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I call shenanigans. Wholly oriented towards investigating and changing the material world, science rejects anything related to practical self-discovery or spir

by antaeos 17y ago

I call shenanigans. Wholly oriented towards investigating and changing the material world, science rejects anything related to practical self-discovery or spiritual truth. In this lies the crisis of the widespread modern intellectualism that swears itself to science; it is incapable of investigating, understanding or dealing with human purposes, eternal values, spiritual realities or the challenges of the meaning of life. On the contrary, science relativises values and makes a private matter of them, thereby undermining them and consequently a moral and good society too. Discovery of new truths about the human soul and destiny will remain beyond its scope until the extent of ignorance about this is better appreciated and much wrong physicalistic thinking about the constitution of the human being is more widely discredited. Only when science is put firmly in its place for what it really is, a study of physical reality by physical means chiefly for material and economic ends, will the crisis be overcome. As far as I can tell, Priddy isn't saying anything the deconstructivists haven't already; and by that I mean the same hollow self-justifying outcries that have dominated the humanistic part of C.P. Snow's Two Cultures since, well, since Wordsworth. If Priddy and his ilk could ever dream up an alternative which would "put science in its place," I'd be happy to hear it, but so far, science makes progress regardless of whether or not we have the words to describe its journey. It's a simple fact that the humanistic vanguards apparently have a very hard time coming to terms with.

philwelch 17y ago
I think there's a use for studying and investigating, in philosophy, what we call "the good life". That's the one thing philosophy has been negligent of, although analytic philosophy (other than that) has been a positive triumph.
prodigal_erik 17y ago
I do think "Einstein's famous breakthrough was one of reason advancing well beyond the facts" bears thinking on. It took years before we could try to falsify relativity empirically, so in the meantime how did we avoid filtering him out as just another crackpot? But it's hard not to dismiss "even investigative and creative reason have largely been blinkered so as to concentrate it overwhelmingly upon the observable world" as whining that people care more about learning from reality than from nonsense made up on the spot.
- ajdecon 17y ago
  Several things about Einstein's work made it plausible and not obviously the work of a crackpot, despite its initial non-falsifiability: * It was consistent with most observations and experiments done thus far. * It offered an explanation for known issues which were being grappled with at the time, i.e. the observation of speed of light in moving reference frames. * It built on existing work and showed Einstein's familiarity with the state of physics at that point. * It was possible to understand how the theory could be tested, even if the technical skills of the time were inadequate. Compare this to most crackpot theories we see today: they may be inconsistent with previous observations. They claim to debunk "establishment" theories rather than attempting to grapple with new problems. And they are often constructed so they cannot be falsified, even postulating improved experimental techniques. So if you see a new theory which claims to explain something like high-Tc superconductivity but requires advances in technology to be testable, it is probably a good-faith effort. But if you see a theory which claims to revolutionize physics by means of an unobservable energy field with no plausible experiments, you're probably looking at a crackpot. Bonus points if the author says "Einstein is WRONG!" in a press release.
  - Herring 17y ago
    There's also that michelson-morley came out around the same time. Whether or not Einstein heard of it, there's very few ways of combining e&m & newtonian physics in light of that experiment. (Pun intended) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#Special_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#S... Apparently the fizeau experiment did influence his thinking
foldr 17y ago
That's nice, but you haven't actually identified any particular thing that he's saying which you think is wrong. (Not that I agree with him on everything -- he is a bit too harsh on Medieval theologians -- but I think what he says in that paragraph is pretty much right.)
- Herring 17y ago
  Really is anything in that paragraph right? It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means; it just so happens that reality is physical. We've prodded the brain enough to be reasonably sure your psychology (purpose, meaning, morals, values etc) is in physical atoms & not in a soul. He really should try to understand this before writing about science. I think his problem is that we can't simulate his brain on a computer well enough to know what will light up his "purpose of life" neurons.
  - foldr 17y ago
    Well, this is the problem. There are really not any good reasons for believing most of what you said there, but people seem to think that no arguments for these positions are necessary: it's enough to state them forcefully and claim that anyone who disagrees is an idiot. >It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means; I guess you could define science that way (although it hardly seems like a "basic fact"), but I'm not sure that it would do anything useful in this context. The whole question at issue is what constitutes an "effective" means of studying various topics of interest. For example, what are the effective means of studying moral facts? You seem to think that they are limited to brain science, but why do you think this? Incidentally, your proposed definition of science is clearly at odds with most standard conceptions. For example, it might (hypothetically) turn out that pure intuition is the most effective way of studying reality -- we might turn out to have incredibly good intuitions about how the world works. According to your definition, pure untested intuition would then be "scientific". As it happens of course, intuition isn't very effective. The point is that all kinds of crazy methods might turn out to be effective, but we wouldn't therefore want to call them scientific. The methods used in science have to be in some sense rational as well as merely effective, although no-one has ever quite pinned down the precise nature of this additional constraint. >We've prodded the brain enough to be reasonably sure your psychology (purpose, meaning, morals, values etc) is in physical atoms & not in a soul. Maybe you should refer to some specific results in psychology, neuroscience or phsyics that back this statement up. For example, an explanation of how facts about purpose and morality could reduce to facts about the primitives of physics. There are a few explanations on the market, but you might at least be specific about which one you are buying into. Here's an exercise. Explain how the moral fact in (1) reduces to physical facts: (1) It is wrong to kill someone for no reason.
modeless 17y ago
"it is incapable of investigating, understanding or dealing with human purposes, eternal values, spiritual realities or the challenges of the meaning of life" This is only true if you believe the brain will remain forever inscrutable. If we come to a complete understanding of how the brain works, we will be able to answer all these questions (at least as far as they relate to humans) far more completely than any amount of introspection ever will. Actually, now that I look at it, this guy's entire argument can be boiled down to "consciousness is not a physical phenomenon and is therefore outside of science". He could have said so using a lot fewer words, but then it would be too easy to disagree with him.
- christopherolah 17y ago
  It's pretty clear that your taking a scientific-materialist stance. So, my question to you is how do you explain qualia? Qualia is a term describing the actual _feeling_ of something as consciously perceived. Wikipedia explains it better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia The problem is this: Consider perceiving the color red. An outside observer can explain this as photons hitting my eye and me reacting. The only problem is, I can actually see the color. How can a series of chemical reactions cause me to feel? The irony of this is, of course, that pzombies (philosophical zombies: beings that don't feel anything but act exactly as though they do) would come to the same conclusion. Since it is impossible for anyone other than myself to verify that I exist as anything more than a series of chemical reactions (ie. I actually feel), it is a difficult problem to work with. I, for my part, was led to the conclusion that the scientific-materialist perspective was wrong, or at least grossly incomplete. It seems logical as science is essentially the art of useful fiction: we make up the simplest story that predicts the right answers and use it until it breaks (and sometimes beyond that and just avoid the points we know it breaks at). I'm very interested in hearing others' views.
  - modeless 17y ago
    I feel that the problem you describe is exacerbated (as so many philosophical "problems" are) by the imprecision of the language used in framing the problem. Rather than bicker over word definitions, I would prefer to wait until we have computers powerful enough to simulate the brain, at which time we can answer such questions using the precise language of mathematics. Of course I can't prove that we will be able to create such computers. If we can't then that would be evidence for a non-physical basis of consciousness. However, I feel that right now the burden of proof is on the people who claim that consciousness doesn't obey the laws of physics, as we haven't yet found any other process which doesn't.

by antaeos 17y ago

philwelch 17y ago

I think there's a use for studying and investigating, in philosophy, what we call "the good life". That's the one thing philosophy has been negligent of, although analytic philosophy (other than that) has been a positive triumph.

prodigal_erik 17y ago

I do think "Einstein's famous breakthrough was one of reason advancing well beyond the facts" bears thinking on. It took years before we could try to falsify relativity empirically, so in the meantime how did we avoid filtering him out as just another crackpot? But it's hard not to dismiss "even investigative and creative reason have largely been blinkered so as to concentrate it overwhelmingly upon the observable world" as whining that people care more about learning from reality than from nonsense made up on the spot.

ajdecon 17y ago
Several things about Einstein's work made it plausible and not obviously the work of a crackpot, despite its initial non-falsifiability: * It was consistent with most observations and experiments done thus far. * It offered an explanation for known issues which were being grappled with at the time, i.e. the observation of speed of light in moving reference frames. * It built on existing work and showed Einstein's familiarity with the state of physics at that point. * It was possible to understand how the theory could be tested, even if the technical skills of the time were inadequate. Compare this to most crackpot theories we see today: they may be inconsistent with previous observations. They claim to debunk "establishment" theories rather than attempting to grapple with new problems. And they are often constructed so they cannot be falsified, even postulating improved experimental techniques. So if you see a new theory which claims to explain something like high-Tc superconductivity but requires advances in technology to be testable, it is probably a good-faith effort. But if you see a theory which claims to revolutionize physics by means of an unobservable energy field with no plausible experiments, you're probably looking at a crackpot. Bonus points if the author says "Einstein is WRONG!" in a press release.
- Herring 17y ago
  There's also that michelson-morley came out around the same time. Whether or not Einstein heard of it, there's very few ways of combining e&m & newtonian physics in light of that experiment. (Pun intended) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#Special_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#S... Apparently the fizeau experiment did influence his thinking

foldr 17y ago

That's nice, but you haven't actually identified any particular thing that he's saying which you think is wrong. (Not that I agree with him on everything -- he is a bit too harsh on Medieval theologians -- but I think what he says in that paragraph is pretty much right.)

Herring 17y ago
Really is anything in that paragraph right? It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means; it just so happens that reality is physical. We've prodded the brain enough to be reasonably sure your psychology (purpose, meaning, morals, values etc) is in physical atoms & not in a soul. He really should try to understand this before writing about science. I think his problem is that we can't simulate his brain on a computer well enough to know what will light up his "purpose of life" neurons.
- foldr 17y ago
  Well, this is the problem. There are really not any good reasons for believing most of what you said there, but people seem to think that no arguments for these positions are necessary: it's enough to state them forcefully and claim that anyone who disagrees is an idiot. >It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means; I guess you could define science that way (although it hardly seems like a "basic fact"), but I'm not sure that it would do anything useful in this context. The whole question at issue is what constitutes an "effective" means of studying various topics of interest. For example, what are the effective means of studying moral facts? You seem to think that they are limited to brain science, but why do you think this? Incidentally, your proposed definition of science is clearly at odds with most standard conceptions. For example, it might (hypothetically) turn out that pure intuition is the most effective way of studying reality -- we might turn out to have incredibly good intuitions about how the world works. According to your definition, pure untested intuition would then be "scientific". As it happens of course, intuition isn't very effective. The point is that all kinds of crazy methods might turn out to be effective, but we wouldn't therefore want to call them scientific. The methods used in science have to be in some sense rational as well as merely effective, although no-one has ever quite pinned down the precise nature of this additional constraint. >We've prodded the brain enough to be reasonably sure your psychology (purpose, meaning, morals, values etc) is in physical atoms & not in a soul. Maybe you should refer to some specific results in psychology, neuroscience or phsyics that back this statement up. For example, an explanation of how facts about purpose and morality could reduce to facts about the primitives of physics. There are a few explanations on the market, but you might at least be specific about which one you are buying into. Here's an exercise. Explain how the moral fact in (1) reduces to physical facts: (1) It is wrong to kill someone for no reason.

modeless 17y ago

"it is incapable of investigating, understanding or dealing with human purposes, eternal values, spiritual realities or the challenges of the meaning of life" This is only true if you believe the brain will remain forever inscrutable. If we come to a complete understanding of how the brain works, we will be able to answer all these questions (at least as far as they relate to humans) far more completely than any amount of introspection ever will. Actually, now that I look at it, this guy's entire argument can be boiled down to "consciousness is not a physical phenomenon and is therefore outside of science". He could have said so using a lot fewer words, but then it would be too easy to disagree with him.

christopherolah 17y ago
It's pretty clear that your taking a scientific-materialist stance. So, my question to you is how do you explain qualia? Qualia is a term describing the actual _feeling_ of something as consciously perceived. Wikipedia explains it better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia The problem is this: Consider perceiving the color red. An outside observer can explain this as photons hitting my eye and me reacting. The only problem is, I can actually see the color. How can a series of chemical reactions cause me to feel? The irony of this is, of course, that pzombies (philosophical zombies: beings that don't feel anything but act exactly as though they do) would come to the same conclusion. Since it is impossible for anyone other than myself to verify that I exist as anything more than a series of chemical reactions (ie. I actually feel), it is a difficult problem to work with. I, for my part, was led to the conclusion that the scientific-materialist perspective was wrong, or at least grossly incomplete. It seems logical as science is essentially the art of useful fiction: we make up the simplest story that predicts the right answers and use it until it breaks (and sometimes beyond that and just avoid the points we know it breaks at). I'm very interested in hearing others' views.
- modeless 17y ago
  I feel that the problem you describe is exacerbated (as so many philosophical "problems" are) by the imprecision of the language used in framing the problem. Rather than bicker over word definitions, I would prefer to wait until we have computers powerful enough to simulate the brain, at which time we can answer such questions using the precise language of mathematics. Of course I can't prove that we will be able to create such computers. If we can't then that would be evidence for a non-physical basis of consciousness. However, I feel that right now the burden of proof is on the people who claim that consciousness doesn't obey the laws of physics, as we haven't yet found any other process which doesn't.