This was going to be a Pit thread calling SlackerInc a hateful piece of filth, but meh.
Just being clever enough to realize that the Christian conception of God is imaginary does not make you the smartest person in the room. It makes you a moderately clever middle-schooler. Of course it’s imaginary! It’s not empirically supported & exists in churchgoers’ imaginations!
And you know, I’m not even talking about a Doper there. I’m talking about that genetic-determinist whackjob Sam Harris. By this point, the psychological sciences should be hanging up posters denouncing that 1990’s “Genes ‘Я’ Destiny” twaddle.
Anyone taking Sam Harris’s advice at this point is following pseudoscience, as surely as if they were following LRH or preaching the subluxation theory of disease.
I can vaguely understand why the concept of biological determinism upsets some people, in the sense of there being no independent “mind” or “human spirit” or whatever; just an extraordinarily complex physical brain. I can vaguely gather the OP is one of those upset people.
I think.
Possibly my own neural programming is insufficient. The original post isn’t a Turing test - it’s more of a Durr-ing test.
OK, there are a few things going on with Sam Harris.
One, he’s a philosophical determinist. OK, who cares? Really! That’s just fatalism in scientism’s clothes. If the universe is hard-deterministic, that means you never actually make any choices anyway; so why are you yapping about it, you dumb zombie? The reason, of course, is that fatalism is an excuse.
Michael Moorcock got it right in The Sailor on the Seas of Fate. Even if we have no choice, it’s better to behave as if we do.
Two, Harris is still talking about genes for personality traits. This is nonsense. Even in a determinist universe, human personality is not pre-coded in our genes. That bit of pseudoscience was everywhere in the 1990’s, but it’s nonsense, on the level of phrenology, blood type personalities, and astrololgy. *Culture and religion don’t map to genetics. Persons have life experiences.
Oh, and people are conscious beings. Not even Sam Harris is really a philosophical zombie.* But of course it’s an excuse (again) for things like class rigidity or racial essentialism, and (although he’ll deny it) for nudging people toward genocidal political policies.
Sam Harris: The missing link between Richard Dawkins, Charles Murray, and Adolf Hitler.
Oh I get it, the OP is a Ben Afflec fan and is trying to make him look better after his encounter with Sam Harris on the Tonight Show.
Ok your second post came in as I was writing mine, Dude you seriously do not know what the hell you are talking about. Every word you just posted about Harris demonstrates this. You should try and watch or read some of his work instead of reposting crap from Checnk
Ignoring the fact that I don’t fully agree with Sam Harris and also ignoring the fact that you invoked godwin’s law you are wrong about human personality traits and genetics.
Thinking the term ‘scientism’ is valid makes you a pseudophilosopher, foolsguinea.
First, trivially, science is a method, not a philosophy. There doesn’t need to be any specific underlying philosophy, just the process of seeking to form and disprove hypothesis and build theories which generate hypotheses in an evidence-driven fashion. That does not presuppose any single philosophy, it merely demands what’s called “methodological naturalism”, which just means “Check your supernatural beliefs at the door”; in more precise language, it forbids proposing a supernatural explanation for any phenomenon, because the supernatural is definitionally beyond what we can probe into. If the reason for something is supernatural, all inquiry must stop. It’s the equivalent of kicking the ball off the playing field and into a sewage treatment pond. (This was actually a problem at my elementary school…)
Second, it’s a strawman. You can ascribe any kind of bizarre (and usually quite naïve) reductionist beliefs to the epithet ‘scientism’ and discredit them, making your audience think you’ve scored points off some scientific hegemony. It goes back to the whole “measuring the marigolds” nonsense which presumes that understanding precludes emotion, and so you can’t be in awe of something if you know how it works. That may be true of crude tricks but it is most emphatically not true of the natural world. It is a vanity, and a folly, of Romanticism for it to presume it is necessarily in conflict with Enlightenment. Such a fight is very much one-sided, especially given how much passion is needed to pursue a research position given the abysmally low pay most of them offer.