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Experience and belief, nonsense, and the landChris Marsh, 31 May 2007 Habitude as a philosophical concept provides an opportunity to try out new ways of looking at the world. This is because it challenges the mechanistic paradigm, scientific materialism, physicalism, naturalism, determinism, and the dominant ideology of the capitalist system and class, replacing all of that kind of thinking with the general idea of habit, which is a tendency to keep thinking along the same lines. In this piece I am going to play around with various aspects of how we (/people in general/some people/you) tend to think, in order to bounce us (/them/you) around in those grooves so that maybe we can at least see over the top into other possibilities.
I shall start with looking at the kinds of models of the world we tend to favour. Most models are incomplete in that they have some inconsistencies or gaps. I have pointed out elsewhere that, in my view, the mechanistic paradigm of orthodox science has gaps. It is deterministic and cannot account for our experience of having free will and the ability to exercise choices. It relies on the laws of science but has nowhere to put those laws, other than in scientists’ minds and discourses. (I make no apology for repeating myself; I’m doing a little bit to create a morphic field for my kind of thinking.) Those orthodox scientists who believe in God are better off, in that they have somewhere to put the laws of science: in His Mind, and He could also have made a special dispensation for Mankind, allowing us to have free will in an otherwise deterministic universe. Such a model has the potential for being complete, able to account for anything and everything, and I shall call that model the Welch model, after this letter from Dr Gordon Welch of Chester to The Guardian, 26 May 2007:
The problem with God-including models in general is that once you bring God in, anything becomes possible, such as creationism, which now has its own museum: http://www.creationmuseum.org/, and websites, including: http://www.creationism.org/ and plenty more; the variety of creationist positions is the subject of this web site: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/wic.html. A supposedly more intellectual version of creationism is called ‘intelligent design’: http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org/ but to sceptics that is just a ruse to make creationism acceptable, less wacky. Creationism is a component of fundamentalist Christian belief, which also includes strong ideas about the world’s end, which are not only wacky, but dangerous; as a taster, see the ‘prophetic speedometer’ called the Rapture Index: http://www.raptureready.com/, but this stuff is so ludicrously wacky, see http://prayon777.com/, it is hard to take seriously, even as a threat.
Those who hold to the mechanistic paradigm without God, naturally regard every variant of creationism as wacky. Two famous advocates of the view that creationism is absurd are Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who are fundamentalist atheists, in that nothing would persuade them of the existence of God or any entity, property, force, field or whatever associated with the idea of spirituality. Both men were born in the early 1940s, as I was, and also Sheldrake. In our childhood, science was highly regarded and influential. At my girls’ grammar school, pupils with some aptitude in science or mathematics were the stars of the school, and eagerly pushed in the direction of university studies in those subjects. A school prize-winner in mathematics, I was urged to try for Cambridge, but I insisted on going to the same university as my boyfriend – big mistake! – and ended up with a poor degree in maths, and a baby. It was a very long journey for me to find that I belonged with the humanities, with literature and philosophy. The respect for science that prevailed in my childhood went with secularism, but not very strongly with atheism. People tended to profess being agnostic. But I was brought up atheist. My father told me when I was eight years old that death is oblivion, and for my beloved recently deceased grandfather it is as if he’d never been born. I have suffered from debilitating ‘death dread’ (naming something gives one a little bit of power over it) ever since, and I have felt that nothing I do counts because everything is wiped out when I reach that cliff edge of oblivion, and I have shuddered at time, years, decades passing. From my experience it is impossible to undo the damage caused by such an upbringing, which is abusive, however well-intentioned. I have explored the spirituality thing in various ways over the years, but it doesn’t stick. I envy those who have some religion to fall back on, but I still share the Dawkins and Dennett conviction that it’s a load of nonsense. And ‘conviction’ is all that it is, and conviction bears no necessary relation to truth.
I said above that the mechanistic paradigm ‘cannot account for our experience of having free will and the ability to exercise choices’, but I should mention that Dennett is famous for having shown that it can, in his book Consciousness Explained, and elsewhere. I am not going to tackle that thesis and try to refute it. What interests me more is the author’s determination to convince the reader, his proselytising zeal, which shows that Dennett identifies with his thesis and the mindset he shares with such as Dawkins and the ‘bright’ * community, and attachment to an identity shared with a community is an extremely powerful drive.
I first encountered ‘identity politics’ when studying Salman Rushdie’s novel, Midnight’s Children, and finding an essay by Patrick Colm Hogan: ‘Midnight’s Children: Kashmir and the Politics of Identity’, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), 510-544, and then I read a number of Hogan’s books; and made this extract: http://www.des4rev.org.uk/hoganafterword.htm.
To my mind, identity politics points to a pathology afflicting modern society. Humankind evolved as a social animal; we are meant to be cells in a social body, not alienated individuals, with minds presumed by such as Dennett to be epiphenomena of our physical brains, and doomed to oblivion when we die. A particular concern of mine is that we are alienated from the land as much as from community, hence the abuse of the land we have allowed to take place for as long as there has been urban, ‘civilised’ society, which has horrendously accelerated since the industrial revolution. It has been supposed that there is no cure for this pathological alienation, because of a ‘conflict of personal interests with those of society’, a point addressed by Mikhail Bakunin 1871, see primitivism.
I shall come back to alienation from the land, but first, to help loosen some of those embedded habits of thought, in order to allow more sociable ones in, I want to expose some of the nonsense, or non-sense, that arises from popular ideas about how the mind works – and note the mechanistic word that we use without noticing it; an example of Bergson’s warning about language favouring the prevailing paradigm. A good place to start with is how it is believed that we see.
The ‘image’ that we see appears to be ‘out there’, but we ‘know’, having had this explained to us, that the image is ‘really’ inside the brain, put there via the retina and the optic nerve, which contrive at the consciousness of the image ‘as if’ it were out there.
On the language one finds oneself using here, note ‘image’: it’s not real, not really what’s ‘out there’, so we do not make contact by means of sight; and note the recurrent definite article: ‘the brain’, ‘the retina’, ‘the optic nerve’, and not ‘my brain’ let alone ‘me’.
And then note how contrived this mechanistic explanation is, and how unlikely. One criticism from a common sense point of view is, who or what is it then that sees the image in the brain?, doesn’t this explanation require a manikin inside the brain to look at the image there, and won’t the manikin need a retina, an optic nerve and a brain to see the image?, and who or what sees that?, and so on. Of course, someone like Dennett will happily – indeed insistently – explain – or rather dismiss – such nonsense, arguing, as he does, that there is no ‘Cartesian theatre’ in the brain, no central ‘place’ where consciousness resides, rather a polling and linking process over the nervous system as a whole. A similar kind of process ‘explains’ the illusion of free will, which is a balancing of associations in the brain from earlier encounters with the options one thinks one is choosing between, and the strongest wins, in an absolutely determined way.
The extent to which such mechanistic explanations have been proved experimentally, using probes connected to the brain, or tests of how subjects react, hardly troubles someone like Dennett. This kind of explanation gets its authority from being mechanistic, for how it substitutes for personal experience a ‘how it works’ model of what is taking place.
To be continued…
* According to Dawkins, ‘A bright is a person whose world view is free of supernatural and mystical elements. The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic world view.’ http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,981412,00.html |