The problem with science II

There are a wide range of personality types. One or more of them might have what you are characterizing as "the science mentality".I myself don't think the shrinking of the inner life is solely done by "science mentality". In my home town I would say it was the fundamentalists and literalist who lacked appreciation of an inner life in favor of repetitious dogma.I remember my bio 110 professor calling us all over in lab to look at some tiny plant under a microscope. He said with deep and happy feeling that more than anything he hoped we would gain an appreciation for the beauty of tiny forms of life. He was a person of real feeling for his students. I also much enjoy the books by Antonio Damasio which I think very admirably relate humanist interests with the unfolding of science.I think your tendency to absolute dichotomy falsifies the rich continuum of experience and life by overly simplifing it and your reductionism does as much violence to the subtleties and nuances of experience as does scientific reductionism. You are looking into a mirror and what you see there and are complaining about is a projection of your attitude.lfen

"The" human experience as in the sum total of experiences of humans? How is that being shrunk?What is "the human experience"? Are you talking about your experience? my experience?What is shrinking, or for that matter expanding "the human experience"?It might help if you specified how experience had been expanded in the past and how it might be expanded in the future. I really don't know if you are talking about popular culture, or television programming, or what books are being discussed on best sellers lists. In brief I know what science is but I'm not sure what the charge of "shrinking human experience" consists of. What sort of crime is it?lfen

I quite admire Tolstoy as well as Dostoevsky and the other great novelist. I think I'm getting a clearer grasp of your use of the term "human nature". Shakespeare had a grasp of it also. I think you are referring to a high level synthesis of social, cultural and personal knowledge. I recall but have no citation of an anthropologist telling some tribes people in Africa the story of Hamlet. Now Hamlet's complexity has made for long discussion about his behaviour but these people's immediately understood the problem. He had failed to make proper propitiation to the ancestral spirits and thus the restless ghost of his father brough all the bad fortune. This is too say that knowledge of human nature varies from culture to culture.The genius of great authors is partly this grasp of the social, culture, personal nexus. It is not the same as the knowledge of science. I understand your preference for it but it is no substitute for science. Tolstoy can't treat strokes, brain tumors, phobias, learning problems, down's syndrome, etc. etc. Pavlov couldn't write the great novels of Tolstoy but neither did Tolstoy do the great scientific experiments that revealed classical conditioning.I think you are ,as many people, ambivalent about science. No reason you shouldn't be. But I think you are defensively denigrating it and confusing things by overly extending the value of art. And I hightly value art but I wouldn't say that it has more knowledge than science. It is a different kind of knowing about a different aspect of human experience. It is largely about the expression of subjectivity. Science is about objective knowledge. You are entitled to your preferences. But your judgements are just that, statements of preference. It's like saying chocolate is superior to vanilla. Well, yes if you prefer chocolate it's true, but not if you prefer vanilla.Tostoy had great skill and understanding in protraying subjective human experience. It is inaccurate hyperbole to claim that Tolstoy's novel contain anything close to the developed knowledge of biology, psychology, neurology, anthropology, etc of the last hundred years of science.
lfen

hmm, let see if this gets closer. I'm thinking you are talking about what might be thought of as complex qualia. Like looking at a painting and grasping the feeling and meaning. Science address light, physics, perceptions but by human soul/mind or nature you are talking about our personal subjective experience. If this is the case I would tend to agree with you, at least I don't at this point see how this could be studied by science.lfen

I've only encountered "qualia" as a term in philosophy to express what many including myself find an unexplicable chasm between objective discription of reality and our conscious experience of it. But it is analytical and I think you may have qualms about an analytical approach to life?lfen

Is it then the reductionism that seems to be a strong approach in science though strictly speaking not all science is reductionist, that you find so off putting?lfen

I feel I work from both sides towards the middle. Reductionism is a neccesary effort of analysis to be pushed until it fails but I don't think it is sufficient nor the "truth". It's a tool and a powerful tool.On the other hand there is the world I actually experience and respond to and that has a primary "reality" that gives it a fundamental quality. I couldn't be talking about any of this, couldn't be creating concepts or reductionist explanations without consciousness.So I work a bit on each side of this chasm seeing if I can narrow it, trying to discover a bridge or connection between them. I intuit that they are different aspects of the same reality but that is all I can say at present.lfenEdited by lfen, : decide "different aspects" was a more accurate word choice than "different sides" and so changed to that.

I don't know if Desmond Morris originated the idea of breasts being a substitute sexual signal for buttocks but he did a lot to popularize it in his writings on "The Naked Ape".I personally love the aquatic ape theory. Unfortunately the only evidence is extremely circumstantial so it's probably not the case. Still the idea that female human hair and breasts developed to nurse children while swimming or sitting up to their necks in water has a certain charm for me.The Japanese have eroticized the nape of a woman neck as well as her back. I think breasts are mommy parts that have been culturaly sexualized. I enjoy Morris's speculation but don't always agree with his notions.lfen