antaeos

Did you mean photons?

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.

I second this. People seem to come with a built-in affinity for probing just how amazing they are. Depending on your agenda, all you really have to do is help them explore that space.

Fake Steve Jobs must be ready to explode right around now.

But remember, we see faces in clouds. We seem predisposed to bullshit our selves in similar fashion.

Sure, there are things that point to it being authentic, but it isn't.

Speaking of ignorance of the scientific method...

Look, this is what science is about. It's an accomplishment of multiplicitous scepticism over time. Imagine if people had harbored the same iron-clad certainty as to the completeness of Newtonian physics over Einsteinian. They'd probably say something along the lines of, "Sure, there are things that point to space-time distortion around heavy bodies, but that's not the case." And if they were feeling particularly sinister, they'd follow up with, "Look at the wikipedia entry for the facts."

Many things once held to be true are revolutionized by advances in technology. There is absolutely no reason to question the rigour and knowledge with which the Danish expert approached this study. A cursory look (which we seem so fond of today) at his credentials reveals a man of some experience: http://www.kons.dk/dk/site.aspx?p=176

Science is objective scepticism over many, many cycles. It's not a cursory look at a wikipedia page.

"One is the recent wave of neural/psychological research about how our experience of ourselves and reality is constructed in ways that don't at all correspond to our beliefs. There are a great many such findings and from what I've gleaned, they consistently refute our concept of ourselves as rational actors making controlled decisions as we move through objective reality. (I'm still waiting for someone to write a good general survey of this material. There's a crying need for one, though it might not be very popular.)"

I know I'm late to the game here, but you might be interested in reading this:

http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2008/11/26/the-semant...

It's a write-up of a talk given by author R. Scott Bakker, an almost-but-so-fed-up-with-it-that-he-gave-it-up PhD in Philosophy about the experiential consequences of neuroscience.

However, I will argue that this differs significantly from postmodern philosophy in one key respect: while anti-foundationalism certainly is a hallmark of the school of thought, it is never founded on objective scepticism, like science. Even the points made by neuroscience (and Scott Bakker) will have to be undermined by postmodernism, as any one viewpoint (or Meta Narrative) inflects any other viewpoint and has nothing behind it but the authority of people in power.

I have a BA in English, and to the best of my knowledge and training, postmodernism is a manifestly worthless endeavour. When concepts like knowledge, empiricism, veracity, and progress become nothing but whips in the hands of the powerful, you've effectively gotten yourself into a rut you can't get out of. As a result, English departments are dying all over the US. For a detailed look at this, get Jonathan Gottschall's brilliant "Literature, Science, and a New Humanities."