Umm I was watching his new TV series the other day (What, I still find him and his opinions interesting), but he does seem far too caught up in religion than an atheist should/could/would want to be. I realised while I was watching his Sex, Death and The Meaning of Life, last week what it is.
His preoccupation with religion over colours his reasoning.
I think I touched upon it last week here or elsewhere, so I'm afraid that i'll have to repeat a little of what i said then.
So imagine an experiment where children are fooled into believing that there exists a machine capable of exactly duplicating a living being. The kids are shown a gerbil, and asked to show a picture or whisper their name to the gerbil. This is then placed into the machine and a button is pressed, a beep is heard and the machine is opened to reveal two gerbils. The kids are asked, has the new gerbil seem your picture, or does the new gerbil know your name?
The conclusion is that even as children we have a 'knowledge' or perhaps an instinct, that even a duplicated life does not contain the memories or experiences of the donor animal.
Dawkins then went on to conclude that this knowledge or instinct is evidence that even as children we have a knowledge or instinct of the soul.
Really? That is not the conclusion I made. I think it shows a perception of Self. That is a consciouses awareness a me different from others (this touches upon what RP and I are talking about). Now it could be argued that this is a function of Soul or a function of Mind. I'm plumping for Mind myself. So I have to wonder why Dawkins would have it that all Theists would say Soul?
Perhaps he is merely guilty of generalisations, now I don't like that anyway and in a scientist I find this mindset rather repugnant.
On Wednesday, 24 October 2012 12:19:42 UTC+1, William L. Houts William L. Houts Lukaeon William L. Houts wrote:
All right, I just wanted to run this by you guys. I know it seems I'm
always rattlling on about aliens, but they're really a stand in for,
well, for a lot of things. Anyway, I've been on Facebook and recently
made a status report commenting on the conversation we had going on here
about hypothetical aliens and what they might or might not want from
us. And I was making the point that I made here: that said aliens will
turn out to be just as befuddled by it all as we are, and are probably
in no position to give us the goods on life's mysteries, or even make a
good cocktail.
Now, my friend Matt, who is very smart but also very bitchy, put forth
Professor Hawking's notion: that we'd better keep our heads down low,
because history tells us that when a more technologically advanced
species meets a less developed one, the results are usually horrible for
the latter. I replied that yes, this does seem to be the pattern in
Earth history. But, I went on, races which manage to break the
lightspeed barrier are going to have better things to do than enslave 7
billion people, or even mistreat them very much. Their energy problems,
I said more or less, will have been solved to such an extent that they
won't have to vampirize us. Matt made it clear that he thought I was
being terrifically naive.
Now, Mat is quickly becoming a sour old queen, but I want to know: with
whom would you agree? Or is there a third answer which I haven't
proposed here?
--Bill
--
"I just flew in from the Land of the Dead
and boy are my arms tired."
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