Last week on Boing Boing Cory Doctorow posted a link to a New Scientist article about how the ‘Intelligent Design’-aligned Discovery Institute was starting another battlefront against Darwinian evolution – this time employing Cartesian Dualism as their weapon.
I think Cory’s introduction to that story, where he describes Cartesian Dualism as “the idea that the brain is a physical object, but the mind that inhabits it is made from some kind of ghostly jesusite-235 that conclusively proves the existence of the Invisible Sky Daddy in a white robe and beard”, as a rather knee-jerk and simplistic reaction to a complex and fascinating topic. To be fair, his wording is a little obscure and he might have been describing Dualism as Intelligent Design proponents might define it. But the more concerning aspect for me is how the topic might be hijacked, and therefore further marginalised. From the NS article:
[T]he movement certainly seems to hope that the study of consciousness will turn out to be “Darwinism’s grave”, as Denyse O’Leary, co-author with Beauregard of ‘The Spiritual Brain’, put it. According to proponents of ID, the “hard problem” of consciousness – how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons – is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute’s mission as outlined in its “wedge document”, which seeks “nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies”, to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one.
I’ve noted before how, before the religious aspect came into it, the idea of ‘Intelligent Design’ was a scientific and much debated topic. Materialist and co-discoverer of DNA Frances Crick even wrote a book on the topic. So I’m wary that developments in understanding consciousness – at least those which suggest some sort of dualist underpinnings – may now be thrown in the wastebasket as “Creationist nonsense”.
In any case, the comments thread which follows Cory’s posting at Boing Boing makes for good reading – there’s some very intelligent commentary (amidst the usual fare, which you’ll have to filter out!). Hey, I even got “disemvoweled” for criticising Cory’s simplistic opening (which I find rather odd, considering that there was nothing inflammatory or vulgar about it – simply a critique of his statement…so much for teh free speech!).
Would love to go into more detail on this story, but have a busy day ahead – perhaps I’ll revisit some of the topics in a future post. Readers interested in really heading down the rabbit hole with dualism and other topics of an immaterial mind, should definitely check out the textbook-like exposition in Irreducible Mind (Amazon US and UK).
