Jonah: Yes, the Pinker-Kass bout is fun too. I’m a bit surprised to see Kass being so nasty, though–don’t recall seeing that side of him before.

I’m mainly with Pinker on the matter under debate, in spite of his blooper about “our inability to visualize four-dimensional spacetime.” Four-dimensional spacetime is radically non-Euclidean, so our inability to visualize it is not the least bit surprising. We can’t even visualize THREE-dimensional non-Euclidean spaces! Pinker probably means “four-dimensional Euclidean space,” though there have been people who apparently CAN visualize that–see Endnote 84 in Unknown Quantity.

In any case, I think the word “scientism” is used much too freely in these kinds of wrangles. Science is nothing but careful observation, classification, and measurement, written up and compared–conclusion to conclusion, hypothesis to hypothesis–with what other observers made of the same phenomenon. If someone has some other method for inquiring into the nature of things, I’d like to hear about it. There is, to be sure, introspection; and there is knowledge acquired by mystical revelation; but compared to the stuff we find out by observe-measure-classify-compare, truths (if they are truths) acquired by these other, rather private, methods seem to me watery and insubstantial. I guess I am naively scientistic.

I also got a more-than-usually strong whiff of obscurantism from Kass’s piece. Anyone who takes Kass’s position ought to squarely confront the questions: (1) Are there things we OUGHT NOT inquire into by observation, measurement, etc.? (2) Are there things which, leaving aside the “ought,” it is utterly pointless to inquire into by observation, etc.? The true obscurantist would answer “Yes–Yes” to these questions. Kass strikes me as a “Maybe–Yes” guy. As I said, just a whiff of the old brimstone. Pinker is plainly a “No!–Let’s See” guy, and I’m with him there. “Wir muessen wissen, wir werden wissen.”

I part with him in dismissing those “Iron Age tribal documents.” I’m sort of attached to them; and I think that when we get a good naturalistic explanation of human nature, we shall see them in a more charitable light than Pinker currently allows.

So far as the good old Problem of Consciousness is concerned, I have had stuff to say about it here .