People are impressed by science, and rightly so. The problem is that they are convinced that science will eventually account for everything, so much so that they think it’s irrational to appeal to any basically different way of accounting for facts about the world.
That’s evidently wrong. So far as I can tell, science—so far as it’s knowledge rather than a method of investigation—is a system of mechanistic explanations of phenomena that rests at bottom on a more abstract system of mathematically-describable regularities in the world around us. As such, it can’t deal with what or why things are, only what they observably do.
It follows that there are basic factual issues science has nothing much to say about: how it happens that anything exists at all, how it happens that the things that exist include subjective experience, what subjective experience is and how it’s connected to human physiology. Those issues are central to our concerns, and to some extent at least they are factual. It’s a fact, for example, that I have subjective experience. It follows that science can’t give us our whole picture of the world. There must be some other sort of inquiry that we treat as a source of our knowledge of things.
Someone might claim that even though there are ultimate questions science can’t deal with, we should look to it alone for answers to all less-ultimate issues of particular fact, like how those things that actually happen come about. That view strikes me as dogmatic. The existence of something rather than nothing is a particular fact, since the world as a whole is a (very large) particular thing. The nature of a particular experience is also a particular fact that science has nothing to say about. It’s a fact that red looks red to me and not green, but science can’t tell me why I have one sensation rather than the other when I see something red.
But if science has nothing to say regarding those particular facts, why expect it to be able to explain all others? Why, for example, expect it to be able to explain mechanistically why I lift my arm when it has nothing to say about my experience of lifting my arm, which is equally a matter of particular fact and includes my decision to do the lifting?
Why does anyone actually need to know about everything?
“that they are convinced that science will eventually account for everything”
I don’t thing that is true. Many scientists don’t make that claim and indeed mathematicians and logicians have proven that it is an impossible goal.
“they think it’s irrational to appeal to any basically different way of accounting for facts about the world.”
Even if it doesn’t answer everything it is the method that best explains many things and by quite a considerable margin over blind faith in silly stories.
“There must be some other sort of inquiry that we treat as a source of our knowledge of things.
Why? I for one, don’t insist that there “must” be. Just who is being dogmatic here?
“It’s a fact that red looks red to me and not green, but science can’t tell me why I have one sensation rather than the other when I see something red.”
Actually recent investigations into cognitive psychology are certainly zeroing in on exactly why red looks red and not green to everyone except the colorblind but letting that pass and moving on to arm lifting, I may not know why you raise your arm if you don’t bother to tell me, but I certainly have a reason for lifting mine and if I didn’t and was perplexed by some unexplained compulsion to do so, I would certainly consult with a neurologist before I asked a priest.
Scientists
Forrest:
Many scientists don’t make that claim.
But their working assumption is that that’s true. It’s not so much articulated, as presumed (as Mona Charen would say). Or have they all these years been leaving a parameter open in their behavioral studies for the effect of Free Will?
blind faith in silly stories.
I’m going to guess you’re 22 years old.
Obama?
I don’t see how Barack Obama’s political assumptions, of all things, have anything to do with, for instance, weather forecasting. Nor do I see how Free Will (in all its capitalized glory) does either.
Clarified
I specified behavioral studies.
People need to know enough
“Many scientists don’t make that claim …”
Agreed. “People are convinced” was intended to refer to a sort of pop scientism that is evidently widespread but certainly not universal.
“[Science is] the method that best explains many things and by quite a considerable margin over blind faith in silly stories.”
Agreed on both points. The second point is trivially true.
“‘There must be some other sort of inquiry that we treat as a source of our knowledge of things.'”
“Why?”
Because there are facts that are important to us, like the nature of other people’s subjective experience, that we need to resolve in order to act reasonably but can’t be settled through methods like those of the modern natural sciences.
“Actually recent investigations into cognitive psychology are certainly zeroing in on exactly why red looks red and not green”
Even in concept, how could scientific experiment show whether or not I see the world with an inverted spectrum compared with the way you see it?
Red
“Even in concept, how could scientific experiment show whether or not I see the world with an inverted spectrum compared with the way you see it?”
That canard is refuted by the fact that the visible spectra is not invertable as there are asymmetries in the gradation of perceptible shades throughout it. Also peoples choices on the Ishihara test shows that they are perceiving the same wavelength when they see the same shade of red. The same cones and rods in the healthy eyes of two people are stimulated and the same areas of the optic nerve are active. I am sufficiently satisfied that we see the same red and I don’t see the need to invent the concept of “qualia” to complicate the issue.
“Because there are facts that are important to us, like the nature of other people’s subjective experience, that we need to resolve in order to act reasonably but can’t be settled through methods like those of the modern natural sciences.”
Human thought, emotions, and speech, are all functions of the central nervous system. If I want to know how you felt about your ride after you have just gotten off the roller coaster at the amusement park I’ll just ask you “How was it?” Although in my experience with roller coaster riders this is rarely necessary as they more often than not feel the need to communicate their experience of the ride and do so.
Riding a roller coaster and communicating the subjective experience of the ride is just as much a phenomenon as the sun coming up every morning is. Both are “facts.” What’s to resolve or to be settled?
“What it’s like” as an invented concept
If you don’t want to discuss subjective experience as something distinct from observable behavior I can’t force you to. It makes it rather difficult to discuss human life, though, which includes our experience of it as well as our observations of what people do in this situation or that.
An invented concept is also a physical phenomenon
Why should we logically treat our so-called “subjective” experiences any differently from our objective ones? And most especially, why on earth do you think that making some undefined distinction between the two is a pre-requisite to discussion?
I find no problem discussing my experience of human life as it is essentially the sum of my observations, what I have learned from others, and my emotional and intellectual reactions to those. In what way does the observation of my emotional reaction to the perceived pain of say, getting kicked in the shin any way prevent me from thoroughly discussing that or any other aspect of human life? Why are any conceptual similes, metaphors, or syllogisms that I invent (or borrow) in order to communicate about my emotional reaction any less real than the toe of the boot interacting with the front of my leg? Rather than being an impediment to the discussion of human life, it has long been held that the ability to deal with ones subjective experiences in a logical manner is a necessary step on the way to wisdom.
I will grant you that internal mental activity is a different type of phenomenon than an external stimulus but it is a phenomenon nonetheless and this is in no way an impediment to a meaningful discussion of anything. If you maintain that thought is not a physical phenomenon, or that you have discerned some other as yet unstated qualitative distinction between a thought and an external event and that this distinction is something that one is required to acknowledge in order to discuss human life, please come up with a concrete example.
Puzzled by comments
The meaning or relevance of most of what you write is unclear to me. In response to your last sentence, though, I would say that my sensation of blue or experience of a pleasantly utopian daydream is different from anything physical in my brain because if a neurologist looked into my brain he wouldn’t find anything blue or pleasantly utopian.
Superstitions?
Of course he would. Brain activity is observable at a gross level in brain scans by seeing the electrical activity caused by neurons firing. There are many higher order brain functions that are not achievable by young children or people with specific brain damage in a certain area. All credible evidence points to thoughts as being the result of electro-chemical activity in the brain.
Your ability to perceive blue is determined by the structure of your eyes and nervous system which you inherited. So is your facility for language, and the learned English word “blue” is associated in different collections of your neurons with your remembered perception of blue things which are also stored as potential energy in your neurons.
What I find unclear are your statements about science not being able to explain certain things that other forms of knowing do, yet you never give any examples whatsoever of what these other forms of knowing are or what facts they purportedly explain.
Why do you have a belief that any and all thoughts of “blue” or your association of pleasure with the contemplation of various ideal political orders are anything other than the physical effect of neurons firing in your brain? What evidence do you have that it is anything else?
Obscure claims
Of course he’s find something blue or pleasantly utopian? Seems doubtful. I don’t think his instruments are set up with that in mind. Can you give an account of what it means to say that neurons firing are the same as the experiences you mention? I can understand the claim one is the effect of the other but the claim the two are identical is quite different.
MRI’s
Well here is a news article that correlates brain activity with seeing:
http://tinyurl.com/c5hka
And another with intention:
http://tinyurl.com/yvfwlb
Scientists have mapped out fifty distinct brain areas and their interconnections that make up the primary visual cortex in primates alone. They are discovering other specialized areas of the cortex dedicated to language, reasoning, planning, and social skills. Other brain organs such as the hippocampus support memory, the amygdala which colors experience with certain emotions, and the hypothalmus from which originates sexual desire.
Sixty years of progressive enlightenment via cognitive psychology and neuroscience has shown that everything we call “mind” is the functioning brain. Why invent dualistic theories of the mind when there is no evidence whatsoever to call for it or support it?
Forrest, can I ask?
Would you
Forrest, can I ask?
Would you call yourself materialist? Or do you think you are just following scientific observations about brain? In my view it is not the same.
Anyway, suppose you and me think about the same thing and suppose thoughts are wholly material. How can we both think about the same think, when two material thinks are never same when they are not on the same place (as I suppose)?
Furthermore, how we do think about numbers? Numbers are immaterial I suppose, so how we can comprehend them with material thoughts?
Have a nice day
Materialism
I suppose you could describe me as a materialist (or physicalist as the current understanding about the forces underlying matter would indicate.)
As for two people thinking about the same thing it is facilitated firstly, by the fact that humans have brains that have evolved an innate ability to register exact quantities of small numbers of objects (see Butterworth’s “The Mathematical Brain”) and also an innate ability for language and grammar (see Chomsky) and secondly, by culture where two different individuals learn, using as a starting point their same innate neural circuitry, to equate the English word “three” with any three distinct objects.
No supernatural explanation is required as all thoughts, including the a priori concept of “three”, are the action of complex combinations of firing neurons. If you are under the impression that we are not talking about the same “three” then I can’t help you nor can I communicate with you (at least by your definition.)
Immaterial is not supernatural, numbers are immaterial
Immaterial is not supernatural – at least as I use it.
You are saying that people have ability to equate the English word “three” with any three distinct objects. I am not denying it of course. You and me can of course communicate about the same “three”.
My point is that it cannot be explained in terms of materialism.
It is because I think numbers are immaterial. Do you think that numbers are material? If they were I suppose there would be at some place, but no number is at some place. They would also change in the passing of time, but no number does change – “three” means always the same thing.
Numbers
Of course numbers are material. The concept of distinct objects and counts of instances of them is innate as I said above. The ability to abstract this to a concept of “number” is a physiological function of another part of the brain. There is absolutely no reason and certainly no evidence supporting the assertion that it is anything else.
What you call immaterial is not. Neurons, synapses, and electro-chemical processes are very real.
Correlation is not identity
You haven’t responded to my request for an account of what it means to say that neurons firing are the same as an experience correlated to their firing. The two things have very different characteristics, so the claim they are the same needs explanation and justification. Showing they are correlated is not enough.
Your line of reasoning seems based on the assumption that modern natural science is identical to our knowledge of the world, so that “should we believe this” is identical to “is this a reasonable extension of generally accepted scientific theory, judged by generally accepted scientific standards.” I have no idea why anyone should accept that view. For starters, science itself depends on informal nonscientific knowledge.
Consciousness
Lower orders of animals that lack certain higher function brain organs such as the neocortex show no evidence of self awareness, neither do people with certain types of brain damage nor those who are in comas. People that experience pharmacologically induced comas show both an observed lack of certain brain wave activity and also experience a subjective loss of self and any memory of events during that same time. This can only lead to the conclusion that consciousness itself is the brain activity which was missing during the coma. QED.
As for a priori concepts in general, which I alluded to in the other response, research by cognitive scientists is beginning to show that all human brains have evolved the following general faculties and intuitions: an intuitive crudely momentum based physics, an intuitive understanding of biology that both recognizes living things and differentiates between plants and animals (a facility for the game “20 questions” is apparently somewhat hard-wired), an intuitive understanding of the meaning of the “mind” or “soul” that differentiates humans (or at least members of ones own tribe) from other animals, a spatial sense, a number sense, a sense of probability and frequency, an innate sense of economic exchange and fairness, language, and (thank God) a native facility for logic including concepts of what, where, when, how, why, and the logical and causal operators “and or not all some necessary possible cause.”
There is an abundance of published books and papers that document this and if you have some alternative explanation of things I’d be interested in hearing the specifics of it.
Repetition
Once again you tell me that there is a correlation between brain states and subjective experience. As I’ve said before, I don’t doubt that.
What is it then?
I’m saying that the mind is certain brain functions. What do you say the mind is?
How should I know?
There are obvious points to make about our subjective experience—e.g., that it really exists, it’s important to us, and it has features that are radically different from the publicly-observable and indeed measurable properties the modern natural sciences deal with. Still, it’s hard to say just what it is. I suppose something similar can be said about other ultimate constituents of reality like time and space. We know things about them but their ultimate nature is rather speculative.
I suppose another point is that our subjective experience is clearly affected by the sorts of thing modern natural science deals with (when I stub my toe I feel pain) but the effect doesn’t seem to be only one way. Otherwise we couldn’t talk about it, because to say something about X is to be affected by it in a way that brings about a physical event (an utterance).
Ghost in the machine
As I said before, those brain activities that cause a decision or initiate an action are themselves physical events. There is no need in my mind 🙂 to posit a ghost in the machine pulling levers and I guess I’ll leave it at that.
Naive metaphysics
No one has posited a ghost in the machine pulling levers, any more than people who reject Berkeleyan idealism posit rocks in the mind of God. You shouldn’t assume that people who think your metaphysics is obviously incomplete really accept it but then add other stuff that doesn’t belong there.
Fundaments of science
(Natural) science rest at fundaments that are not scientific, but filosofical.
For example many sciences use mathematics and (perhaps) all mathematics rests at the concept of “one”. If something is not one it cannot be counted (or exist at all, for that matter). But hardly anybody knows or even takes time to explain what “one” really means , what it really means to be “one”. We have mostly only functional explanations, for example that to “one” means to be countable or negative that to be “one” means not to be many.
Many means not to be one, if you ask 🙂
“One” is a mystery on what (perhaps) all sciences rest.
Not a mystery at all
I take it by your assertions that numbers are not material and the existence of numbers is a “mystery”, that you have not read my replies nor have you read the reference I cited. Let me make it easy for you:
http://www.mathematicalbrain.com/
One thing I know is that the innate, and at least in my case functioning, logic circuits of my brain tell me that repeating a false assertion does not make it any truer.
I am sorry
I am sorry I had no intention to assert something without a proof, but perhaps it might have looked so.
I hope I understand your argument correctly: you (as well as link you posted) think that (1) “humans need (material) brain to think about numbers” implies that (2) “numbers are material”. If it is so, I belive you are wrong. (1) simply does not imply (2).
I of course believe like everybody else that you need brain to think about anything at all. But on the other hand I believe that brain and reason (capacity to think) cannot be equated. Because if numbers are immaterial and reason is material then numbers cannot be thought at all. If my hypothesis of immateriality of numbers is correct, then we will have to leave materialism and say something like that brain is only necessary but not sufficient reguirement of thinking about numbers.
I tried to demonstrate immateriality of numbers, that you deny. Can you please try to respond directly to the demonstrations? I know that “immaterial” look bit weird, but it is in fact more natural than it seems. Please have patience with me and try to understand my kind of reasoning.
My attempt:
Numbers are not material.
1. If they were I suppose there would be at some location, but no number can be localised in space.
2. They would also change in the passing of time like all material things do, but no number does change – “three” means always the same thing.
3. Let us suppose that all countable things are material (as materiast do). There can be for example some apples. Let us suppose that brain has the ability to abstract the concept of number from these material apples (as you do). So we get the universally aplicable concepts of numbers – when somebody thinks that he needs to know about what material things we are speaking when we ask him to say us how much 2+3 is, he is a fool. 2+3 is always 5, regardless of what two and three thing are added together. This is because the universal concept of number is devoid of all materiality.
4. “Three” is always the same in three apples, three stones, three birds as well as three Oxford professors. It can be predicated about all of them in the same way. But no material thing cannot be predicated about many other material thing, that are not identical. Yet “three” can be predicated about stones and birds, no three stones and three birds of course are identical.
I hope it was helpful. It may be the case that you define “material” in other way than me. If it is so then please give me your definition of “material”.
Numbers
Of course a number is localized in space, just like words, the Ruy Lopez opening, hypotheses and theories useful or not, love, hate, and God. The concept of number is nothing more or less than the state that the brain’s neurobiological system is in when thinking about the concept. The concept of addition is learned and is implemented in other areas of the brain that have also been discovered by neuroscientists. If the concept of whole numbers includes immutability as an axiom then it is by definition changeless as a theory as any re-definition of three would require a new theory.
All concepts are functions of the brain and the only fools are those who would equate thoughts with immateriality. If the human race were to disappear overnight then so would number theory.
You seem to confuse what is abstract with the immaterial. “Immaterial” is a concept by the way, that I equate with “nothing” but that shares with that concept a physical manifestation in the brain of the individual who is thinking about it nonetheless.
You can predicate till you are blue in the face from double negations but I fail to see how any system of logic can prove the existence of that which is defined as not existing. And I would advise you to lay off the metaphysics, it’s simply not required for anything.
Metaphysics
You say: And I would advise you to lay off the metaphysics, it’s simply not required for anything.
But when you are asserting that everything that exists is material, you are also doing metaphysics. Such assertion cannot be proved by scientific observations only. When you are trying to speak about anything that is you are always doing metaphysics.
You say: I fail to see how any system of logic can prove the existence of that which is defined as not existing.
But “immaterial” is defined as non existing by materialist only, so if you are supposing it is defined so you are begging the question.
Another questions:
Would you say that truth is correspondence of some sort? What is truth in your opinion?
If numbers are spatial, can they be seen, touched or smelled (or in other way empirically detected)?
Three apples ore not identical to number three, are they?
Thanks for interesting discussion
I really don’t think I can help you
“But “immaterial” is defined as non existing by materialist only, so if you are supposing it is defined so you are begging the question.”
The circular reasoning is entirely yours. I point to brain activity directly linked with various subjective mental processes and you refer to, well, nothing. And as for your definition of metaphysics as speaking “about anything that is” I can only say that since that very “speaking” is also something that is, then it is not “meta” in any way.
As for apples, the fact that a particular group of them has the abstract property of “three” is unrelated to whether or not they are identical. For the last time – the intuitive understanding of three distinct objects exists in an externally measurable group of neurons in the brain and the learned abstract concept of numbers themselves exists in another group.
To answer your questions about truth, first of all the “correspondence theory” of truth contains the implicit existence of metaphysics which I reject as meaningless. Secondly, I consider it true that if you were to step out in front of a speeding cross-town bus that you would in all probability be killed. There are also certain statements that are unequivocally true in various systems of mathematical logic all depending upon the axioms of the particular system. Your continued assertion that various “truths”, “threeness”, or consciousness itself for that matter, can not be empirically detected in the brain is untrue as has been demonstrated by neuroscientists. It logically follows that rather existing outside of space and time all of these ideas would cease to exist in the absence of the brains that conceptualize them. And please note that this is exactly the opposite of Bishop Berkeley’s arguments which all start with the proposition or which inherently imply that the mind of God exists.
The current contempt in which most philosophers are held by both the scientific community and the educated public is directly related to the extent to which they are engaged in metaphysical speculation. Just as biblical theology was reduced to irrelevance by Galileo, Darwin, and Hubble so too is metaphysics being shown to be an unnecessary and therefore silly pursuit by the discoveries of neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
I suppose it boils down to me finding that reliance on common sense is sufficient while you prefer to believe in the value of various abstractions that you call “metaphysical.”
Metaphysics be damned
Mr. Kalb, your retreat into undefined metaphysics is without meaning. You say that science claims “it’s irrational to appeal to any basically different way of accounting for facts about the world.” And then say that science has nothing to say about “what subjective experience is and how it’s connected to human physiology.” I showed that this statement was demonstrably false and then asked what exactly is your “different way of accounting for my facts” and you say “it’s hard to say just what it is.”
No doubt, but that just proves my point that science does explain subjective experience and that you don’t even have an alternative theory.