Monk

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Picking up Mary Shelley after breakfast, Monk smiles over how fitting is the connection to this morning's article on free will. "Frankenstein," after all, is a literary representation of the dehumanizing tendency of over-reductionist, self-annihilating science - the idea that you could just assemble and mesh together a collection of body parts and then zap them with electricity to endue them with vital warmth and life. Life is more than the sum of its parts.

Let it also be noted that philosoophers in that article, such as the materialist Daniel Dennett, also reconcile the special moral experience of the human with the hard reality of determinative causality. Some who are enthusiatically nihilistic can easily go too far with the idea that we are "nothing more than sophisticated meat machines." Even an atheist can marvel over the miraculousness of the emergence of life and human intelligence and feelings.

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“If people freak at evolution, etc.,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?”

-- Dennis Overbye for The New York Times

For those who never tire of the Free Will question, this is a must article.

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