Science and the Demise of Philosophy

http://robertpriddy.com/lim/7.html

by 321abc • 17 years ago

18 70 17 years ago

robertpriddy.com

joe_the_user• 17 years ago

Wow,

This certainly gives a powerful overview of the quandary of human beings in our modern world.

Bit heavy for hacker news but I welcome it.

The problem is, humanity won't go back to the world whose loss Priddy describes. So how do we solve these problems going forward?

billswift• 17 years ago

Since the "problems" in that chapter don't actually exist, we ignore them, how else?

antaeos• 17 years ago

I call shenanigans.

Wholly oriented towards investigating and changing the material world, science rejects anything related to practical self-discovery or spiritual truth. In this lies the crisis of the widespread modern intellectualism that swears itself to science; it is incapable of investigating, understanding or dealing with human purposes, eternal values, spiritual realities or the challenges of the meaning of life. On the contrary, science relativises values and makes a private matter of them, thereby undermining them and consequently a moral and good society too. Discovery of new truths about the human soul and destiny will remain beyond its scope until the extent of ignorance about this is better appreciated and much wrong physicalistic thinking about the constitution of the human being is more widely discredited. Only when science is put firmly in its place for what it really is, a study of physical reality by physical means chiefly for material and economic ends, will the crisis be overcome.

As far as I can tell, Priddy isn't saying anything the deconstructivists haven't already; and by that I mean the same hollow self-justifying outcries that have dominated the humanistic part of C.P. Snow's Two Cultures since, well, since Wordsworth. If Priddy and his ilk could ever dream up an alternative which would "put science in its place," I'd be happy to hear it, but so far, science makes progress regardless of whether or not we have the words to describe its journey. It's a simple fact that the humanistic vanguards apparently have a very hard time coming to terms with.

philwelch• 17 years ago

I think there's a use for studying and investigating, in philosophy, what we call "the good life". That's the one thing philosophy has been negligent of, although analytic philosophy (other than that) has been a positive triumph.

prodigal_erik• 17 years ago

I do think "Einstein's famous breakthrough was one of reason advancing well beyond the facts" bears thinking on. It took years before we could try to falsify relativity empirically, so in the meantime how did we avoid filtering him out as just another crackpot?

But it's hard not to dismiss "even investigative and creative reason have largely been blinkered so as to concentrate it overwhelmingly upon the observable world" as whining that people care more about learning from reality than from nonsense made up on the spot.

ajdecon• 17 years ago

Several things about Einstein's work made it plausible and not obviously the work of a crackpot, despite its initial non-falsifiability:

* It was consistent with most observations and experiments done thus far.

* It offered an explanation for known issues which were being grappled with at the time, i.e. the observation of speed of light in moving reference frames.

* It built on existing work and showed Einstein's familiarity with the state of physics at that point.

* It was possible to understand how the theory could be tested, even if the technical skills of the time were inadequate.

Compare this to most crackpot theories we see today: they may be inconsistent with previous observations. They claim to debunk "establishment" theories rather than attempting to grapple with new problems. And they are often constructed so they cannot be falsified, even postulating improved experimental techniques.

So if you see a new theory which claims to explain something like high-Tc superconductivity but requires advances in technology to be testable, it is probably a good-faith effort. But if you see a theory which claims to revolutionize physics by means of an unobservable energy field with no plausible experiments, you're probably looking at a crackpot. Bonus points if the author says "Einstein is WRONG!" in a press release.

foldr26• 17 years ago

That's nice, but you haven't actually identified any particular thing that he's saying which you think is wrong. (Not that I agree with him on everything -- he is a bit too harsh on Medieval theologians -- but I think what he says in that paragraph is pretty much right.)

Herring8• 17 years ago

Really is anything in that paragraph right? It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means; it just so happens that reality is physical. We've prodded the brain enough to be reasonably sure your psychology (purpose, meaning, morals, values etc) is in physical atoms & not in a soul. He really should try to understand this before writing about science.

I think his problem is that we can't simulate his brain on a computer well enough to know what will light up his "purpose of life" neurons.

modeless4• 17 years ago

"it is incapable of investigating, understanding or dealing with human purposes, eternal values, spiritual realities or the challenges of the meaning of life"

This is only true if you believe the brain will remain forever inscrutable. If we come to a complete understanding of how the brain works, we will be able to answer all these questions (at least as far as they relate to humans) far more completely than any amount of introspection ever will.

Actually, now that I look at it, this guy's entire argument can be boiled down to "consciousness is not a physical phenomenon and is therefore outside of science". He could have said so using a lot fewer words, but then it would be too easy to disagree with him.

christopherolah4• 17 years ago

It's pretty clear that your taking a scientific-materialist stance. So, my question to you is how do you explain qualia?

Qualia is a term describing the actual _feeling_ of something as consciously perceived. Wikipedia explains it better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia

The problem is this: Consider perceiving the color red. An outside observer can explain this as photons hitting my eye and me reacting. The only problem is, I can actually see the color. How can a series of chemical reactions cause me to feel?

The irony of this is, of course, that pzombies (philosophical zombies: beings that don't feel anything but act exactly as though they do) would come to the same conclusion.

Since it is impossible for anyone other than myself to verify that I exist as anything more than a series of chemical reactions (ie. I actually feel), it is a difficult problem to work with.

I, for my part, was led to the conclusion that the scientific-materialist perspective was wrong, or at least grossly incomplete. It seems logical as science is essentially the art of useful fiction: we make up the simplest story that predicts the right answers and use it until it breaks (and sometimes beyond that and just avoid the points we know it breaks at).

I'm very interested in hearing others' views.

aidenn0• 17 years ago

Is this worth my time to read? My bogo-sensor was going off like crazy after reading the first couple of paragraphs.

teeja• 17 years ago

The fact that this chapter doesn't bother to mention Kuhn, Popper, Feyerabend, etc. tells me this is axe-grinding.

"The resulting weak role of 'handmaidens' who applaud progress as scientific" were Feyerabend's favorite targets.

brg4• 17 years ago

Philosophy, as it is taught and developed in academia today, is in no way "essential in the further understanding of the nature of humanity and the cosmos."

Science and philosophy were once one. Aristotle, and Descartes where all hailed as both great scientists and great philosophers. But during the renaissance, critical thinking, creativity, and logic separated and became science. Everything that was left retained the name of philosophy.

To look at it another way, science has lead directly to a downfall in philosophy, in that it has provided a way for one to test theories and build upon ideas. In contrast to the progress of science, one sees that philosophy has developed into a useless branch of linguistic games ("What time is it on the sun?") and esoteric navel gazing ("Essence in this its self-movement is reflection"). Anything that can be tested or verified has been removed from the field called philosophy by the philosophers, who have today reverted to Platonists by abanding experimentation in lieu of problems of "pure" thought.

Consider any philosopher of the period since Descartes. Lets say Immanuel Kant. Now what is Kant's philosophy? What of Kant's philosphy has been accepted as true by the community. What of Kant's philosophical theory has been rejected as false by the community. How has the community settled these question of Kant's philosophy?

The answer is that there is no philosophical community. There are only philosophical camps. The only thing relating each camp to another is that they all at war with each other in a grand popularity contest. The community that gets the most air time is in the lead. There is no progress in philosophy, only novel ideas which supplantt the old due to the boredom inherent in parroting nonsense.

foldr26• 17 years ago

> But during the renaissance, critical thinking, creativity, and logic separated and became science.

But modern logic was developed by philosophers in the late 19th and early 20th century. Frege, Tarski and Russell weren't scientists. And it's surely absurd to suggest that there isn't any critical thinking or creativity in the entire philosophical literature since Descartes.

> There is no progress in philosophy,

That's clearly false in some areas. To stick with the same example, our understanding of paradoxes has been greatly increased by the development of modern mathematical logic, which is largely the work of philosophers. To take another, we now have a much better understanding of the possible ways in which the mind might relate to the brain, thanks to the development of behaviorism, functionalism, etc. in the mid 20th century.

In some areas, such as moral philosophy, it's true that there has been no progress if you define progress as consensus. But so what? Would you rather no-one ever thought seriously about moral questions? Just because it is difficult to reach a consensus on some topic doesn't mean that there's no value in thinking hard about it.

brg4• 17 years ago

I apologize for not responding sooner. This is after all a discussion, and not a forum for simply venting.

As for logicians as philosophers, perhaps I am in the minority when I disassociate them soley based on their results. Maybe that is perhaps defining the problem set based on the solution. But in general logicians follow the rigor of mathematics, and as a result their accomplishments are timeless. But when they are older often simply abandon the rigor for treatises on the "meaning" of the Incompleteness theorem or the futility of logic.

As a young man, Russell classified himself as a mathematician. And to paraphrase hi, he became a philosopher when he slowed down, and then a politician when we slowed down even more.

Perhaps the split on mind/brain understanding is again the birth of the science of psychology. Kuhn's work is obviously sociological in nature, yet it is untested. In the regard, perhaps philosophy has a place as a proto-science. It is were ideas gestate before rigor.

But you ask, "So what?" My answer is that these discussions and time spent are not much more than entertainment for those engaged; but they are portrayed as the most noble art and purest pursuit of man. The general populace scoffs when an actor demands respect for ill-conceived political views or an artist is uncovered as a faux-intellectual. In my opinion it is the same when the the twenty year old with tweed jacket and goatee settles down with Nietzsche in the university commons. That's a past time activity; which is fine. We all enjoy a football game, a movie, or a stimulating books. But when we partake of them we know what we are doing. We aren't lying ourselves and others that we are going to make the world a better place by watching the telly tonight.

Science and the Demise of Philosophy

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