Why modern science alone ultimately falls short is because it does not address that most basic human need for an existence imbued with meaningfulness...
- Cindy
* * * * * * *
Why not? What is it lacking that prevents it from attaining this goal? How does one go about finding meaningfulness? Your brain is a hypothesis testing machine. Whatever process you take to finding meaningfulness is necessarily a scientific one. It may be full of your subjective experience being cast upon your current experience of reality, but it'll be a hypothesis driven approach (just as all human behaviors are).
The point is that there is no bit of truth that science can't approach. By design. How does one find meaningfulness if not through trial and error and learning? THAT is the scientific process.
- Og
* * * * * * *
Well, I discovered this concept of "no free will" is attributed to Darwin. The main issue (as far as I can tell) is that man is an animal the "appears" to have "freewill"
- NeoPlato
* * * * * * *
I still ask the question do we understand Og's point of view? Only when we understand it can we say yea or nay! I lived fifty or more years happy and certain in my dualistic and free will world. Og's simple question about regression of causes demolished my certitude. For that I am thankful.
- Romansh
* * * * * * *
Much of any behavior is a matter of cause and effect. However I'm just not convinced that there isn't more to the equation. Since I'm language oriented and not science oriented I'm caused to look at things by analogy. The universe is not deterministic. It's probabilistic. Complexity allows for a number of probable outcomes the prediction of which is uncertain.
Og may be absolutely correct. The complexity of which I speak may be just a finely woven net from which, eventually, we will be able to absolutely predict the outcomes of human behavior. However, my nature, for whatever cause, has always been profoundly uncomfortable with paradigms that are locked up tight
- Clemsy
* * * * * * *
My take--regardless of the nuts and bolts, whether a staunch materialist, idealist, or somewhere in between, experientially there's no difference to be discerned. So, ultimately, when it comes to living and creating a meaningful life, all that is beside the point... As for the notions of free will and determinism, my take on these is that neither exists as absolutes. We are free to choose within certain bounds, from the level of nature and our place in it through every intervening level up through the cultural.
- Cindy
* * * * * * *
Can you give example of where cause and effect does not come into play regarding free will? And sorry even if quantum mechanics is 'true', our wills are beholden to its probabilistic effects.
- Romansh
* * * * * * *
I do not believe that the exercise of one's will is ever absolutely free, nor do I believe that all is absolutely predetermined. Limits, what I called "bounds" above, always exist in my opinion, but within these bounds we do have the ability to make personal choices, what some might call an exercise of "free will." As I've mentioned before, I'm the quintessential relativist, and I also believe that humans are very much part of the natural world and all that implies.
- Cindy
The key word I found in following this discussion was not ‘science’, ‘idealism’, ‘determinism’, or ‘free will’. The key word for me was the word ‘level’ used by Cindy.
Ages ago, a JCF associate who was deriding the film
What the Bleep do We Know? said, “What happens in quantum physics, stays in quantum physics.” Sometimes a sharp quip like that can be worth more than the entire corpus of well thought out prose of science philosophers and epistemologists. There is simply no easy way to rationally bring together the discoveries of nuclear physics and the discoveries of anthropology into one happy unified theory. And the attempt to do so, even in small ways, even by the top dogs in their fields, has been a big problem. It is sometimes referred to as ‘the science wars’: the war between the soft and hard sciences. The heated debates have waned since their peak in the mid to late 90s. But I don’t think hard and soft scientists have gotten to the point of holding hands and singing Kumbaya. Understand, it’s a matter of prestige – and sometimes research grants as well.
Stephen Pinker, professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard, has written a series of books on language and cognition. I just think this guy is at the level of Carl Sagan in terms of relating scientific ideas to the general public with clarity and wit. Everything I’ve read of his is gold.
Stephen Pinker
Here is a quote of Stephen Pinker from his book
The Blank Slate: the modern denial of human nature., that address the problem we’re discussing here of scientific ‘levels’:
P69 Reductionism, like cholesterol, comes in good and bad forms. Bad reductionism – also called “greedy reductionism” or “destructive reductionism” – consists of trying to explain a phenomenon in terms of its smallest or simplest constituents. Greedy reductionism is not a straw man. I know several scientists who believe (or at least say to granting agencies) that we will make breakthroughs in education, conflict resolution, and other social concerns by studying the biophysics of neural membranes or the molecular structure of the synapse. But greedy reductionism is far from the majority view, and it is easy to show why it is wrong. As the philosopher Hilary Putnam has pointed out, even the simple fact that a square peg won’t fit into a round hole cannot be explained in terms of molecules and atoms but only at a higher level of analysis involving rigidity (regardless of what makes the peg rigid) and geometry. And if anyone really thought that sociology or literature or history could be replaced by biology, why stop there? Biology could in turn be ground up into chemistry, and chemistry into physics, leaving one struggling to explain the causes of World War I in terms of electrons and quarks. Even if WW I consisted of nothing but a very, very large number of quarks in a very, very complicated pattern of motion, no insight is gained by describing it that way.
Good reductionism (also called Hierarchical reductionism) consists not of replacing one field of knowledge with another but of connecting or unifying them. The building blocks used by one field are put under a microscope by another. The black boxes get opened; the promissory notes get cashed. A geographer might explain why the coastline of Africa fits into the coastline of the Americas by saying that the landmasses were once adjacent but sat on different plates, which drifted apart. The question of why the plates move gets passed on to the geologist, who appeal to an upwelling of magma that pushes them apart. As for how the magma got so hot, they call in the physicists to explain the reactions in the Earth’s core and mantle. None of the scientists is dispensable. An isolated geographer would have to invoke magic to move the continents, and an isolated physicist could not have predicted the shape of South America.
So, too, for the bridge between biology and culture.
- The Blank Slate, Stephen Pinker, 2002
So the idea, I gather, is to look for ‘good reductionism’ that ‘connects and unifies’ and to reject ‘bad reductionism’ that tries to replace. But I know this is no easy task. The relativism that allows different levels of perspective results in conflict whenever the draw bridge is lowered to decide a real issue. What percentage of the murderer’s behavior is due to biology? What percentage to environment and culture? What percentage to free will?
The problem of ‘levels’ has been around since Eve and Adam – and is not going to go away, me believes, anytime soon.
- NoMan