New Scientist conspiracy files: A philosophy prof responds

Recently, New Scientist magazine featured an article on non-materialist neuroscience, portraying the symposium at the UN (September 11, 2008) , sponsored by the Nour Foundation, UN-DESA, and the Université de Montréal as fronted by the Seattle-based Discovery Institute.

That was a surprise to me, as it would be to anyone who knows the history. Of course, Discovery wants a ticket to good seats, but so do a host of other people.

Anyway, here is Concordia University philosophy prof Angus Menuge's letter. He sent it to New Scientist, and they may or may not publish it (he is supposed to be one of the Discovery conspirators).

I am told that another letter, protesting the nonsense, from Mario Beauregard and Jeffrey Schwartz will be published in the November 29, 2008, edition of the magazine.

I wonder if it will be edited so as to remove key points ... ?

If that happens, I will publish the letter, in its entirety, here at The Mindful Hack. Anyway, here is Menuge's letter:

Amanda Gefter's article, "Creationists declare war over the brain" (22 October, 2008) misrepresents the current situation in the philosophy of mind. The article suggests that opposition to materialism arises chiefly from "creationism" and organizations such as the Discovery Institute which defend Intelligent Design. But in fact, it is widely accepted by philosophers of a wide range of religious convictions that materialism faces serious difficulties. For example, many philosophers who are secular in outlook have noticed the incompatibility of standard materialistic accounts with the nature of consciousness:

"The most striking feature is how much of mainstream [materialistic] philosophy of mind is obviously false..[I]n the philosophy of mind, obvious facts about the mental, such as that we all really do have subjective conscious mental states.are routinely denied by many.of the advanced thinkers in the subject." -- John Searle, The Rediscovery of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 3.

"No explanation given wholly on physical terms can ever account for the emergence of conscious experience."--David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 93.

"It is not that we know what would explain consciousness but are having trouble finding the evidence to select one explanation over the others; rather, we have no idea what an explanation of consciousness would even look like."--Colin McGinn, The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 61.

"We don't know. how a brain (or anything else that is physical) could manage to be a locus of conscious experience. This last is, surely, among the ultimate metaphysical mysteries; don't bet on anyone ever solving it." --Jerry Fodor, In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 83.

Secondly, I find it very troubling, that while Amanda Gefter took the trouble of interviewing sources who advocate scientific materialism, she did not interview any critics of that position, instead relying on third-hand reports. This does not seem to reflect journalistic best practice.

Third, the choice of language in the article is emotive and betrays a fairly clear bias. In this article, The New Scientist presents itself as identifying science with the philosophical assumption of materialism, and can thus describe critics of materialism as "anti-science." If science is about pursuing the best explanation of the observable evidence, it should not prejudge its findings in favor of materialism. There are important philosophical and scientific criticisms of materialist philosophy, and it does this publication's readers no service to create the impression that all of them derive from fanatical, irrational sources.

Dr. Angus Menuge
Professor of Philosophy
Concordia University Wisconsin
12800 N. Lake Shore Drive
Mequon, WI 53097
USA

(Note: Some links have been inserted, for reader convenience.)

I am still reading, and still enjoying Menuge's book, Agents Under Fire, about neuroscience and rationality, and strongly recommend it.

Dorian Gray, I hope you believe in miracles, because cosmetic surgery ...

One of the people attacked in a recent New Scientist article is Angus Menuge of Concordia University, Wisconsin. Menuge set the record straight here.

That said, the whole business reminded me that I never got around to actually reading Menuge's book, Agents Under Fire, because - well, quite honestly, because I feared it would be yet another academic snooze (= 16 hours I wish I had spent at the news desk, where I would be much more use!).

I was wrong. Agents Under Fire isn't a snooze. Here are a couple of passages - I've only started reading, but it sounds pretty interesting:

This book aims to provide a rigorous defense of the intuition that scientific materialism is incoherent because it either eliminates or artificially constricts resources presupposed by materialistic scientific inquiry. In other words, scientific materialism rests on certain implicit foundational presuppositions that t is inherently unable to sustain and that are in fact incompatible with its central claims. Like so many ideas spawned by the Enlightenment, the apparent strength of scientific materialism depends on its careful concealment of the borrowed capital upon which it lives. The bankruptcy is there but undeclared. While the public image may resemble the eternally youthful Dorian Gray, the truth has more in common with his portrait. (p. xiii)

Materialism is a dead cat and lots of people have an interest in pretending it's still alive.

Here's Dorian Gray:




More usefully, here's Agents Under Fire:

New Scientist: From the "Just connect the dots, and ... " files

EPS Blog, the blog of the Evangelical Philosophical Society (and its journal, Philosophia Christi), has offered some comments (October 23, 2008), on the hit piece in New Scientist against the non-materialist neuroscientists (to which I responded here). They note, for example,

Angus Menuge, Concordia University's (Wisconsin) Professor of Philosophy and Computer Science and Chair of Philosophy, is cited by Gefter for receiving funds from the Discovery Institute for his Agents Under Fire: Materialism and the Rationality of Science book and for testifying "in favour of teaching ID in state-funded high-schools."

But as Menuge notes in an e-mail to us, "I did not testify 'in favour of teaching ID in state-funded high-schools,' as the media would have discovered if they had actually reported the testimony given in Kansas instead of recycling a standardized science/religion story-line; we simply maintained that students should learn about the evidence for and against the neo-Darwinian view and insisted that Intelligent Design was not yet sufficiently developed as a theory to be taught in classrooms."

Moreover, Menuge notes, "Amanda Gefter also has her chronology wrong: though I did receive support from the Discovery Institute to research Agents Under Fire, this was not part of a program to develop 'non-materialist neuroscience' (an area in which I have since become very interested) but my attempt to show in detail that scientific materialism is untenable because materialism undermines the rationality of science."

Facts are such clunky things ... Read the rest here.

Does neuroscience leave room for God?

A friend, Angus Menuge, of Concordia University, Wisconsin, offers a PowerPoint called "Does Neuroscience Leave Room for God? And he obviously thinks it does.

Menuge showed this PowerPoint when he was debating PZ Myers of the University of Minnesota (Morris), a frequent critic of non-materialist viewpoints. Menuge comments,

Moving closer to the central issue of the debate, I argued that there is considerable evidence against the materialist contention that the brain reduces to the mind. There is the “hard problem” of consciousness, that subjective awareness is not explained or predicted by impersonally described states of the brain. Then there is the evidence from neuroscientists such as Jeff Schwartz and Mario Beauregard that, in addition to the bottom-up influence of the brain on the mind, the mind has a top-down influence on the brain (cognitive therapies that exploit neuroplasticity) and on health (psychoneuroimmunology). I focused on how these approaches gave hope to patients by showing that their own conscious choices could play a role in their recovery and health. I also mentioned the remarkable studies of Near Death Experiences by Pim van Lommel. I held up and recommended Jeff Schwartz and Sharon Begley’s The Mind and the Brain, and Mario Beauregard and Denyse O’ Leary’s The Spiritual Brain, and said that if someone is a true skeptic, they should be skeptical of materialism as well as of non-materialistic claims.

Apparently,

Dr. Myers held up a large standard volume on neuroscience, and asserted that it was better than Schwartz’s and Beauregard’s books, apparently because it was bigger! He then showed some interesting slides detailing the standard “homunculus” model of the brain, mapping various sensations and bodily functions to parts of the brain. He acknowledged the reality of neuroplasticity, but claimed that this could all be understood in terms of chemical processes in the brain, without appeal to consciousness. Yet, interestingly, he admitted that no-one could explain consciousness. Dr. Myers also mentioned a recent scientific experiment showing that in advance of conscious awareness of decision, there is already a 60% probability of action. (He did not, however, claim that this showed there was no free will*, and since the result was so recent and under-analyzed, I chose not to take the bait.)

Dr. Menuge says he is greatly indebted to Mario Bearegard and me for The Spiritual Brain , which shows how gracious he is. We only pull together what everyone should know, in a way that makes it easy to understand.

*This experiment probably does not have much to do with free will. I will post more on it later, but consider the following example: A woman vows to give up coffee for a week, and donate the proceeds to charity. Around noon on Monday, she finds herself "automatically" heading for the coffee urn at work. Does that mean she has no free will? Of course not. She had free will when she decided to forego coffee for a week, but force of habit suggests habitual routines. Perhaps it was 100% probable that she would start for the coffee urn at noon on the first day. But that doesn't mean she is forced to carry through with her usual habit.