Stumble it!Religious robot? Or religious freak?
posted in Intelligent Design by themaiden |Or, how about another question entirely? What in the hell does this have to do with Intelligent Design?
The results of a fascinating experiment, in which some people deliberately ignored rational information in favor of emotional information in assessing probability.
The clipping does after all come from The ID Report, an arm of ARN– the Access Research Network, “providing accessible information on science, technology and society from an Intelligent Design perspective.” The article’s author is Denyse O’Leary, whose name is in the tagline of Dembki’s Uncommon Descent, and whose genius has been noted here before– most notably in A curious argument and Denyse O’Leary cracks a joke.
So I ask, “What does this have to do with ID?”
It isn’t really news that people ignore “rational information in favor of emotional information in assessing probability”. Vegas is built on that fact, baby.
The same idea recurs in the following passage.
What would non-materialist economics look like? It would look like the economic world you actually experience, not the one that materialist experts propose.
But she’s taken a baby-step into the bizarre. Exactly what do “materialist experts propose” that doesn’t fit?
I’ll take a guess. I think she’s going for something like this: “People base their decisions on emotions. Materialists think the world world proceeds in lockstep mechanical order. Emotions aren’t mechanical, therefore materialists can’t explain the behavior we see around us. Therefore non-materialism wins.” Never mind the rather extended series of problems with that chain of reasoning– problems starting right from the get-go with ‘materialism’. She really ought to be talking about naturalism. Strict mechanistic materialism died with quantum theory, but it is debatable whether it had even held on that long.
But much more simply, as yourself exactly which ‘materialists’ deny that humans have emotions?
O’Leary has a post at her own blog, The Mindful Hack, titled Economics: What might non-materialist economics look like?. I thought I’d point it out and respond before someone else points it out and accuses me of bad behavior. In general, I don’t object to O’Leary’s post on economics. In fact, I agree with her for the most part, though that apologizing for right wing policy– which, by the way, depends rather heavily upon the ‘rational actor idea– there at the end seems a bit contrived. What O’Leary isn’t doing though is talking about ‘materialism’, despite her title and, I’m sure, her sincere conviction. What she is talking about is a peculiar assumption made by some economists that humans are generally speaking rational actors. We’re not. But this idea is quite different from that of ‘materialism’.
Curiously, the proof she offers for her point is very … ahem… ‘materialistic’.
The notion that most human beings primarily make economic decisions to maximize profit or the accumulation of goods is an economic ideology that can be refuted simply by reflecting carefully on the life choices of a cross section of the people we have encountered in life.
In other words, O’Leary says, “You don’t believe me? Look around.” Very naturalistic, that.
But back to her post at The ID Report. It now gets very strange.
For a dose of really “far out predictions, go here and listen to computer prophet Ray Kurzweil, who takes hundreds of nutritional supplements every day, “reprogramming my biochemistry.”
So I ask again, “What does this have to do with ID?”
How does it all add up?
All I can make of it is “People do irrational and possibly crazy things so…” So what? So irrational and possibly crazy things are admissible as evidence? … are proof of… something? Maybe we should just ditch all this pesky logic and go with what people believe on gut feeling? Maybe emotion, not reproducible results, leads to the right answer? Maybe we ought to just close our eyes, plug our ears and play by sense of smell, like the Pinball Wizard? Oh… wait… Smell is still a ‘materialistic’ input. Sorry. My mistake.
What this adds up to, to me, is an admission that ID hasn’t a leg upon which to stand precariously.
This all begs a further question, “How has O’Leary mangaged to become such a rising star in the ID community?”
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