THE SELFISH GENE Chapter 12: Nice Guys Finish First (by Richard Dawkins)

Dawkins on Darwin and Evolution

    

Dawkins, Richard. "Richard Dawkins on 'Charles Darwin'." ("Darwin's Five Bridges"). Video. YouTube (Northeastern University London) 19 Feb. 2018.* (Natural selection, Heredity, Mendel, Genetics).

         https://youtu.be/HIEbHWKfFK4

         2024

 

 

  

Dawkins, Richard. "Richard Dawkins on 'Evolution'." Video lecture. YouTube (Northeastern University London) 14 Feb. 2018.* (Natural selection, Design).

https://youtu.be/c_OmbkaM4qE

         2024

 

—oOo—

Recantation and re-recantation

 

Following Freddie Sayers’ misleading tweet, let me clarify. I said that even IF religious belief is good for human flourishing, that doesn’t make it true. And TRUTH is what matters.
And I don’t for a moment deny that we would all be well advised to get Covid vaccination. https://t.co/GLGPE4ID9z

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) June 7, 2023

Meme(ce)s de Dawkins - en Bolivia

Aparece en El Diario de Bolivia, a gran altura sobre Zaragoza, mi artículo sobre algunos aspectos de la memética de Richard Dawkins. En dos partes:

"Meme(ce)s de Dawkins." (I). El Diario 16  de enero de 2022.*

         https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HDbs5dTtGw

_____. "Meme(ce)s de Dawkins." (II). El Diario 17 de enero de 2022.*

         https://www.eldiario.net/portal/2022/01/17/memeces-de-dawkins-2/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 También aquí:

_____. "Meme(ce)s de Dawkins." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 2 August 2011.*

         http://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2011/08/memez-de-dawkins_02.html

         2011

_____. "Meme(ce)s de Dawkins." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 3 Aug. 2021.*

https://www.ibercampus.es/memeces-de-dawkins-41392.htm

         2021 DISCONTINUED 2024 – Online at Net Sight de José Angel García Landa.*

https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/Meme(ce)sIBERCAMPUS.pdf

         2025

_____. "Meme(ce)s de Dawkins." (I). El Diario 16 Jan. 2022.*

         https://www.eldiario.net/portal/2022/01/16/memeces-de-dawkins/

         2022

_____. "Meme(ce)s de Dawkins." (II). El Diario (Bolivia) 17 Jan. 2022.*

         https://www.eldiario.net/portal/2022/01/17/memeces-de-dawkins-2/

         2022

_____. "Meme(ce)s de Dawkins—en Bolivia." In García Landa, Vanity Fea  17 Jan. 2022.*

         https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2022/01/memeces-de-dawkins-en-bolivia.html

         2022

_____. "Meme(ce)s de Dawkins." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 25 Nov. 2022, 20 Jan. 2025.*

         http://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/meme(ce)s.html

         2022

https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/meme(ce)s1&2.pdf

         2025

https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/Meme(ce)sIBERCAMPUS.pdf

         2025

The discontinuous mind

On Dawkins on abortion.  Richard Dawkins's critique of idealism and of 'all-or-nothingism' includes a critique of essentialism in personhood which is essentially a justification of abortion, one which incurs in some egregious abortionist sleights-of-hand under cover of dispassionate logical analysis. 

Let's quote:

Essentialism bedevils moral controversies such as those over abortion and euthanasia. At what point is a brain-dead accident victim defined as 'dead'? At what moment during development does an embryo become a 'person'? Only a mind infected with essentialism would ask such questions. An embryo develops gradually from single-celled zygote to newborn baby, and there's no single instant when 'personhood' should be deemed to have arrived. The world is divided into those who get this truth and those who wail: 'But there has to be some moment when the fetus becomes human.' No, there really doesn't, any more than there has to be a day when a middle-aged person becomes old. It would be better—though still not ideal—to say the embryo goes through stages of being a quarter human, half human, three-quarters human... The essentialist mind will recoil from such language and accuse me of all manner of horrors for denying the essence of humanness.

There are those who cannot distinguish a sixteen-cell embryo from a baby. They call abortion murder, and feel righteously justified in committing real murder against a doctor—a thinking, feeling, sentient adult, with a loving family to mourn him. The discontinous mind is blind to intermediates. An embryo is either human or it isn't. Everything is this or that, yes or no, black or white. But reality isn't like that. 

(Richard Dawkins, "The Dead Hand of Plato", in Science in the Soul (2017),  290)

 

Now this is a self-defeating analysis, or a self-consuming artifact if you prefer. A curious example of the 'mind infected with essentialism' that it is supposed to be denouncing. The passage really needs some close reading and deconstruction, as it exhibits a degree of bad faith and one-sidedness which is all too typical in the current abortionist Zeigtgeist—I hope we can at least agree that abortionism, i.e. not just the toleration but the public promotion, the subsidizing, and the active defense of abortion as a moral good which should not be attacked or criticized is one of the hallmarks of current Western ("progressive") ideology and political practice. Dawkins's passage is one such defense of the legitimacy of abortion, under the pretense of criticizing the opponents' arguments as allegedly simplistic and essentialist. Note it is not the abortionists' (the "pro-choice" as the euphemism goes) arguments that he is trying to refute or denounce as based on logical fallacies. It is only one side, and you know which one it its, that rests its case on logical fallacies. As to Dawkins, he is not of course an abortionist, he presents himself as just a dispassionate observer of the presuppositions used by people while they present their arguments—and look which side is using lopsided arguments!

Essentialism bedevils moral controversies such as those about abortion and euthanasia. And there is no way it can ever be purged out of them, because our very way of thinking is essentialist in that it works with concepts, which are defined by their essence, not by the essence of their contraries... At what point is a brain-dead accident victim defined as 'dead'? Well the victim is a person, and a person's brain may be 'dead'—well not really DEAD you know, but failing to generate conscious or significant brain activity—while the person is not dead, because a person is a social identity, and to define or decide at which point that social identity is dead, ay, there's the rub, this is something no scanner can decide. You can forgive essentialists and relatives to be confused, anxious and distressed when the dead person's body is alive, not very much alive but certainly alive. Much of this no doubt Dawkins gets, though sometimes he is surprisingly callous to common human understanding of respect and ceremony, for instance in that egregious video where he discusses with Peter Singer whether you might be justified in eating human corpses as 'roadkill'. And now we get to abortion, where callousness gets more support from current practice and politics: At what moment during development does an embryo become a 'person'? Only a mind infected with essentialism would ask such questions. The rhetoric of the phrase shifts the attention from the problem of personhood, deflecting it to the question of the moment, concentrating the logical attack on the absurdity of there being any one moment, one given second when personhood is suddenly generated. Dawkins does a curious argumentative trick here: on the one hand and on the face of it he of course defends the notion of gradualism etc.—but on the other the drift of his argument seems to deny the problem altogether: "as there is no ONE moment, there is no moral question and the whole discussion is absurd—only a mind infected with essentialism would ask such questions. The embryo's an embryo, not a 'person', and that's it. Only minds infected with essentialism would attribute ANY qualities or dimensions of personhood to an embryo". Which is of course fallacious. First because the embryo becomes a fetus which becomes a baby. And then because a person being a social construct, the construction of the construct begins of course before the full-fledged person acquires citizenship rights, and quite often before birth, depending on who does the construction. "Only a mind infected with essentialism" would fail to see that there are no black and white positions to discredit here. Actually I do claim that this is part of what Dawkins claims before unclaiming it: An embryo develops gradually from single-celled zygote to newborn baby, and there's no single instant when 'personhood' should be deemed to have arrived. Note however that for some constructivists like Peter Singer —and Dawkins too seems to be sorely tempted by this anti-humanist position— this phrase might also mean that personhood never actually arrives along this process, because personhood will be slowly and gradually constructed as the individual grows up and becomes socialized, mentalized, educated, culturized.... and that newborn babies are actually less of a "person" than a fully socialized Great Ape. That is, Dawkins's phrase means, in the wider abortionist context, both things: that a newborn baby (or the same baby, unborn ten minutes before) both is and is not a person. Birth itself as a rite of passage through dire straits is of course the basic "moment" of acquisition of personhood, especially in cultures that have developed a notion of the dignity or the sanctity of human life. But these rituals, these beliefs and these dignities and sanctities tend to be played down by relativists like Singer or Dawkins. Or indeed by many current defenders of 'free abortion'—note that these self-styled 'feminists' systematically shun the issue of whether it is legitimate or ethical to abort fetuses of six, seven or eight months. It is with a puzzling single-mindedness that this issue is avoided, then declared a non-issue, then, in the last line of defense, "YES, I DO JUSTIFY AND WANT TO SUBSIDIZE WITH PUBLIC FUNDS THESE END-OF-TERM ABORTIONS, TOO, YES I DO SINCE YOU INSIST THAT I MAKE MY POSITION CLEAR. WE DO JUSTIFY AND DEFEND ALL ABORTIONS. ABORTO ES SAGRADO". I'm being black-and-whitist here myself, but honestly I haven't seen much in the current 'pro-life' field to make me put the issue otherwise. The world is divided into those who get this truth and those who wail: 'But there has to be some moment when the fetus becomes human.' No, there really doesn't, there really doesn't. A fetus is NEVER among the humans who count for the abortionist frame of mind. It may be a female fetus, but "it/she" is definitely not a girl, or a woman. Indeed, it may be a human fetus BUT IT IS NOT A HUMAN. That's where the drift of our thinking goes. It is not a human because we don't want it to be a human, or a human-in-process, or a half-human, because we don't want to have a half-problem or a half-wrongdoing or a half-subsidy for those abortions. (Because everyone knows that abortions should be fully subsidized for the welfare and protection of women, excluding aborted half-women, we're speaking here of women who choose, ethical courageous women who won't allow biology to interfere with their lives, and who are certainly never manipulated by men into choosing abortion). In sum, there needn't be a day when a fetus becomes a human, any more than there has to be a day when a middle-aged person becomes old. 

It would be better—though still not ideal—to say the embryo goes through stages of being a quarter human, half human, three-quarters human... would it? Would we (abortionists) then admit that we are destroying a quarter human, a half human, a three-quarters human...? Fat chance. The essentialist mind will recoil from such language and accuse me of all manner of horrors for denying the essence of humanness. There are certainly some logical horrors here, as I have tried to show. And there are most certainly unspeakable horrors going on in the abortionist clinics, subsidized with your money and with mine. As to the essence of humanness, there is not, of course, one essence beyon dispute. And that is why you cannot dismiss it as a pseudo-problem, or assume in your arguments that the "pro-life" arguments about the humanness of "unborn babies" or of "viable fetuses" or "abortion survivors" are irrelevant or nonsensical or Trumpist.

There are those who cannot distinguish a sixteen-cell embryo from a baby. I doubt any such people exist. One could also argue that there are those who can distinguish an eight-month unborn baby from an eight-month biological residuum whose removal is to be simply accepted and not frowned upon... perish the thought, it should be subsidized and praised! The invidious exaggeration of the example, the "all-or-nothing" balancing of Dawkins's example between a sixteen-cell embryo and a baby with all its diapers and connotations contradicts the whole problematic issue of transition and development. And it dismisses the whole ethical quandary of abortion as a pseudo-problem created by minds so Bible-Belted and so obtuse that they cannot "distinguish a sixteen-cell embryo from a baby". These are the kind of people whose views should be dismissed in an Enlightened republic, and we've seen of late how this is done. It is not coincidental that Dawkins is himself an obtuse and unreliable Trump-hater of the most simplistic kind—as are so many academics.

They call abortion murder, and feel righteously justified in committing real murder against a doctor—a thinking, feeling, sentient adult, with a loving family to mourn him.

Now you see, all those people with their Bibles and their Belts, and their Guns, THEY SHOOT DOCTORS, DON'T THEY? The hundreds of thousands of abortions performed every year are put on a balance with the extremely rare event of an abortionist doctor being shot by a fanatic. Who would doubt, from the drift of Dawkins's argument, that pro-lifers support, as a rule, the shooting of sentient adults, or, indeed that they would shoot doctors themselves if they had their way?  It is "they" who do call abortion murder. But abortion is never murder, according to Dawkins's drift. There's no transition there—in that one case, we are well justified in applying the discontinuous mind, to keep our concepts clear.

And to end with one more jab at Dawkins's tendentious rhetoric. I'll just note that there are in the world all kinds of thinking, feeling, sentient adults, with loving families to mourn them. And some of them —a tiny minority, mind— are callous, cruel, selective killers, those who get the job done —the everyday agents and journeymen of the banality of evil. A discontinuous mind is much to wished in these professions. But their loving families' voluntary blindness, or their own, does not justify or dignify the disgusting and immoral work they are paid to do.

Matanza libre de personas

 

—oOo—

Time Began, Time May End

Is Richard Dawkins Correct Regarding Twitter's Fact Checkers? (THE SAAD TRUTH)

The Virtual World We Inhabit

Richard Dawkins explains why we all move in a perceptual world which is not "the" world, but a virtual reality model of the same, a mental model which we take for the real thing itself. 

This may seem far-fetched to the naive assumptions (and perceptions) of many people, yet it is self-evident from the moment we realize that although we may partly share our mental maps and models of the objective world, the section of the world I perceive and attend to is different from yours, a different location, a different point of view, etc. etc. Fairly obvious, actually. 

Listen to Dawkins:

You and I, we humans, we mammals, we animals, inhabit a virtual world, constructed from elements that are, at successively higher levels, useful for representing the real world. Of course, we feel as if we are firmly placed in the real world—which is exactly as it should be if our constrained virtual reality software is any good. It is very good, and the only time we notice it at all is on the rare occasions when it gets something wrong. When this happens we experience an illusion or a hallucination, like the hollow mask illusion we talked about earlier.

The British psychologist Richard Gregory has paid special attention to visual illusions as a means of studying how the brain works. In his book Eye and Brain (fifth edition 1998), he regards seeing as an active process in which the brain sets up hypotheses about what is going on out there, then tests those hypotheses about what is going on out there, then tests those hypotheses against the data coming in from the sense organs. One of the most familiar of all visual illusions is the Necker cube. This is a simple line drawing of a hollow cube, like a cube made of steel rods.

The drawing is a two-dimensional pattern of ink on paper. Yet a normal human sees it as a cube. The brain has made a three-dimensional model based upon the two-dimensional pattern of ink on paper. yet a normal human sees it as a cube. The brain has made a three-dimensional model based upon the two-dimensional pattern on the paper. This is, indeed, the kind of thing the brain does almost every time you look at a picture. The flat pattern of ink on paper is equally compatible with two alternative three-dimensional brain models. Stare at the drawing for some seconds and you will see it flip. The facet that had previously seemed nearest to you will now appear farthest. Carry on looking, and it will flip back to the original cube. The brian could have been designed to stick, arbitrarily, to one of the two cube models, say the first of the two that it hit upon, even though the other model would have been equally compatible with the information from the retinas. But in fact the brain takes the other option of running each model, or hypothesis, alternately for a few seconds at a time. Hence the apparent cube alternates, which gives the game away. Our brain constructs a three-dimensional model. It is virtual reality in the head. (...) The model in the brain (...) is constructed. But (...) it is, like the surgeon's computer model of the inside of her patient, not entirely invented: it is constrained by information fed in from the outside world.  (275-77)

One might compare the brain to a Popperian scientist, projecting hypotheses onto the world, as a working model of the same, and correcting those hypotheses only when reality fails to replicate the experiment. If the perceptual/conceptual model is thus falsified, a new perceptual pattern or "hypothesis" is generated to see if it delivers in terms of workable action.

This "top-down" model of perception corrects the naive "bottom-up" account of the same, which gives a more passive role to the mind. On this account, the mind would simply receive the input from the senses, and would construct its mental model of the world as the result of a one-way process, world-to-mind. Using the scientific analogy, this would be a Baconian model of experience: from the collection of data, through induction and generalization, to the building of laws which account for the world (the mental models). Our Popperian account of the mind makes for a much more dynamic role of the mind: it is top-down to a large extent (although of course it is a dynamic two-way model, both top-down and bottom-up in a continuous feedback cycle). The mind is not merely receiving the input of "reality", it is also constructing and projecting that reality around the mental subject, so that minds are reality-generation machines, and the more elaborate the mind, the more mental and more virtual the reality it inhabits. The mind generates its own space for interaction with the world and with other minds, to the extent that both physical reality and (especially) social reality are the result of self-fulfilling expectations. 

Expectations that we call institutions, frames, places (as socially defined), encounters, situations, discourses and disciplines.

For another take on this issue, I refer the reader to these two articles:

- "Goffman: La realidad como expectativa autocumplida y el teatro de la interioridad" — On the nature of social reality as a system of self-fulfilling expectations as theorized by Erving Goffman in his Frame Theory.

- "Constitución reflexiva de la percepción". By way of Hegel, a reflection on the construction of visual space as a mental intervention on reality, with our eyes (in a way) acting as a kind of Super-8 film projectors in a dark room, a bit like those 17th-c. prints which show Anatomical Men projecting light beams from their eyes, beams which illuminate the objects and allow them to be seen. (This is of course an image or analogy the better to visualize my point).

But it brings me nicely to the my last observation about our Virtual Reality in the Mind, having to do with the discovery of this artifact. Of course we would have to go back through a number of shades of awareness in a number of idealistic philosophers, from Plato's cavern to Descartes' evil genius. Nevertheless my example of choice comes from a celebrated materialist, Thomas Hobbes. We are of course at that point of reasoning about the world where matter becomes mind becomes matter, and thus Hobbes gives us (in his account of perception in Leviathan) a memorable definition of how exactly the world we perceive is a mental construct—minds being nothing but machines for the construction of such constructs, including, at a further ratchet of virtuality, their past and their future states, that is, time itself as a moving image of reality. (1)

CHAPTER I. OF SENSE

Concerning the Thoughts of man, I will consider them first Singly, and afterwards in Trayne, or dependance upon one another. Singly, they are every one a Representation or Apparence, of some quality, or other Accident of a body without us; which is commonly called an Object. Which Object worketh on the Eyes, Eares, and other parts of mans body; and by diversity of working, produceth diversity of Apparences.
The Originall of them all, is that which we call Sense; (For there is no conception in a mans mind, which hath not at first, totally, or by parts, been begotten upon the organs of Sense.) The rest are derived from that originall.
To know the naturall cause of Sense, is not very necessary to the business now in hand; and I have els-where written of the same at large. Nevertheless, to fill each part of my present method, I will briefly deliver the same in this place.
The cause of Sense, is the Externall Body, or Object, which presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediatly, as in the Tast and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling: which pressure, by the mediation of Nerves, and other strings, and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain, and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart, to deliver it self: which endeavour because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without. And this Seeming, or Fancy, is that which men call sense; and consisteth, as to the Eye, in a Light, or Colour Figured; To the Eare, in a Sound; To the Nostrill, in an Odour; To the Tongue and Palat, in a Savour; and to the rest of the body, in Heat, Cold, Hardnesse, Softnesse, and such other qualities, as we discern by Feeling. All which qualities called Sensible, are in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter, by which it presseth our organs diversly. Neither in us that are pressed, are they anything els, but divers motions; (for motion, produceth nothing but motion.) But their apparence to us is Fancy, the same waking, that dreaming. And as pressing, rubbing, or striking the Eye, makes us fancy a light; and pressing the Eare, produceth a dinne; so do the bodies also we see, or hear, produce the same by their strong, though unobserved action, For if those Colours, and Sounds, were in the Bodies, or Objects that cause them, they could not bee severed from them, as by glasses, and in Ecchoes by reflection, wee see they are; where we know the thing we see, is in one place; the apparence, in another. And though at some certain distance, the reall, and very object seem invested with the fancy it begets in us; Yet still the object is one thing, the image or fancy is another. So that Sense in all cases, is nothing els but originall fancy, caused (as I have said) by the pressure, that is, by the motion, of externall things upon our Eyes, Eares, and other organs thereunto ordained. 

Perhaps augmented reality, a kind of Google Glass vision, is a better analogue for Hobbes's account of perception. The mind, subject to perceptual stimuli, constructs a fanciful or imaginary version of the world, so that the real and very object seem[s] invested with the fancy it begets in us. Objects may well be in the world, but objects of perception are mental constructs: there is no visual appearance of the object without an eye and a brain, there is no sound whatsoever in a waterfall without the ear and the brain. Berkeley would extract some further consequences of the empiricist account of perception, and would brazenly define objects and the world in which they are placed as the products of the mind's activity, synthesizing the input from the senses and generating something which is not in the senses nor in any understandable sense in the "world without minds". Which is not of course what we usually mean by "the world": it is not the least of paradoxes that this non-mental "raw" world is only conceivable, when we come to examine it, as the result of an elaborate scientific abstraction from the much more intuitive world we inhabit, the virtual world constructed by our mind and our senses.

__________


(1) For more on the cognitive construction of time, see my paper on "La cartografía narrativa en la articulación del mundo humano: El papel de los esquemas y los textos narrativos."

"Lo mismo despiertos, que soñando": 

Hobbes sobre la virtualidad de lo real

—oOo—

Our Internal Virtual Reality

In Unweaving the Rainbow, Richard Dawkins provides a good scientific explanation of the old philosophical insight (Hobbes's, Berkeley's, Hume's, etc.) that what we usually take to be "reality" is actually a mental construct (at the interface between idealism and materialism), a running simulacrum of reality constructed and played to itself by the brain. (Compare also Bergson's cinematographic theory of the mind). 

This is Dawkins's account of the internal virtual reality that we mistake for the real as such:

Everything that we know about the world outside our skulls comes to us via nerve cells whose impulses chatter like machine guns. What passes along a nerve cell is a voleying of 'spikes', impuses whose voltage is fixed (or at least irrelevant) but whose rate of arriving varies meaningfully. Now let's think about coding principles. how would you translate information from the outside world, say, the sound of an oboe or the temperature of a bath, into a pulse code? A first thought is a simple rate code: the hotter the bath, the faster the machine gun should fire. The brain, in other words, would have a thermometer calibrated in pulse rates. Actually, this is not a good code because it is uneconomical with pulses. By exploiting redundancy, it is possible to devise codes that convey the same information at a cost of fewer pulses. Temperatures in the world mostly stay the same for long periods at a time. To signal 'It is hot, it is hot, it is still hot...' by a continuously high rate of machine-gun pulses is wasteful; it is better to say, 'It has suddenly become hot' (now you can assume that it will stay the same until futher notice).

And, satisfyingly, this is what nerve cells mostly do, not just for signalling temperature but for signalling almost everything about the world.Most nerve cells are biased to signal changes in the world. If a trumpet plays a long sustained note, a typical nerve cell telling the brain about it would show the following pattern of impulses. Before the trumpet starts, low firing rate; immediately after the trumpet starts, high firing rate, as the trumpet carries on sustaining its note, the firing rate dies away to an infrequent mutter; at the moment when the trumpet stops, high firing rate, dying away to a resting mutter again. Or there might be one class of nerve cells that fire only at the onset of sounds and a different class of cells that fire only when sounds go off. Similar exploitation of redundancy — screening out the sameness in the wold —goes on in cells that tell the brain about changes in light, changes in temperature, changes in pressure. Everything about the world is signalled as change, and this is a major economy.

But you and I don't seem to hear the trumpet die away. To us the trumpet seems to carry on at the same volume and then to stop abruptly. Yes, of course. That's what you'd expect because the coding system is ingenious. It doesn't throw away information, it only throws away redundancy. The brain is told only about chantes, and it is then in a position to reconstruct the rest. Barlow [Horace Barlow, "The Coding of Sensory Messages", 1965] doesn't put it like this, but we could say that the brain constructs a virtual sound, using the messages supplied by the nerves coming from the ears. The reconstructed virtual sound is complete and unabridged, even though the messages themselves are economically stripped down to information about changes. The system works because the state of the world at a given time is usually not greatly different from the preceding second. Only if the world changed capriciously, randomly and frequently, would it be economical for sense organs to signal continuously the state of the world. As it is, sense organs are set up to signal, economically, the discontinuities in the world; and the brain, assuming correctly that the world doesn't change capriciously and at random, uses the information to construct an internal virtual reality in which the continuity is restored.

(Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow, 260-61)

Now compare this account with that of another contemporary neurologist like Gazzaniga. Michael Gazzaniga's description of the brain's "interpreter", a kind of internal narrator figure which constructs a running narrative of our surrounding world. Gazzaniga's account of the "interpreter" is to be found in The Mind's Past.  In another paper ("La autointeracción, la realimentación cerebral y la realidad como expectativa autocumplida") I point out the parallels between Gazzaniga's account of the brain's fuctioning and a phenomenological-materialist theory of consciousness, that of Herbert George Mead.

As to Berkeley, the substance of his argument is already to be found in his Theory of Vision— it is the mind that constructs objects in the world as mental interfaces for sensory perception, combining the information from diverse senses.

And pushing back further, the essentials of this "theory of reality as virtual reality", stemming from a complex conception of the relationship between perception and reality, is to be found in Hobbes's materialist philosophy (which results, as noted above, in a kind of "idealistic" or "subjectivized" materialism, actually a full-fledged theory of reality as virtual reality). I comment further on Hobbes's theory of virtual reality, or his "phenomenology" avant la lettre if one prefers, in this paper:

"'Lo mismo despiertos, que soñando': Hobbes sobre la virtualidad de lo real"

—oOo—

A Model of History, and of the World

Jared Diamond in conversation with Richard Dawkins - The Use of Religion

Richard Dawkins vs John Lennox | The God Delusion Debate

DEBATE: Atheist vs Christian (Richard Dawkins vs Cardinal George Pell)

Observen el minuto 47.47. Ironías de la vida sobre la cuestión del maltrato infantil.

Richard Dawkins and Julia Sweeney in Indy Nov 9, 2016

'The New Atheism' by Richard Dawkins, AAI 2007

The Great Debate - The Storytelling of Science (Part 1/2)

Richard Dawkins in conversation with Penn Jillette at Live Talks LA

On Altruism in The Wright Show

Richard Dawkins Greatest Show on Earth

The God Delusion (Audiobook)