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Dear Bill: Thanks for including the Chicago Sun-Times on your exclusive list of newspapers on your "Hall of Shame." To be in an O'Reilly Hall of Fame would be a cruel blow to any newspaper. It would place us in the favor of a man who turns red and starts screaming when anyone disagrees with him. My grade-school teacher, wise Sister Nathan, would have called in your parents and recommended counseling with Father Hogben.PWNED.
A friend recently sent me this article about a "gay-friendly" high school. If we were living in a biblical society, homosexuality would be punishable by death so such a school would be unnecessary. Although I'm against the special accommodations, perhaps this new trend of segregation will protect straight kids from these predators. With any luck, some radical will blow up the gay school. No, I'm not condoning vigilantism--I'm merely saying that it would be poetic justice.Charming...and this woman has four children. Pity them.
I watched this earlier today and it is really quite good. Will it make an impact? Unfortunately, I don't think so...people who are addicted to woo-woo seem all too often to be impervious to reason... | |
CALLER: Hello, Ann? I’m calling to ask why you were so mean to my mother.That's just a taste...the full "interview" can be found at Ebert's website. Although as Ed Brayton notes, it's difficult to determine if this is a parody or not, given that Coulter is self-parodying...
ANN (runs fingers through hair): I don’t suppose your mother has a name?
CALLER: Mildred Quaker. And you said she was mean and ugly, but you never even met her, because she died years ago.
ANN (tosses back blonde hair): I happen to know that, darling, because I tripped over her tombstone in a cemetery and got grass stains all over myself. Was that my fault? When these Quakers insist on being pacifists who can be buried anywhere they want to be?
In the tradition of coffee houses everywhere, Starbucks has always supported a good, healthy discussion. To get people talking, “The Way I See It” is a collection of thoughts, opinions and expressions provided by notable figures that now appear on our widely shared cups.As you may also have seen in various news stories, Starbucks has caught a little amount of flak for this program due to the allegedly large percentage of the quotes which are claimed by detractors to be either "liberal" or of the "freethinking" variety. (for example, Worldnutdaily had an article a month or so ago about a Catholic woman "offended" by a humanistic quote).
Darwinism’s impact on traditional social values has not been as benign as its advocates would like us to believe. Despite the efforts of its modern defenders to distance themselves from its baleful social consequences, Darwinism’s connection with eugenics, abortion and racism is a matter of historical record. And the record is not pretty.Via Starbuck's website, I see that the quote (The Way I See It #224) is from Jonathan Well's book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Wells is a well-known evolution denier and the author of Icons of Evolution, one of the first of the modern attempts to use the trappings of science (without any of the actual methodology or content) in an effort to cast doubt on evolutionary theory.
Here's the thing, D: We knew how much they hated America. We just didn't have a full grasp, until now, of how much you and your crazy cohort hate America. Because you have taken to heart the "Islamic critique of Western moral depravity," as you call it, and have come down on their side of things. You actually seek to blame your free-speaking moral inferiors here in America for giving bin Laden no choice but to kill us. And in nothing short of derangement, you imagine a "de facto alliance" between the American "cultural left" and Islamic fundamentalism.There's more at at the link. Read it; it's short and sweet, and as Berube notes, is quite likely the only intellectually respectable response to D'Souza's lunacy.
Think of a yellow flower. Can you see it? Are you sure of the color and the fact that it's a flower and not a fish that you can see? If so, then the experiment has been successful. You have made a major strike at the root of materialism. When you see a flower in your mind, there is no flower inside your brain. That seems simple enough. But where is the flower? There's no picture of it in your cerebrum, because your brain contains no light. How about the color yellow? Is there a patch of yellow inside your brain's gray matter? Obviously not.
Did you miss it? The argument against materialism, that is. Just in case, here are the bare bones of Chopra's reductio (including the hidden premises):
Yet you assume--as do all who fall for the superstition of materialism--that flowers and the color yellow exist 'out there' in the world and are photographically reproduced by the brain, acting as a camera made of organic tissue. In fact, existence of flowers shifts mysteriously once it is closely examined. The experience of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell is created in consciousness. Molecules don't assemble in your head to make the sound of a trumpet blaring in a brass band, for example. The brain is silent. So where does the world of sights and sounds come from?
Materialists cannot offer any reasonable explanation. The fact is that an enormous gap exists between any physical, measurable event and our perception. If I talk to you, all I am doing is vibrating air with my vocal cords. Every aspect of that event can be seen and measured, but turning those vibrating air molecules into meaningful words has never been seen or measured. It can't be.
Well, to begin with, this isn't completely correct. The connection between external stimuli and brain events HAS been seen and measured. Neurophysiologists have located specific regions of the brain that react to particular types of perceptual stimulation (sights, sounds, smells) and used MRI scanning to record images of the brain reacting to those stimuli. They've also been able to map particular regions of the brain that respond to memory recall of those stimuli (so, for example, they can show what parts of the brain respond when a subject is recalling a particular experience).
That aside, there is no doubt that consciousness does represent a "hard problem" in the philosophy of mind. However, it's no more a problem for the materialist than it is for the immaterialist for there are numerous unanswered questions on both sides.
Let's return to Chopra's "anti-materialist" argument for a moment. What can we say about the following reductio:
It seems to me that one of Chopra's mistakes is assuming that we should be able to "see" images or pictures of the objects of consciousness by looking into the "container" of that consciousness. But why would we imagine that to be the case? Why should we expect first-person experiences to be third-person accessible, regardless of paradigm (materialism/non-materialism)? What's likely to be involved is not any actual image but a representation of an image and I see no reason to believe that images cannot have physical representations. Indeed, we have particular experience with such things in the case of digital photographs.
If I take a picture of a yellow flower, I certainly won't see any yellow flowers or pictures of yellow flowers inside my digital camera. The image is represented therein by sequences of 1's and 0's. So we can have a physical representation of a non-physical thing. And this has important implications for Chopra's original argument.
It's not clear exactly what Chopra believes would be the case given a non-material consciousness, but it would seem to be true that some theory of representation is needed (wherein objective existents are represented subjectively). Obviously Chopra believes that materialism cannot sustain such a theory, but on this his reasoning is (characteristically) opaque. However, it does seem clear that at the least, he assumes that the materialist position (all that exists is matter) is necessarily coincident with reductive physicalism (the mind is the brain). But is this true?
To begin with, materialism is not necessarily the position that "all that exists is matter". More broadly, it could be defined as the position that "all that exists is either matter or dependent upon matter for its existence." No sensible materialist would deny the existence of abstract concepts (universals), they would likely only fail to affirm their objective (external to the mind) existence. So it is necessary in our definition to accomodate this reality.
But this distinction vitiates Chopra's argument. If it is the case that the mind is non-physical, but is dependent upon the physical for its existence, then we have our materialist answer: the image of the yellow flower is "encoded" in the physical structure of the brain where it can be accessed by the consciousness and consciousness is an emergent property of the physical brain. Chopra's argument may retain force against reductive physicalists (I say "may" only because of the logical possibility; there are very likely physicalist schema that may undercut it as well c.f. Daniel Dennet).
So much for Chopra's "argument" against materialism. But what about the possibility that the mind is a non-material substance, and not dependent upon matter for its existence (as Chopra apparently believes). Does this view avoid these or other types of problems entirely? I don't think so. Where does a non-material consciousness "live"? How does it interact with the brain? Where is the evidence for its existence? Of what is it composed? How does it come into being? &c. Materialist schema can provide answers for many of these questions and for the ones where it cannot, there are usually no good answers on the non-materialist side as well.
And this is what I see as a primary difficulty with this, and actually all such (in my experience) simplistic arguments against materialist philosophies of mind. Proponents attack what they see as motes in the materialist's eye while missing the planks in their own. There are simply too many gaps in our knowledge of the brain, the mind, and the structure of existence in general to provide any definitive answers. Right now, the majority of evidence from biology, neurophysiology, & psychology appears to be on the materialist side so there is simply no reason to assume that there's any magic required. That's not to say that there are no good critiques of the materialist position in the philosophy of mind. David Chalmers and William Hasker have provided some very on-point and stimulating criticisms of the materialist and reductive physicalist positions. But Chopra and those like him who believe that blathering about flowers and pictures inside the brain represents any serious threat to materialist schema are...well...just blathering.
Rather clever comeback, that. It seems indeed that D'Souza has more in common with the Islamo-"fascists" than he lets on. Who exactly is it that hates our freedom? Could it be...oh, I don't know....D'SATAN?!?What D'Souza proposes in The Enemy at Home is that American conservatives join hands with traditional Muslims to keep gays and women subjugated and subservient. D'Souza opposes radical Islam because they want to destroy us. But Muslim restrictions on sexual freedom and strict enforcement of patriarchal diktats--those he kinda likes. Those he can work with. "What disgusts them [i.e, devout Muslims]is not free elections but the sights of hundreds of homosexuals kissing one another and taking marriage vows."
It clearly disgusts D'Souza too. Maybe he should convert.
In America, sad to say, we are inured to the debris of the broken family. We accept that the traditional family is no longer the norm, it is now something like an 'alternative lifestyle.' We invite Edgar and Austin to our dinner parties.How in the world does "invit[ing] Edgar and Austin to our dinner parties" signal that "the traditional family is no longer the norm?" What connection exists between Edgar and Austin and "the debris of the broken family?" This mantra is chanted non-stop by morons and demagogues like Pat Robertson and James Dobson but there is simply no logic which, granted the first, will lead you to the second. D'Souza has not only drunk the Kool-Aid, he's now participating in preparing it. It is ironic indeed that this screed intended to demonstrate how the cultural left is to blame for 09.11 instead demonstrates how much D'Souza and his fellow travelers share with those who truly hate America and are intent on destroying it.
Edgar and Austin are human beings, and may well be smart and funny and good conversationalists. And your alternative to this is...what? To ostracize them and shut them out? To throw them in prison? To put them to death by stoning, as the radical Muslims do? I'm sure that would make the terrorists like us more, but it would require destroying the very notion of human liberty. That is a tradeoff that is only worth making to the Bin Ladens of the world, on whose side you have firmly placed yourself with this book.Indeed. Who is it that apparently truly hates our freedom? Self-righteous, pseudo-intellectuals like Dinesh D'Souza, that's who.
"I realize that this is a strong charge," D'Souza writes, "one that no one has made before."
The reason it hasn't been made before is that it's a sleazy, shameless, ignorant, ahistorical, tendentious, meretricious lie, one that was waiting for the right brazen liar to come along to promote it, and here he is, and his name is Dinesh D'Souza, who's fatuous and fuddy-duddyish enough to think that it's Britney Spears, the rap lyrics of 2 Live Crew, and the buggering photographs of the late Robert Mapplethorpe that have Islam in a tiz. This is someone so out of touch with pop culture that he thinks liberals look down on risque sitcoms like Will & Grace because "their moral depravity is not highbrow enough for their taste." Does that description fit anyone you know?
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