PZ Myers. 2004 May 02. Mind Wide Open. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/mind_wide_open/>. Accessed 2008 Dec 04.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Sunday, May 02, 2004
Mind Wide Open
Steven Berlin Johnson gets a bad review. It raises an interesting meta-point—are weblogs a way for authors to fire back at their critics? I wonder if authors are often frustrated by the fact that publishing replies to criticism isn't very marketable, and so they're generally forced to let critics have the last word.
I've read Mind Wide Open myself, and I've been meaning to say something about it here for a while. I think it's a very good book, one I intend to recommend to my neurobiology students and may even include in my course syllabus. The things that the reviewer found objectionable, the personal context and the enthusiasm for the new vistas on the brain opened up by contemporary research, are exactly what I consider just the thing to inspire students in the subject. But to be honest, at first when I read Johnson's complaint, I was thinking, "Gee, criticism is part of the territory, Mr Author. Suck it up and be tough, and quit complaining"...but then I read the review. Holy crap. Johnson was right—this is a guy with some weird metaphysical axe to grind.
First he complains that Johnson's view is that
Man's mind must be an epiphenomenon of matter, and therefore it is our duty, as Wallace Stevens put it, "To lay his brain upon the board/ And pick the acrid colors out".
Unfortunately, this is a project with certain implications. If modernity began with Galileo, then modernism began with Wordsworth's sonnet "The world is too much with us". Wordsworth understood that the vision of science disconnected us from the world, left us with "little . . . in Nature that is ours". He longed to be "a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn" so that he might once again see the world of myth and magic. The Darwinian reconnection to nature failed to answer this imaginative longing because it was predicated on a nature that seemed merely mechanical.
It's true that Johnson's philosophy on this issue is quite clearly laid out (and is compatible with mine, to be honest)...but what is this nonsense about Darwinian views being "merely mechanical?" The Darwin of "There is grandeur in this view of life..."? If anyone is imposing strange interpretations here, it's the reviewer, Bryan Appleyard. I'm sorry for him that science hasn't reduced the universe to leprechauns and unicorns, but that does not mean there is less to appeal to our imaginations. What we've learned so far greatly exceeds the paltry guesses of the mythmakers in beauty and complexity.
That business of "certain implications" also troubles poor Mr Appleyard. He argues against Johnson's book because the consequences of materialism disturb him.
Furthermore, in the form of evolutionary psychology, Darwinism raises the paradoxical problem that knowledge might actually make us less fit for survival. Religion, for example, is so pervasive throughout human history that it must provide some evolutionary advantage. If it is suppressed by our science, we are likely, therefore, to be worse off.
Uh-oh. There it is: the Panglossian paradigm. If it exists, it must be for the best. Science says religion is good for mankind (which is not what science says at all), therefore because science suppresses religion (again, not necessarily true), science is bad for us. False assumptions, mistaken ideas about what evolutionary biology implies, and utterly bogus logic; these are not a good foundation for a believable argument.
Appleyard isn't done with his argumentum ad consequentiam yet, though. This next bit made me laugh aloud.
Equally, our minds work on the basis of myriad assumptions. If these are exposed as the deterministic workings of mere chemistry, then we might not even be able to get through the day, never mind the next million years.
Well. I guess we'd better stop studying the brain then, shouldn't we? Who knows, we might actually learn things about how it works that don't involve angels or ghosts, and then people will get depressed.
Quite contrary to Appleyard's take on things, I find the idea that the brain is a beautifully intricate piece of organic machinery to be uplifting, and the idea that we are actually making progress in understanding it, and learning that it is strangely wrought and full of solveable puzzles, to be thoroughly enchanting. Appleyard says, "Don't read this book." I say, "Read it and many others." Who are you going to listen to, the guy who thinks we ought to close our eyes to the chemistry of the brain, or me, the guy who thinks we ought to learn more and more and more?
-
Bryan Appleyard...yes, figures. Gross and Levitt mention him in Higher Superstition - for instance in connection with a review by Timothy Ferris titled "The Case Against Science" which is reviewing Appleyard's "frankly reactionary Understanding the Present."
Not that I've ever read him myself. But the name rang a bell, so I looked him up in HS.#: Posted by Ophelia Benson on 05/02 at 04:19 PM - With regard to your very last sentence here, I regretfully suspect that a majority of people would answer, "The former".
-
Yeah, figures indeed! Appleyard is a reactionary, and a very unoriginal one at that.
#: Posted by on 05/02 at 06:59 PM
-
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
I have to take some exception to the following snippet.
Uh-oh. There it is: the Panglossian paradigm. If it exists, it must be for the best
It isn't necessarily true that the universality of religious belief in all human societies demonstrates in itself that religion must have adaptive value, but it still seems pretty strange to me that believers in evolutionary theory would plump for the presumption that it doesn't; do we really look at behavioral traits universal to all groups of members of any other species and proceed on the assumption that the behavior we observe has no adaptive value whatsoever?
In any case, even if one doesn't accept that religion is necessarily adaptive, I think a strong argument can be made that the phenomenon of religious belief is rooted intrinsically in patterns of thinking that are central to the way we all organize our lives, and as such, anyone hoping to rid the world of religion is doomed to meet with failure. Phenomena like the human tendency to anthropomorphize, to see the world in terms of conscious social actors with "good" or "bad" intentions towards us, and to see patterns even where confronted with randomness, are indeed evolved traits, and they clearly have had, and still have, tremendous adaptive value; unfortunately, for those of us who don't believe in a world of spirits and gods on high, these ways of thinking are also extremely conducive to religious thinking.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) - GPGshell v3.10
Comment: My Public Key is at the following URL:
Comment: http://www.alapite.net/pgp/AbiolaLapite.txt
iD8DBQFAleHOOgWD1ZKzuwkRAlGNAJ45omRFsD5QglaXMjRYRmD4j+opQQCdGwPf
cgaHGaRg0cgR3Cz5kW01tDs=
=e+8f
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
#: Posted by Abiola Lapite on 05/03 at 12:08 AM -
Your argument still makes religion itself a spandrel, and doesn't support Appleyard's claim that religion "must provide some evolutionary advantage", or that replacing it with rational thought will make us worse off. I agree that it is almost certainly a byproduct of the way our brains work, but it is not a necessary component; every atheist on the planet is a testimony to that.
I also disagree that getting rid of religion is a doomed hope. It's almost impossibly difficult, and it's also a rather unimportant goal in itself, but doomed? Nah. All it takes is education. Lots and lots of education. And a properly dismissive social attitude. And many generations. -
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
it is not a necessary component; every atheist on the planet is a testimony to that.
But might it not be the case that we atheists simply lack a certain component that the rest don't? Or, alternatively, that we're capable of a level of intellectual detachment that the majority aren't capable of?
All it takes is education. Lots and lots of education. And a properly dismissive social attitude. And many generations.
You're far more optimistic than I am. I don't doubt that the ranks of the religion-free can be substantially increased with sustained effort, but the rise in belief in astrology, UFOs, new-age claptrap, Eastern mysticism and other sorts of similar nonsense makes me skeptical that most people really are capable of shaking free of their superstitions. As long as there's a human tendency to personalize all aspects of the world, and to strain for socially-rooted patterns of explanation even where none are to be found, I think religious superstition will always be with us in some form or another.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (MingW32) - GPGshell v3.10
Comment: My Public Key is at the following URL:
Comment: http://www.alapite.net/pgp/AbiolaLapite.txt
iD8DBQFAlkCEOgWD1ZKzuwkRAlsTAJ9BwtKMb0TmnficNuzWaiiP6/iy3ACdGguA
Kk/xpK4RReQTUjm+Z8hqIGE=
=goqh
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
#: Posted by Abiola Lapite on 05/03 at 06:53 AM -
Oh, I'm not optimistic at all. I think it would take an amazing amount of time and effort to 'eradicate' religion, and I don't think it would be worth it—religion is mostly harmless, just like believing in UFOs. Except for the nastier, more pathological forms, I think we're best off just leaving it alone.
I don't think atheists are unique, either; we (at least, I) still have that pattern-recognition stuff, a tendency to personalize, etc. We're nothing special, except maybe that we're more consciously aware of it, and keep it in check.
Which actually returns us to Mind Wide Open. One of the interesting ideas in that book is that Johnson is describing the use of scientific tools that allow him to see how his brain is actually working, getting away from the usual naive presumption of a little homunculus that dwells in our cranium. It really does help figure out why we think the way we do by learning how we do it. -
You say, PZ, that atheists are ‘nothing special’. That’s true enough of course but I do think that the atheistical contributors to your blog are, in this context, actually pretty special and kind of fortunate.
If there is such a thing as a god-sized hole in the human mind, or in human culture, then those of us who love and revere Nature and all her weird and wonderful creatures (and who further believe that they all came about through a natural, materialist, and explicable process), who stand in awe under the stars of a winter sky, who feel the unimaginable depths of past time, and so on and so forth (i.e., the great majority of the participants here; you all know what I’m talking about), are in a better position than most to fill this hole with something good, true and harmless to others. If there’s a better replacement for religion I’d like to hear about it.
Before the recent rise of monotheism, all religions were closely bound to Nature. It’s only ‘natural’; that’s where we come from. Let’s hear it for skeptical animism!
#: Posted by on 05/04 at 01:07 AM -
Of course the people here are special, but I meant it in the sense that there are such things as intelligent Christians, and that rational thinking is not something exclusively restricted now and forever to only atheists.
Personally, I'm not interested in a replacement for religion—that's just replacing one cancer for another. Although skeptical animism does sound somewhat more benign than what we've got now. -
Yes sure, we don’t want a replacement for religion as a public ideology; science will do quite nicely thanks. I was thinking more of the private sphere, for those who feel they need to give their own lives a narrative or shape. I go along with the points that Abiola has been making; I think it’s more than likely that evolved ‘patterns of thinking’ mean that we do have an ‘instinct’ to attempt to invest all kinds of things with meaning. I was going to write ‘unfortunately have’ in that last sentence but that would mean no more music, poetry, novels, movies et al.
The conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton has just published a book showing how an entire non-supernatural ethical and moral guideline for living can be derived from Wagner’s opera ‘Tristan and Isolde’. That’s not everyone’s cup of love potion but it’s good to see someone having a go. See also ‘Origins of the Sacred’ by Dudley Young.
#: Posted by on 05/04 at 10:31 AM -
Paul, first, thanks for springing to the defense of Mind Wide Open, a book I admire. Appleyard's review was remarkably poorly thought through, as you've shown.
Second, I'm personally an agnostic, but I'm married to a hugely intelligent, rational, science-embracing orthodox Jew and I find some of the comments about religion by the scientific atheists on this comment board actually to be about a stereotype of Christianity. It sounds like you really have confused religion with superstition. Sure, some religious people do, too, but dismissing all religion as superstition because of them is like dismissing all science as superstition because of Lysenko.#: Posted by David Weinberger on 05/04 at 06:34 PM -
ONLy just scuffling back through this. I won't say anythig aobut religion (mmmmpff) partly because I am in the middle of a piece about S&R for the Financial Times magazine. But Bryan Appleyard is universally acknowledged to be a silly pseud.
#: Posted by Andrew Brown on 05/08 at 07:28 AM