5 ms·

100% of recent posts I've seen discussing reductive approaches have slammed them, so it's time for a reminder about why we do it. Truth. Falsifiable truth. Ev

100% of recent posts I've seen discussing reductive approaches have slammed them, so it's time for a reminder about why we do it. Truth. Falsifiable truth. Everyone knows that reductive approaches are limited. It's in the name. They are a tradeoff. Obviously the world is complex and so intuitively you want to embrace complexity, but the more you do this the more your theories become non-falsifiable and therefore not even wrong, severely limiting their scope because most important truths about the world are falsifiable. This is why spiritualism, mysticism, and religious metaphysics failed so completely to discover the wondrous scientific truths underlying our world, even though these things were supposed to be in their weelhouse. The temptation of the non-falsifiable was a poison apple. Once eaten, the plausible overwhelmed and crowded out the true, and they were never able to build physical knowledge reliable enough to stack, let alone stack high enough to discover that we are all made of star stuff and other such wonders. Truth turned out to be stranger and more beautiful than fiction -- the real conceit was in handing the reins to our imaginations when the world around us exceeded our imaginations so thoroughly. Speaking of which, the neuroscientists figured out how engrams work. It's beautiful. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5trRLX7PQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5trRLX7PQY

tech_ken 3y ago
> most important truths about the world are falsifiable I think it depends on what you deem "important". There are many truths that I relied on just this morning alone which aren't "falsifiable" in the like Popper-derived sense. In my own head I call these "contingent truths", things which are true of the world by mutual convention or by the accumulation of human history. For example, my name or the name of my spouse; the designation of the gravel patch on the corner of our block as an area for my dog to pee off-leash; the presence of paint on the road which keeps my bike separate from cars. In some sense these are all material truths, properties of things in the world which have a falsifiable flavor (like "color" or "mass"). But I do think that their contingent nature, the fact that they are products of human decision making, taste, and history, gives them a different character than what most people keep in mind when they say "falsifiable truths" (scientific statements about the world). On a cosmological sense the latter type of truths are definitely "more important", but on the scale of things that actually determine the quality and shape of my life it's contingent truths which dominate. Spiritualism and mysticism proliferate in part (IMO) because they promise a bridge between the two scales, they reconcile the personal and the cosmic. I feel like Dawkins-era materialism has failed to have similar dominance because it only plays on the cosmic domain, and more often than not scoffs at modern attempts to explore the world of contingent truths (I don't meet many Dawkins-ites who are interested in the modern approach to sociology, which I think has done a pretty creditable job trying to deal with the contingent nature of social dynamics). Moreover, contingent truths are rapidly becoming an important area for multiple fields: many modern problems of engineering and science have contingent faces (infrastructure, big tech, medicine, AI). Being unable to provide guidance for negotiating, or even really a basic vocabulary of, social reality is an enormous hole. I say all this because I do consider myself a material-reductionist, or at least have been aggressively so in the past, but have been left kind of cold by how the movement has developed. It seems too shell-shocked by the culture wars of the 80s-00s and is unable (or no longer able) to act with the sense of openness or curiosity that I think is required by genuine truth-seeking. This is why I'd imagine you see so much criticism of it recently, not because the ideology is fundamentally wrong, but because its standard-bearers are no longer able to push it forward in a way that the meets the needs of the moment.
Shorel 3y ago
Thank you for your comment. This is a very important point, that gets lost in the mystical catch-all argument of: “you just don't understand”. And what's there to understand? An ivory tower of connected ideas which are not falsifiable! On the same note: I'm glad I don't understand the nuances of zodiacal signs.
- eddtries 3y ago
  > On the same note: I'm glad I don't understand the nuances of zodiacal signs. Thankfully I was born an Aries so I'm rational enough to not believe in that junk.
YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
Well, the world is not beautiful. It just is. Claiming that physics or neuroscience is beautiful is just trying to take the place of the mystic. Science only gives you the tools to know when you're wrong. It is not some revelatory cult that you join to be one with the world in a mystical union of knowledge and wisdom. Or whatever. You are either a scientist, and live in the perpetual darkness of never knowing anything for sure, only occasionally pierced by a pale ray of weak light of uncertain knowledge; or in the land of the mystics who conquer the god-given truth with their every breath. Make your choice. And stop bragging for dog's sake. We haven't got a clue how the world works. And we are busy destroying it so fast we'll never know.

tech_ken 3y ago

> most important truths about the world are falsifiable I think it depends on what you deem "important". There are many truths that I relied on just this morning alone which aren't "falsifiable" in the like Popper-derived sense. In my own head I call these "contingent truths", things which are true of the world by mutual convention or by the accumulation of human history. For example, my name or the name of my spouse; the designation of the gravel patch on the corner of our block as an area for my dog to pee off-leash; the presence of paint on the road which keeps my bike separate from cars. In some sense these are all material truths, properties of things in the world which have a falsifiable flavor (like "color" or "mass"). But I do think that their contingent nature, the fact that they are products of human decision making, taste, and history, gives them a different character than what most people keep in mind when they say "falsifiable truths" (scientific statements about the world). On a cosmological sense the latter type of truths are definitely "more important", but on the scale of things that actually determine the quality and shape of my life it's contingent truths which dominate. Spiritualism and mysticism proliferate in part (IMO) because they promise a bridge between the two scales, they reconcile the personal and the cosmic. I feel like Dawkins-era materialism has failed to have similar dominance because it only plays on the cosmic domain, and more often than not scoffs at modern attempts to explore the world of contingent truths (I don't meet many Dawkins-ites who are interested in the modern approach to sociology, which I think has done a pretty creditable job trying to deal with the contingent nature of social dynamics). Moreover, contingent truths are rapidly becoming an important area for multiple fields: many modern problems of engineering and science have contingent faces (infrastructure, big tech, medicine, AI). Being unable to provide guidance for negotiating, or even really a basic vocabulary of, social reality is an enormous hole. I say all this because I do consider myself a material-reductionist, or at least have been aggressively so in the past, but have been left kind of cold by how the movement has developed. It seems too shell-shocked by the culture wars of the 80s-00s and is unable (or no longer able) to act with the sense of openness or curiosity that I think is required by genuine truth-seeking. This is why I'd imagine you see so much criticism of it recently, not because the ideology is fundamentally wrong, but because its standard-bearers are no longer able to push it forward in a way that the meets the needs of the moment.

Shorel 3y ago

Thank you for your comment. This is a very important point, that gets lost in the mystical catch-all argument of: “you just don't understand”. And what's there to understand? An ivory tower of connected ideas which are not falsifiable! On the same note: I'm glad I don't understand the nuances of zodiacal signs.

eddtries 3y ago
> On the same note: I'm glad I don't understand the nuances of zodiacal signs. Thankfully I was born an Aries so I'm rational enough to not believe in that junk.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago

Well, the world is not beautiful. It just is. Claiming that physics or neuroscience is beautiful is just trying to take the place of the mystic. Science only gives you the tools to know when you're wrong. It is not some revelatory cult that you join to be one with the world in a mystical union of knowledge and wisdom. Or whatever. You are either a scientist, and live in the perpetual darkness of never knowing anything for sure, only occasionally pierced by a pale ray of weak light of uncertain knowledge; or in the land of the mystics who conquer the god-given truth with their every breath. Make your choice. And stop bragging for dog's sake. We haven't got a clue how the world works. And we are busy destroying it so fast we'll never know.