Materialism is under assault, both as a lifestyle and as a ground for scientific inquiry. So says Andrew Gurevich. I agree. The philosophy of materialism is going down. Its foundations are crumbling. By the 21st century, our descendants will look back at it with the same amused disbelief with which we now regard creationism or Ptolemys conception of the universe as a set of nested spheres. In this spirit, I offer an essay from the Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research. It analyzes the tortured thinking of materialist physicist and science educator Brian Cox as he indulges in his own special woo-woo while purporting to dismiss . . . woo-woo. Read the essay: tinyurl/kdch7ar + My riff on fundamentalist materialism: The fundamentalist takes everything way too seriously and way too personally and way too literally. He divides the world into two camps, those who agree with him and those who dont. There is only one right way to interpret the world, and a million wrong ways. Correct belief is the only virtue. To the fundamentalist, the liberated imagination is a sinful taboo. He not only enslaves his own imagination to his ideology, but wants to enslave our imaginations, too. And who are the fundamentalists? Lets not remain under the delusion that they are only the usual suspects—the religious fanatics of Islam and Christianity and Judaism and Hinduism. There are many other kinds of fundamentalists, and some of them have gotten away with practicing their tragic magic in a stealth mode. Among the most successful are those who believe in what Robert Anton Wilson calls fundamentalist materialism. This is the faith-based dogma that swears physical matter is the only reality and that nothing exists unless it can be detected by our five senses or by technologies that humans have made. For more on Wilsons analysis of fundamentalist materialism, check out his book The New Inquisition: tinyurl/qzpatwu
Posted on: Sun, 07 Sep 2014 10:50:20 +0000
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