MORPHEAL'S COMMENTARY - February 13, 2009 - Beyond Charles Darwin, AND New Paradigm for Freedom of Speech
Morpheal
A New Paradigm Protecting Freedom of Speech
CHARLES DARWIN 200 YEARS LATER AND BEYOND:
Charles Darwin's exceptional courage in giving formal systematic
expression to ideas that had been religiously and politically
suppressed, was a major step forward in scientific freedom, and a
major victory for the primacy of reason in comprehending the universe
and our own place within it. We owe a vast number of unrelated and
related developments to the formulation of Darwin's paradigm, which
brought understanding of life out of a dark ages that had largely
prevailed for more than two millennia. His courage also demonstrates
the extreme irrationality, anti scientific, conservative nature of
society, in terms of the rabid resistance that has occurred in
response to his systematic formulation, based on common sense
observation of life. In some circles he remains opposed and his
insight denied its true validity. That in itself warns us about the
obstacles to social, cultural and scientific evolution, indicating how
progress in true understanding can be so readily obstructed, delayed
for lengthy periods of time, thwarted in its formulation as principle
of knowledge, and irrationally and illogically opposed subsequent to
becoming a paradigm. Strangely enough the science of economics suffers
even more severely from a similar disease.
We remain reluctant, fearful, of taking the next step, which
completely overcomes the discontinuity that is falsely being claimed
between inorganic and organic, non living and living things. We remain
unwilling to see a natural progress from properties of inorganic
matter, fundamental to the universe, to the very first indications of
what we are willing to concede as being life. Similarly we are even
more reluctant to accept that the ability to experience and learn is a
phenomenon that begins at the very beginning of the universe, at the
most fundamental quantum level of experience, where quanta of matter
already begin to interact in terms of what is already a rudimentary
intelligence.
Charles Darwin was essentially only able to go a part of the way to
the ultimate destination that his formulation of the paradigm of
evolution points towards.
Similar to resistance to Darwin’s ideas, today’s society, inclusive of
many of its scientists, is very commonly frightened of the idea that
the very first living thing had to be capable of experiencing and
learning so that intelligence could evolve in living things, as it has
proven itself to have evolved. The first cell had a “brain”. The
further logical necessity that the nucleus of a cell must be capable
of collecting data from experience and in some way passing it on,
along with the other instructions for building a replica of the
organism, continues to be opposed. Mutation of that blueprint could
never have been enough, in itself, to account for the development of
intelligence. Society still has problems with these concepts, and
still cling to a more mechanistic model, which does not stand up under
careful scrutiny. The conveyance of acquired intelligence, even in the
simplest forms of the most basic experiential data, must have a
quantum location within the blueprint, other than a purely genetic
code for replication. So we can be assured that much more is passed on
from generation to generation, with greater variability, than we
originally assumed, based on purely genetic observations. Portions of
society are more likely to accept irrational beliefs, such as
reincarnation, religious beliefs, and the paranormal, rather than a
rational, logical, answer to the pecular anomalies that do occur.
Anomalies being those facts of human experience that are not readily
or fully explainable, if at all, within current prevailing, accepted
ideas.
Eventually we come to the concept that the material universe itself is
an experiencing and collecting of information from experience, and
that living organisms, despite their increasing complexity as they
evolve, are extensions of that universe that is itself a manifestation
of what we can begin to glimpse as the brain-mind of God. God being
understood as, in terms of our own comprehension, an infinite,
omnipresent, and omniscient supreme intelligence. There is no
necessary contradiction between freedom and chance in evolution, and
determinism.
TRUE TEST FOR THE LIMITS OF FREEDOM OF SPEECH:
Peculiarly the debate about the limits of freedom of speech continues,
and most of the arguments around that subject are irrational,
supportive of irrational and illogical ideas, not the primacy of
reason. That in itself imperils, and opposes, freedom of speech. That
irony of the irrational attempting to overthrow freedom of speech, to
assert itself above and against it, is the fundamental problem that
leads to various forms of oppression that then frequently violates the
freedom of speech of those who seek the primacy of reason. The proper
and only true answer to that problem of totalitarianism, and various
forms of irrationality based extremisms, is the clear and universally
applicable formulation of a principle defining the proper limits of
freedom of speech. The constant argument that this cannot be done, is
a further reversion to irrationality endangering the very same freedom
it claims to attempt to protect.
The truest test to determine the proper limits of freedom of speech is
whether the stated opinion is reasonably supported by any logical and
thus legitimate interpretation of whatever the known facts happen to
be. This includes the fact that those facts do change, relative to
cultural situatedness, as knowledge changes. It is not as much a test
of absolute truth, but rather it is a test of reasonableness within
the context of time and situation. A statement that can be shown to be
reasonably or logically untrue violates the limits of freedom of
speech. This still leaves a place for conjecture, and possibility, for
theorizing and supposing, but reasserts the role of reasonable
responsibility for those assertions.
Where an opinion is found to be utterly baseless as to verifiable
facts it should never be stated as being a true statement. Where there
is a lack of sufficient basis in verifiable facts, sufficient such
that any person of average intelligence and education can discern the
possible truth or untruth of a statement, it would be wrongful to
promote that statement as being potentially true. That is unless we
can show that there are additional new provable facts that extend our
true knowledge.
To truly preserve freedom of speech we must put aside all of our
irrational, purely belief based, suppositions and assumptions about
what is within and what is outside of the limits of freedom of speech.
(In philosophical terms we must become more “phenomenological”)
Instead the question must rely solely upon the faculty of reason,
stripped of what is irrational, unprovable, and known to be untrue.
This is a skill that needs to be taught from the earliest stages of
education, and promoted throughout all of education, if we are to
succeed.
We know that the intelligence, experience and education of persons is
highly variable, and so is the rationality and truth of their sources
of information, so we must allow for errors of judgement and
statements contrary to best knowledge and best application of rational
reasoning. Nevetheless, even in the instance of a provably mistaken
statement, the reasonableness of what were taken as being the facts
for making that statement, must be taken into account if we are to
discern whether a statement is within the proper bounds for allowable
freedom of speech or not. The burden of supporting a questionable
statement with the facts that supported its being made, would rest
with the maker of the statement. And we must realize that education
must teach openness and the necessity for offering correction, in
terms of the presentation of true facts and logical argument, to those
who are provably in error. The reluctance to accept or to offer such
corrective must be erradicated from society, as one of its most
destructive illnesses.
When we realize these truths about freedom of speech we realize that
many things are commonly and routinely being said, claiming freedom of
speech, that have absolutely no rational basis in verifiable facts, or
that have extremely little basis and where contrary statements have
far more support from verifiable facts. Those irrationalisms, as we
might call them, assert their truth value simply by their claim of
being “freedom of speech”. We must realize that they are in fact the
contrary and only destructive to true freedom of speech. Similarly we
find that many statements are repressed, or suppressed, that have a
great deal of support from verifiable facts, and that are very
reasonable, potentially being completely true, because the limits of
freedom of speech are being constrained by irrationality, not in terms
of logical reasoning. That too must be overcome,
in terms of the evolution of attitudes, and the betterment of common
thinking, in terms of the teaching of logical, rational, reasoning,
via betterment of education.
Robert Morpheal