Vast conspiracy files: Connecting the dots to include non-materialist neuroscience

Over at Neurologica blog, Steve Novella speculates about non-materialist neuroscience, about which he seems to have learned from New Scientist and the Discovery Institute's News and Views blog.

My favourite lines:

I also think the New Scientist is correct in pointing out that the ID movement may be shifting their emphasis to neuroscience. I think it is fair to say that the ID attack on evolution has been largely a failure. They failed in Dover (where a conservative judge ruled that ID was warmed-over creationism and could not be taught in public school science classes), and the movie Expelled turned out to be a huge boondoggle. They are getting some traction with their “academic freedom” deception, but not much, and I think that effort will ultimately fail as well.

A man capable of thinking that a bid for academic freedom is a "deception" in a society where academic freedom is widely* under attack is himself the best argument for Ben Stein's academic freedom drive.

*widely under attack: On its membership page, the National Association of Scholars offers

Is It dangerous to join?

It can be. We recognize that graduate students and untenured faculty members run a risk if they join an organization that is famous for challenging campus orthodoxies. So we won't tell your colleagues -- or your dean, and we’ll mail Academic Questions to your home if you wish.

Is joining NAS worth the risk? That’s a decision you must make for yourself -- and something you should consider the next time you bite your tongue in a department meeting for fear of the consequences of expressing what you really think.

They add

today, the pressure on faculty members to conform to ascendant political ideologies is at an all-time high and encompasses college life from freshman orientation to the selection of commencement speakers.

If this type of experience sounds familiar, NAS may be the organization for you. We offer the chance to meet and work with other scholars who have had similar experiences and who have found ways to resist the petty -- and sometimes not so petty -- tyranny of the PC campus. We are not of one mold. Our members include mainstream liberals and conservatives, secularists and the religiously committed, senior scholars and graduate students, women and men, citizens and international visitors --united by a concern that the tradition of academic freedom in the United States is imperiled by the abuses of some and the complacency of many.

Sounds like a good organization.

Intellectual freedom: Do we have to fight that battle all over again?

We wrestle with significant questions regarding the mind and the brain: Is the mind an illusion? Is it merely the buzz created by neurons? Is it an immaterial reality? One thing we will certainly need to sort all this out is academic freedom: Pundit David Horowitz brings us up to date on his academic freedom campaign:

In September 2003, I began a national campaign to persuade universities to adopt an academic bill of rights, aimed at extending traditional academic-freedom protections to students and restoring objectivity and fairness to classrooms. Mounting such an effort is not easy. Getting the issue of campaign finance reform on the national radar, for example, reportedly required some $120-million and the work of several major public-interest organizations. My campaign consisted of two staff members and myself, and a budget to match.

Yet three years later, the issues that I raised — the lack of intellectual diversity on campuses and the intrusion of political agendas into the curriculum — have become topics of discussion at colleges throughout the country. This July, moreover, Temple University became the first institution to adopt a student bill of rights as a response to my challenge.

How did this happen? Oddly enough, no small part of my success can be attributed to my opponents' tactics.

From my reading of this and other accounts of the conflict, Horowitz's opponents make their agenda perfectly clear: Their own stale, tired materialist views cannot long sustain the assault of fresh minds, intellectually free. Hence the need to eliminate intellectual freedom wherever possible. Such systems tend to crumble from their own brittleness.

My other blog is the Post-Darwinist, which keeps tabs on the intelligent design controversy.