Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21St Century
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Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century Philosophy, Human Nature and the Collapse of Civilization -- Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 5th Edition Michael Starks The saddest day in US history. President Johnson, with two Kennedy’s and ex-President Hoover, gives America to Mexico - Oct 3rd 1965 Reality Press Las Vegas Copyright © 2019 by Michael Starks All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted without the express consent of the author. Printed and bound in the United States of America. 5th Edition 2019 ISBN 9781080663781 “At what point is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.” Abraham Lincoln "Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics and leads the philosopher into complete darkness." Ludwig Wittgenstein “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke” Charles Darwin TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE .............................................................................. I THE DESCRIPTION OF BEHAVIOR WITHOUT DELUSION 1. The Logical Structure of Consciousness (behavior, personality, rationality, higher order thought, intentionality) ............. 2 2. Review of Making the Social World by John Searle (2010)---10 3. Review of ‘Philosophy in a New Century’ by John Searle (2008)--33 4. Review of Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy by Paul Horwich 248p (2013)--54 5. Review of The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker (2008)----78 6. Review of “Are We Hardwired? by Clark & Grunstein Oxford (2000)-- -92 THE DIGITAL DELUSION --COMPUTERS ARE PEOPLE AND LANGUAGE IS MATH AND HI-TECH WILL SAVE US 7. Is JK Rowling more evil than me? ..................................... 95 8. Scientism on Steroids- a Review of Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennett (2003)---101 9. Review of I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (2007)---117 10. Another cartoon portrait of the mind from the reductionist metaphysicians--a Review of Peter Carruthers ‘The Opacity of Mind’ (2011) ................................................................................... 137 11. Will Hominoids or Androids Destroy the Earth? —A Review of How to Create a Mind by Ray Kurzweil (2012) ...................... 166 12. What Do Paraconsistent, Undecidable, Random, Computable and Incomplete mean? A Review of Godel's Way: Exploits into an undecidable world by Gregory Chaitin, Francisco A Doria, Newton C.A. da Costa 160p (2012) ................................................ 180 13. Wolpert, Chaitin and Wittgenstein on impossibility, incompleteness, the liar paradox, theism, the limits of computation, a non-quantum mechanical uncertainty principle and the universe as computer—the ultimate theorem in Turing Machine Theory ................ 196 14. Review of 'The Outer Limits of Reason' by Noson Yanofsky 403p (2013)--201 THE RELIGIOUS DELUSION – A BENEVOLENT UNIVERSE WILL SAVE US 15. Review of Religion Explained-- The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought by Pascal Boyer (2002) ...................................... 219 16. Review of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality by Ken Wilber 2nd ed 851p (2001)-233 17. The most profound spiritual autobiography of all time? - a review of "The Knee of Listening" by Adi Da (Franklin Jones) (1995) 251 18. Do our automated unconscious behaviors reveal our real selves and hidden truths about the universe? -- A review of David Hawkins ‘Power vs Force--the hidden determinants of human behavior – author’s official authoritative edition’ 412p(2012)(original edition 1995). ................................................................................... 255 THE ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY DELUSION-- DEMOCRACY, DIVERSITY AND EQUALITY WILL SAVE US 19. The Transient Suppression of the Worst Devils of our Nature—a review of Steven Pinker’s ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined’(2012) .......................................... 260 20. The Dead Hands of Group Selection and Phenomenology -- A Review of Individuality and Entanglement by Herbert Gintis 357p (2017)266 21. Altruism, Jesus and the End of the World—how the Templeton Foundation bought a Harvard Professorship and attacked Evolution, Rationality and Civilization. A review of E.O. Wilson 'The Social Conquest of Earth' (2012) and Nowak and Highfield ‘SuperCooperators’(2012)---279 22. A Review of The Murderer Next Door by David Buss (2005)--294 23. Suicide by Democracy-an Obituary for America and the World(2019)-- -306 24. How the Seven Sociopaths Who Rule China are Winning World War Three and Three Ways to Stop Them …….357 PREFACE This collection of articles was written over the last 10 years and revised to bring them up to date (2019). All the articles are about human behavior (as are all articles by anyone about anything), and so about the limitations of having a recent monkey ancestry (8 million years or much less depending on viewpoint) and manifest words and deeds within the framework of our innate psychology as presented in the table of intentionality. As famous evolutionist Richard Leakey says, it is critical to keep in mind not that we evolved from apes, but that in every important way, we are apes. If everyone was given a real understanding of this (i.e., of human ecology and psychology to actually give them some control over themselves), maybe civilization would have a chance. As things are however the leaders of society have no more grasp of things than their constituents and so collapse into anarchy is inevitable. The first group of articles attempt to give some insight into how we behave that is reasonably free of theoretical delusions. In the next three groups, I comment on three of the principal delusions preventing a sustainable world— technology, religion and politics (cooperative groups). People believe that society can be saved by them, so I provide some suggestions in the rest of the book as to why this is unlikely via short articles and reviews of recent books by well-known writers. It is critical to understand why we behave as we do and so the first section presents articles that try to describe (not explain as Wittgenstein insisted) behavior. I start with a brief review of the logical structure of rationality, which provides some heuristics for the description of language (mind, rationality, personality) and gives some suggestions as to how this relates to the evolution of social behavior. This centers around the two writers I have found the most important in this regard, Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle, whose ideas I combine and extend within the dual system (two systems of thought) framework that has proven so useful in recent thinking and reasoning research. As I note, there is in my view essentially complete overlap between philosophy, in the strict sense of the enduring questions that concern the academic discipline, and the descriptive psychology of higher order thought (behavior). Once one has grasped Wittgenstein’s insight that there is only the issue of how the language game is to be played, one determines the Conditions of Satisfaction (what makes a statement true or satisfied etc.) and that is the end of the discussion. No neurophysiology, no metaphysics, no postmodernism, no theology. I Since philosophical problems are the result of our innate psychology, or as Wittgenstein put it, due to the lack of perspicuity of language, they run throughout human discourse and behavior, so there is endless need for philosophical analysis, not only in the ‘human sciences’ of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, history, literature, religion, etc., but in the ‘hard sciences’ of physics, mathematics, and biology. It is universal to mix the language game questions with the real scientific ones as to what the empirical facts are. Scientism is ever present and the master has laid it before us long ago, i.e., Wittgenstein (hereafter W) beginning with the Blue and Brown Books in the early 1930’s. "Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics and leads the philosopher into complete darkness." (BBB p18) The key to everything about us is biology, and it is obliviousness to it that leads millions of smart educated people like Obama, Chomsky, Clinton, the Democratic Party and the Pope to espouse suicidal utopian ideals that inexorably lead straight to Hell on Earth. As W noted, it is what is always before our eyes that is the hardest to see. We live in the world of conscious deliberative linguistic System 2, but it is unconscious, automatic reflexive System 1 that rules. This is the source of the universal blindness described by Searle’s The Phenomenological Illusion (TPI), Pinker’s Blank Slate and Tooby and Cosmides’ Standard Social Science Model. The astute may wonder why we cannot see System 1 at work, but it is clearly counterproductive for an animal to be thinking about or second guessing every action, and in any case, there is no time for the slow, massively integrated System 2 to be involved in the constant stream of split second ‘decisions’ we must make. As W noted, our ‘thoughts’ (T1 or the ‘thoughts’ of System 1) must lead directly to actions. It is my contention that the table of intentionality (rationality, mind, thought, language, personality etc.) that features prominently here describes more or less accurately, or at least serves as an heuristic for, how we think and behave, and so it encompasses not merely philosophy and psychology, but everything else (history, literature, mathematics, politics etc.). Note especially that intentionality and rationality as I (along with Searle, Wittgenstein and others) II view it, includes both conscious deliberative System 2 and unconscious automated System 1 actions or reflexes. Thus, all the articles, like all behavior, are intimately connected if one knows how to look at them.