Head vs Heart, Intellect vs Feeling?

I can't comment on the validity of the left brain/right brain caricature above or Michael Gazzaniga's split brain experiments, but it's a fitting metaphor for the spiritual existential crisis found among some evangelical Christians, a crisis which prompts them to see "heart" and "head" as worlds apart. But conscious cognition straddles both hemispheres of the brain.

In this time of social lockdown I have been listening to some online services at a nearby church and I was intrigued by one particular sermon series that was trotting out a very familiar spiritual motif. Quoting from my blog post about this motif, I said that this series promotes....

....a pattern where we find some Christians agitating for a spiritual revolution that supercharges what they regard as the rather humdrum, mediocre & unempowered work of a target church. The proposed remedy is that individuals must proactively seek an experience of "the Baptism of the Spirit". Given that many people in the church may already lay claim to having had the Baptism of the Spirit, sometimes more generic and vague terms such as the "touch of God", an "encounter with God" or an "infilling" may be used. However, when one analyses what is actually being promoted one finds that it has less to do with spiritual experience per se than it has in trying to cast spiritual renewal into a quasi-gnostic philosophical mold by asserting a sharp distinction between the initiates and non-initiates of  some kind of inner spiritual light.

There are shades of gnosticism & fideism here: As I have remarked many times before, the kind of philosophical dualism which I believe underlies the series filters Christian reality through the cliché of a heart vs head dichotomy.  In this context one often hears (as I have heard during this series) about the need to submit the profanities of the intellect to the ineffable and sacred revelations found in sublime experiences of the divine presence. It’s a caricature of the left brain vs the right brain contention and yet I would set against this the proposal that conscious cognition, which is the A to Z of experience, is likely to straddle both the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

As Kenneth Clark once expressed, we are still the offspring of the romantic movement, the movement which rebelled against the apparent primacy of the mechanical and the intellectual, a primacy which grew out of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Human feeling, instincts and sensibilities found themselves floundering as they ran up against the implications of automation and the automaton: Our industrial machine culture is haunted by the suspicion that humans too (along with their their natural context) are just another application of unfeeling mechanism, albeit a very sophisticated application*. This was the backdrop for the mysticism of the romantics as they attempted to re-establish the primacy of human feeling and the sublime mystical atmosphere that one senses to be at the heart of nature.

But industrial wealth and its concomitant science is evidence of the success of the mechanistic and intellectual take on reality. The third person perspective in which scientific accounts of reality are framed was and is vital intellectual fuel for the progress of industrial wealth and knowledge. This wealth and knowledge is overwhelming evidence of the fundamental truth and place of mechanism in our world. This paradigm has loomed large in our society and its obvious success in providing wealth and knowledge have given it an almost intimidating authority; in fact given the spiritual egocentricity of humanity it can be frightening; spiritual humanity have become strangers in their own cosmos. 

The scientific project which illuminated the cosmic place of mechanism put an end to the temple of the Ptolemaic universe, a temple where man was manifestly at the centre of divine purposes. Unsurprisingly, then, it would only be a matter of time before the suspicion that humans were themselves just (complex) mechanisms would lead to the human organism being put under the intellectual microscope in an attempt to arrive at a mechanical account of humanity.  But in spite of the successes, the fallacy of hope in illuminating human nature with science and ushering in a golden age of reason and human social progress proved to be illusory.  Something was missing.

***

Technology and science have become victims of their own overwhelming success. Their amazingly effective third person narratives have redirected the attention of many thinkers away from the obvious. That is, they have lost sight of the fundamental basis of those narratives; namely that they have their origins in the first person perspective of conscious cognition: This perspective is always implicit in science as the scientific observer and experiencer of those observations which necessarily provide the evidence of science's third person theories. In short scientific data always leads back to a consciously cognating observer experiencing observations and joining the "data dots" of experience with theoretical accounts. But in the heady stratosphere of a breathtakingly successful and heroic techno-scientific project, the authenticator & cornerstone of all science, namely the first person perspective, has become almost invisible. The inner story of human consciousness has not only been marginalised but in some cases even been outright denied existence by those who have been overwhelmed by the trick that successful science has played on their minds and they have failed to see what is in front of their noses. 

There is a subtlety here that may have fazed the consciousness deniers: It is conceivable (and not impossible in my view) that a complete third person narrative explaining the human mind in terms of its "material" constituents of particles, fields and dynamical equations may eventually be arrived at. Although this has not yet been achieved many strides in this direction have been made and just the prospect of a complete "material explanation" of humanity might easily be taken to imply the absence of consciousness..... a third person account of humanity may become so complete as to leave the false impression that there is no room for consciousness; like the God of the gaps the consciousness of the gaps has apparently been crowded out of the third person perspective, apparently dehumanising the human.

But look again: The apparent absence of conscious cognition in the third person scientific account is simply down to the fact that this account is made from the stand point of an observer-experiencer who is external to first person and who therefore will not (by definition) experience the experiences of the first person. All the external observer is able to see of another person are the patterns and behaviour impressed on the material dynamic. But in the final analysis the third person observer has, of course, their very own first person sense of conscious cognition. In effect, then, we have the mind of an observer giving an account of another mind in terms of the observers own first person experiences and theories. As I have remarked in the introduction of my book Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity the third person account of humanity is written in terms of the human observer's conscious cognition and this is reminiscent of the way a computer language compiler can be written in the self same language it compiles.   

For me it is obviously axiomatic that the third person can only experience the first person as a dynamic configuration of matter, matter which has to be appropriately configured before it generates the qualia of conscious cognition.  Matter is the common medium by which first persons are able to become aware of one another and above all successfully communicate. But the two accounts of the first and third persons have to be brought together as a complementary whole; either account does not exclude the other. Both solipsists and consciousness deniers are working with a partial apprehension of reality.

***

As society has become more complex and dependent on technological artifacts it is the third person language which rightly takes up most of our time; after all, a society is about cooperation & communication and communication demands that shared material medium controlled by universal laws. But the downside is that the vocabulary of the first person with its qualia of conscious cognition is apt to become marginalised, buried and perhaps even lost; at best relegated to the counselling rooms in a society dominated by the mechanical and the intellectual. In the face of the kudos and power of science's third person perspective, a sense of alienation has set in. The essence of core humanity, namely its conscious cognition, is in danger of being swamped like the lives of the slaves in Turner's painting (see below). In a burgeoning technical culture our well meaning reactionary Christian preachers are like those wallowing in the waves as they fight to restore the life. & dignity of humanity. Their response is typical of the romantic response which seeks to reaffirm the special and divinely ordained place of humanity. I understand this response completely, but when it tips over into irrationality, fideism and quasi-gnosticism it is reactionary & misguided. For them the third person becomes at best a spiritually inferior companion and at worst a blockage to sublime gnosis. But reactionary preachers can themselves be equally if not far more authoritarian and intimidating as the science status quo. In fact sometimes they are even prepared to invoke fear with the threat of divine displeasure if their views aren't followed through. 

The backdrop of industrial society places huge demands on the human intellect to handle the third person narratives that cover science, technology and the business of day to day running. But the protest by romantics is prone to overcompensating extremes as it tries to escape the apparently alienating external world by its retreat into the depths of the inner life and its mysteries. The romantic reaction is especially a protest against those who even go as far as to deny that the conscious inner life has any substance or meaning beyond the third person perspective of material configuration. The gnostic protest against "intellectualism" and the latter being contrasted over and against sublime inner experiences is the stock-in-trade of Christian romanticism. But the creation wasn't created by a demiurge but by God himself whose omniscient omnipotence has provisioned his rational creation with the facility to generate conscious cognition when the right dynamic conditions are met.

As Sir Kenneth Clarke said in his Civilisation episode The Fallacies of Hope: 

We've a long rough voyage ahead of us and I can't say how it will end because it isn't over yet.. We are still the offspring of the Romantic movement and still victims of the fallacies of hope. 

The potentially dehumanising effects of industrial society; the slave traders

either didn't care about of couldn't perceive the humanity of their merchandise. 

Footnote (added 19/10/2021)

* One of the bugbears with the common concept of "mechanism" is that it is conceived as entirely a matter of local interactions between the parts of the mechanism. Those parts, such as atoms or fundamental particles, have a few relatively simple rules governing their near-neighbor interactions and it is thought that these "mindless" rules are then the source from which all else incidentally and purely fortuitously emerges. It is assumed then that these rules are the fundamental & primary reality of the cosmos and all else is secondary and ephemeral.  No further questions are then asked about whether this system of rules, if it supports the development and maintenance of life, must therefore be algorithmically pre-biased.  Moreover, it is further assumed that these rules do not include global teleological constraints, constraints which (amounting to action at a distance) would really blow away any semblance of local interaction completeness & primacy.  The oft overriding and superficial response to this picture of local mechanical interactions is that it is entirely mindless in that clearly in and of themselves these interactions have no sentient apprehension of what they are doing and therefore any complex development built on them (such as life) is purely accidental and incidental. It is ironic that this superficial response is endemic among the de-facto Intelligent Design community of North America. But then there is this.

OK, the mechanical picture of cosmic development with its purely bottom-up as opposed to top-down vision is at first sight a challenge to an anthropocentric view of the cosmos.  But if one starts to push a little harder the wall of that challenge starts to crumble. 

Reversibility and the Arrow of Time

The arrow of time, especially that introduced by the second law of thermodynamics, has been at the centre of a paradox, a paradox that comes about as follows.....

The fundamental  equations of physics are deterministic and by and large reversible in time*; that is, if  one replaces the time variable t with -t then the essential form of the fundamental equations remains the same. It is therefore impossible to tell from the dynamics constrained by these equations whether time is going backward or forward; the very concepts of backwards and forwards time doesn't exist at the level of the fundamental laws. And yet our macroscopic experience of reality is that there is very definitely a direction to time: For if we play the film of macroscopic reality backwards it presents a very different aspect to the forwards film, not least because of the second law of thermodynamics, a law which tells us that the disorder of an isolated system always increases as time progresses forwards. But - and here's the rub - the reversibility of the fundamental equations of physics, at least at the microscopic level, means that these equations have as many "forward" solutions as they have "backward" solutions, all of which obey the same equations; this follows because the replacement of t with -t implies a one-to-one relation between backward and forward solutions. Therefore for every solution where entropy is increasing there must also be a solution where it is correspondingly decreasing. Therefore if we randomly select boundary conditions then the probability of selecting a solution where entropy is decreasing will be equal to the probability of selecting a boundary condition where entropy is increasing

Why then the clear macroscopic distinction between the backwards and forwards film and the ubiquity of the second law?  This question is known as  "Loschmidts's paradox". Apparently only recently has this paradox has been addressed professionally via the Fluctuation Theorem;  see  here.  One issue I would have with this theorem is that it takes "cause & effect" as axiomatic concepts.  But I'm not so sure that cause & effect are robust enough notions to be used in an axiomatic way (See my post here for more).

At one level the second law is fairly self evident: Given a macroscopic system state, a state which is usually understood in terms of the systems macroscopic statistical properties (e.g temperature, pressure, volume, mass. distribution, density etc), then the entropy, S,  of the system is  defined by:

S = k Log W

...where k is Boltzmann's constant and W is the number of microscopic combinations consistent with the macrostate as defined by the value of its statistical variables. If we take this statistical weight definition of disorder and we imagine a dynamic where some sort of random walk between microstates is in operation then migration to a higher a disorder (that is migration to macrostates with a higher statistical weight)  is a fairly self evident outcome.  But then random walk isn't deterministic let alone reversible. 

I thought I would have quick think about Loschmidt's conundrum myself and to this end I've come up with what follows.

***

We start by imagining  a set of concentric 3D spheres; that is a set of nested spheres so that the whole picture looks like a large onion. (Actually it would be nearer the truth to imagine an n-dimensional set of nested spheres, but the 3D picture of the onion should suffice). Let each sphere of the onion represent a macroscopic state where the magnitude of the surface area of a sphere represents the magnitude of the disorder of the macrostate - that is, the area of each sphere of the onion quantifies the number of microscopic combinations states consistent with the macrostate. Hence, the larger the nested sphere the greater the disorder of the macrostate it represents. 

We can represent the dynamic development of a system in time by a path in the space enclosed by the onion.  For all we know at this stage such a path could zig-zag around in the space of the onion any-old-how. But if we are dealing with deterministic equations where the exact microstate of the system determines both the direction and speed of development at each point on the path it is then not possible for any two development paths to cross..... this follows because at the crossing point there would be a choice of directions to move in and this would mean that the microstate then doesn't determine the speed and direction of motion through the onion. This contradicts the stipulation of strict determinism. Hence, none of the possible paths through the onion will cross.

However, for all we know at this stage even these non-crossing pathways could still violate the second law and there remains the possibility of a development path which at some point could move toward the centre of the onion thus implying a decrease in entropy in time. But if we require the stipulation that disorder can only increase in time then it means that all motions in the onion could only ever be outwards. 

So, given the following assumptions:

Assumption 1: The second law of thermodynamics  

Assumption 2:  That the fundamental laws are deterministic,

then we have concluded this:

Conclusion: All motions in the onion are outward motions and these motions form a set of non-crossing streamlines. 

But this conclusion leads to a contradiction. For if we follow these streamlines back toward the centre of the onion then because they are non-crossing stream lines this means that each sphere has an equal number of development lines passing through it. But if the point where each streamline crosses one of concentric circles of the onion designates a single microscopic combination then it follows that the disorder value remains constant both in backwards and forwards time.  This is clearly an anti-physical conclusion. So what is wrong?

***

Because by requirement disorder must increase as we move outwards through the onion then the number of development lines crossing the spheres of the onion must also increase as we move outwards.  The only way that can happen is if the paths form a branching pattern as they move outward; that is they bifurcate into one or more branches as does a tree when we follow its limbs upwards and outwards.  The consequences of this "tree" picture are this:

ONE) The forward time development paths can not be deterministic; for if we take any branch point then it means that the microstate at that point doesn't fully determine where the system will advance to in the next move on its outward path. A branch point, by definition, gives a choice of ways. 

TWO) And yet the time reversed motion may still remain deterministic: Following a simple branching pattern backwards will always take us back to the same place; (or if there is an element of in-determinism in going backwards, following the branching pattern backwards will take us to fewer possible places than if when we move forward in time).

THREE) In this branching pattern scenario cause & effect turn out to be meaningful ideas: Looking forward in time into a branching pattern we find that there are many possible routes by which the systems could have traveled backwards in time to the current state. We therefore are unable to attribute the current state to a definite cause emanating from the future. But because looking backwards we do find that the current state of affairs would have developed from a restricted number of starting states the idea that today's state had a fairly specific cause rooted in the past makes more sense.  

FOUR)  The branching pattern means that in looking forward in time we find a far greater number of possibilities open to the future than the possibilities in the past from which the current macrostate could have evolved from. The progressive branching as we move away from the centre of the onion ensures there are far more possible paths into the future than there are back into the past. Therefore if we are choosing possible paths at random then there is a far greater probability of the system increasing in disorder than in it increasing its order.

The foregoing tells us that the dynamic which controls our world cannot be deterministic. This suggests that the apparent random jumps in the quantum mechanical state vector are real events. 

Footnote:

* See the link below for a qualified view on the reversibility of the laws of physics:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/07/05/no-the-laws-of-physics-are-not-the-same-forwards-and-backwards-in-time/?sh=4c9a489d61ec

Noumena, Cognita and Dreams

A discussion of epistemology in relation to the paranormal.

c. Timothy V Reeves

December 2020

(Edition 6)

The mind of (wo)man penetrates behind the experiential façade to the logic that controls it. “A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears!” (Shakespeare).

 

This essay is a response to James Knight’s blog post here to which he drew my attention. James asks if the question of the existence of the supernatural can be answered via the kind of crowd thinking which is behind free market economics. James’ subsequent verdict is that stories of the supernatural are so prevalent that it makes the existence of the supernatural likely. I suppose it’s a bit like one of those experiments where a crowd of people give their estimates as to the number of items in a large jar and though very few get it right the average of the estimates often turns out to be close to the truth.    

I found it difficult, however, to proceed with a judgement on James’ post in the absence of a clear vision of just what the natural vs the supernatural dichotomy really means (….at least in the post in view, although James tells me that he has grappled with this question elsewhere….but see the appendix). But having said that I would certainly agree that the sheer weight of paranormal accounts is a kind of crowd based evidence which leaves me, at least, feeling that there is much more to those “high strangeness” experiences we hear reported from time to time than many would credit. What makes these experiences all the more compelling is that they are not necessarily associated with “supernatural belief”, either before or after the experience; quite often the experiencer isn’t a believer from the outset and after the experience they are left mystified as to what it all means and they do not subsequently engage in an elaborate interpretation of the meaning of their experience in terms of “the supernatural”; for them it remains an experiential anomaly they have to live with.

But let me start with some probing of the concept of the “supernatural”.  How do we distinguish the “supernatural” from the “natural”?  I don’t fully buy the quip that it’s simply a distinction between the known laws of physics being obeyed and them being transgressed. After all on that basis anomalous events leading to revisions of the laws of physics would then classify as “supernatural”, at least until such a time that they became incorporated into “settled science”.

If we hold to a conventional Christian theology (like myself), however, we then do have a clear theological basis for the distinction between the natural and the supernatural: Viz; that God himself classifies as capital “S” Supernatural and everything thing he creates is natural.  From this it follows that angelic beings (which includes Satan), then automatically classify as natural. There is much to be said for this definition theologically since it is (theologically) clear-cut and avoids a spiritual dualism which is inclined to lump God himself into a so-called “spirit world” where, like one of the Greek gods, he is striving with entities and objects that, although lesser than himself, nevertheless all classify as belonging to some supernatural domain of gods, thereby almost putting such entities in the same genus as God himself. This form of dualism may have its roots in the traditional Earth vs the Heavens dualism which contrasts the Earthly world of profane matter over and against the sacred & ethereal god-like spiritual beings that inhabit the sublime reaches of the Heavens. Echoes of this spirit vs matter (sometimes subliminally expressed as mind vs matter) dichotomy remain with us today. I personally am repelled by this kind of dualism, especially in the light of Colossians 1:15-17.  For me the only valid theological dualism is God vs. everything he has created.

But having said that this theological understanding isn’t in fact the folk usage of the term “supernatural”. It is more usual to lump together all those strange entities and events which revolve round miracles, prophecies, angelic beings, ghosts, ghouls and goblins as supernatural (“supernatural” without a capital S in this case).  Well, fair enough provided we keep at the back of our minds the fundamental God vs creation dualism.  But this returns us to the original question, namely, what does the “supernatural” mean in this secondary sense?  This is where our problems begin. 

The whole of this essay can be found here:

Evolution, Unstable Conceptual Feedback & Nihilism

Self affirming loop: Ok, as long as no one uses an eraser!

But Alex Rosenberg seems to be in the business of erasing his mind!

At a lecture I attended by Sir John Polkinghorne I was intrigued to hear him concede that strictly speaking he is an "Intelligent Design" creationist, but then went onto imply that he would never use that term of himself because it has become blighted by its associations with the highly politicised de facto Intelligent Design movement of North America. Sir John, as far as I can tell, is a conventional evolutionist but if I'm understanding him aright he believes that what he calls a "fruitful process" such as evolution could only have been designed by God. He has also said that just as the overarching principle of gravity dominates the cosmic dynamic and yet only tells part of the cosmic story, so evolution as an overall principle is only part of the story of natural history. I don't think I'm as convinced of conventional evolution as Sir John, but whatever way you look at evolution it would itself have to be carefully choregraphed to work - this is not something that many dyed in the wool atheists or dyed in the wool Christian fundamentalists would comfortably admit; ironically both parties (albeit for very different reasons) are inclined to believe that evolution is supposed to feed on the indifference of randomness.

Even though I have considerable doubts about bog-standard evolution I've nevertheless many times criticised de facto-ID, especially as it is expressed on the website Uncommon Descent. I have particularly criticised their philosophical dualism which dichotomises "natural causes" against intelligent design causation, where by intelligent design they really mean "God" as an alternative causative agent; that in my opinion demotes God to a causation level. But far worse than this in my opinion is that they've proved to be highly politized toward the Christian rightwing with at least some of their pundits supporting Donald Trump's conspiracy theories about a rigged American election and charging the Democrats of crypto-communism. But if I'm supposed to believe that the American Democrats are Marxist stooges using nefarious means to barge their way to the top then why should I not correspondingly entertain the parallel notion that in a political environment claimed to be so full of corruption Trump's charges of electoral rigging are also a dishonest fraud trumped up by a crypto-fascist rightwing culture that ultimately will bring about a Trump monarchy protected by AR15 tooting militia? The de facto ID community are doing their own bit to undermine trust in the classic and mature American democratic system by helping to sow the seeds of inter-community distrust. 

However, having said that I've got to acknowledge that the off-hand treatment of some ID stars such as William Dembski by the academic establishment has helped push the de facto ID community into the arms of the far right who fear & despise the left of centre academic establishment. And yet Dembski rightly perceived that evolution, if it was to work, would need to be set up from the outset with high information conditions (i.e highly improbable prerequisites). That lesson still stands as far as I'm concerned. (Except perhaps in the extravagant multiverse theories where all scenarios are played out - on this view we necessarily then find ourselves in a universe that supports our existence). What Dembski didn't succeed in doing (and  Dembski effectively admits this himself  - see foregoing link) is that of disproving evolution; he just made it clear that even evolution would require up front information (See my paper here on this matter). Where the ID community went wrong was to use Dembski's work as an argument against evolution in a similar way that they erroneously think the second law of thermodynamics is an argument against evolution.

But whatever the errors of the North American ID community, they have been humiliated and made to look like deep-south rubes. We've seen what happened in Germany when it was humiliated after WWI; they were then tempted to throw in their lot with a protectionist tough-guy who promised to champion their cause and preserve their culture, pride and egos. It seems that the ID community have also found a protectionist tough guy. 

***

Although I disagree with much of their underlying biases I nevertheless often find myself sympathetic with some of the posts on Uncommon Descent. A case in point is this post on UD which quotes from a review of a book titled How History Gets Things Wrong by atheist evolutionist Alex Rosenberg. Rosenberg  has stumbled across what I refer to as unstable conceptual feedback but seems to be unaware of it. I'll explain what I mean by unstable conceptual feedback after I have quoted the review as quoted by Uncommon Descent (my emphases):

 

Rosenberg writes that there are compelling reasons to question the Theory of Mind. His discussion of those reasons is prefaced by the statement that the Theory’s “Darwinian pedigree is no reason to accept it as true, or even mostly true. The process of natural selection does not as a rule produce true beliefs, just ones that foster survival” The statement that natural selection does not as a rule produce true beliefs, cannot, of course, be confined to the Theory of Mind—it isn’t only Theory of Mind related beliefs that cannot be held to be true due to their Darwinian pedigree. It holds across the board, so for all beliefs. If it is to be consistent, Rosenberg’s view must be that natural selection in general selects not for truth but for survival.

 What is frustrating is that Rosenberg’s book nowhere discusses the implications of this view for Darwinism itself, nor for science more generally. For the implications are monumental and disastrous. For if the mental faculties or mechanisms that produce belief in us are selected for not because they yield mostly true beliefs but because they foster survival, then this also regards science: whatever we wind up believing through science, whatever scientific theory we accept through scientific investigation, the fact that we believe it has to do with survival, not truth. But this means that given Rosenberg’s view on natural selection, we have no reason to think that our scientific theories are true, in fact we have a standing defeater for each and every scientific theory, evolutionary theory and the theory of natural selection included.

In the wake of Alvin Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, this problem has received quite a bit of attention. But Rosenberg doesn’t engage with the literature, and has nothing of any interest to say on a problem that should exercise him greatly, given his over allegiance to scientism, roughly the claim that only science can give us knowledge.

Basically the problem talked about here is this: If evolution only guarantees survival then our "knowledge" serves survival first & foremost and not necessarily truth. There is, consequently, a self referencing problem here which leads to a potential internal contention within our thinking and loss of an axiomatic starting point providing us with the foundation on which to base the edifice of our knowledge; for if the truth of our knowledge isn't assured because "knowledge", so-called, primarily serves a survival dynamic then how do we know we've come to the correct knowledge about that dynamic in the first place?  Stated more generally the problem goes like this: If we believe that we have been generated by disinterested processes that bestow upon us pragmatic knowledge and not necessarily true knowledge then how can we be sure that our belief about the disinterest of those processes is itself true? This seems to be the general implication behind Rosenberg's conclusions, conclusions drawn from his concept of evolution. But then if we have correctly perceived those humanly indifferent processes as Rosenberg assumes then perhaps we have also correctly perceived the theory of mind?  For if there is a chance that we've got it right that evolution is purely a survival dynamic then perhaps we've got our theory of mind right as well.  There appears, therefore, to be a selective scepticism on Rosenberg's part perhaps in order to support his own theories of mind, or rather his theory that there is no such thing as mind! (According to UD). This is a kind of cognitive self mutilation, in fact a form of nihilism. As I often say atheism  teeters on the brink of the nihilist abyss.   

I discussed this kind of potential self-referencing contention in an essay way back in 1993.  Even Darwin himself appeared to be aware of it and as the quote above suggests,  so is Alvin Plantinga.  Like Richard Dawkins as I tell in my essay, we find that Rosenberg has at least put his truth anchors down in evolutionary theory even if he is missing the potential internal contradiction which so often has lead to the anti-foundationalism of nihilistic and postmodern responses and in turn the self-destruction of even secular humanism.  But in any case it is wrong to classify evolution as just a survival dynamic. Evolution is about an exploration of the possibilities in platonic space and who knows what kind of exotic configurations can come to light: Yes, living configurations must always be constrained by the requirement of viability; that is survivability, but within that constraint there may be a whole lot of other things those configurations can do apart from just survive. 

There are, nevertheless mitigating circumstances which in my opinion lend plausibility (if nothing else) to Rosenberg's thesis that an utterly impersonal & dispassionate world constrained only by the most ruthless survival ethic will only supply what one needs to know, or think one knows, for survival. The fact is that since the demise of the Ptolemaic human centred temple-cosmos in favour of a vision of humanity's physical insignificance** on the huge cosmic stage, coupled to a failure to find the ghost-in-the-machine, an atheist case that "the universe doesn't care about us" has some traction.  At this point walk carefully, very carefully; for if you trip you've got a long way to fall down that nihilist abyss. But for me the irony is that our very smallness may be evidence of how important we actually are.

Addendum 20/12/20

Psychological Nihilism

Here's another subject raised by Uncommon Descent where I would likely agree with them: See here:

https://uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/how-a-silicon-valley-psychologist-can-believe-consciousness-doesnt-exist/

Yes, it's the old "I'm going into denial about the existence of conscious cognition" attitude that UD are highlighting here. UD quote the offending psychologist as follows:

“I’ve lost friends over this because a denial of consciousness undermines a final refuge of the arrogance of selfhood: universal consciousness. But even most normal people are strongly insistent that consciousness is a real thing, a special thing, and that they possess it. The problem I have is that there’s not only no evidence for it, but what people seem to be referring to as consciousness is explainable as an effect no more unusual, no less materialistically explainable, than water flowing downhill… – Duncan Riach, “Why I Don’t Believe in Consciousness and What Ai Seems to Be Revealing About It” At Medium

Yes, consciousness may well be "materialistically explainable", and although I wouldn't use those words,  I rather think it is "explainable" as a feature of God given matter provided it is appropriately configured. But I would no more deny the macroscopic fact that water flows down hill as a liquid simply because it is explainable in terms of gravity's effect on water molecules than I would deny that conscious cognition is a feature of the thermodynamic macroscopic brain. As for  "no evidence"; my dear man "evidence" is comprised of conscious cognition's perceptions of the world; that is, the very concept of evidence is an item in conscious cognition's repertoire of experiences of the world;  "Evidence" is conscious cognition! Deny conscious cognition and you deny there is any such thing as evidence! 

Riach may as well deny that evidence for liquid water exists simply because  "it's all molecules". One of UD's commenters described Riach as an idiot. That could be true!

Footnotes

* Sections of the American right-wing were into the collective paranoia of conspiracy theorism before Donald Trump appeared on the scene. Trump simply exploited what was already there. See the links below: 

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2013/03/prepare-for-apocalypse.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/09/witchs-brew-from-townhallcom.html

** But in combinatorial terms humans are far from insignificant.

My online meeting with a Trump supporting conspiracy theorist

Yoked with a conspiracy theory! They are mentally 

damaging. 

In a TV debate that's part of the US presidential campaign we find once again Donald Trump refusing to disown the QAnon conspiracy theorists. QAnon believers have a bizarre take on reality; for them Donald Trump is the centre-piece hero in their convoluted conspiracy theory. As the Wiki entry for "QAnon" has it: 

QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory. It alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against US President Donald Trump, who is battling against the cabal. The theory also commonly asserts that Trump is planning a day of reckoning known as "The Storm", when thousands of members of the cabal will be arrested.

Regarding the TV debate this BBC article tells us that:

When moderator Savannah Guthrie asked Mr Trump whether he would reject them [QAnon], he replied: "I know nothing about QAnon." Ms Guthrie said she had just told him about the group, which has been labelled a potential terrorist threat by the FBI. The president said: "I know nothing about it, I do know they are very much against paedophilia, they fight it very hard

.....Mr Trump spent much of the broadcast arguing with the moderator

Looking at Trump's behaviour my conclusions are as follows: For Trump the presidency is less about serving one's country than it is about serving his ego and getting him back into the top seat where he can continue to throw his weight around among his personally selected sycophantic officials and yes-men. His preferred method of administration is that of by passing the country's democratic institutions as far as possible (which he encourages his followers to believe are compromised) via his tweetings, his rallies and above all his lying, his distortions of the truth and his encouragement of conspiracy theorists such as Alex Jones and the QAnon group. It's unlikely he believes this drivel himself (any more than he believes Christianity) but he is content to make friendly noises toward these people in order get their support and votes. Trump seeks total dominance and this is why he has difficulty accepting the role of the broadcast moderator who's job in a democracy is to ask difficult questions. In any case Trump puts about the story that the media (except his own of course) is the source of "fake news"; Trump dislikes anything beyond his immediate control. In short Trump is made of the stuff of dictators.

Trump is poisoning America with his lies, lies which exploit and exaggerate underlying suspicions, animosity, hatred, conspiracy theories and inflame divisions; and he doesn't care; all that matters is getting enough votes to ensure he gets back into power where he will then do his damnedest to dismantle the democratic institutions of America and set up a Trump dynasty. He's actually the favoured candidate of China and Putin because they know he will weaken the Western alliances.  This web article tries to get at the heart of Trump's appeal and in it we can read:

Trump appeals to an ancient fear of contagion, which analogizes out-groups to parasites and poisons and other impurities.

That also sums up the sociopathic 'Libertarian' (sic) philosophy of the ultra-right Ayn Rand. 

We find a helpful and erudite analysis of the US grass roots right-wing in a book I've been reading recently (and still reading) called "Strangers in their own land" by Arlie Russel Hochschild. Although a liberal Californian academic Hochschild shows great patience and understanding in getting behind what she calls the empathy wall and into the minds of the right-wing voters of the American south. She reveals them as practical and work-a-day human beings facing pressures and vulnerabilities that have helped skew their thinking toward the right and then supporting Trump in the 2016 election, a man who like Hitler knows how to exploit discontent by seeding the conversation with the poison of lies and hints of conspiracy for the purposes of his own power agenda.

***

Unfortunately a large slab of the American evangelical church supports the Trump phenomenon. Blinkered Christian fundagelicals fail to see Trump's pride, corruption, lies, distortions and egocentricity as the worst of sins in the Christian canon. Instead they've focused on the pulse racing issues of abortion, evolution and above all their obsession with gender & sexuality. Trump has cynically sidled up to and courted the American church on these issues just as he has courted and sidled up to the conspiracy theorists. Hitler did same with the German church (although as one of the "ubermensch" and a social Darwinist he actually held with contempt what he perceived to be Christianity's concern for the weak). But in Germany, as in America today, the Church wasn't and isn't an entirely an innocent dupe: An authoritarian, right wing church already has various aspects of its culture in place which have helped ease through Trump's deceptions. Viz: A tendency to see politics through the lens of a hard socialist vs libertarian dichotomy (anyone left of the Republican party looks like a "socialist"), a simplistic in-groups vs out-groups fundamentalist outlook which favours law & order solutions to sin, marginalisation from the intellectual mainstream, an anti-academia ethos, prosperity teaching with little concern for the weak, quasi-gnosticism and a paranoid apocalyptic imagination which acts as a fine seed bed for conspiracy theories. 

But crackpot conspiracy theorism, even in American, tends not to be mainstream: Instead it is mostly confined to a lunatic fringe. So it's not surprising that Hochschild doesn't cover it in her book, although one can see how the anti-federal, anti-elite feelings of the people she meets could well find expression in conspiracy theorist fantasies. But the book was written prior to the rise of the QAnon conspiracy theory which recently has almost broken into the mainstream.  This now brings me to the main subject of this blog entry; my unexpected meeting with a UK conspiracy theorist who seems to have been infected with the big viral conspiracy theories which have the jumped across the Atlantic pond;  I shall call him "Steve Pastry". 

***

1. Conspiracy Theorism

Before I introduce Pastry properly I will do a quick resume of some of the aspects of conspiracy theorism. (More discussion of this can be found under my "conspiracy theory" label). 

In my time (prior to Pastry) I have met several people who have been susceptible to conspiracy theorism. They have had chequered careers and faced difficulties fitting in to the status quo & established order of things. They have made heavy weather of life and one can understand why they would like to make sense of their failure to fit in and of the chaos around them. For them conspiracy theory brings a background order & explanation to the chaotic big picture and provides a rationale for their alienation from the established order over which they carry a big chip on their shoulders. Of course, the established order is far from perfect but like their Marxist opposite numbers they want to see that order overthrown in favour of their idealist (and unreal) notions. Also, like their Marxist doppelgangers they are drawn toward ideas of apocalypse and eschatological doctrines.  

Conspiracy theorists see the world through a kind of convoluted Agatha Christie plot, a plot which runs solely in their heads. This plot, with its highly contrived twists and turns, is most unnatural of the real world dynamic: For them nothing is what it seems and reality is systematically skewed by malign hidden intelligences to deceive. But each conspiracy theorist finds consolation and a certain amount of self-esteem in the idea that they are one of a rare breed who can see through the deceiving façade. They find difficulty accepting that life events can be random. For them randomness is often read as a pseudo randomness with a hidden code and agenda behind it. For example, one of the conspiracy theorists of my acquaintance did not accept that the millennium bug was simply down to the limited perspective of many independent programmer coding monkeys (of whom I myself was one!)  but instead followed the teachings of Christian fundamentalist Barry Smith who taught that it was a deliberate contrivance of covert controllers and part of their plot to bring down the system and take full control at the turn of the millennium. My acquaintance preached this view as part of their Christian eschatological beliefs during 1990s but had forgotten all about it by 2005 when I challenged this person, a person who went onto champion other conspiracy theories. This person was not equipped to conceive an army of programmers (including myself!) working independently and in quite haphazard ways. Instead, as is the wont of conspiracy theorism, this person preferred to believe that there was an involved conspiracy narrative of systematic control working away behind the scenes that accounted for the complexities of an otherwise haphazard activity.

Two of the conspiracy theorists of my acquaintance favoured the notion, if not believed,  that the Earth is flat. Flat Earth theory, of course, would require that mainstream science from the Greeks & Ptolemy, through the scholastics of the middle ages to modern navigational techniques are not merely mistaken about the shape of the Earth but that this is in fact a deliberate deception  maintained (for inscrutable reasons) by a  huge highly organised conspiracy. 

Conspiracy theorists will sometimes claim that "conspiracy theory" is a term invented by the unseen rulers of this world in order to label the musings of conspiracy theorists with a pejorative term. As will shall see Pastry is of this opinion. But conspiracy theorists are unable to conceive that their views actually fall under the general idea of "conspiracy theorism" which is in fact a world view, a view which is fallacious. One of the major fallacies of conspiracy theorism is that, contrary to Occam's razor, it multiplies actors, agents and chunks of narrative willy-nilly in order to join a haphazard collection of data dots into a single coherent but highly contrived big picture. As a theory gets more ramifying the possible routes through the decision network multiply exponentially thus reducing considerably the probability that a right route has been taken. Therefore, arbitrarily multiplying entities in order to fit the data dots of complex social objects to a theory are almost bound to be in error. Human intellectual resources are most effectively employed when constructing simple theories about simple objects (e.g. as in physics) because there are fewer opportunities to take a wrong route in the theoretical decision tree and therefore a greater chance of getting it right. In contrast those complex and chaotic social objects are best approached by us, not with unlikely ramifying theories, but instead with adaptive opportunism that befits what we truly are: Viz Complex adaptive systems.

For a Christian such as myself a world of senseless chaos actually makes some ironic sense of the human predicament: Sin, both Satanic and human, has difficulty planning because Sin looks after itself first and foremost - that is the definition of sin; it is the antithesis of Philippians 2:1-11. This aggressive independence promotes chaotic uncoordinated behavior. Moreover, in the Bible it's no coincidence that Satan is associated with the Dragon, the Serpent and the chaos beast who rises from the deep. (See Rev 13:2ff and also here)

The main reason why conspiracy theorism has gained so much ground today is no doubt down to the internet providing channels of infection for a large minority who, for a variety of reasons, are highly susceptible to persuasion by conspiracy narratives. Some of the web operators who promote these byzantine narratives may be cynical (& clever) trolls who get a control freak kick out of seeing how easily they can dupe gullible people like Steve Pastry.

2. Steve Pastry 

My brief  acquaintance with Steve Pastry started on a Church private members Facebook page where I published  this link to an article on the web sight of Premier Christianity and merely suggested that people read the article and then sign a petition. The article is by a Dr Adrian Warnock and titled American evangelicals must stop spreading conspiracy theories about Covid-19, so it is fairly clear what the article is all about. Given that the church on whose FB page I published this link is a mainstream & moderate UK evangelical church I just wasn’t bargaining on attracting the attention of the otherwise unknown extremist Steve Pastry, who was hiding in plain sight on the FB page members list; how he got there I don't know; he's not a member of the church I'm glad to say. Pastry crept out of the woodwork to post his initial cranky outburst in response to my post. This outburst and most of the online conversation that ensued can be found in this PDF document. 

For someone like myself whose epistemic method proceeds under the assumption that the anomalous, the erratics, the oddities, various phenomenal novelties, the paranormal and in fact anything bizarre (and that includes the Christian cults, the Christian lunatic fringe and spiritual weirdness in general) are the best test of one's world view, Pastry's response was actually a welcome windfall. 

But set against this is the fact that getting information out of a fundamentalist conspiracy theorist is hard work and I don't have the skills of an Arlie Hochschild. They are of course set up to be suspicious of anyone who challenges their views and this was true of Pastry; after all he probably regarded me as an evil stooge of the illuminati. It was all very much a replay of my contact with other Christian cultists who have always assumed that, because I'm not one of them, I must be at best compromised and at worst an emissary of Satan. Although Pastry showed the usual sectarian reticence and kept his beliefs and sources close to his chest it is likely, however, that Pastry is into the QAnon conspiracy, now semi-mainstream among Trump followers. Nevertheless, when he was in outburst mode Pastry conveniently spilt of some of the beans; he's not only a UK Trump supporter but also believes the Earth is flat among other absurdities. 

The worst thing about the kind of nonsense Christians like Pastry promote is that it brings Christianity into disrepute. Also, some of these theories can be damaging and harmful; I knew someone who refused cancer treatment because of a belief in cancer conspiracy theorism and died sooner rather than later as a result. And we have here the spectre of Christians who are making these insane claims being utterly convinced they are in the Spirit of Truth and even going as far as Pastry in accusing those who disagree with him as promoting the devil’s schemes. So we have the prospect that either moderate mainstream evangelicals (such as Dr Adrian Warnock above) are wrong about Covid 19 and the shape of the Earth or the ostentatiously devout sounding Christians conspiracy theorists are wrong. They both can’t be right, of course; one side or other is in error, almost certainly in my opinion people like Pastry who are into hard core conspiracy theorism. So not only does paranoid Christian conspiracy theorism compromise the authenticity of Christianity and its claim to being in Spirit and in Truth but it also has the effect of burying real threats to the church under a welter of junk theology. 

It's no coincidence that Christian fundamentalism, conspiracy theorism, Trumpism, libertarianism and the extreme right-wing have gelled into an ugly congealed stinking mass of intellectual debauchery. The fact is (and I just have to face it) many parts of the evangelical church are not only in the intellectual doldrums but will actually defend those doldrums from a base that is a varying mix of fideism, Trumpism, conspiracy theorism and right-wing sentiments in general. Trump's toxic lies are seeping into and poisoning some parts of the Church. He's doing far worse covert damage to the Church than left-wing atheism ever could; at least with the latter they spare us the corrupting flattery and insidious delusional innuendos. Trump is fundamentalism's voice of Saruman. See the video below where we find two (sensible) American Christians who are critical of the drift American fundamentalist evangelicalism is taking. They tell us that in some evangelical minds Trump has been raised to a figure with an almost eschatological significance. If the election goes against Trump this entrenched eschatological idealism will make it difficult for these believers to accept. What do they do then? Get out their guns?

Relevant Link

From the same Premier Christianity stable there is another article of interest found on their website and relevant to this post. The title of the article speaks for itself:

Evangelical Christians must stop saying Donald Trump has been chosen by God

Probability and Mind

Recently a Christian friend of mine sent me an email raising issues connected with probability, Covid 19 testing and the apparently unrelated philosophical question about what was the true nature of reality.  As he is working in Africa these subjects are all linked together under the title of intercultural mission and contextualisation of the Christian message. Where social conditions may be very different and where perceptions & world view also seem so different social relativism is always a temptation. Social relativism is certainly not a position I would subscribe to myself although I do understand how it arises. For example, something as far removed from us as a bat experiences a world of very different quality to ourselves and its perceptions have very different connotations. But although the bat will see a vastly dissimilar world qualitatively and in terms of its meanings & goals, the formal structure of that world would be the same for ourselves; e..g the bat agrees with us about where objects are although the quality of their experience of those objects and what they signify will likely be vastly different. This identity of formal structure exists because the same transcendent laws organising the patterns that link a bat's experiences also link our experiences and, moreover, there is almost faultless registration* between the laws which govern our experiences and those that govern the experiences of the bat. 

For me reality only exists in so far as interrogation of the formal logic controlling the patterns of our experience passes the equivalent of a kind of Turing's test for reality: that is, the underlying logic is sufficiently replete to return the same coherent and organised world when tested by any experiential sampling. But my contention is that without the potential for serving up an experience of a rational world the transcendent logic of the laws of physics is meaningless (See the introduction to my book Gravity and Quantum Non-Linearity where I express similar views). 

 As I said in my response to my friend I've always had a tendency toward an idealist philosophy of reality: In my case I see reality as a replete formal structure linking together our experiential qualia into patterns; both the formal structure and the cognitive qualia are needed before a reality can be said to meaningfully exist. The vast logical structure of the universe is there to provide a coherent and rational experience of the world to conscious agents and above all to provide the universal contextual medium whereby centres of conscious cognition can communicate. If that world is not experienced and cognitively apprehended by some rational mind - primarily the divine mind - it makes little sense; a world independent of its service to perception is meaningless. True, the "thing-in-itself-ness" of the cosmos may be very different to the window on it that divine providence has provided us with (a bat has different kind of window). But for us that providence assures that its formal structure is rational, regular and coherent enough to reveal its patterns under interrogation - well, let's say most of the time, paranormal circumstances excepted, circumstances where at times it is almost as if reality has slipped into a chaotic dream state, sometimes referred to as the "Oz factor". 

Relevant link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yed05ld0xhcGJwaDQ/view

Footnote

* I've adopted the term "registration" from the four-colour printing world where the four printing colours cyan, magenta, yellow, and black are said to have good registration if their printing positions align sufficiently to produce sharp correctly coloured pictures.

Teetering on the Brink of the Nihilist Abyss.

 

Implausible monsters emerged from Lovecraft's id; the worst of them was racism. 

As I've said before; the move from atheism to postmodern nihilism is one short step for man but one giant cultural leap for humankind. Take this post by my favourite atheist PZ Myers where he remarks on generalised Copernicanism and contemporary authors who are bringing us a postmodern cosmic dread such as we see in an HBO production called Lovercraft Country....

Science has been spending a few centuries working to move the center of the universe away from us, so it fits with an ongoing trend. Now we just have to dislodge that center from white people, which is proving to be the hardest step of them all. Lovecraft Country, though, does its part in the decentering. Don’t read Lovecraft, read the more recent authors that have been bringing us cosmic dread without the petty racism. (Another author I’d recommend: the work of Ruthanna Emrys, who takes on the perspective of the fish men of Innsmouth.)

Hey, can we pretend Skepticon is taking place in Lovecraft country?

There is no need to pretend if you are as good as in Lovecraft country already.  Myers calls Lovecraft a horrible racist (which no doubt he was!) but the monster of racism feels very Lovecraftian to me and of a piece with Lovecraft's id inspired cosmic dread. Like the monster from the id racism inhabits our subconscious and we inadvertently reify it into our social surroundings. In any case Lovecraft had such a jaundiced view of what he believed to be an utterly indifferent cosmos that race supremacism wouldn't be out of place in it and in fact in his mind would likely be a natural outcome of inter-species competition. Lovecraft's vision of the cosmos was so misanthropic that who knows what horrible things it could throw up.

I have a little knowledge of Lovecraft because one of my sons studied Lovecraft for his MA: I think he wanted a grindstone to sharpen up his faith!  The LA Times, as quoted by Myers, tells us a bit more about H P Lovecraft:

Lovecraft helped create a genre now known as “cosmic horror,” stories filled with dread and terror at the knowledge that humans are not the most important things in the universe.

He was beginning to write at a time when science was making vast and profound discoveries,” says Klinger. “What he came to believe, I think deeply and honestly, was that human beings were insignificant little dust motes in this enormous universe and that eventually we would discover that we were not particularly significant.

No question that science in stages, starting with Copernicus through particulate theory, deep time, evolution, and deep space etc has left the old Christian order with a mighty lot to ponder; not that that's a bad thing, although as counter-reactions Christian young earthism and flat earthism are the rearguard actions of an incompetent, run-down and bankrupt religious culture. But let's not give up hope and faith yet, else, as the irony of  satirical  Christian artist Steve Taylor would put it: 

Life unwinds like a cheap sweater

But since I gave up hope I feel a lot better

And the truth gets blurred like a wet letter

But since I gave up hope I feel a lot better

And let's not forget that even on evolutionary logic we find that science is telling us that we never left the centre. Or a better way of putting it: The die was heavily loaded in favour of life from the outset and therefore by implication loaded in our favour as well. 

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2019/09/evolution-naked-chance.html

Relevant links:

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/2019/05/teetering-on-brink-of-nihilist-abyss.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2019/09/many-worlds-theory-theory-devoid-of.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2017/05/whats-gone-wrong.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/08/deep-internal-contradiction.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2011/06/2001-spaced-out-odyssey.html

https://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2008/08/how-to-know-you-know-you-know-it.html

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yed05ld0xhcGJwaDQ/view

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeVXVQRVRPVFRaM1E/edit?pli=1

The Left and Right on Mathematics

Mathematics is at once both discovered and invented

The right-wing "Intelligent Design" web site Uncommon Descent have posted more intriguing material. They quote from another right-wing web article where we hear that: 

Brooklyn College Professor of Math Education Laurie Rubel argued this week on Twitter that the mathematical equation 2+2=4 “reeks of white supremacist patriarchy.” Rubel’s tweet was retweeted and promoted by several academics at universities and colleges around the nation…

Several academics from institutions around the nation chimed in. Harvard Ph.D. candidate Kareem Carr suggested that math should be reevaluated because it was primarily developed by white men.

If this is factual and to be taken seriously then I would probably find myself  aligned with UD on this one: I'm at a loss as to why 2+2 = 4 "reeks of white supremacist patriarchy" - I'm not even sure what that means: Is it a property intrinsic to or extrinsic to 2+2=4? It's probably the latter; that is, it's in the eye of beholder in so far as the beholder has come to associate mathematics with "white supremacism", for whatever complex histrico-socio-political reason. But these very human attributions are not intrinsic to mathematics unless nature herself is somehow party to a "white supremacist" conspiracy. The synergy and rapport between mathematics and nature is nothing short of amazing; this is, as they say the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in modelling nature. Moreover, that nature facilitates the building of complex mathematical artefacts (i.e. technology) is further evidence that mathematics is beyond human likes, dislikes and fanciful political connotations.

The UD article also tells us that:

Carr apparently believes that the people who discovered theorems in math actually invented them the way a novelist writes a novel.

Well, that actually may be not be so very far from the mark: Humanly speaking discovery and creation have a very close relation: When human beings are creating they are discovering at the same time: The novelist, like the artist, is discovering and selecting (semantic) configurations from the platonic world of possibility: There are only so many stories that can be written given the size of the average book and an author/artist is conceiving and selecting one possible configuration. The connectedness of discovery and creation is very clear in technological innovation: If one has technological goals one quickly realises that one can't cobble together any old thing. So in order to find something that works we embark on a seek. reject and select process with teleological goals in mind. Seek, reject and select is a very general process which means that human creation is also about discovery. Mathematics, like any other so-called human "invention", is also discovered and recovered from the huge space of the platonic world of configurational possibility and reified as symbolic operations. Because platonic space is so large  then the reification of any of its huge range of possibilities is likely to be a one-off and at once both an invention and  discovery.

But although I would likely align with UD on the question of whether or not mathematical constructions are intrinsically racist the right-wing have their own extremists in their midst: In this instance I speak once again of their libertarian commentator "Polistra" who we've met twice before on my blog (See here and here). Any thing that smacks of establishment activity he's against. This time he comes up with this gem: 

Polistra August 10, 2020 at 11:48 pm: Nonsense. Tempest in an irrelevant teapot. Look. The math ESTABLISHMENT has been trying to tell us that math isn’t real, ever since Godel. This current attempt to fictionalize math is superficial compared to Godel. People who actually USE math know that it works consistently. Carpenters and cooks and drivers know how measurement works. A cook knows that doubling the ingredients will produce two cakes. A driver knows that he has to drive twice as fast to get to the same destination in half the time. Students who learn math by USING it can’t be fooled by Godel or by the wokers.

Once again we find Polistra railing against the evil plotting establishment. If Polistra is thinking of Godel's incompleteness theorem then he's talking nonsense and people on UD should challenge him but they never do; after all, he's on their side against the evil "Darwinists" in the establishment.  Godel was a theist and a Christian if a little eccentric. It is  unlikely, therefore, he would have gone down the road of social relativism or seen his mathematics as intrinsically racist or arbitrary. Polistra is about as crackpot as the cranks who rail against quantum theory and relativity. 

But there is a link between the extreme libertarian right and the communist left; they all hate the current democratic governmental establishment and its institutions and wish to sweep them away.

UPDATE 14/08/2020

We find atheist PZ Myers talking about this subject at this link:

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/08/12/david-silverman-and-woke-math/

Now PZ Myers is the sort of guy the right-wing pundits at Uncommon Descent are likely to accuse of helping along the notion that 2 + 2 = 4 is a piece of arbitrary white supremacism. But looking at the tenor of what he has written there is no attack there on  the intrinsic properties of mathematics. Instead it's all to do with the socio-political setting of mathematical teaching, that is the extrinsic properties of maths: e.g. who is controlling mathematical material, who dispenses it, who gets credit, how they use it etc. That, of course, is another story altogether. There are no doubt polarised extremists on both left and right, but PZ Myers isn't one of them as far as I can tell,