Evolved Self Publishing

With the release of “Expelled…” and the resulting reviews I’m turned off to the debate over natural selection. The issue is universally seen as involving only origins, not at all the unhappy implications of natural selection for free will.

I’m turning my attention away from attacking natural selection to replacing it. I plan to repeat Descartes’ investigation of reality but with evolution in place of God as the dominant explanatory principle.

The main problem with the modern world view is not natural selection itself but the lack of alternatives for it. The modern world view has many gaps, something like natural selection is the inevitable result–a gap-stopper. The problem is not any one particular gap-stopper, but the existence of the gaps themselves.

Here’s my new focus–what question is religion the wrong answer to, that evolution might answer better?

Please let me know if this sounds promising?

I’m involved in two excellent discussions re the movie “Expelled…”

First, a discussion linked to from England’s New Scientist magazine’s web-site home page which is drawing a fine caliber of argument, though predominantly physicalist.

Second, website of the Acton Institute, a sort-of Christian think-tank. Here, the physicalists are met with general puzzlement. Their point of view does not carry automatic authority, they are being challenged, “do you stand for all of science?”

I think evolutionists are starting to become a bit intimidated at the prospect of the release of a movie that may expose to public view the excesses of Darwin’ bulldogs. Interesting to me, no one on the New Scientist board will distance themselves from charges of “liar” and “pig ignorant” hurled at non -Darwinists in the discussion. I am still trying to get someone to suggest those remarks be retracted.

I’ve not experienced fair discussion of Darwinism on online boards before. For a sample of what it’s usually like, see the amazon science board in relation to my “Save Our Selves…” book, a followup discussion there in my absence, and the review of my book then posted by one of those present.

That sort of a thing is disgrace to science, matched only by the acquiescence to it of evolutionists in general.

I used to be an epiphenomenalist. Before that I was regular just like you probably, unless you’re an evolutionary scientist.

Regular–what was that like? I can’t remember. I do remember what it was like being an epiphenomenalist. I believed mind couldn’t act on matter. Whatever was in my consciousness couldn’t affect my behavior; my behavior was driven by my brain chemistry, directly. Consciousness was like that screen you see on the back of a digital camera. It shows you the image the camera would take if you pressed the button but it can’t itself push that button. Put the camera on self-timer and it can take the picture, but the image on the back can’t. The camera on self-timer, that’s like our brain chemistry, it can do all the work itself. Consciousness is like that screen on the back–it can’t do anything except tell you what the camera is about to do.

Or, to put it everyday terms, your body puts out urine but that urine can’t jump back into your body and change anything. Same way, once your brain exports something into consciousness that something can’t jump back into the brain to make any difference in what you do. The connection goes only one way, from brain chemistry to consciousness.

And that’s what I believed. Until, one day, I realized it couldn’t be true.

Looking back now, my life divides into two: one period leading up to that moment, and all the time since. And I’ve become a very unusual person–I’ve become an ex-epiphenomenalist!

What that feels like is, as if  I’ve grown up backwards. Most people I talk to these days, ardent Darwinists, started out regular, then they became epiphenomenalists. I’ve gone the other way. I used to be an epiphenomenalist, then I became sort-of regular like they were before, like their parents are. In conversation with them I think, “I used to be like you, but I grew out of it,” yet I know what they’re thinking is, “Poor fellow, you haven’t yet grown into it.” They’re proud of having achieved the wisdom of epiphenomenalism, and look down on other people like me, just like I used to look down on people who were “regular.”

What I’ve just said is the story of my life, almost. The other part is having always been a passionate believer in evolution. It’s the two together that put me in the position I’m in now–an evolutionist but not a physicalist, neither Darwinist nor Creationist.

But each assumes I must be the other. So here I am, ducking potshots coming from both sides, but actually saying something entirely different from both of them.

The Creationists are no bother. They just ignore me, I’m irrelevant to them. But to the Darwinists I’m anathema: I used to be one of them but I’ve gone wrong. I’m letting the side down. I’ve become disloyal. I’ve committed apostasy. I’m giving comfort to the enemy. How could I! “How can you be so stupid!”

Well, it’s worse than you think, fellas. I’ve not become just another creationist, I’m becoming something quite other.  I’ve broken the code and I’m coming back to turn you guys out, with all your NeoDarwinian ideas, and put new ideas in their place. That career you’ve built around the arcanery of Darwinism, it’s over. You’ll know no more of what evolution’s really about than the freshest incoming student. In fact, you’ll know less, because you’ve so much to unlearn.

Starting from today, that’s my message. And I won’t express it in the language Darwinists use, because I’m superseding that language, and putting another one in its place.

Starting today.

I’ve been involved in a lot of fights over natural selection recently.

I’ve not enjoyed it. It’s frustrating. It’s little more than posturing. It’s like two pugilists hurling blows while standing seven feet apart and facing in inconsequential directions. No blows are landed. Maybe a better metaphor would be, it’s like a dealer in precious stones trying to compare notes with a scalper who sells tickets to sold-out concerts. Both know there’s important things at stake but they’ve no teminology in common for talking about them, no shared criteria for assessing the relative worth of their treasures, and deep down neither values what the other cherishes. That’s what it’s been like.

I’ve decided to change my strategy. I’m not talking any longer about whether science does or does not make us determined, whether thinking does depend on matter. Instead I’m going to focus on coming up with new terminology for consciousness.

I then wrote, “Here are some examples,” but I couldn’t think of any, not any good ones.

I’ll have to think about it. Ooh! Is that one?

“Free will” is a religious concept and it never had a basis in science anymore than the concept of the “soul” had.

This from a very well informed and highly intelligent commentator on a board I’ve been posting to in response to my query, has free will become part of the supernatural. His answer, “Yes.” His post.

Battle is joined. We are opponents. I will fight for free will.

“Compatibilists” believe free will can be reconciled with determinism. Apparently, if you just insist on the free will aspect without taking the emotional needs of determinists into account, you’re a Libertarian.

Unfortunately, that’s easily confused with Libertarian in the political sense. Searching for libertarianism in Google throws up plenty of the political kind, but little of the philosophical kind. Wikipedia has plenty of coverage of determinsm but is short on coverage of compatibilism and libertarianism.  

Unfortunate. I thought I might find enemies of determinism under that head.

It’s occurring to me that the battle may be already lost. If I can find no one criticizing Darwinism for its denial of the efficacious conscious self, perhaps all resistance has ebbed away.

A book on determinism in Google Books discusses arguments for philosophical Libertarianism, principally those of Sartre. I’m shocked. They’re so ineffective. Do I have to write the book on how the self is free of determinsm? Well, I just have–Save Our Selves… I think it does the job. 

But I come back to the same question–who can it appeal to? Who cares? Philosophers of Mind? Maybe not even them. No, it must be the public. But mind seems to have become absorbed by spirituality.

Suggestions welcome.

From a post on the Scientific American Community discussion board:

“What can only be hoped is that a trenchant critical response by journalistic and science publishing institutions (and, of course, the blogging community)–will suffice so that Ben Stein never gets funding to make an Expelled II.”

Is that really what can only be hoped, in discussion of a scientific theory, that critics will be silenced? Sci Am editor Gary Stix here nicely illustrates “Expelled…”’s accusation that the scientific community does encourage its members to censor critics of Darwinism.

From the “Expelled–No Intelligence Required” movie blog:

“I therefore urges all genuine scientists to use all legal means to oppose and overthrow this creationist pseudoscience that, unlike us Darwinists, refuses to listen to all sides of the issue. Some Intelligent Design practitioners have advanced degrees in the sciences. In every known case they obtain these advanced degrees for the express purpose of injecting themselves into the academic and scientific communities like heroin into the veins of an innocent virgin.” 

I’m as mad as hell. And I’m not going to take it any more.

I’m mad at physicalism. Materialism. Reductionism. I’m going to blow them out of the water, banish them, so they won’t bother us with their claim that everything we do and think is physically determined.

Here goes:

“A system capable of weighing whether or not everything is physically determined cannot itself be physically determined, so the answer must be no.”

Here’s a longer version. Science claims it follows the process of reason to arrive at its conclusions and these conclusions correspond to physical reality (the only ultimate reality) more precisely than unassisted conscious experience does. Science’s conclusions, against which conscious experience is therefore not qualified to appeal,  reveal that physical reality is determined—all effects are pre-formed by physical causes, even when they appear to have their origin in human conscious decision-making.

Objection: This involves us in an unresolvable contradiction: if the above is true, then reason must also be determined and has no privileged access to knowledge of the workings of matter. Or, if reason does have access to knowledge of the workings of matter, then the process of reason must not be physically determined. That is, reason either does or does not supervene on the workings of matter. Either way, it cannot tell us that everything, including itself, is fully determined. Either, being determined, it can’t know, or it is itself proof that the claim is false.

Once reason escapes determinism, everything of the same nature from the same source—human conscious consideration—qualifies for freedom from determinism. Once one kind of truth, reason, is found to originate in human consciousness, it can’t logically be denied capable of arriving at other kinds of truth, similarly free of complete determinism.

I feel better already.

Let’s take the measure of what I call the “Violent Engine,” responsible for evolution, development, and homeostasis.

                 A whale grows from a single egg to a 100-ft long monster, yet ends up perfectly proportioned. Some communication system over that length keeps growth symmetrical and in scale. If that’s due to chemical gradients, they’re maintained over a distance of 100 feet. And there must be numerous such gradients, overlapping yet working independently.

                  Someone in a desert can lose quarts of water, yet on rehydrating completely recover. The body’s intricate machinery can function with ounces of other solvents added to it, such as ethyl alcohol. All a body’s matter is replaced every three months or so, yet it all goes back exactly in place.

                  A land creature can evolve into a whale in ten million years.

                  We’ve developed reason, through which we can map the world scientifically. What does all that, created us. We’re entitled to celebrate how incredible creatures like us are. What greater source of self esteem could there be? 

Through our reason we have an opportunity to learn about that process. What we learn we can apply to enhance our selves.

Doesn’t that have promise of being better than God?