Materialist atheism is — you read it here first — slowly being destroyed by panpsychism. Panpsychism (everything is conscious) makes more sense. Recall Egnor’s Principle: If your hypothesis is that even electrons are conscious, your hypothesis is likely wrong. But if your hypothesis is that the human mind is an illusion, then… you don’t have a hypothesis. That’s slowly killing “scientific” atheism.
Naturalism
At Mind Matters News: Does science disprove free will? A physicist says no
Apart from simple laws governing neurons, we have no clue what laws the mind follows, though it does show complex nonlinear dynamics.
At Mind Matters News: A Darwinian biologist resists learning to live with panpsychism
The differences between panpsychism and naturalism are subtle but critical. As panpsychism’s popularity grows, insight will be better than rage and ridicule.
Eric Holloway at Mind Matters News: Can the “physical world” be wholly physical? Physical at all?
The Epicurean philosophy of pure physicalism is attractive to many but the logic of it, followed consistently, refutes itself.
At Mind Matters News: Why so many neuroscientists are unreflective materialists
In his chapter of a new anthology, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos (2021), neurosurgeon Michael Egnor looks at the growing evidence that the mind is not simply what the brain does and defends a dualist view.
At Mind Matters News: Can wholly random processes produce information?
Marks: We showed that in all cases, that yes, [design] was required, and that there’s mathematics behind it. The mathematics is based on the No Free Lunch Theorem, which was popularized in the IEEE transactions on evolutionary computing in 1997. There, David Wolpert and W. G. Macready showed something which astonished the area of genetic programming and evolutionary programming.
At Mind Matters News: Neuroscientist: Mind is not just brain? That’s career limiting!
Neuropsychologist Mark Solms and neurosurgeon Michael Egnor agreed that clinical experience supports a non-materialist view of the mind but that the establishment doesn’t.
At Evolution News: C. S. Lewis and the argument for theism from reason
Jay Richards: Natural selection could conceivably select for survival-enhancing behavior. But it has no tool for selecting only the behaviors caused by true beliefs, and weeding out all the others. So if our reasoning faculties came about as most naturalists assume they have, then we have little reason to assume they are reliable in the sense of giving us true beliefs. And that applies to our belief that naturalism is true.
And now… David Hume Cancelled? Jerry Coyne reports.
Jerry, what goes around, comes around. You did to Eric Hedin what the Woke are doing to your faves. They’ll Cancel them all. Then they won’t have to do any homework. We didn’t tell them to. You did. We could all help stop it now but then you have to stop too.
At Mind Matters News: Why physicalism is failing as the accepted approach to science
Essentially, panpsychism offers a way for scientists to address human consciousness, as currently understood, without explaining it away as an illusion. It would allow us to say that if Zombie-Jane existed, she would be missing something critical that Jane has (and so does everything else, to some extent). Whether that makes panpsychism a better explanation of reality than idealism or dualism is a separate question. Like all points of view, they have their own issues but the Zombie isn’t one of them.
Jerry Coyne on Cancel Culture’s hit on medical science
The new terminology would make it hard for most family doctors to talk plainly about typical health issues around, say, obesity or substance abuse very clearly. One doesn’t get the impression from the Woke rhetoric that the patient can decide to make changes that lead to better health. Yet people in all social groups do that every day. Anyway, Coyne is way more useful fighting this than fighting design in nature.
At Mind Matters News: Philosopher: Panpsychism is not in conflict with physics at all
Remember Egnor ’s Principle: If your hypothesis is that your mind is an illusion, then you do not have a hypothesis. The panpsychists want to have a hypothesis. They want to include consciousness as a real fact in nature while avoiding dualism.
A Review of Steve Meyer’s The Return of the God Hypothesis
Scambray: Meyer summarizes his thesis early on when he points to three 20th century mutually supporting scientific discoveries that provide strong evidence for belief in the God of Judaism and Christianity. (from review)
An interesting take on how science splutters out amid cries of “Trust the Science!”
Curiously, “Trust the Science” echoes across the landscape at about the same time as Cancel Culture has started going after prominent historical scientists. There may be a connection in the sense that the slogan relates to a state of mind in which Correct scientists are identified and given implicit obedience — for now — and Incorrect ones are destroyed.
Wokeness isn’t new: Apparently there was such a thing as Marxist astronomy
Pannekoek would have been a stalwart, had he lived, in the war on math.