Interview with Richard Dawkins 'The problem with God': http://beliefnet.com/story/178/story_17889.html 

 

More power to his pen (Dawkins' that is!),

 

Barry 

Dawkins has been frequently attacked by  "lefties" who seem to have completely misunderstood his "selfish gene" theory.... just one example among many is Will's reference to him as a "modern scientific zealot" in his article about materialism and idealism which I was responding to when I launched the relation between materialism and idealism thread.  At the time,  I largely ignored that comment by Will ,  intending to get back to it later - but never got around to it.  

However I've just managed to put a short exerpt on the site from Dawkin's book A Devil's Chaplain : Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love

The excerpt is called : Rebelling Against Our Selfish Genes  and shows that Dawkins is in no way a mechanical materialist - indeed  his argument is that "natural selection has unwittingly blundered into its own negation" - pretty dialectical if you ask me!

Here's a quote from it - but read the whole thing!

Stand tall, Bipedal Ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence; the gift of revulsion against its implications; the gift of foresight--something utterly foreign to the blundering short-term ways of natural selection and the gift of internalizing the very cosmos.

_______________

Another article that is worth reading is Nothing But or Anything But?

I had the following letter published in The Canberra Times. I think it's a good idea to participate in letters' forums in the mainstream media, even though it does seem very tame compared to the good ole days of storming barricades.

 

Maintain the vigil

A common error in your correspondence concerning "intelligent design" is the assumption that evolutionary science sees change as random.

Evolutionary science sees mutation as random - after all, it doesn't anticipate what's needed.

However, natural selection is guided by whichever genes survive and whichever don't survive.

That is obviously a non-random process.

And it explains why lions are very good hunters and antelopes are very good at running away from them.

In his recent ruling, the Republican-appointed US Federal Court judge, John E. Jones, himself a Christian, called the "intelligent design" brigade liars for the way in which they conceal the religious foundations of their anti-scientific ideas.

The full ruling is available at: http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/051220-kitzmiller-342.pdf

Secular democratic civilisation is safe so long as the religious fundamentalists, of all creeds, are kept from power.

They should, of course, be free to express and practice their religions but the rest of us must continue to challenge the ludicrous claim that Genesis is a scientific text.

Barry York, Lyneham

 

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,392319,00.html  

 

Barry

I liked all of the Dennett interview but particularly this bit at the end. Dennett argues that religion can't afford to be too placid, stable or reassuring, that to survive it needs to inject a sense of drama, mystery, excitement, incomprehensibility.

The bankrupt principle that we ought to strive for stability applies to religion too. Religions that present themselves as too bland will lose membership through boredom. This was a new idea for me because I was brought up as a Methodist / Protestant and abandoned it as soon as possible through boredom. Dennett's argument makes sense to me: for anything to survive and prosper today it needs to be exciting.

Suicide bombing might have more mileage in it than Intelligent Design? Intelligent Design is a clever twist but not all that exciting and it won't stand up very well to an informed argument. I might be exaggerating Dennett's idea, I probably am, but his idea did make me think about the religion meme and its survival a bit more.

... the idea that the bread is symbolic of the body of Christ, that the wine is symbolic of the blood of Christ, that's just not exciting enough. The idea needs to be made strictly incomprehensible: The bread is Christ's body and the wine is his blood. Only then will it hold your attention. Then it will win in competition against more boring ideas simply because you can't quite get your head around it

SPIEGEL: You see that too as an evolutionary strategy to keep the religion alive?

Dennett: It's very possible. The Israeli evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi argues that behaviors which are costly -- which are hard to imitate -- are those that can best be handed down because non-costly signals can and will be faked. This principle of costly behaviors is well established in biology and it is present in religion. It is important to make sacrifices. The costliness is a feature you tamper with at your peril. If the imams got together and decided to remove that feature they would be damaging one of the most powerful adaptations of Islam.

SPIEGEL: By using this type of argumentation, can you predict which religions will win out in the end?

Dennett: My colleagues Rodney Stark and Roger Finke have researched why some religions spread quickly and others don't. They're adapting supply side economics to this and saying that there's a sort of unlimited market for what religions can give but only if they're costly. So they have an explanation for why the very bland and liberal Protestant religions are losing members and why the most extreme, intense religions are gaining members.

I like both Dawkins and Dennett (especially Dennett) for their sharp "party spirit" as representatives of militant materialism in struggle with its philosophical enemies.

Their contempt for agnosticism is refreshing compared with the usual conciliatory approach of attacking only the most primitive religious dogmas. As they are serious and primarily positive writers it isn't appropriate to tackle their negative aspects in quick notes without detailed study of their work and references to it. Nevertheless I'll risk some comments "off the top of my head" as the only practical alternative at the moment would be to remain silent, which wouldn't help develop a better analysis either.


I think there is an element of mechanical materialism in their outlook, and it shows especially in their analysis of religion (as opposed to their rejection of it). Dawkins in particular has a very elitist sort of approach and sometimes says quite absurd things indicating no understanding of the social functions of religion. Both adopt an essentially mechanical concept of meme replication and evolution instead of concretely analysing the function and development of religious and other ideological conceptions in human culture as an expression of class society in the context of the social productive relations and development of the productive forces.


This is astonishingly crude, like deriving trends in music or fashion directly from molecular biology or quantum mechanics. The evolutionary metaphor with memes instead of genes does provide some helpful insights. But it still rests on an essentially metaphysical philosophy in which things only change quantiatively rather than new things developing as a result of internal contradictions in old things.


They try to explain the rate at which particular memes including religious ones propagate without having a satisfactory theory of how they originate. It is the cultural milieu that determines what makes a meme likely to propagate more rapidly than another meme yet they take that for granted as a static given.


It is quite absurd to ignore the obvious fact that different religious conceptions have been popular in different types and stages of society and have developed in close conjunction with changes in social relations and productive forces, yet they do claim to analyse what would make different sorts of religion propagate more rapidly than others in the abstract.


This completely ahistorical approach really reflects the most absurd conventionally conservative view that human nature and human society have always been pretty similar to the present bourgeois order and always will be.


 Likewise they presume variation is just random mutation or generation of memes despite the dialogue of ideas being the most obvious sort of dialectic and the origin of the term itself.


This is also a common mistake in biology - evolution is primarily coevolution of species interacting with each other by affecting each other's environment in a common ecosystem, yet it is widely misunderstood as being the evolution of separate species or even the individuals within them.


 Explaining darwinian mechanisms for evolutionary change should be subordinate to philosophical understanding of the notion of becoming. Without that it is impossible to understand that new things emerge and old things disappear at all.


 The intelligent design idea that a painting must have a painter, a building must have a builder etc is really an extension of the old pantheistic concept that everything just "is" with nothing new, refuted long before Hegel. "From nothing comes nothing, from something comes something" and the genes or memes replicate at different rates. So nothing can come into being or disappear because whatever comes into being must either come from something that already is, which is impossible because whatever already is cannot become since it already is, or it must come from what is not, but that is impossible since nothing comes from nothing. With this philosophy not only would a painting need a painter in order to come to existance, but it would be impossible for anything to come into existence at all.

But if you start from becoming as the most fundamental fact there is nothing startling about the emergence of things that did not exist before including both painters and paintings. The philosophy of becoming, ie materialist dialectics should be the starting point.


I don't like Dawkins' emphasis on evolution as a "ruthlessly cruel process", "pitiless" etc. This is explicity missing the forest (cultures, ecosystems) for the trees. What evolves is not the replicators but the system they are part of so that meaning and purpose itself evolves with the self-organization of function.


Dennett is much better on that. Dawkins concept of rebelling againt our selfish genes is closely related to his bourgeois elitism. Instead of the morality of different classes emerging from the needs of their social struggle he asserts his own morality as an arbitrary principle out of time and space and urges the "gift of revulsion" against nature.


This is an enormous concession to religion as an equally valid source of morality to his own revulsion. It is essentially dualist. On the one side is the "ruthlessly cruel" world of nature and on the other side various arbitrary ideas as to how we should live including those of Dawkins and those of the Pope.


When rebelling against both heaven and earth, its nice to know that history and the nature of the universe is on our side rather than feeling revulsion!


On the other hand the real social content of his advocacy of rebelling against our selfish genes is that "There is no fate but what we make for ourselves", expressed more positively in Terminator. It is that belief, which Dawkins does advocate, which really undermines religion. But it is a belief learned from social experience and struggle rather than from an understanding of evolutionary replication and arbitrary adoption of Dawkins morality.


The terminator "no fate" meme replicates rapidly because it corresponds to our growing mastery over nature generally,  and religious fatalism declines in inverse proportion. In times of apparant helplessness such as natural disasters like the Tsunami, religion actually bounces back and the sneering about the cruelty of God in no way dissuades people from seeking religious relief from pain.

Less elitist sneering and revulsion and more optimism would make Dawkins a better propagandist for atheism. Its interesting that Douglas Adams was a close friend as he cdid convey that positive spirit of atheism and ridicule of religion through literary means very effectively without the elitist sneering and revulsion against nature.

In fact some of Douglas Adams could be read as ridiculing Dawkins in the same way that it ridicules religion.

I haven't got time to write a really well thought out response today but will try to get into the spirit of writing something off the top of my head  -  I think that's better than holding off till I've re-read a couple of books by Dawkins and spent days thinking about it.  Especially since I doubt that I will find time to do that in the near future and its a pity not to throw something into the mix and see if it goes anywhere.

so here are my initial thoughts:

Firstly Dennett and Dawkins stand out among  contemporary materialist thinkers because they are militant and have worked hard to take their ideas beyond academic circles and into the public arena.   They want to excite people about the materialist world outlook -  they present their ideas with real passion. And they have also been quite successful, despite the unavoidable problem that their subject matter is deep and  hard.  This is a significant achievement which we could learn something from.

Their opposition has been not only people who are overtly non-materialist (ie creationists, the intelligent design movement etc) but also those who have been pushing a sort of pseudo-left materialism (Stephen Rose, Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldridge, Richard Lewontin).  

These latter biologists and evolutionary theorists have also been in the public arena and have consistently presented themselves as left wing and progressive, some of them even calling themselves Marxists.  However a closer look at their idaes reveals that they are actually not "thorough-going materialists" at all.  I'm not going to attempt to explain why I say this at the moment as it's a huge topic. At the moment I'm just trying to present a simple view of the "lie of the land" as I see it. 


On one side we have Dawkins and Dennett who have been prepared to bite the bullet on materialism and on the other side we have those others (named above) who claim to be materialists, "marxists" (even fling around the word "dialectical") but actually jump ship at the last moment.

I agree with Arthur that Dennett and Dawkins fall down when they try to move into the social/economic/political arena (but not as badly as those others).

However when they stick to biology they really are quite brilliant.  And even when they do move on to discussing the implications of Darwinsim for modern human beings they are very clear that the evolution of selfish genes has created creatures who can make their own history.  And they actually attempt to explain how this is possible. That is,  whether they realise it or not,  they have potentially (at least)  put some real flesh on what Engels and Marx could only hint at when they were writing about dialectics and nature.

If Karl and Frederick were around today they would find  so much in the rich theorising  of people such as  Dawkins and Dennett (also Maynard Smith who I neglected to mention above) .

...........

Jumping to something slightly different.

One thing in Arthur's post I think was a distortion of Dawkins' thinking.

Arthur wrote:

This is also a common mistake in biology - evolution is primarily coevolution of species interacting with each other by affecting each other's environment in a common ecosystem, yet it is widely misunderstood as being the evolution of separate species or even the individuals within them.

I'm not sure if  Arthur was in fact attributing that "common mistake" to Dawkins, I may have misread him.  But if he was I think he is wrong.  Dawkins has written a whole book entitled "The Extended Phenotype" in which he provides an extraordinarily detailed analysis of the role of the environment shared by species (and by individuals within a species) in shaping the direction of evolutionary development.  In this book he is writing about non-human species and I think he is spot-on.  Although he never departs from his selfish gene theory he is able to show just how this leads to "coevolution of species interacting with each other by affecting each other's environment in a common ecosystem".

...............


Arthur also wrote:

I don't like Dawkins' emphasis on evolution as a "ruthlessly cruel process", "pitiless" etc. This is explicity missing the forest (cultures, ecosystems) for the trees. What evolves is not the replicators but the system they are part of so that meaning and purpose itself evolves with the self-organization of function.

I think the "ruthllessly cruel process" is at the genetic level (ie at the level at which individual genes survive - or not).  dawkins wants to dispel the notion that when we look at the most fundamental processes there is any foresight or anything that could be construed as the hand of a conscious creator.  He doesn't deny that as a consequnce of these blind, pitiless processes we also have the evolution of whole systems which can be described at a higher level.

What is exciting about his theorising and the empirical data which he presents in support of it is that he is able to show just how this higher level has been able to come into being. 

Anyway, as I've already said, what Dawkins has done is to give us a very rich and interesting account of how very simple and blind processses occuring at a fundamental level can produce things which operate very differently. 

It's true that he hasn't been able to apply the same incisive thinking at the next level  - ie the level of human social and economic organisation.  Although the "meme theory" is certainly not just vacuous,  it is an example of a good materialist lapsing into a sort of mechanical idealism when he tries to take his militant materialsim into a different (and even more complex) domain.

It's probably up to people like us to build on what dawkins has given us at lower levels of description to flesh out the things that Engels and Marx were saying (with far less data available) in the 19th century.

.....................

We also need to come out strongly against the sloppy theorising of those on the pseudo-left who make a mockery of Marxism by attacking people like Dawkins and Dennett for all the wrong reasons  - and  in the process creating the impression that left-wingers are incapable of engaging in intelligent debate on  complex scientific/philosophical  issues.


 

Just to clarify, I wasn't attributing that "common mistake" to Dawkins.

Also my first sentences praising their "party spirit" in attacking agnosticism was intended to refer to the same thing you are talking about concerning alleged "Marxists" who are not in fact thorough-going materialists. I was particularly struck by their polemics with Gould where they adopt much the same "party spirit" as Lenin in "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism" in exposing Gould as a philosophical ally of religion (more politely and skillfully than Lenin) before Gould openly came out as an agnostic with his "Separate Magisteriam" stuff.

To understand the importance of attacking the mechanical materialism of their meme stuff, checkout the links to Dawkins on Bush and the Iraq war from the pages by Matt Humphries which Bill linked in another topic. Dawkins doesn't just fail on current political issues - he's on the wrong side.

BTW Does anyone know, or could somebody please check whether Dennett has said anything about Iraq etc. I'm guessing that he hasn't said much and that this would reflect his better understanding than Dawkins.

Jacques Monod is another important writer in these areas. His book on "Chance and Necessity" expresses his philosophical understanding of fundamental issues arising from his pioneering work in molecular biology with a much more sophisticated philosophical background than Dawkins (and more familiarity with Hegelian and Marxists philosophy than Dennett who only noticed an interesting "biological flavor" to marx but never studied it thoroughly).

Somehow Monod manages to simultaneously develop Marx's Epicurean thesis on the relation between chance and necessity while completely misunderstanding Engels Dialectics of Nature and accusing him of pantheism!

I'm not going to have time to continue this (or anything else here for a while) but just wanted to add something relating back to the subject heading and current controversies about "intelligent design".

I find Dawkins elitist sneering particularly bad because he could play a far more positive role in the current struggle with creationists of which he is an important leader.

Science classes avoid teaching about "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" precisely because it is so dangerously corrosive to all static conceptions and the primary function of bourgeois education is to prepare students for life as passive objects rather than taking charge of changing the world.

What they teach instead is boring facts about DNA and the evolution of species WITHOUT counterposing it to the religious world view. In fact there is "official" promotion of Gould's agnostic line that science and religion are two separate spheres (Gould's and the Pope's "magisteria") which do not contradict each other so you can acknowledge whatever scientific facts we are stuck with, while also praying to whatever Gods your parents ask you to.

Since large numbers of people (apparantly a majority in the US) do believe in creation by a God as part of their religion and do not understand how this diametrically conflicts with scientific understanding of the world, this subject should be a MAJOR focus of science classes. Students need to learn how to distinguish faith based theories masquerading as science from actual science and there is no better way to learn that than actually studying intelligent design.

Instead there is a defensive capitulation to the separate realms idea which might have been understandable as the only way to avoid prohibition of teaching about Darwinism at a time when religion was dominant but is ridiculous now. At the same time "official" evolutionary theories are imposed on science curricula based precisely on trust in tradition or authority. Trust in the tradition or authority of the consensus of scientists backed by the state is relied on to overcome trust in the tradition or authority of faith and revelation advocated by creationists.

But science isn't about trust in tradition and authority, not even that of scientists, let alone the state.

The intelligent design advocates have provided a golden opportunity for students to learn dangerous ideas by studying their claims to be putting forward a scientific theory and debating it the way scientists do.

Instead of grabbing that opportunity with both hands, Dawkins has joined with the pseudos in resorting to court judgments to prohibit the debate. This reflects his bourgeois elitism and sneering.

I was amazed by a TV program on the creationist/intelligent design movement in the US a while back where some (presumably religious) students were petitioning their school board to be allowed to study intelligent design alongside Darwinian evolution and were dismissed with the "argument" that the law required the school to teach only what is officially accepted as science by the tradition and authority of scientists and the state. This gives the initiative entirely to the religious right who can pose (and not just pose) as victims of "official science" rather than losers in a scientific debate.

Teaching "both sides" is essential for teaching kids how to distinguish valid scientific arguments from appeals to faith and revelation.

Refusing to do so is intended to preserve trust in authority and tradition.

Dennett and Dawkins should take the lead on this - especially since their books would be the obvious texts for the Darwinian "side" and study of them in schools, side by side with the cleverest intelligent design arguments would lead to the rapid spread of atheism.

For people who claim an understanding of "meme replication" its odd they haven't picked up on the simplest lessons we learned from rebellion in the sixties - drawing more people into the argument is the best way to win support. Memes spread faster when they are disputed.

(sigh) I keep coming back to this because it is more interesting although I should be doing something else...

The "Nothing But or Anything But" link to Marion Dawkins is much better than Richard Dawkins on "ruthlessly cruel" etc.

In "The problem with God", Richard Dawkins says:

**By the way, I would hate this to be taken as any sort of suggestion that adoptive parents don’t love their adopted children; of course they do. But you could think of it as a kind of genetic mistake, in that human adults have strong parental instincts which make them long for a child. If they can’t have a child of their own, they can then satisfy those parental instincts by adopting a child.**

Here I think his bourgeois elitism is leading him to make what strikes me as an elementary mistake in evolutionary biology.

Granted I am not a biologist or anthropologist and have not studied the extensive scientific debate on group evolution, with which Dawkins must be familiar.

Nevertheless it seems obvious to me that humans evolved as social animals living in bands dependent on each other for survival and surviving or starving to death as a group.

Dawkins concepts of "human adults" with "parental instincts" "adopting a child" import social relations that are relatively modern and simply could not have existed in primitive hominid bands. Families and the concept of fathers being "parents" could only have developed much later. Society is continuing to develop with much broader horizons than kith and kin.

It seems obvious that bands in which children whose mothers die in childbirth or otherwise are abandoned would be less likely to survive as a group than bands in which they are looked after. Group evolution would favour this and many other forms of "altruism". It is Dawkins bourgeois individualism that leads him to talk of "genetic mistakes", not evolutionary science.

It is mechanical materialism that leads him to focus on individual genetics rather than anthropology in discussing social phenomena and this applies even more when studying the further evolution of human culture which rests entirely on what distinguishes humans from other animals - social labor.

It is clearly societies and cultures that evolve, not individuals within them or individual memes.

Engels got it right on the transition frome ape to man and on the origin of the family

Dawkins argues that individual genes don't (can't)  act at the level of the group or entire species but goes on to explain just how it can appear that this is happening  - and furthermore how to all intents and purposes,  we do have a form of evolution operating on this higher level.

This explanation has been entirely necessary because the fundamental biological process of natural selection does occur at the level of individual genes and we've needed to bridge the gap in order to explain what emerges at a higher level.

People talk all the time about the survival of species, groups, individuals (group selection) but they are wrong to say that at bottom natural selection could act  on this level.   If we don't have an explanation which can bridge the two (actually more than two)  levels,  then opponents of Darwinism can make a mockery of the whole idea of natural selection. 

I agree that dawkins is being crude when he says:

By the way, I would hate this to be taken as any sort of suggestion that adoptive parents don’t love their adopted children; of course they do. But you could think of it as a kind of genetic mistake, in that human adults have strong parental instincts which make them long for a child. If they can’t have a child of their own, they can then satisfy those parental instincts by adopting a child.

But I think he's right to say that the reason for (a sort of) altrusistic behaviour being possible in non-human species has an explanation something like this.  We evolved from non-human species and the real dialectical 'leap" occurred when we became conscious and able to act with foresight and awareness, no longer at the mercy of blind, genetic "forces".  If this isn't 'magic', or due to us having a soul implanted by a higher being, it has to have come from something much more "basic" and less "genuine". 

For those who have read Daniel Dennett, (especially his debate with John Searle)  I think there are parallels with his notion of "as-if" intentionality.

Sure, Dawkins falls down and gives a very poor account  when it comes to human history and society, but his area is biology and ethology and as I said before, the work of people like him could be very valuable to anyone who wanted to produce a  more up to date version of the "Dialectics of Nature".

Dawkins "genetic mistake" explanation for adoption isn't just crude - it's wrong.

It suggests (explicitly) that the phenomenon is similar to cuckoos tricking other birds into bringing up their young, which can reasonably be described as (exploiting a) "genetic mistake" in a non-human species - ie other birds evolved to feed young birds found in their nests without mechanisms to discriminate in favor of their own kin and cuckoos co-evolved to improve their own replication prospects at the expense of the others.

Point is that the survival of hominid bands that are genetically disposed towards looking after their young regardless of parentage would be enhanced compared with those that aren't - thus ensuring migration of the human gene pool in that direction. That is "at bottom" an at least plausible genetic theory. Dawkins "genetic mistake" theory seems far less plausible and based on nothing more than a preconception that selection was essentially of individuals rather than inherently of bands.

I can't take this any further without having to actually do the research, in which I am not qualified or interested.

My point was not based on human foresight etc and was based on the assumption that Dawkins is correct in describing the behaviour as instinctual and genetic rather than cultural. It should be applicable to other social animals even where they only form a pack rather than a band. My impression is that it does so apply, for example to wolves who are not notoriously altruistic but do look after their young regardless of parentage (and have been known to rear human wolf-children by "genetic mistake").

The issue is not whether the propagation of such altruistic characteristics is based on DNA or culture, but whether the "selection" (ie differential reproduction rates) is individual or group. Don't confuse this with the higher level evolution of group and species characteristics being determined at bottom by individual DNA.

My assumption is that throughout most of hominid history (pre-savagery when life was even more nasty, brutal and short) the primary differential selection was whether a band as a whole survived. If the band survived its gene pool would prosper. Many didn't and their gene pools died with them. Hominids couldn't survive as individuals outside their bands.

Obviously I could be completely wrong about this but Dawkins gives the impression he cannot conceive of humans or pre-humans as anything but individuals.

BTW social insects are notoriously "altruistic" ;-)

Certainly study of Dawkins would be useful in updating "Dialectics of Nature". But if you check the two links provided I think you'll find that Engels was ahead of Dawkins on certain issues where Dawkins should have been an advance on Engels.

I mainly agree with what you've written above, but like you I feel I don't have time to do the necessary reading and thinking at the moment.

Philosophically Marx and Engels were ahead of Dawkins but I'm sure they would both love to have had access to books like "The Selfish Gene" , "The Extended Phenotype" , "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" and the research they refer to. 

Anyway, what I'd like to do is to write something longer when I get the time (???) and put it on the site for discussion.

That's probably some time off however as there are currently more pressing things to attend to. 

I think that at some stage it would be worth entering into discussions with those people who are "into" Dawkins and Dennett - they do have quite a following and some of the polemics are interesting.

Certainly would be worth getting into discussions with those sort of people. Why not follow up your earlier contacts with Dennett himself? Ask for reaction to this thread?

I just did a quick scan through google for "Daniel Dennett" Iraq and came across lots of interesting web discussions on all sorts of topics. Couldn't find any explicit statements by Dennett on Iraq (though didn't take long enough). Did find this though, which is certainly not the sort of thing Dawkins would say and encourages my assumption that Dennett's position would be better and his silence is not accidental:

Fodor and Baghdad Bob

Also came across Dennett comment on US court decision against intelligent design - took up the point that science does conflict with religion contrary to court's decision but failed to call for the active teaching of "both sides" so students can learn to distinguish scientific arguments from appeals to faith.

BTW did you know that Hilary Putnam used to be in US "ML" group "Progressive Labor Party"?

The letter from Dennett comparing Jerry Fodor to Baghdad Bob

 was very funny,  but the humour  depends somewhat upon being familar  with  the flavour of the  polemic between Dennett and Fodor over the nature of mind and consciousness.  There's actually been a degree of unity between Chomsky and Fodor on these philosophical issues.  Both believe that  we must be born with a certain amount of knowledge built into our brains.  

I did know that Hilary Putnam had a left wing background, but not the specifics.

He has written some good critiques of Fodor and Chomsky ( eg"Representation and Reality")


This whole area (of polemics between people who are fighting things out  in the  philosophy of biology/brain/mind)  is quite specialised and although I find it fascinating, I don't know that casually chatting away about people like Fodor and Putnam is particularly appropriate on this forum. Most people won't know what we are talking about.

It is probably of interest  to people to know that even within his own special area (linguistics) Chomsky is  seen by many as a conservative who is not prepared to reconsider his own theory- refuses to take new, fresh, ideas on board.

In some ways he's  still probably the biggest name in lingusitics  - the most famous.  But his theories have been under sustained attack from  younger people in the area  and I gather that he's  not at all gracious  in defeat (refuses to admit/acknowledge it).

Anyway this year I will try to find time to write something about these current debates among philosophers, biologists, artificial intelligence researchers and linguists (these groups have tended to come together into the  new (multi) discipline called "cognitive scinence").  

The trouble is that there is so much else to write and think about!  However excursions into what can seem like quite abstract phlosophy have always been a necessary part of the Marxist world outlook.  I read that -  much to the consternation of many of his comrades-  Lenin once disappeared into the library for 6 months ( the result was   "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism") .

Keza:

although I find it fascinating, I don't know that casually chatting away about people like Fodor and Putnam is particularly appropriate on this forum. Most people won't know what we are talking about.

Then why do it?

I simply provided a link to a letter which might shed some light on a possible difference between the attitudes of Dawkins and Dennett on Iraq. The nature of the humor in the letter was self evident and does not require knowledge of the polemics between Dennett and Fodor.

As a friendly one liner aside I did also mention another related philosopher, Hilary Putnam, and his previous political affiliations, thinking that might be of some interest to you and knowing it was unlikely to be of interest to most other readers.

The discussion in this thread was not about specialized areas of cognitive science but about two very well known public intellectuals, Dawkins and Dennett, in the context of faith in tradition or authority, current events concerning controversies about evolution and intelligent design etc.

As usual, I find it difficult/impossible to communicate with you about anything without just ending up feeling angry.

I am reasonably certain your projection above was not intended as a deliberate insult. Its just that you talk about whatever you find fascinating, regardless of what the conversation is about and without giving any thought to what others are talking about. It would be quite possible for you, or anyone else to be completely uninterested in the issue I raised about whether there is a difference between Dawkins and Dennett on Iraq etc, without being totally oblivious to what issue I was actually raising and without proceeding to both chat away about whatever free associations are triggered in your mind by it and imply that I was doing so.

You say:

The trouble is that there is so much else to write and think about!

It's now more than 2 weeks since I publicly challenged you to write and think about behaviour I did find deliberately rather than accidentally and obliviously insulting and about a week since you refused to talk about it personally and said you were writing something about it.

Excursions into what can seem like quite concrete practice have also always been a necessary part of the Marxist world outlook.

If you have changed your mind about writing a reply, please say so. If not, say when.

keza: I read that - much to the consternation of many of his comrades- Lenin once disappeared into the library for 6 months ( the result was "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism") .

An interesting and detailed reference on that is in the introduction to Ilyenkov's Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism

Is that where you read it?