The problem with science II

Hi JM. Just want to say that your presentation has more in common with what I'm after than Quetzal's, but I'm still not ready to get into it. Snow's book hasn't arrived, taking its time, and I also want to go back over what I've already said on the subject, and it's hitting me that it's a really big subject and I really care about it and there's probably too much to think about. Maybe I'll get some inspiration and post anyway, but right now just want to let you know it's on hold for me.

Just want to say that what you are getting at is in the ballpark of what I had in mind about the "two cultures" but I got knocked out of my frame of reference by the recent discussions and have to regroup before I know what I think for sure. And the book still hasn't come -- I misread the notice from them about the timing.Anyway. Not sure what to do with that particular Dickenson poem in this regard but that's the idea. A "science" like Sociobiology is just a klutzy pretense that shouldn't be taken seriously for half a second. It used to make me angry that anyone would dare to pronounce on human experience from such a perspetive. Makes me want to strangle scientists. I'd always immediately think how good literature gets at the truth of human experience in a way that makes the social sciences an offensive travesty.My creationist views are in a different category I think.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I think we are in some camp or other together, and against Positivism sounds right, but I'm not sure this says it. I really can't stand Nietzsche and Sartre but I'm not sure it's their atheism that's the problem. I appreciate Nietzsche's perspicacity though not his conclusions, but I think Sartre was just massively confused about everything. Kierkegaard doesn't enthuse me either, though. I read him as more of a liberal Christian than an existentialist. Wasn't the idea of a "leap of faith" his? That has made nothing but problems ever since, for anyone trying to talk about what Christian belief really is. It's certainly no blind leap of faith. But I always liked Dostoevsky.But it will do for a working model of our situation here.

No, I don't think it has anything to do with any particular school of thought from the past really. This started in my mind, as I recall, with the absurd attack on robinrohan's use of the term "logic," which escalated to an attack on him personally. That struck me as indicative of the whole conflict at EvC in some sense, defining a divide between two different sensibilities or frames of reference so wide as to be unbridgeable, beyond the science vs. religion dispute but possibly in some way related to it. I forget at what point NWR suggested Snow's "Two Cultures" as a framework for what I was trying to talk about, but it caught my attention. The book arrived and I don't yet know how useful it will be.Various forms it has taken in my mind. Not up to trying to explain any of them, and may find some of them don't serve my purpose and that others not on the list would do better. Just for the sake of whatever they might evoke of the problem.The shriveling of human experience
Humanities versus Science
Humanism versus Behaviorism
Philistinism of science
Instrumental talk as opposed to meaning
Reduction of human beings to animals
Literature versus Science
Careerism versus culture, civilization, true knowledge
Survival versus Meaning
Sociobiology versus Everything Human
Analytic Psychology versus Cognitive or Brain Psychology
Brain talk versus experience talk
Implicit morality in supposedly value-free or scientific approaches to social problems
Social science as such with its built in biases in its definitions of its own research projects.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

True. All Marxist categories of "forces" -- all in the service ultimately of "deconstructing" -- read "destroying" -- western culture itself. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

No, I don't mean that. I'm talking about how people THINK about things, about experience, about life. Conceptualizations.As I said, anglagard, "Not up to trying to explain any of them . . ."Also said that I "may find some of them don't serve my purpose and that others not on the list would do better" and that I made the list "Just for the sake of whatever they might evoke of the problem."To you they evoke nothing. In fact your response is probably a perfect example of the very divide I'm talking about since you grasp nothing of what I'm trying to say. Maybe JavaMan will. In any case, eventually I will get through The Two Cultures and perhaps then will be able to decide on the best terms for what I have in mind, and then can begin the hard -- no, probably impossible -- work of trying to explain it.Edited by Faith, : added quote & answer to it.Edited by Faith, : changed "meant" to "mean"Edited by Faith, : eliminated duplicate "to"

Man as a human animal was a very fashionable idea in the 70s, which saw the publication of such books as The Territorial Imperative by Robert Ardrey, On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz, and The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris. E O Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis also came out in the 70s and immediately became the center of a huge controversy. Now apparently the concepts of sociobiology have merged into a new field called Evolutionary Psychology.Again I'm not up to trying to explain anything at this point, I just want to try to define this area of contention that relates to the idea of the Two Cultures conflict between Science and the Humanities, and this is at least one part of it. It derives directly from Darwinism of course, which reduced humanity to an animal. From this followed all the efforts to formulate human experience in objective biological terms.I don't know how far I'll get trying to define this problem area in the end, if only because I find myself at the moment unable to respond to such a treatment of human nature with much more than expressions of disgust. Yuck, Yick, Gag, Blech, etc. I'm sure this will not sit well with anyone here of course. But perhaps after I catch up on my sleep -- didn't get much last night I'm afraid -- I'll have more to say later. In any case I just wanted to note down the category for future reference.Maybe I can at least spell out my emotional response to this category as a feeling of humanity's being violated, like being raped. Reduced to a pathetic piece of physical flotsam. There isn't a shred of truth in the evolutionist approach to human experience. It's a pretentious fraud. So there.Side note: In my researches I came across mention of a book by an anthropologist by the name of Alexander Alland, Jr., which apparently addressed this general area of my discontent under the title The Human Imperative. It apparently got a glowing review in the New York Review of Books in 1973, which means I probably read the review myself at the time. The book is for sale at Amazon and B&N for $58 to $60, OR it's available used for $0.01, which is more within my budget, advertised to be in decent condition too.Can anyone explain to me why it would be sold for 1 cent?

I believe my point was that the sociobiological studies of aggression and naked ape and so on derived from Darwin's work. You want to argue with that?

Yes, but wasn't I clear that this was just a subjective impression and I'm not ready to declare it as something I believe beyond that? Not at all. Whatever the darlings have that we can relate to so personally, it's still nothing like a human being's soul. Biology you are referring to? DNA level biology? I consider it all quite valid except where it insists on evolution -- MACROevolution that is. Edit: Oh, and of course where it spills over into interpreting human social behavior on the basis of insect life and similar such idiocies.Edited by Faith, : as indicated

I don't feel very inspired on this subject at the moment and your post has added weight to that. Since my list was a rough attempt to sketch out what I have for decades found oppressive about some arenas of science, your objections to my categories as "false dichotomies" is just going to be an exercise in your feelings versus mine at this point. What do you plan to do, stamp out my objections with your claims about science? My feelings are going to survive whatever you do and nothing will be accomplished except obscuring the point I'm trying to make. So I'm not really interested in pursuing it at this point. Perhaps I will get a second wind later.The list in Message 42 was an effort to CHARACTERIZE what has bothered me over the years. Just because it hasn't bothered you is no answer. Just to repeat the list from that post: These are obviously a matter of sensibility or interpretation. You either resonate with them or you don't. I think your casting them as "false dichotomies" illustrates the fact of the cultural divide in itself.Edit: Of course you can always register your objections to the list whether it's a finished list for my purposes or not.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Maybe you'd say something that got me interested.

"Problems?" Not how I'd put it. "Problems" implies a solution. This is the kind of conflict that has no solution because it's built into the fabric of people's consciousness. In fact, this whole post of yours in answer to my list to my mind confirms that there is no solution because you don't grasp what I meant by anything on it. You appear to be using the word "experience" in a different sense, perhaps to refer to an increase in some collection of external things that may be experienced --? I'm using it in the sense of the shriveling of the inner life, the vocabulary for speaking of it. Science has its own concepts and vocabulary for human experience, the realm of the humanities, that completely change the meaning of them. As soon as you talk like crashfrog and schrafinator about how this or that human behavior "evolved" as if it actually makes sense to you and explains your own experience, you've left the world of the humanities completely. They never do. They just co-opt the whole arena and claim it is adequately accounter for by their sterile and trivializing terminology. Not sure what you are talking about or what you think I was trying to say. You are talking exactly the way they talk, apparently without a clue to what I'm trying to say. {Edit: "folk meanings" is a trivialization of experience, and here you have subordinated it to the intrumentation of science, exactly what I'm talking about. "Human sensory systems" is reductionistic science talk.} No, it's a worldview, a whole conceptual framework which has consequences in everyday thinking, how one thinks about abstinence-only sex education for instance. Everything is now conceptualized in terms of animal health and human morality is subsumed under such ideas, as something that evolved, that may have some usefulness but certainly no overarching authority for humanity. Typical science talk. You just don't get it. And I guess I can't explain it. Irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make, which I already said. This is a term I got out of my reading of the intro to Snow's essay about the two cultures. It's not something I'd particularly thought of before myself, but it fits in just fine so I used it. Careerism means the mentality that thinks in terms of education as a means to getting on in the world rather than a means to knowledge for its own sake, understanding of the human experience or of oneself, etc. Excellent expression of the science side of the divide, meaning as servant to survival. Survival is a sterile objective and it is what evolution reduces all life to. Everything is just striving to survive. Meaning is just a sort of epiphenomenon. Nor would any scientist. Only those of us on the other side of the divide would. Its not being scientific is nothing against it, in my opinion, as reality is messy and as soon as you think you can capture it in scientific terms you've lost it completely, which is in fact exactly what I'm complaining about. But I agree there were plenty of problems with some of the conceptualizations, especially Jung's, whose stuff I detest. But Freud at his best was a great analyst, and his thinking respected the inner life while science doesn't, to say the extravagant least. Describing the inner life in terms of brain functions is what I'm talking about, and it's eyerolling stuff.See, this is why I don't see the point in talking about this after all. I realize that if you have the science set you just have the science set, and you can't get the other point of view.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Well I wouldn't claim such a strange paradox of a "richer experience of pain, suffering and death" but I would suggest that they had more access to the inner states they experienced, however limited the variety of experiences possible to them. You are saying exactly what I said you were saying, your focus is on the variety of experience, and mine is on the depth of it.And really I suppose this introspective capacity I'm talking about has always been rather a luxury in any time, a privilege of the privileged or educated, and some never had a talent for it anyway, but the more important part of what I'm talking about is the effect of science anyway, and I do believe that the science mentality in general shrinks our inner life for all of us by giving us these pat categories from biology to explain ourselves and causing people to think of themselves in a sort of objectified externalized way as a sort of machine.Again, you are saying that people now have more opportunity for experiences, varied experiences, and that's what I was saying you meant. Crash and Schraf have both argued from this position particularly strenuously, but I had no intention of implying anything about them personally beyond that. It's certainly not that everybody who talks like that lacks an inner life, but it is a general effect on humanity at large I'm trying to talk about, and it's a habit of thinking that can't help but impoverish one's inner life to one degree or another. I have to assume that one may have a rich inner life in spite of it but its effect is nevertheless against it. I do have to say that the pleasures of food and cooking have nothing whatever to do with the depth of inner life I'm talking about in any case. I'm happy to toss that one out. The list was just a brainstorming list. It's a word that might convey something to someone sometime. If that were so, then you wouldn't be talking exactly the way I'm trying to identify. I got fascinated with how it has this science dimension to it while on that thread. Certainly it also has a religious meaning as well, but at least until recently there were many nonreligious who would have defended the moral position that is now only supported from a religious point of view. The posture of moral neutrality of it is very in tune with this sciencemindedness I'm trying to identify. In fact for you to call the religious view "intolerance" is to be speaking FROM this posture of supposed neutrality which is the scientific pose. Of course it's also political correctness. It seems to all run together in some cases like this. I'm sure the sex ed example was just one of many I might come up with if I think about it further. You talk like the other side of the divide there, what else can I say. And I think today the humanities have taken on so much of the science and PC mentality they are rather suspect anyway. I'm not aware of Christians in general decrying behaviorism. It's really rather my own hobbyhorse, and a dated issue in any case. Also, I have not defended any existing abstinence-only program because I don't know what all they teach. On that thread I was very clear that abstinence-only is the ONLY position from which a Christian can teach about sex to unmarried young people, but that the particulars of information beyond that I'm not discussing. That is another subject for another thread, so whether it has anything in common with Skinnerian thought I have no idea. I seriously doubt it though. Actually I kind of anticipated that one coming and I'll have to think about why it's not what I mean. It's probably legit for any science that doesn't require rethinking one's own experience, but if it does have that effect then it's like knowledge that makes knowledge impossible or something paradoxical like that, but I'll have to think about it further. It turns my stomach. But in any case, there's some common ground. Good note to end the post on.

Exactly what I mean. Reductionism. Scientism. You can't operationalize the inner life and submit it to science without trivializing it.

So what we have here are just exchanges of the usual opinion from the two sides of the divide. Back and forth.