Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Never mind Darwin’s Doubt. What about Darwin’s “horrid doubt”?

Denyse O'Leary
September 14, 2014
Darwinism, Intelligent Design, Mind
Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
arroba Email

Darwin’s “horrid doubt”: The mind:

But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

…

Most partial or whole explanations of the human mind propose one of the following models:

  • The brain randomly generates illusions that self-organize as a “mind.” Behavior is thus better accounted for by the study of neurons (neuroscience) than the study of the illusory “mind.”
  • Our hominoid ancestors passed on hypothetical genes via natural selection acting on random mutation. These claimed (not demonstrated) genes result in our attitudes, values, beliefs, and behavior — mistakenly seen as the outcome of thought processes (evolutionary psychology).

Ironically, while Darwin may have doubted the fully naturalized mind and felt horrid about it, most of his latter-day supporters believe and feel good. And, on its own terms, their faith cannot be disconfirmed.

It can, of course, be dissected, and sometimes just plain sent up, as here.

Follow UD News at Twitter!

Comments
The "lower animals" don't have minds, so man's mind could not have arisen from the "mind" of a lower animal. Darwin was wrong. Mung
Consciousness cannot be an illusion or an epiphenomenon of the brain (an epiphenomenon is a phenomenon that cannot influence the process that caused it). An illusion could not influence the brain. The placebo effect and self-directed neuroplasticity demonstrate that consciousness can influence the brain. Also for an illusion to fool someone, there has to be someone to be fooled. You must have a conscious entity first that can be fooled by an illusion in order to claim anything is an illusion. Jim Smith
The brain randomly generates illusions that self-organize as a “mind.”
An illusion to whom?
FOR SOLID EVOLUTIONARY REASONS, WE’VE BEEN tricked into looking at life from the inside. Without scientism, we look at life from the inside, from the first-person POV (OMG, you don’t know what a POV is?—a “point of view”). The first person is the subject, the audience, the viewer of subjective experience, the self in the mind. Scientism shows that the first-person POV is an illusion. A.Rosenberg, The Atheist's Guid to Reality, Ch.9 [my emphasasis]
Who is the "we" in "we 've been tricked"? And POV is an illusion to whom? Box

Leave a Reply