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J. B.

Is Scientism a Faith? - 0 views

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    Bob Kurland asks whether science can substantiate the claims of scientism.
J. B.

The Disenchanted Naturalist's Guide to Reality « On the Human - 0 views

  • It is one that most naturalists have sought to avoid, or at least qualify, reinterpret, or recast to avoid its harshest conclusions about the meaning of life, the nature of morality, the significance of our consciousness self-awareness, and the limits of human self-understanding.
  • Scientism is my label for what any one who takes science seriously should believe, and scientistic is just an in-your face adjective for accepting science’s description of the nature of reality.
  • the answers to the persistent questions are not what people want to hear, and the bad news may lead them to kill the messenger—scientific research
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  • So, scientists have an incentive to cover up
  • the mechanism Darwin discovered for building adaptations is the only game in town. Any explanation of the very existence of even the slightest adaptation must be Darwinian. 
  • Ever since Newton physics has ruled out purposes in the physical realm. If the physical facts fix all the facts, however, then in doing so, it rules out purposes altogether, in biology, in human affairs, and in human thought-processes.
  • The fundamental laws of nature are mostly timeless mathematical truths that work just as well backwards as forward, and in which purposes have no role.
  • the process that Darwin discovered–random, or rather blind variation, and natural selection, or rather passive environmental filtration–does all the work of explaining the means/ends economy of biological nature that shouts out ‘purpose’ or ‘design’ at us. What Darwin showed was that all of the beautiful suitability of living things to their environment, every case of fit between organism and niche, and all of the intricate meshing of parts into wholes, is just the result of blind causal processes. It’s all just the foresightless play of fermions and bosons producing, in us conspiracy-theorists, the illusion of purpose.
  • When it comes to life, natural selection, it turns out, is the only game in town.
  • One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours). Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality.
  • Just because there is strong selection for a moral norm is no reason to think it right. Think of the adaptational benefits of racist, xenophobic or patriarchal norms. You can’t justify morality by showing its Darwinian pedigree.
  • The process of natural selection is not in general good at filtering for true beliefs, only for ones hitherto convenient for our lines of descent.
  • we can’t invest our moral core with more meaning than this: it was a convenience, not for us as individuals, but for our genes. There is no meaning to be found in that conclusion.
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    Alex Rosenberg pops the Naturalist's bubble.
J. B.

Do our genes reveal the hand of God? - Telegraph - 0 views

  • I went into science because of these religious reasons, there's no doubt about that. I asked myself what were the two things that appear inexplicable and are used to support religious beliefs: the difference between living and nonliving things, and the phenomenon of consciousness.
J. B.

Massimo Pigliucci on How to Tell Science From Bunk | Skeptiko - Science at the Tipping ... - 0 views

  • that’s like saying the vast majority of astrologers are in agreement with the fact that astrology works.
    • J. B.
       
      Couldn't all this come back to bite him? You can't appeal to individual scientists as authorities, because we can find individual scientists who say anything. And we can't just appeal to scientific consensus, because any consensus in any field could be analogous to "the vast majority of astrologers" having a consensus.
  • The theory is that consciousness, in some way we don’t totally understand, survives bodily death. Now, that’s well-constructed. It’s not totally framed up in scientific terms but it’s an important theory because it contradicts the prevailing materialistic explanation of consciousness, which is pretty much nonexistent because consciousness is something we’re grabbing at. So to say that consciousness in some way we don’t understand seems to survive bodily death, I don’t know why that violates some sacred creed of science.
  • If we’re going to play the expert game, it’s too easy. That’s one of the things that I get into in the book. Almost for any position whatsoever, no matter how far out it is, you will find somebody with a PhD. or an MD that is willing to defend that position. But that’s not the way science works. I mean, you can find scientists who deny climate change. You can find scientists who deny evolution. You can find scientists…
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  • If somebody who does near-death experience research claims that what these people are doing is experience-having a supernatural experience, that’s not science. It’s not science because first of all, science cannot actually say anything about the supernatural to begin with. That’s not what science does.
  • science has been well understood over the last several decades in philosophy as a particular kind of activity which is based on a particular set of assumptions about what is being studied, one of those assumptions is regularity of the laws of nature.
    • J. B.
       
      Are the laws of nature discovered or are they a set of a priori assumptions? Are the laws of nature descriptive or prescriptive? Can't we modify the laws of nature as we discover more about the universe or reality?
  • It’s your paranormal explanations don’t seem to me explanations at all. There’s no mechanism that is being proposed; there is no understanding of how these kinds of things happen. That’s not science.
    • J. B.
       
      Does a mechanism have to be provided in order for it to qualify as a scientific explanation? What mechanism did Newton give? And do we understand how gravity happens?
  • his definition of death, which is as good as I’ve heard, is to say to look at cardiac arrest patients and to know that when someone has a cardiac arrest, this is not a heart attack, this is cardiac arrest. Your heart has stopped. We know within 10 to 15 seconds your brain stops. We know that if we do nothing, you’re dead.
  • One of the most widely accepted ways in both theoretical science and philosophy of science these days, thinking about the relationship between claims and evidence, is the Bayesian framework. So Bayesian theory which is very wide-spread in statistical analysis decision-making theory and so on and so forth, and it’s now being used in several other areas of science.
  • That doesn’t mean we understand consciousness. It doesn’t mean that we have a good mechanistic explanation for what’s going on, but it is something that philosophers of mind refer to as the “no ectoplasm clause.” The no ectoplasm clause is the idea that whatever consciousness is, it seems to depend on the brain.
    • J. B.
       
      If there is no good mechanistic explanation of what's going on, does this mean there is no science of consciousness?
  • you go to the sources, to the actual experts, you look at what they’re saying and say, ‘Well, is there a consensus within that community?’ And if the answer is yes there is, then the best bet for somebody who does not have technical expertise in that area is to say, ‘Look, unless there is in fact a controversy within the scientific community, my best bet is to go with the current consensus,’ of course with the understanding that every consensus in science is provisional.
    • J. B.
       
      Does this contradict his earlier remark about consensus among astrologers?
  • So the argument from authority of course, is a fallacy when you use it this way, if you’re saying that it necessarily follows from a scientific consensus or from what an authority says that what that authority says is true. So if I were to say that, “You know what? I know for certain that climate change is real. Why? Because the experts say so,” that would definitely be an example of a logical fallacy. You cannot derive certain knowledge, you cannot derive consequentially, absolutely certain knowledge from the fact that there is agreement within a certain community of experts because of course, the history of science shows that the community of experts can be wrong.
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    Alex Tsakiris interviews Massimo Pigliucci. They get into an interesting conversation on NDEs.
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    Alex Tsakiris interviews Massimo Pigliucci. They get into an interesting conversation on NDEs.
J. B.

Science Warriors' Ego Trips - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • Standing up for science excites some intellectuals the way beautiful actresses arouse Warren Beatty, or career liberals boil the blood of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. It's visceral. The thinker of this ilk looks in the mirror and sees Galileo bravely muttering "Eppure si muove!" ("And yet, it moves!") while Vatican guards drag him away. Sometimes the hero in the reflection is Voltaire sticking it to the clerics, or Darwin triumphing against both Church and Church-going wife. A brave champion of beleaguered science in the modern age of pseudoscience, this Ayn Rand protagonist sarcastically derides the benighted irrationalists and glows with a self-anointed superiority. Who wouldn't want to feel that sense of power and rightness?
  • a chasm has opened up between two groups that might loosely be distinguished as "philosophers of science" and "science warriors." Philosophers of science, often operating under the aegis of Thomas Kuhn, recognize that science is a diverse, social enterprise that has changed over time, developed different methodologies in different subsciences, and often advanced by taking putative pseudoscience seriously, as in debunking cold fusion. The science warriors, by contrast, often write as if our science of the moment is isomorphic with knowledge of an objective world-in-itself—Kant be damned!—and any form of inquiry that doesn't fit the writer's criteria of proper science must be banished as "bunk."
  • It is, in principle, possible that an empirical observation could confirm intelligent design—i.e., that magic moment when the ultimate UFO lands with representatives of the intergalactic society that planted early life here, and we accept their evidence that they did it. The point is not that this is remotely likely. It's that the possibility is not irrational, just as provocative science fiction is not irrational.
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  • Far from explaining nothing because it explains everything, such an explanation explains a lot by explaining everything. It just doesn't explain it convincingly to a scientist with other evidentiary standards.
  • he concedes that "nonscientific claims may be true and still not qualify as science." But if that's so, and we care about truth, why exalt science to the degree he does? If there's really a heaven, and science can't (yet?) detect it, so much the worse for science.
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    Critique of Massimo Pigliucci's book Nonsense on Stilts
J. B.

Hey Physics, Get Real! - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • The new books on physics promise "a state-of-the-art tour of cutting-edge science that is changing the way we see our world," as the jacket blurb for The Hidden Reality puts it. But they are just recycling the once-startling propositions of Car­ter, Everett, Wheeler, Barrow, Tipler—and Nietzsche and Borges, for that matter.
  • These ideas, in fact, are just scientized versions of stoner thought experiments: What if our whole world is just a grain of dirt in the pocket of a giant? And there is a whole universe inside one grain of dirt in our pockets? What if our world is really just an experiment created by evil machines? And so on. Physicists' fantasies about parallel and virtual realms are not just stale. Increasingly they strike me as escapist and irresponsible.
  • Physics (along with biology) is STILL the primary deliverer of awe to our lives. This is the THE PRIMARY religious function that physics took over from all religions and churches centuries ago. It opens up minds and emotions whenever we visit its knowledge edges seriously.
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  • -these two disciplines are the core of our global church/temple/etc.
  • Physics and biology PLACE us in the giant scheme of things---not centrally---but tentatively, fragily, remarkably, appreciatively. They evoke cosmic gratitude for TODAY from us. THEY channel the divine to our self concerned lives, breaking us out of our narcissisms.
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