Well I disagree that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the sciences now. All of neuroscience and experimental psychology is based on the idea that the mind can be reduced to the brain, which is itself a byproduct of a scientific materialist view of the world.
Scientific Materialism Is NOT Intellectual Fascism-Proof Inside!
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Well I disagree that it has nothing whatsoever to do with the sciences now. All of neuroscience and experimental psychology is based on the idea that the mind can be reduced to the brain, which is itself a byproduct of a scientific materialist view of the world.
Reductive analysis is only an initial step. In the sciences it hasn't been methodologically necessary or fruitful to show that reductivist initial strategies are particularly relevent to current problems. Sure, in the 1830s (for example -- or maybe until say 1860), it was crucial to insist that the brain as a physical thing was a precondition for the functioning of the mind as an experienced thing, but these days, there's no reason to make much of an arguement for that. I don't think it would get you any scientific points at all. It seems to me that science long ago moved far beyond scientific materialism. For example, if I wanted to state something about say dreaming in a current scientific context, it would be a waste of time to argue that a dream-state had something to do with a brain-state. I would have to be much more specific and say something like:
" During REM sleep, the release of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine, serotonin and histamine is completely suppressed." (see Wikipedia on dreams).
So you might say that a statement like "the actions of the mind are dependent on the actions of the brain" is a bit of scientific materialism -- science has moved on to being so much more specific that "materialism" doesn't really fit the types of entities that are invoked in scientific discussions these days.
Well there's two interesting points you bring up here.
The first is about what materialism really means. I would argue that normally science ultimately does and must rest on verifiable/falsifiable observations of matter. That all the entities, including chemicals like histamine, states like REM sleep, and even exotic particles like quarks, ultimately describe patterns in data that are somehow perceptible through the sense organs, either by themselves or with the aid of scientific instruments.
Now materialism would hold that this kind of physically perceptible truth is also the only kind of truth there is.
The second is, and I think you're right here, that a belief in modern science does not actually necessitate a belief in materialism. That is, science could easily accept physically perceptible truth as its province but actively accept the possibility of other kinds of truth. But most often that is not what happens.
Science is turned into the theology of scientism, which takes scientific materialism as the only means of finding truth.
That's just the problem: that if it's not physically verifiable, it's not knowledge. That's what I disagree with.
Suppose everyone in the universe were blind, and there were one man who could see. He couldn't prove his sight to anyone else. But would his sight not be "knowledge"?
We are all in that position in our own little universes of personal consciousness -- we are all blind to everyone else's inner world and have our eyes open to our own (hopefully). We can try imperfectly to talk about our own experience and hope some of it gets across, but ultimately we know that language is limited even at the best of times...
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The blind man's sight can be empirically tested. He can say, "there is a rock four paces in front of you half again as tall as you are."
The person he is talking to can then step forward four paces and feel if the rock is there, and if so how tall it is.
In the case of external repeatable phenomena, science can be brought to bear.
Internal (that is mental) phenomena are not its province because they cannot be independently observed.
Internal phenomena can be discussed, accepted, rejected, practices taught and so on. I can say that I know Tai Chi has helped me with a great deal of self control, but I can't prove it to anyone's satisfaction. I can suggest it on grounds of personal testimony and somebody else can try it and find that it is or is not useful to them.
But I can't and don't say that its utility for me proves the underlying chi theory (it doesn't and I don't). Nor do I think Taoism accurately describes the universe even though I get a lot of utility out of its teachings.
So what knoweldge do I have from this. The knowledge that a particular set of disciplines are useful to me. That knowledge I can share and others can accept or not.
Interesting point. He'd be treated just like someone who claims to have ESP is treated now, i.e., disbelieved, his knowledge thought to come from elsewhere.
The fact stands that even if he could gain knowledge, the very notion of how it works -- sight -- would be incomprehensible to every other person.
Well but I think the standard of proof changes depending on the subject matter. When it comes to philosophical worldviews, external proof is not the standard. Utility, internal coherence and logic, aesthetic appeal: these become the standards. Heck, they're judged as standards even in the choice between different scientific theories.
The thing is, I think philosophy CAN yield us a kind of knowledge. The knowledge of our limitations, for example, is useful. As you say, the idea that science cannot explain internal experience is itself not a scientific fact but a fact of philosophy, part of a worldview. And that worldview can then point us in different directions, perhaps to spiritual practices like the Tao.
I can't see the point in reducing science to an imaginary set of ideas called materialism that is characterized by a reliance on the senses. First of all, there are a lot of ways of arguing for or about the senses and there's nothing particularly materialistic about emphasizing that what people experience as sensations has a pretty big impact on them. Second, there's no big deal in the sciences about the senses per se. They are not regarded as the infallible final recourse of knowledge, but only as one of many tools for working out particular problems. IT is generally more crucial in the sciences to emphasize the range of possible observations, the incompleteness of the data, the relation of models to observations, the use of theory to drive observational programs and so on. There just is no simple scientific model whereby the senses drive knowledge.
Can you give me examples of anything in science that does not ultimately depend on observations derived from the senses, either directly or with the aid of scientific instruments? I think that absolutely is a fundamental criterion of scientific truth. It is not the only thing that can be said about the scientific method, but science is about what is in theory accessible to *common perception*, without a shadow of a doubt.
Any science that was not so grounded would not be considered a science by most people.
This is important because it defines science's strengths and also its limits.
Well, I don't think there is any connection between how the sciences actually address problems and materialism. There really is no particularly strong relation between the sciences as they are and materialism. I think the two ideas were closely and fruitfully associated in the earlier part of the scientific revolution -- say from Boyle to Maxwell, but that materialism just isn't a relevent idea in the actual sciences these days and hasn't been since say Helmholtz or Boltzmann or Gibbs (even though he has no Z and I've never read him).
I have never seen any theological scientism so I have no idea what that is about.
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Incomprehensible directly, but if he was clever and had enough time he might be able to create a piece of hardware from which me might be able to examine the characteristics of light, analogize them to sound and make a light detector that produced musical tones as output. Using this device he could teach others about the properties of light even though they are blind. A science of optics could be created for these people even though they might never see at all.
But this only works if there actually is a light that he is seeing that is an actual characteristic of external objects.
If that seems silly. I invite you to consider the scientific processes of neutrino detection which were devised even though not one human being has or can have neutrino sight.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector
Atomic theory was developed thousands of years before anyone saw any atoms at all. Lucretius developed the idea of the clinamen 1800 years before anyone worked out any atomic probability distributions. Dirac worked out a "function" to describe interactions (and it wasn't even a function, it was a distribution) before they were observed. Robert Oppenheimer imagined a positive particle satisfying the demands of Dirac's formalism a year or two before the positron was observed. Without the theory, nobody would have known what an "observation of a positron" was at all. Without the theory the positron was not observable.
The Standard Model has worked for the last 40 years with no observation of the Higgs Boson and the Higgs Boson hasn't been "seen" -- but there are multiple models of what seeing its various possible states might be like.
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You're right. Excellent points. I suppose I must keep this example as pure metaphor -- that though the blind man could create a science of optics, he could never explain what it was like to see, and yet, his sight itself, apart from the fact that it could partially be made into science, is knowledge.
There really is no particularly strong relation between the sciences as they are and materialism.
I really think there is. There doesn't have to be, strictly logically, but there as a matter of fact is: scientists tend to believe that everything, including the mind, is fully amenable to scientific, physical explanation.
I really think there is. There doesn't have to be, strictly logically, but there as a matter of fact is: scientists tend to believe that everything, including the mind, is fully amenable to scientific, physical explanation.
I think what you're pointing out with these examples is that theories can be made before direct observation, and that intuition plays a large role in new hypotheses. True.
But theories can only be considered scientific if there is some way of verifying or falsifying them via observation. The standard model, atomic theories... they all require recourse to sense-based proof for acceptance. No possibility of sense-based verification, no science.
They may tend to believe that, but in actual scientific practice how "physical" is something like the model of the Higgs Boson? And how materialistic is it really to say that aspects of the mind derive from how nerves had to be arranged in using the genetic structure necessary to move from protoworm to chordata. To say that sensory events derive their impact from what it took to get through the mud 600 million years ago -- well it is more mystical than mysticism ever can be and I can't see anything materialistic about it. I just don't think the term actually applies to how scientific arguments work these days.
I think the falsification model covers even less of how science works than the materialistic model. As Duhem (I think) pointed out around 1905, observations that don't square with theory are not what forces changes in theory, but alternative theories do. Acceptance changes not as observations change, but as new theories emerge. Sense-based proof is really not what is going on, especially when it takes special constructions to even measure anything even remotely relevent to the theory. It's the theory that drives the constructions that enable the observations that enable the supposed verification and the supposed verification is only a minor part of the scientific work.
And there is no such thing as direct observation, given how theory drives construction and measurement.
I don't think you know very many scientists if you believe that.
Scientists have a tendency to be interested in scientific questions.
That doesn't mean they believe everything can be answered using the scientific method.
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Let me drop a large monkey wrench into the word materialism. The farther modern physics develops the more it seems that there isn't really such a thing as a material as we inuitively understand the idea.
We think of material as stuff we can hold and which has properties like the solids, liquids and gasses we experience. But all three of these material types are complex electromagnetic interactions of atoms and our experience of them comes from further electromagnetic interactions.
It can be argued (I'm simplifying vastly) that the quantum mechanical description of the universe is as a large probability dsitribution. And that the relativistic description is of a four dimensional manifold with a distribution of energy corresponding to the shape of the manifold.
Mathematically neither the probability distributions of quantum mechanics nor the manifold, metric, and tenors of relativity correspond in any simple fashion to anything we can think of as material.
We think of material as stuff we can hold and which has properties like the solids, liquids and gasses we experience. But all three of these material types are complex electromagnetic interactions of atoms and our experience of them comes from further electromagnetic interactions.
It can be argued (I'm simplifying vastly) that the quantum mechanical description of the universe is as a large probability dsitribution. And that the relativistic description is of a four dimensional manifold with a distribution of energy corresponding to the shape of the manifold.
Mathematically neither the probability distributions of quantum mechanics nor the manifold, metric, and tenors of relativity correspond in any simple fashion to anything we can think of as material.
Reasonably physical -- doesn't it make testable predictions? If it doesn't, I think most scientists would dismiss it. I mean, aren't they looking for evidence of the particle in the supercolliders, etc.?
But this is exactly what sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists say
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Well, no. People in our world who claim ESP and are subjected to scientific tests fail pretty routinely. A person who could see in the universe of the blind would have a far higher success rate when tested than any person who has claimed ESP has ever demonstrated.
Well let's not get too skeptical. Theories do not change independent of observations. New theories gain traction because they better fit the data, because they better predict new results. At least, that's what science assumes.
I agree that theory influences observation, but I think scientists basically take the stance, frankly one which I agree with as far as science goes, that theory is not totally detached from observation; that there is such a thing as correcting a theory by seeing how it does not fit data.
You're right, not all of them do. But many do. And in any case it is just those people and their evangelizers that I'm talking about.
All the new ideas are about matter inasmuch as they are, at least in theory, subject to empirical testing. That's the matter I'm talking about: that which can be sensed empirically.
Right -- this is not matter in the old-fashioned sense, but quantum theory makes predictions that are ultimately observable. That makes it about matter in the most fundamental sense.
Right, no I agree with this. I guess my point is that his experience of color would nevertheless remain unknowable by others; though you're right -- science could show some of its workings.
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Just so we're clear, you are classifying anything empirically observable as material. Are you then saying that there is non empirical knowledge of material things, or non empirical knowledge of non material things? And could you please provide an example or two?
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