Materialism - Devastator of Scientific Method! / Observer Delusion

[Nick227]

I'm not sure what I agree with yet, I was just asking for you to explain your reasoning as to why perspective is finished, etc., under the theory that the mind is just what the brain does, or is an epiphenomenon of the brain, etc.

Can you explain your reasoning?

I'll have a go. Subject-object relationships seem pretty much inherent in our world. But what when scientific research clearly points to something being true which devastates the notion of a subject existing at all?

Can you follow me here?

I don't see any fleshing out of your reasoning, just another statement of your claim. Can you explain why method would be weakened if there isn't an observer. And, don't you mean a non-material observer? Or are you allowing for a material observer when you say "observer?"

I mean no observer, full stop. No get out clauses. No dualism. Even observation may be in trouble under materialism. Flatland. The observer is just a massively favoured artifact of our evolutionary past. Great for communicating and fighting, no doubt about it. But for discerning truth?

 

[ehcks]

I mean no observer, full stop. No get out clauses. No dualism. Even observation may be in trouble under materialism. Flatland. The observer is just a massively favoured artifact of our evolutionary past. Great for communicating and fighting, no doubt about it. But for discerning truth?

I think the problem is that you also don't know what "observe" means.

When an photon hits an electron and raises its energy state, that is an observation. When enough photons hit enough electrons in a thermometer that its temperature readout increases by .1 degrees, that's not your observation that the temperature increased, that's millions of individual observations that have nothing to do with human bias.

 

[Nick227]

The entire purpose of the scientific method was removing those biases.

Scientific method traditionally removes biases associated with the subjective. We're not talking subjective here. We're talking that the subject doesn't exist!

They're already gone. For instance, it's not a human measuring distance. We don't use the actual length of a foot for feet anymore. We use real measurements, such as the distance a photon travels in a vacuum over a period of time. Human bias does not change that. Nothing changes that.

Total agreement. But it's a human applying significance to the experiment. It's a human putting it in context and working out what it means. And doing so using an evolutionarily-favoured illusory construct!

Like I said, if it's for an evolutionarily-favoured purpose - protection, staying alive, feeling healthy, getting sex - all cool, no problem. But if you want to discern truth...

 

[ehcks]

Scientific method traditionally removes biases associated with the subjective. We're not talking subjective here. We're talking that the subject doesn't exist!



Total agreement. But it's a human applying significance to the experiment. It's a human putting it in context and working out what it means. And doing so using an evolutionarily-favoured illusory construct!

What is an "objective bias" in this context?

Science doesn't look for what things mean, only what they are and what they do. How they work and interact. Meaning is philosophical at best, not scientific.

 

[Nick227]

What is an "objective bias" in this context?

I don't know.

In this case it's more about a bias that comes from everyone having a pretty much identical tool, which has been developed for a different purpose, and very few people realizing the potential issues with this.

Well, ok, some people. We have the Interface Theory of Perception now. But the ITP may be uncovering just the surface of what will turn out to be a collosal epistemological error.

Science doesn't look for what things mean, only what they are and what they do. How they work and interact. Meaning is philosophical at best, not scientific.

I agree totally. But we're also talking about scientists here, not just science.

 

[Nick227]

Someone has been using exactly the same argument over on Edzard Ernst's blog, in order to object to the "hounding of homeopathy":

Oh God. Looks like Parfit's Transporter went wrong again! I knew I should have taken the train.

 

[Paul2]

I'll have a go. Subject-object relationships seem pretty much inherent in our world. But what when scientific research clearly points to something being true which devastates the notion of a subject existing at all?

Can you follow me here?

Why can't the subject in a subject object relationship be the emergent subject from the material brain?

I mean no observer, full stop. No get out clauses. No dualism. Even observation may be in trouble under materialism. Flatland. The observer is just a massively favoured artifact of our evolutionary past. Great for communicating and fighting, no doubt about it. But for discerning truth?

Why doesn't observation work if the observer is an artifact?

And, it's not the observer (alone) that discerns truth, it's which particular process the observer uses that will discern or muddy up the truth.

 

[Fudbucker]

Isn't it funny how science has done far more to improve the lives of people than the philosophy of science ever has?

Show me a materialism that can grow more efficient crops, that can better harness energy and generate power, that can forge lighter and stronger materials, that can carry more information at less cost, that can prolong human life while reducing human suffering. Show me that, and I will show you a materialism that spells the end of science.

Show me what you've got in this thread, and I will show you exactly so much inconsequential navel-gazing.

Will materialism spell the end of science? Might as well ask if science will spell the end of people being pseudo-mystical superstitious jackasses.

This is always asserted as if it's self-evidently true, but is it? Are people happier today than they were during the pre-agricultural era? Are peoples' lives improved while living under the existential threat of near-total/total destruction of all life on Earth through their own actions (e.g., nuclear war/ runaway global warming)? Was your life improved if you were one of the countless millions killed in the technologically advanced wars of the 20th century?

Here's an excerpt from an interesting article:

"The advent of agriculture, for example, increased the collective power of humankind by several orders of magnitude. Yet it did not necessarily improve the lot of the individual. For millions of years, human bodies and minds were adapted to running after gazelles, climbing trees to pick apples, and sniffing here and there in search of mushrooms. Peasant life, in contrast, included long hours of agricultural drudgery: ploughing, weeding, harvesting and carrying water buckets from the river. Such a lifestyle was harmful to human backs, knees and joints, and numbing to the human mind.

In return for all this hard work, peasants usually had a worse diet than hunter-gatherers, and suffered more from malnutrition and starvation. Their crowded settlements became hotbeds for new infectious diseases, most of which originated in domesticated farm animals. Agriculture also opened the way for social stratification, exploitation and possibly patriarchy. From the viewpoint of individual happiness, the "agricultural revolution" was, in the words of the scientist Jared Diamond, "the worst mistake in the history of the human race".
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/05/were-we-happier-in-the-stone-age

But I don't want to derail this thread on materialism causing the end of science. If Prestige wants to defend his assertion, I'll start a new thread.

 

[Toontown]

I think the OP has given us a good demonstration of how not to use philosophy.

 

[Mashuna]

This is always asserted as if it's self-evidently true, but is it? Are people happier today than they were during the pre-agricultural era? Are peoples' lives improved while living under the existential threat of near-total/total destruction of all life on Earth through their own actions (e.g., nuclear war/ runaway global warming)? Was your life improved if you were one of the countless millions killed in the technologically advanced wars of the 20th century?

Here's an excerpt from an interesting article:

"The advent of agriculture, for example, increased the collective power of humankind by several orders of magnitude. Yet it did not necessarily improve the lot of the individual. For millions of years, human bodies and minds were adapted to running after gazelles, climbing trees to pick apples, and sniffing here and there in search of mushrooms. Peasant life, in contrast, included long hours of agricultural drudgery: ploughing, weeding, harvesting and carrying water buckets from the river. Such a lifestyle was harmful to human backs, knees and joints, and numbing to the human mind.

In return for all this hard work, peasants usually had a worse diet than hunter-gatherers, and suffered more from malnutrition and starvation. Their crowded settlements became hotbeds for new infectious diseases, most of which originated in domesticated farm animals. Agriculture also opened the way for social stratification, exploitation and possibly patriarchy. From the viewpoint of individual happiness, the "agricultural revolution" was, in the words of the scientist Jared Diamond, "the worst mistake in the history of the human race".
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/05/were-we-happier-in-the-stone-age

But I don't want to derail this thread on materialism causing the end of science. If Prestige wants to defend his assertion, I'll start a new thread.

Would you rather live then, or now?

 

[Fudbucker]

As to the OP, science will cause the end of science, when all the major discoveries have been made and scientific achievement means figuring out some subset of a subset of an aspect of a theory (e.g., why is the dorsal fin of some shark species X percent of its body-weight?). Science then will turn into philosophy now- a few people just working on the margins while everyone else is trying to translate scientific discovery into something that has a practical benefit.

We're not there yet, but you can see it coming up. The paradigm shifts in science that used to regularly occur and totally upend a branch of science (germ theory, relativity, genetics, geo-centrism, chemosynthesis, plate tectonics, quantum mechanics etc.) just don't happen much anymore. The last time we even had something close to one was in the 90's, when it was discovered the universe's expansion rate was accelerating. I predict the hunt for dark-energy/dark-matter will be the last great scientific "adventure". I almost included explaining consciousness, but that seems like an insoluble problem now.

 

[Giordano]

My apologies to those who utilize philosophy to puzzle out legitimate issues such as "morality" and "ethics." But I must say that the OP in this thread only further convinces me that philosophy employed to determine "the truth" about the physical world and the brain/mind (which, like it or not is part of the physical world) is a crock. Thousands of years ago, philosophy was probably the best one could do. But then the scientific method was evitually recognized as an approach that does one thing very well: it establishes which aspects of the world exist in a reproducible manner so that if one does x, the result will be y, no matter the philosophy or identity of the experimenter. This has proven to be an extremely valuable approach that cut short a lot of philosophical self-stimulation and discussion, and has led to enormous improvements in what we know about the universe and how we can adapt it to our needs. Including the mind.

Questions of "Can the mind study itself?" and "How do we know that what we perceive is real?" and "What do we mean by what?" are almost pointless, overly self-aware issues. The questions might entertain some, but I fail to see why asking "what should be the facts" is very important if one can ask "What are the facts?" The fact that there are so many schools of philosophy that disagree with one another as to the "truth" highlights to me the concept that this is not an approach that yields truth. In contrast, I and some high school kid in India are likely to agree what the acceleration of gravity represents, and to obtain equal values of g within experimental error.

In fact, I can even apply the same scientific method to the mind, whatever a philosophy says. Different people will typically see the same optical illusion in the same way, and this can be studied using the scientific method by use of our minds to better understand how our minds work. Sam idea if one determines that people with certain lesions in their brains have minds that exhibit corresponding symptoms of Lewy body dementia, even if the MD who discovers this is also using their own mind to figure it out.

 

[tsig]

Yes, we use double blind studies and look for reproducibility of results, ideally from different researchers. We do this to try and remove subjective bias.

It's great, but the next layer of bias that will need to be assessed and dealt with is now on the horizon. And it's not so subjective, more the opposite. From evolutionary biology & psychology we learn of instinct blindness. The fact that human brains developed instinctual reactions to certain stimuli through selection pressure, over a long period of time, means two things. 1) they're pretty much all the same, and (2) their perceptual and cognitive systems are fundamentally instinctual, though mental capacities to override instinct have more recently emerged.



Consider separation. Seems pretty reasonable, huh? I mean I'm here and well, the laptop is just there. Oh, the wall's over there. Until we remove the subject, I, out of the scenario. Now everything is just object. Everything looks the same but the sense of hard boundaries is dispersing. It's more like a TV screen. Now, a masked gunman has just walked into the room! Ah good, hard boundaries again, instinctual responses override this non-dual spaciness. Glad I learned to fight. That's him dealt with. You get the idea?
Perception, distance - I mean they look real. And in any situation where the brain's instinctual response to danger (or other favoured stimuli) is triggered they will seem real as hell. But that guy measuring the distance between those two points, well that's just an action taking place! Where's the real significance?

The significance of scientific method is weakened when the illusion of there existing an observer is seen through. Great, guys. We measured the distance and checked the time. And now, er, we know more about relationships within an erroneous perception of space. Uhm, great.

For tasks with evolutionarily-derived significance, staying alive, reproducing, of course science is wonderful. Determining truth... well maybe. Maybe not.

No, I don't get the idea, the hilited looks like a random agglomeration of words with some punctuation interspersed.

 

[Mashuna]

As to the OP, science will cause the end of science, when all the major discoveries have been made and scientific achievement means figuring out some subset of a subset of an aspect of a theory (e.g., why is the dorsal fin of some shark species X percent of its body-weight?). Science then will turn into philosophy now- a few people just working on the margins while everyone else is trying to translate scientific discovery into something that has a practical benefit.

We're not there yet, but you can see it coming up. The paradigm shifts in science that used to regularly occur and totally upend a branch of science (germ theory, relativity, genetics, geo-centrism, chemosynthesis, plate tectonics, quantum mechanics etc.) just don't happen much anymore. The last time we even had something close to one was in the 90's, when it was discovered the universe's expansion rate was accelerating. I predict the hunt for dark-energy/dark-matter will be the last great scientific "adventure". I almost included explaining consciousness, but that seems like an insoluble problem now.

On physics, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established.

Alfred Mickelson, 1894

 

[Fudbucker]

Would you rather live then, or now?

I honestly don't know. Look at how many people kill themselves these days. Do I want to come down with cancer and suffer for years through treatments so I can squeeze five more years out of my lifespan, or would it be better if I broke my neck falling off my thatched roof? Do I want to live now, while we're rapidly exterminating species, and inching closer and closer to turning Earth into Venus, or back in a time when it didn't matter if the family cow burped out a little cloud of methane? Would I rather go through life believing fairies and sprites exist, and that all this hard work will earn me a place in some afterlife, or know we're all in for the eventual inescapable heat-death of the universe? Ignorance can be bliss.

As Louis CK said, "Everything's amazing, and no one's happy". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E

 

[marplots]

My apologies to those who utilize philosophy to puzzle out legitimate issues such as "morality" and "ethics." But I must say that the OP in this thread only further convinces me that philosophy employed to determine "the truth" about the physical world and the brain/mind (which, like it or not is part of the physical world) is a crock. Thousands of years ago, philosophy was probably the best one could do. But then the scientific method was evitually recognized as an approach that does one thing very well: it establishes which aspects of the world exist in a reproducible manner so that if one does x, the result will be y, no matter the philosophy or identity of the experimenter. This has proven to be an extremely valuable approach that cut short a lot of philosophical self-stimulation and discussion, and has led to enormous improvements in what we know about the universe and how we can adapt it to our needs. Including the mind.

I have come to see the divide as science doing the description and philosophy trying to ferret out what is being described. When there is an observation to be done, or an experiment to construct, the description rules the day. But trying to extend beyond the available observations is still worthwhile. Theorists in science, in my view, are "doing" philosophy. They are limited by the knowledge and habits of their particular field, but they operate in the same theater the philosopher does, pressing at the edges of what we are confident of to see what may/might follow.

In this way, philosophy will always be about unanswered questions.

 

[Manopolus]

Isn't it funny how science has done far more to improve the lives of people than the philosophy of science ever has?

Depends on what you mean by "improve" but that's a whole other thread.

 

[calebprime]

Why can't the subject in a subject object relationship be the emergent subject from the material brain?


Why doesn't observation work if the observer is an artifact?

And, it's not the observer (alone) that discerns truth, it's which particular process the observer uses that will discern or muddy up the truth.

seconded

Depends on what you mean by "improve" but that's a whole other thread.

It seems we have at least two separate topics going on already.

 

[Mashuna]

I honestly don't know. Look at how many people kill themselves these days. Do I want to come down with cancer and suffer for years through treatments so I can squeeze five more years out of my lifespan, or would it be better if I broke my neck falling off my thatched roof? Do I want to live now, while we're rapidly exterminating species, and inching closer and closer to turning Earth into Venus, or back in a time when it didn't matter if the family cow burped out a little cloud of methane? Would I rather go through life believing fairies and sprites exist, and that all this hard work will earn me a place in some afterlife, or know we're all in for the eventual inescapable heat-death of the universe? Ignorance can be bliss.

As Louis CK said, "Everything's amazing, and no one's happy". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E

Fair enough, it seems a simple answer to me, but I appreciate we're in different situations. I'm delighted to have two young children that I can expect to live until old age, and I'm glad my pregnant sister-in-law doesn't have a high chance of dying in labour.

There are other problems that come with the march of time, and I'm fortunate to be born where I was and have the life I do. My ancestors were pretty much all English or Irish peasant farmers, and I'm far too lazy to do real subsitance work.

 

[Mashuna]

Here's a more realistic example: it's more dangerous to fail to perceive enemy action against us, mistakenly attributing covert attacks as chance occurrences, than it is to mistake chance occurrences for covert enemy action. Therefore, one might expect that evolutionary adaptation has made us over-sentitive to patterns and intentions, causing us to sometimes perceive patterns where only chance occurrence exists, and to sometimes perceive intention where no intentional agency is acting.

To get back on topic, I'd agree with this. We know we're more likely to perceive false positives than false negatives, and for what reason. The same is true of various issues where problems are described as 'counter-intuitive'. Our evolutionary history means we're not that good at probability, very large or very small scales to name but a few. Fortunately, we have a tool (mathematics, and to a lesser extent the scientific method) that we use to compensate for these things.

I can't see anything in your proposal that is qualitatively different from anything that we already adjust for.