Based on actual hard evidence, however, materialism has no more claim to scientific authority than does "panpsychism", the view that all matter and energy, down to the tiniest subatomic particles, is in a fundamental sense conscious, possessing at least a rudimentary proto-sentience, or "prehension".
Harris disagrees with the many eminent physicists (60%, according to recent polls) who, following the "Copenhagen Interpretation" and going all the way back to Max Planck, agree that consciousness (perhaps expressed as the "quantum vacuum" variously named) is the irreducible substrate of "physical" matter and space-time. Planck wrote, "'I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."
Many others, like Harris, take the materialist perspective. There is no fair reading of the record except for all participants in the debate to admit that the science itself is entirely neutral and agnostic regarding the debate between materialism and a "conscious Kosmos".
--There's a mountain of strong scientific evidence for mind-matter interactions. Thousands of controlled double-blind parapsychological experiments, conducted by diverse groups, many of them conducted according to standards of rigor more stringent than those commonly applied in other scientific fields, have produced a mountain of scientific data that demonstrates at least subtle interactions between consciousness and matter and the (imperfect and probabilistic and usually weak, but nonetheless actual and irresponsible to ignore) phenomenon of psi, or "non-ordinary" human knowing, and the influence of consciousness on living tissue and non-living matter.
We'll return to this later. For now, suffice it to say, scientific materialists have been very successful in the politics ignoring and marginalizing this evidence, but not very successful in the scientific project of bringing intelligence and curiosity to exploring and accounting for it. Which leads us to our next point:
--Harris's book is a political act in the domain of intellectual and cultural politics. He presents it as a neutral rational exploration of the factual nature of reality and human neurology and its implications. However, his manifesto emerges in a social and cultural context, and can only be fully understood, appreciated, and engaged as it interacts with that context.
Materialism is the most popular, broadly recognized system of beliefs among scientists and engineers. It is the simplest and most easily understood and articulated, and thus most coherent and common philosophical basis for committing to and advancing scientific research, as well as the world-transforming technologies that science makes possible. It has enormous intellectual and institutional credibility and power.
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(Image by (From Wikimedia) Jan Luyken (1649–1712) / Cl Roger-Viollet, Author: See Source) Details Source DMCA
Not only do trans-rational approaches to this synthesis lack this enormous structural advantage, they are not in agreement even with one another. The various trans-rational syntheses have only more recently emerged (which is natural, since they're inherently more complex and nuanced) and have yet to converge in a single unified coherent thesis.
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