I’m at Skepticon, and while waiting for registration to open this morning, I thought I’d peek in at the Discovery Institute, and their Evolution News & Views site. So much entertainingly idiotic stupidity is on display.
There’s Casey Luskin, squeaking away in blithe ignorance about his total lack of awareness of the history and philosophy of evolutionary biology (no, really…he gets everything wrong). David Klinghoffer is, of course, indignant about the criminalization of Intelligent Design creationism (writing from his jail cell, no doubt) and announces that Neil deGrasse Tyson is a buffoon
…no, that he’s not a buffoon, he’s a cunning and dangerous man. Both are examples of the vacuous content of ID creationism, but the best has got to be Michael Egnor, who seems to be babbling a great deal lately. I think he’s jealous that another, different lunatic neurosurgeon is getting all the press lately, so he’s trying to remind everyone that he can be just as kooky as Ben Carson. Maybe he’s hoping to get a vice presidential slot.
So he writes this pathetic exercise in human exceptionalism.
We are more different from apes than apes are from viruses. Our difference is a metaphysical chasm. It is obvious and manifest in our biological nature. We are rational animals, and our rationality is all the difference. Systems of taxonomy that emphasize physical and genetic similarities and ignore the fact that human beings are partly immaterial beings who are capable of abstract thought and contemplation of moral law and eternity are pitifully inadequate to describe man.
So he thinks chimpanzees are more like viruses than humans? Astonishing. His whole post works that way: he claims that animals have no power to understand concepts at all, they’re all about reflexive, conditioned responses to their environment, while humans all have these totally unique powers of abstraction that are derived from the fact that their minds are partially immaterial. He has no evidence for any of his assertions, and in fact they fly against the existing evidence. But no matter, mere evidence cannot stand against his mighty preconceptions.
Jeffrey Shallit points out the obvious inanity of Egnor’s claims, and Egnor rushed over to repeat them. Repeat them a lot. Apparently if you say something stupid, stupid people believe they will sound more intelligent if they say them again.
He also trots out a “challenge”. We’re apparently supposed to address this claim.
Explain in a post how it is possible to instantiate (not represent) a universal in brain matter.
OK, easy. It is not possible. Egnor is making the claim that we are somehow creating a universal property in our heads, rather than modeling it, and I think it is his responsibility to demonstrate why that ludicrous claim is possible, not ours. But I know exactly how he would defend it: by repeating it 50 times.
Well, I’ve done my penance now. I don’t have to look at Evolution News & Views again for another 6 months, at which time I’ll probably find the same cluster of blustering incompetent assholes fuming away.
I’m hungry.
Could someone instantiate me some breakfast?
If “egnorance” isn’t a word, it ought to be.
What colour unicorn would you like on your breakfast, Sir? Today’s special is pogo stick.
“But can you prove that there is no invisible, tasteless, odourless, weightless immaterial substance present in all humans, that is absent in apes (and viruses)? No? Ha, thought not, I win!”
– Science, according to Mr. Egnor.
ugh, dualism. Our intellect is what our brain chemistry does, when abstracted in order to analyze discretely.
One can also say pi is immaterial that it is sometime instantiated by physical circles, etc. It can also be said that nothing actually exists, that everything is only our senses sending signals to our mind, so no actual proof exists. (I think Kant had something to say about that).
So he likes to play word salad: throwing incomplete concepts commonly not understood and throw them all together into a salad to entice his listeners into saying “uh maybe”.
Great, now he’s gonna quote you saying that it isn’t possible to do this important thing, and so forever after he has justified in his mind that he won all the debates with you ever.
Now on display for a limited time only: Egnor and His Self-Refuting Argument.
I wonder where Egnor places crows in his taxonomy? They seem to be pretty good at this whole thinking thing.
Get on I-95S during the DC rush hour and tell me all about how rational we are.
Viruses aren’t even an organism for fucks sake! Never mind, pointing out anything reasonable to such types is beyond useless.
dreikin @ 8:
So are rats. I’m much more impressed with the thinking my rats do than I am with what passes for thinking with Egnor.
Egnor prepared me for Ben Carson’s idiocy. Thanks Egnor with out you I might have been surprised that brain surgeons can be idiots.
Uhh… wasn’t Plato’s argument in favor of the Forms essentially relying on the assumption that limited being like us can’t do that? (For that matter, theologians routinely make similar claims about our knowledge of gods or any of the properties of supernatural beings generally, which are conveniently inaccessible to us mere mortals.) Can another dualist like Egnor start from opposing assumptions and reach the same sort of conclusion? How are we supposed to tell which is more convincing? Where exactly did Plato and (very nearly all of) the sophistmicated theologicians go wrong?
If we can do that, and we’re supposed to explain that without appealing to our own minds being immaterial, it’s not clear what kinds of evidence would demonstrate that we can. Anyway, I’m not aware of this evidence, either that we can know such things or even more basically that there is anything to know about. It seems like he expects us from the beginning to be a limited sort of dualist (one that believes in something supernatural but not necessarily immaterial human minds), to argue that the best explanation of those immaterial things we all agree upon is that we have immaterial minds as well, which he claims here we can access. But we don’t all agree that there is anything to access or that it can be accessed, because there’s no convincing evidence for either claim.
On the other hand, if we can’t do that, and that’s why there need to be immaterial things included in our worldview, which aren’t limited in the ways humans are, because those (immaterial) universals do in fact exist and because their inaccessibility to us is exactly what we should expect of such things, then we don’t need to explain how we can do something we can’t do. Because that makes no sense at all. We only need to explain what we know is true, not things that may turn out to be false. If they do exist, we should have some non-circular way of determining that they exist, even if the likes of Egnor can only offer us a bunch of fallacious garbage. I still don’t see a way to do that.
We could also distinguish between claims about abstractions, like “the number five exists,” if that’s something you can support somehow, and claims about the existence of immaterial minds. The former (if the number five “exists” in an appropriate sense) is not at all like a mind, and I have no idea how that association is supposed to work. But we have to get the basics out of the way first. Creationists usually aren’t ready for issues like this, which are at least mildly interesting.
So Egnor claims to be a brain surgeon, that’s terrible. He seems to be entirely unaware that one slip of a knife can permanently alter perceptions, awareness, memory and all of the other “unsubstantial” elements of the mind. This just confirms what the large proportion of my family who were in the medical profession tell me about surgeons – outside the operating theatre they should be locked into a padded cell.
@ dreikin Not just crows, cephalopods, dogs, elephants, cats, pigs, all the apes and on and on and on
When creationists go to a “metaphysical” explanation, they are truly admitting they have no evidence, and are inventing something that they hope is outside of science so that won’t be refuted. Except they can and will be laughed at, and the law and everybody else will see the religious nature of their arguments.
Oh those right-wingers! Always trying to project their own flaws onto others.
“Explain in a post how it is possible to instantiate (not represent) a universal in brain matter.”
What in the everlasting fuck is this supposed to even mean? A universal what? Serial bus? Studio? Life church?
According to Google, instantiate means “represent as or by an instance” — so represent (not represent) an undefined thingy in brain matter.
BOOM! Mr. Egnor drops the mike and walks offstage. Obviously, nobody would ever dare question Aristotelean science!
*eyes threatening to roll out of my head*
Chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans, and even certain monkeys have all demonstrated the capacity for abstract thought and moral reasoning.
Just not to the degree of complexity than humans can.
All on a continuum, almost as if, *gasp*, there is a shared ancestry for these traits.
” can you prove that there is no invisible, tasteless, odourless, weightless immaterial substance present in all humans”
Please refer to the definition of “substance”. If it invisible, tasteless, odourless, and weightless it isn’t a “substance” so far as I can see. In fact, if it “has” all these “attributes” it pretty much isn’t anything, is it? Even neutrinos have mass. Photons don’t, but then they are not “invisible”.
Andrew Glasgow:
No, it means an example. If you are an instantiation of humankind, you are an example of or an instance of a human. You are not merely a representation of a human; you are one.
People sometimes don’t use “example/exemplify” but prefer more quasi-technical jargon like this, because there doesn’t need to be any of the connotations of exemplifying, like being a paradigmatic case of something, bringing attention to special features which other “instances” may not have. You could just be an instance, not necessarily an especially exceptional or extraordinary one. But the relevant point here is that you are that thing, not a representation of it. If someone took your picture or wrote a story about you, that would be a representation of you, which is not the same as you being yourself.
Ed Seedhouse:
Well, you can play games with definitions all you like, but an “immaterial substance” doesn’t occupy spacetime like material substances do, however it is that they happen to do that occupying. Cartesians usually talk in terms of spatial extent (and you could add temporal extent), because Descartes wasn’t exactly thinking atomistically of zero-dimensional particles (much less points in a field or any more modern physical theories), but it amounts to the same thing as being in space and moving through it. You don’t need to discuss various other material properties, because at the end of the day those all derive from (material) things being somewhere at some time. We invent concepts like “energy” (or mass, weight, etc.) to explain why things move as they do. That’s what physics is about.
And you can’t move if you’re not in spacetime, which is what you would have to say about a such a thing (an im-material substance) if it exists. That doesn’t mean you must conclude it doesn’t exist. It’s not that easy. A definition, and a priori reasoning generally, isn’t the sort of thing which tells you whether or not things exist, which you should be able to understand by considering responses to the various ontological arguments. You couldn’t magic a god into existence with word games, and you couldn’t magic them out (if they were real) by doing that either. Because the evidence, and not bare definitions or assumptions, suggests that like everything else words don’t have magic powers.
Egnor’s intellect is certainly immaterial…
What’s this again about apes being unable to think abstractly?
http://www.koko.org/gorilla-art-1
I don’t suppose Egnor has worked on (or assisted, or critiqued, or heard of) any sort of research on exactly what bit(s) of the human (and human only!) brain interact with the soul? Correct me if I’m wrong, but actually finding such a thing would be a slam-dunk for dualists – perhaps not entirely irrefutable, but massive evidence in their favor.
Speaking personally, if I was a scientist who truly accepted this idea of an immaterial soul making itself known uniquely through human brains, I’d be falling all over myself to pinpoint it so I could throw it in the face of every single atheistic doubter that came along. Nobel Prize city, we’re talking.
And yet I am under the impression that the field is strangely quiet. Perhaps I’m mistaken, of course, and there are biologists feverishly working away at the parts of the human brain that, unlike every other animal brain in existence, dumb it down to just a radio receiver.
Can someone set me straight here?
The stakes are so high, and the task so straightforward, I’d have to think any honest researcher would be champing at the bit to do tests on this subject. Or did I just give the game away somehow?
Hmm….every time such religious ideas as a soul has been defined with sufficient rigor so that science can study it, those ideas have been shown to be false. The religious must stay vague or they run the risk of being shown wrong.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls @ 25:
Ah, but y’see, I don’t even ask for research into souls themselves – I’d grant, for the purposes of argument, that they are essentially undetectable directly.
But one can’t argue that the brain is being heavily altered by the existence of such a soul – and that human brains are the only such brains to be so altered – and then turn around and say that there’s no point in looking for these changes, or the structures that propagate them (structural or cellular). I haven’t even heard any suggestions as to what’s actually changing in the brain when the soul interacts with it. You’d think that, if they actually fancied their ideas as being the least bit scientific, they’d have at least the wisp of an idea, wouldn’t you?
Anri #26
I’ll give you my take on the situation. Many religious folks put god outside of space-time, so that it is not detectable. The problem becomes, if their deity interacts with normal space-time in any way, there should be some record left in space-time of that interaction. If their deity is undetectable by any means, that means the deity doesn’t interact with space-time and is an essentially an useless philosophical bit of metaphysical rationalization.
Same with the soul. If it interacts with the brain, leaving traces, it has a presence in space-time and can be detected. If it is undetectable, that means the soul exists outside of space-time, doesn’t interact with it, and, like the deity above, is a useless bit of metaphysical rationalization.
The problem is that religious folks like Engor want to have it both ways. Something that exists outside of space-time, but interacts with space-time without leaving any traces. This is why what they claim is utterly laughable. They can’t have it both ways. Only one can be right.
The only thing worse than the magical wish-thinking (smugly proclaimed as unassailable axiom) that is Egnor’s argument is its numbing, exasperating tediousness – or, more accurately, the tediousness of Egnor himself.
He has just this one horse to ride and ride it he does, whipping it bloody and riding it to exhaustion at every opportunity, stopping only after it drops dead so he can pick up a stick and beat its carcass into dogmeat.
It used to be that neurosurgeons were held up as some of the most intelligent people on the planet – hence the old saying “Hey, it’s not brain surgery!” – but between them, Egnor and Carson have almost irreparably damaged the brand with their unchecked public brainfarts. If I was a neurosurgeon myself I’d hasten to distance myself from these sluggards, lest I be lumped in with them and considered yet another idiot with uncommonly steady hands.
I’ll take Egnor seriously on his dualism when he can look at a photograph of two apples and point out where the two is.
The first instance of “egnorance” is, I think, at the Panda’s Thumb, by Burt Humburg, who perhaps coined the term: Egnorance. (n) The egotistical combination of ignorance and arrogance.
http://pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/03/egnorance-combo-arrogance.html
Anri @ 24:
No, no, you drink your soul. Or eat it. Maybe just swallow it, I’m not sure. MYSTIC SOUL SEED … from the Pharoah’s to today’s Medical Patents!
Drs. Carson and Egnor both show that being a brain surgeon is not evidence that one can think rationally.
Caine @31 — Oh, that takes me back to Sailor Moon Stars, where the baddies are, like, stealing people’s Star Seeds or something to free the Big Bad (Galaxia, I think). I may be mixing this up with the other seasons, so…
aaand shutting up now.
Does he not realize just how irrational us humans are? Most of us have never had an original thought, can’t reason our way out of a paper bag, and spend all our time watching TV. And getting us that far takes twelve years of education.
@PZ – I’m sorry you had to go through all of this crap. My sympathies. And thanks for the warning. No one of us will go to Evolution News & Views ever.