Elegantly Fisking Materialism.
David B. Hart, reviewing Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind:
Again and again, Robinson emphasizes the degree to which the mind’s experience of itself continues to elude the reach of the monist materialisms that want to subdue it.
And yet the reductionist project apparently understands itself, and certainly presents itself, as a kind of scientific project. Thus it generates the literature of what Robinson aptly calls “parascience”: a form of discourse whose rather grand, frequently incoherent, and usually irreducibly metaphysical assertions about the nature of the universe, the self, the genealogy of morality, and so on, masquerade as purely scientific claims. This is a literature that systematically blurs the distinction between fact and theory, and between legitimate theory and ideological invention; but it is marketed to readers who for the most part lack the special training needed to recognize when they are being misled, and so enjoys — as Robinson says of the works of Dawkins and Dennett — “the effective authority that comes from successful popularization.”
A great deal of the pleasure that Absence of Mind affords the reader comes from Robinson’s patient deflation of parascientific pretensions. She does not counter the reductionist case with vague appeals to hopeful sentiment, but instead quite effectively demonstrates how much of that case consists in baseless assumptions, ungoverned metaphors, and sheer assertion.
I love it!! This is on the Templeton Foundation-sponsored website Big Questions Online, which looks like the kind of sandbox I love to play in. You see, while Hart doesn’t suffer fools gladly, neither does skeptic.com‘s Michael Shermer, who in another piece on BQO eviscerates Deepak Chopra’s “quantum flapdoodle.” (Shermer may be a parascientist, but that doesn’t make Chopra’s equation of subatomic and mental nonlocality anything but fanciful.) You end up not knowing which is worse, the so-proud-to-be-boneheaded parascience or the mooshy new “spiritual” pseudoscience, but in any case being glad that there is a place that is ready to scrutinize all varieties of bad thinking with an endangered intellectual rigor.
Ambiance 