Angus John Louis Menuge

Folk psychology affirms the existence of a persistent, unitary self at the center of each individual’s mental life. Darwinian psychologists have challenged this view with the selfish gene and selfish meme theories of the mind. Both theories claim that cognition arises from the interaction of blind, selfish replicators (genes or memes) and that the enduring self is an illusion. I argue that both theories suffer from an implausible atomism and an inability to explain human reasoning, subjectivity, points of view, and psychological unity. By contrast, a psychology premised on Intelligent Design is able to account for all these problems.

The ontological argument from reason aims to show that deliberative reasoning cannot be located in a naturalistic ontology, because such reasoning requires a unified, enduring self with libertarian free will. The most popular way of avoiding this argument is to claim that some version of naturalistic compatibilism suffices for human reason, because even in a world of event causation, some creatures may be responsive to reason. In this paper, I argue that the best versions of this approach either smuggle in nonnaturalistic commitments or else cannot distinguish between compulsive rationality merely occurring in someone’s brain from reasoning an agent does.