Site Meter Reflections on Playboy: Why the “new atheists” need to go back to the drawing board

October 26, 2007

Why the “new atheists” need to go back to the drawing board

I publish this post in the spirit of the unlikely but historically interesting dialogue between Playboy and mainline organized religion in the 1960s. Although I make no excuse for religion as the term is understood by, say, Osama bin Laden or Jack T. Chick, I believe I can defend a certain sophisticated kind of religiosity against the newly emboldened generation of militant atheists, like Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens.

The state of the art in this militancy is represented by this blog post at Jewcy.com (courtesy Reason.tv) inspired by a debate between atheist Hitchens and theist Dinesh D’Souza (unabridged video). First, Josh Strawn explains his problems with D’Souza’s arguments. Then he reveals (accurately) that atheism wasn’t fully spoken for in that debate:
But to Hitchens: why not school people in precisely how the human mind does work at this point in the argument? It certainly does obey laws—laws so material that the notions of subjectivity and consciousness on which the theist’s argument rest get blown to smithereens. If a human subject with a “mind” who makes ethical decisions that transfer to his or her immortal soul suffers a brain injury impairing his or her interpretive systems, ability to read human emotions (key to the brain response we know as ‘compassion’) then what’s happened to the soul? If I can remove the part of a person’s brain that enables ethical judgment, have I not surgically removed their moral soul? This connection between what the religious call the soul and what is known about material brain functionality severely undermines the theist’s notion of the “I” that makes choices that bear on “my” eternal soul. If I’m a neuroscientist, I can plug your immortal soul into a machine and map it’s [sic] electricity.

Descartes believed that somewhere in the brain there was a driver’s seat for the soul—the site where “you” make the decision to act, whether morally or immorally. But the “I” that so many take for granted is known to be nothing more than the brain’s interpretation of its own complex functioning. Multiple things occur in the brain that the “I” isn’t aware of and couldn’t control no matter how hard it tried. The notion of heaven, this place where all the “I”s will someday go because of things they did or didn’t do, is not commensurate with what is known about the brain. The human “I” in other words is little more than the transcendentalizing of an evolved brain phenomenon. If one accepts evolution, as D’Souza does, then one must also accept that these brains once had no ability to conceive of themselves in this way, much less to glorify it so. And so grows a new problem for the theist—not the atheist—to explain, one that isn’t unlike the ensoulment debate regarding abortion. Whence did the soul of the “I” come into being in terms of human evolution? And how can something be transcendent if it can be surgically removed?

Many have charged the new atheists of wearing out an old argument and passing off as if its [sic] new. But these questions are completely current. Francis Crick proclaimed the brain to be the great frontier of the 21st century and it has only been with the advent of computers in the last 20-30 years that the intensive acceleration in learning has taken place. Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, and Dawkins are not beating dead horses by the name of Russell or Nietzsche. They are pushing back the post-everything world’s increasing tendency to accept bullshit. And their rebuttals to this trend stand on foundations that aren’t hundreds or thousands but mere tens of years old. Hitchens could have been a bit more forward with some of this information. D’Souza could stand to be a bit more aware of it. But hey, the best bullshitters are the ones who believe their own bullshit.
Strawn foolishly tips his hand by mentioning René Descartes. Descartes’ framing of the mind-body problem has undeniable flaws. But this does not mean that the essential problem he faced is not a real problem for philosophy, even now. To prove it, I quote at length from How the Mind Works, by an especially smart atheist, Steven Pinker:
  • If we could ever duplicate the information processing in the human mind as an enormous computer program, would a computer running the program be conscious?
  • What if we took that program and trained a large number of people, say, the population of China, to hold in mind the data and act out the steps? Would there be one gigantic consciousness hovering over China, separate from the consciousnesses of the billion individuals? If they were implementing the brain state for agonizing pain, would there be some entity that really was in pain, even if every citizen was cheerful and light-hearted?
  • Suppose the visual receiving area at the back of your brain was surgically severed from the rest and remained alive in your skull, receiving input from the eyes. By every behavioral measure you are blind. Is there a mute but fully aware visual consciousness sealed off in the back of your head? What if it was removed and kept alive in a dish?
  • Might your experience of red be the same as my experience of green? Sure, you might label grass as “green” and tomatoes as “red,” just as I do, but perhaps you actually see the grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as red.
  • Could there be zombies? That is, could there be an android rigged up to act as intelligently and as emotionally as you and me, but in which there is “no one home” who is actually feeling or seeing anything? How do I know that you’re not a zombie?
  • If someone could download the state of my brain and duplicate it in another collection of molecules, would it have my consciousness? If someone destroyed the original, but the duplicate continued to live my life and think my thoughts and feel my feelings, would I have been murdered? Was Captain Kirk snuffed out and replaced by a twin every time he stepped into the transporter room?
  • What is it like to be a bat? Do beetles enjoy sex? Does a worm scream silently when a fisherman impales it on a hook?
  • Surgeons replace one of your neurons with a microchip that duplicates its input-output functions. You feel and behave exactly as before. Then they replace a second one, and a third one, and so on, until more and more of your brain becomes silicon. Since each microchip does exactly what the neuron did, your behavior and memory never change. Do you even notice the difference? Does it feel like dying? Is some other conscious entity moving in with you?
Beats the heck out of me! I have some prejudices, but no idea of how to begin to look for a defensible answer. And neither does anyone else. The computational theory of mind offers no insight; neither does any finding in neuroscience, once you clear up the usual confusion of sentience with access [to information] and self-knowledge. [1997, p. 145-147]
With all the intellectual humility due a subject like this, I dare propose the beginnings of a solution. The philosophical problem of sentience almost literally stares us in the face from every mirror, no matter how hard some thinkers try to wish it away. If sentience is an undeniably real phenomenon that can never be identified as the direct consequence of any particular event at one place and time—not even the workings of a human brain—mustn’t it necessarily follow that sentience somehow characterizes the entire universe all at once?

D’Souza, to name only one, might have reasons to reject my question as a suitable defense of his sense of religion. For all I know, he might even call it an heretical argument leading to pantheism and animism. But as I said, my idea won’t satisfy every religious person’s sense of the value of religion. And, at the same time, if a philosophical debate drives me to the conclusion that the entire cosmos has a mysterious awareness of itself resembling mine, it seems a mild and forgivable anthropomorphism to call that consciousness God.

Of course, I don’t give myself credit for a brand new idea, either. From what little I understand of him, I wonder if Spinoza, for example, has already been there and done that. Anyway, my hat is in the ring, too, for what it’s worth.

Posted by Brian Sorgatz at 2:50 PM

  • Blogger iih left this comment at November 22, 2007 3:27 PM  
    Very interesting... but I am wondering, in the first paragraph you refer to "religiosity" in a general sense (I guess you mean not in the sense of "organized religion"). Would the word spirituality do any better?

  • Blogger Brian Sorgatz left this comment at November 29, 2007 5:08 PM  
    iih,
    I apologize for the delay in answering your good question. I’ve been distracted by other posts I’ve written lately.

    I chose the word religiosity instead of spirituality for a specific reason. I wanted to dignify the well-established religions of the world as reservoirs of many generations of human wisdom on how to be happy. (Modern technology makes life comfortable, but happiness per se is probably no easier to find now than in the time of Jesus.) Regardless of anyone’s disbelief in the divine inspiration of the Bible or the divine revelation of the Quran, Christianity and Islam have both served that function as institutions. That’s simply a fact of world history—regardless of anyone’s “spirituality” or lack thereof.

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