[Continuation of previous post]
Bertvan
the rebellion
might become even greater than that voiced below by congress over some
research projects.
* A study of the brain circuits which control mounting and receptive sexual
behavior of the unisex whiptail lizard. In nine years, this project cost $1.4
million.
* A five-year study of red-winged blackbirds to determine how humans make
choices of mates, dwelling, reproductive areas, escape routes and foraging
areas. Cost: more than $539,000.
* A five-year study of the hormonal mechanisms in the brains of rats which
make them want to eat salt. Cost: $5 million.
A study of tree frogs' communications to their mates to determine the
development and maintenance of speech communication in humans. Cost: over
$91,000.
What are the "outstanding research projects" which the NIMH has approved?
They include:
* A 19-year study of the affectionate, sexual and aggressive responses in
monkeys, costing more than $1.6 million.
* A one-year study to determine why some transsexuals who apply for
sex-change surgery follow through with it while others don't. A bargain for
only $7,236.
* A 25-year study of the effects of psychedelic hallucinogens on the brains
of rats, at a cost of over $2.9 million.
* A 17-year study of slang terms used by Puerto Ricans in New York City when
under stress. Cost: over $4.7 million.
* A six-year study of pigeons and humans to determine the response to delayed
punishments or rewards when given a decision to make. Cost: more than
$500,000.
* A five-year study in which rats were given electroshock treatment to
compare its effect on their brains with the effects of drugs. Cost: more than
$543,000.
* A four-year study in which drugged rats were startled by sounds and
electric shocks to determine which drugs block the "fear mechanism." Cost:
over $300,000.
*A 12-year study in which the jaw muscles of pigeons and rats were monitored
electronically to determine which brain mechanisms could be linked to eating
disorders in humans. Cost: over $545,000.
Bearing in mind that for every two studies approved, the NIMH rejects eight
applications, one wonders what the remaining psychiatrists are attempting to
"study."
Chris
Perhaps they are the really *good* studies; the phrase "government science"
is largely oxymoronic, as Ayn Rand and others have pointed out.
I don't really want to defend *any* of these projects, because I oppose
government funding of *any* research (because it rests on taxation, not
because of the nature of the research).
However, I will point out, in defense of some of the research itself, aside
from how it was funded, that, in at least some of these cases, whether it
represents good science depends on details that you have not given. And,
some of them, even as described above, seem to be at least possibly good
science. For example, if we could find a way to block fear responses to
being startled, many military veterans might be helped immensely, as might
a fair number of other people. Further, though I still oppose funding even
good science by taxation, let me point out that $545,000 is not a lot of
money to be spent on such a purpose, compared to the amounts spent on other
kinds of medical treatments and such for such people.
Finally, I may as well point out that tax-funding of research depends on
the epistemology of religion, not on adherence to consistent principles of
reason. *Faith*, not reason, supports the belief that science will somehow
grind to a halt, or become totally concerned with immediate technological
concerns if it is not government-financed. This kind of thinking will only
*increase* if such epistemological views are able to become sufficiently
dominant. Then, people like Dembski will be financed by government funds,
as might Behe and his ilk. If you think it's questionable to study how
startling triggers fear responses, wait until you see what kinds of
"research" projects such people would get funded by government, until those
same epistemological views became *so* dominant, *so* nearly universal,
that government "science" would consist of reading Genesis and making
"scholarly" reports on the scientific meaning it supposedly has about
cosmology, the origin of life, the nature of sin, mental health, and so on.
If Bertvan thinks poorly of the ideas of Freud, et al, just *wait* until
she gets a load of 13th century medievalist ideas on such topics as mental
health and autism. Bruno Bettelheim will begin to look like an absolute
*angel* in comparison.
The Dark Ages are proof that a dark age can happen. Events in just this
century, in the US, show just how delicate is our general decency in
respect to science and human life. One example is the Tuskeegee Syphilis
research project. Here is a one-paragraph summary, from
http://www.aabhs.org/tusk.htm:
"In 1932 the American Government promised 400 men - all residents of Macon
County, Alabama, all poor, all African American - free treatment for Bad
Blood, a euphemism for syphilis which was epidemic in the county. Treatment
for syphilis was never given to the men and was in fact withheld. The men
became unwitting subjects for a government sanctioned medical
investigation, The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.
The Tuskegee Study, which lasted for 4 decades, until 1972, had nothing to
do with treatment. No new drugs were tested; neither was any effort made to
establish the efficacy of old forms of treatment. It was a nontherapeutic
experiment, aimed at compiling data on the effects of the spontaneous
evolution of syphilis on black males. What has become clear since the story
was broken by Jean Heller in 1972 was that the Public Health Service (PHS)
was interested in using Macon County and its black inhabitants as a
laboratory for studying the long-term effects of untreated syphilis, not in
treating this deadly disease."
Not only was treatment withheld, some of the men were forcibly *prevented*
from getting treatment on their own. I suppose the people running the
project felt it would reduce the amount of usable data they could get.
Remember this study the next time you think today's relatively enlightened
views are stable, secure, unshakable: This project lasted until *1972*,
less than thirty years ago. If you think our culture has changed in such a
fundamental way that such things cannot happen again, you are very naive
indeed. These projects, if an attempt is made to justify them at all, are
always justified on the grounds that the (involuntary) sacrifices of the
victims are for the greater good of society (or the state, or the Aryan
race, or, very commonly, for the glory of God -- anything but respect for
the rights of the victims themselves). Since we are still a society in
which mindless appeals to the "good of society" are very effective, new
projects of a similar nature could easily gain substantial backing, perhaps
enough to get them approved and funded.
Supernaturalism is only one form of irrationalism, of course; it is
probable that many of the supporters of the above-described study were
materialists of one sort or another. The key is not whether a person
accepts supernaturalism or not, but whether he implicitly (if not
explicitly) accepts the *epistemological* premises of supernaturalism,
whether he accepts that his own feelings (etc.) determine (or are magically
determined *by*) the corresponding external facts in the world, etc.
*But*: Supernaturalism *is* one form of irrationalism. Rational
materialists oppose it not because supernaturalism's metaphysical claims
are in fact false (though the core ones *are* false), but because the basic
method of attempting to justify them is corrupt and demonstrably unreliable.
Faith does not work. It does not produce good science, it does not produce
good philosophy, and it does not produce good theology (even if we assume
the premise that God *does* exist). Faith does not work, regardless of
whether it is faith in God or faith in mystical nonsense like "Dialectical
Materialism" (i.e., Hegelian philosophical theological drivel restated in
social, political, and pseudo-materialistic terms).
If Marx had been an actual materialist, he would have understood that
matter has no interest in behaving in the way he claimed it would; there
are no simple, grand, inevitable *materialistic* laws of the type Marx
claimed. But, because most of the human race had been "primed" for such
irrationalism by thousands of years of *religious* irrationalism, it was an
easy matter to sucker millions upon millions of people into it.
So: Yes, I see the rise of scientific irrationalism and supernaturalistic
beliefs as threatening to drag us into new dark ages, because they have
before, because there is no reason to believe that we are, as a nation or
as a world culture, free of the epistemological premises that have done it
in the past, and because it is clear that faith does not work (it does not
even have a mechanism, other than the deaths of its advocates, that allows
faith-based errors to be discovered and corrected). Some people who hold
some ideas on faith *are* sufficiently rational that they will give up
specific irrational beliefs about the world if they are proven false, but,
if they were rational, they would not have adopted such irrational beliefs
to begin with (and then, possibly, lived according to such irrational
beliefs for decades, causing irreparable harm to themselves and others).
Faith has a strong tendency to "evolve" toward coercively imposing beliefs
on others because it has no *rational* means of persuading others. If two
people who believe in conflicting ideas on faith take those ideas
sufficiently seriously, then, without *reason* to enable them to work out a
means of getting along without at least physically attacking each other,
their only recourse may be to violence. Thus, because the Nazis were unable
to provide rational justification for their views, and since, for good
reasons, Jews could not accept the Nazi view of them as a fundamentally
evil "race," the only way *available* to "resolve" the issue was Nazi
violence against Jews. Nazi irrationality excluded even the *possibility*
of a rational alternative.
We see the same style of "thinking" in today's creationists and other
supporters of ID, in trying to get government to forcibly impose their
views on children as if they were in fact science instead of religion. ID
dogma excludes even the *possibility* of a complete rational naturalistic
explanation for life and evolution, so, ultimately there is *no* other
alternative than to forcibly impose their views. Naturalistic science, on
the other hand, is *inherently* limited to what can be at least
investigated empirically. It does not, and *cannot* say anything about the
*absolutely* ultimate basis for the existence of the Universe, for example.
For all science is or *can* be concerned, God might exist, so it has no
stake in attempting to forcibly impose atheism on anyone (although some
*scientists* undoubtedly do have such stakes). Faith is not needed; any
claim that is scientific has a rational basis that can be examined and
criticized by anybody. ID theory, at present, relies *primarily* on faith,
and only uses scientific facts in an incredibly selective way, and it's
arguments are not even generally well enough defined (c.f. Dembski) to make
a claim to rationality. When they *are* well enough defined to be tested,
they *fail* the tests (as in the case of all of Behe's claims, some of
which had failed such tests even before he wrote "Darwin's Black Box").
I oppose government schooling for the same reasons as I oppose state
religions, but the attempt to get creationism and ID taught, in their
current forms, as science is an *especially* egregious irrationalism that
goes beyond even the normal irrationality of "public" schooling, and so
should be opposed, even if we don't bother with the Constitutional
prohibition on favoring religious beliefs.
Naturalists can afford to allow free thought and free speech, because their
approach is to appeal to physically determinable facts (except when they
try to make science support do things like prove that there is no God at
all, etc., in which case they are not doing science but theology -- *bad*
theology). ID theorists *cannot* ultimately allow free thought and free
speech because their approach is to make claims that are consistently
falsified by physically determinable facts, and to use arguments that
systematically violate basic principles of rational cognition (thus
allowing them to pseudo-prove nearly anything they want to, without regard
for actual facts at all, if need be).
Bertvan likes to claim, in her typical dogmatic way, that neither side of
some issue can rationally prove its claims. Besides the fact that I'd like
to see *her* attempt to prove *anything* rather than merely asserting it,
she is often wrong in making such claims, or at least misleading in a
fundamental way. For example, she claims that neither theism nor atheism
can be proved, but *completely* ignores the fact that *theism* has the
primary burden of proof, and ordinary I-don't-believe-God-exists atheism
need not prove anything because it doesn't *claim* anything other than that
theists have not proved that God exists. Stronger variants of atheism do
have a burden of proof, but, even then, because the epistemological and
metaphysical *default* is the *presumption* that Existence is "innocent
until proven guilty," that, if there is no support for the existence of a
claimed thing, the presumption must be that it does not exist, and this
presumption reigns until some real evidence *does* show up. Otherwise we
have to spend our entire lives arguing individually against a virtual
*infinitude* of things that people can simply make up in their minds, and
the existence of God would be only one in that infinitude.
Thus, while the "positive" atheist may be wrong (depending on what he takes
"God" to be), he is wrong in a much milder and less virulently irrational
way than the person who claims that God *does* exist but who has no strong
rational positive support for this claim.
Further, since, on basic logical and absolutely primary ontological
grounds, all mainstream variants of God (in the West, if not the world) are
logically impossible, even many forms of "positive" atheism *can* be
rationally justified on the grounds that that which is logically
impossible, that which is logically self-contradictory, cannot and does not
exist.
Thus, Bertvan is really doing no more than pretending that *her* ignorance
is somehow evidence that proof is not possible one way or the other. I
suppose it makes her *feel* better to think that her own ignorance is not
the result of her lack of thought and study but rather a *general*
condition that we humans face. After all, if we *must* be ignorant of some
truth, by our nature or by the nature of Existence, then it is no shame for
oneself to be ignorant. But, if one is ignorant because one has shamefully
*chosen* to remain ignorant, to not think, to not study, to not learn the
thinking skills needed to conclusively evaluate the issue, that's more of a
personal flaw. By viewing it as a necessary limitation on human knowledge,
she can pretend that her ignorance is not due to a personal failure to come
to grips with the issue.
But, if she *admits* that she does not know, won't at least *she* not be
interested in imposing her views on the rest of us? No. Absolute skeptics
can be the worst. Because they, *too*, do not have reason on their side,
they *too*, may well resort to violence to get things to go the way they
*want* them to. Further, since morality, as well as deeper branches of
philosophy, falls under the "rubric" of such absolute skepticism, they may
feel *less* compunction than others about coercing others to accept their
way of living, if not their intellectual views.
I believe Bertvan herself would *not* resort to violence; she is too
unfocused and fearful to engage in such activities, and she may well have
too much decency in *spite* of her claimed beliefs about things, to even
want to participate in such oppressiveness. This is not about Bertvan
herself; it is about the *thinking* habits and the *beliefs* she and those
like her hold, particularly the most basic ones.
In her view, even the presentation of a rational argument for a belief is
an attempt to "impose" it on others. That is, giving them the opportunity
to know, understand, and rationally evaluate one's reasoning is "imposing"
one's beliefs on them. But, if you reject *reason* as a means of persuading
others, or of defending oneself against the real or imagined threats that
others pose, what means is *left*?
If you are not willing to present rational arguments, even for the view
that people ought to be allowed to be free to think and believe whatever
they naturally come to think and believe, then just *how* can you promote
such freedom? The only alternative to reason is force. Force may be, at
times, justified in defending oneself and one's freedom, obviously, but if
rational argument is rejected, all issues become matters of acquiescence
to, or using force *on*, the opposition. It deprives one even of a major
tool for persuading the uncommitted to one's position, thereby limiting
one's options even further.
Of course, as always, a question remains: Will Bertvan *ever* actually
attempt to answer a question as posed, or will she *always* simply evade
it, or make up a new and largely unrelated question and attempt to answer
*that*, or will she simply blatantly *misread* the questions and answer
them as if they were different questions? Will she, once again, take my
plain statements about my position and turn them into claims that are not
even logically *compatible* with my position? I hope I can handle the
immense burden of the suspense of waiting to see just how she will continue
the systematic misrepresentation of my views. Another question is: Given
that she does misrepresent my views, despite many attempts at correcting
her misrepresentations, will I be amazed yet *again*? :-)
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