(2018-01-05, 01:20 AM)malf Wrote: [ -> ]Chris, you’ve clearly missed the memo. Not only is an immaterial ‘reality’ more satisfying, but so self-evident that it requires an organised, systematic, religious-style conspiracy to deny it (for some vague notion of patch protection apparently). Hence this thread.
And this is why discussion here is ultimately pointless. Everything that has gone before in this thread reduced to a sneering put-down.
What is self-evident is the organised, systematic, religious style approach of the materialist orthodoxy. As I said earlier, it is good that more scientists and academics are recognising and openly criticising scientism but we have a long way to go before the die-hard faithful accept it. To add to what has been offered so far, here are a couple of articles from that bastion of New Age woo, the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-...s-elephant
And this:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/a...uage-poole
Quote:"Scientism" describes the practice of making wildly inflated claims for what modern science is able to explain, while denigrating other modes of understanding. For instance, popularisers of neuroscience who claim that it can solve the mystery of who we really are have no scientific basis for such claims. They are overreaching and indulging in false advertising. That is what I and others have called "neuroscientism", a discipline-specific subset of scientism in general.
<snip>
Pinker's essay poses as a gesture of reconciliation between the two cultures, but is really a thinly veiled demand for total surrender by non-scientists. It thus perpetuates the idea that science and the humanities are hermetically distinct entities.
Malf sneers at the suggestion of an organisation but what are we to make of these:
https://www.csicop.org/
https://www.skepticsinthepub.org/
http://guerrillaskepticismonwikipedia.blogspot.co.nz/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brights_movement
and other too numerous to mention. The very essence of, in Malf's words, "an organised, systematic, religious-style conspiracy".
(2018-01-05, 02:41 AM)PKamarling Wrote: [ -> ]And this is why discussion here is ultimately pointless. Everything that has gone before in this thread reduced to a sneering put-down.
What is self-evident is the organised, systematic, religious style approach of the materialist orthodoxy. As I said earlier, it is good that more scientists and academics are recognising and openly criticising scientism but we have a long way to go before the die-hard faithful accept it. To add to what has been offered so far, here are a couple of articles from that bastion of New Age woo, the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/oliver-...s-elephant
And this: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/a...uage-poole
Malf sneers at the suggestion of an organisation but what are we to make of these:
https://www.csicop.org/
https://www.skepticsinthepub.org/
http://guerrillaskepticismonwikipedia.blogspot.co.nz/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brights_movement
and other too numerous to mention. The very essence of, in Malf's words, "an organised, systematic, religious-style conspiracy".
Or perhaps these organisations are fuelled by the need to counter those who, in order to promote unscientific ideas and agendas, seek to discredit the entire field of scientific inquiry?
(2018-01-05, 04:53 AM)malf Wrote: [ -> ]Or perhaps these organisations are fuelled by the need to counter those who, in order to promote unscientific ideas and agendas, seek to discredit the entire field of scientific inquiry?
That reads like a prepared statement, Malf. Do they print it on your membership card?
Who decides what is unscientific?
Precisely who is trying to discredit the
entire field of scientific enquiry? Are we still talking about those who complain about scientism - including the working scientists, philosophers and academics already mentioned? Or those who wrote the Guardian articles?
Or
maybe this guy - a prominent atheist and supporter of Darwinism.
Quote:This kind of intellectual hubris is known as scientism, the idea that science is the ultimate arbiter of any question, or indeed even of what counts as a meaningful question. Taken to its logical extreme, scientism leads to nihilism, and as such is both scientifically untenable (nihilism is a philosophical position, not an empirical one) and philosophically sterile. And if there is one thing that secular humanists do not want , it is to be associated with nihilism, both because it is intellectually uninteresting and because it plays into the worst stereotype of the “godless atheist” that most people still unfortunately hold.
Or, perhaps John Horgan writing in that noted anti-science rag,
Scientific American?
Quote:Mr. [Jerry] Coyne repeatedly reminds us that science, unlike religion, promotes self-criticism, but he is remarkably lacking in this virtue himself. He rejects complaints that some modern scientists are guilty of “scientism,” which I would define as excessive trust—faith!—in science. Calling scientism “a grab bag of disparate accusations that are mostly inaccurate or overblown,” Mr. Coyne insists that the term “be dropped.” Actually, Faith vs. Fact serves as a splendid specimen of scientism. Mr. Coyne disparages not only religion but also other human ways of engaging with reality. The arts, he argues, “cannot ascertain truth or knowledge,” and the humanities do so only to the extent that they emulate the sciences. This sort of arrogance and certitude is the essence of scientism.
(2018-01-05, 01:38 AM)Kamarling Wrote: [ -> ]It might be that we can't explain it all empirically - that we can't reduce consciousness to particles or some kind of energy - but we possibly can have a subjective understanding. I think that was Jung's approach.
Of course, the other question is whether something being non-material implies that it can't be investigated empirically. There sometimes seems to be an assumption that the scientific method can be applied only to the material world. I don't see why that should be so, and I think much of experimental parapsychology relies on its not being so - except where the idea is only to prove the existence of psi by demonstrating that the current scientific understanding of the material world is inadequate.
(2018-01-04, 11:55 PM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]I think my problem is that I find it as unsatisfying to say consciousness is an intrinsic attribute of a non-material entity, which either we can't understand or is beyond our understanding in principle, as it is to say that consciousness arises from the material world in a way we don't understand.
And if the non-material entity is beyond our understanding, I'm not sure how we can be sure that it would have a greater degree of free will than a purely material entity, or that its life would necessarily be more "meaningful".
It appears that your real problem is that you can't accept the validity of the mass of empirical evidence accumulated by inquiry and research in parapsychology and related fields. Maybe that means the end of the discussion, since you apparently reject any other logical or philosophical arguments.
(2018-01-06, 09:45 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]It appears that your real problem is that you can't accept the validity of the mass of empirical evidence accumulated by inquiry and research in parapsychology and related fields. Maybe that means the end of the discussion, since you apparently reject any other logical or philosophical arguments.
I didn't say any of that, though.
(2018-01-07, 09:07 AM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]I didn't say any of that, though.
I agree that it is intellectually unsatisfying to find something incomprehensible. But I am not really surprised that some things may be fundamentally impenetrable, and I don't have much unease due to that. For me, on issues like these, empirical evidence always trumps theory.
(2018-01-07, 10:57 PM)nbtruthman Wrote: [ -> ]I agree that it is intellectually unsatisfying to find something incomprehensible. But I am not really surprised that some things may be fundamentally impenetrable, and I don't have much unease due to that. For me, on issues like these, empirical evidence always trumps theory.
Me too. As far as I'm concerned, it's the
prima facie empirical evidence in favour of psi that makes the subject interesting, not the philosophical arguments.
(2018-01-07, 11:11 PM)Chris Wrote: [ -> ]Me too. As far as I'm concerned, it's the prima facie empirical evidence in favour of psi that makes the subject interesting, not the philosophical arguments.
For me it is the other way around: I like to ponder on the why rather than the how. If there's evidence for the how, so much the better but I'm still more interested in why I'm here (or anything is).
(2018-01-03, 10:45 PM)Steve001 Wrote: [ -> ]Why single out emotions? Take Love for example. That is entirely a chemical reaction caused mostly by oxytocin. Did you know that it is in one state responsible and necessary for a mother to be able to bond with her newborn baby?
Remember the very first time you fell in love all of the physical reactions you felt were all caused by certain chemicals created by your brain. And remember how as your love relation progressed those feelings faded to be replaced by loving feelings of contentment. Why chemicals cause certain states of mind is a mystery for sure, but why imply the answer lays with metaphysics?
Have a read of this:
Fifty psychological and psychiatric terms to avoid: a list of inaccurate, misleading, misused, ambiguous, and logically confused words and phrases
Quote:(16) Love molecule. Over 6000 websites have dubbed the hormone oxytocin the “love molecule” (e.g., Morse, 2011). Others have named it the “trust molecule” (Dvorsky, 2012), “cuddle hormone” (Griffiths, 2014), or “moral molecule” (Zak, 2013). Nevertheless, data derived from controlled studies imply that all of these appellations are woefully simplistic (Wong, 2012; Jarrett, 2015; Shen, 2015). Most evidence suggests that oxytocin renders individuals more sensitive to social information (Stix, 2014), both positive and negative. For example, although intranasal oxytocin seems to increase within-group trust, it may also increase out-group mistrust (Bethlehem et al., 2014). In addition, among individuals with high levels of trait aggressiveness, oxytocin boosts propensities toward intimate partner violence following provocation (DeWall et al., 2014). Comparable phrases applied to other neural messengers, such as the term “pleasure molecule” as a moniker for dopamine, are equally misleading (see Landau et al., 2008; Kringelbach and Berridge, 2010, for discussions).
If anything, this suggests that we still know very little about how the brain works...