Thank you for your reply! It seemed the thread had gone to crickets - I'm glad it has not.
me: The result is the dangerous “second reality” so obvious in Lewontin, Singer, Pinker and Dawkins – which would merely be amusing if it were not that, from their lofty positions of power over the sciences, they also effect public policy. Singer, for instance, suggests that parents be allowed to kill their children within months or perhaps a year after birth. you: What a thoroughly dishonest attempt at guilt by association.
Unless you can read my mind, the adjective “dishonest” cannot apply and so I shall dismiss that assertion. Concerning “guilt by association”, I raised the point that Lewontin, Singer, Pinker and Dawkins all live in a “second reality". I hold to that assertion of their association.
The “guilt” I presume you mean concerns Singer’s attitude about babies. It was offered as an example of a potential public policy consequence of a "second reality". I don't know if the others share his view on infanticide, though they all appear to be metaphysical naturalists. And it is evident that "equal rights as animals" is a political consequence of that ideology.
For Lurkers interested in more on second realities, here are two essays by betty boop:
Flight from ReasonHuman Rights and Second Realities
An ideologue imagines a “second reality” which he chooses to live in, ignoring the reality around him. It is a disease of the spirit which would be harmless if only those who choose to live in second realities never came to power. An excerpt from the second link above:
The Second Realities which cause the breakdown of rational discourse are a comparatively recent phenomenon. They have grown during the modern centuries...until they have reached, in our own time, the proportions of a social and political force which in more gloomy moments may look strong enough to extinguish our civilization – unless, of course, you are an ideologist yourself and identify civilization with the victory of Second Reality. -- Eric Voegelin The [grotesqueness of Second Realities]… must not be confused with the comic or humorous. The seriousness of the matter will be best understood, if one visions the concentration camps of totalitarian regimes and the gas chambers of Auschwitz in which the grotesqueness of opinion becomes the murderous reality of action. – ibid.
To review the names I mentioned and why I aver they live in “second realities”:
Peter Singer of Princeton (philosophy and ethics) famously holds that animals which are capable of suffering are equal to human beings. Thus he justifies infanticide, euthanasia and abortion for any whose existence would cause pain and suffering to another person. Richard Lewonton of MIT (evolution biology, genetics, social commentary) is a Marxist. He famously said:
“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute….”
Stephen Pinker of MIT (evolution psychology) famously holds that “the mind is what the brain does” and that there is “no ghost in the machine”. These two views taken together support the notion that the mind (consciousness, soul and spirit) is merely an epiphenomenon of the physical brain. Epiphenomenons are secondary phenomenons which can cause nothing to happen, i.e. when you think to press the mouse button it is actually your brain doing it, the notion of free will is an illusion. Richard Dawkins of Oxford (ethologist) is an atheist on a mission to convert others using his own interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
I wouldn’t say that the four of them agree on all aspects of their “second reality” but they all clearly live in one and they have power in the sciences and do frequently join forces. Pinker and Dawkins for instance join together in asserting that science has killed the soul.