Sorry, I'm not sure I understand your question. I'm claiming that to say something is matter is to say that it is empirically observable, that is, observable either with the unaided sense organs or through the observable results of some test.
Scientific Materialism Is NOT Intellectual Fascism-Proof Inside!
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Sorry, I'm not sure I understand your question. I'm claiming that to say something is matter is to say that it is empirically observable, that is, observable either with the unaided sense organs or through the observable results of some test.
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I'm asking the opposite question. Are you saying that anything that is empirically observable is therefore material?
And you started by talking about other than scientific knowledge. So I wanted some examples of this. I also asked if you thought there was non scientific knowledge of empirical phenomena or only no scientific knowledge of nonempirical phenomena.
Dawkins/Sam Harris/et al. People like this guy who thinks physics makes philosophy and religion obsolete.
Yes, I think so. To say that something is empirically observable means, at least to those who care about the existence of something called matter, that it is material.
Interesting question. I would say that there is nonscientific knowledge of empirical phenomena. History is a great example.
I hesitate to post here, as it's like trying to argue with someone who, unknown to me, thinks millionaire means someone who is paid at least one million dollars per year (I DID look in several online dictionaries and other resources, but didn't see that definition). Been there (the discussion, not being paid a million dollars in any one year), done that. But here goes...
You seem to be arguing that no "scientist" would ever be convinced that this one person has sight. It could well be an uphill battle, but there certainly are people interested in claims of unusual and unknown but verifiable human abilities. Here's someone who spent much of her life on such claims:
http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Chapters/Kurtz.htm
Had she found the equivalent of a man claiming sight in an all-blind civilization, I have no doubt she would have verified the claim.
I suspect these people (who claim science is capable of discovering all knowledge) are more of a straw man you're arguing against, and are in the minority as kuwisdelu is saying.
Furthermore, it seems you have some different definition(s) of some word(s) than many of us others do, or something similar to that - it looks like people are arguing past one another in this thread. I'm hoping this gets cleared up.
Yes, there would be a lot of disbelievers, because as Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and there hasn't been much evidence for ESP, certainly not enough for the repeatable tests that are part of science.
You seem to be arguing that no "scientist" would ever be convinced that this one person has sight. It could well be an uphill battle, but there certainly are people interested in claims of unusual and unknown but verifiable human abilities. Here's someone who spent much of her life on such claims:
http://www.susanblackmore.co.uk/Chapters/Kurtz.htm
Had she found the equivalent of a man claiming sight in an all-blind civilization, I have no doubt she would have verified the claim.
Can you name one or more public figures who you would call evangelizers? I see kuwisdelu is already asking as well.
I suspect these people (who claim science is capable of discovering all knowledge) are more of a straw man you're arguing against, and are in the minority as kuwisdelu is saying.
Furthermore, it seems you have some different definition(s) of some word(s) than many of us others do, or something similar to that - it looks like people are arguing past one another in this thread. I'm hoping this gets cleared up.
The experience of different radio frequencies is (as far as direct experience) unknowable, and weren't known to exist until the last couple of centuries, yet anyone can tune a radio or change channels on a TV. But once again, I might be missing what you're trying to say.
What I'm really getting at is that your subjective experience can never be fully known by anyone else (here's a blog post of mine on the same point). By subjective experience, I mean "what it is like" to experience something, like the redness of a rose, or the sweet aroma of butter and sugar. The redness is not just the wavelength of light reflected from the rose. It's literally your experience of that color. Similarly, the sound waves coming from your stereo are not the actual experience of the sound. You can never know what it is like for someone else to experience something (except very imperfectly, through language and art).
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Oh, it would have been easier if you had mentioned this at the beginning. Science is not applicable to subjective experience since it is not externally observable. Science can be applied, somewhat to the correlation between subjective experience and reality.
For example, I cannot perceive what red looks like to you, but we can together discern whether we deem the same objects to be red (assuming we report honestly).
There is some idea that science will eventually be applicable to such phenomena, but that's only a hypothesis without much to back it up, so it's still SF not science.
Right, only I think science will never be able to get there. The problem is that no one can ever, even in theory, know what someone else is experiencing directly. They would always observe that someone else's experience through the filter of their own experience, their own mind. So they could never be sure what they were getting was in fact what it seemed to be, or was an artifact of their own mind.
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Yes. But it's not as if a particularly large group of scientists or science as an endeavor were claiming to be able to. Nor do most scienitsts deny the personal import of personal experience. They have lives and personal tastes and loves and families and they don't think that everyone should love the same people they love or even like the same art or music.
Science is not trying to hegemonize personal experience.
Ehh, I went and read the interview. The title is mostly provocation. He didn't say anything that leads me to believe he thinks science can answer everything. In fact, he explicitly admits it probably can't.
Frankly, I just don't think these people's claims are what you think they are.
At least, I've never personally met a scientist who honestly believes science can or is the answer to everything. I can't help but feel the entire argument is based on an illusion.
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Science isn't, but some supposedly pro-science philosophers are. Daniel Dennett, for example, basically thinks personal conscious experience is just an illusion.
Well Dawkins may be one such scientist. The "new atheists" (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens) are basically staunch materialists: they think that the only thing that exists is matter.
What that means is that personal conscious experience is nothing but matter. That means all morality, all beauty, love, everything is just matter... and just a matter of science.
I don't think this is a large monkey wrench. A simple way to look at materialism is that it is a stage that science went through centuries ago. There is no area of current scientific work where the materiality of a thing gives it a priviledged status. What's material about fields or population genetics? Or the range of possible phyletic body plans?
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Okay, and some pro-religious thinkers say science is stupid and the universe was created 6000 years ago. Arguments about how science/scientists are narrow-minded ideologues always seem to descend into finding an individual who is taken to be speaking for Science.
(I am making no comment about your claims re: Dennett since I am not familiar with him or what he actually claims.)
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I believe all of the above. Except the last - I guess you are trying to extrapolate from this that materialists believe that beauty and morality and love can be reduced to a scientific equation or something, which doesn't follow from the belief that our perceptions, including of beauty and morality and love, are all products of purely physical phenomena. I can appreciate love and beauty without believing that it emanates from a supernatural plane.
The problem is that these people are not random. They are very influential, and they shape the worldview for a lot of highly educated people who think it's axiomatic that the mind is nothing but a machine evolution put together. It's becoming increasingly unfashionable and derided to have any other view. That's what's dangerous: that people think any other view is supernatural, irrational, etc.
While people like Dennett are at the extremely outspoken ends, the trickle-down versions of their philosophy are watering the trough for everyone else, including most scientists.
Your complaint is with the new atheists apparently. I don't think most people or most scientists would insist on the primacy of material qua matter. After all the biggest scientifically described entity in current cosmology is "Dark Energy" -- which doesn't really seem to fit with the idea that science as a thing about the materiality of things.
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Actually, that's exactly what they would believe. Everything physical is governed by scientific laws. Laws are regularities. Regularities could in theory be reduced to equations or probability distributions. And that's in the end what all of these things are -- things generated by the equations and the programming evolution put in us. They're just illusions.
It's just that what the new atheists say influences all the scientists and educated people. And again, Dark Energy is only accepted as a possibility because in theory certain observations will either bear it out or they won't -- that's what the materiality comes down to: observability, testability in the physical world.
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Reasonably Physical? This is pretty far from simple materialism. Okay. Let's look at the Standard model and the Higgs Boson. First of all, the Standard model became the standard on purely theoretical grounds. The crucial step was about as non-physical an event as can be imagined: t'Hooft showed that Yang-Mills (non-Abelian) Fields were renormalizable. That was it. The Theory beat other theories long before any observations confirmed any of it.
The Higgs mechanism has an even less materialistic derivation and role in that there are still a large number of theories about the Higgs and these are driving the construction of mechanisms for finding the mechanisms.
Now what on earth is "Empirical" or "materialistic" about having a mass of theories that it takes huge amounts of specialized machinery to even come close to nailing down?
This is the complete opposite of a materialistic model of how one finds out about how things work.
Well Richard Dawkins believes much the same stuff, and he is an actual scientist. And that's also true no doubt of a lot of his fans.
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