The Triumph of the Necrophiles: A Critique of the Mechanical Worldview (2021 Edition)

By John Modrow

The Triumph of the Necrophiles is the product of over forty years of research and is the most thorough, comprehensive, and penetrating critique of the mechanical worldview ever written. Modrow meticulously traces the prescientific sources of that worldview back to our Judeo-Christian heritage and to the metaphysics of Plato and Pythagoras. He documents that Plato was in fact a necrophile and that his metaphysics can best be understood as a sublimation of his necrophilia. He discusses the influence that Plato and Pythagoras had on Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. He especially emphasizes how the necrophilic worldview of Plato essentially became the worldview of Galileo, Descartes, and other seventeenth- century thinkers. He also discusses how Newton’s worldview was shaped by his religious beliefs.

Modrow contends that the mechanical worldview is totally at odds with every major scientific advance that has occurred since the mid nineteenth century. He painstakingly explains how and why these scientific advances discredit that worldview. He discusses the philosophical implications of the theory of evolution, the theory of relativity, quantum theory, Bell’s theorem, and Godel’s proof and presents an alternative worldview that is more consistent with current scientific knowledge.

In a final chilling chapter, Modrow shows where the necrophilic worldview of Plato and his modern mechanistic followers are taking us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462070213

John Modrow

John Modrow can be considered as a sort of left-wing version of Eric Hoffer: a retired Seattle longshoreman, philosophy graduate, and the author of the critically-acclaimed book, How to Become a Schizophrenic: The Case Against Biological Psychiatry.

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ISBN: 978-1-4620-7020-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4620-7021-3 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 08/30/2021

Contents

Introduction

1   The Prescientific Sources of the Mechanical Worldview

2   Towards an Alternative Worldview

3   The Origin and Nature of Life

4    The Triumph of the Necrophiles: The Singularity is the New Normal

Notes

Introduction

A pparently people exist who don’t believe in life after birth. Consider, for example, the following statement by the highly influential behavioral scientist, B.F. Skinner: Physics did not advance by looking more closely at the jubilance of a falling body, or biology by looking at the nature of vital spirits, and we do not try to discover what personalities, states of mind, feelings, traits of character, plans, purposes, intentions, and other perquisites of autonomous man really are to get on with a scientific analysis of behavior. ¹ This worldview conceptualizes humans and other living beings as inanimate objects devoid of sentience as billiard balls being pushed and pulled by external forces. Marvin Minsky, an important cognitive psychologist and pioneer in artificial intelligence, is no fan of behaviorism, but when it comes to metaphysics he is on the same page as Skinner. Minsky has stated that the human mind is more like a computer than like the mind of an ape. Moreover, he also believes that some day it will be possible to upload the human personality into a computer and people will be able to live inside a computer. And he is far from being alone in believing this. The high priest of this mechanistic religion is Ray Kurzweil who firmly believes that—to quote the title of one of his recent books—The Singularity is Near—when computers will be every bit as smart as humans—in the year 2045 to be exact. According to Kurzweil, machines will then become much smarter, so that humankind will have no choice but to merge with machines into a sublime totalitarian technocratic unity. Kurzweil firmly believes he’s never going to die and that he is going to live forever inside a computer. Meanwhile, Kurzweil is taking good care of himself: he’s taking massive amounts of nutritional supplements that he hopes will prolong his life until that blessed day when he is safely uploaded into life eternal inside a computer.

Apparently not even Kurzweil’s views are bizarre enough for Silas Beane and his colleagues at the University of Bonn in Germany. These researchers claim they have evidence that the universe is a computer simulation devised by aliens—that we are already living inside a computer—a finding that delights fundamentalist Christians since it validates their belief that the universe was created via intelligent design.

In this essay I will argue that the ideological components that make up the mechanical worldview are very ancient and have more in common with religion than they do with science: that they have their origin in prescientific sources and are totally at odds with every major scientific advance that has occurred since the mid-nineteenth century. For example, in his two-volume study, The Myth of the Machine, Lewis Mumford points out that the concept of the machine logically implies some kind of purpose: a machine is, after all, an instrument consciously designed for some preconceived end. This mechanical or teleological worldview was thoroughly discredited by Charles Darwin in 1859. Nevertheless, this worldview has been part of our cultural DNA for thousands of years and will not be going away anytime soon. Nature, for example, was viewed by the ancient Hebrews in a purely instrumental or utilitarian way as typified by the commandment in Genesis 1:26 to have dominion over all this planet’s creatures. Devout Christians and devout mechanists view the human body in exactly the same way—the only difference being that the former believes there is a ghost in the machine while the latter does not. However, both concepts—machine and ghost—are equally prescientific in nature.

This essay is a thorough and comprehensive critique of the mechanical worldview: it elaborates in great detail the prescientific sources of this worldview and also the main scientific advances that discredit that worldview. Furthermore, it also constructs an alternative worldview more consistent with known scientific facts and principles than the worldview it critiques. It also shows how this alternative worldview more adequately explains the origin and nature of life. In the concluding section of this essay, I show where the mechanical worldview is taking us. In this section—and to some extent throughout this entire essay—I will argue that the mechanical worldview represents nothing less than an abstract expression of a naked will to power and that power not only corrupts, it also destroys.

1

The Prescientific Sources of the

Mechanical Worldview

T he mechanical worldview also stems from our ancient Greek heritage—specifically from two influential Greek philosophers, Plato and Pythagoras. Indeed, as Alfred North Whitehead has noted: The history of the seventeenth century science reads as though it were a vivid dream of Plato or Pythagoras. ² Since the views of these two philosophers have had a more direct influence than even our Judeo-Christian heritage in shaping our scientific worldview, their views merit a very close and detailed scrutiny.

However, before I examine the views of these two thinkers I want to examine the three arguments that are used to support the mechanical worldview. I call these the three pillars of mechanistic thought. The first pillar argues that machines and living beings must be identical since both are governed by the same mechanisms or laws. The second pillar maintains as an obvious and undeniable fact that there is absolutely no difference between living and nonliving matter. Since there is no real difference between the atoms found in living beings and the atoms found in nonliving things, it is argued that the difference between the two must be one of mere complexity. The third pillar of mechanistic thought involves the use or existence of computers that simulate thought processes that used to be the exclusive domain of human beings. It is claimed that the mere existence of these computers somehow proves that the human mind is a machine. In order to thoroughly undermine these three pillars of mechanistic thought I will show how they are based on assumptions that are simply false—on assumptions that both predate science and are inconsistent with science.

First, let’s start with the assumptions which predate science by examining the views of Pythagoras. In his History of Western Philosophy, Bertrand Russell described Pythagoras as a strange mixture of Einstein and Mary Baker Eddy. On one hand, Pythagoras was a brilliant mathematician credited with discovering the theorem named after him. On the other hand, he was the leader of a mystical religious cult who advocated some very odd views, such as his claim that the flatulence caused by eating beans could cause one to fart out their soul. Pythagoras’ most influential idea was his mystical belief that the world is made of numbers, that there is a mystical one-to-one correspondence between mathematics and physical reality. In Selections from Early Greek Philosophy, Milton C. Nahm writes : the Pythagoreans conceived the cosmos as a mathematical structure. Their speculations was enormously influential in establishing the quantitative interpretation of the world and its processes.³

It is very easy to see how Pythagoras’ views have had an enormous impact on the development of science. Indeed, even now his views remain extremely influential: superstring theorists at all the major universities in the world are currently busy publishing thousands of papers and devoting millions of man hours to developing what is nothing more than Pythagorean metaphysics. These theorists are seeking to unite all the forces of nature—gravitational, electromagnetic and nuclear—into one grand, explain-all theory that contends that the cosmos is composed of at least ten dimensions. However, not only isn’t there a single shred of empirical evidence that supports their views, there is also no way their theories could possibly be put to an experimental test. For example, Leonard Susskind, one of the original founders of superstring theory, admits that it would take an atom smasher at least the size of an entire galaxy to test their theories.⁴ However, as several critics including Lee Smolin⁵ and Peter Woit⁶ have pointed out, things are considerably worse than that, owing to the fact that string theory does not provide anything to test because it does not have any equations capable of making any predictions! Indeed, as even Susskind admits: With all the years String Theory has been studied, no one has ever found a single defining equation! The number at present count is zero. We know neither of what the fundamental equations of the theory are nor even if it has any.

⁷ Yet they persist despite the fact that it is highly unlikely that superstring theory could possibly have any validity because it is based on supersymmetry which itself has been pretty much discredited

⁸ because they have faith—faith that there is some kind of mystical one-to-one correspondence between their mathematical theories and the structure of the universe.

Ray Kurzweil is the ultimate Pythagorean: he believes that his entire mind and body can be duplicated by a string of ones and zeroes and that this will allow him to live forever inside a computer. Indeed, he seems very eager for this to happen because he seems quite disgusted with his biological body, particularly the fact that 90% of the cells in his body are not really him, but rather bacteria that live in his gut.

Pythagoras also had a profound influence on Socrates and Plato. Plato is usually considered the greatest philosopher who ever lived, and like Pythagoras, he also had a profound influence on the development of the mechanical worldview.