But my answer in the string was much shorter. Here it is in its entirety:
"QUOTE
'You don't *experience* any of those things as a conscious awareness of neurons firing in a specific location in your brain. The *thought* is conceptually distinct from the neurons just as the mind is conceptually distinct from the brain." by Dragon Lady
'You don't *experience* any of those things as a conscious awareness of neurons firing in a specific location in your brain. The *thought* is conceptually distinct from the neurons just as the mind is conceptually distinct from the brain." by Dragon Lady
"The distinction Dragon Lady makes is the difference between Objectivism and scientific naturalism. The website Center for Naturalism states, 'More and more, biology and neuroscience show that the brain and body do everything that the soul was supposed to do. [ ] Your thoughts, experiences, feelings, decisions, and behavior are all things your brain and body does. [ ] Naturalism says we are completely physical, material creatures, a complex, highly organized collection of atoms, molecules, cells, neurons, muscles, bone, etc., produced by evolution.'
"The owner of the Center for Naturalism is Tom Clark, who is opposed to Ayn Rand and had debated her with myself via email, and with Tibor Machan and others on the web. [See "Round Four"]
"To further the statements made by Clark in my second paragraph above, in 'Round Five' he begins a sentence by saying, 'In a world in which all behavior is understood to be fully caused...' This is the kind of language that scientific naturalists use to indicate that behavior is caused by environment, biology and brain physiology, 'memes,' and anything but free will, which they they dismiss, not suprisingly, as a myth.
"Clark's 'advisors' who are named on his website are Susan Blackmore, Paul Bloom, Paul Broks, Daniel Dennett, Sheldon Drobny, Owen Flanagan, Ursula Goodenough, Joseph Hilb, Nicholas Humphrey, Brian Leiter, Thomas Metzinger, Tamler Sommers, and John Symons. Then he has another longer list of 'allies' and another list of 'contributors.' They are all of the same school in one way or another--they are anti-Objectivists, anti-capitalists, anti-free-will philosophers.
"Many of them have good contributions to make here and there, but overall they are subjectivists. But the overall similarity between them is that they maintain we are not 'self-made' creatures, that we are 'fully caused,' and they invent the most metaphysically horrid things like 'memes' to describe why we act the way we act.
"In other words, they 'spatially position' who and what we are in the firing of neruons and the resultant "reactions" we call emotions. Clark's sister website Naturalism.Org has all the technical ideas explained in great detail. Check it out. You won't like what you read." END QUOTE
Clark and his cohorts turn it all into biology and neurology. However, to be fair, Clark sometimes writes in the phrases of apologetics:
"Some might conclude from this [from scientific naturalism] that naturalism reduces human beings to mere mechanisms, mere automatons, but this doesn’t follow. What follows is that the physical universe has produced, in us, marvelously complex and adaptive organisms, with the capacity for self-reflection, wonder, suffering, and joy. Far from mechanizing humanity, naturalism re-enchants the physical world by showing how consciousness and choice don’t involve supernatural processes."
I don't believe him for a minute, and I don't think you should either. That is because his scientism also leads him to say things like this:
"Naturalism holds that everything we are and do is connected to the rest of the world and derived from conditions that precede us and surround us. [ ] Our bodies and minds are shaped in their entirety by conditions that precede us and surround us. [ ] Seeing that we are fully caused creatures - not self-caused - we can no longer take or assign ultimate credit or blame for what we do. [ ] ...the homeless person in front of us, the convict, or the addict, [have] been given their genetic and environmental lot in life. [ ] Instead of supposing people can simply will themselves to be otherwise... [ ] We don’t have free will...in our choices or decisions. [ ] People don't create themselves, so responsibility for their character and behavior isn't ultimately theirs, but is distributed over the many factors that created them." [italics added]
Need I go on? Clark speak from both sides of his mouth and hopes you, his readers, don't see all the contradictions, and the determinism (his word), and the subjectivity involved in everything he believes.
I would not be surprised to find some of Clark's "advisors" and "allies" and "contributors" on the list of Barak Obama's advisors. Some may even wind up in the White House or in other government agencies--seriously. His advisors are well respected authors and they say that same social slogans Obama says. Obama is well-read, erudite, a Constitutional scholar, lawer, and professor who, we all know by now, leans well to the left.
Clark's advisors are left-leaning in their own liberal/academic spheres. Obama has been quoted as saying many of the same things about jurisprudence that Clark's website says, things like: "This leads to an ethics of compassion and understanding, both toward ourselves and others. We see that there but for circumstances go I." [and] "Naturalism focuses our attention on what works, increasing self-efficacy and encouraging science-based, progressive social policies in areas such as criminal justice, social inequality, behavioral health, and the environment."
Be afraid, very afraid, because many policy wonks who think in these same terms are already in positions of power, and you can see, if you look far enough into the future, where this nation is headed, because we are already half way there.
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