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Author | Topic: The problem with science II | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Yes, overall you have put your finger on something central to the problem here, the utter lack of any attempt on the part of the science side even to begin to grasp what the other side is saying before they start forcing the conversation into their own terminology, thereby misrepresenting and making a shambles of the whole effort.
Good show. You're on the record, repeatedly, for saying that the purpose of heterosexual activity is reproduction. Now you think it's "laughable" to assert that men are attracted to women because they want to reproduce with them? Should we just start calling you "Flip-flop Faith"?
This wouldn't be flip-flopping unless Faith asserted that men are attracted to women because it is their purpose to reproduce with them. Though from an evolutionary standpoint this might make sense, somehow I doubt that Faith would argue from that standpoint. That is correct, I never have said such a thing and I'm now ridiculing that very idea, as I already explained.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
So what you are calling "scientism" is a habit of mind and also a philosophy. It's not a science; however, certain scientific ideas suggest it. Here are two symptoms of "scientism": 1. explaining human behavior in evolutionary terms2. equating mind with brain. Correct? I'd say so, yes.
We as humans have a feeling of incorporeality as regards our "minds." I feel like I am incorporeal. Scientism wishes to do away with that feeling. I'm hesitant to make too broad a generalization -- but I'll go with it. OK, that's one thing that scientism does. But I doubt they'd say they care about "doing away with" the feeling as long as they make sure it's understood that's all it is, a feeling and therefore an illusion that has nothing to do with reality.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I'm sorry Percy, the way you are going about this just doesn't ... interest me. I don't want to even think about "how scientific methods are applied in biology." Sorry. I'm trying to do something else, and in fact at the point of abandoning communicating anything at all about it.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Nihilism makes perfect sense. I think I have a problem with the way you derive this, because when I was an atheist I would have thought that nihilism did make sense as you define it (without using the word), but I resented the thinking that made human beings into things, always hated the physicalistic reduction of mind to brain and thought and feeling to epiphenomena and human being to animal. All that even though I was an atheist and believed in evolution. But maybe I was being stubbornly irrational about it -- I trusted my subjective introspective "knowledge" that human beings were way more than that. I would have agreed, however, based on my atheism I suppose, and general nihilism in the sense of believing we have no "formal purpose" as you defined it, all thanks to Darwin really, that morality makes no sense, or sin or virtue. But I would have denied, just on the basis of subjective experience, or on the basis of human history, or even literature, what you say about how ""free will" is meaningless" or that "Our thoughts are merely like water running downhill." Edited by Faith, : No reason given. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Well, there's the whole shabang there, as you have very well expressed it. Now I'm having trouble following you. I thought I'd disagreed with some part of what you were saying. But I think this subject has got out of my hand. It got going before I'd thought it through and all the strange and aggressively argued misunderstandings by others have made me lose interest. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Now as for the computer point, yes I stand by it. If a church (or some other dogmatic authority) had continually repressed scientific enquiry during our recent history then we would have had no means of accumulating the necessary knowledge to build computers. OK I'll try to say it again. The idea that any church has any interest in suppressing ordinary science, the kind that builds computers, is completely wrong. You might as well be from some other planet for all you get anything I'm saying. And again, BEFORE I was a believer in God I KNEW human beings were far above animals and even nature in some sense. Stop trying to attribute this to religion. The term "sacred" never came up. You are making up the whole thing to suit yourself. There are many people who aren't believers who see it the same way, or always used to be. I don't know how much you really understand, as you claim, since you keep religifying it.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
What kind of "scientific" explanation of human nature contradicts what it actually feels like to be human? Well, for instance, the sort of speculative scientistic explanation that Robin encountered some time back that he reported on this thread, about men's attraction to particular qualities in women "really" being about their suitability for breeding. Sure doesn't FEEL that way. Nor for a woman's attraction to particular qualities in men I might add. Or the famous sociobiology idea that self-sacrificial love for a child is really based on an altruism gene or something like that and is intended to further the genetic package of the family. Sure doesn't feel like that.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Percy writes: I'm sorry Percy, the way you are going about this just doesn't ... interest me. Well, that's why we're taking baby steps. You complain that no one is getting it, then when someone tries to get it, you beg off. Not exactly a formula for success. In fact, it seems guaranteed to perpetuate that no one will ever get it just so you can keep complaining. Sigh. Baby steps in the wrong direction aren't going to get us anywhere. I don't understand the difficulty here, except that it's an example of the very divide I'm trying to talk about, and I don't have a way to solve it. No, the baby steps bit isn't going to do it. It's in the wrong direction.
So let me change it up just a little. You said back in Message 141: Faith writes:
quote: Okay, it's laughable. Now, can you explain why it is laughable, and put it in the context of science not properly following scientific methodology, which I assume is what you meant by "they make a reductionistic falsified trivialized mess of it"? Afraid not. The idea makes me extremely tired. Who knows, maybe some time I'll get a new perspective on it and try it again.
In other words, are you criticizing science because of some failure of science or procedure? Or is it just that you don't like the conclusions? I don't know. I don't think I'm criticizing science. I think I'm criticizing a certain mentality that grows out of science, and yes, does get applied as science where it just makes up stuff. Like sociobiology. Like Robin's example. But if you don't get it after all my attempts to talk about it so far, I should just give up. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
What can I say. Spoken like someone from the Science side of the divide. End of subject for you, apparently, but for us on the other side of the divide it elicits pain, groans, eyerolling and cynical snickers.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
They are TOTALLY silly ideas and that's that. If you don't get it you don't get it. Stop this bullying you all do.
What can I say? OK I'll say that it's all speculative and unprovable, for starters, and nothing but the thinnest application of the most stupefyingly addlepated version of "survival of the fittest" to the complexity of human experience.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
It's been supported. And it is bullying. And no you do NOT feel any genetic motivation in your sexual attraction.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
I've supported my point. You don't get it. You are the one being abusive and bullying. Again, this is a perfect example of the cultural divide. All you want to do is force me to submit to the terms of your side of the divide instead of making any effort to get what things look like from my side. My point has been supported. I've been arguing it for weeks off and on. You and others here have an occupational blindness to recognizing the point I'm making. That, again, is an expression of the two cultures problem.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
What can I say? OK I'll say that it's all speculative and unprovable, for starters, and nothing but the thinnest application of the most stupefyingly addlepated version of "survival of the fittest" to the complexity of human experience.
I'd say that the ideas were certainly testable. There is no way to test such a thing. It's purely interpretive, just a typical case of imaginative fantasy based on evolutionism.
And it is completely false to say that they are based on a simplistic version of "survival of the fittest", since the role sexual attraction is based on a proper understanding of "fitness" not found in simplistic treatments and the whole idea of kin selection is also well beyond the simplistic understanding found in basic arguments. The particular statements under discussion are stupefyingly mindnumbingly reductionistic, trivializing and addlepated. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
Faith's central point is that when it comes to understanding human nature, then our own experience of it has primacy. We should be extremely skeptical of any "scientific" explanation of human nature that contradicts what it actually feels like to be human. That seems like a very sensible approach to me. Thank you. At least this much we can agree on.
I don't have any truck with any of her religious arguments, or with the notion that science should be barred from certain fields of investigation, but on her central point this atheistic, materialistic, former chemist is in total agreement. Thanks again, but I have to point out that I did NOT say "that science should be barred from certain fields of investigation" at all, only that when they get into some of them they make a mess of it, and that is a clue that science can't deal with some fields. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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Faith  Suspended Member (Idle past 1475 days) Posts: 35298 From: Nevada, USA Joined: |
In my judgment I produced an argument. Your demands for argument or proof are what is abusive under the circumstances, as well as your accusation that I have produced none. This is a typical go-round between you and me.
In my judgment I am not being abusive, merely descriptive of the level of thinking involved in this sort of thing. It's reductionistic and trivializing. You want me to leave off "addlepated" perhaps? I guess I can do that.
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