[Brian Jones]

Good heavens! I had no thought of erecting any barriers not articulated by science itself, in its heuristic method, criteria for truth, modes of description and denotation, and so on. Unless I misunderstand you, we have no real disagreement here about the whatness of things, but the oughtness as it were. By all means, let the great scientific beehive buzz away, but when that buzzing drowns out the whispers of our gods, and when the torrents of honey that pour out of it flood and bury even the tips of our sacred mountains, something--however true--is going wrong.
I've not the slightest interest in restricting or fencing-out such production; I merely wish to fence-in another space that <u>happens</u> to be disappearing, at least since the modernist problematic was exhausted.
I'll say one thing more: I think our moral and religious evolution, which moves with aching slowness and by sudden starts, has long since been outstripped by our technical development; and the effect of this huge and ever-increasing gap is not only dangerous (which I don't mind much), but ugly and ignoble (which I do).

[This message has been edited by Brian Jones (edited April 15, 2004).]

[Alder Ellis]

I would be inclined to agree with Brian's or Rorty's qualification, "scientific," about the reality science addresses. This is inevitably a matter of one's metaphysical bias. However one characterizes science, it would seem to be inherently inimical to ontological distinctions, any hierarchical differentiation of "levels of being" such as characterized pre-Enlightenment philosophy. Historically, science acquired its cultural prestige by demonstrating power over nature. It accomplished this by treating nature abstractly, as a manipulable system of substances. The discovery of power was represented as (or confused with) a discovery of reality. It blew away traditional (hierarchical) conceptions of reality. The metaphysical bias of science is that nothing is real outside the manipulable system of substances it deals with. Ontological distinctions are ruled out.

An ontological axiom is: "you cannot derive the greater from the lesser." You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, nor (for example) human consciousness out of a soup of randomly colliding manipulable substances. Deriving the greater from the lesser, like a rabbit out of a hat, like consciousness out of matter, is the great trick of science-driven philosophy & quasi-philosophical apologetics. The bigger the whopper, the more enthusiastically it is swallowed, when it comes to this.

Brian writes: "I think our moral and religious evolution, which moves with aching slowness and by sudden starts, has long since been outstripped by our technical development; and the effect of this huge and ever-increasing gap is not only dangerous (which I don't mind much), but ugly and ignoble (which I do)."

Right, but don't you think the "technical development" you refer to is itself a "sudden start" in historical perspective, the last 3 or 4 hundred years? And it puts a certain kind of evolutionary pressure on the moral/spiritual essence that would not otherwise be there. When you think of it, it's pretty amazing we haven't blown ourselves up yet, having possessed nuclear power for 50+ years. So, maybe there's hope for us. I in any case like the idea that it's an evolutionary process & that the one-sidedly technical development of modern science has a specific function within this process, like a risky bet. Not ignoble in that regard.

[Brian Jones]

Brian writes: "I think our moral and religious evolution, which moves with aching slowness and by sudden starts, has long since been outstripped by our technical development; and the effect of this huge and ever-increasing gap is not only dangerous (which I don't mind much), but ugly and ignoble (which I do)."

Right, but don't you think the "technical development" you refer to is itself a "sudden start" in historical perspective, the last 3 or 4 hundred years?

Thanks, EA. I meant more the unpredictable irruption in history of a single part of a single life, as in the case of Luther's 'posting'. But I would certainly agree that the technical growth has been exponential, and further, inexorable and asymptotic by the look of it (although I hate to think of <u>that</u> axis). More than this, it's shown astonishing growth in its capability to domesticate and nourish itself on discontent, especially with itself. But it's leaving the religious evolution so far behind now, I think, that the latter has, as it were, disappeared and come back as a sort of technical holograph, whether it be Chris' "psychology", new-age religiosity, sales up on the Passion, whatever.[/b]

And it puts a certain kind of evolutionary pressure on the moral/spiritual essence that would not otherwise be there. When you think of it, it's pretty amazing we haven't blown ourselves up yet, having possessed nuclear power for 50+ years. So, maybe there's hope for us. I in any case like the idea that it's an evolutionary process & that the one-sidedly technical development of modern science has a specific function within this process, like a risky bet. Not ignoble in that regard.[/quote]

I think we have blown ourselves up, we just missed it. The joke's on us; all that gene-pool worrying about our bodies, when what distinguishes them from plant-life was left in little charred bits outside the movieplex.
You'll have to help me see the nobility in that "risky bet". All I've seen of high-risk gamblers--of that sort--is a pretty pathetic sight.

[ChrisW]

AE,
I would be interested in understanding a little more fully what you mean by the traditional (hierarchical) conceptions of reality.
If I understand what we are talking about, it seems to be the issue of "reductionism". If I say that everything is MADE OF atoms, does that commit me to the claim that everything JUST IS atoms -- that there aren't really animals and human beings and societies (or beliefs and desires or justice and injustice) but only atoms. On this reductionist view the only things that really exist are the fundamental constituents of things -- talk of human beings and all the rest is just short-hand for more complicated but more true talk of atoms.
On a non-reductionist view, to say that animals and humans are made of atoms is not to say that everything just is atoms. On this view, reality is hierarchical in a way: there is a physical level of reality, but this level does not exhaust reality. Above this level (perhaps a few rungs above) is the biological level. Organisms are just as real as the atoms which compose them, and the laws governing them cannot, even in principle, be reduced to the laws governing atoms (though organisms do depend for their powers on the atoms that make them up. This non-reductionist view is closely related to Aristotle's distinction between material cause and formal cause.

If the non-reductionist view is what you have in mind, then I think science is actually perfectly compatible with it -- in fact, (I would argue) reductionism is a very poor match for the actual results of modern science. A hierarchical view of nature, which leaves room for emergent properties and emergent entities (substances) is actually a much better fit.
Even such a less restrictive view limits us in certain ways: there is no room for a vitalism, for instance -- the view that emergence of life involves a wholly new fundamental "life force" -- nor does it leave room for an immaterial human soul. But, unlike reductionism, it does seem to leave room for organisms and even conscious organisms (and self-conscious organisms like us). I'm inclined to think it leaves enough room for ethics and even for a conception of a "meaningful life."
If Kantian positions like Rorty's are really the only way to save the human and spiritual realm, then I might join you there -- but it looks like a last resort to me. I'd much rather see whether the perceived threat from science was really such a threat before I retreated so far.

Two questions about your other remarks:
1. You say we can't make human consciousness out of matter because you can't make the greater out of the lesser. If we assume reductionism, I agree. But if not, then your argument seems to commit you to things you might not want to say. Can living organisms be made out of matter? On your principle, no -- you seem to be committed, not only to dualism, but to vitalism.
2. If science did not have knowledge of reality, what accounts for science's ability to manipulate it? If science is not learning about mind-independent reality, its ability to manipulate nature seems nothing short of miraculous. Is it such a confusion to suppose that understanding that gives us power is (a part of) the true understanding of reality?

Quick note to Brian: By 'psychology' I certainly didn't mean pop-psychology or new age psychology -- nor did I mean Freudian or Jungian psychology. I meant only to point to a particular field of study (the study of the human psyche -- emotions, intellect, sensations, beliefs, desires etc.) without making too many presuppositions about what the correct theory in psychology would be. Plato regards the virtues as "the health of the soul" -- and I agree with him. A study of virtue will then be a part of the study of the soul (psychology). That's all I had in mind. You may disagree with Plato on this, but surely he isn't a New Age thinker.



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 15, 2004).]

[Brian Jones]

Quick note to Brian: By 'psychology' I certainly didn't mean pop-psychology or new age psychology -- nor did I mean Freudian or Jungian psychology. I meant only to point to a particular field of study (the study of the human psyche -- emotions, intellect, sensations, beliefs, desires etc.) without making too many presuppositions about what the correct theory in psychology would be. Plato regards the virtues as "the health of the soul" -- and I agree with him. A study of virtue will then be a part of the study of the soul (psychology). That's all I had in mind. You may disagree with Plato on this, but surely he isn't a New Age thinker.
[/quote]

Thanks, Chris, and of course you're right to extricate the term this way--I spoke too loosely--, but do you not think we should try to find another, then, given this one's absorbtion into 20th century pseudo-science?
And something else: I think, and argued at Cambridge (indeed, argued my way out of Cambridge thereby), that Plato's, and even the Master's ethics are floating on top of imagination, of an ultimately counterfactual vision of man, as begins and ends the Nichomachean Ethics for example, and thoroughly infects its critical definition of man early on (as in Book X's:"we must not, being human, think of human things, but must, insofar as we are able..."). Any such "study of virtue", then, will indeed reach down to some description of the essential contours of the human soul; but those contours, I would argue, are like a fence, shaped mostly from the <u>other</u> side, by the dreams of Pythagoras or Bach's music, for example.
And if that soul is sick, we must--somehow or other--get behind the fence to heal it. In other words, by the time Greek "psychology" had a soul to map, the dreaming had all been done (with Socrates the waking bridge).
I find philosophers oddly resistant to this seemingly obvious fact. But as long as they look to psychologists for their soul, I think they're bound to embarrass themselves.
(Psychology looks in a mirror and--surprise--always finds itself.)
On the other hand, when the soul is finally good and dead, there is no other side of that fence to alter its shape anymore; and then psychologists will finally get it right.




[This message has been edited by Brian Jones (edited April 16, 2004).]

[Alder Ellis]

Chris,

"If the non-reductionist view is what you have in mind, then I think science is actually perfectly compatible with it -- in fact, (I would argue) reductionism is a very poor match for the actual results of modern science. A hierarchical view of nature, which leaves room for emergent properties and emergent entities (substances) is actually a much better fit."

I agree with your account of the non-reductionist view & this is indeed more or less what I was getting at, but I would question whether science is ultimately compatible with it. In fact I had the idea of "emergence" specifically in mind with my "rabbit out of the hat" metaphor. Isn't "emergence" just a fancy term for "presto!"? There is, say, a science of physics (in principle encompassing chemistry), and a science of biology. The science of physics works systematically & with increasingly powerful results towards defining the "laws" of physics, and likewise the science of biology towards the "laws" of biology. But neither the science of physics nor the science of biology provides any possible explanation for the "emergence" of life out of matter. That belongs, rather, to the new science of Chaos. But is Chaos really a science? Isn't it just a way of saying: we don't know what the fuck is going on here, but man, it's really cool!

In short, perhaps, science operates competently at each level, but has no competence in grasping the relationships between levels. It works horizontally, not vertically. In this sense it is inherently reductionist even if it pragmatically allows for multiple levels, multiple sciences.

"If science did not have knowledge of reality, what accounts for science's ability to manipulate it?"

My point was not that the manipulable is unreal, rather that science mistakes the manipulable for the whole of reality. This plays directly into the "ontological" point of view, insofar as non-manipulable reality, such as, say, the being of one's beloved, is "more real" to oneself than any manipulable reality. The manipulable is a rather low grade of reality, from a human point of view. Such distinctions are ontological distinctions, which science has no idea of.

Brian,

"Thanks, EA."

No problem, JB.

"But I would certainly agree that the technical growth has been exponential, and further, inexorable and asymptotic by the look of it (although I hate to think of that axis). More than this, it's shown astonishing growth in its capability to domesticate and nourish itself on discontent, especially with itself. But it's leaving the religious evolution so far behind now, I think, that the latter has, as it were, disappeared and come back as a sort of technical holograph, whether it be Chris' "psychology", new-age religiosity, sales up on the Passion, whatever."

I see your point, & if I were arguing with a flagrant optimist I might mount similar arguments. But I have an abiding intuition that the whole picture outwits me. Arguments either way are just a way of keeping one's ignorance in balance, keeping oneself open to what happens next. There is always the need to counteract onesidedness & naivety, & the rhetoric is ready-to-hand. Maybe that becomes a vocation. But then, it's a kind of giving-up, too, a falling-off from four-square facing of reality, which has no rhetoric, nothing to fall back on, no pillow, no club-house, no special vocabulary. It's just out there.

At least, that's my opinion!

[Robt_Ward]

I'm way out of my league here, honestly. I'm just a not-so-humble poet/photographer who occasionally looks up and says, wtf is going on?

But it occurs to me that this entire discussion is being run on a very narrowly-constructed, peculiarly "Western" set of axioms. No Buddhist, say, would even have this discussion with you, I don't think.

A thing "is" what it is: we know it, if at all, by what it "seems". We comminicate, if at all, through codes: the codes have no "objective reality" but that's ok because, at any ontological level, even if there is such a thing as an objective reality, it exists outside our codes. In this sense, to discuss the "nature of reality", no matter how much we dress it up with scientific terminology, is so close a kin og discussing how many angels can dance.. etc... as to render the differences between "theological" and "scientific" thought as no more than a difference in coding.

It seems perfectly reasonable to me to posit (as some have) that the whole of human knowledge — nay, the whole of human existence — is an example of mass hysteria and that in a very real sense "reality itself" morphs to reflect/embody what the perceiver chooses to perceive.

Gawd help me. I'm sinking fast. I'll just go write a pome, I think, until myhead stops aching...

(robt)

[ChrisW]

Brian,
I personally do not believe that science is merely instrumental. Pure physicists do not seem motivated primarily by a desire for technological manipulation, but rather by a desire for understanding. And I find the understanding of nature to be itself a spiritual thing. If there is a Creator, wouldn't understanding His creation be a way of getting to know Him? Even if there is not a creator, surely understanding the world beyond human beings would be part of the theoretical reason Aristotle thinks is the ultimate point of practical reason.
I'm also suspicious of religious or spiritual objections to the instrumental (technological) side of science.
Before science, religion claimed instrumental value for itself. The OT prophets told the Israelites that they were conquered because they had slipped into idolatry. Jesus didn't just tell us about spiritual things -- he healed the sick (and the dead). I gather that many of the American Indians converted to Christianity when plagues were wiping them out and leaving the Europeans unscathed. And the Christians of the time agreed with them that this was evidence for their own religion. People still pray for health. It's only once science radically outperformed prayer alone that religion started to dismiss the instrumental value of being able to produce health that religion regarded it as irrelevant. (At any rate, we should at least realize that health and the greater leisure that technology allow us could be valuable for spiritual purposes. Yes, technology also produces time wasting video games, but in the middle ages, very few could afford a book, whether religious or secular. It's too easy to pretend that technology brings us only the cineplex and the video game -- and even the cineplex sometimes brings us a real work of art.)

Robt,
The view that language doesn't really refer outside itself (a position you share with the structuralists and post-structuralists) is a particular theory of language (or group of theories). Such non-referential theories of language are not the only ones, and indeed not the kind that a realist would accept. (A realist on my view is someone who believes that rocks and stones and trees and tigers and genes and most of the other things we confidently believe in really do exist independent of our perceptions and beliefs about them -- they existed before humans came along to believe in them, for instance.) Therefore, to assume such theories in an argument for anti-realism is to beg the question against the realist.
I raised a problem above for such non-referential theories -- that they seem to have problems accounting for how language could arise in the first place or how they could be learned by any individual child.
I did not explain the alternative views because I'd already written too much and because I was afraid no one would be interested -- I can explain them if it would help.

As for Buddhism, I'm not knowledgeable about it, but I am told that there is much Buddhist philosophy which looks a fair amount like Western philosophy -- engaging in rational debates on subjects that would be recognizable to Western philosophers, though naturally phrased in a different vocabulary. And in fact, even the view you describe is one which roughly corresponds to some form of Kantianism -- and Kant is surely a Western philsopher. Actually, in its linguistic focus it is more closely related to the views of the amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, the structuralists, Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science and "analytic" anti-realists like Michael Dummett -- all very much within the Western tradition (and all ultimately indebted to Kant).

AE, I'll respond to you in a separate post since this one's already pretty long.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 17, 2004).]

[ChrisW]

AE,
Cars are unproblematically physical objects, they are made of matter and their powers all derive from the powers of their constituents. But a car is not identical with its matter. Disassemble it or melt it down and you no longer have a car. But replace each piece of the car gradually, and arguably you have the same car. Try to describe the laws of auto-mechanics in purely physical terms, and you have a problem, because cars can be realized in multiple materials. From the engineer's point of view, a Ford Taurus made of metal and one made of hard plastics whose physical properties approximated metal would be very slight -- the same laws of automechanics would apply. But from a purely physical point of view, the difference between two cars will seem vast.
Cars and the laws of auto mechanics emerge at a level above that of particle physics, yet there is surely nothing mysterious about this emergence -- since as I said, the powers that cars have can be fully explained in terms of the powers of their constituents when those constituents are organized in a certain way (though they are not identical with those constituents).

In the case of life, I believe we are also able to see the emergence of life from the matter that makes it up as non-mysterious. The operation of DNA is well understood at a chemical level -- no extra vital force enters into the replication of DNA or in DNA's synthesis of proteins. And once you have a self-replicating complex molecule like DNA, natural selection explains how eyes and wings, birds and humans could arise without the intervention of any non-physical forces or beings.
Consciousness is a far more difficult matter. In my view, Daniel Dennet's title "Consciousness Explained" is very premature. Still, the dualist who would erect an explanatory wall between human consciousness and the rest of the world has a problem too: animal consciousness. Which side of the wall does it go on? Descartes consistently denies that animals have consciousness, but this is just obviously false. We seem to face something of a continuum of consciousness among animals -- if there is a dualist wall between matter and consciousness, where does it go?
In any case, I think the desire to erect walls is premature. I think the existence of minds (and of moral truths for that matter) is as clear as the existence of physical objects. A science that dismisses mind seems to be undercutting its own basis in experience. Physics has to find a way to leave room for the existence of minds and for the manifestations of mind we see in the world, or it will be undercutting itself. Just as physics seems to put some constraints on psychology, so psychology puts constraints on physics. Until we have a theory that reconciles physics and psychology, we should go on with both -- as physicisst themselves go on with Relativity and Quantum theory, even though the two cannot be employed together (unless superstring theory turns out to reconcile them).


[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 18, 2004).]

[Tim Love]

AE: "In short, perhaps, science operates competently at each level, but has no competence in grasping the relationships between levels. It works horizontally, not vertically."

As ChrisW says, there need be nothing very mysterious about emergence (after all, this message is merely dots on a screen). And I think science does try to stretch vertically, and does try to study action in that dimension.
In Complexity Theory they say "More is Different" - a slogan confirmed by AI simulations and termites. It's not always easy to "explain" the observed emergent behaviour, but progress is being made. However especially if the different layers share a common code one risks Hofstadter's strange loops, tangled hierarchies, and hierarchy violation.