Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is). Elementary particles, moments in time, genes, the brain – all these things are assumed to be fundamentally real. By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information.
This framework faces two intractable problems. The first concerns scientific objectivism. We never encounter physical reality outside of our observations of it. Elementary particles, time, genes and the brain are manifest to us only through our measurements, models and manipulations. Their presence is always based on scientific investigations, which occur only in the field of our experience.
This doesn’t mean that scientific knowledge is arbitrary, or a mere projection of our own minds. On the contrary, some models and methods of investigation work much better than others, and we can test this. But these tests never give us nature as it is in itself, outside our ways of seeing and acting on things. Experience is just as fundamental to scientific knowledge as the physical reality it reveals.
The second problem concerns physicalism. According to the most reductive version of physicalism, science tells us that everything, including life, the mind and consciousness, can be reduced to the behaviour of the smallest material constituents. You’re nothing but your neurons, and your neurons are nothing but little bits of matter. Here, life and the mind are gone, and only lifeless matter exists.
To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty. If ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it, then the assertion that only physical phenomena exist is false. Why? Because physical science – including biology and computational neuroscience – doesn’t include an account of consciousness. This is not to say that consciousness is something unnatural or supernatural. The point is that physical science doesn’t include an account of experience; but we know that experience exists, so the claim that the only things that exist are what physical science tells us is false. On the other hand, if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness.
what happens when we cannot draw a clear line between the observer and the observed? This, according to Dartmouth physicist Marcelo Gleiser and some of his colleagues, is a serious problem. And because these cases concern some of the most important unanswered questions in physics, they potentially undermine the idea that science can explain “everything.”
The game of 'I'm more open-minded and spiritual than you' is as dull, puerile and pointless as the more traditional pastime of competing over the size of reproductive appendages. — andrewk
What do Gleiser, Thompson and Frank think gives them the right to tell the world's millions of scientists, plenty of whom hold worldviews that encompass things not covered by science, what they believe? — andrewk
And the salient question is 'what possible changes could we make, in any attempt to somehow include the observer, to the way we practice the natural sciences? — Janus
Are you familiar with 'the observer problem' in physics? — Wayfarer
that is the one and only science, natural or human, where the observer may make a difference to what is observed. — Janus
There's a lot of that in the Copenhagen interpretation (which Bohr was a member of), which goes so far away with this that it puts the observer in the middle of things. In the extreme it goes to arguments like if nobody looked at the moon, it might collapse or something like that.Are you familiar with 'the observer problem' in physics? With the decades-long debate between Einstein and Bohr about 'the role of the observer' and whether there is a 'mind-independent reality'? That is what provided a lot of the impetus for these kinds of developments. — Wayfarer
And the salient question is 'what possible changes could we make, in any attempt to somehow include the observer, to the way we practice the natural sciences?'. How would including the human observer change what we say about geology, or climate science? — Janus
When scientists just do there jobs, look at some new collected data and make their scientific article on what the data can tell to us, it isn't hard to imagine that by observing this 'behaviour' you get the impression of scientific materialism and physicalism being the dominant beliefs in the scientific community.
Ask them a little bit else and you can notice that physicalism isn't the trendiest fad in the community. — ssu
Science reveals the way the world appears to us, and this is revealing (at least some aspects of) what it is in itself, since we are part of nature. — Janus
Regarding the claims they make in their article - that scientists (without restriction or qualification) believe such and such - they know as close to nothing as makes no odds, since between the three of them they probably have interacted with fewer than 0.1% of the world's scientists, and discussed metaphysics or phenomenology with less than a tenth of those. Being an astrophysicist, a theoretical physicist or a philosopher doesn't give you any special insight into what a million plus people you have never met believe.But, hey, what do they know? — Wayfarer
No.fundamental physics claim to describe the fundamental constituents of the universe, of everything including ourselves, and other scientific fields (chemistry, biology, neuroscience, psychiatry, ...) submit to this position of authority that fundamental physics has, they are imbued with the belief of physicalism. — leo
And this is called reductionism.There is the widespread belief that in principle everything reduces to and emerges from the constituents described in fundamental physics, that is elementary particles interacting with one another as described in laws of physics. — leo
I shudder to think what devoutly religious scientists like Francis Collins, or deeply philosophical ones like David Bohm would make of such tripe. — andrewk
Many thousands of years ago our culture was not broken into fragments as it is now. At that time science and spirituality were not separated. Since then they have grown far apart. In my view it is important to bring them together.
The modern view has been that of mechanism and the universe was compared to a gigantic machine (originally clockwork and later the structure of atoms). This outlook has gone on to regard the human being as a machine
This development has led to a view that has had bad effects. For example, Steven Weinberg, one of the leading physicists of our time has said the more we look into the cosmos the less we see any evidence of meaning. There is no place in this for spirit. It is all mechanism. The domain of spirit has receded until it’s gone as far as science is concerned. We may still hold onto the idea of spirit in spite of this, but at the expense at a kind of split in life.
Modern views on science must be contributing to the current lack of meaning. First of all directly by being mechanistic and secondly indirectly be leading people who want to hold onto spirituality to be incoherent in various aspects of their lives.
But does modern science really force us into mechanism? At present, most scientists seem to believe that this was inevitable.
A current notion that is commonly accepted is that science is value free except possibly for truth, honesty, and similar notions. But that is not really so. Thus, Thomas Khun has said that scientists almost unconsciously pick up paradigms in their apprenticeships which have all sorts of values in them. One of the current values is that mechanism is the right way and the only way. Another value is that we want to make everything calculable by some sort of algorithm.
It is clear that he considered reductive materialism a widespread view among scientists, and that he too saw it as a problem. — leo
Science tells us that everything, including life, the mind and consciousness, can be reduced to the behaviour of the smallest material constituents. — Article
Many have commented that this view exists, and offered their opinion that it is a problem. I have said as much myself, many times. Those who are open to this message have already received and accepted it. Those who really need it are those whose emotional attachments to their personal beliefs are so deep that they cannot even hear discussion like this one. A shame, but there it is.
So where to go from here? :chin: — Pattern-chaser
Physics doesn't claim anything like that. — ssu
Yet a quantum-physicist has no clue based his own field how mammals communicate or what the monetary policy ought to be. The idea that one phenomenon can be reduce to other more fundamental phenomena and in the end "everything would be physics" is just silly as physics has a limited scope to the field of science. — ssu
woo peddlers like the OP need science to be this reductive boogeyman all the better to leave breathing room for their own two-bit idealisms. — StreetlightX
Attempt to solve the problem? By for instance changing the way physics is taught in schools so that kids don't leave it believing they are nothing more than particles behaving according to laws of physics. — leo
I believe many people are potentially open to this message but have never heard it. I desperately needed to hear this message during my scientific studies, but I was surrounded by scientists who boasted that their view is the truth and that anything going against it is essentially religious crackpottery. Took me a while to escape this madness and find some sanity in the words of philosophers such as Feyerabend who, unsurprisingly, was designated by many scientists as an enemy of science, or even the worst enemy of science, while all he was an enemy of was the bullshit that scientists spouted. — leo
And this message definitely hasn't been heard nearly enough, just need to look at some of the reactions in this thread. — leo
The OP and the article it champions is just another in a long line of dialectical tactics to shore up idealism by pushing the most vulgar of science as the most authoritative. Without doing so, it'd die the ignominious death it deserves. — StreetlightX
There is a closemindedness and oversimplification by this culture or significant subculture - and one that is really quite philosophically illiterate despite their intelligence - and this is problematic. — Coben
By contrast, experience, awareness and consciousness are taken to be secondary. The scientific task becomes about figuring out how to reduce them to something physical, such as the behaviour of neural networks, the architecture of computational systems, or some measure of information.
And that utterly fails to answer the actual questions. This kind of reductionism is simply totally and utterly useless.Can be reduced to particles in the sense that "how mammals communicate" or "what the monetary policy ought to be" would be thoughts held by a human being, and these thoughts would correspond to a specific pattern of electrical activity in a brain, and that electrical activity would correspond to many electrons moving in some specific way. — leo
I wouldn't speculate what the intensions are of our fellow site members, but just to give my point of view on things. Yet I can relate to this what you said above, StreetlightX.And the truth of course is that woo peddlers like the OP need science to be this reductive boogeyman all the better to leave breathing room for their own two-bit idealisms. Nothing is more terrifying to them than to learn that science itself repudiates these shitty reductive takes on science, least their own space of intellectual manouver is shrunk to nothing. — StreetlightX
Whatever ‘physical’ means should be determined by physics and not armchair reflection ... We should expect further dramatic changes in our concept of physical reality in the future.
Simply put it, physics cannot answer to every question there is in science. Hence the observation that everything is made of particles doesn't take us anywhere in a huge field of scientific topics. Add social sciences into the mix and physics is totally useless in those fields of inquiry. — ssu
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