CONSIDER THIS: Harvard/Tufts Biology Prof Says Goodbye to ‘Physicalism’
By Daniel Witt
There’s a pattern you notice in science writing. Whenever a scientist is positing something he thinks is really far-out or paradigm-shaking, there will come a place in his writing when he stops and clarifies that he is not, of course, trying to cross The Line. He is not (of course!) saying that anything exists outside the material world.
That may be the biggest sacred cow in modern science: materialism, the idea that matter is all that exists. Or, to be more accurate, physicalism, the idea that the “physical world” is all that exists.
(This newer term was coined after it had become glaringly obvious in physics that “matter” is not all that exists. Since “the physical world” has proven a wonderfully flexible concept, physicalism is easier to hold on to than materialism is.)
Irreducible Complexity illustrated
It’s fine to believe in all sorts of wild and daring things. You can believe in the mind, you can believe in free will, you can believe in teleology and purposiveness, you can even talk about a “vital force” — but at the end of the day, you have to pay your materialist dues and clarify that you are not invoking anything… ahem… spooky.1
You understand that the physical world is all there is, was or, ever will be.2
Michael Levin, however, is done with all that.
Levin is a professor of biology with appointments at Tufts University (the former academic home of none other than atheist Daniel Dennett) and at Harvard, so one wouldn’t necessarily expect him to be in the vanguard of rebellion against materialism.
But that’s where he has positioned himself, with a new article (“Ingressing Minds: Casual Patterns Beyond Genetics and Environment in Natural, Synthetic, and Hybrid Embodiments,” currently in preprint) that explicitly and vehemently rejects the materialist paradigm.
Go here on Evolution News & Science Today for the balance of this Daniel Witt post, which is introduced here for HillFaith readers with permission.