Dawkins speaks of our reading personal agency into nature as the source of the delusion of a personal God. But earlier in this blog I pointed out that the very basic notions used by science, such as causality, are not perceived in nature but interpreted on the basis of an analogy with our experience of our own agency. In other words, the interpretive pattern that leads us to think of nature as involving causality also leads us to regard a personal Being as its source. And one who attacks the latter as Dawkins has done may well undermine the former.
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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