Incidentally, I find Mary Midgley (the author of the Guardian article) to be a deeply frustrating philosopher. I enjoyed parts of her book “Science and Poetry”, but felt with both book and article that she fails to make a persuasive argument.
In the article specifically for example, she complains first that “we” (ie, presumably, materialists) treat matter as incapable of producing life, whereas I’m not aware that anyone in fact does that. Rather "we" think life to be an emergent property of matter, but not one necessarily deserving of a new, non-materialistic paradigm to investigate and understand it.
Similarly she complains that we “pretend” that our experience is “just an illusion”. The issue rather though is that we cannot step outside of ourselves to know with any certainty that what we perceive as real objectively is real, so we’re forced to accept the reality we appear to experience using the tools of sense and reason that we have. How real or illusory that model is though seems to me to be unknowable.
That is, rather the pretend we just play the only hand we’re dealt.
MM also says we need a “new mind-body paradigm, a map that acknowledges the many kinds of things there are in the world and the continuity of evolution”, but that seems to me to be a straw man. Who doesn’t acknowledge those things, and why isn’t it possible to acknowledge them from within the paradigm of materialism?
She continues: “We must somehow find different, more realistic ways of understanding human beings – and indeed other animals – as the active wholes that they are, rather than pretending to see them as meaningless consignments of chemicals.” Again, that’s a straw man I think – we can perfectly readily see our lives and the lives of others as meaningful within the context of our material selves and the emergent properties we have without needing to invent a wider context to do it, let alone without imputing some kind of universal significance to what we do.
She continues to refer approvingly to Sheldrake’s complaint that materialism “veto(es) inquiries on topics that don’t suit it, such as unorthodox medicine, let alone religion.” Here she’s properly off the rails I think. Take medicine: the purpose of it is to cure people, and either it does that or it doesn’t. You can’t complain that materialism vetoes it as if in some way but for materialism it could be found to be valid.
Similarly with religion – in part at least it claims certain things to be factually true: “God”, a resurrection etc. These claims are positioned outside a materialistic paradigm, so require some other method to determine their probable truth or otherwise. And that’s the problem: having posited non-material “somethings”, then it’s for the proponents to suggest a method to investigate the claim rather than just to complain that materialistic methods – like science – aren’t up to the job.
And that’s when MM and the posters here alike go all quiet it seems to me.
She continues: “…unworkable the assumptions behind today's fashionable habits have become…the current popular confidence in certain fixed assumptions – the exaltation of today's science, not as the busy, constantly changing workshop that it actually is but as a final, infallible oracle preaching a crude kind of materialism.”
Such an egregious straw man! Does anyone engaged in science not think to be a “busy, constantly changing workshop”, and who on earth claims it to be a “final, infallible oracle preaching a crude kind of materialism”?
Science “preaches” nothing, but self-avowedly concerns itself only with that which it’s capable of investigating and it certainly doesn’t think its findings to be infallible – indeed fallibility in the form of a falsifiability test is central to its method. What materialism and science actually are is indifferent to claims of the non-material – they’re just so much white noise, and must continue to be until and unless those who propose them finally produce a method of their own to investigate their claims.
To be fair, she does concede: “In trying to replace it he needs, of course, to suggest alternative assumptions. But here the craft of paradigm-building has chronic difficulties.”
Quite so. But it’s still the job of the non-materialist to suggest something at least – and if he fails to do so, why should he be listened to at all?
MM concludes: “That is surely the right way to take new suggestions – not as rival theories competing with current ones but as extra angles, signposts towards wider aspects of the truth. Sheldrake's proposal that we should think of natural regularities as habits rather than as laws is not just an arbitrary fantasy. It is a new analogy, brought in to correct what he sees as a chronic exaggeration of regularity in current science. He shows how carefully research conventions are tailored to smooth out the data, obscuring wide variations by averaging many results, and, in general, how readily scientists accept results that fit in with their conception of eternal laws."
Well fine, but that’s essentially a complaint about the practice of materialistic science – basically confirmation bias - rather than conceptually about the nature of the claims that science can in principle at least investigate. Sure, eliminate the smoothing out of data etc as much as you like – if it happens, that would be a good thing – but much as you may take on this and the other suggestions that would help you not one jot in investigating the supposed non-material. Where on earth would you even begin to do that using anything science has to offer?
MM concludes: “Whether or no we want to follow Sheldrake's further speculations on topics such as morphic resonance, his insistence on the need to attend to possible wider ways of thinking is surely right. And he has been applying it lately in fields that might get him an even wider public. He has been making claims about two forms of perception that are widely reported to work but which mechanists hold to be impossible: a person's sense of being looked at by somebody behind them, and the power of animals – dogs, say – to anticipate their owners' return. Do these things really happen?
Sheldrake handles his enquiries soberly. People and animals do, it seems, quite often perform these unexpected feats, and some of them regularly perform them much better than others, which is perhaps not surprising. He simply concludes that we need to think much harder about such things.”
That’s a bit disingenuous: does she mean, “think harder within the materialistic, scientific paradigm” or “think harder by inventing a new paradigm”?
If the former, fine and dandy; if the latter though, again it’s for the claimants of the non-material to make the running I’d say.
