Darwin's Black Box - Michael J. Behe and Intelligent Design

When you're a child, you dress up and pretend to do grownup things based on what you've observed and learned. When you're an adult, most of the time it's the same thing... Only now you have a degree or professional training, you've learned how to do grownup things the "right" way, and so on. But most people are literally just "playing" as adults.
I've heard a few people, usually in their 20s or 30s, say that they always feel like outsiders because they feel clueless about most things around them. They feel like when it comes to "life", they're just winging it, and they feel like everyone else around them knows what they're doing. But the truth is that everyone's kind of winging it. It's just that the other people are better at pretending like they know what they're doing, often to the point that they believe it. The real difference here is that the people who feel like outsiders are actually honest with themselves and think about things. The others are automatons who go through the motions without ever thinking about what they're doing.

That's an interesting take! The second highlighted above is something I figured out a while back and really boosted my self confidence. There may be a lot of people out there who are technically smarter than myself; who could score much higher on an IQ test. But, that doesn't always translate into them having a more accurate understanding of things. Which is kind of bizarre, but I guess the whole learning thing is obviously contingent on more than just raw intellectual power.
Overall intelligence (which is poorly defined in the first place) is must more than just the IQ stuff. IQ is largely about computational power and memory, the kind of measurable materialistic aspect of intelligence, but it has pretty much no way to account for things like wisdom. There are people who may have average or lower IQ and be very wise, which is often connected to things like empathy and being honest with themselves and everyone else. On the other hand, there are those typically materialist scientific types with excellent computational power and thus high IQ, but there's virtually zero wisdom in them, and in certain ways they may seem astonishingly dumb. Materialism has probably more to do with that than anything else.

The most mind boggling thing is that Darwinism/Neo-Darwinism, extreme materialism, and mainstream "science" in general are what are REALLY pseudo-scientific and should have been exposed as such and accepted widely a long time ago....
Indeed. It's science rooted in a specific ideology - materialism - which already isn't scientific at all, because objective science shouldn't follow any ideology. It should consider everything and look at actual evidence. But these types go as far as to actually define science to make it fit within materialism. Basically they define immaterial things as outside of science and thus limit the scope of science itself. And then they go and say that ID can't be taken seriously because it's not science (based on their definition of material science). You end up with the notion that what's "scientific" is more important than what's true.

And then there are all kinds of specific errors in Darwinism, like the idea that similarity of structure proves common ancestry. By the same logic, all cars would have common ancestors and couldn't possibly have been designed. But if you bring that up, you get all kinds of idiotic excuses and twisted explanations, usually along the lines of "but that's different", but it's really not different at all. What's different is their set of rules for evolution and their set of rules for everything else (a clear mark of pseudoscience if I evert saw one). Neo-Darwinism is pseudoscience, for many reasons, and I'll have a whole article about that.

It really is mind-boggling what kind of mental gymnastics the NDs have to go through to not see this.
 
I've been thinking about how it is possible that so many people believe in "Evolution" when it is so obviously wrong once you think it through. One reason might be that there IS evolution: namely of consciousness. It is all around us - people evolve, societies evolve, technology evolves etc. Things seem to get more complex. A helpless child grows into an independent adult, a tribe into a state, a telephone into a smartphone...

When regular people (including scientists not specialized in Darwinism) think about Darwinian evolution, it makes sense to them - like of course "stuff evolves". Except that they never think it through and so it never occurs to them that in all these cases consciousness/intelligence is at the root of this process. So they mix it all up in their heads, in part because evolution is such a generic word with many meanings, and so they somehow think it's all just "natural forces" without any intelligence. Maybe something like that is part of it at least, there are of course other reasons. Just a thought.
 
I've been thinking about how it is possible that so many people believe in "Evolution" when it is so obviously wrong once you think it through.
The simple and obvious answer to this point is that most people never do think it through. The establishment tells you what to believe, and most people don't feel any need to think about it on their own.

But you're absolutely right that different things get mixed up. For example there's just simple learning. Animals learn new things through experience, even over generations. But if you're brainwashed, you don't even see that and instead say they "evolve" and act like learning is a result of some switched nucleotides.

What really evolves is consciousness, not matter, just as you said. But this is not even comprehensible for materialists. They can't understand that matter cannot "evolve" if they believe matter is all there is, so they must invent ways how matter could evolve. They operate in a limited reality, one without consciousness, which is kind of the key element of reality, so it's not even limited reality as much as unreality.

And another part of this is that design evolves. Software "evolves" through new versions, but that doesn't mean it mutates randomly. Despite apparent evolution of the software, every version is designed. The idea behind it evolves. Same with cars or anything else that's designed. And generally anyone can understand that, except in the case of the evolution of life, people suddenly suffer an acute case of blindness and stupidity and give the same kind of thing a completely different interpretation. The "science of evolution" exists in a separate reality with separate rules, ideas, and views. And the worst part is that instead of getting closer to realising it, the proponents actually try to apply this completely upside-down view to other areas.

So I think there are two kinds of people who don't get it. One group is so absorbed in materialism that they can't get it even if they wanted to, and the other group is people who just never really think about it. While the former is hopeless, the latter needs an incentive to think about it, and even then it's anybody's guess what will happen.

Still, once you do think about it properly, it's almost scary to see just how stupid it is. I think I've gone from "wow, it's all wrong" to "holy shit, how come everyone doesn't see how wrong it is?" But the answer to that is in what I just wrote. You have to ditch materialism, and you have to actually think. Apparently hard for a lot of people.
 
And another part of this is that design evolves. Software "evolves" through new versions, but that doesn't mean it mutates randomly. Despite apparent evolution of the software, every version is designed. The idea behind it evolves. Same with cars or anything else that's designed.

Yes and that's because the designer learns through creating and improving what he/she is designing. Like you said, there is only evolution of consciousness. The material realms are only mediums through which consciousness evolves through trial and error. The designer of life forms evolves and learns from what is designed. The life forms themselves provide an opportunity for growth for the consciousness that will reside within, which one day will create other life forms providing an opportunity for the growth for some other consciousness. All for the sake of the one infinite mind to explore and come to know itself through an infinity of experiences for growth and learning.

I was never really a believer in Darwinism however, things have still changed in terms of how I look at nature. Now I look at something like a crepe myrtle tree and go wow! What a brilliant design! A world full of designed living things. It's unfathomable!
 
Just wanted to share that a new genus and species of dinosaur has been named.

Strange new species of duck-billed dinosaur identified

The most complete skull of a duck-billed dinosaur from Big Bend National Park, Texas, is revealed in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology as a new genus and species, Aquilarhinus palimentus. This dinosaur has been named for its aquiline nose and wide lower jaw, shaped like two trowels laid side by side.

In the 1980s, Texas Tech University Professor Tom Lehman (then a Master's student) was conducting research on rock layers at Rattle Snake Mountain and discovered badly-weathered bones. He and two others from the University of Texas at Austin collected them, but some were stuck together making them impossible to study. Research in the 1990s revealed an arched nasal crest thought to be distinctive of the hadrosaurid Gryposaurus. At the same time, the peculiar lower jaw was recognized. However, the specimen spent additional years waiting for a full description and it was not until recent analysis that the researchers came to realize that the specimen was more primitive than Gryposaurus and the two major groups of duck-billed dinosaurs.





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I was listening to an interview with Nassim Taleb recently on GMOs (he's very strongly against them and has been a thorn in Monsanto's side for years). But he said something that I think relates to evolution and intelligent design:

If you look at evolution, if you look at how things get from point A to point B, it's by small tinkering, where mistakes are kept small and local. And you cannot foresee interaction in a given complex system unless you experiment with it. ... You cannot really forecast interaction between systems - they're too complex. ... time counts a lot. You put things together, let them interact, and then there's some dynamics of interaction; and you see if the system doesn't blow up, then it's a good system. If it blows up, then it's a bad system. And the system would anyway clean itself automatically using these mechanisms, and small tinkering. ... feedback loops between things. In Antifragile I presented it in terms of different layers. You have a fragile layer at the bottom, like your cells. And then you have a hierarchy, above the cells, and you have individuals and then you have society. And then your families and then societies and so on. And then humanity. And then--oh, species, and stuff like that. So you have hierarchies. And then you have, of course, evolutionary mechanisms at all levels of the hierarchies. So, this is how things work in nature.

I haven't seen any sign that Taleb's into ID, but the idea is compatible, and I think it helps explain what it means to say that life really IS an experiment. It helps provide a framework to begin answering questions such as:

-If life is intelligently designed, why does life seem to follow an evolutionary principle, with increasingly complex lifeforms following more primitive lifeforms in a historical sequence over billions of years? Why not just terraform a planet and install humans from the beginning, for example?

Well, that's not how 'nature' works. If life is an experiment, the life system is so complex that you cannot predict how things will progress. You need to progress by 'small tinkering' - introducing an element here, and element there, and to then see what happens. The mistakes will be small and local - e.g., species extinctions - but the whole system will not be destroyed. Too big of a change can destroy the entire system. Nature is VERY conservative, but with progressive infusions of novelty - that's what gives the history of life its 'evolutionary' character.

It think it also suggests that the lifeforms themselves have a big role to play in the process. They are not just the passive playthings of some cosmic engineer - they're active participants in the experiment, and not entirely predictable. What we - and all other creatures - do will help to shape the future direction of the experiment, suggesting new 'tweaks' for future species.
 
I couldn't sleep last night so grabbed my Kindle and started reading the sample for this book. I was immediately struck with how easy it was to read which was a welcome relief. I get rather intimidated by books like this as I could never quite get my head around science at school and I am often not as mentally sharp as I would like to be. However, the author's use of plain English and simple phrasing was very welcoming and much appreciated. I find that some author's use 'big words' and overly complex phrasing to show everyone just how clever they are so Behe's humility and thoughtfulness is much appreciated.

However, after getting excited by how he was setting up the book in the introduction my heart fell when there was an abrupt gear change of pre-emptive protection against the flak that the book would inevitably bring him. That was disappointing but understandable and I have only just started to read the book so I can hardly judge at this stage. Once the sample ran out I immediately purchased the full book and am rather keen to dig into it which I really would not have expected.
 
It think it also suggests that the lifeforms themselves have a big role to play in the process. They are not just the passive playthings of some cosmic engineer - they're active participants in the experiment, and not entirely predictable. What we - and all other creatures - do will help to shape the future direction of the experiment, suggesting new 'tweaks' for future species.

Touching on the topic of life being an experiment, and what that means for each of us personally, I've recently read this short excerpt from Maurice Nicoll's work:

Man is regarded as unfinished, incomplete, imperfect. He
has the possibility of completing himself, perfecting himself,
and all that is necessary for this lies in him.
He is an experiment in self-evolution.
As he is mechanically, he is incomplete and undeveloped, but is
capable of a further inner development. For this reason it is
said that man is a self-developing organism.
In the New Testament man is compared to a seed. It is
said that unless a man dies to what he is now, he cannot
evolve into what is possible for him.
A definite
transformation
is being spoken about by which the
experiment can be completed. The idea that man is a self-
developing organism means that he cannot develop under
compulsion
. To see God in the flesh would mean man being
compelled to believe by the evidence of the senses, but man
cannot develop in this way at all. He can only develop
through understanding.
If man is a special experiment on this earth, as distinct
from the animals which cannot undergo an individual
evolution, what does it mean? It means that a man can only
develop internally if he begins to understand the necessity of
it, and seeks for the means himself. It is only through
internal freedom, which is one's understanding, that a man
can evolve. No external compulsion can bring this about.
When we see we are wrong and realise what we are like and
how we behave, then from this basis self-evolution becomes
possible. We begin to change when we begin to understand
ourselves, and see the need.
Man is free to change himself through his own
understanding. This is the only sense in which he is free -
and this freedom no-one can take from him. No-one can
change life, or other people; but each person can change
himself. This system begins with a man, with oneself, with
you - and its object is to change you yourself.

No rules, rituals, ceremonies or regulations, even if
their aim is to develop man, can change him unless he begins
to understand.
The Work therefore begins by teaching that we must try
to enter into ourselves, and begin to see ourselves. Prayers,
pilgrimages etc., are useless because they are taken
externally. It is only through new knowledge and work on
our being that new understanding can be born.
The next idea is that man is in a bad situation on this
earth. The earth is a small point in the solar-system, the
solar-system a small point in the Milky Way or Galaxy, and
the Galaxy is only one of many Galaxies. Man is in a bad
position under many laws which do not necessarily contribute
to his well-being. Cosmically speaking, man is a small thing
in the universe, a new experiment which might be wiped out
in favour of another experiment.

Man becomes of
consequence only when he realises his meaning and destiny
and begins to live more consciously.
If man were only a machine he would not suffer his
inner painful doubts and uncertainties, simply because he
would then be a machine: but everyone knows in a dim way
that this is not the case - and that they should be different.
The third idea about man is that as long as he remains
asleep and mechanical he is used.

If man were incapable of doing anything about himself,
his position would be without hope - he would be subject to
all that happens around him, floods, disease, war etc. It
would be his sole life. But if man is created a self-
developing organism life cannot fulfil him and is not
supposed to fulfil him: his full meaning is not in life. But
life uses us owing to our position on this planet. Re-
arrangement of outer things still leaves us under the same
laws that use man. As long as being remains the same,
mankind attracts the same kind of life, recurrently. The only
starting-point of change is in us - in our spirit.

All mankind is asleep from the point of view of this
system. We are asleep, and in this state mankind can do
nothing. Today mankind is being used more and more by
cosmic forces outside him because he has discarded the
power to awaken.

This system turns round the central point that man is a
self-developing organism, capable of evolving through his
understanding, and changing his level of being - by which
means he can come under new influences and reach help.
In the first two states of consciousness we are
mechanical and cannot change. Only at the Third Level of
Consciousness, or Self-Remembering, can man alter his
situation on this earth.
 
Touching on the topic of life being an experiment, and what that means for each of us personally, I've recently read this short excerpt from Maurice Nicoll's work:

@Anthony I can really see the Gurdjieff influence in Maurice Nicoll's work as you quoted it.

Maurice Nicoll said:
Today mankind is being used more and more by
cosmic forces outside him because he has discarded the
power to awaken.

I think maybe this situation is more "open" than when he penned that observation but my observation is also "open". Really the power to "discard the power to awaken" is an individual choice is it not?

I am not sure that "cosmic forces" use anyone but STS forces as I see them do.

"An experiment" is also an "open" thing for which one must "wait and see" to observe the result. In other words "It ain't over till the fat lady sings".

Maurice Nicoll said:
Only at the Third Level of
Consciousness, or Self-Remembering, can man alter his
situation on this earth.

Aren't we at 3D level now according to the Cs? Maybe if we wake up to 3D's lessons by learning them we can alter the situation to advance to the next level which is 4D. Of course that means all our lessons in 3D need to be learned first.
 
I can really see the Gurdjieff influence in Maurice Nicoll's work as you quoted it.

Yes, he was a student of Ouspensky and Gurdjieff.

I think maybe this situation is more "open" than when he penned that observation but my observation is also "open". Really the power to "discard the power to awaken" is an individual choice is it not?

I am not sure that "cosmic forces" use anyone but STS forces as I see them do.

"An experiment" is also an "open" thing for which one must "wait and see" to observe the result. In other words "It ain't over till the fat lady sings".

I think he would also agree that it's open. But the majority don't really see the situation as it is, or that effort is required in order to stay aware and awake.

Aren't we at 3D level now according to the Cs? Maybe if we wake up to 3D's lessons by learning them we can alter the situation to advance to the next level which is 4D. Of course that means all our lessons in 3D need to be learned first.

He's referring to states of consciousness that are actual and possible for us in 3D, as taught by Gurdjieff:

4. State of Objective Consciousness
3. State of Self-Awareness of Self-Consciousness or Self-Remembering (First truly waking state)
2. So-called Waking State
1. Sleep with dreams
 
I don't know what it's really worth, but here are two papers which can add food for thoughts regarding this subject.

First, this one which involves retrocausality

Which Came First: The Chicken or the Big Bang?
by Tom Huston



New explanations for why the cosmos is perfectly suited for life are cropping up every day, and some are far stranger than others…

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(Originally published in What Is Enlightenment?, Issue 38, Oct–Dec 2007)


This past spring an international team of astronomers announced their discovery of the most potentially Earth-like planet yet detected, a relatively small world orbiting a red dwarf star twenty light-years* away. At such a distance and with the rather unfortunate name Gliese 581c, the rocky orb probably won’t be in the running for its own Lonely Planet guide anytime soon. But that hasn’t stopped scientists dedicated to the search for ET from carefully uncorking champagne bottles and stoically expressing their barely contained glee. “Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life,” said one of 581c’s codiscoverers, Xavier Delfosse of Grenoble University in France. “On the treasure map of the universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X.”
With no less than 240 other planets having been discovered outside our solar system at the time of this writing—a number that is rapidly growing as planet-hunting skills and technologies evolve—the chances of finding life elsewhere in the cosmos have never seemed greater. But why is the universe hospitable to life in the first place? Physicists tell us that if any of the fundamental constants of nature—such as the mysteriously low strength of gravity or the precise values of atomic forces—had differed during the universe’s initial conditions to even the tiniest degree, life as we know it would never have formed. They call this the “fine-tuning problem.” According to some cosmological models, if we simply adjusted a decimal place or two, the quantum chaos that exploded from the big bang would still be a seething hot miasma, never having cooled and evolved into atoms. With another subtle tweak, the rate of cosmic expansion would already have spread all particles so far apart from one another that the universe would be a featureless void. Fortunately for us, the laws of physics happen to be fine-tuned exactly as they are, and here we find ourselves, contemplating a cosmos that we now know contains planets—some presumably even lush, living worlds like ours—in numbers far exceeding its trillions of stars.

So how did we get so lucky?
“Since the 1970s, theists have invoked this fine-tuning argument as empirical evidence for a creator by asserting that there are only two explanations: God or chance,” writes Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host of the PBS roundtable discussion series Closer to Truth, in the summer edition of Skeptic magazine. “However,” he adds, “to pose such a stark and simplistic choice is to construct a false and misleading dichotomy.” Instead, Kuhn proposes no less than twenty-seven different explanations for why we happen to find ourselves in such a biologically accommodating place. Grouping his “taxonomy of ultimate reality generators” into four broad categories—“One Universe Models,” “Multiple Universe Models,” “Nonphysical Causes,” and “Illusions”—Kuhn hopes to account for every explanation, or combination of explanations, that scientists, philosophers, and mystics have proposed as possible answers to the perennially perplexing question of why we exist.
Aside from more traditionally theistic notions like Intelligent Design, some of the currently fashionable theories in Kuhn’s cosmological taxonomy are those involving multiple universes or multiple dimensions, espoused in such recent books as Leonard Susskind’s The Cosmic Landscape, Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages, and Victor J. Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis. Exceedingly popular among quantum physicists and string theorists, these “multiverse” ideas attempt to account for our universe’s life-friendliness by proposing that it just happens to be one of billions of other universes that didn’t turn out so well. After all, in a “multiversal” ocean of zillions of infinitely varied soap bubbles, they reason, there would have to be at least one with the precise qualities necessary to give rise to living beings like ourselves, and of course, that’s the one we’re in.
Still other scientists, arguing on behalf of what’s known as the anthropic principle—the general idea that our universe’s life-friendliness is not a random accident—find this kind of speculation absurd. “To be blunt, in my view, it’s just giving up,” cosmologist James N. Gardner, author of Biocosm, told WIE. “It represents a failure to recognize that just as the appearance of a seemingly well-tuned natural world constituted a vital set of clues for Darwin to follow, so, too, does the appearance of a seemingly well-tuned cosmos constitute a vital set of clues that should be pursued.” Arizona State University physicist Paul Davies agrees. In his latest book, Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life, he argues that most theories about a multiverse simply represent a failure of the imagination. He much prefers two alternatives: 1) the idea that there is some kind of implicit life force or evolutionary impulse guiding the emergence of life and consciousness in our universe, or 2) what’s been described as Davies’ “self-creating universe in a teleological backward causation” theory.
Yes, the theory is as strange as it sounds, but Davies believes it’s no more bizarre than any other explanation in Kuhn’s taxonomy. He proposes that the natural laws forged so precisely fourteen billion years ago in the big bang happened to favor the eventual emergence of life because our existence as living beings, here and now, actually fine-tuned them to be that way—retroactively. “Crazy though the idea may seem at first,” Davies explains, “there is in fact no fundamental impediment to a mechanism that allows later events to influence earlier events.” Invoking arcane mysteries of quantum physics such as entanglement, nonlocality, and the idea that conscious observation plays an essential role in “collapsing” quantum potentials into concrete reality, Davies contends that the presence of conscious observers today is no accident. Our existence, he says, is due to the ability of conscious observations to ripple forward and backward in time, influencing even the quantum fluctuations that took place in the initial nanoseconds of the big bang itself—a time when the laws of physics were still susceptible to subtle tweaking. “If the conditions necessary for life are somehow written into the universe at the big bang,” Davies told New Scientist last fall, “there must be some sort of two-way link.” In other words, the universe may be continually pulling itself up by its own bootstraps—from the future to the past—as a self-correcting, self-contained, and very living system.
The concept of events preceding their causes, technically known as retrocausality, has long been theorized among scientists (and science fiction writers), with creative thinkers such as the famed Richard Feynman even offering mathematical proofs of how certain properties of physics work just as well backward as forward in time. Still, there’s never been any experimental evidence to lend real- world validity to the idea. But scientists are nothing if not inventive, and soon University of Washington physicist John Cramer hopes to conduct an elaborate quantum physics experiment (involving, among other household objects, six miles of fiber-optic cable and two photon detectors) that should put retrocausality to the test. If Cramer succeeds, Davies’ retrocausal, closed-loop theory may become the top contender for explaining why the universe seems so intricately suited for life. But Davies remains open-minded, insisting that all scientific explanations for the universe that have been presented so far may be limited not only by an overly materialistic bias but also by the limited cognitive framework in which we’re approaching the problem in the first place, “a mental straitjacket inherited from evolutionary happenstance.” The future, he believes, may yield possibilities that present-day theorists can’t even imagine.
In the end, perhaps we’ll admit that the great Bertrand Russell already came up with the simplest explanation: “The universe is just there,” he once declared, “and that’s all.”
* approximately 120 trillion miles

Tom Huston—Which Came First: The Chicken or the Big Bang?

And this one which add consciousness and information in the picture. To summarize, I will quote the hypothesis :

So, my hypothesis is as follows: Hierarchically negentropic systems are associated with partially non-local information/probability fields. These fields entail or express interiority and carry information, in the form of solutions, to other similar HN systems directly (“entangled learning”). In biotic forms of HN systems two additional factors come into play. First, this information is carried in particular to progeny, which process could be considered to constitute non-genetic (or “Sheldrakian”) evolution. Second, the field effect of this information causes otherwise random mutation to become somewhat non-random, thus partially directing genetic evolution via quantum observation/measurement. Evolution in all domains is best understood from a dual “inside” (observation) and “outside” (measurement) perspective. Regarding genetic evolution, Richard Dawkins has said, We can imagine (just) a form of mutation that was systematically biased in the direction of improving the animal’s adaptedness to its life. But although we can imagine it, nobody has ever come close to suggesting any means by which this bias could come about. (Dawkins, 1986, p. 312) My speculation is that the above information/probability field effect may be that means.

 
Darwinism is a materialist philosophy, and materialism is essentially the philosophy of non-being: all there is is matter, and matter does not have consciousness. So to the degree that people accept materialism - consciously or not - they are really siding with non-being. This became a bit clearer for me after reading a bit in Kastrup's book "Idea of the World". (Sidebar: mixed bag of a book - some really cool ideas, some not-so-well-developed and wrong-headed ones, IMO.) In one chapter he argues that materialism (he uses the word physicalism) actually serves as an ego-defense mechanism, similar to the way that materialists argue that religion is such a mechanism ("opiate of the masses", calms our fear of death, offers the illusion of meaning where there is none, etc.).

Kastrup argues that what happens with physicalism is projection: consciousness is projected onto senseless bits of matter - neurons, atoms - i.e., something 'not us'. As he puts it, "we are not really 'here,' grounded in our subjective sense of being, but somewhere 'over there,' in an abstract world fundamentally beyond the felt concreteness of our inner lives." And as he puts it, this narrative "can exonerate its proponents from responsibility for their choices and actions." He even quotes Sam Harris admitting precisely this: "Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I ... could not inspect or influence ... Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic - in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal".

Kastrup sums up this narrative:

We are not responsible for what happens here because we are not - and have never been - really here. We are not ghosts in the machine but ghosts conjured up by the machine. In a significant sense, we do not really exist.
...
By appealing to metaphysical abstractions fundamentally beyond experience, such denials of our felt selves achieve a form of deliverance somewhat analogous to religious absolution. ... The physicalist narrative may also give us permission to carve out and dismiss ... our felt emotions. ... We feel justified to dismiss or repress our traumas and demons, avoiding the often-painful work of psychological integration. The physicalist narrative provides a foundation for rationalizing the choice of living an unexamined, superficial life.

It even takes away the fear of death by promising that "all of our problems and suffering are guaranteed to end at that point."

So in a very real way, materialists are wishing for non-being. They are convincing themselves that they don't REALLY exist, and that they will be snuffed out of existence completely upon death. Basically, they've chosen their 'side', and like Harris and Dawkins, they are evangelizing to gain converts to the cult of non-being. At least, that's the way it looks to me!
 
Kastrup argues that what happens with physicalism is projection: consciousness is projected onto senseless bits of matter - neurons, atoms - i.e., something 'not us'. As he puts it, "we are not really 'here,' grounded in our subjective sense of being, but somewhere 'over there,' in an abstract world fundamentally beyond the felt concreteness of our inner lives." And as he puts it, this narrative "can exonerate its proponents from responsibility for their choices and actions." He even quotes Sam Harris admitting precisely this: "Did I consciously choose coffee over tea? No. The choice was made for me by events in my brain that I ... could not inspect or influence ... Losing a belief in free will has not made me fatalistic - in fact, it has increased my feelings of freedom. My hopes, fears, and neuroses seem less personal".

I recently got into a bit of an argument with a friend over this at one point. He spouted the usual narrative that nothing is meaningful and that we're all just products of random processes. I had to point out that his ability to sift meaningfulness from meaninglessness was itself an indicator of significance and signal and therefore could not be a product of randomness.

He still didn't really grok it though, and instead just appealed to the "Darwin of the Gaps" Theory that an infinite number of universes would make life and consciousness possible. This is of course based on the proposition that a random number generator, given infinite time, will spit out any sequence you like, no matter how rare it is. But the fact is that "sequence you like" is itself a signal, and therefore what is superficially "random" is in fact information imposed on the system by an intelligence outside it. What it would REALLY be like if meaning/signal didn't exist is imagining a random number generator being tasked to spit out a certain sequence, but you don't even know what the target sequence is. The experimental result would be "undefined" period, because it's nonsense to say that randomness can produce information. Randomness itself can't even really be produced by signal or information; supercomputers devote time regularly to generating sequences to be as random as possible for encryption purposes, but they can never truly erase all the information from it.

All I got in response to this was that you didn't need to know the sequence the random matter bumping together would eventually produce a program and off it goes. Again, smuggling information into the system. Somehow I get the sense that some people have a very strange disconnect between their experience of the world and how they abstractly think about the world, and how the latter is rooted in the former and no objects of the latter can invalidate the functions of the former.

A part of me wonders about that last point though. Learning to viscerally understand that we do not see ourselves correctly can itself be a very counterintuitive experience, where an intellectual understanding can conflict with a certain strongly held belief, passion, or appetite. So I'm not sure how to draw the line in some respects. Perhaps the experience of the world can never be invalidated entirely in an understanding that brings you closer to truth, whereas things that undermine the psyche in its entirety (like materialism) can only destroy truth or its possibility.
 
"We feel justified to dismiss or repress our traumas and demons, avoiding the often-painful work of psychological integration. The physicalist narrative provides a foundation for rationalizing the choice of living an unexamined, superficial life."

I think that's true in theory. But I also think to a certain extent, life as we experience it doesn't really give a damn about how you've tried to rationalize your 'get out of free jail card.' At some point one is compelled to try and make sense of one's experiences. You can dodge it for a while, whether with the nihilist philosophy du jour or with copious amounts of drugs and alcohol, or possibly some other ways, but eventually it can't be evaded any longer. It becomes a trap, however, for the younger generation who can be influenced by this sort of thing. They don't know any better and it could be a while before they figure it out. Dawkins and Harris are charlatans. I don't believe they completely buy what they're trying to sell. I find it hard to believe, anyway.
 
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