Phillip Kitcher: Same Argument, Different Words.

There is an ongoing intellectual scramble in the Atheist-Intellectualist community ever since the publication of Thomas Nagel’s book, ”Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False”. The title itself is a slap in the Atheist face, since monism is a necessary belief, and Darwinism is a sacred tenet within that belief.

The Atheist/Materialist response has been widespread and not at all happy with Nagel.

Nagel has been a long time philosopher of differentiation. There is a difference between fact and meaning, between observing and comprehending, between qualia and electron discharge. For the Materialist, there is little if any difference because everything is physical, and thus there is very little motion required to get from fact to meaning, or from observing to comprehending, and so on. In fact, pre-determination of those movements exists, just due to cause and effect of mental input (neurological electrical discharge) to mental output (meaning).

But Nagel says that there is both less and more than that; less certainty of Materialist constraints, and more to the mind than physical determinism.

The most interesting part though is the response of overt Philosophical Materialists. Rather than disprove or refute the allegations against Materialism, they take a different tack.

For example, In response to the attack on his ill-fated book “Universe From Nothing” in the New York Times by David Albert, Lawrence Krauss declared that such questions as cannot be answered by scientists are to be dismissed, because they are "“not interesting”. He was referring to the question of the source of quantum fields and the source of laws governing them, which Krauss insists constitute "nothing", and need no explanation of their source.

When Atheist icon Antony Flew wrote “There Is a God” based on the requirement of a source for the apparent intelligence contained in DNA, the idea was attacked as illegitimate because Flew was to be declared senile for suggesting it. His argument went unanswered, while the intellectuals attacked Flew personally and publically and loudly. The argument is declared illegitimate and the arguer incompetent.

And here, the idea of dualism and the failure of science to provide monist unifying theories as presented by Nagel is attacked by Philop Kitcher in the same vein:

”Dewey, a thinker who understood the philosophical significance of Darwin better than anyone else in the first century after “The Origin of Species,” appreciated two things that are crucial to the controversy in which Nagel is engaged.

First, philosophy and science don’t always answer the questions they pose — sometimes they get over them.”

Brilliant response to any question which might upset the Materialist applecart: just get over it. Forget it. It is not interesting.

”Second, instead of asking what life and mind and value are, think about what living things and minds do, and what is going on in the human practices of valuing.”

Your issue is devalued; therefore it has no value. Because: there is no way for empiricism to answer such issues, so the issues are without value, and we are the arbiters of that. "Get over it!"

”This shift of perspective has already occurred in the case of life. A Nagel analog who worried about the fact that we lack a physico-chemical account of life, would probably be rudely dismissed; a kinder approach would be to talk about the ways in which various aspects of living things have been illuminated.”

Rudely dismissed, yes; rationally, no.

The bottom line is always the same: Materialism is valid and true, because we Materialists declare all other questions to be illegitimate, and refuse to discuss them. At best, all non-material questions must be shown to have material solutions so that they can be addressed under Materialism; otherwise, "Get over it, because we won't answer with any reasoning for why they are false (which we can't prove)".

This frequently is restated as the Burden of Proof, where the material evidence must be presented (and even when it is) or the question is rejected without cause – other than it is illegitimate to ask such things. And as Kircher demonstrates above, even asking what life is and how it jumped into existence from minerals is an illegitimate question. So, "Get over it".

Stated in plain speaking: “I don’t have to tell you why you are wrong; you just are”.

So rather than discuss Nagel’s theory, Nagel is merely declared wrong and that it is illegitimate for him to even think such thoughts.

Fine argument from the Atheists, once again. It demonstrates fully the dogmatic religious nature of Philosophical Materialism and the emotional neediness of Atheism, and the paucity of its intellectual power.

Kircher winds up with the usual Scientism-as-faith recitation:

”Nagel is in the grip of a philosophical perspective on science, once very popular, that the work of the last four decades has shown to be inadequate to cope with large parts of the most successful contemporary sciences.

First delegitimize with the Appeal to Authority which is not even necessarily true of relevant “authorities”, a poisoning of the well. There is no question that science involving sources and fundamental connections has stalled. It’s not a philosophical question, it’s an empirical observation. Physicists admit it.

Because of that perspective, a crucial option disappears from his menu: the phenomena that concern him, mind and value, are not illusory, but it might nevertheless be an illusion that they constitute single topics for which unified explanations can be given.”

Here we go: the questions are illegitimate, “illusions” which empiricism might not be able to answer. So asking the questions is out of bounds and dealing with proposed answers is to be avoided, if it takes articles in the NYT to avoid it.

“The probable future of science in these domains is one of decomposition and the provision of an enormous and heterogeneous family of models. Much later in the day, it may fall to some neuroscientist to explain the illusion of unity, a last twist on successful accounts of many subspecies of mental processes and functions. Or, perhaps, it will be clear by then that the supposed unity of mind and of value were outgrowths of a philosophical mistake, understandable in the context of a particular stage of scientific development, but an error nonetheless.”

So there are categories and subcategories but no general category? That is mathematically impossible, since for every category [X] there is category [!X] and together they have a supercategory. [note 1] What Kircher is proposing (to merely ignore the question) is much less rational than what Nagel proposes (to at least acknowledge it honestly). But it is all that Kircher has left in his arsenal, since his arsenal is filled only with denial of intellectual responsibility to address issues which defeat his Philosophical Materialism.

Further, Kircher does not seem to understand the concept of decomposition which he promotes. Decomposition always goes to cause. And each cause has a prior cause, at least in the material realm and thus also in Materialism. So decomposing the prior causal chain toward a unifying or primary cause is perfectly empirical and scientific. That’s why scientists do it. So Kircher is not even consistent in his invocation of science; he deviates in order to cover for his Atheism, and invents a new definition of scientific pursuit, one which is senseless.

ADDENDUM:
William Carroll makes the following observations regarding Kircher’s assertion of illusion:

“Human beings are biologically one and psychologically one. The physical and chemical processes that are features of human life also possess characteristic unities. Unity does not mean homogeneity. Each of the various natural sciences studies the unity appropriate to its domain of inquiry. The different empirical sciences do function in the ways that Kitcher suggests. But it does not follow that any sense of a wider unity, for example, of a human being as a whole reality, is only an illusion. It is the function of a more general science of nature, traditionally referred to as the philosophy of nature, to describe this wider unity.”

Actually the sciences of chemistry and molecular biology and others have been rather subsumed under the necessities of physics, which is a unification of sorts. But it is empiricism as a limitation which caps the ability of actual knowledge under Materialism.

“Understanding unity in nature is not only a theoretical or speculative concern. If a human being is not one thing—that is, if he or she does not possess an intrinsic principle of unity, precisely as a human being—then no one can really be a cause of his or her own activity. Causal action flows from the nature of things. Human beings think and act; it is not the brain that thinks nor the body that acts. Without real human causal agency—agency that would not exist absent a human being’s being one thing—there could be no human responsibility for any action. In such a scenario, ethics becomes the real illusion.”

And in fact, the top-down sorts of ethics which are invented by Atheist philosophers are actually illusions of ethics, because they refer to a behavior set for the other guy. Atheists have entered the Atheist Void, been stripped of all absolutes, and exit ready to tell the Other what to do. Could it be that the hatred of absolutes, which goes clear back to adolescence, colors the fight against an absolute unity? Not for most, maybe just for the few.

Notes:
Note 1: Even a creating deity has a super category: [creating deity] & [not creating deity] = [existence]. Further, existence has a super category: [Existence] & [nonexistence] = [Existence] because non-existence is an empty set. So existence is tautological.