When Distinguished Authorities Peddle Mind Poisons

Most false ideas are not harmful. For example, you will cause yourself no harm if you believe in the false idea that Friday the thirteenth is an unlucky day. But some false ideas may cause great harm. We may use the term “mind poisons” for such ideas. A poison is some substance that causes death or injury. A mind poison may be described as any idea that tends to injure the conscience or moral behavior of a person, or which tends to cause great unnecessary injury to a person's state of mind.

Below are several examples of mind poisons that have been sold by people who believed that our minds are merely the products of our brains (or some states of the brain), and that humans are the mere accidental product of blind natural forces.

Mind Poison #1: Racism

The entanglement of Darwinism and racism stretches back very far, probably to the very beginning of Darwinism. Charles Darwin's main book had the full title of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The phrase “favored races” has a very racist sound to it.

Darwin's other main work was The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. That book had some shockingly racist passages in it. One of them was the passage below:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

This utterly racist passage predicts that the “savage races” (meaning humans such as blacks and Africans) will in the future all be exterminated. It is also a passage suggesting that blacks or Australian aboriginines are closer to gorillas than Caucasians are.  Although it does not specifically advocate a program of racial extermination, such a passage can be called exterminationist-friendly. There was another European who predicted that a race would be destroyed, and his followers tried very hard to make his prediction come true.

Thankfully, there have been no parties that began a program of mass extermination against black people. But Darwin and his writings seemed to provide many a talking point for racists. Darwin's teaching of the idea of survival-of-the-fittest was evoked by many acting to oppress people of color. In the late nineteenth century the British Empire was approaching its high point, and as that empire put many in Africa and India under its oppressive control, slogans such as “survival of the fittest” were frequently evoked to help justify cruel mistreatment.

Darwin's racism is shown by his use four times in The Descent of Man of the phrase "lower races," including this quote: "But the inheritance of property by itself is very far from an evil; for without the accumulation of capital the arts could not progress; and it is chiefly through their power that the civilised races have extended, and are now everywhere extending their range, so as to take the place of the lower races." We have here a very clear demarcation between "civilized races" that are regarded as superior to "lower races." This is the second time in this book that Darwin approvingly cites the idea of the "lower races" or "savage races" being replaced or exterminated. In the same book Darwin made five uses of the phrase "savage races," which is almost as racist as the term "lower races."

During Darwin's time, the chief advocate of Darwinism (other than Darwin himself) was Thomas Huxley, who was called "Darwin's bulldog." Huxley was openly racist. He stated, "No rational man, cognizant of the facts, believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the white man."  Referring to people of color, Huxley stated, "The highest places in the hierarchy of civilisation will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins.” Darwin never publicly denounced his friend Huxley for such deplorably racist statements. 

For many decades, racism was a brother-in-arms of Darwinism. A standard visual technique in textbooks and museums was to do speculative paintings or sculptures depicting alleged "more ape-like" ancestors of mankind, and to make sure the faces had the skin color and facial characteristics of modern blacks.  

An example of how closely Darwinism and racism were intertwined can be found in the 1914 Darwinist textbook A Civic Biology by George William Hunter, which for years was one of the top textbooks used to teach biology to children.  We find in the book (which can be read here) the following deplorable passage, claiming the white race is "the highest type of all":

"The Races of Man.—At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America."

In the twentieth century one of the leading figures of Darwinism  was Ronald A. Fisher, author of books such as The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection. Fisher's racism is discussed in this article.  According to the article,  Fisher wanted compulsory sterilization of what he called "defectives," and claimed that 17 percent of the population was "defective." Such racist eugenic notions were also preached by another leading Darwinist of the twentieth century, the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, who coined the term "modern synthesis" used for twentieth century Darwinism. On page 42 of his book Man in the Modern World, he preached the following racist nonsense about sterilizing and limiting health care to certain types of people he called "the lowest strata":

"The lowest strata, allegedly less well-endowed genetically, are reproducing relatively too fast. Therefore birth-control methods must be taught them ; they must not have too easy access to relief or hospital treatment lest the removal of the last check on natural selection should make it too easy for children to be produced or to survive; long unemployment should be a ground for sterilization, or at least relief should be contingent upon no further children being brought into the world ; and so on."

Racism is bunk, and also very harmful bunk.  The human mind cannot be explained by brain effects, nor can anything in the human brain explain human memory powers such as the 60-year retention of memories, the ability to instantly form permanent memories, and the ability to instantly recall things learned long ago, given only the slightest prompt.  The idea that very slight gene differences (such as might be found between Africans and Europeans) might account for minor variations in IQ tests is also incorrect.  There are quite a few reasons (discussed here) for doubting all claims that intelligence is significantly heritable, and for thinking that IQ tests are not-terribly-reliable measures of intelligence.  Various social factors unrelated to intelligence can cause geographic variations in IQ test scores. 

The very idea of different human races is a dubious one. There are differences in skin color, but all attempts to specify different human races (on grounds other than superficial appearance) seem to lack a solid scientific basis.  Examination of human genomes from different geographical areas shows no major differences, and no clear demarcations justifying a belief in distinct human races.  And contrary to the frequent insinuations of materialists, the human genome only specifies low-level chemical information, and is very far from being any explanation of the human bodily structure, the human mind or human behavior.  After we examine the evidence that the brain cannot explain the most important human mental phenomena, and also the abundant evidence for paranormal phenomena (discussed in these 84 posts), we have many a reason to suspect that a human body is like a mere costume worn by a soul during a tiny fraction of its existence, and that the real imperishable "you" is something neither white nor black. 

Mind Poison #2: Determinism

Another form of mind poison peddled by many materialists is the doctrine of determinism. Determinism is the doctrine that human beings have no free will.  A statement of determinism can be found in the Jeremy Epstein-funded site www.edge.org, where we read this statement by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne: 

"A concept that everyone should understand and appreciate is the idea of physical determinism: that all matter and energy in the universe, including what’s in our brain, obey the laws of physics. The most important implication is that is we have no 'free will': At a given moment, all living creatures, including ourselves, are constrained by their genes and environment to behave in only one way—and could not have behaved differently. We feel like we make choices, but we don’t. In that sense, 'dualistic' free will is an illusion. This must be true from the first principles of physics. Our brain, after all, is simply a collection of molecules that follow the laws of physics; it’s simply a computer made of meat. That in turn means that given the brain’s constitution and inputs, its output—our thoughts, behaviors and “choices”—must obey those laws."

Determinism is a type of mind poison, because it tends to weaken or destroy any sense of shame or guilt a person might have. Determinism offers an excuse (a kind of “get out of jail free” card) for any evil thing that you might do. If you believe that you have no free will, and that everything you do is completely mandated by the particles and electricity in your brain and the laws of physics, you may kill, maim or rape without feeling any sense of guilt at all. Why feel guilty about some terrible thing you did, if your neurons and brain chemicals and brain electricity made you do it? A person should only feel guilty about anything if there is free will.

Thankfully, there is a way to completely undermine the mind poison of determinism, to make it melt into the ground like the Wicked Witch of the West after Dorothy threw a bucket of water on her. We can make determinism melt away by simply discarding the unwarranted doctrine that the human brain generates the human mind. Take a look at Coyne's argument for determinism in the quote above. It is entirely predicated on the dogma that the mind is generated by the brain. But if our minds are not generated by our brains, there is not the slightest reason to doubt our free will. If my mind is some spiritual reality or soul reality or some mental reality that is not generated by my brain, then if I do something wrong I can't blame my neurons or some chemical reactions or electricity in my head; I can only blame my self.

There are very many good reasons for rejecting the belief that our minds are generated by our brains. They include the following:

• the fact that there are many dramatic cases in the medical literature of people who had more or less normal minds even though large fractions of the brain (or most of their brains) were destroyed due to injury or disease, including super-dramatic cases of people with good minds but less than 15 percent of their brains;
• the fact that there is no scientific understanding at all of how brains or neurons could be producing consciousness, thought, understanding or abstract ideas (mental things that are very hard or impossible to explain as coming from physical things);
• the fact that there is no plausible account to be told of how brains could possibly be storing memories that last for fifty years, given the high protein turnover in synapses, where the average protein only lasts a few weeks;
• the fact that there is no understanding of how brains could achieve the instantaneous recall of distant, obscure memories that humans routinely show, given the lack of any coordinate system or indexing in a brain that might allow some exact position of a stored memory to be very quickly found;
• the fact that there is no understanding whatsoever of how concepts, visual information, long series of words, and episodic memories could ever be physically stored by a brain in any way that would translate all these diverse types of information into synapse states or neuron states;
• the fact that for more than 40 years numerous people have reported vivid near-death experiences occurring after their hearts stopped and their brains were inactive, during times when they had no brain waves, and they should have had no consciousness at all, with many of the medical details they reported during such experiences being independently verified (as described here).

Determinism is bunk, because it is based on the idea that the mind is merely a product of the brain or is an aspect of the brain, an idea that is untenable for reasons such as those mentioned above. 

Mind Poison #3: Sexism

We may define sexism as the belief that men are intellectually superior to women.  Sexism is a mind poison because all of the harm it cause females who are denied opportunities and treated disrespectfully. An opinion article in Scientific American is entitled, "Darwin was Sexist, and So Are Many Modern Scientists."  Beneath this title, we read the tagline, "For far too long, Darwinian theory has justified sexist attitudes and behavior."  The article here discusses the widespread sexism in academia, where certain branches of study have oftened seemed like a White Man's Club. 

In his book The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote, "The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman— whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands." A few sentences later he stated, "We may also infer... the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman."

But a belief in the intellectual inferiority of females is not justified by facts. Males and females do about the same on IQ tests, and in the US females tend to have slightly higher academic grades. It is thought that females may do slightly better on questions involving verbal reasoning, and males may do slightly better on questions involving spatial reasoning. Given such possible differences, any very slight differences in IQ tests between male and female may be purely an artifact of the question mix in such tests (what percentage of the questions involve verbal reasoning and what percentage involve spatial reasoning).  

So why have sexist ideas survived so long? Maybe people have reasoned that males must be smarter, because their brains are about 10% bigger. But once we abandon the unjustified belief that the human brain is the source of human intelligence,  such a materialist basis for sexism vanishes. 

Mind Poison #4: Everettism

Another form of mind poison peddled by some materialists is what is called the Everett "many worlds" theory (or what we can simply call Everettism). What is called the Everett "many worlds" theory is a theory claimed to be based on quantum mechanics (although quantum mechanics provides no actual basis for believing in such a theory). The theory holds that every instant the universe is constantly splitting up into an infinite number of copies of itself, so that every possibility (no matter how unlikely) can be realized. The theory has a name that makes it sound not so unreasonable (with all the planets being discovered, the phrase “many worlds” doesn't sound too farfetched). But the name “many worlds” doesn't describe the nutty idea behind the theory. The theory would be more accurately described as the theory of infinite duplication, because the theory maintains the universe is duplicating itself every second. Or we might also call the theory “the theory of infinite absurdities,” since it imagines that all absurd possibilities (no matter how ridiculous) are constantly being actualized.

There is no evidence whatsoever for this theory, which is endorsed by only a minority of theoretical physicists. The Everett "many worlds" theory has been firmly rejected by physicists such as Adrian Kent, T. P. Singh (who says it has been falsified), and also Casey Blood, who calls it “fatally flawed.” No one has ever observed a parallel universe. We also cannot plausibly imagine such a theory ever being verified. To verify the theory, you would need to travel to some other universe to verify its existence, which is, of course, impossible. Even if you did travel to such a universe, you could never verify the idea that every possibility is occurring in other parallel universes.

Why is the Everett “many worlds” theory a type of mind poison? It is because if a person seriously believed such a doctrine, such a belief would tend to do the greatest injury to any moral inclinations he had. I will give a concrete example. Imagine you are driving in your car at 2:00 AM on a bitterly cold snowy night, and you see a scantily clad very young child walking alone far from anyone. If you don't believe in the Everett “many worlds” theory, you may stop your car and call the police to alert them of this situation, or do something like give your warm coat to the child to keep her warm. But if you believe in the Everett “many worlds” theory, you may reason like this: regardless of what I do, there will be an infinite number of parallel universes in which the child freezes to death, and an infinite number of other parallel universes in which the child does not freeze to death; so there's really no point in doing anything. So you may then drive on without stopping or doing anything, convinced that the multiverse would still be the same no matter how you acted.

Imagine any moral situation in which you should act in some moral way. In any such situation, your tendency to act morally will be dulled if you believe that there are an infinite number of copies of yourself, and that all possible outcomes will occur an infinite number of times. So the Everett “many worlds” theory is a very morally destructive doctrine, one that we may classify as a type of mind poison, because it will tend to do great injury to any moral tendencies you may have. 

No divine power would ever make a universe that had the characteristics of the Everett "many worlds," just like no software developer would ever write some program that was constantly splitting up into a billion different versions of itself.  Since no deity would ever create anything like the Everett "many worlds" situtation, the Everett "many worlds" fantasy presupposes atheism.  Everettism is atheism at its craziest.  

Because of the many types of fine-tuning in our universe, such as the very precise fine-tuning of fundamental constants, we have strong reason to believe that our universe is the product of purposeful intention.   The evidence for the sudden unexplained origin of the universe, the evidence for the fine-tuning of the universe's fundamental constants, and the evidence of accidentally unachievable fine-tuning and stratospheric levels of organization in biological organisms are all reasons for thinking we live in a purposeful universe, something that is the exact opposite of the utterly purposeless reality imagined by Everett "many worlds" fantasists.  But we really need no philosophical reasons for rejecting Everettism, just as we need no philosophical reasons for rejecting any other extravagant groundless speculation not supported by any observational evidence. 

While we are taking note of how Everett "many worlds" fantasists try to make the silliest fantasies imaginable sound like something scientific, we should also ask: in what other cases is nonsense being sold to us as something scientific? There are many other cases, often in the mainstream teachings of academia.