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    • AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
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from Weird Studies/Radical Mystery
  • Radical mystery holds that mystery is not merely a contingent flaw in the state of our understanding, some lapse in knowledge to be supplied at a later date. Radical mystery asserts that the unknown — the hidden, the obscure — is not a lack at all but a positive and unexpungeable quality of things and events. Mystery inheres even in saying there is no mystery: I have long suspected that Richard Dawkins is a trickster sage, whether he knows it or not.
from Patterns of Refactored Agency
  • For example, Richard Dawkins used the concept of the “Selfish Gene” as a way to convey the idea that the units of evolution are genes rather than organisms, in some respects relegating the individual person as a mere puppet being manipulated by genetic interests that were often at odds with the individual and each other:
from On Purpose
  • Ruse is a philosopher and involved in some way with the New Atheist movement (which is not so new any more). His reputation is as a moderate atheist, in contrast with extremists like Richard Dawkins. That is, he considers religious arguments politely rather than calling their adherents fools and charlatans. That is a point in his favor I guess.
from Weirding Dennett
  • I sort of think as Dennett as a more polite and genteel atheist compared with the crudities of Dawkins, but they were lumped together as leaders of the so-called New Atheists (no longer new if they ever were). So, I am not surprised to find he is hated by people with any sort of spiritual leaning.
    • More specifically, is is foundational conviction of Weird Studies that your weird experience (mystical revelation, synchronicity, UFO sighting, etc) are real, if only because they are your real experiences, and Dennett's brand of science seems to say, no, nobody's experience is real, it's all just brain hiccups, only we in our lab coats and presigious university jobs are allowed to say what is real.
    • From WS perspective, they are marginal people being victimized by The Combine of techne. And – they have an absolute point!
    • That is to say, PF's sneer at Dennett was perfectly justified, because Dennett and his establishment colleagues have been sneering at him, with quite a lot of noise and fanfare.
from Acid Horizon/David Bentley Hart, We Are Not Software
  • No, it's something about his tone. He really hates not just materialism, but materialists themselves. Dennett and Dawkins come in for particular rancor (he thinks Chalmers is OK, barely). He thinks their doctrines are obviously absurd, and thus by implication anyone who advocates them must be either stupid or evil.
from Weird Studies/Request List
  • Richard Dawkins is anathema on the show due to his militant and rather anti-intellectual atheism, but I maintain that The Selfish Gene is itself a Weird text, or should be.
from Weird Studies/X-Files
  • Some deserved ragging on Richard Dawkins
    • Leads me to idle thought: the world is divded up into "explainers" like Dawkins and "mysterians" like the hosts. What if neither of these two POVs is correct and there is some synthesis available? Of course this is what X-Files is all about, the dramatic interaction of Scully (science) and Mulder (supernatural).
    • Isn't being an FBI agent inherently rationalistic though? I mean, your job is to explain things, at least to the level of human agency.
from atheism
  • See monotheism. I don't know that I have anything interesting to say on this extremely boring topic. That is to say, I find fundamentalist atheism (of the kind promulgated by Dawkins and related pop-sci writers) to be as dreary, limited, and wrong-headed as fundamentalist religion.
from The Selfish Gene
  • book by Richard Dawkins and a well-known example of agential refactoring. What the title means is not that genes are selfish in a moral sense, we can't judge them, they are SELFish in the sense of being the real units of natural selection, that is, they are effectively agential.
from David Bentley Hart
  • It seems to me he is a mirror of the worst of the scientismists like Dawkins. Two rival ape gangs hooting at each other over who controls the cosmic water hole.
Twin Pages

Richard Dawkins

08 Dec 2022 - 06 Jan 2025
Open in Logseq
    • The well-known biologist and militant atheist. Because of the latter, he's somewhat of an anathema to Weird Studies, and I have to agree with them, Dawkins gives atheism a bad name by his crude approach to religion, and not coincidentally by also playing the philistine on Twitter:
    • Meanwhile I am slagging on Richard Dawkins
    • But I still think The Selfish Gene is a sort of foundational document for whatever it is I am trying to do here. It's an important and well-known example of agential refactoring. Also a cornerstone of weird naturalism.
    • Jan 6th, 2025 The Myth of the God-Shaped Hole | Free Inquiry
      • How patronising, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational. If I am to profess a faith here, it is a faith in human intelligence strong enough to doubt the existence of a God-shaped hole.