The Second Apocalypse
Miscellaneous Chatter => Philosophy & Science => Topic started by: sciborg2 on May 29, 2014, 03:26:47 am
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Etienne Gilson once said, "Philosophy always buries its undertakers" and it seems this will be put to the test. Neil Degrasse Tyson doesn't think people should study philosophy (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/massimo-pigliucci/neil-degrasse-tyson-and-the-value-of-philosophy_b_5330216.html). Krauss has said philosophers that aren't willing to bend down and fellate Science are just an annoyance. (http://theconversation.com/philosophy-under-attack-lawrence-krauss-and-the-new-denialism-12181)
Whether one gleefully evangelizes self-aggrandizing New Atheism with its questionable Return on Investment, takes up Mad Maxian rants in the style of Benjamin Cain, or jerks off to one's own tears while clinging to the very Scientism that apparently obliterates intentionality...is all that's left for philosophy acceptance that reductionism is the undertaker that philosophy cannot bury?
And, if so, what should materialist philosophers do with themselves? Argue with immaterialist contemporaries they expect to drop like flies in the wake of neuroscience? Fight off the Nihilists?
It would seem that philosophy still has something to tell us about what apparently illusory choices we should make with our apparently illusory free will to be in accord with apparently arbitrary morality.
One might think the Is-Ought Problem, Symbol Grounding, the Hard Problem, the criticism of Memory Traces, and so on would give more philosophers some reason to take pride in their profession, but as Berlinski notes the "desire to think of themselves as scientists" goads them into "accepting their irrelevance."
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is capitulation all that remains for philosophy?
Yes.
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is capitulation all that remains for philosophy?
Yes.
What does science have to say about morality?
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I think its more a question of degree--philosophy has less to say every day and I don't think the trend is going to change. Seems like science is going to eat us all up. Bakker had that cool blog post about the future where we discover the exact right way to artificial produce "good literature" and there's nothing left to write. :( Can't remember what that one was called...
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A good question, although in some ways it's the one that has been asked since logical positivism decided that philosophy could not offer a description of the world, that was science's job, and all of ethics and aesthetics were literally meaningless. And that was in the 1920s, so philosophy could trundle on for a long while yet.
As to what science says about morality, well, we know what it says! It says nihilism, no? And nihilism implies general acquiescence to power, since there’s no basis to criticize murder, rape, slavery, etc, therefore no grounds for objections to what a foolish moralist would call abuse of power. Practical nihilism is what we would call Machiavellianism and essentially devolves to power-worship, which if translated into successful toadying makes it by far the most sensible position (from a suitably cynical viewpoint). If you can’t beat ‘em, and it is more or less stipulated that you can’t, then join ‘em, regardless of what they’re up to. It also allows for guiltlessly switching sides when the power-balance tips, so it shares something in common with the “game theory” view of life that was discussed on a thread at TPB. It hasn’t been explicitly advocated on TPB yet, but it’s the only real option once you’ve concluded everything else is fraudulent (eg Scott’s once professed feminism, which is not worth supporting on his own argument, since there’s no such thing as right/wrong, etc. I assume he’s abandoned it as his position has evolved). Combined with the other implication of BBT (fatalism, according to Scott, which I quite like), it becomes quite an easy sell in an American context, esp American business of course! If they play it right, BBT advocates could enjoy a bright future.
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is capitulation all that remains for philosophy?
Yes.
What does science have to say about morality?
Nothing at all, other than showing morality doesn't objectively exist. It proves moral nihilism.
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The thing is, no one is objective anyway. Every person has his/her own view on the world and is therefore, by definition, subjective in all aspects. So if a group of people (read - whole cultures) agree on some moral standards that they should adhere to, that is all it needs. And people who violate it will be punished accordingly.
So in other words, i couldn't care less what all those fancy neuroscientist say. As long as it affects our lives only in theory, why should i care?
The problematic point will be reached when/if some cultures start to "use" the "morality is non-existant so nobody has to adhere to it"-stance. Or in other words the "i can't be made accountable for my actions because there is no free will" and all the other scary-bull-shit excuses people will surely start to make up after this "knowledge" is starting to spread.
So in conclusion - i do not see why the new discoveries really make philosophy redundant. Sure, as above, in theory maybe it is ...not so important anymore. But for the real live out there, why should it all be irrelevant? I mean just because science seems able to "prove" that there is no free will does not mean we really feel like that in our everyday lives etc etc .
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Kellais,
Yes, on a day-to-day problem-solving basis, society can function okay. But there is a reigning assumption that there is some argument for moral action that we might roughly be able to agree on if we think it over hard enough. And the problem of nihilism is that it says no, there is no reason why anything is right or wrong. And if science is on nihilism's side, then for society to resist going nihilist, it will have to be actively at odds with its own method of progress. Which is unlikely. This is the Pessimistic Induction argument, anyway. There is of course a Counter-Pessimistic Induction argument which says that science is constantly finding out it's been completely wrong, and so it's just as likely that a few years from now the trend of research will suddenly point to objective values - we have no idea what science will find out.
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Murphy,
the last sentence of your post is one of the most important ones for my view of those...discussions. Neurosciences are pretty new...and just because they think they have it figured out it doesn't mean they do.
And, to be honest, not our whole society works under the scientist method...so the at odd part is not really a convincing argument. For the field of science, sure, for us as a society, not so much.
On top of it, we would descend into anarchy if our societal standard would be based on nihilism (there is no right or wrong etc. pp.). So i'm kind of hoping we will stick to our guns and will see those discoveries as interesting and discussion worthy but not as our compass to what we as a race will have to do.
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Oh, I'm sure most people are hoping that we'll find a way to stick to non-nihilism, it's just there's a creeping sense of doom about whether that's realistic or not. The proposition might be phrased like this: if capitulation to science is all that's left for philosophy, then capitulation to power is all that's left for society.
Having said that, I do think that a quick glance at the history of science suggests the CPI is about right. Whatever science thinks now, you can be fairly sure it won't think that in the future.
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Oh, I'm sure most people are hoping that we'll find a way to stick to non-nihilism
Most people probably will. I'm fairly sure the average nihilist isn't a sociopath who lives his life entirely by moral nihilism, even though he intellectually admits that there isn't any objective morality.
Humans are moral creatures, for better or worse. It's hardwired in our system.
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I'm not sure that philosophy will be rendered meaningless so much as its meaning will come be nothing more than relevant science. Ethics is the study of how x brain reacts to y behavior. "Treat others the way you want to be treated" can be declared a true moral universal at the point that we can demonstrate that a high enough threshold of brains finds it positive. That's what I imagine will happen. Then Skynet.
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There is a relevant documentary called Human Resources: Social Engineering in the 20th Century.
The things done in the name of science is really disturbing.
If you are curious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zp1hi2lHoRU#t=43
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"Then Skynet". Love it. ;)
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The proposition might be phrased like this: if capitulation to science is all that's left for philosophy, then capitulation to power is all that's left for society.
Society capitulated to power when national states with ruling governments became the norm.
I think Murphy is right about this being an issue of power. How many people on this planet have the time,luck,brains to even consider these kinds of questions? 2%? 3? maybe 5 if I can allow myself to exaggarate a bit. So it is the intellectual elite(and us!:) who decides what to do with this kind of knowledge.
John B Watson(the behaviorism guy) experimented on infants years ago, and found out that fear plays a decisive role as a ruling emotion of behaviour. Not love, but fear.
So, given that the elites in business and elsewhere were aware of this handy knowledge, television and advertising soon came as useful tools of control by spewing out fear, violence and sex in every household in the western sphere(its tentacles is getting more and more global every day of course).
My point here is simply that if the elites have the knowledge that humans are just biological machines, dolls of flesh that can be exploited and used(for whatever purpose) on a mass scale, we suddenly are living in Bakkers neuropath novel. To me that is scary as fuck. If the "wrong" people impose the rule of "no free will" on the general population, what are we left with then? MK ULTRA as a reality show on a saturday night?
It will be very interesting to follow this process further, that is for sure.
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Royce,
Yes, I agree with all that. For someone of a radical temperament, it's an argument against corporate abuse of neuroscience, to which the obvious response would be, "but the corporations own the government, so there will never be any regulation that will prevent it." Which you could say was an argument for rallying people against corporate control of government. Over on TPB, I notice that the view is that this is simply impossible, therefore the only option is fatalism. This is obviously the answer most people want to hear - "you don't have to get involved because it's unstoppable." But I also think it's fairly realistic, since if people haven't risen up yet, I can't see what would make them. So we might as well enjoy it all while it lasts.
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Consider these notes from Searle and Chalmers:
"I believe one of the unstated assumptions behind the current batch of views is that they represent the only scientifically acceptable alternatives to the antiscientism that went with traditional dualism, the belief in the immortality of the soul, spiritualism, and so on. Acceptance of the current views is motivated not so much by an independent conviction of their truth as by a terror of what are apparently the only alternatives."
-John Searle, "What's wrong with the philosophy of mind?"
"A motivation to avoid dualism, for many, has arisen from various spiritualistic, religious, supernatural and other antiscientific overtones of the view. But those are quite inessential. A naturalistic dualism expands our view of the world, but it does not invoke the forces of darkness."
-David Chalmers, "The Conscious Mind"
It seems to me philosophers could eek out a space for humanity if only they dared to suggest whatever we are there is a touch of some mystery in there.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Scientism and the Scapegoating of Philosophy (http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.com/2014/05/neil-degrasse-tysons-scientism-and.html?showComment=1401323684318)
Now that the myths of the free market’s fairness, of democracy’s functionality, and of the link between technoscientific and social progress have been widely exposed as noble lies, a neoliberal humanist can apologize for mainstream Western culture only by discrediting the messengers, however self-destructive the scientistic attitude may be in the long run. This is a desperate defense of the legitimacy of the science-centered modern world order even as science itself undermines all talk of legitimacy as subjective and relative. This scientific reductionism feeds postmodern cynicism and incredulity towards all myths, including the secular humanism of Cosmos, not to mention Bush’s War on Terror or the abortive myth of Obama’s transformative presidency. To be sure, there are still efficacious postmodern metanarratives, such as those seen daily in advertisements, but they operate now only as fads and are thus unsuitable to any long-term project such as that of saving the ecosystems.
Philosophers and authentic religious individuals are in the unpopular business of bursting all of these bubbles, of unmasking the noble lies and rallying the troops to revolt. But Neil deGrasse Tyson’s having none of that. He belittles philosophy as merely useless and thus as no threat to society; as he says, philosophers seem to suffer from paranoia so that they can’t even cross the street. This calls to mind Aristophanes’s play that caricatures the pretentious Socrates as having his head in the clouds so that he misses the facts on the ground. What Tyson misses is that the absentminded, angst-ridden philosophers are only harbingers of science. In so far as philosophers are hyper-skeptical and nihilistic, they’re only drawing out the implications of the scientific picture of natural reality. If academic philosophy is presently irrelevant to public debates, that institution is only the canary in the coalmine. Watch as the mass media, democratic government, fine arts, and other modern institutions are further eroded by science’s continuing disenchantment of nature! All that will remain of postmodern Western society is a dominance hierarchy of barren social mechanisms, assuming scientists continue to discover that our naïve image of ourselves as free, conscious, rational, and dignified persons is a self-serving delusion.
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For a balanced view on science/scientism, read Ian Hutchinsons book Monopolizing Knowledge
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It's just hard to know what a "balanced" view of scientism would be, without lapsing into "science goes wrong when it doesn't tell us what we want to hear." It seems like the "god of the gaps" strategy mutates into "humanity of the gaps", which is not promising when you think how feeble the theological version is, and the only other move is to devalue science/rationality, aka the three monkeys method.
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It's just hard to know what a "balanced" view of scientism would be, without lapsing into "science goes wrong when it doesn't tell us what we want to hear." It seems like the "god of the gaps" strategy mutates into "humanity of the gaps", which is not promising when you think how feeble the theological version is, and the only other move is to devalue science/rationality, aka the three monkeys method.
I don't know about that. Massimo and Cain both have made good arguments for the importance of philosophy as well as the other humanities. (Massimo has a variety of them on his page, I'll post a few later as they're on the whole more...well, life-affirming than Cain's stuff.)
I think Chomsky & McGinn have the right of it when they say we're better off regarding free will as a mystery. I've yet to see anyone make good on acting as if they don't have free will, though I notice people trying to pretend compatibilism gives one a means to act exactly as one normally would if they believed in free will. I find most people agreeing with the pessimistic conclusion, despite their first-person experience, do so because the third-person ontology just has to be right or you're one of the "stupid religious folk".
Watts wrote Blindsight years ago, and in the Appendix he said believing in free will is silly. Yet during the whole Acrackedmoon battle he seemed pretty wound up for someone who should "know" our actions are supposedly born from the collision of atoms.
Hell, even Brassiere complains about what he sees as the immoral Israeli occupation!
As Hoffman notes, we can't use science to prove or disprove God. (http://anti-matters.org/articles/17/public/17-17-1-PB.pdf) I figure we can also just regard ourselves as free willed for similar reasons, at which point meaning and all that jazz is preserved and so philosophy regains its seat of respectability.
Naturally I'll just be watching hot people in K-pop videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9hToWmNBX4), which is what I'll probably be doing if anyone disproves free will to my satisfaction by taking it on as their lived truth. So for me it's just SSDD (Same Shit, Different Day)
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Murphy,
Who said anything about devaluing science? Science and scientism are two different things IMO.
The point Ian Hutchinson makes is pretty valid. There is this new trend of putting the word science in places where it does not belong(political science, social science etc). It confuses the meaning of what science really is, testing, analysis and reproducibility. You probably know all this:) I am just making the point that no one is devaluing the scientific method here.
Although it is interesting that the scientific method rules out explanations in terms of purpose. Purpose presupposes an agent, a personality. Persons can not be adequately described within the rubrics of reproducibility, analysis and testing. They are methodologically excluded, and so is purpose.
It should be no surprise that, therefore, that science fails to find personality and purpose in the world. It could not possibly do so because it rules them out from the beginning. There can never be a scientific explanation of personality or purpose as such. There can be a scientific description of the material substrate in which personality is embodied; brain science is at the very rudimentary beginnings of such a description for humans; but this does not prove that there is no such thing as personality. It is mere presumption, not based on scientific results, to suppose that a scientific description "explains away" personality, in the sense of rendering descriptions in personal terms empty or meaningless.
What about music? You can describe music using science, but that description makes no sense whatsoever in explaining the experience of music. Is the experience of music meaningless?
What about a psychedelic experience? you can also here describe psychedelics scientifically, but again, it does not even hint at what that experience brings to a person. Are the insights gained meaningless?
My point here is that if science(the scientific method) provides the only knowledge worth looking into, everything is indeed meaningless and purposeless. To me that makes no sense. Everyone would commit suicide if there were no meaning to anything.
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You put the case very well and I don’t want to seem stubborn by persevering, since you’re convincing me up to a point. That said, I do think the only way to not capitulate to science’s encroachment is to willfully draw an arbitrary line and refuse to accept anything that crosses over it, which may be very hard to sustain. You say science can’t explain the experience of music – but it will. That’s exactly what it will do. It will define in terms of absolute precision why the subjective emotional wonders of music occur – and once science has nailed that down, to say there’s more to it will be like saying, “oh, but there’s something indefinably more to the taste of ice cream than simply triggering taste-bud responses and pleasure centers in the brain, something magical outside of mere biology.” Music is a device that pushes our buttons and makes us go back for more. Nothing else but science can actually explain the experience of it; outside of that, it will just be babble.
So, I think there’s a huge problem for humanism as science tidies up what’s happening. Just as, at one point, supposed mystical experiences turned out to be explicable as epilepsy or schizophrenia, so the raptures that humanism attributes to other experiences might be revealed as equally misunderstood. I admit it’s only a “might.” But it’s quite a plausible “might.” And then what can we say? But I really did see God when I had that fit, so it makes no difference what the doctor says, right? And if I’ve never heard from God since I started taking the pills, well, that’s just a coincidence. It’s true that following this line of thought leads to absolute meaninglessness, but sadly that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. I defer to Al Gore for a useful description: an inconvenient truth.
I should add, I think there’s probably not an answer to Sciborg’s point, that it’s difficult to see how you’d live like that in practice. Brassier holds views about Israel’s “crimes”, Bakker at least used to say he believed in feminism, and so on. So there’s a hypocrisy, and the nihilist (or pseudo-nihilist) can only shrug about it, leaving the rest of us free to pursue our own interests after all. The problem is that that pursuit might be taking place, possibly, in an ever shrinking context unless science hits on something that opens the box back up again (but we shouldn’t count on that).
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Murphy,
While i agree with you, at least partly, that science will ever move forward and most probably will have a (at least partial) answer to most things, i disagree with you on the impact it will have in the end.
As i said once before, we humans just do not work that way (and in that i agree with Royce and Sci). I mean, as an example, everyone knows that smoking is very very bad for you. It's proven fact. Does it deter us from smoking and dying in the hundred of thousands every year? No, apparently not. We humans just are not that rational. We have the capabilities to use rationality and work with logic and its instruments, but we do not live it, like, at all.
Therefore, even if science entmystifies everything you say in your post, i do not see how it will change our lives ("our lives" as in: 99.9% of humanity). They will just not care. Most of them will not even know that those results are out there. And to be honest, i am glad for it. Because as i said, if these things will ever find a way into our morals and/or societal standards, i think humanity will be done for.
As long as it feels as if we have free will and that there is a "right or wrong", as long as music feels like an experience from out of this world...i couldn't care less about how it is explained (away) by science etc. . If it feels real, it is real...or something along those lines.
Also, as a sidenote, never forget to look closely at what science means by some of those power-words. Sometimes they define stuff so narrowly or "against the everyday use" that it is a very abstract discussion that science holds with itself. Especially, sometimes the opposite of something is not what we think it is. For example "free will does not exist" might not have the implication that everything is already determined. There are shades of grey, so to speak. Or, as a mathematician, i can tell you that most people do not get it right if they try to formulate what we call complementary event.
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Murphy,
My only objection(it is not really an objection,more the case of "we do not have a clue yet) is that (as of now) it seems to me impossible to use descriptive tools(words) to really understand something that transcends words, namely experience. That is why I brought up music as an example. I just can not see how describing how and why music has a profound effect on humans will change the experience itself. That is indeed the interesting part I think.
If science can show us exactly how and why experience is meaningful, will that knowledge make experience meaningless, or will it make it more profound? Why does that knowledge have to be viewed as nihilistic?
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All good points. I'm guessing the technical term would be that nihilism doesn't haven't "first order" implications? I could be wrong about that terminology. In any case, I certainly grant what you both say - and yet it strikes me that it does raise a directly political problem. If scientists figure out how "free will" really works, and nobody pays attention except the CIA and corporations, then we have a problem. Then we'll have a situation where the world works according to nihilism in practice, as run by the 1%, and the 99% are "free will non-skeptics" who choose to remain oblivious to the problem because the reality's too disturbing. Essentially the majority of the population will be in the position of the congregation of a conman preacher, who can't bear to stop being conned because it's more painful to admit their pastor is a fake than to be scammed by a cynical psychopath. How's that for bleak?
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I hear you Murphy, and that does sound bleak. If this is how it will turn out.
I think it was Carl Sagan who warned against scientific and technological discoveries being controlled by the few, because it could create an elitist hierarchical power structure, which would be able to get away with anything. The "herd" remains ignorant, because they will lack knowledge and understanding.
Classic robocop paranoia though:)
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Doesn't it seem weird you have backwater guys on the internet bitching and moaning about nihilism, jerking off to their tears, while the guy who coined the term "Hard Problem" is talking about consciousness collapsing the wave function and how he's increasingly seeing a role for mental causation? (http://www.second-apocalypse.com/index.php?topic=1357.0)
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Weird in what sense? I mean, jerking off to your tears is generally frowned on in most contexts. But "weird" tends to be used as an adjective that implicitly values conformity. Not sure what your point is?
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Weird in what sense? I mean, jerking off to your tears is generally frowned on in most contexts. But "weird" tends to be used as an adjective that implicitly values conformity. Not sure what your point is?
It just seems there's two directions being taken - one is that science is going to disenchant the world, the other is that philosophy + science keeps the world enchanted.
That one side is made up of people ranting on the internet apparently hoping to ruin the day of the average joe suggests that personality may be swaying things toward the pessimistic side rather than any actual truth.
Which is not to say eliminative materialism as a philosophy doesn't threaten every cherished thing humans value, but so would Cthullu waiting in the waters to awaken and threaten all humanity or any other dismal fiction.
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It's a disheartening idea in some ways, liberating in others (fatalism/determinism are perfect arguments for hedonism if personal responsibility is an illusion). I agree strongly that when eliminative materialism is used as a swaggering provocation, it becomes boring, and we can all tell when someone's interest in it is of that superficial type. But I don't see any need to be apologetic about a general interest in, or slight concern regarding, nihilism. It casts a shadow, and not everyone finds the counter-arguments decisive. That doesn't seem unreasonable. After all, the pessimism comes about because nobody has refuted the case. We can talk about what response most people will have to it - eg ignore it, party harder, etc. But those are emotional adaptations, not disproofs.
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After all, the pessimism comes about because nobody has refuted the case. We can talk about what response most people will have to it - eg ignore it, party harder, etc. But those are emotional adaptations, not disproofs.
I will suggest that the pessimism is a choice. As I have stated earlier, I can not see why this knowledge has to be interpreted as meaningless and pessimistic.
Say that a nihilist says to me that science has proved that everything is meaningless, no free will etc. IMO those statements do not take away meaning. If you convince yourself that this is actually true, by pure belief in another persons words, then you label yourself a nihilist. This seems like a choice to me. Although I might be ignorant.
If somehow meaning is "taken away" from experience, then we would for sure experience meaninglessness. I just doubt that statements/words can accomplish that.
Just ask a buddhist what he thinks about the fact that there is no free will, no peronality etc. He would answer that it is full of meaning either way. I am not saying buddhism is right and nihilism is wrong, only that there are many perspectives to consider.
"Meaning is only billions of neurons firing". Well, is not that fucking amazing? Neurons firing=The experience of life. In my humble opinion this is fantastic and filled with meaning. Sorry nihilists:)
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I think a lot of our mechanistic concepts have to do with the history of science and philosophy, rather than the summation of what's in nature.
I used to think there was a huge gulf between skeptical philosophers - who I presumed to be materialist/mechanistic - and those that seemed to want to keep the world enchanted in some manner.
But if a JREF member like Massimo is telling us naive determinism is false and reality rests on the patterns of transcendental Platonic Mathematics, and a New Atheist Horseman like Harris is saying you need consciousness to begin with otherwise a nonsensical something-from-nothing miracle is required....
What does that even mean for reality? As Hoffman notes in the previously linked piece, due to the caricature of reality presented to us we're not in position to say anything definitive about God via our sciences. But then how are we prepared to say anything about the other Big Questions like meaning and free will via our sensory experiences either?
And this is before you throw in the quantum stuff with its challenges to "realism" and the whole observer-participancy suggested by certain experiments. I've seen a few places where it's suggested that the choice is between consciousness influencing reality and the multiverse, and AFAIK the multiverse is just pure fantasy at the moment.
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Well, given the difficulty of all these questions, you can hardly blame nihilists for concluding that one obvious solution to the question of meaning is that it’s a wild goosechase. It’s plausible enough.
As far as pessimism goes, I would draw a distinction between pessimism which has been won honestly and deserves some respect (though not necessarily assent) and glib pessimism which deserves contempt. And that will always be a judgement call. The danger of pessimism, of course, is that it might be disabling in situations which aren’t futile; the danger of optimism is that terrible sacrifices might be made in situations which are. Upshot: don’t have a rule of thumb about what’s possible. But Kahneman says we under-estimate the accuracy of pessimism and I think that’s filtering out into an uptick in pessimistic predictions.
Other than that, though, I agree with Royce. I think nihilism is an essential part of many debates and I’m not sure I’d trust one which ignored it entirely. But it’s not a helpful view in itself and people who say “nihilism, end of story” aren’t particularly bright. The only real question around nihilism is “if nihilism, then what exactly?” which, as you and Sciborg have both pointed out, nihilists aren’t good at answering. You could say they have a theory with no model. I don’t begrudge the theory and I think it provokes useful discussion, but without a model, so what? Same goes for eliminative materialism. When it offers a model, I might care more, but until then, it has no force to it.