From Alternet (republished on Salon) The dangerous delusions of Richard Dawkins:
Richard Dawkins has been responsible for popularizing an updated version of this Cartesian myth, writing famously that “life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information,” adding: “That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn’t be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.” Open any science magazine, and you’ll see genes described as programmers that “code” for certain traits, while the mind is discussed as “software” for the “hardware” of the body that is “wired” in certain ways. Thanks to Dawkins and his followers, this deluded view of nature as a machine has become ubiquitous, creating the moral sanction for corporations to treat the earth as a resource to plunder, beguiling techno-visionaries to seek immortality by downloading their minds, and inspiring technocrats to argue for solving climate change through geoengineering.
Wow I think the left has come full circle
The progressives were at first religious, then repudiated it, and now are embracing it again . I have noticed this trend online, in that many on the ‘left’ embracing a sort of ‘secular, idealist moralist relativism’ that borrows from Protestantism, in contrast to the hard, deterministic materialism of Dawkins. Materialism says that reality exists independent of our minds, yet many on the left argue that things such as disability, gender, or sexual orientation are fluid and internal, rather than based on a biological or even a social construct. It’s just so weird how things have changed, even in the past decade.
And of course, criticizing Islam is always a big no-no.
Plus, parts of the article are incoherent. The author mentions Dawkins’ theory as a rejection of monotheism, and then says ‘Cartesian myth’ in reference, I presume, to Cartesian dualism, which says that the mind and body are distinct things. But what the author probably meat to say was ‘monism’, in contrast to Cartesian dualism, which is easily confused with but not the same as monotheism.
Cartesians view the mind as being wholly separate from the corporeal body. Sensation and the perception of reality are thought to be the source of untruth and illusions, with the only reliable truths to be had in the existence of a metaphysical mind. Such a mind can perhaps interact with a physical body, but it does not exist in the body, nor even in the same physical plane as the body. The question of how mind and body interact would be a persistent difficulty for Descartes and his followers, with different Cartesians providing different answers.[4]
The author writes:
Biologists, however, identify principles intrinsic to life that categorically differentiate it from even the most complicated machine. Living organisms cannot be split, like a computer, between hardware and software. A neuron’s biophysical makeup is intrinsically linked to its computations: the information doesn’t exist separately from its material construction.
This is monism, not monotheism.
Richard Dawkins has been responsible for popularizing an updated version of this Cartesian myth, writing famously that “life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information,” adding: “That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn’t be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs.” Open any science magazine, and you’ll see genes described as programmers that “code” for certain traits, while the mind is discussed as “software” for the “hardware” of the body that is “wired” in certain ways. Thanks to Dawkins and his followers, this deluded view of nature as a machine has become ubiquitous,
But the analogy of the mind-as-a-computer doesn’t imply dualism. It is possible for such a computational process to exist either inside or outside of the physical realm.