Paradigm Bias

In this blog entry, I'm attempting to make a case for saying that the "quality" media, most scientists and the academic establishment have a bias in favour of physical realism - or materialism as it is more commonly termed. Stating the bleeding obvious, you might say, but many people tend to trust the above mentioned authorities without question. This materialistic bias is sustained by the fervent deisre of its proponents to expunge anything smacking of the spiritual or the supernatural from public debate. This is a concerted attempt to promote a philosophy that eliminates purpose and consciousness from any description of fundamental reality.

Highly credentialed materialists such as Daniel Dennett or the Churchlands (Paul and Pat) go so far as to deny the existence of consciousness altogether. There is actually a name for this kind of denial: they are called "Eliminatist Materialists". Thoughts belong in the realm of the subjective and there is no place in science for the subjective. There is a book entitled "The Taboo of Subjectivity" (see Amazon) by B. Alan Wallace who is the President of the Santa Barbara Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Consciousness. And where we really see the full fury of the campaign against idealism is when we speculate about the metaphysical: possible worlds beyond the world of the five senses. Worlds possibly inhabited by incorporeal beings: dead people and such like! How can you measure something that is not of this world? Impossible. Therefore, if it can't be measured, it just doesn't exist.

We don't have to try too hard to find examples of this bias. There are anomalies that science has a bit of a problem trying to explain. Consciousness is one (the New Scientist gracefully included consciousness as one of the 13 great mysteries that science has yet to explain). I would contend that many of these anomalies just wouldn't be a problem if we were to adopt an idealist worldview. Religious types like to explain these anomalies by saying that God did it (obviously). This, the sceptics accuse, is the God of the Gaps argument and that one day, all of these slight problems will be satisfactorily explained by physical science. What I see, on the other hand, is the over-use of coincidence and statistical probability as an explanatory device among materialists. When someone tells of a dream they had that grandpa had died and then they hear the next day that Grandpa did indeed die during the night ... coincidence. When people all over the world describe similar experiences: all coincidences (or they are all liars). To accept the idea of a mind-based reality is asking far too much but to believe that at every moment, with every decision made by anyone and everyone, a whole new universe is created is just hunky-dory. After all, it would be a new PHYSICAL universe, now wouldn't it?

This is precisely what was suggested in the 1950's by the physicist, Hugh Everett. For years it was regarded as the ramblings of an eccentric. Until, that is, these New Age hippy types started hijacking physics and putting consciousness back in the centre of things. Come back Hugh, all is forgiven ... what a genius you turned out to be! At a stroke we can be rid of that pesky consciouness thing and solve the problem with statistics. Schrödinger's cat can be dead in one world and alive in another. No conscious observer required. Just an endless supply of universes ... not much to ask in the defense of materialism. Actually, I don't have a problem with the idea of parallel universes and the splitting-off of new universes at decision points - in fact, for what it's worth, I think that is probably the way the world does work. But to use that purely to eliminate the need for consciousness seems a little desperate.

There is another example of this stats-of-the-gaps argument. We are told that the universe is so precisely fine-tuned as to appear to be designed that way. Prof. Paul Davies calculated the odds against life-supporting stars evolving from the Big Bang rather than an aggregate of black holes is "one followed by a thousand billion billion billion zeros (at least)". Any good atheist or materialist couldn't allow that word "design" into the equation. So again we see the old stand-by - probabilities (nobody but scientists and mathematicians understand that stuff anyway). Again, if we have enough universes (only this time we need all these universes at the outset, not just created at decision points) then we can explain why we happen to live in one that just so neatly fits the bill. No less than arch-materialist and high priest of British cosmology, Sir Martin Rees supports this explanation while agreeing with the impossible odds against chance for a single universe.

So we have examples of desperate number crunching going on in order to eliminate the need for mindful purpose. Mindful purpose suggests God. God represents all that superstitious nonsense we learned at church when we were children. We must not allow that back in at any cost. Isn't that the general tenet?

Here, therefore, is the bias: while idealism might provide just as good an explanation of the world as would materialism; and while idealism might actually provide a better explanation for the so-called supernatural phenomena that many of us observe or experience, why is it that the materialist explanation - no matter how contrived - is invariably accepted (or demanded)? At this point one might expect to hear a clamour of voices proclaiming "Occam's Razor!". I might suggest, however, that Ian Stevenson's reincarnation research would find a more parsimonious iterpretation within an idealist worldview while it would be seen as impossible according to the materialist view. Indeed, investigating the impossible is not science - it is fantasy. And who decides what is possible? Scientists.

I'll end this little discourse with a recent example of media bias. The BBC recently aired a documentary called "The Secret Life of Chaos". This was, as you might expect from the BBC, a well produced and well presented treatment of the theories of Chaos and Complexity. However, as we have also come to expect from the BBC, it presented a particular point of view as fact: that being the materialist/atheist point of view. In short, we were presented with the inescapable (and somewhat triumphant) conclusion that chaos theory showed that the universe has no purpose. That massively complex systems such as humans can be explained by a few simple equations involving feedback loops. Finally, Darwinian Natural Selection is embraced to complete the picture: no purpose, no mind, just self-organising dust which happens to produce very complex, self- replicating organisations of dust over billions of years. It seems that at some point along the billions of years timeline, the dust learned to think. No mention of how that happened but it is hinted at that thinking is nothing more than an emergent property of the organised clumps of dust.

Well, who'd have thought it?

Dave.