I was beginning to think that DI had given up on attacking neuroscience as they had not posted an anti-brain article since January. I was wrong, however. There is an article marked April 27 about free will.
But it’s not by Egnor.
It’s by a guy named Gage.
All that it says about him on the DI website is that he’s a policy analyst in D.C. The post covers his opinions of a panel discussion on free will hosted by the American Enterprise Institute. I have a few problems with this:
- Gage is not trained in anything having to do with brains.
- Out of the five panelists, three were public policy analysts with no educational background in anything brain related
- The one panelist with neuroscience training is a shrink
- The last panelist is a misinformed schmuck science reporter for the NYTimes
So what we have here is a policy analyst critiquing a neuroscience forum populated by policy analysts. To give you some sort of analogy, it would be akin to a group of economic analysts debating the existence of/ logic behind the Higgs boson.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewc1hixzYPY
All of this would be excusable, of course, if Gage had any hint of rational argument or evidence in his analysis.
If Darwinism is true, there is no such thing as a human being, let alone human nature. There are just various organisms which right now happen to anatomically resemble each other and will one day in the not too distant future evolve new physical and intellectual features.
No. Species designation is arbitrary in that there is no definitive way to say that two organisms are definitely two different species. We used to define species as a group of individuals that can successfully interbreed, but there are organisms that are vastly different yet can still produce viable offspring, and other organisms that are nearly identical except that they cannot successfully breed (this happens a lot in insects). But we do know that a H. sapiens is a H. sapiens and not a X. laevis. And yes, there is such a thing as human nature. Technically speaking, it is the statistical composite of human behavior over all individuals over time.
Or, in less complicated terms, an average. As much as people talk about the difference between whatever groups of people they decide to arbitrarily define, the similarities are always always always orders of magnitude greater. This is “human nature”. It is a product of evolution, not a contradiction thereof.
You see, Darwinism destroys the classical view of essences. There is no underlying immaterial, unchangeable stable reality to the natural world. Rather, there is just a long spectrum of organisms, and what we call a ’species’ is really just an arbitrary snapshot in the history of life. All of this goes to the heart of many of the panelists’ concerns. Hoff Sommers, I believe, is very concerned with letting boys be boys and girls girls; several of the panelists are against over-medicating our children; Murray is terrified at the prospect that government and society might begin to manipulate our genomes. But what unifies these concerns and gives them legitimacy is the one idea they implicitly deny: That there is a stable reality called human nature.
Wait… what? What does gender, medicine, or genetics have to do with essences? The classical view of an essence is that some deity had a preconceived notion of “Dog”, and that all objects in the category “dog” on earth are various flawed replicas of this divine idea. Darwin destroyed this by showing that one, there is no preconceived notion because organisms adapt to their environments, and two, that what an organism is changes over time. In other words, “dog” was not always “Dog”. Why must you deny any of this in order be concerned about over-medicating children?
But one wonders which part of Murray stood outside of his genes and environment to make this observation? His response assumes that there is a reality, “us,” which is more than the sum of “our” genes shaped by our environment. And this is exactly what materialist neuroscience denies.
There is one word for this. That word is “NO”.
Because this is not a problem either. This concept of the whole being more than the sum of the parts is called “emergent behavior”. This lies entirely within materialism. A good example of this is Benard convection. If you heat a fluid unevenly, convection currents form. There’s nothing from an individual molecule that would tell you it self-assembles into organized flow systems with other molecules. You could only predict this by knowing how the particles interact, but it is entirely deterministic and entirely materialistic.
We do not need to give souls to water molecules to understand what happens to a pot of water when you boil it.
