What are some examples of scientism?

[osgart]

People certainly do have unique personal lives, and there are a lot of factors that contribute to that uniqueness.

You seem quite confident that human behavior does not have physical causes or the result of physical processes. I am surprised in your confidence given our incomplete understanding of how the central nervous system functions. Yet, scientific inquiry into brain function and behavior continue to improve our understanding decade after decade. I, personally, think it is way too early to throw in the towel and say there is nothing more to be learned.

I am curious as to how being philosophical is more effective at measuring emotion, desire, consciousness than a scientific approach? Presumably we have human investigators in both circumstances, one a philosopher, one a scientist. The philosopher is presumably forming his/her opinions on these issues using something other than biology, chemistry, physics, neuroscience, psychology/psychiatry etc. What informs the philosopher that is unavailable to the scientist, both being human beings after all. How does the philosopher mitigate human error in the investigative process, human beings being imperfect and fallible?

Human behavior is effected by physical processes not caused IMO.


If desire, conscience, emotion, and consciousness could be measured and detected science would have something to say about it.

Philosophy is a matter of inferring things to the best explanation. Philosophy is supposed to come up with the right questions to ask. However philosophy is a matter of interpretation and can always be argued about.

Things that fall under philosophy have no direct evidence. Only the physical bares direct evidence. Everything else is subject to philosophical interpretation IMO.

Anything subject to interpretation can be argued about ad nauseum.

To reduce everything to physical causes is philosophy not hard fact.

 

[MikeF]

And no, MikeF you just have another cognition than me. That is all.

That's the whole point, Mikkel. Every one of us is a unique compilation of physical structure and experience. That is why we cannot simply rely solely on our own personal perception and intuition. We consider everyone's perceptions and conclusions and try to understand both why they may agree and why they may conflict. It is understanding the why that allows us to evaluate and reconcile all these unique perspectives and build a better, composite understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

That's the whole point, Mikkel. Every one of us is a unique compilation of physical structure and experience. That is why we cannot simply rely solely on our own personal perception and intuition. We consider everyone's perceptions and conclusions and try to understand both why they may agree and why they may conflict. It is understanding the why that allows us to evaluate and reconcile all these unique perspectives and build a better, composite understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

That includes subjectivity and you can't do that objectively. That is where we disagree subjectively.

 

[MikeF]

The problem is e.g. gravity is objective but cognition and feelings are subjective. You can't use an objective methodology on something which is subjective.

If the frontal lobe of my brain were removed, you don't think that would objectively affect my cognition?

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

If the frontal lobe of my brain were removed, you don't think that would objectively affect my cognition?

That is not all cases of how brains function.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Ok. I will try a different way to explain this.
Detection of color is different from the "having" of the subjective experience of color.
Performing of logical operation is different from the "having" of the subjective experience of thought and inner monologue.
Detection and response to useful and harmful external stimuli is different from the subjective "having" of emotional states.
If I myself did not have first person experiential states and observed my own behaviors that are correlated to these inner experiential states, I would never be able to infer the existence of these first person inner experiential states in others from their acts and behaviors. So a thought experiment can go like this:-

Assume an alien Turing Machine (basically a super-duper computer) with exceptional detectors and enormous processing power, but with no inner mental experiential states, comes to earth to study the behavior of organic brains. In time, based on our behaviour, it creates a perfect theory based on neurochemical signaling pathways of how the brain computes through the day-to-day problems and navigates through its life. It can explain all external brain-body behaviour. But what could possibly induce it to say that in addition that "Aha! That bit of chemical signaling potential gradient among these 75 nerve cells imply an inner experience of blue is generated!" What could possibly be a material " atom-based" model for this inner experience field we find ourselves immersed in all day!

Great.

Now what is the actual practical impact of this?
How is any of this useful in our approach to uncover reality?

How does this affect what "blue" is?
How does any of this play out when we for example determine that someone is color blind?

Or is all this no more or less then the experience of "I like blue" or "I don't think blue is pretty"?

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Congratulations, you're an instrumentalist.

Great. Another -ist label.

The Tyson quote under your posts confirms this btw. This explains why you struggle to communicate with idealists.

And yet another -ist label.

The quote concerns the quest of figuring out how reality works. Nothing more, nothing less.

The reality we "perceive" is that the earth is stationary and that all celestial bodies are what are moving. The tools and methods of science revealed otherwise.

The reality we "perceive" is that the flow of time is a constant always, everywhere, for everybody. The tools and methods of science revealed otherwise.

That's the kind of stuff that the quote is about. Nothing else.

But perhaps you should consider that instrumentalism is itself an anti-realist stance.

And yet another -ism and -ist.
Seriously.

I find it funny how people tend to think that they can put people in neatly tight boxes based on just a few statements in a very limited scope.

In concerning himself only with what can be shown to be real, the instrumentalist abandons the scientific realist's ambition to uncover underlying ontological truths about nature.


instrumentalism (noun)

1. a pragmatic philosophical approach which regards an activity (such as science, law, or education) chiefly as an instrument or tool for some practical purpose, rather than in more absolute or ideal terms.

Sorry, I have no idea what you are accusing me off.
This is way too abstract and vague for my taste.

 

[TagliatelliMonster]

Human behavior is effected by physical processes not caused IMO.


If desire, conscience, emotion, and consciousness could be measured and detected science would have something to say about it.

All those things seem to have physical underpinnings in a physical brain.
Whenever those things are present, brain activity is present.

We are so sure about this that if a thinking person under a scanner doesn't show any activity, we conclude the machine to be defective.

That, and I have never seen any of those things absent a physical brain.

In fact, we can induce such things even by stimulating the brain.


All this tells me that all those things have physical underpinnings in a physical brain. A theory that is supported by all evidence, contradicted by none and which makes testable predictions.

Give me one good reason why I should think otherwise?

Philosophy is supposed to come up with the right questions to ask.

Like Lawrence Krauss once said as half a joke when he was ranting about "philosophers": Philosophy is great at coming up with / asking questions. Science is great at answering them.

 

[Quintessence]

For example: why is it immoral to dump toxic waste in rivers?
How is the answer to that question not a scientific answer which deals with pollution and how it negatively affects fauna and flora?

I haven't read the rest of the thread yet so I apologize if this has already been addressed, but I wanted to comment on this because this sort of thing came up a lot during my postgrad program.

One of the challenges with conservation science as a discipline is that it routinely crosses the line of science and into something else. Why? Because conservation science goes beyond simply observing the environment to making prescriptive or normative statements. We were taught to be very, very mindful of where this line was to stay impartial and objective with the science and be careful with our language in how we talk about what we should do about the data we gather and analyze.

Observing that humans are the primary driver of planetary scale climate change is a scientific, fact-based statement.

Saying that humans are immortal for contributing to this change is NOT a scientific, fact-based statement, it's a value judgement.

Similarly with your example, calling it immoral to dump toxic waste into rivers is NOT a scientific statement, it's a value judgement. A good shorthand way to remember the difference is as follows:

Science is descriptive, NOT prescriptive.
​

Put another way, it observes how the world IS, not how humans think it OUGHT to be.

 

[Erebus]

Again, what is science, what does it mean to have a scientific approach to solving problems and answering questions? In my view, it simply means that it is acknowledged and accepted that human beings are imperfect and fallible in a wide variety of ways, and those imperfections and fallibilities can affect or impact any investigative process.

I agree with your assessment that humans are fallible and that the sciences attempt to mitigate that. However, I feel that the scientific method (or methods) involves more than just the acknowledgement of that fact. My understanding is that the methods used at the very least require looking for some form of measurable/observable evidence that can be subject to further testing.

How you would attempt to do that with something ethereal is beyond me.

I would ask why any line of inquiry should be shielded from mitigating the introduction of human error in the investigative process.

Perhaps human error is sometimes a feature, not a bug? Alternatively, there may be lines of enquiry in which human error is simply unavoidable.

How would you separate human error from literary analysis for example and should you even attempt to do so in the first place? A critic could misunderstand an author's intention but still produce something of value.

To touch briefly on your comments regarding a soul, you state that you are "unconvinced that science is equipped to answer the question, "do we have a soul?"" Again, we are talking about people. Scientific investigation is conducted by human beings. If resources are not available to scientists to tackle this question, then they are not available to anyone, right?

Your statement also begs the counter-question, "Is anyone equipped to even positively assert the existence of a phenomenon labeled 'soul'. " If the answer is yes, then why is that not available to a scientific investigator? If the answer is no, then there is no reason to assert such a concept other than as a speculation, which is fine, but that speculation still has to correspond to what we currently know and observe.

I mentioned that I'm agnostic towards this particular interpretation of the soul. I think you've neatly outlined why.

A philosopher is a human being, just like all of us. If science is philosophy that acknowledges the fallibility of the human investigator and takes steps to mitigate that fallibility, what is gained by kicking the problem back to classical philosophy? The classical philosopher is still a human being with the same access to information as anyone else. What advantage does a classical philosopher have over a scientist?

If a scientist is a philosopher then a scientist is absolutely able to grapple with the question I raised. I would go further and say that they are basically required to.

How do you balance the acquisition of knowledge against the impact that knowledge would have? Is some knowledge off-limits? Should knowledge have utility? What ethical boundaries should we respect?

Those are all questions a scientist should consider. They're also questions that fall outside of the scientific method in my opinion. You may be able to use science to inform your answer to those questions but not to answer them for you.

I certainly agree with you that something would be lost for some people. But this would be true for any case in which a belief is strongly held in error, for example a breach of trust. This phenomenon is not restricted to religion, wouldn't you agree?

If you disagree with his assessment that nothing would be lost, then we agree. Perhaps we differ in terms of what kind of loss we emphasise here.

 

[MikeF]

Human behavior is effected by physical processes not caused IMO.

I don't think your reasoning holds here. If behavior is affected by physical processes, what are those physical processes acting upon? Something physical, right? If I can remove pieces of brain matter and permanently alter behavior, that would be one indicator to me that behavior is a product of the physical brain structure.

If desire, conscience, emotion, and consciousness could be measured and detected science would have something to say about it.

I believe science has a lot to say about all of that. What informs your opinion here? Do you stay current on the topic of neurobiology and neuropsychology?

Philosophy is a matter of inferring things to the best explanation.

I think you will find the philosopher Karl Popper is quite critical of the efficacy of "inferring things to the best explanation." See Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery.

Philosophy is supposed to come up with the right questions to ask.

Ok, and who is supposed to answer those questions? Science, perhaps?

Things that fall under philosophy have no direct evidence. Only the physical bares direct evidence. Everything else is subject to philosophical interpretation IMO.

We human beings create abstract systems such as language, mathematics, and logic in order to organize and communicate our thoughts. Abstraction is boundless and therefore each abstract system we create, we create the boundaries, characteristic, and properties that define that abstract system. If we want to talk about reality, about real things, then we must further restrict our abstract systems to be synthetic with the real world, to correspond and comport to the characteristics and properties of the real world.

If you want to say that philosophy is restricted to abstraction, to imagination unbounded by reality, I say fine, but then it can only be treated as such, providing no insight into the real world.

To reduce everything to physical causes is philosophy not hard fact.

The only way to understand and talk about reality, things that are real is to ensure the abstractions we use to communicate those thought remain synthetic to the real world, for we have the capacity to imagine things that do not exist and can never exist, and we must have a mechanism to keep within the bounds of reality.

 

[syo]

Formal education is scientism. And there is no escaping it.

 

[The Sum of Awe]

Ethics is subjective. There is no external or universal morality, in my opinion. Therefore, we have to come to agreement on the rules we adopt to govern society and enable us to live together in large groups. I'm not suggesting a science based ethical system, rather a science informed one. Understanding how we work, what influences our behavior will allow us to create better social systems to reach our desired goals and outcomes.

It seems we are in agreement then. Ignoring what has been shown through the scientific method in our ethical conclusions would only lead to delusion-based belief. I'm only arguing that there are questions that science cannot answer, such as morality and metaphysics - that's what philosophy is for.

Except that what one believes affects their values and the decisions they make. These include political decisions that affect everyone. People are going to believe what they are going to believe for a variety of reasons. My only argument is that an approach that is informed by our growing scientific understanding resists stagnation and fosters continual social improvement.

Yes, I am in support of a more scientifically informed worldview on all aspects, it's never useful to ignore science, and in fact it can be quite dangerous, as you've said.

 

[sayak83]

Great.

Now what is the actual practical impact of this?
How is any of this useful in our approach to uncover reality?

How does this affect what "blue" is?
How does any of this play out when we for example determine that someone is color blind?

Or is all this no more or less then the experience of "I like blue" or "I don't think blue is pretty"?

The practical impact is that material monism cannot be true. Reality is not material alone. The practical impact is that subjective conscious experience points to another dimension of reality apart from the material word to which we can access through a careful analysis of our own consciousness. The result of such an analysis takes us to the meditative introspective practices and the awareness/wisdom thereof. Having such awareness and not having them is very similar to being blind and being able to see. Yes, a blind person can live a rich and satisfying life....but it is so much better to have vision nonetheless.

The word blue is simply a label we have put to name one aspect of our subjective visual experience. If someone is color blind, all we can say is that her subjective experience is such that a blue label cannot be attached to certain parts of it. But notice, all this depends on our prior having of blue subjective experience which cannot be explained through any materialistic theory...ever.

The fact of subjective experience is perhaps the most fundamental aspect of our reality and materialism/physicalism can have no explanation for it. If that does not bother you then I would suggest you reflect further the the concept of what a worldview is or should be.

 

[Erebus]

Formal education is scientism. And there is no escaping it.

Much of my own formal education has been devoted to literature and fiction writing so I've got to disagree with you here.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Formal education is scientism. And there is no escaping it.

No, e.g. that is not the case of social pedagogy.

 

[MikeF]

I agree with your assessment that humans are fallible and that the sciences attempt to mitigate that. However, I feel that the scientific method (or methods) involves more than just the acknowledgement of that fact. My understanding is that the methods used at the very least require looking for some form of measurable/observable evidence that can be subject to further testing.

How you would attempt to do that with something ethereal is beyond me.

That's the crux of the issue right there. Why postulate anything as being ethereal? What informs such a speculation? If it isn't observable or measurable in any way, how do we know such a thing exists?

Perhaps human error is sometimes a feature, not a bug?

Well, it quite depends on the nature of the error, right? Goodyear discovered the vulcanization of rubber, by accidentally spilling pure rubber and sulfur on a hot stove, or so the story goes.

Alternatively, there may be lines of enquiry in which human error is simply unavoidable.

And all we can do is be patient until such a stumbling block can be resolve, yes?

How would you separate human error from literary analysis for example and should you even attempt to do so in the first place? A critic could misunderstand an author's intention but still produce something of value.

Is there right or wrong in literary fiction? Expressing thoughts, ideas, values, aspirations, fears is nether right nor wrong. We can certainly look to what informs those expressed ideas and consider whether they have merit to us personally, or reflect real or possible aspects of society or the human condition on the whole.

If a scientist is a philosopher then a scientist is absolutely able to grapple with the question I raised. I would go further and say that they are basically required to.

Alright, then.

How do you balance the acquisition of knowledge against the impact that knowledge would have? Is some knowledge off-limits? Should knowledge have utility? What ethical boundaries should we respect?

Having knowledge does not require using that knowledge, especially in a negative way. Knowledge acquisition is a building process, questions answered yesterday provide the platform upon which to ask and work on new questions that when answered provide a platform in the future upon which to continue this process. I do not think there should be limits on knowledge acquisition, at least not permanent ones, and I also agree there are conditions that require ethical restraint in using or implementing acquired knowledge. However, these are decisions to be made and reevaluated by each generation and are not static and fixed. We have the capacity to grow into our every expanding understanding of ourselves and the cosmos.

Those are all questions a scientist should consider. They're also questions that fall outside of the scientific method in my opinion. You may be able to use science to inform your answer to those questions but not to answer them for you.

Methods are specific to the problem under consideration. One does not use a space telescope to study cell nuclei nor an electron microscope to study far off galaxies. In the realm of ethics, for example, we are talking about the management or regulation of human behavior. It would seem to me that a thorough understanding of human behavior and the factors that impact it would be a pre-requisite in making informed choices regarding ethics.

If you disagree with his assessment that nothing would be lost, then we agree. Perhaps we differ in terms of what kind of loss we emphasise here.

Sounds fair.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

That's the crux of the issue right there. Why postulate anything as being ethereal? What informs such a speculation? If it isn't observable or measurable in any way, how do we know such a thing exists?

...

You are aware that neither things, exist or real are concrete, but rather cognitive abstracts, right? You are doing it yourself.

There is an example of a non-observable or non-measurable referent of an experience. No, you know the meaning of no, but you can't observe it or measure it objectively.
Your trick is this. You use words that don't live up to your own rule, yet you in effect ignore that. You have to learn to spot in your own thinking when you do something, which doesn't live up to your own rule. I.e. your rule for how to know is not observable nor measurable in any objective sense.

 

[MikeF]

You are aware that neither things, exist or real are concrete, but rather cognitive abstracts, right? You are doing it yourself.

There is an example of a non-observable or non-measurable referent of an experience. No, you know the meaning of no, but you can't observe it or measure it objectively.
Your trick is this. You use words that don't live up to your own rule, yet you in effect ignore that. You have to learn to spot in your own thinking when you do something, which doesn't live up to your own rule. I.e. your rule for how to know is not observable nor measurable in any objective sense.

Yes, our thoughts are abstractions, but that does not mean we cannot use them to describe and understand reality.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Yes, our thoughts are abstractions, but that does not mean we cannot use them to describe and understand reality.

Well, they are a part of the everyday world in the end. You are trying to make the everyday world objective and the falsification is that I can act differently than you subjectively-