RICHARD DAWKINGS: AN ATHEIST'S CALL TO ARMS

[Dragonfly]

Further, in Wilber the holon skirts with being a separate 'morphic field' itself guiding the development. Not an abstracted 'morphic field' pattern as a heuristic, implied or derived from the action of gene/organism/environment, no, but a field that is invisible but active, guiding the forms and structure of the things under its influence. An elan vital, so to speak.

I looked up some texts by Wilber on the Internet. I've seldom seen so much gobbledygook. Here are a few examples:

All of these different methodologies are not important merely as historical traces; they are all crucial ingredients of what might be called an Integral Operating System (IOS)--an integral methodological pluralism that touches all the bases in a attempt to endlessly open itself to the creatively self-disclosing and self-enacting Kosmos: to feel all feelings, prehend all prehensions, as the Self feels itself to infinity and back, never fixed but always changing each and every moment in an open-ended free for all cascading through the AQAL matrix and infinitely beyond. Once an individual downloads and installs IOS in their own worldview, they begin more conscientiously attempting to include all views, all approaches, all potentials in their own sweep of the Kosmos. IOS initiates a self-correcting, self-organizing outreach to all aspects of the universe previously marginalized by worldviews that were too narrow, too shallow, too self-enclosing to serve as more transparent vehicles of Kosmic consciousness.

A deep pattern, then, is simply a probability wave. The deep features that are characteristic of that probability wave are discovered by doing a reconstructive investigation after the fact of its existence, and not something that we can deduce in a Platonic or Hegelian or Aurobindian fashion before the fact. In other words, to say that consciousness is "at the red wave" simply means that it is vibrating at a particular probability wave: from the outside, we say that it is flowing along a particular morphogenetic field that represents the probability of finding certain types of behaviors at that point in spacetime; from the inside, we say that the feeling-awareness of that holon arises within a horizon of individual and collective prehensions, such that the probability of feeling a certain type of feeling is very high at that particular wave.

For example, while the subjective dimension of this moment is prehending the subjective dimension of the previous moment (and thus being molded to some degree by the prehensive causality of past feelings), the objective dimension of this moment is exerting a formative causation on the objective dimension of the next, and thus exerting not just a feeling causality but a morphic causality. That type of objective or exterior inheritance is not directly prehended by the holon, unless it takes up a third-person stance to its own existence, and thus it cannot be accounted for by Whiteheadian prehension or concretion (but can be accounted for by Sheldrakian morphic fields and other UR and LR inheritances, including subtle energy resonances [see Excerpt D]).

It reminds me of Sokal's hoax...

The fact that he accepts Sheldrake's theories is already clear evidence that he's a crackpot. That was confirmed when I read this review of one of Wilber's books. It shows among other things that Wilber doesn't understand evolution and is repeating creationist and ID arguments as if these are valid!

[Roger Bissell]

No, it means: sometimes you should shut up and listen...

Roger,

Perigo once told me to shut the fuck up.

I didn't.

I don't think I will here, either.

(But I do listen.)

Michael

Ever sensitive to the partial quoter inadvertently or advertently making me out to be some kind of bully, I offer here the full sentence Michael truncated above:

No, it means: sometimes you should shut up and listen,

as I do

, instead of spouting off about everything under the sun (which is your Constitutional right as well as your privilege as host of OL -- but which is not always advisable!)

[emphasis in original]

Nice comparing me to Perigo. Real nice. Perigo would ~never~ admit that ~he~ realizes he sometimes needs to shut up and listen.

Real nice, Michael. So, I guess we shall look forward to your continuing to spout off about everything under the sun, whether it is advisable or not. Fine. As well as partial quoting or paraphrasing disguised as quotes, making those who disagree with you out to be ham-fisted intellectual bullies. (Do you hear me, Pigero?)

REB

[tjohnson]

I looked up some texts by Wilber on the Internet. I've seldom seen so much gobbledygook. ....:

Wow! You got that right! Sounds like lunatic ravings to me.

[Brant Gaede]

Roger, I'm with Michael on this one.

--Brant

[william.scherk]

Further, in Wilber the holon skirts with being a separate 'morphic field' itself guiding the development. Not an abstracted 'morphic field' pattern as a heuristic, implied or derived from the action of gene/organism/environment, no, but a field that is invisible but active, guiding the forms and structure of the things under its influence. An elan vital, so to speak.

[ . . . ]

The fact that he accepts Sheldrake's theories is already clear evidence that he's a crackpot. That was confirmed when I read this review of one of Wilber's books. It shows among other things that Wilber doesn't understand evolution and is repeating creationist and ID arguments as if these are valid!

I had hoped I wasn't the only one to find the Wilber opus to be troublingly woo-friendly vis-a-vis evolution.

Just to remind everyone what Wilber has to say about so-called Intelligent Design purveyors (in the body of Behe): "Instead of a religious preacher like Dawkins, start with something like Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. And then guess what? Neo-Darwinian theory can't explain shit. Deal with it."

For those who have a high tolerance for spirituality-a-go-go, here is a dialogue (MP3 download) between arch twinklehead Rupert Sheldrake and his friend and supporter Ken Wilber. That morphogenetic fields can be incorporated easily within Wilberism is a signal that Wilber has the discernment of a clam.

For an in-depth, well-referenced and intriguing critique of Wilber and evolutionary theory, here is a strong dismantling article by Alan Kazlev, "Ken Wilber's misunderstanding of science - Evolutionary Theory."

Incidentally, Nathaniel Branden offers a conversation with Wilber for $12.95.

[edited for spelling]

Edited August 13, 2008 by william.scherk

[Roger Bissell]

Roger, I'm with Michael on this one.

--Brant

Thanks for the warning.

REB

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Incidentally, Nathaniel Branden offers a conversation with Wilber for $12.95.

William,

That's a pretty good indication of NB not throwing out the good with the bad, which is what I detect you are prone to do with Wilber. That surprises me a bit because I pegged you as an outside-the-box kind of thinker and outside-the-box is Wilber's whole approach (like it was Rand's).

What I like of Wilber I like, irrespective of the parts I don't like. For instance, I find a category quadrant he made a very useful form of identifying a person's focus, i.e.,

Individual - interior

Individual - exterior

Collective - interior

Collective - exterior

He's got some cool stuff like that. There there is that thing about zeroing his brain waves...

The problem with outside-the-box is that it doesn't fit in the box.

Michael

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

As well as partial quoting or paraphrasing disguised as quotes...

Roger,

Oh, come on. Even after I explained it, you are calling it disguised as if there were intent to deceive.

Thus, I still don't detect fertile ground for objective discussion.

btw - I would never tell you to shut up on an intellectual issue. But that's my values.

(Low-level heckling is different, as happened with a poster or two where I had to intervene, but you have never done that. I don't expect you ever will, either. Despite our present flare-up, I hold great value and admiration for you.)

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

Roger, I'm with Michael on this one.

--Brant

Thanks for the warning.

I wasn't going to post anything more. Michael can take care of himself. That's that for me.

--Brant

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

It reminds me of Sokal's hoax...

Dragonfly,

Without agreeing with your bash in general, I looked up Sokal's hoax and I strongly agree with you, but only partially (meaning, when Wilber is good, he is very very good and when he is bad he is naughty...)

Two things have kept me from investigating Wilber in great depth, despite some things that have strongly attracted me: I intensely dislike excessive name-dropping (I consider it snobbish) and I start going into a coma when the jargon gets too thick. Wilber is often guilty of both. Not always from what I have read and seen, but I have encountered enough for my inner druthers meter to go into the red.

Michael

[Nicholas Dykes]

I was reading dawkins through most of my high school and college career and admired him a great deal. However, he seems to have become a scientific nihilist or material determinist, and his rebuttals to the Iraq War published in the Skeptical Inquirer were childishly naive. In the God Delusion though, Dawkins clearly wrestled with the moral relativism he was advocating, as he suggested that raising children to religious indoctrination amounted to pyschological torture and that 'something' should be done about it. Edge.org asked many famous scientists what they thought the worlds most dangerous idea was, Dawkins, disgustingly, answered that it is the concept of free will, and that we punish criminals for their crime.

from - http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_9.html#dawkins

RICHARD DAWKINS

Evolutionary Biologist, Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science, Oxford University; Author, The Ancestor's Tale

Let's all stop beating Basil's car

Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.

Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).

But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.

Contrast Dawkins with Matt Ridley, evolutionary biologist

MATT RIDLEY

Science Writer; Founding chairman of the International Centre for Life; Author, The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nature

Government is the problem not the solution

In all times and in all places there has been too much government. We now know what prosperity is: it is the gradual extension of the division of labour through the free exchange of goods and ideas, and the consequent introduction of efficiencies by the invention of new technologies. This is the process that has given us health, wealth and wisdom on a scale unimagined by our ancestors. It not only raises material standards of living, it also fuels social integration, fairness and charity. It has never failed yet. No society has grown poorer or more unequal through trade, exchange and invention. Think of pre-Ming as opposed to Ming China, seventeenth century Holland as opposed to imperial Spain, eighteenth century England as opposed to Louis XIV's France, twentieth century America as opposed to Stalin's Russia, or post-war Japan, Hong Kong and Korea as opposed to Ghana, Cuba and Argentina. Think of the Phoenicians as opposed to the Egyptians, Athens as opposed to Sparta, the Hanseatic League as opposed to the Roman Empire. In every case, weak or decentralised government, but strong free trade led to surges in prosperity for all, whereas strong, central government led to parasitic, tax-fed officialdom, a stifling of innovation, relative economic decline and usually war.

Take Rome. It prospered because it was a free trade zone. But it repeatedly invested the proceeds of that prosperity in too much government and so wasted it in luxury, war, gladiators and public monuments. The Roman empire's list of innovations is derisory, even compared with that of the 'dark ages' that followed.

In every age and at every time there have been people who say we need more regulation, more government. Sometimes, they say we need it to protect exchange from corruption, to set the standards and police the rules, in which case they have a point, though often they exaggerate it. Self-policing standards and rules were developed by free-trading merchants in medieval Europe long before they were taken over and codified as laws (and often corrupted) by monarchs and governments.

Sometimes, they say we need it to protect the weak, the victims of technological change or trade flows. But throughout history such intervention, though well meant, has usually proved misguided — because its progenitors refuse to believe in (or find out about) David Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage: even if China is better at making everything than France, there will still be a million things it pays China to buy from France rather than make itself. Why? Because rather than invent, say, luxury goods or insurance services itself, China will find it pays to make more T shirts and use the proceeds to import luxury goods and insurance.

Government is a very dangerous toy. It is used to fight wars, impose ideologies and enrich rulers. True, nowadays, our leaders do not enrich themselves (at least not on the scale of the Sun King), but they enrich their clients: they preside over vast and insatiable parasitic bureaucracies that grow by Parkinson's Law and live off true wealth creators such as traders and inventors.

Sure, it is possible to have too little government. Only, that has not been the world's problem for millennia. After the century of Mao, Hitler and Stalin, can anybody really say that the risk of too little government is greater than the risk of too much? The dangerous idea we all need to learn is that the more we limit the growth of government, the better off we will all be.

Matus, thanks for the Ridley quote. Excellent stuff. Nicholas Dykes

[Paul Mawdsley]

Paul, I don't recognize a distinction between the "I" and the "me" except that I is/am the subject of awareness and me is the object of awareness. I hit him -- I am the doer. He hit me -- me/I am the receiver. Same for awareness. I ~am~ me, from the "subjective" (subject of cognition) perspective. Me is I, from the "objective" (object of cognition) perspective.

Similarly, I don't see a distinction between the ego and the self. They are the same thing, the same person, just from two different perspectives. So they can't be two different ~parts~ (holons) of the person, just two different perspectives on the same person. They are the top of the organismic hierarchy, also, so again they cannot be parts/components (holons). They ~are~ the whole person.

Roger,

Your post has sparked a few chains of thoughts but I don't have much time to respond right now. For now I will just quote NB to provide the context from which my own thinking has grown on this issue.

Ego (the Latin word for "I") is the unifying center of consciousness, the irreducible core of self-awareness-- that which generates and sustains a sense of self, of personal identity. Our ego is not our thoughts, but that which thinks; not our judgements, but that which judges; not our feelings, but that which recognizes feelings; the ultimate witness within; the ultimate context in which all our narrower selves or subpersonalities exist.

There is one point I would like to make for now. We have the ability to focus our awareness on some particular introspective (or extrospective) content while turning attention away from other content. This suggests that the thing that is focusing or turning away is distinct from that which it is focusing on or turning away from. What is it that is doing the focusing? What is it that is doing the turning away? And what is it that is being focused on or turned away from? This is part of the reason I see a distinction between the "I" and the "me." The "I," the core of consciousness is that which is aware. It is what focuses and reacts and judges and wills. The "me" is what is focused on or turned away from; or it is what reactions and judgements and the will are expressed through so we can be self-aware.

So, IMO, it is clear that we are really talking about the same thing. The apex/ego and the core/self are really just two different perspectives on the same thing, the ruling part of the human organismic structure.

I agree we are talking about the same thing. However, we seem to be using different processes to think about it. Yours appears to be categorical model building. Mine is causal model building. You are seeking to identify concepts. I am seeking to identify (sub)entities and their actions. I don't think these two approaches are inimicable. They can be complimentary complementary.

Paul

Edited August 14, 2008 by Paul Mawdsley

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

They can be complimentary.

Paul,

Do you mean they are for free or that they can admire each other?

Sorry. I learned that one the hard way, and too recently to be comfortable to tell you the truth. You said complimentary as in freebie and praise. I believe you meant complementary as in complete.

Michael

[Paul Mawdsley]

Thanks Michael. OL is educational in many ways. Somewhere in here I feel like I've learned this one more than once before. Let's see if it sticks this time. Since Roger is publishing in JARS, I know his views are not complimentary.

Paul

[Roger Bissell]

Thanks Michael. OL is educational in many ways. Somewhere in here I feel like I've learned this one more than once before. Let's see if it sticks this time. Since Roger is publishing in JARS, I know his views are not complimentary.

Paul

Oh, Kant rare, Paul!

Chris Sciabarra has assured me that I am free to post my JARS essays on my website if I wait until the issue has been out for at least 6 months. So, my views are ~indeed~ complimentary.

Also, my views have always spoken well of you.

REB