The problem with science II

In a previous thread Faith tried to explain to us why she has a problem with the scientific approach to life. Quetzal has made a stab at trying to understand what Faith is going on about in the Deep Faith, Deep Science thread, but I think he's got the wrong end of the stick. So here's my attempt Consider the following poem by Emily Dickinson: Although I haven't the foggiest idea what the first line means, and only have an inkling of what she's getting at in the final verse, this poem has a direct, visceral effect on me and stirs up a whole world of images and feelings. That's the effect of the poem itself - like our experience of life, it is rich, complex and ambiguous.Now science is like a literary analysis of a poem. It isolates features of its subject in order to elucidate general patterns. So just as this poem can be analysed in terms of the poet's use of insect imagery, or her use of dashes for punctuation, so human life can be analysed in terms of its biochemistry or its evolutionary history.What Faith objects to, I think (I'm sure she'll correct me if I'm wrong), is what she sees as the attempt by those with a scientific world view to claim that the scientific analysis is more real than the human experience, as if a literary critic were to claim that the literary analysis were more important than the poem being analysed.So is this a real problem with science or just a misunderstanding by someone who doesn't understand how science works?For my part, I believe it's a real problem, not a misunderstanding. Scientists, being human, can often overstate their case and draw general conclusions about human nature that aren't really justified by the evidence. And science, because it operates within a wider society, can be as affected by fashion and political expediency as any other social activity.Sometimes, false scientific generalisations can have such an impact that they may even stifle scientific research for decades. A case in point is the dominance of behaviourism in psychology from the 50s through to the early 90s. The discovery of simple and repeatable mechanisms of conditioning seemed to provide a hard, scientific basis for a discipline that, until that point, had spent its time discussing vague, humanistic concepts such as memory, reasoning, consciousness, etc. In their desperation to appear 'scientific', behavioural psychologists perversely seemed to believe that it would be possible to understand human psychology without understanding what goes on in people's heads. For decades, any psychologist who wanted to investigate cognition was ridiculed as approaching the subject unscientifically.It wasn't until the advent of modern neuroscience that this tyranny of behaviourism was overthrown.Edited by JavaMan, : Admin request

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Done. I've added a subtitle just to make clear what the context is.

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Sure. No problem. It's an issue that interests me too. We'll see where it goes.

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Welcome to the fray. And good post. In fact it's so good I'm going to have to think about it for a while before I respond properly .(By the way, what part of the UK are you writing from?)

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

You shouldn't take analogies too literally. I'm using an example from a field outside science to show the difference between experiencing a thing and analysing it. That's as far as the analogy goes. I'm obviously not saying science and literary criticism are the same thing. I'm not saying that scientific descriptions of the world aren't true, and I don't disagree that sometimes what they tell us about the nature of things contradicts our personal experience. (Although I'd argue that this is a rarer occurrence than you suggest - if our perception of things were so faulty we wouldn't have much chance of surviving, would we?)But a scientific description is an interpretation of reality, not reality itself. It is a model of reality, built up by making generalisations about particular instances. If you want to explain the biochemistry of human behaviour, for example, there are whole bits of reality that you need to leave out in order to build your model. Alternatively, if you want to explain behaviour in terms of evolutionary advantage you have to leave different parts of reality out of your model.Now this simplification and generalisation is very powerful. It allows you to make accurate predictions about how things work, and this can sometimes mislead people into believing that the model is a complete representation of the thing under investigation. And when the object of investigation is human experience itself, you can get the absurd situation I tried to describe in my previous post, where scientists, or those expressing a scientific world view, claim that a particular model of human experience is more important for understanding human experience than the actual experience itself.Edited by JavaMan, : Edited a typo

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Yes, I think that's pretty much how I'd interpreted it, but thanks for the analysis. It's always good to read someone else's impressions.I love those two lines at the end of the middle section: They seem to contain that perfect combination of the emotional and the physical that excites me in poetry. I'm fairly new to Emily Dickinson, but she's already becoming a favourite. Reading her is like watching a high wire act.

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

The more I read that line to myself, the more it keeps rousing memories of unexpressed desire or love. Growing close to someone, but never getting to the point of expressing what you feel. And then the moment is gone, and you're just left with the unrealized desire.

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

This is a general post to correct a misunderstanding.I am not claiming that human perception is infallible, so examples of human fallibility such as the Monty Hall dilemma, although they are fascinating in themselves, are irrelevant to my point.What I'm trying to do is contrast scientific explanations of human nature with the actual experience of living. The former are abstractions or generalizations of reality, the latter is the reality itself.Maybe Dostoyevsky can explain it better:

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

What argument? That your personal experience of the world is fairly accurate? Do you really doubt that? The point I'm trying to make is that an interpretation or explanation of a thing is different from the thing itself. The accuracy of the interpretation is irrelevant to this point. Where human nature is the object of scientific investigation it is human experience that is the reality being explained. The reality is what you experience, scientific explanation is just a model of that reality. Knowing the mechanism of how one's sense of taste is caused is fascinating and can be very useful, but claiming that taste IS this mechanism is wrong. Taste is the subjective experience - that's the reality that's being explained. I'm talking about living human experience, not understanding it in a rational, scientific sense. I've addressed this in a general post, so I won't go into it here.

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Maybe I'm not explaining myself very clearly. I'm not saying that our experience of things is truer than a scientific explanation of things generally, when by 'things' we mean the world outside us. I don't hold that we have a special knowledge of the truth about a world that's hidden from science. (So I'd completely reject ikabod's argument in my defence, for example!).I'm specifically arguing about scientific explanation of human nature. In this case, and this case only, our experience IS the reality that science is trying to represent. That seems a very strange thing to say. Personally I would have said there was nothing more concrete than my day-to-day existence. Maybe you can clarify what you mean?

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

That's interesting. I got the impression she was gay.

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

The poem was just a hook to hang the argument on. The content of the poem wasn't important (well, not for the argument anyway!). Yes, the scientific establishment can produce as much pseudo-science as the beauty parlour. That's how it seems to me too. I think we're in the old Existensialism vs Positivism debate here, with the two of us in the Existensialist camp, you on the Christian wing with Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, me on the atheistic wing with Nietzsche and Sartre. What do you think?

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

I'm talking about any scientific explanation of human nature here. I'm not criticising any particular scientific theory. (Well, not here anyway, but see my opening post for a specific criticism ).

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Why do I need to make it concrete to you?

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible

Maybe the Romantics are more to your taste. You might be interested in the biography of John Stuart Mill. He was educated by his father in a strict rationalism, learning Greek at the age of 3, philosophy at 5, and so on. In his early 20s, he had a breakdown, which he ascribes in his later autobiography to an over-rationalist tendency stemming from his education. He claims that it was only reading Wordsworth, and finding in his poetry those bits of life that his education hadn't taught him, that he managed to get over his breakdown.Take a look at the Wikipedia entry on John Stuart Mill. You might find it interesting.

---

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible