The Logical Atheist

Philosophers and others who insist that consciousness, the self, and free will do not exist sound like Chico Marx in Duck Soup , saying in effect, "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes (that is, your introspection)?"

I’ve been an atheist for over 50 years. It took one lecture to convince me. I don’t just disbelieve in the existence of the supernatural. I believe in the  non existence of the supernatural. The natural universe is it. How do I know? (That’s always the appropriate question but with the caveat below). The wrong answer to that question is that we have no or too little evidence. (The “new atheists” seem to like that answer.) But that gives theism credit it does not deserve. Before you ask for evidence, you need to know what an assertion means. Otherwise, you cannot know if something qualifies as evidence or not. If I say, “Crooly blurps,” the right question is not “How do you know?” but “What are you talking about?” I submit that the same applies to the assertion “God exists.” God is always defined incoherently (it can’t be all-knowing and all-powerful, etc.), and since God is said to be literally out of this world, I don’t know what the word  exists  means in the supposed s...

Sorry to hear about yesterday's death of philosopher Daniel Dennett at 82. He was a leading "new atheist,"  one of the so-called four horsemen along with Christopher Hitchens (also gone), Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. Since Dennett was a consciousness denier , I can't regard him as a true friend of reason and hence atheism. ( What's reason without consciousness and free will? ) So I prefer philosopher Gilbert Ryle , economist Ludwig von Mises , and psychiatrist  Thomas Szasz , but then again, if everything is physical, what does  prefer  even mean?

Est, ergo sum, ergo sum conscius et potest cogitare. (It is, therefore I am, therefore I am conscious and can think.)

 

I just saw this quote from Patricia Churchland, a professor of neurophilosophy: "To understand the mind, we must understand the brain." Now this leads one's thoughts in perhaps unintended directions, although Churchland might not disagree with anything I'm about to say. It seems to be equally valid that to understand the brain, we must understand the mind. We must understand, in other words, what it means to understand, which is a mental, but not a brain, activity, as well as a state of being.  I don't see how it can make sense to try to understand what it means to understand if all we talk about is the brain. That sounds like a category mistake: how could neuroscience explain what understanding -- that is, comprehension -- is? Neuroscientists can talk from now till the end of time about what goes on in the brain when we engage in mental activities, but that is nothing like explaining what those activities are in themselves. I am not aware of my brain activity, bu...

You may speculate all you want about how  we material beings manage to be conscious and how  we manage act willfully, that is, with purpose, but what you cannot rationally  do is ask if we are conscious and if  act willfully. We each know this directly, so the fact needs no investigation, which would affirm that which was to be investigated. Even to ask a question about those things is to demonstrate  their reality. You cannot even talk about the subject without your words presupposing and depending on them.  I'll give you an example. The other day I heard a YouTube celebrity skeptical atheist say, "I generally prefer to say now that we have will. Whether or not it's free or how free it is, I have no idea. So I don't need to come up with an explanation for something that hasn't been demonstrated to actually be real." Look closely at this free-will-denier's words: prefer , idea ,  come up with , demonstrated . What in the world can those words mean in t...

From Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained :  I will explain the various phenomena that compose what we call consciousness, showing how they are all physical  effects of the brain's activities, how these activities evolved, and how they give rise to illusions about their own powers and properties. It is very hard to imagine how your mind could be your brain -- but not impossible. [Emphasis added.] Well, actually it is impossible. The brain is not what we mean when we speak of the mental activities we attribute (metaphorically) to the mind. (Remember, mind  is a verb, not a noun.) Seeing cannot be reduced to anything physical. I see  a thing, dammit! What am I to make of a philosopher or neuroscientist or physicist who has the gall to tell me I'm not really seeing it, but rather my brain is up to such and such, say, sorting out "sense data"? Dennett commits what philosopher Gilbert Ryle -- Dennett's teacher! -- called a "category mistake." Any norm...

The question is obviously ironic. What does should  or ought  mean if our actions are determined?  Should  presupposes the ability to deliberate and decide. But without a will -- the term free will  is redundant -- how could we make decisions? I've heard social scientists say something like this: since there is no free will, we ought to rethink the criminal justice system. We ought ? What does that mean if the premise is that the will is a delusion?  The reason I bring this up is that many atheists seem wary about free will. I think I can explain this wariness. Since atheists properly deny the existence of soul, or spirit, they think they're committed to what seems the only remaining alternative: materialist reductionism. They reject "the ghost in the machine" and embrace the machine alone. But they've thrown the will/mind baby out with the soul/spirit bathwater. I wrote this post, and you are reading it. Think of what those facts imply. How can they b...