Friday, September 1, 2017

The Anthropocentric Bias of Scientism


In a discussion with Mike Gerow at Metacrock's blog, he made a comment that I thought was worthy of more than a com-box reply.  Mike comes across a an intelligent person, but he still has a woefully uninformed understanding of topics in science that he brings into his own arguments.  In this comment, Mike reveals some serious misunderstandings about what science tells us regarding the concept of self and about evolution.  These failings are driven, at least in part, by his religious training, and deeply ingrained bias toward religious explanations whenever they come into conflict with scientific explanations.  Here is what he said:

Or, to put my objection another way, the scientist experiences his or herself as a free subject objectively observing results and making judgements. But ironically, THE SCIENCE ITSELF (takng the form of neuroscience) denies this rather vehemently, and makes the claim, that there is no free-standing "self" capable of an objective viewpoint like that, but only a brain, which is only another part of the universe not so different from any other, and really just a sort of combinatorial machine designed by evolution to achieve evolution's goals.
 And there is no reason to believe "learning the truth" is one of those goals of evolution. As best we can tell, evolutionary drives only program us to pursue things like comfort, plenty, security, and propagation -for a set of behaviours collectively called "the 4 F's" sometimes - and not for truth-seeking.

So, this shows what someone called the anthropocentric bias of scientism....? - Mike Gerow
Let's start with his claim that neuroscience denies any concept of self-hood.  In the first place, I think Mike is confusing neuroscience with philosophical physicalism.  Physicalism is the idea that everything in the world is physical.  It denies the existence of any non-physical things, especially souls and gods and the like.  Neuroscience deals specifically with the structure and function of the brain.  If you think that the "self" is equivalent to the soul, then it is probably physicalism that you take issue with.  Neuroscience is a physical science, and as such, it tends to be consistent with all other physical sciences in its rejection of supernatural explanations.  But that's not to say that there is no natural explanation for things that religionists tend to place in the realm of the immaterial.

The concept of the "self" is certainly not denied by neuroscience, even if the unscientific concept of an immaterial soul is.  It is regarded as a natural part of the human psyche, and explained as a representation of our own thought processes and mental states that is partly overlapped with, and partly distinct from that of other people.  This cognitive model is a necessary part of our social interaction.  Here is a brief but informative paper that describes it.  The point is that if you, as a theist, think that "self" is equivalent to soul, or that it is something that can only be imparted to us by God, that's fine, but you should understand that science still has the ability to recognize the existence of this part of the human psyche and understand it from an empirical perspective.  To claim that neuroscience denies any "self" is just ignorance of neuroscience, and it's easy enough to correct that ignorance, if you care to look.

The other serious claim that Mike makes is that evolution gives us no inclination for "learning the truth".  I've heard this trope many times from religionists like Alvin Plantinga, in his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism.  But Plantinga's argument is based on sheer ignorance of the science of evolution.  He assumes a simplistic behavioral model of evolution in which cognition plays no significant role.  According to this model, beliefs are selected by evolution based not on their truth value, but by their consequences for survival.  But this simplistic model ignores both neuroscience and the fundamental mechanism of evolution itself.  In general, evolution doesn't select for beliefs at all.  It selects for ability to survive and pass on the genome.  The means by which different creatures survive is extremely varied.

And one of the key genetic traits of the human species is our capacity to form complex cognitive models that enhance our problem-solving capabilities.  A better (and more realistic or truer) cognitive model of our world gives us more opportunities to overcome the problems of surviving in the real world.  The human intellect does indeed improve our chances for survival.  That's what evolution selects for.  Outside the cloistered halls of religious philosophy, Plantinga's ignorance of evolution is laughable.  And anyone who buys his EAAN without first attempting to understand what evolution theory actually tells us is equally guilty of sharing in Plantinga's abject ignorance. 

Finally, Mike clarifies what he means by "the anthropocentric bias of scientism".  In a later comment, he says:
evolutionistically, our brains are designed to help us pursue pleasures, safety, have lotsa food &!lotsa offspring, and basically engage in the kinds of behaviours known collectively as the 4 F's, rather than for detached "understandings" of our greater surroundings. ... But where, in evolutionary theory, do you see how we would have developed the capacity to step back, be objective, and "understand the universe" in the first place? - Mike Gerow
Actually, I think it would make more sense if he said "the anthropocentric bias of  naturalism".  At any rate, this is really an extension of Plantinga's argument that evolution doesn't give us the kind of cognitive function that would lead to anything more than the immediate satisfaction of our base desires - the "4 F's", as he calls it.  I think I have already made a start in addressing this.  We are certainly more than just hedonistic meat machines.  Despite Plantinga;s ignorant claims, evolution has given us intellect.  Plantinga does make one point that happens to be true.  Evolution does not select for true beliefs.  In the case of humans, at least, it has selected for generally improved cognitive function, which often corresponds to true beliefs.  This improved cognitive function is what leads us to inquire about our world and to try to understand it.  And insofar as that greater cognitive function that does correlate with true beliefs has allowed us to solve many problems of survival, it has served us well. 

But the picture is somewhat more complicated than that.  We are complex social creatures, but we don't enjoy anything like perfection in our cognitive models.  We are not immune from false beliefs.  For example, we may gain in social interaction at the cost of certain false beliefs.  Shared religious beliefs and associated rituals, in particular, may play a role in improving our social bonding.  But at the same time, they can hinder the development of more improved cognitive models of reality.  As it is, our cognitive models have been good enough to vastly improve our survival, up to this point in our evolutionary history.  But now we are facing new environmental problems, many of which are of our own making.  The big question in my mind is will we be able to overcome those false beliefs and find a way to fix the problems we have created, to help ensure our long-term survival?

49 comments:

  1. Thanks for your extended response & I'm flattered....

    (1) is "better" living just naturally associated with more truth? As I suggested on meta's board, there may be a problem here, and someone like a Buddhist might point out the possible impasse between science's roles as a fulfiller of human desires (for health, longer life, more food, etc) and a vehicle for the pursuit of knowledge and truth. ;-) ( I called this science's "dual roles"....)

    Does Platinga say anything like this? I haven't read his book but it would seem a bit outside his purview ...

    (2) debates about the self cut across the A/theism divide, btw.....

    Here's a book by a French neuroscientist ( altho what he's doing here isn't really neuroscience.but more like philosophy, as you say)

    https://www.amazon.ca/Descartes-Error-Emotion-Reason-Human/dp/014303622X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504306079&sr=1-1&keywords=Descartes+error

    & here's a German (atheist) philosopher....
    https://www.amazon.ca/Being-No-One-Self-Model-Subjectivity/dp/0262633086

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    1. Not that it is very important but Antonio Damasio is a Portuguese American.

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    2. Yeah? Thx for the correction, jd...

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  2. is "better" living just naturally associated with more truth?

    - I don't know. I think that question might fall into the arena of philosophy. Of course, you would need to define what you mean by "better living". I think it is clear that improved cognitive function and the associated correspondence of the cognitive model with reality (ie truth) has enhanced the survivability of humans. That may not be true in the future, though.

    As for the "dual roles" of science, I think that science is fundamentally a way of discovering or learning truths, which can then be used for a variety of purposes. That knowledge can be subject to misuse, as well.


    debates about the self cut across the A/theism divide, btw.....

    - Again, these debates (as in the subject of the books you note here) fall more into the category of philosophy. Philosophy argues about everything, including matters of science that are well settled.

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  3. skep, I agree it's a philosophical question, and also that alleviating others's suffering by any means is always "better" than not--in a philosophical/ethical sense--too.

    The question I'm raising, in a wider sense, might be whether worldview rooted in materialisms must always lead to materialist-oriented societies? Can that kind of society ever deliver anything but materialist-minded types of "solutions" that lead everyone to expect a continual flow of MORE material-type fulfillments, and which, at this point in history, might soon lead us to exhaust all the resources the planet can provide?

    Then again, from a different perspective, you yourself seem to pondering a similar issue in your last paragraph:

    As it is, our cognitive models have been good enough to vastly improve our survival, up to this point in our evolutionary history. But now we are facing new environmental problems, many of which are of our own making. The big question in my mind is will we be able to overcome those false beliefs and find a way to fix the problems we have created, to help ensure our long-term survival?

    wdyt?

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    1. The question I'm raising, in a wider sense, might be whether worldview rooted in materialisms must always lead to materialist-oriented societies?

      - I think the term materialism is open to interpretation here. Philosophical materialism is concerned with what the stuff in our world is made of, and another kind of materialism is more concerned with how we live our lives. I think it's important to keep those two things separate, because I don't think there's much overlap.

      I understand that if you are a theist, that implies that you are not a philosophical materialist, because you believe there are things that are not made of material stuff. At the same time, you might also believe that a good theist should reject material possessions and hedonistic living in favor of a spiritual quest in your life. So you are non-materialistic in both of these major senses. But you must realize that many theists, while rejecting philosophical materialism, still fully embrace a materialistic lifestyle. At the same time, an atheistic materialist can lead a lifestyle that would be aptly described as spiritualistic - not in the sense that he believes in spirits, but in the sense that he is concerned about state of mind and a quest for self-improvement more than material possessions.

      The role of science is neutral with respect to the kind of lifestyle we should pursue. Granted, it enables more of a materialist lifestyle, by giving us freedom from much of the toil of subsistence. But at the same time, that same freedom can be used to pursue a spiritualistic lifestyle. Science itself doesn't dictate which way we go.

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  4. BTW, it's possible to be both a "theist" - tho I don't really like that term, myself, as it only refers to one possible, kinda Euro-Enlightenment-era oriented and limited way of believing in "God" - and simultaneously hold a position in (eg) philosophy of mind called "nonreducible materialism," or as it's sometimes called "nonreductive physicalism," or at least some peeps say it is....

    This position is kinda outside and independent of the A/theism debates, and is held by many of the most contemporary and most radical theologians (who also typically show very little interest in debating atheists)....


    Nonreductive Physicalism

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    1. If you're any kind of physicalist (whether reductive or not), then the God that you believe in must be a physical thing, or your views would be incoherent. Perhaps you see God as some kind of emergent property of nature. I don't know. It sounds pretty flaky. I don't see any evidence that would support such a view.

      The whole issue of reductive vs. non-reductive physicalism is just a philosophical obfuscation that gets in the way of understanding reality, rather than lending any kind of clarity. If you're an emergentist who believes that emergent phenomena override or negate microphysical laws of causality, I think you need to show a case where those microphysical laws are violated. That has never been done, and I don't think it ever will be. But I still believe that there is emergentism. How do you explain consciousness in terms of the mechanical motion of particles? It's not that these things can't in principle be explained by basic physical laws, but rather that any attempt to do so would be mired in intractable complexity. Emergent phenomena are best described as things that are more easily understood at a different level of analysis.

      Perhaps the easiest way st see this is to use an example where understand something at a higher level, but we also see precisely how it reduces to basic low-level physics. Software might serve that purpose. We develop software as a reflection of the thought process of a programmer. The program is defined with a high-level language, and tokens have symbolic meaning. The programmer himself might have no idea how it is physically implemented. But his program translates to assembly language. And that translates to microcode. and the computer implements the microcode in electronic logic gates. And the logic gates are implemented with transistors. And the transistors are made of doped regions in a semiconductor crystal. And those doped regions interact with electric fields to inhibit or promote the flow of electrons. And the movement of electrons gets us close to the fundamental laws of physics.

      The point of this is that if you look at this whole process its two endpoints, it is difficult to explain one in terms of the other. But we know it can be done in principle. When we consider something like mind, the step-by-step causal connections are not fully known. Mind is vastly more complex than any human invention. But I see no reason to think that it couldn't be explained in principle by low-level physics.

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  5. No, God is understood more like an "event" - a non irreducible irruption into reality - according to the theological view I was discussing (which I do have some personal sympathy with, btw, even if I don't fully subscribe). IOW, in that view, a God is not characterizable in "substantialist/essentialist" terms...and therefore cannot even be definitely said to "have existence". (Those essentialist terms are really nonbiblical and non-NT and were brought in later by converted Greco-Roman intellectuals beginning (perhaps) in the last part of the 2nd century . But I'll leave it to you to look up more about contemporary theology if you want to....

    I also think, as is the case with some people's spins on chaos theory, attempts to characterize something as measurable and explainable "in principle", even if not ever predictable in practice, kinda tend to refute the scientific method?


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    1. But I'll leave it to you to look up more about contemporary theology if you want to...

      - I've heard about how God is said not to "exist" in the way we usually understand the term. I get what they mean. On the other hand, we're talking about something that was never anything but a concept in the minds of men, to begin with.


      I also think, as is the case with some people's spins on chaos theory, attempts to characterize something as measurable and explainable "in principle", even if not ever predictable in practice, kinda tend to refute the scientific method?

      - Not in the slightest.

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  6. Well, this is a little different than classical apophatic theology. Peter Rollins, to refer you this school's most popular representative, makes the case that the death of Christ in the Gospels invokes exactly the death of that "concept", which he refers to (in Lacanian terms) as "the Big Other" or it could be associated with the human "superego in a Freudian sense.....iow the "death" of the God of shoulds and oughts who typically underpins a given society's norms and mores.

    So, at least it's possible to try to THINK God outside a normalized or domesticated box? Does the core of the Xian narrative, "man kills God", intrinsically bring that concept of God into question, tho, as these guys suggest?

    Couple of articles around Rollins, mostly focused on his borrowings from philosopher Slavoj Zizek, and that's all I'm gonna say...

    https://www.pcnbritain.org.uk/blog/post/the_god_who_dies

    https://www.pcnbritain.org.uk/blog/post/the_church_that_dies


    Otherwise, continuing to believe something is totally deterministic when you know you can't ever fully predict it (like eg the weather or, most likely, the decision mechanisms in the human mind) strikes me as a breach of empirical reasoning, and almost in itself an "act of faith," even.....

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  7. continuing to believe something is totally deterministic when you know you can't ever fully predict it (like eg the weather or, most likely, the decision mechanisms in the human mind) strikes me as a breach of empirical reasoning, and almost in itself an "act of faith," even.....

    - I'm trying to make sense of what you're saying here. (And I haven't read those articles yet because it seems to be a completely different topic.) You bring in a few different topics, related in a way that I don't understand. Determinism vs predictability, empiricism and the scientific method vs faith. Perhaps it's your terminology that throws me off. I noted in my OP that you used the word 'scientism' when it would make more sense to use 'naturalism', and you used 'neuroscience' when it would make more sense to use 'physicalism'. If something like that is going on now, I might have the wrong idea about what you are trying to tell me.

    But let me give it a shot. You seem to be saying that unpredictability is equivalent to indeterminacy. If so, that's not the case at all. Something can be completely determined, even though we don't know how it will turn out. Unpredictability is a result of lack of knowledge - ie. we don't have enough information to know what the outcome will be, but that doesn't change the fact of whether something is determined. Using the example of a weather model, we may set it up with all the starting conditions, and if we let it run, it will produce some result, which is completely determined by the program. If I don't know what those starting conditions are, I can't predict what the model will do, but it is still fully determined. Likewise, if the model doesn't have sufficient details in its starting conditions (which might involve detailed knowledge of every single molecule in the atmosphere, surface conditions, temperatures, etc.), the model can't match the actual progression of the weather. In principle, it is possible to create a highly detailed weather model and crank through the calculations to get something that exactly matches the real weather. That is determinism. But in practice, we can't provide all the detailed knowledge needed, so the best we can do is approximate it, and that leads to prediction errors.

    How does this relate to empiricism and scientific method? Without empirical and scientific methods we would have no basis for making any kind of prediction. Our weather models are based on knowledge of the laws of physics, and observance of the conditions. We use science to figure out what those laws are, and the weather model is built upon that. What kind of model do you suppose we could make without any understanding of the physics of the atmosphere? The fact that our models are less than perfect (due to incomplete knowledge) is not relevant to the question of whether there is value in scientific method. There is.

    Is science a matter of faith? That's a loaded question, because 'faith' has multiple meanings. No, science is not a religious faith. It doesn't involve worship, it has no deities, and it doesn't purport to provide answers unless those answers are fully supported by objective evidence. So why do people like me have "faith" in science? Because it is the best known method of obtaining the knowledge that we DO have.

    If I am faced with two different beliefs, X and Y, and I am told that religious philosophy supports belief X, and scientific investigation supports belief Y, there is no question about which one I'd rather believe. But I don't have a religious devotion to science. Just show me something that works better, and I'll happily dump science in favor of that. That's something you won't hear from a religionist about his religion.

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  8. Yeah, skep, language/lingo barriers... You're prolly right about some of my word choices .but I'm just chatting, not producing any kind of document that matters, so no biggie .... You seem to mostly get my drifts. And yeah, there/ been 2 separate topics here on this thread....

    But on weather science, no, it's theorectically possible to predict the weather - if eg one covers the whole planet with weathEr stations - but for about only three weeks only. After that, chaos takes over. There are limits on predictability. "Chaos theory" is actually mathematical and the problems are related to the incommesurabilty of radicals with rationals. But does chaos even exist in the a sense of round-off errors? - the whole thing is a topic of current research.

    Possibly, 'worship' and 'religion' exist because they meets human needs? These can also be secularized, but why does that make everything so different?

    How different are your father confessor and your psychoanalyst when both mostly wanna know about your sex life? ;-) kinda like that....

    This basic tact, btw, is sometimes called post-secular thinking. Here's a snip....

    "It is just that insurrectionist archivists have no interest in a would-be secularist austerity proving itself by a lack of sophistication about that massive and monumentally wonderful archive that are these strands of “religion.” It’s always those who do not see the seething restlessness and unease of this archive who seem always to convince themselves—and others—that it is finished, over, come to nothing. Wanting to unearth, invent, and extend emancipatory instances of solidarity without the tumultuous and shifting archive of religion seems to us like cutting down the rainforest in order to see if useful plant and animal species are lying there beneath it. Such programs are the least interesting of our tradition’s secularist fantasies.....

    Excerpt From: "An Insurrectionist Manifesto: Four New Gospels for a Radical Politics" by Ward Blanton



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    1. Hmm. I'm not sure what to make of this post-secular thinking. Perhaps if I was more familiar with the underlying philosophies. But unfortunately, they are unknown to me. May I ask, is this what you subscribe to?

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    2. I'm not sure there is enough systematic development to "subscribe" to post-secularism like a complete worldview, it's just (from one perspective at least) a term for some sociocultural analysis of the interweaving of so-called "religious" themes within so-called "modern secular" contexts.
      https://www.nypl.org/blog/2010/12/21/what-post-secular


      "The death of god is not just denying the god, it is denying the god-shaped hole. Postmodernity produced the post-secular. The post-secular is its own route of escape and insurrection into new secular formations of being, appropriations of religosity and secularity that don't lament their own automutations, but instead delight in their emancipatory potential and attempt to accelerate them."

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    3. The "god-shaped hole" is just a question-begging device. If you assume such a thing, then whatever you fill it with will likely be limited to some kind of god. If you recognize that it is a natural aspect of the human psyche, then you are open to a much broader range of discussion about what we are looking for.

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    4. Theologically, I'd suggest a god-shaped hole suggests a "God" who satisfies the yearnings and desires of the human heart, i.e., in particular, our desires for 'certainty and satisfaction' as Peter Rollins put it.

      Some of these thinkers Ive been talking about claim the core event in the Xian narrative -- the death of Christ by torture and his exclamation, "why have you forsaken me?", already denies the existence of such a God.

      Cf my "God who dies" link above....

      I'll try to post or link something about how similar religious themes are taken into modernist science, largely to its detriment too. (I've already suggested at meta's that science, too, in its "working" to fulfill our material wishes, thus bankrolling itself, might not really be a boon to its truth-seeking potential.)

      Science can also be, at times, just as pompous as religion.....
      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OrIULxZb8Wo

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    5. Or here, this is another review of Hawking's book "Grand Design" [you see what I mean? ] by a physicist....

      http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2010/09/08/129736414/hawking-and-god-an-intimate-relationship

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    6. Addendum from MJR...

      "While securing such a single theory might seem the ultimate scien- tific liberation from religion, the Brazilian astronomer Marcelo Gleicer has criticized such efforts as hopelessly theological. Since the Ionians, he argues, western scientists and philosophers have been in pursuit of Oneness—whether it be the one primordial element, the one God, or the one theory that will unlock every cosmic secret (2010a: xiii). If the discoveries of the twentieth century have taught us anything, Gleiser claims, it is that the universe is in all likelihood not the coherent, intelli- gible whole we so desperately want it to be. And yet, insofar as it looks for a “Theory of Everything,” modern science remains what he calls “monotheistic science,” still “under the mythic spell of the One” "

      http://wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1115&context=div2facpubs

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    7. I think Gleiser is trying to make the search for a unified theory sound like some kind of religious quest so he can sell his own book.

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    8. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcelo_Gleiser

      Dunno if he's all that much more desperate to sell books than Stephen Hawking. Then again, he's not claiming to be close to "the final answer" or anything else quite that vainglorious.....

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    9. He's making essentially the same critique or a very similar one as in this article I already been posted at meta's. Care to think of some (ad hom) reason these guys are just out to "get" Hawking or whatever as well so you don't ever have to deal with the ideas? *** roll eyes****

      "Hawking believes that M-theory (a form of string theory) will be the truly unified theory Einstein sought after—uniting both Einstein’s general relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Maybe Hawking is right, maybe not. Only time and scientific experimentation will tell. But notice that Hawking is actually saying that String Theory would contextualize Einsteinian General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics not invalidate their central insights.

      And as a consequence, inevitably somebody would ask—assuming M Theory does turn out to reconcile General Relativity and Quantum Theory in a larger context—what is M Theory? What context does it arise from?

      (Modernist) Materialism as a philosophy fails because it is always trying to argue that some context is the final context. It just doesn’t recognize contexts. It always promises to be just on the edge of figuring out the final truth, the final scientific insight the one context that will explain all contexts.

      But materialism never does fulfill its promise of finality—it always finds only deeper and deeper contexts."

      http://www.beamsandstruts.com/articles/item/135-stephen-hawking-and-the-design-of-a-flawed-argument

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    10. I hear Gleiser talking about "the final theory", as if this is the ultimate end of science. I don't hear Hawking saying that - or anyone else.

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    11. No, I think Gleiser was focusing more on "under the mythic spell of the One," but it's a similar issue....

      However, Gleiser does quote Hawking thusly [with my emphs]

      "It was Einstein’s dream to discover the grand design of the universe, a single theory that explains everything. However, physicists in Einstein’s day hadn’t made enough progress in understanding the forces of nature for that to be a realistic goal. And by the time I had begun writing A Brief History of Time, there were still several key advances that had not yet been made that would prevent us from fulfilling Einstein’s dream. But in recent years the development of M-theory, the top-down approach to cosmology, and new observations ... have brought us closer than ever to that single theory, and to being able to answer those deepest of questions."

      So, not the ultimate "end of science" perhaps, but it does seem like he is/was expecting the ultimate answers to "the deepest questions", the biggest ones to be solved soon.... seeming to leave only the various kinds of mop-up ops for ensuing generations of thinkers, physicists, philosophers, or of whatever other kinds, I suppose.....

      .. but even if H is proven correct about the power of M-theory (which seems less and less likely right now with the increasing absence of evidence of SUSY particles) those newer, younger generations gonna tend to disagree with Hawking's assessment, almost indubitably, do u think?

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    12. I think scientists get exuberant about the prospect of answering questions that mankind has been asking for ages. Science is exciting. And it DOES give us answers that religion has failed to. When Hawking speaks of a theory that "explains everything", he doesn't mean literally everything in the sense that religious people believe God explains literally everything. This is where Gleiser gets it wrong. This is not a religious quest. If one theory turns out to be wrong, scientists will turn their attention to something different. And this is where it becomes plain to see that science isn't like religion at all. Nobody is staking their life on any one particular theory the way people bet the farm on their favorite God. They aren't religiously devoted to it. It isn't a matter of faith. They may be enthusiastic about it because it looks promising, but if it doesn't turn out to be true, so be it.

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    13. Actually, I think, if you throw in determinism, a Grand Unified Theory does, in principle, explain "everything", no?

      Pretty much literally.....

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    14. Actually, I think, if you throw in determinism, a Grand Unified Theory does, in principle, explain "everything", no?

      - And they accuse ME of scientism.

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    15. Given determinism - that everything that happens is ultimately an effect stemming from the original Big Bang (even if particulars must be defined within an Indeterministic but statistically definable set of quantum variations) - how then is an explanation of the ultimate origin of the inverse NOT ultimately an explanation (at least in principle) of "everything"?

      I think you're right in that the argument is not as strong as all that.....at best it shows one consistent way of explaining things that subsequent generations are likely to contextualze, cordon off, and /or expand on. But in Hawkng's spin on Einstein's ambitions, cited in his own words above, the goal does sound rather scientismistic, no?

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    16. Given determinism ... how then is an explanation of the ultimate origin of the inverse NOT ultimately an explanation (at least in principle) of "everything"?

      - I suppose it depends on what you mean by "everything". You can say that the initial conditions determine everything that follows, but that doesn't imply that you know how everything works, or that you can predict how everything will unfold.


      But in Hawkng's spin on Einstein's ambitions, cited in his own words above, the goal does sound rather scientismistic, no?

      - If you spin it that way, perhaps. You can look through green light filters, and everything looks green to you. But other people see it differently.

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    17. Yes, and other people continuing to see it differently is a pretty good guarante - esp. within the now fast-changing social/technological environment - that no physicist will ever really come up with a "Grand Theory" - no moreso than any theologian ever will or did...cuz younger geniuses will always wanna tweak it at least & make it their own

      This is part of what's called, "the social construction of scientific knowledge" and in itself it has to be considered the more....scientific- minded concept ...no?

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    18. http://www.hippiessavedphysics.com

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    19. that no physicist will ever really come up with a "Grand Theory" - no moreso than any theologian ever will or did...cuz younger geniuses will always wanna tweak it at least & make it their own

      - There is always room for imaginative minds and new ways of thinking about reality. When an established theory is tweaked or updated, it isn't just because someone wants to make it his own - it's because the new version works better than what we had before.

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    20. You'd have to give an "objective" definition of "works better" there?

      Much of what is " objective" - ie what can be thought - emerges from our socially conditioned realities. Eg, would super-determinism be a more elegant theory to explain the "spooky action" of than accepting the standard theory, the vagaries of Nonlocality , the extremely unintuitive conclusion that "space isn't real?" Maybe it would....

      "[W]e always implicitly assume the freedom of the experimentalist... This fundamental assumption is essential to doing science. If this were not true, then, I suggest, it would make no sense at all to ask nature questions in an experiment, since then nature could determine what our questions are, and that could guide our questions such that we arrive at a false picture of nature."

      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism

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  9. Um, that last post shoulda said "absence" of round off errors.....

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  10. Don't kid yourself that careers in the science community aren't staked (often) on someone's favourite theories being right.

    Where'd you get this spin of yours? .... from a preschool science special on PBS? If the sciences were really this pure and benevolent (not as subject to every sort of human corruption as all other kinds of human endeavour) wouldn't that STRONGLY suggest there would be a God after all?

    "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
    Max Planck, 1949

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    1. Don't kid yourself that careers in the science community aren't staked (often) on someone's favourite theories being right.

      - There's a BIG difference between devoting a career to the investigation of a theory and betting your eternal existence on religious devotion to a story your parents told you when you were too young to understand much of anything.


      Where'd you get this spin of yours? .... from a preschool science special on PBS? If the sciences were really this pure and benevolent (not as subject to every sort of human corruption as all other kinds of human endeavour) wouldn't that STRONGLY suggest there would be a God after all?

      - Hold on there. I'm not the one trying to turn science into a religion. Leave that to the people who can't live without some kind of God. I'm not one of them.


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    2. Yeah okay, well, I just read what you said above .... Hopefully, as you say in this corrective remark, you're not really anywhere near that starry-eyed nor naive.

      And btw, don't make assumptions about "theists" .... Not all "theists" believe in eternal life, or find "personal survival of the self/soul" an unproblematic idea ....(eg humans. - unless transformed into something more angelic or whatever - would become insane after a few millennia at the mos, but if transformed in what sense are "we" the thing that "survives?"

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    3. ... but if transformed in what sense are "we" the thing that "survives?"

      - You raise an interesting question. Eternal implies outside of time. In fact, physicists will tell you that time itself is part of the physical universe. Therefore, to exist in some immaterial realm implies existence outside of time. That has significant implications for what it would be like to be part of that. Thinking is a process that involves changes in our mental states - and that implies that it is temporal. God is said to be static and unchanging. Thomists believe that the intellect of God is not at all like our intellect, and I would have to agree. But for people to exist in this timeless realm would seem to imply something similar. "We" would not be the same "we" that we know.

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    4. I think they say God is static and unchanging "in His essence" - whatever that means - since we might wonder otoh, in what sense amy completely static, unchanging being could be said to be "personal"?

      That would seem more like the Platonic/Neoplatonic One and certainly couldn't incorporate the moody and kinda volatile version of God found in the OT...

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    5. I also mentioned spooky action in another comment ... Is that a non-temporal action - faster than light - and so happening outside the constraints of physical space time?

      http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080813/full/news.2008.1038.html

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    6. OK. I'm not sure what point you're making, though.

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    7. The fact of information being exchanged outside our Newtonian universe raising the POSSIBILTY of non-temporal forms of "thought", contra what you just said above... [It's only..um, a "thought," or something ... :-)]

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    8. That has nothing whatsoever to do with thought. It's a quantum phenomenon.

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  11. Anywhere there's a (predictable) element of change you could conceivably have a pattern-matching capacity - like a network of gates and switches - no?

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    1. If you want to have an intelligent discussion of quantum physics or its observable effects in the world, you may be well advised to do some reading, and gain a more solid understanding of what they're talking about. There is no "(predictable) element of change" in this phenomenon, as I understand it.

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  12. https://uwaterloo.ca/institute-for-quantum-computing/quantum-computing-101#Superposition-and-entanglement

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    1. "In 1994, a mathematician from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Peter Shor, who was working at AT&T at the time, unveiled that if a fully working quantum computer was available, it could factor large numbers easily."

      "Theorists are continually figuring out better ways to overcome decoherence, while experimentalists are gaining more and more control over the quantum world through various technologies and instruments. The pioneering work being done today is paving the way for the coming quantum era."

      Maybe some day. But not now.

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    2. But if it's even possible, it raises the possibility of a "thinking" (and one that could affect the conditions of our existence) that is outside Newtonian/Einsteinian spacetime....a thinking with "faster than light" neural transmissions even. ;-)

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    3. I need to learn more about how this is supposed to work. But something tells me there's no free ride.

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