Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, HPMoR, Eliezer Yudkowsky, or Robin Hanson. If you'd like to revive an old quote from one of those sources, please do so here.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
You correctly describe what the quote literally says, but there's a fine line between "I'm just writing a story which requires that these particular materialists be biased" and "I'm accusing materialists in general of being biased like this". The former is often a way for authors to hint at the latter without saying it.
I could easily write a story where the Devil tempts Jews into baking matzohs using the blood of Christian babies. I could then argue that I'm not really accusing any Jews except my fictional characters of anything, and that this is simply a story about how people can do bad things for bad reasons. But you would be completely justified in not believing me when I say that.
Lewis is not accusing materialists in general of having that bias - Lewis is accusing humans in general of having that bias. The idea that humans have that bias, and that that bias can be exploited to convince a human to subscribe to a given philosophy independantly of whether that philosophy is true is rather the point of the quote.