God & Materialism: John Haught, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, On Three Ways of Heating Water

God & Materialism: John Haught, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, On Three Ways of Heating Water

Among other points, theologian John Haught, Georgetown University, says that scientific materialists use a different kind of metaphysics when they claim that life is meaningless, has no purpose, and that the physical is all there is.

As for Richard Dawkins, celebrated evangelist of atheism (The Selfish Gene, et al.), Haught says that Dawkins tricks-out the game. Dawkins starts with "Okay, let's play by the rules. God is a designer, right? Well, then, I win, obviously all the design we see needs no God." John Haught does not understand God quite this simply.

With regard to physicalist Daniell Dennett (Consciousness Explained, among other books), Haught disagrees with Dennett's conception of consciousness, considered by Haught as narrow. Haught's response is that there are three ways of looking at a pot of water being heated for tea. (1) Electrons in the water are moving around, becoming increasingly excited or that H2O molecules are transitioning from a liquid to a gaseous state. (2) I turned on the gas burner under the pot. (3) I wanted tea. Dennett's philosophy of consciousness is the kind that belongs to number one, yet there are three points of view for the same phenomenon.

Here is a Video interview of Haught by Robert Wright. I have opinions, but don't want to prejudice your viewing.

Is There Such A Thing As A Core, Common Mystical Experience?

John Hayes: Is There Such A Thing As A Core, Common Mystical Experience?

To this day still a believing Christian, back in the 1960s, John Hayes, a psychologist and self-described Zen-Catholic, was a Franciscan friar watching with curiosity while the counter-culture used psychedelics with impunity. Through his own meditation and religious practice, Hayes believes he has had sensations that he would label mystical. But these mystical states—which he described to me as “moments of unitive experience” —were significant enough that when he heard about a surprising research project at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine he was more than intrigued. Doctors at JHU were investigating the effects of psilocybin—the active ingredient in the more common variety of hallucinogenic mushroom—and looking for volunteers.

After some considerable thought, he and other theology students signed up. Would it have substantial and sustained personal meaning as spiritual experience? More at Search Magazine (science, Religion, Culture

You will find a list of people so inclined at the Mystical Experience Registry.

Here is a Wikipedia account of mysticism.

What I think. That mystical experiences help us understand our senses are bounded, which of course limits our understanding of the universe. Without his epilepsy, Dostoevsky could not have written so brilliantly and profoundly about existence. However caused, the experience is an anomaly of brain function that opens vistas of the natural we otherwise could not have beheld. That statement does not make me an atheist. People emerge from the experiences changed to the core. Have they pierced the veil? I leave the debates to theologians.

Walter Freeman, Ice Picks, & Brain Surgery

Walter Freeman, Ice Picks & Surgery

Okay, Relax Now, This Will Only Hurt A Little Bit. I'm Just Going To Poke This Ice Pick Into Your Brain

Randle Patrick McMurphy, where are you now that we need you? Your free spirit and rebellious nature has become an icon of the 1960s. But then they had to do it to you. Nurse Rached couldn't stand your antics, your failure to respect her authority. She had you lobotomized. She transformed you into Randle Patrick McZombie, and now you and the 1960s are both gone.

In his One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, novelist Ken Kesey takes McMurphy from a prison work farm and writes him into a mental hospital as a happy-go-lucky guy. Sent up for a battery charge, McMurphy fakes insanity for an easier way to serve out his sentence--in the hospital. He hadn't counted on Nurse Rached.

Kesey knew about mental hospitals. He had worked in one and saw what they did to patients. So, too, in his book The Lobotomist, Jack El-Hai describes a man named Richard, a 1930s mental patient who was lobotomized because he didn't cooperate with hospital staff. El-Hai's book is about a physician, Walter Freeman (1895-1972), who discovered the fine art of ice-picking in order to calm troubled people.


Freeman had heard of António Egas Moniz (1874-1955), a Portuguese, who did the first lobotomy in 1918. Moniz found that the procedure helped many of his patients, although not all. It resulted in severe personality changes, or even mental retardation, often done on unwilling subjects. In 1939, one of his patients shot him several times, though Moniz recovered.


Freeman didn't like the term ice pick. It has a rather unseemly ring to it. He redesigned it and called it a leucotome.

Dr. Freeman was not a surgeon. He had no real surgical training. He was not certified in surgery. For the era he did have a good knowledge of brain anatomy, and because of his interest he hired a young neurosurgeon, Dr. James Watts. After gaining experience with Watts, Freeman entered a solo practice.

I should point out that neither Moniz nor Freeman were regarded by colleagues as mad scientists. They had a credible hypothesis, that severing connection to the thalamus gave relief to schizophrenics and depressives. Credible, though not widely accepted, and Freeman's own behavior was not always cautious. I will also say that opinions about him changed. Radically.

Leucotomy, or lobotomy, severs connections in the prefrontal cortex (prefrontal lobe) or simply destroys it. The surgery can leave a person placid, listless, and without deep interests in anything. As you might guess, it is a practice not without controversy.

Back in 1936, Alice Hammatt at 63 became the first American to receive a lobotomy. She was not, shall we say, altogether willing. After the procedure had been described to her, she didn't like the idea of an ice pick in her brain. She withdrew her consent, but Freeman went ahead anyway. Freeman recorded her last words as "Who is that man? What does he want here? What's he going to do with me? Tell him to go away. Oh, I don't want to see him." Then she screamed.

Alice's husband was quite happy with the results. Before the operation she had moods of suicide and depression. Afterward, he had a sweet marriage until she died five years later. We do not know Mrs. Hammatt's opinion--that is, if she had one. She lost initiative, spontaneity, and was what we today call a couch potato.

Word spread among Freeman's colleagues and with it controversy. Then came Thorazine in about 1950. Though still practiced, today lobotomy is out of favor, largely because of relatively effective antipsychotic drugs. The ethics of the procedure is also a serious issue. As Freeman's son said, "You could never talk about a successful lobotomy. You might as well talk about a successful automobile accident."

Freeman had become a true believer, a crusader for his practice. He performed almost 3500 lobotomies and in 23 states. He traveled the country in his van which he called the Lobotomobile. Pulling up to state-run institutions, he would demonstrate before doctors working there. With a stage presence, he would try to impress them. With a leucotome in each hand, he would "ice pick" both of a patient's eye sockets at one time. By this time, he was a showman of his skill.

Moniz served as a deputy in the Portuguese parliament, as ambassador to Spain, as foreign minister, and as delegate to the 1918 Paris Peace Conference.

If you want to know, António Egas Moniz is remembered for a Nobel Prize for medicine. Walter Freeman is also remembered, although in a different way.

Click here to read from Jack El-Hai. Or here for The American Experience program transcript. Or this one: Lobotomized at 12, Howard Dully has always wondered if something is missing from his soul.


My post is on Walter Freeman, and is not about lobotomy itself. Lobotomy today has been reserved for special cases, and is used judiciously. Bear in mind that operations also turn out well. Read Patricia Moen's account of her lobotomy.

Does science make belief in God obsolete?

Does Science Make Belief in God Obsolete?

Steven Pinker of Harvard. . .

Yes, if by...

science "we mean the entire enterprise of secular reason and knowledge (including history and philosophy), not just people with test tubes and white lab coats.

Traditionally, a belief in God was attractive because it promised to explain the deepest puzzles about origins. Where did the world come from? What is the basis of life? How can the mind arise from the body? Why should anyone be moral? . . .

No and yes . . .

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, O.P., is a Dominican friar, the Archbishop of Vienna, Austria, a Member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for Education of the Roman Catholic Church, and was lead editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Absolutely not . . .
William D. Phillips, a Nobel Laureate in physics, is a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

No, but it should . . .
Christopher Hitchens is the author of God Is Not Great and the editor of The Portable Atheist. These and more views can be found by clicking here.

No, as a matter of reason and truth. The knowledge we have gained through modern science makes belief in an Intelligence behind the cosmos more reasonable than ever. Yes, as a matter of mood, sensibility, and sentiment. Not science itself but a reductive "scientific mentality" that often accompanies it, along with the power, control, comfort, and convenience provided by modern technology, has helped to push the concept of God into the hazy twilight of agnosticism. Superficially it may seem that the advances of science have made God obsolete by providing natural explanations for phenomena that were once thought to be the result of direct divine activity—the so-called "God of the gaps." But this advance has been the completion of a program of purification from superstition begun thousands of years ago by Athens and Jerusalem, by a handful of Greek sages and by the people of Israel, who "de-divinized" Nature to a degree unparalleled in the ancient world. Summarizing an established tradition 750 years ago, St. Thomas Aquinas taught that the wise governor ordinarily governs by delegation to competent subordinates. In the case of Nature, God's ordinary providence governs by means of the regularities ("laws") built into the natures of created things. This theistic outlook has been fully vindicated. As the ancient Greek materialists recognized long ago, if we wish to explain the observed world in terms of Matter without reference to Mind, then it must be explained by things material, ultimate, and very simple all at the same time—by indivisible, notional "atoms" and a chance "swerve" that sets them in random motion. If the things of everyday experience are mere aggregates of these "atoms," and if the cosmos is infinitely old and infinitely large, then chance can do the rest. To be the complete explanation of material reality, these "atoms," and whatever natural regularities they exhibit, must be so simple that their existence as inexplicable "brute facts" is plausible. Fast-forward to the present: Modern science has shown that Nature is ordered, complex, mathematically tractable, and intelligible "all the way down," as far as our instruments and techniques can discern. Instead of notional, perfectly simple "atoms," we have discovered the extraordinarily complex, beautiful, and mathematical "particle zoo" of the Standard Model of physics, hovering on the border of existence and intelligibility (as Aristotle predicted long ago with his doctrine of prime matter). And order, complexity, and intelligibility exist "all the way up" as well. We see a teleological hierarchy and chain of emergence from quantized physics, giving rise to stable chemistry, enabling the nearly miraculous properties of carbon and biochemistry, providing the material basis for the emergence of life with its own ontological hierarchy of metabolic (plant), sensitive (animal), and rational (human) existence. Beyond this astounding and unfailing order and intelligibility, our knowledge of which increases each day as science expands its scope, we now know of the precise fine-tuning of the physical laws and constants that make possible a life-supporting universe. In short, the Nature we know from modern science embodies and reflects immaterial properties and a depth of intelligibility far beyond the wildest imaginings of the Greek philosophers. To view all these extremely complex, elegant, and intelligible laws, entities, properties, and relations in the evolution of the universe as "brute facts" in need of no further explanation is, in the words of the great John Paul II, "an abdication of human intelligence." But the modern mood is an entirely different matter. In terms of modern sensibilities, the intellectual culture of the West is dominated by a scientific mentality that seeks to explain qualitative and holistic realities by quantitative and reductive descriptions of the workings of their parts. Although the scientific program that gives rise to this mentality has been quite successful in explaining the material basis for holistic realities, and in allowing us to manipulate natural things to our advantage by altering the configuration of their parts, it fails to grasp the reality of natural things themselves. The unlimited application of the "scientific mentality" is scientism, the philosophical claim that the scientific method and scientific explanations can grasp all of reality. For many, scientism is accompanied by agnosticism or atheism. In terms of popular sentiment, however, scientism has not carried the day. Most people still intuitively cling to the notion that at least human nature and human experience are not reducible to what is scientifically knowable. But with no rational alternative to scientism, most people live in a “soft,” non-rational, and relativistic world of feelings, opinions, and personal values. The increase in leisure and health brought about by our increasing mastery over Nature has not resulted, as the ancient sages supposed, in an increase in wisdom and the contemplation of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Instead, our technology-based leisure is more likely to result in quiet hedonism, consumerism, and mind-numbing mass entertainment. While many still claim belief in God, the course of their lives reflects de facto agnosticism in which the "God hypothesis" is far from everyday experiences and priorities. In all our scientistic "knowledge" of the inner workings of things, and our technology-based comforts and distractions, there seems to be no place for the still, small voice of God. In that practical and existential sense, science and technology seem to have pushed belief in God toward obsolescence. Or have they? In our innermost being, we moderns remain unsatisfied. Sooner or later we face an existential crisis, and recognize in our lives something broken, disordered, in need of redemption. The fact that we can recognize disorder, brokenness, and sin means that they occur within a larger framework of order, beauty, and goodness, or else in principle we could not recognize them as such. Yet brokenness and disorder are painfully present, and the human soul by its nature seeks something more, a deeper happiness, a lasting good. Consideration of the order and beauty in nature can lead us to a Something, the "god of the philosophers," but consideration of our incompleteness leads us beyond, in search of a Someone who is the Good of us all. Science will never make that quest obsolete. Close Essay

Martin Seligman & Happiness

Mind Shadows Home Martin Seligman & Happiness

A woman, call her Jane, sees a psychiatrist who prescribes Prozac for her depression. Joe, with bi-polar disorder, takes lithium. They have been helped by the pharmacopeia of drugs made available to the public. Undergoing standard therapies, others have gained a better sense of well being from the data psychology has collected on various mental illnesses. Over the years, psychology has focused on negative mental health, much to the benefit of those suffering from it.

But what about psychological studies on positive mental health? What makes people happy? Until recently, little research has been conducted on that. More

We Think We Know What Will Make Us Happy, But Are Bad Predictors of What Actually Will

Mind Shadows Home We Think We Know What Will Make Us Happy, But Are Bad Predictors of What Actually Will

My cat Sebastian likes food in his bowl, a warm lap, and a hand stroking his head. After I pet him for a while, he settles into a purr of perfect contentment while I read a book. For him, the future doesn't exist. It is one continual series of now. So much for living in the present. His brain has a limited frontal cortex while ours, yours and mind, is large. Like him, we have a limbic system deep in our brains, and there lies our problem as so-called rational human beings. To use some short-hand here, the cortex reasons, the limbic system emotes. The cortex prepares for the future while, in a cat, the limbic system lies on your lap and purrs, so to speak.

We all want to be happy. Aristotle long ago said it is the ultimate good, and not to be questioned as it is an end unto itself. Buddha taught that people can become happy by developing skillful means (upaya) to see through the tricks mind plays on them. The mind plays tricks aplenty. We think we know what will make us happy but we don't, not really. We think we know what has made us happy but that too is often wrong. So the question becomes, If happiness is so important to us, why are we not any better at finding it?

Recently considerable research has been spent on this question, and in several fields of inquiry. One of the fields is Behavioral Economics. A different field, Neuroeconomics, explores competition between the cortex and the limbic system. My cat Sebastian, though, does not buy things. Living in the Long Now, he does not have the least curiosity in how food gets to his bowl. You and I must deal with getting and spending and, like Wordsworth, we sometimes fret that the world is too much with us. We are not always happy, maybe never, and we wonder why.

It seems that people make bad life choices because they have faulty estimations of their future emotional state. Overall, they are poor judges of future events, good or bad, which prove less intense and more transient than they predicted. (Read Misconceptions About Happiness (Maybe You'd Really Rather Have A Candy Bar) )

Behavioral Economics helps us understand how to better manage and predict our own and others' happiness. It begins with an observation that the traditional, classic view of economic science is flawed. What does that mean?

Our free market system is based on the view that we are rational, all human beings, and free agents acting in our own rational self interest. That is the premise of orthodox economics. In his 1776 The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith wrote that "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard for their self-interest."

Rational? Well, over two hundred years later, that is still the prevailing doctrine taught in economics classes. It's not wholly accurate, though.

Behavioral economics, looks at the irrational side of things. People buy, but they often buy what they should not. Consider the following comment:

"People very robustly want instant gratification right now, and want to be patient in the future. If you ask people, ‘Which do you want right now, fruit or chocolate?’ they say, ‘Chocolate!’ But if you ask, ‘Which one a week from now?’ they will say, ‘Fruit.’ Now we want chocolate, cigarettes, and a trashy movie. In the future, we want to eat fruit, to quit smoking, and to watch Bergman films." More

The video below has Daniel Gilbert in a very interesting presentation of findings on happiness. Watch it to discover a few mind hacks and learn something about your brain.

Flat Earthers Unite: Politically Correct Text Disclaimers

Mind Shadows Home

I recently joined the Flat Earth Society because after thinking about the implications of the Old Testament, and after serious and careful consideration I concluded that Columbus was wrong. He did not sail far enough. Had he sailed past China he would have fallen off the edge of the world. He would have fallen into Hell. Satan would have sentenced him to its lower depths to burn in fierce-red flames for wanting to know too much.

The same goes for Darwin, Newton, and Copernicus. They wanted to know too much.

As for me, I'm content to bask in the ignorance God has bestowed on me. Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of the Fruit of Knowledge and look at the legacy they left us.

In the public weal I am proposing some stickers I found for public school textbooks. I sincerely offer them in the best interests of future generations. Our children are threatened by an atheistic, socialist government that wants them to know too much. The stickers are warnings to be placed inside the front covers of biology, physics, and astronomy textbooks.

Because the government and the ACLU will take school boards to court, the stickers can only be advisory and are politically correct. I am confident that some parts of Texas will implement them immediately. Here they are:

This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living organisms. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

This textbook asserts that gravity exists. Gravity is a force that cannot be directly seen. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

This textbook explains heliocentrism, the theory that the Earth orbits around a centrally located sun. By definition, then, the theory also holds that Earth is not the center of the universe. Students should be encouraged to fully consider the evidence for, and the evidence against, this theory.

Whether You Think Free Will or Determinism, Belief Shapes Behavior

Mind Shadows Whether You Think Free Will or Determinism, Belief Shapes Behavior

Popular wisdom has it that everybody will do right or wrong based on moral choice, and that moral choice is just―well, just a personal thing. One person can be as moral as another despite any difference in underlying beliefs about the world. Maybe, but Kathleen Vohs' and Jonathan Schooler's experiment gives us pause to think about the questions. What are the implications for society if people come to believe they have no free will? No moral responsibility?

They had some students read passages from Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis--a very deterministic view of the universe and the human place in it. We are creatures without God and without free will. The students read this: " ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

They had other students read inspirational books on how we make our own decisions and forge our own paths in life

They then let each group play a video game in which the groups were allowed to cheat. The students were told to do 20 arithmetic problems and to press the space bar when a question appeared, otherwise the answer would also pop up because of a computer glitch. The students were told that no one would know when the space bar was pushed. Still, the students were asked not to cheat.

So guess who cheated?

The group that read Crick's words.

What are the implications of this? We hold ourselves responsible when we think we choose our actions.
___________________
An interesting commentary on the experiment can be found at Mindful Hack. A different approach is taken at Miller-McCune.

The wild child. Feral cats and feral dogs are domestic animals who have returned to living in the woods, or who grew up there. In myth, the founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, were raised by a wolf. In fact, feral children have grown up with minimal human contact, or none at all. They may have been raised by animals (often wolves, a "community"-oriented animal) or somehow survived on their own. Here is link to a piece on feral children in Mind Shadows.

As in the case of Genie, they are confined and denied normal social interaction with other people.
Strapped to a potty-chair in her home in Temple City, Los Angeles, California, Genie wasn't taught to speak, and was denied normal human interaction.

In Siberia, the Russian government has discovered another such child.

"Feral' child barks and hisses after being raised as a pet. A 'feral' five-year-old girl who hisses and barks after being forced by her family to live as one of their many pets has been rescued from a home in far eastern Russia. More

The Man Who Found Einstein's Brain

Mind Shadows The Man Who Found Einstein's Brain

Steven Levy said that he had an almost religious experience when he found it in Wichita, Kansas. A journalist for a magazine, New Jersey Monthly, he knew it had been missing since Einstein's death. Yes, missing. The most brilliant mind of all time was buried without his head intact when he died in 1955. By 1978, when Levy's editor told him to find it, the trail had gone cold. People speculated as to where it might be, but nobody had found it. After some investigation, Levy concluded rather logically that the brain might still be in the possession of the man who did the autopsy, the pathologist who examined the great scientist's corpse. More