Scientific Materialism Is NOT Intellectual Fascism-Proof Inside!

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Maxx

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I don't really see how any of this rebuts the idea that a map refers to observable things...

A map potentially refers to some things that some people might observe (assuming the right people have the right map at the right time). There's no logical rebuttal, I'm just pointing out that the notion of materiality is a simplification so extreme as to be misleading.

In the case of my silent progress as an effective map, the reference to materiality and/or observation remains in suspension or to put it another way the reference is all in my own expectation that I understood what I was supposedly told. As soon as I make this map available the unique reference disappears from its place in my head and becomes a different kind of (rather indirect) reference in a small community. It becomes a codified boundary, a communal expectation, a linguistic artefact whereas when it was all in my head, it was pure materiality in terms of being a pure expectation.
 

RichardGarfinkle

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As I understand it, "observation" and "observable" in regular QM are not mushy, they are just misleading. In every case the term "interaction" seems to cover the same ground. Where things go off the tracks is to mistake "observer" for consciousness. And now (thanks to Orange) I can see why this might be. It is the map-in-the-head problem. Paradoxically it seems to be the insistance on the non-materiality of mental expectations that drives the need to have a consistant material world as a boundary or an explicitly alien place. If I accept that my mental expectations are material, then the problem of materiality versus immateriality disappears and in its place you find the problems of translating between different kinds of expectation or just different uses of language and/or representation.

I didn't mean that the word 'observer' in QM was mushy, but that it gets mushy because of the everyday meaning of the word. That's why as you say interaction is in general a better word. What I was wondering was whether the current discussion was better served by the older more ambiguous term because of the definition of materialism we're currently faced with.

I like the way you've wrapped things together. I was trying to reach for something slightly different namely the reality of the uncollapsed state that becomes otherwise upon interaction. Hence the demand of observable materiality being out of date with the modern views of science.
 

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Well, I think what you mean is that you cannot necessarily describe biology in terms of physics (though certainly scientists are trying!), that there is some irreducible complexity there. Well I definitely agree with that, but even so -- materialists nevertheless believe that everything that is, is observable by the senses. So it simply must be the case that beauty and love are also reducible to things that can be seen with the senses.

And that must mean at some level they are matter, that at some level they do follow physical laws. That prevents them from being transcendental.



But in theory even the entire sound of the orchestra can be described in terms of the sound waves that emanate from it.



That's the thing. It shouldn't negate the experience, but the materialists think the experience is itself material. They think that doesn't negate the experience, but it does. For how can experience, what is private, be material, what is public? It cannot be both.



And this is correct. It's simply that a materialistic philosophy would also hold that taste itself is something that can be reduced to interactions in the brain.



Well, it doesn't remove the experience. It simply removes any claim that experience has to refer to something beyond, something more than neurons firing, something more than the working of a machine. And that's the whole point of such experiences; that they do point beyond.

But if the human, personal value of the experience is acknowledged and considered important as it is even by Dawkins and Hitchens, what does it matter if that experience is built up out of material structures or not? The former does not remove the vitality of the experience, anymore than knowing about the chemical structure of paint removes the experience of looking at a painting. My wife is a very good artist and skilled in the materials and techniques of paintings. She gets more out of a trip to a museum than I do, and not despite but because of her deeper understanding of the what, how, where, when, and why of the artworks.
 

Maxx

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I was trying to reach for something slightly different namely the reality of the uncollapsed state that becomes otherwise upon interaction. Hence the demand of observable materiality being out of date with the modern views of science.

The reality of the uncollapsed state -- which in terms of Feynmann's QED formalism (IIRC) is the same as the reality of a "Sum over (all possible) histories" -- is pretty emblematic of how far science has come in the details of its representation of the world from the early model of the material realm as a kind of theater of mechanical causes and effects. In terms of summing over history, the idea of a gene works in similar ways in that a gene is potentially many different things until expressed AND (of course) the very idea of a gene assumes it has a long-long history and in many ways this whole history IS the gene as an entity, which is all very far from any simple idea of materiality.
 

benbradley

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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.
Aha, the "Four Horsemen." They should get a registered trademark on that term, though it's only three now.

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.


Er ... but he's a science fanboy, isn't he? Not an actual scientist.
According to Wikipedia, Dennett is a cognitive scientist. The book he-co-edited with Hofstdater, "The Mind's I," is fascinating in several ways, and I recommend it to anyone reading this thread. Much of it is about ideas that manipulate emotions - the "robot" stories in the book are especially good at this. But it's also about the philosophy of science and what the mind is.

Another interesting book s Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind," a critique of "hard" artificial intelligence that also includes an informal course in quantum mechanics (as I recall, that's a large part of the book). His argument is that the firings of neurons in the brain are influenced by quantum-level fluctuations, and so have a random component that cannot be reproduced by a deterministic machine (computer). It was a popular and important book, but many have dismissed the claim for many reasons, one being that the energies in a neuron are many orders of magnitude above any possible quantum influence, and so cannot have any significant influence. "Strong AI" has yet to be shown true or false, but despite the author's attempt, this book doesn't appear to offer strong evidence either way.
I think we may be arguing past each other.

I completely agree with you that science nowadays generates a lot from the manipulation of its theoretical and mathematical machinery.
I've read that as an argument against String/Superstring/M (whatever these things are called) Theory, that most if not all of the conclusions and claims are untestable. While this is an important area of modern theoretical physics, it doesn't appear to have any bearing on the recent posts in this thread.
And it's not really science per se that I have a problem with. It's about how science is regarded by many as the only method of finding truth that is the problem. That philosophy is what I call materialism.
Okay, that's different definition than I envisioned. Maybe we could call the people who believe that "strong materialists."

Your use of the word "truth" bothers me a bit, because it has some connotations that aren't covered by science.

But science is abundantly successful in finding facts, and many of them very useful facts at that. It's hard to think what idea or activity or whatever would be in second place as far as finding facts - regardless, if measured by the number of facts, or just number of USEFUL facts, it would be a far distant second place from science.

Philosophy and/or logic might be in second place, though the facts generated might be more in dispute. Logic is actually a subset of mathematics, which is in its own world, but which is widely applicable to practical situations and scientific investigations.

So going just by past achievements, it's reasonable to see why someone would think science could answer all questions.

On the other hand, just because it's so succesful, it doesn't logically follow that it will continue to be so successful, so (as I see it) one cannot logically conclude that science will or can answer all questions.

I read your blogpost about the perception of colors, and yes it's interesting, and an argument I've heard before (though I don't recall where). I'm not sure that it's a successful argument, however.
 
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