again, thank you guys and gals.  Though I suspect it will still end / has ended in the same mire, usually caused by lack of clarification in initial definitions.  I forget the name of that chap who always, in discussions, said, "It depends what you mean by..."  Smart chap.

I do think the view that science has somehow done away with, or at least made obsolete, philosophy (and, by extension, metaphysics) is naive at best.

I also wonder why I'm being prompted to feel "awe" and "majesty" over matter because it can power a lightbulb for a really long time (relatively speaking), any more than I should over a cinnamon bun that looks like Mother Teresa.

Hi Bigland,

I too think philosophy survives the new ideas of modern science; surely it is informed by them. All that does not survive are the ideas, whether old or new, that are disproved by science.

Maybe it's just me but I can't help being more amazed by the implications of Einsteins theories than by some random scorch-marks on a bun.

Still, I hate the thought that I'm so arrogant as to dictate what other people should be inspired by.

That would be aweful.  Or not.

I'm loathe to pick up Mike's arguments in his absence, in case he returns and finds the debate isn't where you and he left it!  Having said that, every comment I think of writing just ends up as a paraphrase of what Mike wrote in his last comment anyway.

I'll reiterate my point about definitions though.  The thought experiment about cloning a person and duplicating "identity" is a case in point.  I think Mike's usage means, if identity is truly duplicated, the cloned "person" would have to exist in both bodies simultaneously.  My impression of your usage is, the clone would share all memories and sensations of the cloned body up to the moment of the cloning, but thereafter be a separate entity.

Maybe it's just me but I can't help being more amazed by the implications of Einsteins theories than by some random scorch-marks on a bun.

But its not really random (as, I think, nothing is).  Given the exact same inputs, the universe would create a Teresa bun every time.  In fact, make a kilo of them, and you could power your lightbulb for 2.4 million years and grin at the simulacra.  What gadget shop couldn't come up with a slogan for that product?!

I doubt that Mike will return here now (busy licking his wounds).  In case he does, I was just kidding, Mike.

I agree with you about the problem of definition of terms. That was something I noted here on 13th March. I thought then that the ambiguity of different meanings was being used to fudge the debate. Maybe I was guilty of that as well.
It is interesting to consider the identity question. I did interpret Mike's remarks on this in the same way as you do, that a cloned person would have to exist in two bodies at once. Not sure what else could be meant, though the idea is surely not tenable is it?
This seems to be a slightly desperate attempt to shore up his non-materialistic agenda. Like other similar notions it only appeals if you overlook the central inconsistency; that no two entities can be the same (in that sense). They can be perfectly similar or identical but that is all. Unless the two are occupying the same time and place, which would be impossible, then they must be separate entities.

This debate has taught me one thing,- that however reasonable and intelligent a person may be, religious belief acts as a fatal flaw which vitiates against pure logical reasoning. Once a leap of faith has been made and the principle of the acceptance of unprovable phenomena is made, then what is to prevent ever more dubious assumptions?  I claim no superiority for myself in any way. I may be wrong about many things, but I believe an open mind, unhindered by blind faith is better than some kind of unfounded belief as a starting point in any inquiry.

Your marvellous Mother Theresa buns might well be possible as you suggest. They would no doubt sell well for a time, but when the novelty wore off - well, the lightbulb would still be burning. (In theory).
My suggestion for a slogan -

'Repent! buy the sinner-man bun, for an indulgence you can afford.'

Happy Easter to all you 'NERds'!