Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Machines?

"The self contradiction in the philosophy of materialism: A columnist for the science journal Nature announced that genetics and neuroscience “are verging on drawing the ultimate materialist picture of human nature”—a picture in which humans are “all machine and no ghost.” And if there is no ghost, then freedom is an illusion. Even consciousness is said to be unreal. “Humans think they are free, conscious beings,” writes philosopher John Gray, but “they are deluded animals.” Even the sense of being a unique individual self is a “chimera.” As Adrian Woolfson writes, evolution has endowed us with “genes that make us believe in concepts like the soul,” but those concepts are illusory. “One day such irrational tendencies might be removed by adjusting the relevant brain circuitry.” In the meantime, “We will have to resign ourselves to the unpalatable fact that we are nothing more than machines.”

  "The fatal flaw in this theory is that it undercuts itself. If consciousness is an illusion, then who is conscious of that fact? And why should we trust the thinking of scientific reductionists who tell us there is no such thing as thinking?"

 

The problem is that all too many will tell us that we MUST listen to "experts" like Woolfson, despite the self contradictory nature of their claims.  

 

 

2 comments:

Marshal Art said...

Not only contradictory, but totally lacking anything akin to actual evidence.

Craig said...

That too. Yet I'm amazed at the number of people (mainly on the left) that uncritically buy into the Naturalist/Materialist/Darwinian worldview despite the inherent nihilism and lack of evidence.