Richard Dawkins - The Root of All evil; Monday 09/01/05 Channel 4

"Hello, I'm a Useless Prick"

The one good thing I can think of to say about Dawkins is that he's married to Lalla Ward, therefore their children might inherit brains from one parent at least. Someone who is prepared to say humans are the pinnacle of evolution, what life on earth is for (Cambridge lecture, 3 years ago); or that varous parts of his theory of evolution rely on faith to be true (Jonathon Miller's atheism programme on C4 a few weeks ago) is perhaps not someone we should hold up as a great scientific thinker.

here is an interview with dawkins from today's sunday herald, in which he says:

"This programme just might open some eyes to the fact that you don’t have to believe this stuff, that it’s OK to be an atheist. It’s a bit like being gay 30 years ago, when it was necessary to consciously come out of the closet. I’m hoping that I may sway people in that middle category, who might be shaken into thinking about it.”

sadly, i fear he will be so didactic, so - heh - fanatical, that it will be far too easy for anyone with even the slightest (admittedly irrational) interest in preserving their faith to dismiss him out of hand.

Having said that, those kind of stats are just based on what people profess when surveyed, and it iprobably IS something like 80% of people who don't give a serious fuck about religion. And that is the problem. People don't give a serious fuck about what their principles are full-stop. (People who let their kid to be baptised just to get in a catholic school, even if they're atheist. Take a stand, will ya! Be consistent!)

1http://www.live8live.com/images/jpegs/left-dvd.jpg

But if you're atheist or agnostic, why should you care if they wanna pour a little water on your kid's head? My non-churchgoing wife was kind of interested in having our son baptized -- for no particular reason except that everyone in her family had been baptized and it would be a chance to take cute pictures -- and I was fine with it. I don't care. I'll pass on whatever thoughts I have about all these things to him, and he can take it from there as he chooses. (I did ask my wife which church exactly she had in mine, seeing as how we've never set foot in one. She was stumped and I haven't hears anything about it since. But if at some point she goes and finds a church that'll baptize him, s'OK with me.)

Why as an athiest should you care about anything other than being a selfish prick? DO ideas matter?

Because if it is, although I'm not an admirer of Dawkins, I don't see how anyone can think it such a terrible thing to ridicule Christians for being irrational. "Oh, you're so intolerant! Mocking my belief that you're so evil you should burn in hellfire for the rest of eternity!"

Its not a terrible thing, its just not that productive to ridicule others like Dawkins does, hes not so smart. You think YOURE rational and others arent, fine no skin off my nose, makes me smile if you really want to know, kind of like Live 8 makes me want to scream in desparation

No...not really.

well, i'm a devout atheist: rather like dawkins, i genuinely believe the world would be a better place if people didn't believe in any concept of "god". so i think that adopting a couple of bits of someone else's creed just in order to get your kid into a better school (yes, it happens here in the UK a lot) is vastly hypocritical, and morally dubious too. for me, atheism isn't just an absence of belief; it's an active denial of faith. it is, if you like, a moral code.

also: i respect the fact that vast swaths of the populace are so irrational/scared/confused that they need something to believe in, and i respect the fact that some of them take these beliefs very seriously. if someone masqueraded as a journalist, i would take it as a professional insult; therefore i think that masquerading as - say - a devout christian is equally abhorrent.

that said: i'm the godfather to a child who was baptised in the church of scotland by two parents who never go to church. and yes, i went to the service and stood there like a spare prick at ... er, a christening, simply because i was too scared of falling out with my friends to say: "no fucking way, piss off." so who's the hypocrite now?

so much for the moral code of atheism, it seems. ah, fuck it. at least i don't believe i'm going to hell.

The core of his theory of consciousness is the "multiple drafts" model. In the multiple drafts model consciousness is not a unitary process but rather a distributed one (just as a novel in preparation may exist in multiple drafts at any one time and is only afterwards "finalised"). Sequential timing of events breaks down at small (millisecond) time scales within the brain, and the events that make up consciousness cannot be ordered. In short there is no central place in the brain/mind where everything is presented and decisions are made (the fallacy of the "Cartesian Theatre"). The evidence for this view of consciousness is a whole series of results from experiments in cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

(and anyone who's ever dealt with 3-year-olds can tell you that consciences are learned as much or more as they are intrinsic. you have to be told why it's a bad idea to hit other kids in the head with blocks.)

The core argument against central control processors (or homunculi) is this: if the process is being controlled, what is controlling the controller? Any answer to this question makes the homunculus a free agent (therefore, not something that can be studied in a causal environment such as an experiment) or ineffective (since a control processor that is not really in control is not a control processor.

What I really want to say though is jeez people, we are organisms without free will, just like the mud wasp and the worm, only more complicated. In fact, we are complicated worm food. No matter how educated or brilliant a person is, they will never accept this if it scares them. It is very confronting to face stuff like this - but how ridiculous we look when we refuse to do so.

i think you get into interesting but tendentious waters there, because "free will" itself needs some definition. we've already seen that supercomputers will occasionally make inexplicable decisions in chess games, and humans are working with processors a hell of a lot more complicated than supercomputers. what's the boundary between random error and conscious decision? (like, i put this pawn here because i want to, not because i meant to move the bishop.) our decisions and actions are obviously the product of huge amounts of input but they are also at some level ours.

"Some wasps are able to sting people painfully, but there are more wasps that have a rather unpleasant character. There are lots of wasps that lay their eggs in other animals, which are then completely eaten by the larva of the wasp. Some wasps simply deposit there eggs on other insects, but some are ready to go to all lengths, such as the spiderwasps. For their larva they seek a much bigger victim, e.g. a spider larger than they are themselves. They sting the spider, which deadens the animal. They then take it to the nest, put the spider in and deposit an egg in or near the spider and seal the nest. Because the spider is just deadened, not killed, the larva has a fresh meal when it hatches. Below you see a very common Spider Wasp going about with a deadened victim. In order to make transportation of the victim easier, this species often bites off a few or all of the victims legs. So it is a good thing the wasp uses some kind of anaesthetic!"

What's the current Christian orthodox view of atheists? I was under the impression that it used to be that someone who denied there was a God was destined for eternal damnation. a) Was that ever actually the case? b) Is it still the case?

No idea about orthodox stians, but when I was broadcasting fundie xtian tv there was a segment on one of the kids shows about what to do if you met an atheist (politely run away and go tell a pastor I think). Unfortunately they didn't have a how to spot an atheist segment, that would have been hilarious.

Rigorous, very rigorous.

Is this what Dawkins would say to Da Vinci, Newton, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy or Pascal if he were to have a conversation with them about their Christian faith? Because he might sound a little ignorant. Just a thought.

His most famous work is probably 'The Seven-Storey Mountain,' which tells the story of how he changed from a being a succesful young writer living in New York to a Trappist (the most rigid from of Catholic monasticism).

Nutter: I believe in x
Richard: But why??
Nutter: Because I do.
Richard: :(

It would be nice if he'd made the point to the fundy whackos doing their "Hell House" (or whatever the fuck it was) grotesquerie, that if you do good things because you're scared of going to Hell, that's exactly where you'll end up because you were being utterly selfish. The only way good acts get you into Heaven is if you do them for their own sake. Pascal's wager is not a sure bet.

Presumably he wouldn't because he doesn't take them seriously enough to argue with them on their own terms.

You mean "adding machine".

yeah, but the type of fundamentalist Protestant denominations that hold "Hell Houses" don't believe doing good works or not doing good works are what get you into heaven or hell. you are only saved by the grace of god, by accepting jesus as your personal savior.

This is deeply deeply unfair to both Dennett, and Dawkins to a lesser extent. Gould also made excellent contributions to the field he went on to popularise.

Which would seem to imply that you can do whatever the fuck you want as long as you believe you have been born again. Which strikes me as quite astoundingly amoral.

It's "deeply, deeply" unfair, and not just rude and snarky of me to say? Why? Granted that Dennett isn't wasting all his time now trying to convert religious believers with a hammer (and "brights" was the stupidest idea ever BTW), but I've run into too many young would-be philosophy supergenii who are happy to blather about "intuition pumps" and misapprehended stuff from Gödel, Escher, Bach but seemingly haven't read anything else at all. One such young buck in an ethics class of mine last semester prompted a classic comment from my prof: "Think about what you're saying! Daniel Dennett is an improvement on Kant?!?" Mostly I'm just annoyed that the "100 greatest intellectuals" thing is always decades behind the curve-- people read Gould and Dawkins now to argue against their theories, no? Stuff the popularity contest-- I want to know who's doing good work now!

faith vs. works is not one of my favorite theological topics. it feels like splitting hairs at times. it's also a major point of disagreement between various branches of the church.

m.

m.

Where did the last twenty years thing come from anyway? As most intellectuals do their best work early on, its kind of unfair to pick on Dawkins that he's still not doing more work along the lines of the stuff he did in the 60s and 70s. and then after that he MOVED ON to communicating science in a popular way - something which is admirable on its own terms, and which he did brilliantly. at first. if you compare his well known early stuff with some of the turgid "pop genetics" lit coming out at the mo, it really stands up.

i've not been a fan of his (or his approach) in the last 10 or so years. as i've said here on ilx, i think it's harmed the image of science more than is healthy for someone who is (was?) professor for the advancement of science.

i was primarily defending Dennett. i studied philosophy of mind, not biology. (and that was under 20 years ago if it matters). I was specifically interested in the difference between him and a couple others (Rorty n so on) wrt varieties of realism in respect to "beliefs" and classes of entities. i've not read any of his academic stuff since the 90s. but i gather he's far from being considered a burned out man with nothing left to contribute.

His publishing history, AFAIK from the philosophy of biology stuff I've had to read. The other stuff did occur to me before after my first post and I thought I was being slightly silly then. But since you called me out on something I wrote off the cuff a week ago, I wanted you to elaborate anyway.

but i gather he's far from being considered a burned out man with nothing left to contribute.

I don't think I ever said this-- it's the GEB effect that annoys me in regards to him more than anything else (I can walk into any Half Price Books probably and find something by Hofstadter or Dennett-- could you say the same thing about Richard Rorty or, I dunno, the Churchlands?). Some of his stuff I like (not "Quining Qualia" though), even the pop science stuff.

wrt varieties of realism in respect to "beliefs" and classes of entities

??? I'd be interested if you elaborated.

ha, in my (rubbish) dissertation i kind of ripped into Quining Qualia - it didn't ring consonant with his other stuff at all.

when this was my thing, there was a lot of chat about D's "instrumentalist" approach to beliefs, and the literature at the time was awash with a variety of attitudes suggested (between the extremes of Fodor's hardcore realism and Rorty's universal "who cares"). D's point always was that beliefs are a special order of thing, and i remember making the point that this approach made it entirely inappropriate to label it instrumentalism. In'ism being principally used as a pejorative emphasising the gap between reality and representation - when such a gap is just not possible when you adopt D's approach as a whole. neither did it mean his entire approach was instrumentalist. there was some key paper about patterns.

blimey, i'm getting really fuzzy here. anyway, that sort of thing. while we're on this my favourite Dennett line was his coining of the phrase that the "self is a centre of narrative gravity". that was like the jackpot for me. and i see it (or the idea) popping up all over the place - though prob because it keyed in to many things already out there, but the point is that that way of expressing it was brilliant. he's good with words that way.

How so? I didn't think that Dennett was a direct realist (and that doesn't seem to be what you're saying).

there was some key paper about patterns.

If this was the thing about the necessity of error involved in boiling down complex data inputs to workable abstractions, this was the paper of his I read that I liked the most.

D's stance is based on a more fundamental question of what it makes sense to be realist, or not, about. eg what would it mean to be non-realist about a story or a tune (i think these might be examples he actually gave, so forgive me). realism is kicked around/discussed largely wrt the ontology of the physical sciences. in proposing "how the world is" there is the capacity for a gap between the reality and the representation (well "theory X" wasn't right), which leads to a variety of "instrumentalist" attitudes - where we are just "saving the phenomena" and abandonding the hope of corresponding to reality. and it's precisely "correspondence" that doesn't always hold in other ontological realms.

the Churchlands are (were?) (coarsely) non-realist about beliefs saying that there really was no such thing, but D says (and i paraphrase) "this is madness" (so say we all) "not only do we have beliefs, but it's such a robust concept that is used in a variety of explanatory narratives." this lies at the core of D's "intentional stance" approach to psychology. not only do beliefs exist but they HAVE to exist from the "boiling down complex data" thing. they exist if the data does.

the correspondence problem is taken to another level, viz a belief ABOUT a belief could be wrong, and as such beliefs may or may not be true.

will this do?

I watched Richard Dawkins going on about alternative medicine tonight in his Channel 4 series Enemies of Reason.

I thought there were some interesting ideas raised...

(perhaps despite Dawkins' rather Sixth form 'I'm right, you are wrong - and it's not me saying that, it's science! ' arguments. I nearly always find myself agreeing with what Dawkins says (at least to some extent), but I don't think he does himself any favours in his TV documentaries - this is in direct contrast to his writing style which I find lucid, well argued and witty.)

... such as the idea of a placebo industry (no, not the bald wannabe goth-dwarf); where the whole idea of alternative medicine is provide the most persuasive, and therefore most succesful, placebo.

I am fascinated by the idea of whether practioners are aware that what they practice is placebo - whether they are doing it purely for the money or to help people. There was one medically qualified doctor on the show who I thought was genuinely practising homeopathy in order to help his patients, but I couldn't work out whether he really believed in his 'cures', or was aware of the placebo effect and was exploiting it for the good of his patients.

wonder if tough-guy dawkins would be up for a scrap with, y'know, the pharmaceutical industry. what could be more rational than prescribing medication to pre-teens coz they get a bit snappy in class?

Does anyone actually read, watch or listen to Dawkins except to pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves for having this frightfully clever man telling them exactly what they already believe?

judging by the success of the god delusion, i'd say yes.

Does anyone actually read, watch or listen to Dawkins when they pat themselves on the back and congratulate themselves for smugly dismissing him?

Dawkins and Hitchens should get do some kind of comedy routine

er "get together and do"

Hitch could be the obnoxious boorish drunk and Dawkins could be the stuffy straightman

I would watch all this reality tv program

shakey mo could be the obnoxious straightman

i liked the bit in that book where he used his v. old-skool computer to evolve insects

http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Dawkins/Work/Books/safari.gif

I have that floppy disc with my copy of Blind Watchmaker! Obv. never used it tho.

he does seem to be a bit less interested in belittlement in this new series (or at least the first episode; I didn't see the second one). Does he have any kind of philosophical background? Even as someone who has very little knowledge of the philosophy of science his thinking considered from that perspective seems to have some gaping holes in it, as portrayed on TV at least (probably not the best place to judge), along with his more obvious general philosophical flaws.

i think to be fair to him he was holding back during most of the interviews because most of these people seemed very nice which didn't allow him to cut into them like i expected him to.

gotta agree with alansmithee upthread, though. his written work is much much better.

Yes, he was *very* restrained with his interviewees this time around, letting them present their case and dig their own holes. Vast improvement, I thought.

http://i.imgur.com/BUIoF1W.png