Bynum Stands Up To The Experts

Via Jeffrey Shallit , I found an article by Rebecca Bynum that was full of such Profound and Telling Wrongness that I just had to dedicate a whole post to dissecting it — since I think it presents the root of what’s wrong with most similar arguments against science’s “humiliation” of humanity.

The first thing to note is the title: The Progressive Diminishment of Man. It is fairly telling, since the author seems to be saying: “Hark! See, I am bravely and controversially using the True and Correct concept of Man, before the world hath gone Insane and the Feminazis started invading our Literature. I look to a Nobler bygone age, where Men were Men, life expectancy was 12 and you could hang an Ethnic without losing status in Civilised Society.” Perhaps I overdo it, nevertheless let us go on with a selection of the juiciest bits.

It may be argued that what man believes himself to be determines not only his conduct, but the substance of what he feels is possible, thus determining the scope of art and culture. The ostensible purpose of science is to serve man through the ever-expanding knowledge of facts, and yet as science has ascended, many scientists have mounted a purposeful attack on the ancient concept of man in order to diminish him in his own estimation. The feeling among scientists seems to be that man does not deserve a privileged place in the universe.

There is an interesting argument to be had there on what the purpose of science is, but why bother when you can simply assert it? And if it be for the benefit of people, there is an interesting debate to be had about which way the sum total of science’s benefits and drawbacks go, but why bother when you can just ignore the very idea that there’s been any benefit?

In the space of a few short generations, man has descended from seeing himself as a little less than the angels to king of the beasts to nothing more than a complex machine. The effect this has had on culture, on art and literature, has been devastating. For as the essential importance of man has decreased, so has his ability to portray life in anything other than absurd terms…But even in Shakespeare the idea of the hero, so prominent in Greek tragedy, was already diminished.

This is of course part of the standard discourse that anything new including art can only be a debasement of former Purer forms — a natural consequence of believing meaning is always imposed from above. It is true that our view of the world as informed by science might have made some art obsolete. The best example (stolen from Dennett) is that in the middle ages, people genuinely believed in love at first sight, which was the staple of serious literature (ie. the romance). Now that we are less psychologically naive, most of us would never be able to look at such a story again without irony. It might seem that an innocence has been lost. But I think it’s just a part of humanity growing up, and pining for art based on things we know to be false is basically pining for the tooth fairy stories of your childhood. Finally this particular example I think has enriched art: by losing the formulaic romances that have nothing to do with the complexities of love and relationships we have opted for art where this is portrayed in a way more likely to be of value to us in our lives.

Even that last bastion of heroism, the military, has reduced the description of its mission to nothing more than a “job.”

Wow. Just wow. Turns out my excessive mockery about Bynum pining for a more violent and unjust world of yesteryear wasn’t that excessive after all. Again, I might agree that the “romance” of war has lost esteem in our public consciousness. Although it probably has to do with knowing a lot more about war as opposed to science. But to think that it’s a bad thing–? And to lament about learning those pesky little “facts” that mean violence is much less acceptable today–?

The high priests of scientism, from Stephen Hawking to Richard Dawkins, argue that given enough time, science will eventually answer all questions, and implied is the idea that science, and science alone, contains all truth. However, upon examination, we find great areas where science has already abdicated. Science cannot, for example, explain the difference between a living and a dead organism in purely scientific terms.

Such grand statements about the limits of science often rely on stating things that aren’t true. Of course we know the difference between a living and dead organism. And one of the great triumphs of science was to put this in naturalistic terms after centuries of people saying this was completely impossible and there was a vitalist spirit, an “essence” of life that mystically permeated living creatures. She goes on with many other things science supposedly can’t explain, almost all (AFAIK) completely wrong. Shallit dismantles those in his post.

Darwin once famously asked, why thought, “being a secretion of the brain” should be considered “more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter?” Though thought, like gravity, is non-material, both, according to Darwin, can be safely assumed to be the products of matter. The secret of atomic organization and the organization of life, according to scientism, is thought somehow to be contained in the smallest dead particles of mindless material. Yet when we look at reality, we must admit that matter without pattern would remain undifferentiated and therefore it is pattern which is the determining factor, not matter alone. And if pattern does not exist in mind or as mind, then where does it exist?

It is literally true that we live in a world composed of pattern. One does not see the wind, but we see the effect of it; we do not see mind, but we certainly see its effects in the observable patterns of reality. To attribute complex patterns or even simple patterns to mysterious mindless forces only deepens the mystery rather than clarifying it. The fact that mind is non-material does not mean it is not real.

Aah yes, the science-can-never-explain-consciousness-without-a-non-material-”essence” argument! The last bastion of creationism… Well I’m currently doing a grad diploma on that very topic, so more on the details of the various ways such arguments are wrong later. For now, it’s enough to note that I have looked at these 2 paragraphs blindly without really understanding a word of what Bynum is actually saying, if anything at all. But it’s not a bug, I think this is a central feature of such arguments about consciousness.

The human genome has now been found to contain a comparable number of genes as any other vertebrate and this is evidence that our bodies are no more complex than that of a dog or an ape. Yet this discovery hasn’t prevented the proliferation of “scientific” theories about the genetic basis of language, art and culture. Language alone, with its well neigh infinite complexity, were it genetically based, would logically require an immense amount of genetic space. And if language cannot be found in our genes, how could art or culture be found there?

Of course we’re as complex as dogs, if you use the genome as the complexity measure. So what? A dog has a sense of smell millions of times more powerful than a human and a human can write heartrending poetry. Using the genome as the measure gives equal weight to both abilities — but why do you have to use this measure (and then complain about it)? The bit about language requiring infinite genetic space would mean that all the sentences we utter were pre-programmed into us. This indeed would make humans terrible dullards — but it’s telling that Bynum made this mistake when visualising what a naturalistic explanation of language would look like.

Animals are also undoubtedly conscious, but human beings are conscious of being conscious. This implies a level of mind experience above that of animals.

And we know that animals like dolphins and apes aren’t conscious of being conscious why? Because that would diminish Man. QED. Or, as she argues earlier, because apes cannot master human language in any meaningful sense. Looks like Bynum hasn’t moved on from Descartes’ views on animals. Which is rather sad: he claimed that they couldn’t feel pain at all (being machines and lacking souls and all) so if you vivisect a dog and it cries and whimpers it’s only sound escaping from a mechanical body. That’s another telling thing about such arguments — they do for animals exactly what the accuse materialists of doing which is “reducing” them to automata. But surely if being conscious of being conscious is what counts, then is it only wrong to torture chimps because it brutalises us?

It is because science has progressively diminished man in his own eyes that philosophy has been stunted…The reinvigoration of Western culture must include the restoration of man to a place of dignity in a meaningful universe.

I see, I see. But wouldn’t this require some…umm…arguments that science has been…you know…WRONG about these things? Oh, but I missed the part where Bynum dismantles modern linguistics in a few sentences, seeing what they could not see for all their booksmarts! After all, somebody’s got to stand up to the experts.

Her essay needs to be printed and framed on the wall of everyone who believes in reasoned inquiry. It has everything that most arguments against science get wrong — just more of it.