Dominic seems to be arguing against a caricature of my position, so here's a breakdwon:
1) Regarding "Stuck on Stupid" - disagree with this meme as I don't think there's anything overly obvious about whether there's life after death, free will, mind > brain. All of these are open questions. As a
Creative Agnostic I see materialism as one more paradigm among many, though a (large?) subset of materialist evangelicals seem to think they are not promoting a religious faith
with its own miracles.
That said, I think there's a limited extent to which you can choose what you belief in so those who simply don't think there's more to reality than the material can only try and keep an open mind. Something that would apply to immaterialists as well, though there is IMO a distinction:
2) Now, regarding livable truth, I think Chomsky points out a glaring hole in the materialist paradigm when he insists mind = brain yet we mysteriously have free will. The one western philosopher I've seen really trying to live as if free will is an illusion is Harris, and even he falls short rather often. Most people don't react as if others are not the origins of their beliefs & actions.
Even this thread, started due to Dominic taking offense toward Alex's statements, contradicts the idea that Alex was - barring some quantum fluctuation - meant to exist as is from the Big Bang.
3) Perhaps not every materialist claims to be an eliminativist, though it seems to me any attempt to make a distinction - barring some variation on quantum consciousness - fails to really elucidate why their mechanistic assumptions about reality don't collapse down to eliminativism. Perhaps we're using different definitions of eliminativism?
In any case, I'd agree it would be a mistake to assume that every materialist is amoral agent obsessed with maximizing personal pleasure at the expense of those around him/her. But I think one needs to consider the long term social trend of a society where the majority of citizens doesn't believe themselves to be the origin of belief/action:
4) This is where my position lies - that over time societies where the majority holds to the materialist, mechanist paradigm will ultimately degrade. Part of this is due to the presumed lack of moral responsibility n
oted by Conscious Entities entry on Searle:
The AI fraternity has a habit of redefining difficult words in order to make things easier. Terms for things which, properly understood, imply understanding, and which computers can’t, therefore, handle – are redefined as simpler things which computers can cope with. At the time Searle wrote his paper, it looked as if “understanding” might quickly go the same way, with claims that computers running certain script-based programs could properly be said to exhibit at least a limited understanding of the things and events described in their pre-programmed scenarios. If this creeping debasement of the language had been allowed to proceed unchallenged, it would not have been long before ‘conscious’, ‘person’ and all of the related moral vocabulary were similarly subverted, with dreadful consequences.
After all, if machines can be people, people can be regarded as merely machines, with all that implies for our attitude to using them and switching them on or off
and part of it is the feeling of entrapment of the downtrodden as noted - among others - by writer Damien Walter discussing his experience growing up poor in the UK:
The materialist society of 1980s Britain had a hierarchy, and we were the bottom-rung.
From the perspective of the underclass, material reality is bleak. You’re a survivor of blind evolution, stranded on a muddy rock under the harsh glare of a nuclear sun. Beyond that is an infinite universe of inert matter, dust and devastating radiation that is neither for nor against you, but simply unaware of your existence. There is no God. There is no heaven, or eternal reward. There is only another shift in the factory, or the call centre, or McDonald’s — if you're lucky. At its determinist extreme, materialist philosophy enforces a strikingly rigid and oppressive social hierarchy.