Sometimes the debater focuses on the political dimension to the question of ID and argues that it will hurt science education in the US if ID is taught. This argument is sound only if ID is faux-science. And I certainly would grant both that creationism is faux-science and that teaching it if it were better than that would be harmful to education. But ID, at least in its most evolution-friendly incarnation, may not deserve such a harsh judgment. And to argue against ID w/o having already offered a sound argument against ID's being a genuinely scientific proposal is an example of begging the question... kind of like a prosecutor arguing before the jury that they should convict the defendant of rape because murder is such an evil crime and murderers must not be allowed to go to kill new victims.... arguing in this manner without ever offering support of the claim that the person on the stand is in fact a murderer. To argue in such a way would both be a distraction and a circular argument.
This is a nice way to try to avoid being cornered re the irreality of the self if you're a reductionist, for you can assert that a pattern obtains at the microscopic level that is not all that unlike the pattern found at the societal level. No need for the one self that does it all: instead, you have many sub-selfs that compete for dominance or take turns guiding the whole. The problem with this is, however, that the voters/officials are all zombies. None of them thinks about the whole as such. And perhaps none of them thinks even about themselves (unless one is a panzoist). None of them makes a comparison of alternatives. The more this proposed democracy seems like a zombocracy, the more consciousness will be seem to be epiphenomenal. Furthermore, if the oneness of the self is less real than the multiplicity of explanatory neural parts, then why can't each of these neural parts be conceived of as democracy as well? And why not parts of these parts, et...
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