The speaker of such statements doesn't say, in first person singular, what he thinks, feels, intends, wants, but makes claims about the other person, esp. about their inner life. — baker
Disagreeing with scientists potentially comes with a cost. — baker
Because they want to have control over people.And why do you think scientists are telling you what you think so frequently? — flannel jesus
Well, you can always dismiss my experience on the grounds of them being a statistically irrelevant sample.Disagreeing with scientists potentially comes with a cost.
— baker
Do you think that's unjust in some way? What specific examples of this unjustness have you experienced?
Because they want to have control over people. — baker
Well, you can always dismiss my experience — baker
And why do you think scientists are telling you what you think so frequently?
— flannel jesus
Because they want to have control over people.
It's a standard mode of operation for people anyway; scientists have just elevated it to a whole new level, much like religion/spirituality — baker
The language they use; namely, you-statements; and we-statements (which are veiled you-statements).Im not asking you for what you think their motivations are, I'm asking you what has led you to believe they are doing that. — flannel jesus
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.
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.
It's earlier than positivism, you can see it with the ancient Greeks already. That characteristic brand of normativisim -- "It's like this and no other way".Are you talking about the influence of positivism on science? — Joshs
What/whom do you have in mind?Not all approaches in science are positivistic. There are postmodern sciences, for instance.
well, how can a subjective experience be compared to another without being in accordance to a standard of some kind? I think every subjective experience has something to do with objective knowledge...does the knowledge itself become or is/can be subjective when used from/obtained from a single subjective experiences alone? — Kizzy
How do they elevate one's perceptual observations with possibility of fallibilities and subjective in nature into objective apodictic knowledge? — Corvus
And finally, I personally think there's an alternative term for what the paper calls 'lived experience', which helps to orientate the discussion more clearly in the context of the philosophical tradition. I wonder if there are any guesses as to what this word might be?
— Wayfarer
"Lived experience" sounds like a historical topic due to the word "Lived". What about "Having been lived"? — Corvus
Pick up any scientific piece of writing, and insofar it makes claims in the form of "we humans", as if the generalizations the writer makes apply to all people. — baker
Science is based on someone's particular, ideologically driven idea of human experience (or how it should be). — baker
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.
Objectivism and physicalism are philosophical ideas, not scientific ones – even if some scientists espouse them. They don’t logically follow from what science tells us about the physical world, or from the scientific method itself.
You use the phrase "objective knowledge", but it should be explicitly noted, 100% certainty in science is not attainable. — flannel jesus
I wonder how common belief in the primacy of particles still is? — Count Timothy von Icarus
Knowledge of how things are "in themselves," as they "relate to nothing else," is not only unattainable, but useless, telling us nothing about the world. — Count Timothy von Icarus
The logical positivist doctrine that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," ends up in the absurdity that things "really look the way they would be seen without eyes" — that the world "is the way it would be conceived of without a mind." — Count Timothy von Icarus
what do you mean by "objective knowledge"? — flannel jesus
The shift to the process view helps here because you lose the problems of reductionism. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Ah, so then let's reword your previous question: — flannel jesus
The two different perspectives, the perspective of "being" and the perspective of "becoming" (process), each if taken to account for the totality of reality are reductionist. — Metaphysician Undercover
Yes, it seems a good explanation for the process of objectifying some subjective knowledge.There are a variety of ways that happens. One way is, in medical science, you conduct a double blind study with placebo on the efficacy of a medicine in treating an ailment, you publish your study, and then other people can go on and repeat that study. Eventually, in successful cases, the studies are so successful that the rest of medical science comes to be convinced that that medicine does in fact effectively treat that ailment, and that's how it goes from personal knowledge to "objective knowledge". — flannel jesus
There must be also the underlying principles for objectifying subjective knowledge such as "consistency" of the knowledge. For example, when Newton saw the apple dropping from the tree in his garden, he induced the law of gravity. At that moment of time, it must have had been his own subjective knowledge. But through the objectifying processes, it became an objective scientific knowledge ever since.Not all things you might call "objective knowledge" happen in simliar ways. That's just one possible, but relatively common, narrative. — flannel jesus
If apple dropped in Japan, and it kept on floating in the air instead of falling down to the ground, or landed in the kitchen table by itself as soon as it dropped, then it couldn't have been accepted as an objective scientific knowledge or law. — Corvus
'the One and the Many'.
Agree. Also very much the point of my Mind Created World OP. Logical positivism is scientism par excellence.
The process view has its own problems, such as how to explain the reality of mass, as that which stays the same while time passes, inertia.
The problem is that the two, the perspective of being and the perspective of becoming, are fundamentally incompatible as Plato found out, and since reality is revealed to us as consisting of both, the entirety cannot be reduced to one or the other. This is why dualism cannot be dismissed because it provides the only true foundation for a complete understanding of reality.
I do see some possible ways of addressing this, at least in their outline, primarily in Hegel and St. Aquinas. In Aquinas, there is the intuition that the things that are most truly discrete and self-determining are precisely those beings in whom a unity of phenomenal awareness emerges. — Count Timothy von Icarus
(as) the poem is presented as the speech of the Goddess, this grasp of the whole is received as a gift, a revelation from the divine. The very first full-fledged metaphysician in the western tradition, then, experiences his understanding of being in religious terms, as an encounter with divinity. It is no surprise, therefore, that, according to the Goddess, the road Parmenides takes “is outside the tread of men” (B 1.27). Thus the Goddess draws a sharp distinction between “the untrembling heart of well-rounded truth” on the one hand, and “the opinions of mortals” on the other. The implication is that truth, as distinct from mere human seeming, is divine.
Natural numbers, essences, universals, the sorts of stabilities that can form in the world, these seems to exist, or at least subsist, in a sort of eternal frame. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists (!) independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. This is, of course, denied by many philosophers, either for Berkeley's reasons or for Kant's. But we have already considered these reasons, and decided that they are inadequate. We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.
This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something.
To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty
Well, that is not the point of physicalism. And the issue is:Why? Because physical science – including biology and computational neuroscience – doesn’t include an account of consciousness
f ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it
because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness.
"Fundamental particles," can be thought of as stabilities in process, and the fact that they appear to have beginnings and ends (e.g. the destruction and spontaneous formation of quark condensate) seems to go along with this nicely as far as I am aware. — Count Timothy von Icarus
. Although Hegel's conception of becoming emerging from being/nothing seems to offer up a potential way to balance these issues if the dialectical is thought of in an ontological sense, as in Jacob Boheme and Eriugena, Hegel's big forerunners. — Count Timothy von Icarus
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