Monsters from the ID: A Review and Critique of Michael Shermer’s Chapter 7 in Truth

An Engineer’s Stress Test of Michael Shermer’s Moral Realism

by Marc Desmarais

1. Axioms & Evidence vs Values, two different categories

In formal logic and geometry, you cannot prove anything without axioms — assumptions accepted without proof. Similarly, in science, we must simply accept raw empirical evidence; the physical universe exists, period. While there is nothing inherently wrong with establishing axioms (or values) to build a functional legal or social architecture, a distinction must be maintained: these values (such as minimizing suffering, protecting human rights, or promoting individual flourishing) are assumptions “we” choose. They are not logical axioms, nor are they empirical facts waiting to be unearthed.

2. Pennock’s Trap, Plato’s Euthyphro, and Circular Logic

There is nothing to be gained from taking Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma seriously. The first part is nonsense. God is an unfalsifiable figment of the human imagination created for emotional payoff; nothing reasonable came from him, it came from the human imagination. This is setting up circular logic. They aren’t God’s reasons, they are the brain’s reasons (articulated 2000 years ago)

Shermer argues that if a god has reasons for its commands, then reasons for values must exist. But this logic is wrong because there is no god to begin with. Shermer then suggests that since there are reasons behind values, we should provide our own reasons. A fictional god as imagined by men 2000 years ago might claim to have reasons for values, but Shermer can’t use that to claim reasons are behind values.

With Pennock’s blessing, Shermer relies on the following deductive logic (and in deductive logic, a conclusion cannot introduce a new concept):

· Premise #1: Some fact about flourishing (let’s say it’s correct for the sake of argument).

· Premise #2: The “ought” about flourishing that needs to be validated.

· Conclusion: The “ought” is valid!

Shermer wanted his deductive logic to conclude an “ought,” so he put an “ought” as one of the premises. But the “ought” that he put in as a premise is the same “ought” that he is trying to validate with the argument. Pennock likely overlooked this circularity because academic philosophy often treats sufficiently large, conceptually elegant frameworks as valid justifications, mistaking a sophisticated tautology for an empirical proof.

There’s more to say about the skyhook factory that Pennock belongs too, but enough for now.

3. Sanitized Biology and Evolutionary Cherry-Picking

From a strict biological standpoint, Shermer’s view of human nature is fundamentally flawed. Natural selection does not optimize for the long-term flourishing of individual sentient beings; it optimizes for the replication of selfish genes.

Historically and biologically, gene replication is frequently achieved through horrific, zero-sum violence: tribal warfare, infanticide, rape, xenophobia, and the brutal subjugation of out-groups. These destructive behaviors are evolved adaptations grounded in biology just as firmly as cooperation. Shermer looks at human nature and cherry-picks the pro-social, cooperative mechanisms — such as reciprocal altruism — while labeling only those preferred parts as “objective morality.” This overlooks the fact that competitive, exploitative, and destructive drives are just as deeply embedded in our neural networks by natural selection. Evolution built the parasite and the apex predator with the exact same thermodynamic care it used to engineer empathy.

4. The Illusion of the Interchangeability of Perspectives

Borrowing from Steven Pinker and Abraham Lincoln, Shermer argues that game theory and pure reason force us into the Golden Rule via the “interchangeability of perspectives”. This logic completely breaks down when exposed to physical reality. An actor only engages in negotiation or treats others as equals when they lack the power to dominate them.

The historical reality is captured by the saying, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” While many — including Shermer — cannot imagine being corrupted by absolute power, any biological organism granted absolute power for long enough will inevitably end up becoming “the reason onto themselves.” Shermer has the entire dynamic backward: reason does not force us to treat everyone equally via an interchangeability of perspectives; a lack of power does. When a dominant actor accumulates enough power to guarantee zero retaliation, the game-theoretic balance vanishes, and abstract logic possesses no independent physical force to stop them.

In that movie forbidden planet, the Krell built a machine of ultimate, infinite power, believing they had evolved past all base impulses — only for that absolute power to bypass their conscious minds and unleash the “monsters from the Id.” Shermer falls into the exact same trap, forgetting that beneath our abstract reason lies a biological engine driven by evolutionary survival.

5. The Misuse of Physical Analogies: Thermodynamics and Kepler

Shermer’s use of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to anchor moral realism presents a clear category error. A cancer cell, a malaria parasite, and a tyrant locking dissidents in a gulag are all actively expending energy to combat entropy and preserve their own internal order. Physics is completely indifferent as to whose internal entropy is being delayed. By pretending that the Second Law of Thermodynamics mandates a Western liberal concept of individual human rights, he is suspending his moral lever from a cosmic skyhook manufactured out of physics equations.

Similarly, his comparison to Johannes Kepler is fundamentally flawed. Kepler discovered an objective geometric fact about planetary orbits that exists entirely independent of human survival, representation, or consciousness. If humanity vanishes tomorrow, planets will continue to move in ellipses. By contrast, democracies, market economies, and individual rights are not objective laws of nature waiting in outer space to be found by a telescope. They are highly specific, historically contingent human technologies engineered to manage primate behavior.

While there is a legitimate science of economics — where thinkers like Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell have made real progress — that science only predicts the outcomes of economic policies on a population based on specific models. The science itself does not make value judgments. For instance, economics tells us that government-imposed price limits will cause shortages. But for a politician, if causing that shortage makes them look good to uninformed voters and secures their re-election, they will view it as a “good” outcome. Science can map the cause and effect, but it cannot dictate which outcome an individual human ought to value.

6. Sarcasm as a Shield: The Holocaust Reality

When challenged by physicist George Ellis on the cultural bias of his framework, Shermer resorts to sarcasm, writing that it is highly doubtful scientists will ever discover that people prefer to starve, enjoy being enslaved, or do not object to being liquidated in gas chambers.

This sarcasm serves as an emotional shield that obscures the factual weakness of his position. By framing the argument as an absurd binary choice — either you agree with his universal moral science, or you believe people enjoy being exterminated — he completely misses the materialist reality. The materialist critique is not that the victims of the Holocaust didn’t object to their destruction; obviously, their biological survival systems were working entirely against it. The critique is that the brains of the perpetrators were also running an evolved, self-serving biological algorithm. To the Nazi brain, eliminating an out-group was computed as an act of competitive evolutionary survival — clearing out rivals to secure resources for their own genetic lineage. One cannot use the laws of physics to prove the Nazi brain was violating nature; one can only state that the Nazi’s method of fighting localized entropy violently clashed with their victims’ method of doing the same.

7. The Political Platform as Objective Truth

Shermer’s ultimate conclusion is that history demonstrates a clear, objective arc of “moral progress.” He views the expansion of rights and the decline of violence as evidence that humanity is moving toward a scientifically discoverable moral destination. This relies on a teleological fallacy — the mistaken belief that nature or history operates with an intrinsic purpose or ultimate goal.

Evolution has no goal; it is a blind process of adaptation to shifting environmental pressures. Similarly, human history does not possess a built-in trajectory toward enlightenment. The expansion of the “moral sphere” over the last few centuries is not a universal law; it is a highly contingent historical luxury. Modern liberal values are heavily dependent on industrialization, unprecedented economic abundance, and energy security.

When resource scarcity, environmental collapse, or existential threats emerge, the cooperative neural networks Shermer praises are rapidly bypassed by the brain’s more primitive threat-monitoring systems. The “arc of the moral universe” is a comforting narrative framework, but from a materialist perspective, it is a fragile, temporary alignment of human behavior, not an objective truth.

8. The Failure of Practical Adjudication (“The Weeds”)

Near the end of the chapter, Shermer admits that a science of morality struggles to get ‘into the weeds’ of complex, real-world problems like abortion, immigration, or tax rates. He concedes that these disputes are ultimately unresolvable by science and depend instead on political preferences and election outcomes.

However, it is precisely in ‘the weeds’ of practical application that any scientific hypothesis or ethical system must be tested. If a framework fails practical tests and cannot resolve specific, competing variables in a complex environment, it possesses no predictive or deterministic utility. By acknowledging that his framework cannot adjudicate real-world situations where moral values conflict, Shermer confirms that his system is a failure as a science, functioning only as an abstract philosophy.

9. Free Will, Self-Determinism, and the Structural Blind Spot

Shermer’s attempt to rescue ‘free will’ by shifting the goalposts to a compatibilist framework called ‘self-determinism’ suffers from a similar conceptual gap. He argues that while individual neurons are bound by strict physical laws, choice is an ‘emergent property’ of massive neural networks, granting humans ‘wiggle room’ and creating a universe that is ‘post-determined’ by conscious choices.

Attempting to label choice as an ‘emergent property’ redefines ‘freedom’ to mean network complexity rather than actual independence from physical causality. He is obscuring the unsettling reality of absolute biological determinism — where humans operate as complex biochemical puppets bound entirely by antecedent physical causes. Naming a complex physical cascade ‘emergence’ does not grant it an exemption from physics.

The ‘future self’ making a choice based on past conditioning is simply a biological computer running a complex algorithm. Choosing is a purely biochemical process: inputs come in, actions come out, and a fully deterministic process occurs in the middle.

He is fundamentally confusing unpredictability with freedom. The fact that a brain processes data like a complex computer and cannot be predicted without running the full calculation is a recognized property in physics and computer science known as computational irreducibility. Because a system cannot simulate itself in real time without running the full calculation, the conscious mind lacks the biological capacity to model the rest of the brain.

Essentially, Shermer argues that human beings possess ‘conscious choice’ because they lack conscious access to the rest of the brain. This reasoning is structurally flawed; choice is a systemic biological computation involving far more than conscious awareness. The observer experiences an internal blank space — an ignorance of their own underlying hardware calculations — and mistakes this lack of data-access for a lack of physical cause. Shermer is attempting to make room to insert human agency where no physical gap exists. Call it Shermer’s secular ghost. Ultimately, the conscious illusion of ‘free will’ only demonstrates that the illusion exists; it does not change the fact that the machine cannot transcend the physical laws governing its chemistry

10. Contextual Framework: The Interdependence of Chapter Foundations

In a broader structural context, the arguments presented in Chapter 7 are deeply dependent on the frameworks Shermer establishes in other sections of the book, specifically Chapter 9 (‘What It’s Like’) and Chapter 10 (‘Free Will’). His claims regarding moral realism rely entirely on these underlying assumptions about consciousness and human agency — assumptions that are fundamentally disagreed with here. Because Chapter 7 stands on foundations built in these surrounding chapters, a complete refutation requires evaluating those premises directly, marking Chapter 10 as a necessary subject for a future, dedicated analytical review.

Epilogue

On the one hand, people like Shermer & Harris seem comfortable with the concept that mind is the brain in action, but they then try to view the “morality” brain function as something that can be lifted by a shyhook to a “better place”, forgetting the “crane” of neurotransmitters is what motivates all action, all thoughts (with pain or pleasure).

Every moral choice, heroic sacrifice, or ethical debate isn’t guided by abstract logic; it is driven by a primitive, bottom-up chemical ledger. The brain is an organic survival machine that navigates the world entirely through a system of chemical rewards and punishments.

Every “good” thing these thinkers want to achieve relies entirely on this biological crane:

•Altruism & Cooperation: When we help someone, the brain releases oxytocin (bonding) and dopamine (reward). We do it because it feels good or relieves the cortisol (stress) of watching someone suffer. It is evolutionary self-interest wrapped in biochemistry.

•Moral Outrage: When we see an injustice and demand “progress,” the brain is reacting to a threat to our group cohesion, releasing chemical signals that demand action to restore social equilibrium for our own safety.

You cannot get a brain to move, think, or care about a “better place” without activating the physical cranes of pain and pleasure. A brain completely detached from its neurochemical survival evolutionary drives would have no reason to prefer human flourishing over human extinction. Reason alone possesses zero motivational power.