The problem with science II

I am unclear about what you mean in some of the concepts listed.

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The shriveling of human experience

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Sorry, I have no idea what you are talking about here. Do you mean people in the past had more or better experiences than people do today?

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Humanities versus Science

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Once again, I am not sure what this is about. I realize bringing in my own experiences in this matter may be offensive to some, however I am doing so in order to succinctly elaborate on why I do not believe there is some war between the humanities and the sciences. I have a BS in Technical Communications and have even worked some in the field, which requires one to be conversant with both English usage including literature and science/technology. How does such a degree/employment exist if there is such a wide unbridgeable gulf between the two fields of knowledge?

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Philistinism of science

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What is meant by this? Strictly speaking, are you implying scientists are using the philosophy, or indeed, taking orders from an extinct Middle Eastern tribe?

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Instrumental talk as opposed to meaning

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I think I may have a vague idea of what you may mean here, however I believe science must use strictly defined terms in order to convey proper meaning. Besides, isn't meaning in the humainities a philosophically subjective, as opposed to objective, concept? How could science communicate the concept of certian elements in repeatable experiments in florid, poetic terms when precision is the name of the game? IMHO sometimes it simply has to use numbers.

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Literature versus Science

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Once again, puzzled. Are you saying a person conversant with science is opposed to literature or visa versa? History provides many counterexamples IMHO.

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Survival versus Meaning

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Need more information to delineate what is meant here. Is survival antithetical to meaning? Does that imply a life of meaning is against survival?

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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.

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These could be an entire thread. I for one, would be interested in hearing what constitutes such implicit morality or biases, since I believe these are quite valid subjects for consideration. Of course, I would be more interested in valid criticisms of social science methodology based upon evidence and less interested in personal disagreement with conclusions unsupported by evidence of misapplication of methodology.

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"

Excellent post. I'll step aside and let you finish the thread .

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

Ok, I think I understand now. You are talking about the specific application of science to human experience.In your original post you said : and I must assume I took this too broadly.You later said : Now I may be off-base again, but I think science can offer explanations of human nature, and OUR human experience, to the extent that experience can be generalised. Is my experience representative of human nature? Isn't human nature the observed tendancies and reactions of people? Am I reading too much into the apparent interchangeability of 'experience' and 'nature' in this thread? I don't think human nature is the same as human experience.I still think that scientific analysis leads to answers that are more 'correct' than raw individual experience, but in the OP you said you thought the objection was due to a perception that scientific analysis was more 'real'.So, here's where I am now with this; scientific analysis is just as real as human experience, and often more correct. Analysis and models of human nature are useful, but I'm not sure that is the same as human experience. I don't think scientific explanations of human nature are trying to represent our experience. Is this a problem for science? Not really, science doesn't help with MY experience, but it does help put that experience into context.Maybe an example of a scientific explanation of an aspect of human nature that tries or appears to represent our experience would help me. Violence for example? Science can attempt to explain why people are violent in evolutionary, social and perhaps chemical terms, but I'm not sure that would be representing the experience of violence? The experience doesn't take these factors into account.Phew, apologies in advance for my undoubted misunderstanding (and probable over-simplification), I'm not sure I have the vocabulary for this discussion, but now I've started...

i quite agree. but, being an artist and hanging out with such, i know that who we are has a great deal to do with the work we create. was this poem about the preacher? no. probably not. but it was probably about that general feeling of i'm almost there but i just can't do it. she couldn't finish seminary, she couldn't get much of her work published (whether she couldn't bring herself to or couldn't deal with the editors or what) even though she was friends with a publicist, she couldn't get the guy even though he was always right there, and i imagine she also was hurt by not being able to get her mother better and also not being able to live her own life.my photographs are interesting to people because they show the same amount of intimacy with inanimate objects and people. this results from many years of feeling like people are cardboard and impossible to interact with added to a feeling of abandonment and and topped off with bullying. i have learned to simply avoid most people and it shows in my work (and in the prolificity of it... or lack thereof). is every picture about my father dying? no. not any of them. but they all have grown from those same feelings.i don't like em's stuff anymore because it's singsongy and the imagery feels um. blech. i can't connect with her. i don't speak her language. i like cummings cause words are toys, but i'm not really big on poetry. i write some, but i don't like that either. i just really think people get too caught up with words and it's worse when they try to hide what they mean.

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'll contest that. It is considerably older than Darwinism.From wikipedia:

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?

In that case I disagee with the "directly" part of "it derives directly". However, I admit to being dubious as to the scientific merits of sociobiology or evolutionary psychology.

This interests me greatly. I do understand what you mean.I read the thread titled "Do animals have souls" in which I got the impression that you felt animals have a soul because of the connections you have made with them. Does the categorisation of animals as, er, animals, provoke a similar response?I am aware that I may be drifting off-topic, in an attempt to prevent that can I ask if the scientific treatment of life(specifically life, excluding utterly material sciences) as a whole is as flawed as its treatment of human experience? Seeing as JavaMan did name you in his OP I hope this is a fair question.

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 have time to respond to this post in full, but I'd just like to make a couple of points.My emotional repsonse to the theory of evolution is quite different - it's more like 'Wow, that's amazing!'. Even without the theory of evolution, it's obvious that we're animals (notice that I don't say just animals), and a kind of animal that's quite similar to chimpanzees and gorillas. (Before evolutionary theories started to gain ground chimps and gorillas were believed to be types of human because they were obviously so similar). So who's emotional response is correct?Personally, I don't have a problem with the human/animal comparison generally. It's only when a scientific theory tries to make generalizations about human nature based on study of other animals, without taking into account the peculiarities of human experience, that I begin to have a problem.On a general point, it does seem very odd to me that someone who takes such personal offence at man being described as an animal, who seems to be so concerned about human dignity and about the shrivelling effect of the scientific model of human nature, should accept without any apparent qualms a version of Christianity that sees man as utterly enslaved to a superior being, that allows man nothing good that doesn't come from God.For those humanist humanists amongst us, Calvinism is as much the enemy as Comtean positivism or scientific socialism.

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

I'm looking forward to when you get it straight in your mind so that you can start explaining your meaning. You can probably guess that I found all the ____vs._____ in your post to represent false dichotomies. I think I would have called you on them without your caveat "Not up to trying to explain any of them . . .". When you are, it could be a very interesting discussion.

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.

No argument. I think the two of us take that as a given, no? What would be the point? If you are unwilling or uninterested or un-whatever in discussing the list you created, it doesn't make much sense for me to spend any time at all debating it with you, now does it?