????
all right SF
i do understand you would shitcan the whole thing
i don't understand this post
could you briefly illuminate the statement?
I assumed that the "man is mud" position you were claiming would be replaced by Scientology is essentially the reductionist position, i.e the view that humans -- like everything else -- are essentially the sum of their parts and everything about humans can be explained in terms of physical processes.
The arguments against reductionism usually claim that certain things (consciousness, evolution, the abiogenesis, the creation of the universe, etc.) require some organizing principal that is not explainable solely in terms of the behaviour of the lower-level processes. In this view, consciousness dictates the behaviour of processes within the body rather than arising from processes within the body.
The arguments against reductionism typically focusses on gaps in our knowledge. As gaps in our knowledge shrink, this pool of arguments shrinks.
The more we learn about the brain and consciousness, the more the reductionist view has held up.
While it is possible that neuroscience will suddenly conclude that Hubbard was right and we aren't just bits of dead stars (which is both more accurate and more poetic than "mud") but it does not presently seem likely.