…and this is a 
Ron Numbers is a very smart fellow, a historian of science, who has done marvelous work on the history of creationism. Paul Nelson is a Discovery Institute Fellow, a young earth creationist (but an amazingly fuzzy one), and, unfortunately, very long-winded. Bloggingheads has brought Ronald Numbers and Paul Nelson together in a dialog. I can hardly believe I listened to the whole thing — I was working away at other stuff while it was playing in the background, so it wasn't a total waste of time — but it was incredibly boring. Both parties were so determined to be nice to each other that they spent the whole time agreeing with each other, and never wrestled with their differences. It was an epic collision of titanic marshmallows; no one was bruised or dented, but afterwards, everyone involved was sticky and gooey. It just fills one with a desire to wash one's hands and maybe take a shot of some good scotch to get back a little sharpness and bite. Conviviality is a fine thing in an appropriate social situation, but in a discussion of matters of substance, it can be a toxic sludge that obscures differences and impedes the achievement of any real understanding.
A few interesting comments managed to untangle themselves from the treacle. Numbers made the useful point that religion achieves compatibility with science when it recedes into the background and simply accepts whatever science discovers as what the gods have been doing. That's fine with me; he didn't come right out and say, though, that religion lacks any method to actually determine the truth of any statement about the world.
Nelson brought up a hypothetical (a common tactic of his): if an intelligent designer created and planted the very first cell in the ocean a few billion years ago, could methodological naturalism determine that? His point was that if it had actually happened — whether a deity conjured that cell into existence, or a passing alien spacecraft flushed its space toilets as it passed by — it would be undetectable to the tools of methodological naturalism, and therefore it is a flawed procedure.
Numbers had a couple of answers to that. One was to compare it to his field of history, in which everyone knows some information is always lost over time. That does not mean that history cannot work, but simply that we always acknowledge that we cannot possibly know everything. He also made the pragmatic argument that methodological naturalism has been eminently successful, and is a tool that allows even the most evangelical Christian to be a successful scientist, and that breaking that down is an expense we should be unwilling to pay.
What he failed to mention, though, is that Intelligent Design creationism does not fill the gap in our knowledge. They have no tools in place to detect a great cosmic space poof (or flush) that occurred 3 billion years ago, either. What is their way of knowing that succeeds where science fails? Where is their evidence? The failings of ID creationism were not brought up, however, perhaps because it would breach civility on the spot.
The only point where they got spiritedly critical, but not with each other (they still agreed entirely with each other) was — and you knew it had to be this — was in damning those damned damnable atheists. A major problem here was that Jerry Coyne's book, Why Evolution Is True, was made the target, Paul Nelson glibly mischaracterized the book, and Numbers obligingly accepted his mangling. They spent a fair amount of time flogging a dead horse filled with straw, or some such unholy metaphor.
Nelson claimed that Coyne's book is "soaked in theology", that it was one big theological argument from beginning to end, and compared it to a hypothetical (again!) situation in which aliens landed, asked us to explain evolution, and Coyne begins by telling them the Christian myth, and how it is all wrong.
I've read the book. Nelson was not describing any book I've read.
His example was to talk about the argument from imperfections, the fact that many of the points Coyne made as evidence of evolution were from sub-optimal adaptations, or historical relics. Nelson has made this argument many times before; he says that it is an attempt to judge what a rational god would do, finding differences from our expectations, and then using those to argue against religion…a purely theological plan and conclusion.
Numbers chimed in to agree vigorously, pointing out that imperfections are no argument against creationism, because creationists believe in a flawed world as a consequence of the Fall. I know this. It is irrelevant.
The argument from biological imperfections is not theological, no matter how vociferously Nelson asserts that it is, because no biologist is simply saying what he claims they are; the interesting part about imperfections like the recurrent laryngeal nerve or the spine of bipeds or mammalian testicles isn't simply that they seem clumsy and broken in a way no sensible god would tolerate, but that evolution provides an explanation for why they are so. We can build a case that these structures are a product of historical antecedents, and have a positive case for them as consequences of common descent. Nelson is misrepresenting the argument, and Numbers just went along with it.
Then, of course, talking about Coyne leads into some Dawkins-bashing. Coyne and Dawkins are going beyond the conventional boundaries of science, Numbers says, and he doesn't like theological conclusions being made from empirical work; evolutionary biology doesn't and can't tell us much of anything about god.
Bullshit.
When you've got a specific theological claim, such as that the earth is only 6,000 years old (or, in Nelson's uselessly blurry version, is simply much younger than geology says), then science certainly can weigh in on a theological claim. It can say that that specific claim is wrong. We can whittle away at virtually every material claim that religions make, and reduce them to an empirical void — the Catholic Church, for instance, officially goes along with the scientific observations of evolution, and simply adds an untestable, immaterial claim on top of it, that there was some moment of "ensoulment" that corresponds to the literary metaphor of Adam and Eve. Science can't disprove that, but what it means is that they are diminished to making pointless claims about invisible, unobservable entities being magically added invisibly and immaterially to people at a distant time and place that they cannot name.
It was a frustrating discussion. If either of them had been having a dialog with Dawkins or Coyne, then this would have been an interesting tack to take, because then they would be arguing over differences, and maybe some reasonable arguments would have emerged (entirely from the Dawkins/Coyne camp, of course). As it is, the two simply dodged their own deep differences to find common, non-antagonistic cause in bashing positions neither understood that were not represented by anyone in their dialog.
At the end, Numbers says one thing that really made me roll my eyes: "One thing that is not welcome in the science and religion debates is people in the middle." It's so true. When you are debating over straightforward questions, like "evolution vs. creation" or "god vs. no god", the position in the middle is non-existent, and people who try to waffle about, refusing to answer the question, are definitely not welcome. They're only there to add noise and confusion.
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
Posted by: Ten Bears | July 25, 2009 4:13 PM
A tedious little something from my place...
There are no “gods”, only fairy tales. Fantasies to explain away the dark, justify sex with young children, and profit. You really don’t think the witch doctor really believes that tossing a virgin in a volcano will make it rain, do you? Nooo… tossing a virgin in a volcano keeps him in his cushy witch doctor gig, with the additional perk of spending a few quality end of life hours with the virgin – what…!? you thought the virgin, stoned to the bone on Ambien, Prozac, and Viagra and smiling all the way to the bottom, was still a virgin when the witch doctor tossed ‘em in? I’ve got some property to sell. Ocean-front. Cheap. Cash only, in small bills. You’ll love Idaho!
Recalling that in all legend lay a kernel of fact, reading the fabrications koran, bible, and torah in larger, historical context with other fabrications lain down in stone it is in fact quite easy to afford “Intelligent Design” a measure of credibility. When chariots with wheels of fire flitting about, vast arks propelling the seeds of life across vast empty spaces, and fathers asking of their wives “be this my son, or that of a “giant?” are lain aside the physical record it isn’t all that far fetched to supposit that at some point in the past half-million years extra-terrestrial travelers – for whatever reason: pure science, sheer boredom, desperate survival, or profit – genetically interfered with the development of the proto-humans they found roaming the savannahs of Northern and Western Africa. Not only are we but fleas agitating the hide of a far greater organism, but some bastard’s abandoned science project, if not cattle, as well. Wrap the twelve percent of your brain you use around that.
This notion that the bastard is going to come back and rescue us… that as the blood of our adolescent squabbles over whose imaginary dog has the bigger dick rises to the horses’ bridle will come floating down out of the sky on a white horse with a thousand angels to carry away the chosen few, the faithful… Who are these “Chosen People”, these “faithful”? The genetically purest cattle (or pigs, as it is)? More accurately: just who do they think they are? Get this straight, these “Chosen People”, these “faithful”, can destroy the world – burn the forests, chop down the mountains, turn the air we breath into toxic gas and waters we drink into vast garbage reservoirs… can
and at the last moment, the moment the world is utterly destroyed, after the bloodbath, some spectral being with whom they’ve entered into some kind of “special” contractual obligation is going to float down out of the sky and carry them away.
Uh-huh. To what?
Far the more likely thousands upon thousands of cavernous spacecraft, vast slaughter-houses piloted by ravenous vaguely reptilian creatures, replete with horns and folked tail, intent not as benevolent overseers of the demise of this world and our current iteration in human evolution and our children’s evolution onto the next iteration of humanity but as ravenous reptilian creatures… you know, hungry lizards. We did, afterall, invite them to “Come Eat!”
Though I often despair of humanity, seeing the mass as that of maggots: a few will evolve and escape as flies, the vast majority will consume the host and die, we as a species, the human species, as a “race”, the human race, today stand at a cusp, an iteration, in the evolution, in the maturing, of humankind. But if we don’t abandon - outgrow - this irrational dependency on adolescent fairytales and attendant adolescent squabbles over whose imaginary dog has the bigger dick… we may very well not survive at all. And while Americans certainly enjoy the “right” to believe whatever fairytale it is chosen to be believed, we are equally free not to believe in fairytales, and leave me remind you of Ben Franklin’s admonishment that “‘rights’ end with the tip of [the] nose”. There is no inherent “right” to impose such nonsense on me, or mine, nor is there any “right”, “divine” or otherwise, to destroy the world my grandchildren are growing up in… in the name of some dog. To do so will result, “right”fully so, in short order and at my hand, in instruction in the difference between prey, and prayer.
Posted by: JRQ | July 25, 2009 4:35 PM
"It was an epic collision of titanic marshmallows; no one was bruised or dented, but afterwards, everyone involved was sticky and gooey."
That is some wonderful, hilarious imagery.
Posted by: Jerry Coyne | July 25, 2009 4:36 PM
Yeah, I watched this debate too and pretty much agree with P.Z.. It's also bizarre that Numbers would give credibility to Nelson, a young-earth Discovery-Institute creationist, by debating him.
And Numbers fails to grasp the "imperfection" argument in my book (of course I'm not the first to make this), which is that the imperfections of nature are exactly of the kind expected if evolution occurred, but cannot be explained by any form of creationism without special pleading.
The puzzling observation that the recurrent laryngeal nerve goes around the ligamentum arteriosum before looping back up to the larynx makes perfect sense under the observation that the l.a. is a remnant of a brachial blood vessel, and has moved backward over time, constraining the nerve to move with it. But this "imperfection" defies explanation under any creationist view--unless you want to claim that God created everything to make it look as if it evolved.
I'm ashamed of Numbers' faitheistic performance here--in his desire to be "civil," he goes astray with the science and, indeed, fails to stick up for science as strongly as I would have supposed. Shame on him.
Posted by: SciencePundit
|
July 25, 2009 5:08 PM
This morning I checked bloggingheads and when I saw who was on (Paul Nelson??? This is supposed to be Science Saturday??????), I figured that I had better things to do with my time. I also figured I would get an honest review here, so why bother watching. ;-)
Posted by: Bueller007 | July 25, 2009 5:16 PM
If you've read The Creationists, you should have already known that Ron Numbers was a "faitheist". As I recall, he accuses Dawkins' religious statements in his popular works about evolution with polarizing the population and motivating the spread of the creationism and the founding of the IDC movement.
Posted by: Leofwine
|
July 25, 2009 5:18 PM
It was an epic collision of titanic marshmallows; no one was bruised or dented, but afterwards, everyone involved was sticky and gooey.
Very funny
Posted by: Tom Morris | July 25, 2009 5:37 PM
As a philosophy grad student, I've decided I'm going to spend the next few years solidly trying to find a middle ground between P and not-P. Now, where did I leave the Templeton Foundation application form?
Posted by: Pi Guy | July 25, 2009 5:45 PM
I was about say that this statement was hilarious. Then I read Ten Bears @ #1.
What a total f*@%ing buzz kill.
Think I'll go grill some pork...
Posted by: Lynna | July 25, 2009 5:58 PM
Jerry Coyne, thanks for adding the info about the recurrent laryngeal nerve. One needs details like that to back up the abstract idea that imperfections are what we expect when we understand the process of evolution.
As for God conducting the orchestra of creation so that it *looks like* evolution in which he/she/it had no hand -- well, that is the biggest spin factor I've ever encountered.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 25, 2009 6:06 PM
Hmm, perhaps you've got this backwards, PZ. I think the noise and confusion is added by those who think only in "either/or" terms and are unable to grasp the significance of "both/and". For instance, the simple "evolution v. creation" dichotomy may, indeed, be that simple; but only if by evolution you mean the common descent of life and by creation you mean the individual formation of each creature by God 6,000 years ago. It is easy for any educated person to choose "evolution" in this case.
But if by evolution you mean something more specific, like that all living organization is reducible to a strictly mechanical process of variation under natural selection, then the dichotomy is certainly made more contentious. One can grant common descent and that the earth is billions of years old and still remain unsatisfied with the claim that Darwin's mechanism can account for all biological form. As someone associated with the Evo-Devo paradigm, I'm sure you can at least see where I'm coming from here. Common descent is undeniable and well understood. As for an adequate explanation for organic form and the self-organization of biological individuals, it seems the science is still a work in progress. My skepticism is certainly not an attempt to wedge God into the gaps; I'm just suggesting that the possibility of a completely mechanical, reductionistic account of living organization may be more a materialist dogma than a legitimate scientific possibility. Young Earth creationists are confused about most things, but they are right to reject the idea that human consciousness can somehow emerge from a process driven entirely by selfish genes.
I think the "evolution v. creation" arguments usually miss the point, because most often, evolution is equated with neo-Darwinian orthodoxy, while creation is equated with Biblical literalism. Why can't nature itself be creative? Seems like a reasonable enough middle ground to me.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 25, 2009 6:12 PM
Bullshit. You "god" is woo-woo-woo.Welcome to science. We can't use your metaphysical construct without worldly meaning. Only the woo-woo-woo infested IDiots do that.Choo-choo train train time. Woo-woo-woo. We previously refuted your nonsense. Philosophy without evidence is sophistry, and you have no evidence. So, you are a sophist.Posted by: eddie | July 25, 2009 6:13 PM
I'm sure mooneytits enjoyed it immensely. Kirshentits not so much. All those titanic marshmallows...
Posted by: SC, OM, Blogmistress | July 25, 2009 6:20 PM
How so? What is lacking, specifically?
What does this mean? Through what method did you arrive at this "hypothesis"? Didn't you run out on questions a week ago?
Posted by: eddie | July 25, 2009 6:22 PM
"Why can't nature itself be creative?"
That's what emergence does, as the good Nerd said.
It also means there are no real gaps; only gaps in our understanding.
Posted by: Amerikon Mau Mau | July 25, 2009 6:23 PM
@#1
"... behind a gothic mask of duty"
"Drop your fucking bombs, burn your demon babies... "
Posted by: eddie | July 25, 2009 6:29 PM
Also, #1's parable of the virgin and the volcano has been on pharyngula before, though not surrounded with so much dodginess.
Posted by: AdamK | July 25, 2009 6:30 PM
Oh, goody. Argument by bald, unsupported, groundless assertion. Again.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 25, 2009 6:40 PM
SC,
What is lacking from both the classical and neo-Darwinian approaches is a theory of organic form. Darwin's is a theory about phylogenetic change across many generations. It tells us almost nothing about ontogeny, the generation and development of biological individuals. The neo-Darwinian synthesis suggests the informational content of the genome can explain organic form. This is just a more subtle, modern form of the old preformationist arguments (that microscopic organisms exist preformed in sperm). Developmental Systems Theorists (see Oyama, 1985, 2001; Thompson, 2007) have given strong arguments against the use of the "information" metaphor in reference to the genome, arguing instead that organic form must be understood holistically as the result of many factors, including but not limited to the genome, the intracellular matrix, the inherited niche, and the emergent influence of self-organization. Evo-Devo and especially DST are bringing formal causation back into biology for the simple reason that living organization cannot be understood without it.
The creativity of nature follows from its intrinsic tendency to self-organize, bringing forth processes more complex than what was present before. I mean to imply nothing supernatural here. This creativity is a natural proclivity of matter given the right conditions.
Posted by: AdamK | July 25, 2009 6:49 PM
@Matthew Segall:
What in god's green hell do you mean by "nature"?
What a vague, hollow yet loaded word.
Sophistry much?
Posted by: Ciaphas | July 25, 2009 6:52 PM
If you're not proposing anything supernatural, then why the earlier nonsense about "materialist dogma"?
Posted by: articulett | July 25, 2009 6:53 PM
There is no middle ground to the truth!
There are lots of stories about the history of life on earth, but only a singular truth. It just so happens that science is the only method ever shown to be successful at illuminating that singular truth. When religious myths are involved, science gets compromised to try to fit into a prefab story.
Science can even tell us a lot about how and why such stories come to be. They can't change the truth to make them fit what people "believe in", however. The earth was never flat even all those eons when humans presumed it was so. God never poofed organisms into existence even when humans had no inkling about how life evolved.
Empirical evidence is the only tool we have for weeding out the singular truth from all the stories, myths, wishful thinking, illusions, etc. proffered. (The only tool proven to work, anyhow.)
Thanks, PZ, for keeping me from wasting my time on this fatheist nonsense.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 25, 2009 6:55 PM
AdamK,
Nature is the sum total of the physical world. If we take a cosmological perspective (cosmos meaning "whole"), then it is more than a mere sum, but is itself whole. We might call nature, or the cosmos, the Being of beings (the one Thing containing all of the many things).
How would you define nature?
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 25, 2009 6:57 PM
I think the "evolution v. creation" arguments usually miss the point, because most often, evolution is equated with neo-Darwinian orthodoxy [mischaracterized and misused by creationists], while creation is equated with Biblical literalism[which is a strawman of the arguments used by people like PZ]. Why can't nature itself be creative? Seems like a reasonable enough middle ground to me.
because anthropomorphizing nature as a mythic entity is bullshit?
do you know what the fallacy of the golden mean is?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_compromise
sometimes, arguments are just plain wrong, and nothing whatsoever to do with ANY creation myth has EVER been supported by any evidence at all.
ergo, no matter how you spin it, it simply has no comparison to science.
there IS NO MIDDLE GROUND.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 25, 2009 6:58 PM
Yes, he, and probably his dissertation advisor, kept the Thread that will not die going. Lots of sound and fury, mean nothing. No hard evidence ever presented to back up their inane assertions. Just what one expects from sophists.Posted by: tmaxPA | July 25, 2009 7:01 PM
*sniff* *sniff*
What's that smell?
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 25, 2009 7:04 PM
It tells us almost nothing about ontogeny, the generation and development of biological individuals.
duh, you moron, that's because Darwin knew nothing of the mechanism of inheritance, nor about development.
You can't cobble together a strawman of the modern ToE and expect to have a valid comparison to anything.
we've learned a bit in the last 150 years. What we've also learned is that while we have a much more complete picture about the very things you raise in what I quoted above, there is also a tremendous amount of support for the idea that natural selection is and has been an important mechanism wrt to the changes we see. So, like any modern scientist, Darwin didn't have a complete picture, but he wasn't wrong about his central thesis, either.
I highly suggest you read Sean Carroll's book:
Endless Forms Most Beautiful
http://seanbcarroll.com/books/Endless_Forms_Most_Beautiful/
traces just how we learned to answer the very questions you seem to think the ToE hasn't answered.
In short, you apparently know just enough about modern evolutionary biology to build a giant strawman of it.
Posted by: AdamK | July 25, 2009 7:05 PM
I wouldn't define nature, nor would I use the word, especially after what you just did to it.
It's "the sum" but also "more than a mere sum"? I would ask you what that's supposed to mean, but I really don't want to know.
And I fail to see how Capitalizing random Words makes them mean Anything Different from what they Meant when they Began with Lower case Letters.
Unless your Intention is to Spout Sophistry.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 25, 2009 7:05 PM
Ciaphas,
One need not invoke supernaturalism to recognize that both parts and wholes have a causal role to play in nature. Reductionistic materialism tries to derive wholes (like living organisms) from their parts. While this has been very useful in physics (though I think quantum mechanics, in light of the work of those like David Bohm, also shows the limits of reductionism), I think it will continue to fail in biology. Note that I am not suggesting wholes are more important than parts, just that explanation by reference to parts alone will always be lacking.
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 25, 2009 7:11 PM
One need not invoke supernaturalism to recognize that both parts and wholes have a causal role to play in nature.
then why do you?
why did you find a need to anthropomorphize nature itself like you did?
intellectually dishonest much?
Reductionistic materialism tries to derive wholes (like living organisms) from their parts.
does this include or exclude the idea of emergent properties?
How has it failed in biology?
I rather think you know so little about biology that such a sweeping statement can only be made out of ignorance.
You're an ignorant fucktard. Admit it, be happy, and move on.
Posted by: AdamK | July 25, 2009 7:16 PM
Ichthyic, I beg to differ. He's no mere ignorant fucktard, but rather an Ignorant Fucktard. There's a subtle but crucial difference.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 25, 2009 7:18 PM
Ichthyic,
If you read my post again, you'll see that I am not denying natural selection plays an important role. I am only questioning whether biology can point to Darwin's mechanism alone as anything like a complete solution to the problems of organic form and ontogeny.
Carroll's perspective, like all Evo-Devo biologists, is more adequate to the evidence than strict genetic reductionism. I think DST is even closer to the reality.
Posted by: tmaxPA | July 25, 2009 7:23 PM
During the time I was going to Tech school, some fast food restaurant had an ad on TV mocking McDonald's McNuggets in comparison to their product. A lot of you may remember it:
"What part of the chicken is the Nugget?"
"Pieces Parts"
"Parts is Parts"
Well, we were dealing with a lot of electronic components ('parts') so several times a week the whole class would break out into everyone babbling "parts is parts!" and laughing and laughing...
I know you think you're sounding all intellectual and all, but you're really full of shit. There is no distinction between parts and wholes "in nature". If I can wade through the putrid muck that you provide as rhetoric, I think you're saying that you haven't yet discovered the concept of 'emergent properties'. That would make you the only one, AFAIK.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 25, 2009 7:25 PM
Well, fellas... I'd love to engage in a spirited debate about these issues, but obviously it is difficult for you to avoid dragging the exchange down to the level of a food fight. You may carry on without me. Farewell.
Posted by: SC, OM, Blogmistress | July 25, 2009 7:25 PM
Uh, reality.
They appear to have the same problem with questions of consciousness. If Descartes said it, it's what contemporary neuroscientists think. Bizarre.
Posted by: John Morales | July 25, 2009 7:26 PM
Matthew:
Boy. Why don't you go back to the other thread with your presupposition and your need for "final causes"?
Yeah, because biology has been such a failure. Why, hardly any progress in the last 150 years!
Posted by: AdamK | July 25, 2009 7:28 PM
Parts is parts, but the whole is no mere sum but rather the Whole, with added mystical non-material but mysteriously non-supernatural ingredients. I mean Ingredients.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 25, 2009 7:28 PM
Well, fellas (and ladies!)...
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 25, 2009 7:31 PM
Translation, I have nothing but woo on my side, and no scientific evidence whatsoever. Therefore, I must flee before you catch on to the fact I have no hard evidence. *Too late.*Posted by: Ichthyic | July 25, 2009 7:33 PM
I am only questioning whether biology can point to Darwin's mechanism alone as anything like a complete solution to the problems of organic form and ontogeny.
It's a good thing it doesn't then, you fucktard.
so why do you keep propping up that strawman?
go run away so you can raise the same strawman again in another thread, right?
I suggest a nice dungeon cell for you.
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 25, 2009 7:38 PM
He's no mere ignorant fucktard, but rather an Ignorant Fucktard. There's a subtle but crucial difference.
Of course!
Apologies all around for missing the Subtle yet all-Important Distinction!!!
I retract all of my arguments for getting that Distinction so Utterly wrong.
:P
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 25, 2009 7:43 PM
Carroll's perspective, like all Evo-Devo biologists, is more adequate to the evidence than strict genetic reductionism.
from the introduction to the book:
you haven't even read the book, nor understand the slightest thing about what developmental biology has added, and CONFIRMED about genetics and their role in development.
you're nothing but a pretend commenter.
go get a fucking clue, and
thendon't come back.Posted by: tmaxPA | July 25, 2009 7:45 PM
Bye bye troll! Catch you next time, too. :-)
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 25, 2009 7:54 PM
@ 41,
Also from Carroll's book:
Yes, genetic switches are involved in development. My contention is that genes are no information content independent of their embeddedness in living organisms and niches. Evo-Devo points to this, DST fully realizes it.
Posted by: AdamK | July 25, 2009 8:01 PM
Genes with Embeddedness are so different from all those genes without Embeddedness, wherever they may be. Floating around out there in the Whole, no doubt.
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 25, 2009 8:03 PM
My contention is that genes are no information content independent of their embeddedness in living organisms and niches.
uh, that would be the selection part.
you don't have a clue.
really.
keep on making a fool of yourself though, I'm enjoying myself.
Do stick to one thread though. I know it's hard for you self-appointed geniuses, but if you don't want to be tossed for trolling, you really need to spew your crap in no more than one thread.
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 25, 2009 8:04 PM
Floating around out there in the Whole, no doubt.
Genes
In
Spaaaaaccccceeeeee....
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 25, 2009 8:18 PM
Matthew has the woo-woo-woo down pat. The true science, from the peer reviewed scientific literature, leaves a lot to be desired. Matthew, I shouldn't have to embarrass you by describing how much a lot means...
Posted by: 'Tis Himself
|
July 25, 2009 8:34 PM
Matthew,
It's folks like you and Alan Plantinga who convince me that much of philosophy is sophistic bullshit.
Er, excuse me for being so vulgar, I should have described it as sophistic bovine feces.
Posted by: Quixotic | July 25, 2009 8:38 PM
Mathew reminds me of the postmodernism generator.
www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
Just generated this little gem:
"If one examines neocultural narrative, one is faced with a choice: either accept realism or conclude that the goal of the poet is social comment. The primary theme of von Ludwig’s critique of constructivist situationism is a postcapitalist paradox. Therefore, an abundance of deappropriations concerning realism may be revealed."
Posted by: MadScientist | July 25, 2009 8:40 PM
That's why I don't tolerate nor am I nice to idiots - it only encourages them to be idiots. As long as people don't call them morons they seem to think that everyone must be OK with their nonsense and that their nonsense has some validity.
Posted by: Malcolm | July 25, 2009 9:03 PM
I see Matthew is back with his "I don't understand any biochemistry, so it doesn't explain consciousness" argument.
Matthew,
Do you still think that bacteria think that food is "Yum"?
Posted by: Pablo | July 25, 2009 9:56 PM
No one has addressed this, but I just want to say:
if said "intelligent designer" created the universe last Thursday, complete with our current memories, science couldn't detect that, either.
What's the difference with what he has said?
Posted by: Son of Adam | July 25, 2009 10:22 PM
Adam and Eve is not a metaphor. They were two real people just like you and I. Also demons, angels, spirits, good, and evil are not metaphors either. Angels and demons (fallen angels) are real physical beings just like you and I. There are some metaphors in the Bible of course, but Adam and Eve were two real individual human beings.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 25, 2009 10:32 PM
Fine, a beautiful myth you think is real. Now, show us the physical (scientific) evidence you are right. Until you do so...Posted by: 'Tis Himself
|
July 25, 2009 10:36 PM
And every Christmas Santa Claus comes down the chimney and leaves a quarter under the pillows of good little boys and girls who've lost their teeth.
Posted by: Bill Harper | July 25, 2009 11:07 PM
I attended a lecture by Ron Numbers in Tallahassee this spring on the history of Creationism/ID, one of a series of events commemerating the Darwin anniversary. Coming from a fundamentalist background I found his history credible and his presentation was good. I was astounded that after this commendable exercise he ended by stating that he was concerned that since atheists have embraced evolution he thought the Supreme Court would one day ban it from the classroom because it was a "religious belief!"
Posted by: Thomas Winwood | July 25, 2009 11:16 PM
So apparently the collision of titanic marshmallows produces large numbers of bogons. There's a paper in this somewhere. Who wants to co-author?
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | July 25, 2009 11:35 PM
So is Frodo, Bilbo and Gandalf.
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | July 25, 2009 11:37 PM
are...ARE
sheesh
Posted by: Doo Shabag | July 26, 2009 12:34 AM
PZ: You are just wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!
"maybe take a shot of some good scotch to get back a little sharpness and bite"
One should never shoot scotch. It is to be sipped, neat, in a nice snifter or rocks glass (sans rocks unless you really insist). If you are taking shots of whisky it better not be the good stuff or you're not invited to my house!
Posted by: Uncle Glenny
|
July 26, 2009 12:40 AM
Angels and demons (fallen angels) are real physical beings just like you and I.
Even got your theology screwy, eh?
Posted by: Vadjong | July 26, 2009 1:34 AM
No No NO, Frodo and Bilbo are Actually HobBITS, Not human beings, you morOn! And GandALLf is someTHING(/-s) Else, ALtoGether, 4reAL. Go see a movie, once in a while!
PS.
Whereas the dual Nature of the Gollum is a post-Wellsian quantum construct of neomarxistic commentary on the emergent properties of Victorian Imperialistic class struggle inherent in and wholly dependent on the quantum suspension of quantum disbelief by a supernaturally relevant quantum cosmic bioforce (either squid or spaghetti) regarding the intricacies of weightless defecation in casu worldcarrying quantum elephants of the male chauvinistic persuasion. Bidet as it may, or turtles all the way down, but definitely no teapot in evidence.
[Good to see the woo slayers out in force and on form.LOL
I hope this gets ironically doubleposted]
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 26, 2009 1:59 AM
PZ,
After reading your comments here about Mooney and Kirshenbaum, I wandered over to their site: boy the little children over there really do not like you!
I would particularly like to congratulate you for banning John Kwok from these comment threads.
Please do remember – the only thing the “faitheists” or “accommodationists” (or was the recent suggestion of “Vichyists” a better term?) want from all of us “New Atheists” is for all of us to shut up or, barring that, to be ignored.
They can’t shut us up unless we choose to comply, and by whining about us in the outlets they control, they just give us all more free publicity.
And that’s the main thing we need – we’ll win on the inherent logic if only enough young folks learn that there is a real debate going on.
So, here’s to Mooney, Numbers, et al. Thanks, guys! We needed that!
Dave Miller in Sacramento
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 26, 2009 4:29 AM
Matthew Segall wrote:
> I am only questioning whether biology can point to Darwin's mechanism alone as anything like a complete solution to the problems of organic form and ontogeny.
>Carroll's perspective, like all Evo-Devo biologists, is more adequate to the evidence than strict genetic reductionism. I think DST is even closer to the reality.
Matthew, back in 1980, I was a doctoral student in physics at Stanford and my wife was a doctoral student in biology. She had to write a term paper for a graduate course on evolution and got to talking about the subject with me.
I convinced her that the future of biology lay in the coming together of evolutionary theory, developmental biology, and molecular biology in a grand systemic synthesis, and that this should be the subject of the term paper.
Does that prove that I was a brilliant prophet wise before my time?
No, it proves only that what you are touting as a brilliant new insight was in fact so obvious even thirty years ago that even a poor physicist, generally ignorant of biology (my ignorance of biology was the stuff of legends back then!), could not avoid seeing it.
Yes, evolutionary theory of course connects with developmental biology and molecular biology just as biology connects with chemistry and chemistry relies upon physics and physics needs math and so on.
But this has not been news for a very, very long time.
As to “systems theory,” I myself have actually been interested in that subject since the old salad days of “General Systems Theory” (Bertalanffy et al.) forty years ago. I’ve actually made practical use of systems theory in some engineering applications, which is where it originated. I still have hopes that it will show some value outside of engineering, but it has never lived up to the original promise in the social sciences, biology, etc.
Perhaps systems theory will end up showing some real value in the whole area of feedback loops in gene regulation. But I think the biologists will be able to work that out without advice from you or me.
Dave Miller in Sacramento
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 26, 2009 5:14 AM
Matthew Segall wrote:
>Reductionistic materialism tries to derive wholes (like living organisms) from their parts. While this has been very useful in physics (though I think quantum mechanics, in light of the work of those like David Bohm, also shows the limits of reductionism)…
Matthew, I got interested in Bohm’s work as an undergrad over three decades ago and am pretty familiar with it.
Bohm did some solid work that showed us physicists that nature was not quite as “local” as we might have thought – the Bohm-Aharonov effect, the Bohmian formulation of quantum mechanics, etc.
But despite his own claims late in his life, none of this really made physics less reductionistic. We still start with tiny little things – quarks or superstrings or whatever, use other low-level concepts (e.g. the complex numbers defined for each little possible state of the system, generally known as the “wave-function”) and reductionistically put this all together to figure out what is happening.
Conceptually, it’s the same sort of thing Newton did, but harder.
If by “reductionism,” you mean a situation where one can figure out what happens to each part of a system separately, while ignoring all other part of the system, then even Newtonian physics was never “reductionistic.” You cannot, after all, figure out the motion of the moon while ignoring the existence of the earth and the sun!
The only sense in which nowadays physics is not reductionistic or biology cannot be reductionistic is this straw-man sense of “reductionistic” that has never been taken seriously by any competent scientist.
What about consciousness? Beats me. Just understanding black-body radiation required the most radical revolution physics has ever faced – the development of quantum theory.
So, it would not surprise me if understanding consciousness requires us physicists to again go through a re-learning experience.
Will a post-consciousness science, including physics, be, in some real sense, non-reductionistic. Who knows?
If you have any clear, concrete ideas on this, by all means get in touch with the neuro-scientists and let them know the concrete experiments you have in mind.
Otherwise, I fear we’ll have to just wait and see what turns up. (Personally, as a physicist, I’d love to see physics turned upside down: all good physicists have a tendency towards metaphorical patricide.)
Dave
Posted by: 'Tis Himself
|
July 26, 2009 6:34 AM
PhysicistDave #64
Austrian School economics claims to use systems theory. The economic calculation problem is a criticism of socialist economics, or more precisely economic planning. It was first proposed by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and later expounded by Friedrich Hayek. The problem referred to is that of how to distribute resources rationally in an economy.
The problem can be summarized thusly: Since capital goods and labor are highly heterogeneous (i.e. they have different characteristics that pertain to physical productivity) economic calculation requires a common basis for comparison for all forms of capital and labor. Money, as a means of exchange, allows many different goods to be analysed in terms of their cost in a very easy way; the cheaper good is a more desirable one to use. This is the signalling function of prices, and the rationing function prevents over-use of any resource. Without money to facilitate easy comparisons, socialism lacks any way to compare different goods and services. Decisions made will therefore be largely arbitrary and without sufficient knowledge, often on the whim of bureaucrats.
The Austrian School or free market solution is a price mechanism; Mises and Hayek argued that this is the only possible solution, and without the information provided by market prices socialism lacks a method to rationally allocate resources. Those who agree with this criticism argue it is a refutation of socialism and that it shows that a socialist planned economy could never work.
This is a vastly simplified description of the problem and the solution. Mises and Hayek (and others) have written and lectured voluminously on this subject. Personally, while I think there is some validity to the problem, it's overstated and the solution is incomplete.
Posted by: 386sx | July 26, 2009 6:40 AM
No one has addressed this, but I just want to say:
if said "intelligent designer" created the universe last Thursday, complete with our current memories, science couldn't detect that, either.
What's the difference with what he has said?
Not much. Both your theory Mr. Nelson's theory are flawed, since they don't have any evidence, and they are both pulled completely out of nowhere.
One difference though. You blame the flaw on your theory, but Mr. Nelson blames the flaw on everything else but his theory. It's all methodological naturalism's fault that he can pull whatever he wants completely out of thin air.
Posted by: XD | July 26, 2009 7:09 AM
So, in a debate between a person who says that 2+2=4 (and provides proof), and a person who says that 2+2=6 (simply because that was what he was taught when he was a child), what we really need is someone who believes 2+2=5?
Bollocks.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself
|
July 26, 2009 7:18 AM
XD, you're ignoring the whole accommodationist argument. Those who believe that 2+2=6 should not be discouraged from thinking. You fundamentalist arithmetists aren't giving the "sixers" the proper respect their believe deserves. If you disparage sixers' beliefs, then they won't accept the whole subtraction thing, not to mention multiplication and other higher forms of numerological manipulation.
Posted by: 386sx | July 26, 2009 7:32 AM
The sixers and the fourseys have different ways of knowledge!!
Posted by: 'Tis Himself
|
July 26, 2009 7:43 AM
Having just reread my post #69, I see I have a different way of writing.
Posted by: XD | July 26, 2009 7:43 AM
Yes, in retrospect, I was just being a militant arithmetist. I should have realised that just because I am interested in mathematical proofs, not everyone else is. Also, even though there is no proof that 2+2=6, the Sixer's belief that 2+2=6 is part of their identity, and that trying to point out that 2+2=4 is offensive and just plain rude.
Thank Math we have people like Chris "2+2=5" Mooney.
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 26, 2009 8:08 AM
'Tis Himself wrote to me:
> Austrian School economics claims to use systems theory. The economic calculation problem is a criticism of socialist economics, or more precisely economic planning. It was first proposed by Ludwig von Mises in 1920 and later expounded by Friedrich Hayek. The problem referred to is that of how to distribute resources rationally in an economy.
Strangely enough, I am intimately familiar with all that: I was friends with one of Mises’ younger students, the late Murray Rothbard, who was an economics professor at UNLV.
Yeah, I suppose in a sense that is “systems theory” and, I think there have been some attempts, e.g., by another acquaintance of mine, the British economist Stephen C. Littlechild, to actually take those ideas and turn them into hard mathematics.
In general, however, the “Austrian school” was rather hostile to attempts to introduce methods from math and the natural sciences into economics (although my friend Rothbard’s bachelor’s degree was actually in math).
In the broadest possible sense, one could label a lot of thinking in the social and biological sciences as “systems theory”: anything that uses the metaphors of feedback, information, etc., indeed, even the idea of a selection process is, in some very broad sense, systems theory.
I suppose that my main point is that this almost always arises from discoveries internal to the field, not from an outside impetus from systems theory in the narrow, mathematical sense. After something has actually been discovered in economics, molecular biology, etc., it may sometimes be convenient to use metaphors from systems theory to describe the results, but I don’t know of systems theory having actually driven the discoveries in any important case.
I’d like to be proven wrong: I have some patents on the applications of information theory to computer and communication systems, and so I know a decent amount about information theory and systems theory in the narrow mathematical and engineering sense.
It would be really cool if my knowledge turned out to be useful in biology or social science.
As I said above, I have hopes for that in gene regulation. But, as far as I can see, so far, discoveries in both biology and the social sciences have been made without any real assistance from systems theory, and with systems theory nomenclature simply added on after the fact, icing on the cake, so to speak.
Dave
Posted by: 'Tis Himself
|
July 26, 2009 8:36 AM
This is one of my major complaints about the Austrian School.
Incidentally, Dave, I'm an economist and I knew Rothbard very slightly.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 26, 2009 12:15 PM
PhysicistDave,
Are you familiar with the work being done at the Sante Fe Institute? Stuart Kauffman is external faculty there, I'm sure you've heard of him. When I wrote above that reductionism fails in biology (at least when trying to account for whole organisms), I think Kauffman gives the best example why in this talk at Beyond Belief: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3180594616479446930
In physics, there are only happenings. In biology, there are agents with purposes (or at the very least, organs with functions). What do you think?
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 26, 2009 12:21 PM
BTW, PZ makes a guest appearance in that video of Kauffman about 6 minutes in.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 26, 2009 12:31 PM
Matthew, still no scientific evidence to back you up. Here's one way to tell woo from science. Science cites the peer reviewed primary scientific literature. Woo cites videos and philosophy books. You have done only the latter. You won't make inroads into scientists without the physical evidence. So, you might as well quit wasting your time.
Posted by: llewelly | July 26, 2009 1:01 PM
This is true only so long as ID posits that nothing is knowable about the proposed designer. In practice - most ID proponents are also proponents of religions which purport to know something about the designer. In particular, that man was the central focus of the designer, and the primary reason for the existence of the universe. Once a designer has been hypothesized to have specific attributes, one can deduce how these attributes might affect the design. At that point - design by a designer with specific attributes becomes a testable hypothesis. For example - a designer who loves beetles is proposed. One might expect there would be many different kinds of beetles, and that they would be found in great numbers in every environment. Now it seems the environs of Earth support the beetle-loving designer quite well. But what about Jupiter? It is often the 3rd brightest natural object in the night sky, it is by far the most massive planet in the solar system, it is over 1300 times the volume Earth - and yet, as far as we know, its environment is wholly inimical to beetle life. Worse, Jupiter is hardly alone. In fact - astronomy shows that planets where beetles can thrive are at best in the minority. So the hypothesis of a beetle-loving designer is cast into doubt.PS: Please, Please, please ask the sciborg tech people to get preview working again.
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 26, 2009 1:03 PM
Matthew,
Please point us to a biologist (or for that matter a physicist) who is "reductionist" in your sense; preferably with appropriate citations.
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 26, 2009 1:09 PM
BTW,
I have difficulty believing "Ron Numbers" is a real name. It was the name my brother and I gave to a journalist on a spoof newspaper, The Nudge, which we handwrote as adolescents. I think we may have pinched it from Private Eye. In the UK (and surely in the US?) a "wrong number" is what you get if you misdial when phoning someone.
Posted by: keiths | July 26, 2009 2:00 PM
This is too good not to share with the folks here.
Joe Gallien sets PZ straight in a comment at Uncommon Descent:
At AtBC, commenter 'Reciprocating Bill' wryly notes:
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 26, 2009 2:29 PM
Knockgoats,
Dawkins would be the best example, but any biologist with a genocentric view of living organization would do.
Dawkins also says, in reference to thinking about the genome in terms of digital information, that it:
Daniel Dennett, though not a biologist, expresses reductionism well when he says "biology is engineering" (1996, p. 187). Darwin and William Paley had more in common then it first appears, as they both approached living organization from the perspective of "design" (which implies that organisms are best understood as machines). Paley said the design of biological machines is evidence of intelligence; Darwin that it is evidence of natural selection.
A non-reductionist biology would have to approach organisms from a different paradigm altogether. Kant offers such a paradigm. He argued in the Critique of Judgment that, unlike machines, the parts of organisms reciprocally produce one another and the organism as a whole. He coined the term "self-organization" to describe this process, and referred to self-organizing living systems as "natural purposes". Machines are put together from the outside (either by intelligent designers or natural selection) and are reducible to their parts (i.e., no new properties are present in the whole that weren't already prefigured in the parts). Organisms, according to Kant, produce and organize themselves from within and cannot be reduced to their parts without ignoring what defines them as living systems in the first place (agency at the level of the whole).
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 26, 2009 3:04 PM
Matthew,
It's customary, and useful, to give a title as well as an author and date in a citation.
I have to conclude that you haven't actually read Dennett (1996) Darwin's Dangerous Idea with much attention. The very chapter you cite includes a section on Kauffman's work - which he praises, while criticising some of the ways Kauffman has presented it.
Your point about information is otiose: information always requires a reading mechanism in order to be such.
Machines are put together from the outside (either by intelligent designers or natural selection) and are reducible to their parts (i.e., no new properties are present in the whole that weren't already prefigured in the parts).
Nonsense. From the hafted spear to the nuclear reactor, all machines have properties their parts do not. Otherwise, there would be no point in making them.
Organisms, according to Kant, produce and organize themselves from within and cannot be reduced to their parts without ignoring what defines them as living systems in the first place (agency at the level of the whole).
And you think you could find a biologist who disagrees with this? (Except that some would prefer to restrict "agency" to organisms capable of relatively sophisticated cognition, and would substitute "function".)
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 26, 2009 3:18 PM
@83,
About Kauffman, Dennett tries to squeeze his ideas into a Darwinian framework, while I'd argue Kauffman is trying to approach biology from a different perspective altogether. It is not in opposition to Darwin's mechanism, but adds to it the idea that much order in the biosphere is "for free." Dennett accuses him of "[feeding] the antiengineering prejudice" (p. 227), which is exactly the point. Biology is not engineering, it is self-organization.
About information, of course I agree with you. Dawkins seems to think there is information in the genome independent of the intracellular matrix and niche ("...not a metaphor" -The Blind Watchmaker).
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 26, 2009 3:26 PM
@83,
About new properties in machines, I should have been more specific. A machine, or any artifact, may have functional attributes not present in its parts. But the parts of a machine cannot add up to ontologically new properties, like genuine agency or natural purpose.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 26, 2009 3:35 PM
Still looking for hole to put your argument into, just the godbots trying to find a philosophical hole for their imaginary deity. In this case, you are the one with imaginary, but non-deity, construct. We don't need or want your sophistry. Try reading the real scientific literature rather than books for the general public. And keep reading until you fully understand what is being said and why. You might even be able to develop an argument that would pass muster. But you still have a lot of research to do before you can do that.Posted by: Owlmirror | July 26, 2009 3:42 PM
Says you.
Are you saying that machine intelligence is logically impossible? Or just ontologically impossible?
Would you accept a true machine intelligence as a disproof, or are you just a carbon chauvinist?
Posted by: Roel | July 26, 2009 3:50 PM
I'd recommend something very heavily peated, like a Lagavulin or a Laphroaig Cask Strength.Posted by: SC, OM, Blogmistress | July 26, 2009 4:00 PM
Matthew, would you mind defining "ontological"? I believe you (like Ken Wilber fan) are using the term in an idiosyncratic manner which renders debate difficult. "Natural purpose" is rather hazy as well.
Thanks in advance.
Posted by: SC, OM, Blogmistress | July 26, 2009 4:29 PM
[rampant speculation]
It seems like the panwhathaveyouists are, at root, precisely what they seem to accuse others of being: dualists. Materialism to them does not appear as naturalism - the study of reality - but as an approach that explains "inert" matter but not what "animates" it. But this is strange: naturalist scientists investigate all of the features of dynamic reality (nature).
In the recent Grothe panel discussion with Dawkins, Druyan, Tyson, and Stenger, Stenger made an interesting remark about one of the "big questions." It's suggested by scientific knowledge at the moment, he suggested, that nothing is unstable. Therefore, something. Tyson responded with an argument many of us have been making for some time - that saying "We don't know - people are working on it" is totally acceptable. I completely agree with Tyson in general, but don't think he was really reponding to what Stenger was saying. I find Stenger's little allusion extremely interesting. But the difference between my view and that of the panwooists is that I'm saying that if the science is suggesting that to some people they should go ahead and investigate it, sharing their empirical findings with all of us as they go. The panpomoists appear to be saying "Scientists don't know. Insert woo here."
[/rampant speculation]
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 26, 2009 4:35 PM
Dawkins would be the best example, but any biologist with a genocentric view of living organization would do.
one, even dawkins isn't as "genocentric" as you're painting him.
two, there aren't ANY publishing evolutionary biologists (or geneticists, for that matter), that are as "genocentric" as you project.
keep puttin' up those strawmen, boy. Soon you'll have an army big enough to conquer, um... your backyard?
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 26, 2009 4:40 PM
I have to conclude that you haven't actually read Dennett (1996) Darwin's Dangerous Idea with much attention.
my guess is he actually hasn't read ANY of the books he cites.
rather, he relies on second or third hand reviews of those books, that quotemine them for the very things he's looking for.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 26, 2009 4:42 PM
Until real science comes by with some phosphorus sesquisulfide on a twig.Posted by: Ichthyic | July 26, 2009 4:47 PM
The panpomoists appear to be saying "Scientists don't know. Insert
woo herefoot in mouth."heh.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 26, 2009 4:54 PM
Owlmirror,
Depending on how we define "intelligence," AI has either already been invented or will certainly become possible when computing power reaches a certain point. If a machine only needs to pass the Turing Test to be considered intelligent, this happened long ago.
As a disproof of the irreducibility of biological agency or natural purposes (as defined by Kant)? No, AI would not disprove that living organization represents an ontologically emergent feature of nature. There is a difference between computational intelligence/information processing and living organization. I'm not a carbon chauvinist; I think life is probably realizable on other physical platforms. But life is not at all like the processing of digital information, no matter how complex or apparently intelligent. A biological agent is a self-producing system that defines its own physical boundary by maintaining a membrane of some sort. Perhaps scientists will eventually be able to create a simple version of such an agent in the lab by assembling genetic and cellular components, but this doesn't mean ontological emergence is not still taking place when the molecules begin to function as parts of the whole system.
SC,
When I use the term "ontological" in this context (i.e., that agency is an ontologically new property not found in the components of a biological system), I mean that the emergent properties of the whole could not have been predicted based on any amount of knowledge of the properties of the parts. The ontological emergence of agency implies that living organisms are irreducible to the physical properties of their components. Ontological refers to the real "existence" of whatever property is in question. In this case, the properties in question are agency, natural purpose, and wholeness.
A "natural purpose" is Kant's phrase for an organism. A thing is an organism, or a natural purpose, if it is both cause and effect of itself. In other words, if it is self-organizing. To read the section of Kant's Critique where he goes into more detail, go to this link and scroll to the bottom: http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=1217&chapter=97595&layout=html&Itemid=27
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 26, 2009 4:59 PM
Ichthyic,
Any book I've cited on Pharyngula, I have read, including Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
SC,
Thanks for the reference to that panel discussion, I'm watching it now.
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 26, 2009 5:07 PM
including Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
and I don't believe you.
If you have read the book you just mentioned, then explain what Dennet actually means by "organizing principle" as one of the central theses of it, and indicate what evidence he uses (general, by chapter) to support it.
surely you can at least recall what the primary evidences presented in the book are, right?
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 26, 2009 5:10 PM
One thing that is important to remember about Kant is that he was still a dualist. I think his insight that organisms can not be accounted for solely in terms of efficient causes is important, but he leans to heavily on his phenomenal/noumenal dichotomy for this realization to be fully grounded and consistent.
Kant writes:
Kant rejects hylozoism, of which panexperientialism is a more modest version. I think accepting a more modest version of hylozoism is a necessary metaphysical move if we want to account for natural purposes without dualism.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 26, 2009 5:12 PM
Ichthyic,
I don't care if you don't believe me. If I was lying, I could just look up the text of his entire book via google and comply with your request. But again, I'm not here to prove I can read.
Posted by: AdamK | July 26, 2009 5:13 PM
SC,OM,B
I agree. I've run across similar references a couple of times -- don't know where, or I'd -- but always just quick references to what may be a well-grounded opinion of some physicists. I'd like to see a fuller explanation, dumbed down to my level of course.
Because that's always been my intuitive response to the "why is there something rather than nothing" question: why should we assume they're equally likely? And isn't that a question for physicists, not armchair philosophers? (As is the question of defining "nothing" in this context.)
Metaphysical questions, properly put, reduce to physical ones.
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 26, 2009 5:17 PM
If I was lying, I could just look up the text of his entire book via google and comply with your request.
then go ahead and do it.
frankly, using Dennet to support your inane contention is easily disproven by actually reading the fucking book, so even having you regurgitate the relevant key points would immediately put the lie to your entire concept of "reductionism in biology".
so go ahead, feel free to keep lying about what you've read and what you haven't. It's obvious to me you either haven't read any of these books, or else had filters on your reading glasses of such density that only every tenth word or so actually filtered into your brain.
Posted by: SC, OM, Blogmistress | July 26, 2009 5:27 PM
And, even further, to mine. :)
To elaborate a bit: I think Tyson was kind of jumping on Stenger out of suspicion (reasonable, but misplaced here) that Stenger was suggesting that scientists must respond to every question (and I love Tyson's discussion of incoherent questions elsewhere in the discussion). I don't think Stenger was arguing that. I think he was simply saying something like:
"Reality. There's an app for that."
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 26, 2009 5:32 PM
Matthew Segall,
It is not in opposition to Darwin's mechanism, but adds to it the idea that much order in the biosphere is "for free."
Which Dennett accepts. He summarises his interpretation of Kauffman's vision: "Either you find the path that leads to evolvability or you don't go anywhere, but finding the path to evolvability is not such a big deal; its "obvious"."
"Dennett accuses him of "[feeding] the antiengineering prejudice" (p. 227), which is exactly the point. Biology is not engineering, it is self-organization."
Biology involves self-organization, as no-one denies, but self-organization also occurs outside biology, and biology involves much more than self-organization - notably (but not only), random mutation and natural selection. Whether we call the adaptations resulting from natural selection "engineering" is a matter of taste. I wouldn't, but I see Dennett's point: we can get a long way in understanding organisms by thinking of them as if they were engineered.
genuine agency or natural purpose
In addition to defining "ontological" as SC asks, perhaps you could tell us what distinguishes "genuine" agency from the fake kind, and why "natural" purpose is more purposive than (presumably) "artificial" purpose.
I said at some point that I'd summarise for you some work I've done on Conway's "Game of Life" (henceforth GoL) that's relevant to these issues. As you'll know, GoL patterns can have properties such as indefinite growth, self-reproduction and computational universality. What I have shown (there's a chapter in a Santa Fe Proceedings volume "New Constructions in Cellular Automata", and an update in International Journal of Systems Science - I'm not giving exact references because I don't want my real name and hence work email to be too easy for random idiots to find) is that such patterns will arise spontaneously, through self-organization, in "sparse Life". "Sparse Life" starts with an infinite (or sufficiently large finite) GoL field in which initially every cell has, independently, a very low probability of being "on". More recently (article just out in Artificial Life), I show that something similar to natural selection can arise within finite, and quite simple, GoL patterns which generate a large number of different local subpatterns (and which would themselves arise from much simpler, randomly distributed predecessors in sparse Life). So here we have a system far simpler than real-world physics, in which, almost certainly, evolvability would arise without any necessity for innate drives to complexification, panexperientialism, or any similar winky-wanky-woo.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 26, 2009 5:33 PM
Matthew, keep in mind that people like Richard Dawkins post here on occasion, and they won't like it if you misrepresent what they say.
Posted by: SC, OM, Blogmistress | July 26, 2009 5:46 PM
I really don't think they get this. It doesn't fit with the Aristotelian causal framework they haven't moved beyond.
:D
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 26, 2009 5:49 PM
When I use the term "ontological" in this context (i.e., that agency is an ontologically new property not found in the components of a biological system), I mean that the emergent properties of the whole could not have been predicted based on any amount of knowledge of the properties of the parts. - Matthew Segall
1) How do you propose to demonstrate the impossibility of such a prediction?
2) Your definition looks more epistemological than ontological.
3) In GoL, the ultimate "parts" are individual cells, each of which follows the same simple rule (turn on if exactly 3 of your 8 neighbours are on; turn off if less than 2 or more than 3 of those neighbours are on). Now it's true that you can't predict the existence of patterns with specific properties without knowing how the cells are connected up. So if you exclude such knowledge, gliders (small patterns that move across the GoL array) are "ontologically emergent". If you allow it, they are not - and nor are self-reproducing patterns. What "parts" are you talking about in the real-world case? If it's molecules, for example, what are the "properties of the parts"? How can these be defined without specifying how they interact with other molecules, or with light?
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 26, 2009 5:57 PM
'Tis Himself wrote to me:
>>[Dave] In general, however, the “Austrian school” was rather hostile to attempts to introduce methods from math and the natural sciences into economics
>[TH]This is one of my major complaints about the Austrian School.
>[TH]Incidentally, Dave, I'm an economist and I knew Rothbard very slightly.
Interesting. Your description of Mises' and Hayek's work on the economic-calculation issue was a fairly sympathetic presentation of their views.
I’m a bit conflicted on this myself. On the one hand, I think that my own mentor in physics, the Nobelist Richard Feynman, was right to claim that some social science was “cargo-cult science” – i.e., it pointlessly imitated the forms of physics without having any real empirical content (Feynman was, apparently, particularly annoyed with Samuelson’s classic “Foundations of Economic Analysis”).
On the other hand, my own natural inclination is to think in math, so I do naturally tend to try to translate any econ I learn into math.
Incidentally, Rothbard was more open-minded on this in personal conversation than one might have gathered from his published writings. As near as I could tell, his main objection was similar to Feynman’s: he thought that, way too often, math was used in economics simply to make very simple (often simply wrong) ideas look complicated and profound.
That’s bad scholarship in any field, of course: sad to say, the same disease has infected physics in recent decades where too many physicists feel that they must use enormously complicated mathematical apparati to deal with physically very simple (and often wrong) physical ideas. (Math, and sometimes very abstract math, is needed in physics, of course, and in some cases – e.g., superstring theory – the math we have is not yet powerful enough to handle the job.) Feynman was also critical of this going on in physics.
I wonder if you could suggest some texts at an advanced undergrad or graduate level that you feel present economics with the right balance? For example, is “rational expectations” theory still taken seriously or is it dead nowadays? (I remember rat-ex as being promising but mathematically intractable.) There are various reasons why I’m curious to look at such texts, which I won’t go into in detail here except to say that I am not trying to start a debate on the methodology of economics on PZ’s blog!
I’d also be curious if you yourself have published anything on the topics we are discussing.
All the best,
Dave Miller in Sacramento
Posted by: PhysicstDave | July 26, 2009 6:04 PM
Matthew Segall wrote to me:
>Are you familiar with the work being done at the Sante Fe Institute? Stuart Kauffman is external faculty there, I'm sure you've heard of him.
I know of him and the Institute, of course, but have only slight knowledge of his work from some years ago.
As it happens, I am headed over to the university library in a few minutes and will look and see what they have in the stacks by Kauffman.
I’ll see if I can refresh my memory of his stuff a bit, and give you a marginally better informed reply this evening.
Dave
Posted by: 'Tis Himself
|
July 26, 2009 7:03 PM
It's quite simple. I am unsympathetic to the Austrian School and I loathe libertarians, especially libertarian economists*. I was trying to give a reasonably even-handed description of the economic calculation problem. I did say that I thought their description of the problem was overstated and I am unimpressed with their solution.
I like Samuelson's book. It's considered a classic in the field and contains a basic description of welfare economics. As for Feynman's disliking the book, since I have no idea what his objections were, I can hardly comment. The Austrian School hates Samuelson because of his use of icky math and other stuff not based on intuition and wishful thinking.
One of the problems with all social sciences is we try to be too sciency at times. Unfortunately, Newton's Third Law of Motion has an analog in economics: "For every economist there is an equal and opposite economist." This observation can be expanded to note that often both economists are wrong. It's a lot more flamboyant to say "and this phenomenon is due to Arglebargle's Law of Hand-Waving which can be expressed mathematically as y = ex then dy/dx = ex = y dy/dx = y then dy/y = dx" than "it's my opinion that things will not change in the short-term."
IMO the best basic textbook is McConnell & Brue's Principles of Economics. It's reasonably complete, well written, and well organized. Samuelson (yes, that Samuelson) & Nordhaus's Economics is also good for the basics.
You can download MacAfee's Introduction to Economic Analysis for free. There's other textbooks I can recommend, but they tend to be pricy. I can suggest several books that run over $100 new.
There are people who still use rational expectations. I was never too impressed by the idea. Incidentally, both the Austrian School and the Keynesians don't like rat ex, of course for different reasons. My main criticism is the efficient markets hypothesis models assume that at any specific time, a market or the economy has only one equilibrium (which was determined ahead of time), so that expectations are formed around this unique equilibrium. If there is more than one possible equilibrium at any time then the more interesting implications of rat ex do not apply. In fact, expectations would determine the nature of the equilibrium attained, reversing the line of causation posited by rat ex theory.
No, I haven't. I've written large numbers of papers for various employers but nothing that was generally published. I was a co-author on two textbooks, both now out of print.
*I said I knew Rothbard, I didn't say I liked him. Actually, as you probably know, he was a very pleasant person to talk to. I despised his economic and political views, he knew it and he knew why.
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 26, 2009 7:27 PM
'Tis Himself wrote to me:
>My main criticism is the efficient markets hypothesis models assume that at any specific time, a market or the economy has only one equilibrium (which was determined ahead of time), so that expectations are formed around this unique equilibrium. If there is more than one possible equilibrium at any time then the more interesting implications of rat ex do not apply.
Yeah, that’s the sort of thing that I had understood to be a problem in rat-ex.
I read Samuelson’s textbook (two different editions, in fact) years ago, and I’m familiar with all the old undergrad stuff from standard micro to IS/LM curves and so on.
I was wondering if you could suggest anything at a more advanced level that includes developments in recent decades (Samuelson’s “Foundations of Economic Analysis” is from many decades ago, of course). Could you name some books, that if a person really read and understood them, you would consider him truly educated in economics?
Tough math is not an issue for me, of course.
I can't promise for certain that I will have time to read such books, but I am trying at least to get a sense of the “lay of the land” in contemporary economics, at least as you see it.
You also wrote:
>Actually, as you probably know, he [Rothbard] was a very pleasant person to talk to. I despised his economic and political views, he knew it and he knew why.
Yeah, he was “take no prisoner” in print, but a fairly quiet guy (with an infectious laugh), who was willing to listen to others, in person.
Which of course proves that PZ is really a quiet, mousy introvert out in the real world!
Dave
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 26, 2009 8:08 PM
Matthew Segall wrote:
>One thing that is important to remember about Kant is that he was still a dualist. I think his insight that organisms can not be accounted for solely in terms of efficient causes is important, but he leans to heavily on his phenomenal/noumenal dichotomy for this realization to be fully grounded and consistent.
Do you think that even plants cannot be accounted for solely in terms of efficient causes?
It seems to me overwhelmingly likely that a rosebush is simply a physical machine – a mushy, chaotic complicated machine made of atoms and, of course, “designed” by natural selection.
I understand the argument of Thomas Nagel that a naively physicalistic explanation of a bat is incomplete because it cannot explain what it “feels like” to be a bat.
As a physicist, this seems to me to have some strength: we physicists have been very careful (for very good reasons!) to avoid questions of what it “feels like” to be an electron or a quark, and I am not quite sure how physics can move from the “externalist” perspective that physics invariably takes to the “internalist” perspective, the ‘raw feels” as it is sometimes said, that we all have of ourselves.
But I don’t think it “feels like” anything to be a plant. Do you?
So, I just do not see any problem with a purely materialist explanation of plants based purely on efficient causes.
I think maybe the frustration some people here are having is that you sometimes sound as if it is obvious that Kant and others had legitimate points, when most of us feel that any points they made have to be judged in light of the relatively primitive state of scientific knowledge in their time. Certain concepts, such as “final causes” may have seemed necessary to Aristotle or Kant simply because they did not understand how natural selection can produce very complex mechanisms that superficially appear to be subject to “final causes” but actually are not.
We do not naively assume that Newton or Galileo was right, now that we know so much more than they did. Newton, for example, was wrong in his calculations for both the refraction of light and for the speed of sound because he made assumptions that turned out to be empirically false.
(Similarly, as Fleeming Jenkin (what a name!) pointed out at the time, Darwin initially seemed not to understand that the issue of particulate inheritance versus continuous-blending inheritance was of central importance to the theory of natural selection.)
Why should we be any less reluctant to unflinchingly dismiss views of Aristotle or Kant if those views seem simply to be the result of ignorance of scientific facts that we ourselves have since discovered?
Dave
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 26, 2009 8:27 PM
Matthew Segall wrote:
>When I use the term "ontological" in this context (i.e., that agency is an ontologically new property not found in the components of a biological system), I mean that the emergent properties of the whole could not have been predicted based on any amount of knowledge of the properties of the parts. The ontological emergence of agency implies that living organisms are irreducible to the physical properties of their components. Ontological refers to the real "existence" of whatever property is in question. In this case, the properties in question are agency, natural purpose, and wholeness.
There is an ambiguity in your use of “irreducible to the physical properties of their components” here.
Do you think that surface tension is not reducible to the properties of individual water molecules?
Well, obviously, a single water molecule cannot have any surface tension!
On the other hand, we are almost certain that what we understand of water molecules – their electronic structure as described by quantum theory – does indeed explain surface tension: a bit of hydrogen bonding, a bit of van der Waals force and add in some statistical mechanics and -- voila! – there’s your surface tension.
Now, if surface tension is an irreducible phenomena, then science does explain irreducible phenomena every day, six times before breakfast. It’s a piece of cake, our bread and butter.
Irreducibility? No problem, part of the standard package.
If you do not consider surface tension to be an example of irreducibility, I frankly do not see why you would consider a plant to be an example of irreducibility. Plants are more complicated, of course, but, in principle, we think we can reduce plants to chemistry (and ultimately physics) just as much as surface tension can be reduced.
If surface tension is not irreducible, why is a rosebush or an amoeba an example of irreducibility?
I just do not see a problem here.
Dave
Posted by: PhysicistDavedhmi | July 26, 2009 8:47 PM
Matthew Segall wrote:
> But the parts of a machine cannot add up to ontologically new properties, like genuine agency or natural purpose.
Maybe this gets to the heart of the dispute.
In the light of Darwin’s work, I cannot think of any reason to believe that there is such a thing as “natural purpose.”
Or, to put it a bit more accurately, I think that if there is anything at all that can properly be called “natural purpose,” then “natural purpose” is simply serving as shorthand for the way an organism generally behaves as a result of the purely materialistic, efficient causes that led to its current state, so that we could, in principle, eliminate the idea of “natural purpose” altogether.
I get the feeling that you think that *of course* all of us scientists recognize that “natural purpose” really exists as something more than the shorthand I just described.
If so, you’re mistaken.
Do you see the point? Almost no one here really believes in “natural purpose” in the sense that phrase used to be used.
You also wrote:
> A "natural purpose" is Kant's phrase for an organism. A thing is an organism, or a natural purpose, if it is both cause and effect of itself.
Again, this phrase “cause and effect of itself” seems to presuppose that we all agree that this means something.
I don’t think it does.
As a physicist, I think of cause-and-effect as just one little thing after another, following each other in time in accord with the laws of physics. For something to be “both cause and effect of itself” you’d seem to have to somehow bundle all those little causes up into some grand big cause. That makes no sense to me, and it also violate the requirement that a cause must precede its effect in time.
I know that, in fact, you may just be alluding to the obvious point that the state of the plant yesterday is (part of) the cause of the state of the plant today, but, if that is what you mean, there is no mystery and no need for a special concept of “natural purpose.”
Again, I think you may be assuming that we scientists find it necessary to think in a pre-scientific mode of thought that we long ago found to be unnecessary and counter-productive.
We just do not think that way any longer, and we see no reason why we should go back to the old ways that have failed.
Dave
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 26, 2009 10:31 PM
PhysicistDave,
Thanks for your lengthy and thorough responses. Let's get to it...
Let's stick to physics first. What do you think the implications of quantum entanglement are, as regards efficient causation? Can entanglement be accounted for in terms of efficient causes?
As for plants, I do not think efficient causes are enough to account for their morphology or metabolism. Neither would be possible without the role played by efficient causation, but it alone is not sufficient. You might say natural selection explains the "design" of a plant just fine, but this is to attempt to pawn off a question of ontogeny to one of phylogeny. Yes, the general morphology of plants evolved. But this is no explanation for the development of individual plants. To explain ontogeny, we need to reference formal causation. You might say that the morphology of the plant is stored in the genome, but this just begs the question concerning how genetic "information" is realized purely by way of efficient causation. Final causality is also required to explain the growth and metabolism of plant life (or any life), as a plant is both cause and effect of itself. This is Kant's way of describing how, for instance, a tree's leaves are not only produced by the tree, but themselves help to maintain the tree. Kant adds that "[the tree's] parts, both as to their existence and form, are only possible by their relation to the whole" (CoJ, Sec. 65). This is a circular causality in which the system in question produces and maintains itself.
Are you familiar with the panexperientialist cosmology of mathematician/physicist/philosopher Alfred North Whitehead?
The scientific facts we've since discovered are the result of shifting our metaphysical presuppositions. The shifts that were made (such as removing all interiority from nature and describing it instead as pure extension) proved to be extremely valuable in respect to the engineering feats and empirical insights they allowed for. They also allowed us to move past the more naive versions of finalism held by the ancients. However, the metaphysical reversal brought about by the Scientific Revolution also created some rather intractable problems, chief among them the mind/body duality. You mentioned Nagel, and seem to recognize the severity of the issue in terms of our general understanding of the natural world. How is it, exactly, that our psychological lives are possible if nature is completely describable in terms of extension alone?
I think my failure to find common ground with the regulars here at Pharyngula has to do with my belief that metaphysics is not simply philosophy trying to become physics. I think there are genuine metaphysical problems that we cannot tackle using empirical means alone. That doesn't mean metaphysics should not be informed by our direct experience; it means that some problems (like the mind/body duality) are created by the way we conceptualize the scientific enterprise itself.
I do think Aristotle's philosophy is valuable in our age, but that doesn't mean it doesn't require major changes in light of modern discoveries. Kant is even more valuable, as his views are thoroughly modern. He was about as well versed in Newtonian physics and the sciences generally as you could be in the 18th century. In the CoJ, he was very close to describing something like Darwin's theory of evolution (even Descartes' came close in the 17th century). But even in light of 150 years of research into Darwin's mechanism, I think Kant's argument still stands. Darwin's is a theory of the origin of species, not the organization of biological individuals.
If so, you’re mistaken.
All biologists (that I know of) recognize the purposes of organisms as "teleonomy." This is derived straight from Kant, who held that the finality of organisms was merely a regulative principle of human judgment, and not constitutive of organisms themselves. In other words, teleonomy is a biologist's way of talking about the purposes of organisms without actually attributing purpose to the organism itself. The purpose is thought to be an artifact of our human language.
The problem I have with this, of course, is the blatant dualism. How is it that human organisms are purposeful, while all other life is merely apparently so? This is why Kant is limited. He maintains a metaphysical gap exists between the human mind (knower) and the natural world (known). Kant's is a position more adequate than a strict reductionistic materialism, but is nonetheless lacking. I'd suggest that A. N. Whitehead (mentioned above) provides us with a cosmology that brings together the best of ancient philosophy and modern science, while at the same time avoiding the substance dualism that leads to the mind/body problem and the alienation of human consciousness from nature.
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 26, 2009 11:30 PM
Matthew Segall wrote to me:
> Let's stick to physics first. What do you think the implications of quantum entanglement are, as regards efficient causation? Can entanglement be accounted for in terms of efficient causes?
Well… my own mentor, Dick Feynman, was famous for saying that anyone who thought he understood quantum mechanics was fooling himself!
So, perhaps I should refrain from making a fool of myself.
The short answer is that, like almost all scientists I think, I really do not think in terms of “efficient cause,” “final cause,” “formal cause,” etc. I was using the term “efficient cause” because you were, but I really think of all of that as simply concepts from an early Iron Age worldview that has been supplanted by more modern worldviews.
I cannot easily prove to you that most scientists have the same perspective as I; I can only report that I never recall such terms coming up in a conversation with other scientists about science (or anything else, for that matter). Nor can I recall them ever be used in a serious science book (as opposed to a book about the history of scientific thought, which may reference pre-scientific thinkers such as Aristotle or Aquinas).
Like most physicists, I simply think of causation as a matter of equations or laws that connect the past to the future. From that perspective, quantum entanglement is pretty straightforward. That is why, as soon as it was pointed out by people such as John Bell, there was really not much debate among physicists that it had to be real. The equations of quantum mechanics imply entanglement, as Bell proved.
Ergo, it is real, since those equations have never failed us. Of course, experiment confirmed this.
Now, of course, entanglement is really weird in some ways – it seems to allow causation to occur faster than light, yet in a way that does not allow us to communicate information faster than light. It therefore fits into relativity in a rather strange way: the direction of cause and effect seems to get reversed depending on how you look at things (your frame of reference). Exactly what is going on here is a subject of debate among physicists – though the experimental results are not.
I’m afraid, however, that I have never seen any indication that switching from “efficient” causation to “formal” or “final” causation will clear up the mystery.
The Aussie philosopher Huw Price, in his book “Time's Arrow and Archimedes' Point” did suggest that maybe this apparent switch in the time direction of causation was a sign that causation in the real world went in both time directions.
That’s always intrigued me and some of my colleagues, and some of us have played around with equations trying to implement that idea.
None of us has ever succeeded.
Again, many of us scientists are well aware of the various types of supposed causes that go back to Aristotle. But we just have not found any use for those ideas in modern science.
Dave
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 26, 2009 11:48 PM
Matthew Segall wrote to me:
>All biologists (that I know of) recognize the purposes of organisms as "teleonomy." This is derived straight from Kant, who held that the finality of organisms was merely a regulative principle of human judgment, and not constitutive of organisms themselves. In other words, teleonomy is a biologist's way of talking about the purposes of organisms without actually attributing purpose to the organism itself. The purpose is thought to be an artifact of our human language.
If your use of quotes is meant to imply that all biologists actually use the word “teleonomy,” I think it is easy to show you are wrong.
My wife is a biologists: she certainly does not use the word “teleonomy,” and I am doubtful she even knows what the word means. You could ask our host here, and any other biologists on this thread: again, I do not think you will find it is a very widely used word among biologists.
You say “This is derived straight from Kant…” as if that is relevant to most contemporary scientists.
I never recall actually talking with a contemporary scientist who cited Kant at all.
Kant simply does not matter to most of us scientists, any more than Schleiermacher or Duns Scotus or Zhuangzi matters to most of us.
Again, one of the problems that you are having here is that you keep throwing out statements such as this, assuming we will see its relevance, when what seems to be relevant to you is going to strike most scientists as being about as relevant to contemporary science as phrenology is.
Personally, I was once mildly interested in Kant’s theory of the categories and the synthetic a priori, but I concluded that the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry (Kant famously thought that Euclidean geometry was a necessary form of human thought) swept Kant into the dustbin of history.
Most scientists, from what I have seen and read, know and care even less about Kant than I.
Some people here have told you, rather rudely, to forget all this and learn some modern science.
I’m afraid that most contemporary scientists are likely to concur with their sentiments if not their rudeness.
I don’t see, and I do not think most scientists will see, any connection between the point I quoted above from you and modern science.
You are presenting stuff from an old worldview that is now dead, at least among most scientifically educated people that I know of.
Dave
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 27, 2009 12:25 AM
Thanks Dave. You're comments are by far the most valuable I've had in several weeks of engaging Pharyngula. Your points are well taken. I nonetheless think one of the unfortunate tendencies of modern thought is to assume knowledge unambiguously progresses as time passes. No one can deny that science has opened whole new vistas of understanding, but I think much ancient wisdom remains as relevant as ever. We ignore the truly timeless insights of traditions past to our own peril. Science has given us great technological power (which has in turn allowed for deeper penetration into the mysteries of nature), but it is still very young in comparison to other human endeavors. I fear that our world has become so enthralled with the power granted us by science that we may destroy ourselves with it before we truly grasp the significance of its discoveries.
I'm not sure if you've been following the drama that unfolded last week regarding the criticism of PZ in Mooney and Kirshenbaum's new book "Unscientific America," but I'd be curious to know if you agree with PZ's unflinching anti-accomodationist stance? If our age has anything to learn from Kant, I think it would be that reason and faith can coincide. The fundamentalist backlash against science is a recent phenomenon, and I don't think increasing the materialist rhetoric is in any way increasing the public understanding of science. It would not only be more pragmatic, but more honest to describe science as a method providing us with phenomenological/descriptive knowledge, rather than as a body of facts that any educated person would recognize unambiguously proves materialism. I think the latter approach is only going to lead to increasing religious extremism (as it is itself a form of scientism). What do you think?
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 27, 2009 12:40 AM
I wrote:
I wanted to qualify this by adding that the scientific method has produced a body of facts and evidence, and that we can certainly draw likely conclusions from them (i.e., the earth is not 6,000 years old and life was not divinely created in its current form). But the history of science shows that paradigm shifts lead to the same facts being interpreted in radically different ways. I think it would be best for science if it were not conflated with metaphysics (like materialism).
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 27, 2009 12:48 AM
Matthew Segall wrote to me:
>As for plants, I do not think efficient causes are enough to account for their morphology or metabolism. Neither would be possible without the role played by efficient causation, but it alone is not sufficient. You might say natural selection explains the "design" of a plant just fine, but this is to attempt to pawn off a question of ontogeny to one of phylogeny. Yes, the general morphology of plants evolved. But this is no explanation for the development of individual plants. To explain ontogeny, we need to reference formal causation.
Matthew, I do not wish to be rude, but to me, and I think almost any competent scientist, this is simply and obviously false.
You want to understand ontogeny, learn how genes are turned on and off, learn what proteins are used to signal position in the organism, and all the other stuff the developmental biology guys do.
If you get all that straightened out, then it is just straightforward, conceptually simple (though of course quantitatively complicated) “efficient causation.” One thing pushes on another which pushes on another, rather like clockwork, except a lot wetter and messier.
You also wrote:
> You might say that the morphology of the plant is stored in the genome, but this just begs the question concerning how genetic "information" is realized purely by way of efficient causation.
DNA to RNA to protein. Ask the molecular biology guys for the details: they have it largely worked out.
Transcription, translation, DNA repair – all of it is just one thing banging into another. Again, just like clockwork, but wetter and messier.
You also wrote:
> Final causality is also required to explain the growth and metabolism of plant life (or any life), as a plant is both cause and effect of itself. This is Kant's way of describing how, for instance, a tree's leaves are not only produced by the tree, but themselves help to maintain the tree. Kant adds that "[the tree's] parts, both as to their existence and form, are only possible by their relation to the whole" (CoJ, Sec. 65). This is a circular causality in which the system in question produces and maintains itself.
Perhaps Kant did say that: his knowledge of science is now way outdated. No “final” causality or “circular” causality needed. One day a seed. Mechanical processes turn the seed into a tree. Eventually, mechanical processes produce leaves. Mechanical processes in the leave convert sunlight into sugar in the leaves. That sugar is later used in other parts of the tree.
And so on.
Just one darn thing after another.
Mechanical causality all the way through.
Just like clockwork, but wetter and messier.
Again, you are assuming things that I think almost all modern scientists would find false or even silly.
I’m not sure how to say this more politely.
You seem to assume that scientists think in a way we really do not think.
And it seems impossible to get you to understand that we really, really, do think very, very differently from you.
Weird.
I have had the same experience with Christians who are absolutely certain that I believe things about the nature of morality, the purposiveness of the universe, etc. that I just don’t believe. It is not simply that they think I am wrong, but that they are unable to grasp the possibility that someone thinks differently from them.
Matthew, I think a number of us here are having a similar experience with you.
Dave
Posted by: Ken Cope | July 27, 2009 12:49 AM
If our age has anything to learn from Kant, I think it would be that reason and faith can coincide.
Yeah? The result is either a train wreck or, one displaces the other. By and large, when faith is challenged, it's the science that gets displaced, because science is hard, and it provides more questions than answers. For those to whom that's not a bug, but a feature, faith is jettisoned. When people try to walk around presuming there are no conflicts, no cognitive dissonance trying to accommodate both faith and science, you can watch the gears strip and the sparks fly, hopefully from a distance. M & K are not trying to pander to the people who have jettisoned faith, they're too busy demonizing us. They bring nothing else to the conversation.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 27, 2009 1:23 AM
Ken,
Contrary to the modern fad of scientific materialism, most of reality (life, consciousness, self-consciousness) is invisible. Only matter can be seen, but the higher principles of life, awareness, and awareness of self are completely undetectable by the five senses. Faith doesn't give us understanding of these invisibles, but it provides the path toward understanding truths about what we cannot yet see by giving us the opportunity to make ourselves adequate (adaequatio) to the things we desire to know. As Augustine put it, "Crede ut intelligas" - "Believe that you may understand." Faith isn't only compatible with knowledge, it is necessary for it. Science can take root only in those who have faith that the universe is rational, that it obeys laws and that the human mind is capable of discovering and understanding them.
I don't mean to suggest here that all religious belief is compatible with science. It definitely is not. There is reasonable and unreasonable faith.
Posted by: Ken Cope | July 27, 2009 1:36 AM
There is reasonable and unreasonable faith.
Is there some sort of method you could employ to tell the difference?
Sorry to have engaged you, but you're dribbling woo all over yourself, and I don't want to get any on me. I've had this conversation too many times. You'll get all Mysterian, and pribble at me about how Consciousness is forever going to be made of Unexplainium. Look, just let your Kantian Homunculus settle back in your Theater of the Mind and play Glass Bead Games with its feet getting stuck in the cinemuck while, in order to think about the shadow puppets, your Kantian Homunculus' Homunculus settles back in its Theater of the Mind and plays Glass Bead Games with its feet getting stuck in the cinemuck while, in order to think about the shadow puppets...
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 27, 2009 1:46 AM
Ken,
No woo is required. Adaequatio is a very simple idea. A human being who can see is not necessarily able to read. One must learn how to read. The meaning of these letters is not an empirically measurable quantity. One must be internally adequate to them before they will be able to understand them. Faith is required for one to begin trying to see that which they cannot yet see. Consciousness can be understood if we are adequate to the task.
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 27, 2009 1:48 AM
Matthew Segall wrote to me:
> I nonetheless think one of the unfortunate tendencies of modern thought is to assume knowledge unambiguously progresses as time passes. No one can deny that science has opened whole new vistas of understanding, but I think much ancient wisdom remains as relevant as ever. We ignore the truly timeless insights of traditions past to our own peril.
But we do not “assume” that knowledge progresses! Those of us who are scientists actually find out whether it has progressed – I actually do know why the quark model is true, how extraordinarily well quantum theory works, etc. That’s our job.
The core question is whether the “insights of tradition” have indeed proven to be “truly timeless” or not.
They haven’t.
The traditional ideas that humans had about reality have been proven false.
Definitively so.
Have you read Ernest Gellner, for example, his “The Legitimation of Belief”?
His central theme is that the scientific revolution means the annihilation of all hitherto existing systems of human thought.
As he puts it, prior to the rise of science, systematic thought was largely concerned with ensuring the stability of society, buttressing the power of the dominant elite (i.e., rulers and priests), and differentiating one group of humans from another.
In his words, the social and intellectual elites systematically “poisoned the well” of human belief systems. Or, as Pascal put it, what was true on one side of the Pyrenees was false on the other.
Science changed all that.
Science is the same in Beijing as in London, the same in Rio as in Capetown.
Science is the first systematic, reliable, large-scale structure of knowledge possessed by the human race.
It is also, as Gellner said, utterly destructive of all of the grand traditions of belief in the past and of the social systems which they served to legitimate.
You also asked me:
> I'd be curious to know if you agree with PZ's unflinching anti-accomodationist stance?
Oh, I think PZ errs a bit on the side of being overly gentle.
You also wrote:
> If our age has anything to learn from Kant, I think it would be that reason and faith can coincide.
If the faith has no actual content, I suppose there need not be much of a conflict!
But all the actual great historical faiths that I know of have very definite content that most assuredly disagrees with science, e.g.:
The earth was not created in six days.
Jesus was not born of a virgin.
Jesus did not rise from the dead.
Even if you wish to take Kant’s very attenuated form of faith, his belief in immortality of the soul is very doubtful in the light of modern neuroscience, his belief in the transcendental basis of morality is open to question based on research into the evolution of morality, etc.
No, the only faith that is consistent with science seems to be a faith without content.
You also wrote:
> It would not only be more pragmatic, but more honest to describe science as a method providing us with phenomenological/descriptive knowledge, rather than as a body of facts that any educated person would recognize unambiguously proves materialism.
The problem is that science is both a method and also some extremely well-established theories – the atomic theory, evolution, the heliocentric theory, etc.
And, *both* the scientific method and the facts established by science challenge traditional religion.
Have you read Rev. Jack Good’s “The Dishonest Church”? Jack, a retired United Church of Christ minister, continues to call himself a Christian, but his actual beliefs are slightly more materialistic and atheistic than mine.
I have no real quarrel with Jack. After all, I too enjoy Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” give gifts at Christmas, and look forward to seeing the grand cathedral at Chartres.
But neither Jack nor I pretend for a moment that Jesus rose from the dead or was born of a virgin, etc. And both of us are honest enough to state that there is probably no such thing as a god, as life after death, etc., although both of us are willing to be proven wrong by real evidence.
Like most atheists, I have friends, relatives, and neighbors whom I am fond of and who happen to be true believers. Terence’s words, “Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto” (I am a human: nothing human is alien to me), should be the atheist’s motto.
But we need not hate those humans who are mired in the lies of religion to be firm in telling the truth about those lies.
You also wrote:
>I think the latter approach [pushing the hegemony of science] is only going to lead to increasing religious extremism (as it is itself a form of scientism). What do you think?
Well, I hope that is what happens! I have more respect for an honest fundamentalist than for “moderate” believers who will yield on Genesis but try to retain the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, etc.
I think and hope that religion is doomed. I think the triumph and ultimate hegemony of science is inevitable, for reasons laid out by Gellner.
I grew up among those ancient traditions that you laud: I had anxiety and nightmares over the fear of Hellfire.
I want to drive a stake through the heart of all those wonderful ancient traditions.
And, a necessary part of that healing process for the human race is for people to come to realize that there really is no middle ground between religion and science – either religious fundamentalism or hegemonic science, all else is incoherent.
That is one of the main reasons I became a scientist: to help usher in the grand simplification that would wipe out moderate religious belief prior to the ultimate elimination of all forms of religious belief and of all other belief systems that sustain human society as it has hitherto existed.
I really dislike lies.
You did ask what I thought, Matthew!
Dave
Posted by: Malcolm | July 27, 2009 1:58 AM
Matthew Segall @114
Biochemistry.
Posted by: Ken Cope | July 27, 2009 2:06 AM
Adaequatio is a very simple idea
Is faith some Humpty Dumptyist term for you? After all that Kant, is all you've got left some stale Aquinas to lob at me? Are you just here to prove that medievalism isn't dead, it just smells funny, and you'd rather eat that than a nourishing meal of anything that's happened since? You're living in the 21st Century, and you've missed it, along with the 20th.
Have fun storming the castle!
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 27, 2009 2:26 AM
Gah, Matthew is back to offer more woo.Faith is what people use to justify a position in the absence of evidence. It's not required for pushing forward in knowledge - only holding onto what is unjustifiable.
Posted by: Steve P. | July 27, 2009 5:40 AM
"One day a seed". - But of course no explanation as to how that seed got there.
"Mechanical processes produce leaves". - But no explanation as to how those mechanical processes got into the seeds.
"Eventually, mechanical processes produce leaves." How does time solve probability issues? You have to first understand if bouncing atoms actually learn from their bouncing, thus reducing the search space once they 'learn' that they already bounced a certain way and it didn't do anything to make a leave so better bounce another way.
Otherwise, time does nothing for 'idiot' atoms 'eventually' becoming leaves.
Posted by: Dania
|
July 27, 2009 5:43 AM
Matthew, do you remember saying this a while back?
Did you learn anything? Do you still believe that bacteria feel "yum" and "yuck" and that's why they move towards food and away from toxins?
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 27, 2009 6:14 AM
Steve P. wrote to me:
> How does time solve probability issues? You have to first understand if bouncing atoms actually learn from their bouncing, thus reducing the search space once they 'learn' that they already bounced a certain way and it didn't do anything to make a leave so better bounce another way.
Uh, Stevie. It’s called “statistical mechanics.” It was basically worked out over a hundred years ago.
There are lots of textbooks on it.
It is well understood.
If you had actually managed to get in to a decent university, they might have allowed you to learn about it.
Oh, probably not – after you flunked the first few tests, they would have kicked you out.
It’s not possible for me to teach this to you or Matt here in PZ’s blog.
And, even if I could, I would refuse.
I would rather guys like you not learn science.
I like you just the way you are – all you gotta do is open your mouth, and there is your ignorance, available for all the world to see.
I’d hate to ruin that.
I find you amusing.
Dave
Posted by: Dania
|
July 27, 2009 6:51 AM
Matthew:
OK, you don't know how genetic information is translated into an organism. You don't understand the processes that account for it. So what? That doesn't mean no one else does. Seriously, go learn some modern biology first. You're talking about things you don't understand and people here are getting tired of that.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 27, 2009 10:46 AM
Dave,
I'm familiar with the central dogma, but it misrepresents a circular process for a linear one. Proteins must already exist for transcription and translation to take place. DNA doesn't make anything by itself; it needs what the central dogma supposes are its products before it can produce those products. So like the organism as a whole, the realization of genetic information requires a system that is "cause and effect of itself."
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 27, 2009 10:57 AM
Your posts show otherwise. Your whole argument is from your ignorance about how science operates, and what the state of the scientific literature is. Quit worrying about your woo philosophy, and immerse yourself in the science. Not by reading popular books or books about the philosophy of science, but the real peer reviewed scientific literature. Or, better yet, take some real courses in molecular biology, then go beyond them into the scientific literature.Posted by: Walton | July 27, 2009 11:26 AM
I wouldn't call that "faith". We assume that the universe is rational and obeys consistent laws, and that humanity can use the scientific method to identify and understand these laws, because the scientific method demonstrably works. Modern science, founded on empirical investigation, has given us modern medicine, computers, space travel, and a whole host of other innovations and discoveries which have greatly enhanced the life of the average human being. Our belief in the precepts of modern science is founded not on "faith", but on the fact that science actually produces useful results.
By contrast, religious faith involves believing in numerous fairly complex doctrines and supernatural entities without any compelling empirical evidence whatsoever. It is really quite absurd, therefore, to draw some kind of equivalence between having "faith" in a religious doctrine and having "faith" in the precepts of modern science.
More accurately, I'd say that there is more unreasonable and less unreasonable faith. All faith, by its nature, involves belief without evidence; and in that regard, liberal religion is no more rational than fundamentalism. Anyone who asks me to believe that Jesus was the son of God and was physically resurrected from the dead, or that Mohammed was a prophet, needs to adduce some kind of compelling evidence; and so far, no one has done so. The fact that someone cherry-picks the less ludicrous parts of their religion doesn't make their epistemology any more rational; they're still believing extraordinary claims without extraordinary evidence.
That said, liberal religion is certainly less unreasonable than fundamentalism, in that liberal believers generally accept modern science, empirical reality and common decency. The beliefs of (say) the Church of England may be founded on ground equally as weak as those of (say) al-Qaeda, the Thomas Road Baptist Church or the Christian Science movement; but I'd far rather live in a world full of mild-mannered vicars offering tea and buns, than a world full of lunatics rejecting modern biology or decapitating those who disagree with them. I am, therefore, all in favour of making common cause with liberal religious believers against fundamentalist lunacy.
(Sorry for the long, rambling post.)
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 27, 2009 3:03 PM
Walton,
There are two types of science, instructive science, like physics and chemistry, and descriptive science, like biology. In practice, there is some overlap between the two, but generally, I think this is a fair distinction to make. When you say that science works, you're referring to instructive sciences. An instructive science is based on injunction and experiment: do exactly this, and you will always get the same result. The results of such experiments are brought together in a systematic way to produce theories and laws. This knowledge allows us to devise all sorts of technologies, as you mentioned. Proof in such sciences is based upon the results, as you say.
In descriptive science, like biology, proof is often based more upon informed conjecture than experiment. One cannot prove, for instance, that random variation under natural selection is capable of generating all biological diversity and complexity. Nor can one prove that evolution is entirely undirected, at least not scientifically. Common descent, on the other hand, is quite a reasonable conjecture in light of the fossil record and genetic analysis. Ideally, science should not make assumptions based on faith alone that it does not have the empirical/experimental evidence to prove. The idea that natural selection accounts for all biological form and function is just such a faith-based assumption.
I personally see the scientific method as one of the crowning achievements of the human mind, and so prefer not to conflate true science with the scientism that claims, based on faith alone, that all life can be reduced to and explained by chance and necessity.
I don't think we can do without faith; however, faith need not always lead to belief without (and often in spite of) evidence. Faith as I described it in my prior comment is more about the initial openness to gaining insight about something not yet known. All inquiries after understanding begin lacking the understanding that is sought. Beginning requires faith in our ability to attain knowledge.
I applaud you for this sign of sanity. The problem is not faith, but belief despite evidence to the contrary. Such dogmatism occurs in (supposedly) scientific as much as religious circles.
Posted by: Ken Cope | July 27, 2009 4:37 PM
Faith is belief despite evidence to the contrary.
Posted by: Ken Cope | July 27, 2009 4:50 PM
All inquiries after understanding begin lacking the understanding that is sought. Beginning requires faith in our ability to attain knowledge.
You're just here to torture language, aren't you? Our ability to attain knowledge requires no faith whatsoever. That we will continue to attain knowledge based on method that have so far shown themselves to be reliable is a safe assumption, based on a long track record, no faith necessary. If you have half a brain, you'll want to put down that rhetorical crowbar you're using to insert the word "faith" where it has no business, other than to obfuscate.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 27, 2009 4:59 PM
I think Matthew lost track of his original desires a while back. Now he is just trolling/amusing himself. Still as inane as ever, with no grounding in reality.
Posted by: thalarctos | July 27, 2009 5:19 PM
You're evil, Dave.
I like that.
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | July 27, 2009 5:26 PM
Open mouth, insert keyboard.
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 27, 2009 5:32 PM
Such dogmatism occurs in (supposedly) scientific as much as religious circles.
more false equivalency.
that house of cards you've built in your head eventually will tumble.
what will you do then, I wonder?
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 27, 2009 5:44 PM
In practice, there is some overlap between the two, but generally, I think this is a fair distinction to make.
you wouldn't say that if you actually really knew anything about physics, chemistry, or biology beyond what you learned in primary school.
again, it's obvious that you either haven't read any of the books you commonly cite, or you have such a poor education in general that your inane preconceptions filtered out all relevant information if you did skim them.
Don't know why you continue, frankly. Anyone who actually has studied to be a scientist is quite aware of what actually constitutes the current realms of scientific endeavor, and it's obvious to anyone who has that you, moron, haven't a clue.
try actually reading the primary literature, even in the more general journals like Science or Nature, and at least try to grasp that biology is no more a descriptive science these days than physics.
both have standard models that make predictions, both are entirely testable.
biology as a descriptive science still exists, just like physics and chemistry also are descriptive sciences at times (new particles, new stars, new species, new traits, etc, etc.), but they are also predictive as well (Higgs Boson, Tiktalik, gene frequencies, balancing selective pressures, etc etc).
that's about as patient as I can get with you.
Bottom line:
You grossly misunderstand all of science, and particular appear to like to construct strawmen of biology.
you might try learning something new for a change, but I doubt you will.
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 27, 2009 6:55 PM
Matthew wrote to me:
> Proteins must already exist for transcription and translation to take place. DNA doesn't make anything by itself; it needs what the central dogma supposes are its products before it can produce those products. So like the organism as a whole, the realization of genetic information requires a system that is "cause and effect of itself."
No, Matthew you are simply and completely wrong here. Your ignorance of science really is showing.
I have tried to be more patient with you than most of the others here have been, partly because I actually am a nice, friendly guy, and partly because I am intrigued with how you somehow have managed to acquire an explicit worldview totally lacking in the scientific orientation achieved by human beings during the last five centuries. You really do think like a well-educated fourteenth-century man! (Most Americans think like ill-educated fourteenth-century men.)
It is not “cause and effect of itself.”
Yes, to produce protein molecules at some point in time requires *other* protein molecules that were produced earlier. They are not the *same* protein molecules. The same goes for the DNA.
You have a tendency to think in very abstract, fuzzy terms: since protein makes protein, it must be circular.
But it’s not protein-in-general that makes protein-in-general. It’s specific protein molecules that (help to) make *other* specific protein molecules. Not circular at all.
Think of it this way: human females give birth to human females. Sounds circular. Until you remember that, in any actual case, one specific human female gives birth to some *other* specific human female. Not circular at all.
My wife bore our daughter; our daughter did not bear my wife.
What all of us have been trying to get through to you is that science has found that the only way of thinking that explains the way the world works (and also happens to lead to antibiotics, cell phones, etc.) is this particularistic “what specific thing bangs into what specific thing to produce what new specific thing” way of thinking. I believe this is called “mechanism” (I’ve sometimes seen “mechanicism”) in the history of thought.
You are adamantly resistant to thinking this way.
All we can really do is say that many of us are scientists and we really know this stuff. You don’t.
I know that on the ‘Net it is a horrific no-no, a real social fauz pas, to point out that some people are superior in their intelligence or knowledge to others, but it is nonetheless true.
You will never understand what any of us are saying unless you at least attempt the experiment of giving up all of the outdated philosophical beliefs you hold, all that stuff from Augustine to Whitehead, and try out the novel mechanistic philosophy.
I don’t think you are willing to try that, in which case you can never understand science.
At all.
Why don’t all of us do the reverse and try out your philosophy? Well, first, your philosophy is just a more formal version of the naïve worldview that kids start out with. All of us have been there, done that.
Second, we understand science well enough to see that science simply cannot work with your philosophy and that, in fact, all of modern science requires the mechanistic philosophy.
This is the central point that the philosopher Ernest Gellner, and many of us here, are constantly trying to make. (Please, read Gellner's "The Legitimation of Belief.")
Science is not just the random collection of data that can then be fit into any philosophy that you may like, be made compatible with any religion you may enjoy, etc.
Science is a radically and completely new worldview which shreds all of the old worldviews that have sustained human societies and comforted human beings over the centuries.
(Personally, that is the main reason I like science: I hate those old all-so-human worldviews with a passion!)
This is the main reason most people have trouble learning science (how many high-school kids take physics?), why so many people hate science, etc.
You cannot grasp science unless you are willing to give up childish things, all those worldviews that have sustained humanity through the millennia.
You refuse to give up those worldviews.
Therefore, even if you actually start trying to learn science, you will fail.
Dave
Posted by: Ichthyic | July 27, 2009 7:00 PM
No, Matthew you are simply and completely wrong here. Your ignorance of science really is showing.
shocker, eh?
I have tried to be more patient with you than most of the others here have been, partly because I actually am a nice, friendly guy, and partly because I am intrigued with how you somehow have managed to acquire an explicit worldview totally lacking in the scientific orientation achieved by human beings during the last five centuries. You really do think like a well-educated fourteenth-century man!
we're not patient with him because we've seen his arguments a thousand times before, from all the other fourteenth-century wannabees living in the states, and in other places...
science ignorance is only worse in Turkey these days, so the polls say.
One of the reasons I moved to NZ.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 27, 2009 7:25 PM
Dave,
Mechanistic philosophy has its roots in the 17th century, it is hardly novel. Are you familiar with any of Whitehead's work? He was a thoroughgoing mechanist until relativity and quantum theories shook his faith. Google him, if you are unfamiliar with his post-mechanistic philosophy of science.
Correct. See this paper by Westerhoff and Hofmeyr if you're interested in why circular causality is not a trivial issue: http://www.springerlink.com/content/t63qy4hfmm392u77/
The abstract:
I am always interested in reading cogent arguments for the validity of mechanistic philosophy, so I will see if I can find Gellner's book on the cheap (Amazon has 1 copy for almost $200!). I would recommend you read Whitehead's "Science and the Modern World." http://www.amazon.com/Science-Modern-World-Alfred-Whitehead/dp/0684836394/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1248737082&sr=1-1
Posted by: John Morales | July 27, 2009 7:36 PM
Dave, I'm not surprised you've independently come to the same conclusion about Matthew that others have, myself included.
His knowledge of science is based on popularisations, and interpreted through his presuppositions.
He doesn't realise that, when he writes such as "He was a thoroughgoing mechanist until relativity and quantum theories shook his faith.", he exposes his misunderstanding.
Matthew, relativity and "quantum theories" are mechanistic.
Posted by: John Morales | July 27, 2009 7:39 PM
[meta]
Nice! Preview bug has been fixed.
Thanks, ScienceBlogs!
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 27, 2009 7:54 PM
John Morales,
Dave admitted he didn't know, but perhaps you can educate me as to how non-locality and entanglement can be explained mechanistically?
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 27, 2009 8:32 PM
Matthew wrote:
>There are two types of science, instructive science, like physics and chemistry, and descriptive science, like biology. In practice, there is some overlap between the two, but generally, I think this is a fair distinction to make. When you say that science works, you're referring to instructive sciences. An instructive science is based on injunction and experiment: do exactly this, and you will always get the same result. The results of such experiments are brought together in a systematic way to produce theories and laws.
[snip]
>In descriptive science, like biology, proof is often based more upon informed conjecture than experiment. One cannot prove, for instance, that random variation under natural selection is capable of generating all biological diversity and complexity. Nor can one prove that evolution is entirely undirected, at least not scientifically. Common descent, on the other hand, is quite a reasonable conjecture in light of the fossil record and genetic analysis. Ideally, science should not make assumptions based on faith alone that it does not have the empirical/experimental evidence to prove. The idea that natural selection accounts for all biological form and function is just such a faith-based assumption.
No, Matthew, that really is completely wrong. Indeed, if anything you have it exactly backwards.
Until the last few decades, it was *biology* that tended to be just gathering facts and putting them together rather easily to produce generalizations. It was physics and chemistry that were based more on informed speculation, ultimately checked by various experimental predictions. That is why we physicists tended to look down our noses at biology, until, that is, the molecular biology revolution of the last half-century: we physicists know view biology with respect as a real science.
Again, your problem is that you really do not know any science. Almost everything you say about science is just wrong.
And, your larger problem is that you cannot learn science until you are willing to adapt, at least when you are thinking about science, the mechanistic philosophy, as I have pointed out (a few scientists do adapt the mechanistic philosophy, as they must, when doing science, but then temporarily take on the old superstitious philosophies on Sunday morning when they go to church).
You are quite literally like someone writing about American history who refers to Gladstone as the fifth American President or to Mussolini as a well-known American statesman. You are constantly saying things that are entirely wrong because you have not bothered to learn what you are talking about.
The one difference, again, is that Christians, atheists, mystics, or materialists can all learn the facts of American history.
But a person cannot learn science without thinking in terms of the mechanistic philosophy. As I have said, that is why most American students find even high-school physics, a rather trivial subject, too tough to handle.
You will never learn science, because you are extraordinarily stubborn about holding on to the superstitious philosophies of the pre-scientific era, the era of comforting superstitions.
Dave
Posted by: PhysicisDave | July 27, 2009 11:59 PM
Matthew wrote to me:
> Mechanistic philosophy has its roots in the 17th century, it is hardly novel.
I know, Matthew. That was the scientific revolution. I did not say it was new in the last century: it is novel in the same way that science is novel -- it *is* science.
Mechanistic philosophy was not something that was just thought up on the side and then a bunch of scientists decided they liked it.
It *is* science. Mechanistic philosophy is simply the way people who learn science end up thinking about the world, at least when they are doing science. (As I have said before, some scientists adopt one of the old superstitious philosophies that you love so much when they go to church on Sunday, but when they are doing science, they are philosophical mechanists.)
To say that you cannot learn science and that you refuse to think in terms of mechanistic philosophy is to say the same thing: science is a philosophy (or, perhaps, I should say the replacement for philosophy) and you choose to reject it in favor of disproven, outdated, superstitious philosophies to which you are emotionally attached.
Philosophers tend to dismiss the mechanistic philosophy as shallow, unsatisfying, etc., and they are of course quite right. The mechanistic philosophy boils down to: look at science, there is the truth.
Sort of puts philosophers out of a job, now doesn’t it?
There have been attempts, again and again, to create non-mechanistic science (Goethe and Whithead are notable examples). Those attempts have always failed.
If you were ever to learn quantum mechanics, relativity, etc. (which of course is not possible given your stubborn refusal to engage in the scientific mode of thought – i.e., mechanism), you would find that the mechanistic philosophy still *is* science, even after all the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century.
Perhaps, that will change someday: as you and I discussed earlier, I am open to the possibility that a full understanding of consciousness will shake up our understanding of science quite radically.
But it hasn’t happened yet.
You also wrote:
> circular causality is not a trivial issue
You are wrong. I and others have already explained this to you in great detail.
You understand too little about science to understand what we explained to you. That is your problem, not ours.
Dave
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 28, 2009 12:15 AM
Matthew wrote:
> Dave admitted he didn't know, but perhaps you can educate me as to how non-locality and entanglement can be explained mechanistically?
Don’t bear false witness, Matthew.
What I wrote was:
>[Dave] Now, of course, entanglement is really weird in some ways – it seems to allow causation to occur faster than light, yet in a way that does not allow us to communicate information faster than light. It therefore fits into relativity in a rather strange way: the direction of cause and effect seems to get reversed depending on how you look at things (your frame of reference). Exactly what is going on here is a subject of debate among physicists – though the experimental results are not.
>[Dave]I’m afraid, however, that I have never seen any indication that switching from “efficient” causation to “formal” or “final” causation will clear up the mystery.
I went out of my way to mention that, while entanglement is quite weird, this weirdness seems to have nothing to do with your obsessions about “efficient” vs. “final” vs. “formal” cause, etc. Specifically, there is no indication that it requires abandoning the mechanistic approach to science. Quite the contrary, our understanding of entanglement, indeed the proof that it exists, relies on the standard mechanistic mode of reasoning.
In fact, I know of at least three mathematically solid ways of dealing with entanglement that are very nice and mechanistic indeed: one was discovered by David Bohm, one by Princeton’s Ed Nelson, and one by me.
Part of the mystery with entanglement is, indeed, that we have too many mechanistic explanations, and we do not know how to choose which, if any, is true!
It is an ongoing research problem in physics: science is like that. We do research.
Can I explain this to you?
Is the Pope a Buddhist?
I have been doing research on this subject, off and on, for several decades. If you actually learned physics at a middle-grad-school level, I might be able to get you to understand Nelson’s, Bohm’s, and my work.
But you will never understand physics at the level I did even when I entered college, because you do not want to.
Learning science means giving up on the way you think, and learning to think differently.
You will not do that because you do not want to give up believing the lies you believe in.
Dave
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 28, 2009 12:32 AM
There's a reason for everything...i.e. Matthew Segall has pulled this same nonsense out here before.
It's hard to keep tolerance up when someone continually espouses nonsense. I commend your attitude, but really these things are rarely isolated events.
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 28, 2009 1:34 AM
Matthew wrote to me:
>I would recommend you read Whitehead's "Science and the Modern World."
I do know about Whitehead: his philosophy is not a subject of great interest or respect among most scientists.
It is an attempt to save God from science, just as other crackpot pseudo-philosophers such as Teilhard de Chardin, Buber, Bergson, etc. attempted to do. They all failed. Charlatans all.
The concluding paragraph of the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Whitehead (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead/ ) states:
>Whitehead's ultimate attempt to develop a metaphysical unification of space, time, matter, events and teleology has proved to be controversial. In part, this may be because of the connections Whitehead saw between his metaphysics and traditional theism. According to Whitehead, religion is concerned with permanence amid change, and can be found in the ordering we find within nature, something he sometimes called the "primordial nature of God." Thus although not especially influential among contemporary Anglo-American secular philosophers, his metaphysical ideas have had significant influence among many theologians and philosophers of religion.
That pretty much says it all.
Matthew, I am not interested in reading suggestions from you.
I’m not quite sure how to say this politely:
I do not consider you to be at all an intelligent, educated person.
You and I are not equals who can have a conversation based on being equals.
Your way of thinking is really, really messed up.
I frankly think you are ineducable.
I know that saying all that goes against accepted social norms on the Internet and in the USA at large. We are all supposed to pretend that everyone’s ideas are equally valuable, that everyone’s opinions are worthwhile, that no person is better than anyone else.
To violate those norms is considered a sign of arrogance, boorishness, lack of social grace, etc. etc.
I know, I know.
And I truly wish I could communicate the information above in a way that would not violate all of those social norms.
But, alas, those norms are *meant* to prevent the communicating of information. Those norms were created by people who held blatantly false ideas, such as yours, but who wished not to be told that those ideas were blatantly false.
And, alas, I think I owe it to you to tell you that I know for certain that your ideas are wildly, crazily wrong.
You may be basically a decent fellow, but, despite the fact that you know almost no science, you have somehow deluded yourself into thinking that you have ideas related to science that have some value or some validity.
You don’t.
Dave
Posted by: Dania
|
July 28, 2009 5:24 AM
Yes. And he ended up calling it quits and admitting he had to study some science before scientists (and pretty much everyone here) will take him seriously. Now he's back, but still talking about things he doesn't understand. It's pathetic.
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 28, 2009 7:54 AM
Ichthyic wrote to me:
>>[Dave] No, Matthew you are simply and completely wrong here. Your ignorance of science really is showing.
>[Ichthyic]shocker, eh?
Well, in truth, I’ve interacted with a lot of guys like Matthew over the years, both on the ‘Net and in the real world, but in several ways he is an unusually fine specimen on which to test two of PZ’s and the New Atheists’ central ideas.
First, many New Atheists have been arguing, contrary to the “accommodationist”/”faitheist” position, that religious commitment can be very damaging to learning or understanding science.
Matthew, especially since his religious commitment is not simply to traditional Christianity, is a good test of that hypothesis.
Obviously, Matthew is a confirming instance. He admits to a deep yearning for “meaning,” “purpose,” and “feeling” in the universe, a yearning so deep that it makes it impossible for him to actually learn modern science, because he really cannot bring himself to think in the mechanistic way required by science.
He more or less knows this himself: anyone who goes to his website can read lengthy (and of course quite insane) essays in which he makes quite explicit that he knows that mainstream science is mechanistic, but admits that he simply cannot stand this.
For example ( http://karmabuster.gaia.com/blog/2008/12/on_the_matter_of_life_biology_mental_and_integral_consciousness ):
> We endeavor in the present essay to coherently define every actual entity as a living creature. The reason is that no scientific account of life can, without incongruence, explain its emergence in a physical universe that is otherwise devoid of purpose and feeling.
“Every actual entity” is a “living creature” – a rock, the planet Neptune, each electron in my CRT, etc.
Now that’s insane!
Second, one of the main points of the New Atheists’ is that the yahoos get away with this stuff because they are socially accepted and treated with respect rather than simply being publicly exposed as yahoos.
So, to test this, I tried treating Matthew with acceptance and respect, while politely pointing out a few of his most egregious errors.
I think we can safely say that this indeed only encouraged him.
According to his Website (http://karmabuster.gaia.com/profile ):
> I am entering my second year of graduate studies in philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
This institution includes a “School of Consciousness & Transformation.”
I think it is safe to say that we are dealing with the old phenomenon of confidence artists here: use a web of words to lure your victim into a sense of trust and complacency so that you can extract whatever you are trying to get.
Looking over the CIIS Website, it looks to me rather like a training school for flim-flam artists -- or transformative consciousness raising -- which ever phrase you prefer (as if there is any difference).
I challenge anyone who believes in the Mooney and Kirshenbaum “accommodationist”/”faitheist” line to study carefully my interaction here with Matthew: I was friendly; I was polite; I indicated (honestly) some areas of agreement; I tried to educate him in some areas where he was ignorant.
I think the outcome of the experiment is obvious.
Of course, it requires further replication (which I have done on other sites – though in truth, Matthew was a near-perfect experimental subject), so I urge everyone who agrees with M & K to replicate my experiment for themselves.
By the way, I really do have a Ph.D. in physics, but I also have a longstanding interest in social psychology.
All the best,
Dave
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 28, 2009 8:16 AM
Thanks for the analysis PhysicistDave. It confirmed my suspicion that Matthew isn't interested in learning anything, but is only interested in spreading his woo.
Posted by: Malcolm | July 28, 2009 8:40 AM
Matthew's attitude strikes me as a classic case of Egnorance. He assumes that his total ignorance of a subject means that, obvious, no one could possibly understand it.
Posted by: Walton | July 28, 2009 9:11 AM
Matthew:
I'm not a biologist, but I'll assume you're right about that (it tallies with my layman's understanding, at least). But my understanding is that, while science cannot prove absolutely that there was no supernatural involvement in evolution (since you can't prove a negative), it does provide an explanation of the diversity of life which doesn't require any supernatural intervention. Taking that into account - and taking into account the fact that there is no objective evidence whatsoever suggesting any such supernatural intervention - I would suggest that the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that there was such supernatural intervention, rather than on me to demonstrate that there was not.
In other words: no, we can't prove absolutely that a god or gods didn't intervene in the evolutionary process. (Just as we can't prove absolutely that there isn't an invisible pink fairy at the bottom of my garden.) But the evolutionary process can be understood without the intervention of a deity, and there's no evidence to suggest that an interventionist deity of any sort exists at all. As extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, therefore, the default position should be to assume that there was no supernatural intervention in evolution (just as the default position should be to assume that there is no fairy at the bottom of my garden), until empirical evidence is produced to demonstrate the contrary.
Apologies to anyone if my understanding of biology is incorrect (which it may well be; I haven't studied any biology since I was sixteen).
Posted by: SC, OM, Blogmistress | July 28, 2009 9:14 AM
I think it's the latter. When I recommended a short article by Bricmont and Sokal to Ken Wilber fan on the neverending thread recently, he did actually click on it and seems to have read some of the words. But then he came back with a couple of comments that showed he hasn't understood what they were saying, and even cited them (well, Sokal, anyway; pauvre Bricmont - never gets any respect! :)) in support of his claims. It's like they don't really read to understand what people are communicating or to gain knowledge, but merely to find phrases that they believe fit with or can be marshalled in defense of their pre-existing views.
It really brings out the teacher in me. I wish, when linking to something, that you could require people like Matthew and fan before they say anything about a work or an area of science to offer a brief description of what the person is arguing or what the state of knowledge is in that area. Nothing in this part about what they find problematic or lacking - just a factual report. I think it would help.
Unfortunately, this is the internet and we can't give assignments.
:)
Posted by: SC, OM, Blogmistress | July 28, 2009 9:20 AM
Oh, yeah - Walton. OK, well we can't give assignments and expect them to be completed.
:P
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 28, 2009 9:47 AM
PhysicistDave,
Thanks for your hard work here! On philosophy, you are somewhat too dismissive: philosophers such as Dennett, and Andy Clark, work in a way which takes full account of scientific research, and complements the work of scientists themselves. In particular, I recommend, if you haven't read it, Dennett's Consciousness Explained, which IMO shows that your one concession to Matthew was entirely unnecessary.
Posted by: M & K | July 28, 2009 12:08 PM
Speaking of social psychology:
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 28, 2009 1:19 PM
Though PhysicistDave seems uninterested in reading anything he doesn't already agree with, I'll throw this out there anyways. While Dennett's Consciousness Explained is certainly worth the read, I'd also recommend The Embodied Mind by Varela et al. as a rejoinder. It would be silly to suppose Dennett has single-handedly solved the very controversial problem of consciousness in a single book. Dennett champions the computational theory of mind, while Varela et al. prefer an enactive account of human experience. They are on opposite ends of the debate in cognitive science, so reading both books would give you a good idea of the playing field.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 28, 2009 1:26 PM
Of course, if you're willing to read Dennett's nearly 600 page brick, you could read Evan Thompson's new book (published in 2007) Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, which is also nearly 600 pages. It updates the enactive perspective based on more recent research in neuroscience. The Embodied Mind (published in 1992; Thompson was a co-author) is only about 300 pages long, and still gives a good overview of the enactive paradigm in cognitive science.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 28, 2009 1:29 PM
BTW, Knockgoats mentioned Andy Clark, who happens to be very sympathetic to the enactive approach. I find Clark's ideas about extended cognition to be fascinating! We are all already cyborgs, so far as he is concerned.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 28, 2009 1:33 PM
Matthew, you are not forwarding your woo-woo-woo argument, as you are not citing the peer reviwed primary scientific literature. Until you are able to do so, you are merely an inane troll. I suggest you take some actual courses in molecular biology before you attempt to convince us of anything. Arguing, like you are, from ignorance shows.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 28, 2009 1:40 PM
For an even shorter rejoinder to Dennett's views, you can see the essay titled "The fantasy of third-person science: phenomenology, ontology, and evidence" by Shannon Vallor published this year in Vol. 8 of "Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences." The abstract:
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 28, 2009 4:44 PM
Matthew,
Now that the experiment has ended, I would like to acknowledge one of the few points on which I think you are almost spot on.
In the other thread (comment 133 at http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/07/i_was_wondering_about_that.php ), you wrote:
>I made this claim to counter the one often made by scientistically-minded atheists, that religion is something society will eventually grow out of. I think that the psychological makeup of all human beings is such that they need some sort of mythic structure in order to lead a functional and meaningful life. Even a secular society is supported by certain mythic ideals concerning the founding of their nation, the value of their money, the principles of justice upholding their legal system, the goals of their economy, etc.
[snip]
>The psyche seeks spiritual meaning, and science doesn’t consider that aspect of reality. Of course, science should factor into our myth-making so as to assure the stories that give meaning to our civilization do not contradict empirical evidence; but science alone cannot fill this need for human beings.
Where I differ from you is that you over-generalize your own personality to all human beings in general: my “psychological makeup” is *not* such that I “need some sort of mythic structure in order to lead a functional and meaningful life” along the lines you are selling.
Of course, you could argue that I “need” the “myth” of mechanistic science, but, if you concede that mechanistic science can fill that need, you would then be backing down on your whole project, which argues that humans require the replacement of mechanistic science with various lies that give people a universe filled with “purpose,” “feeling,” and “meaning.”
But let us simply stipulate that I am an odd duck that lacks the psychological needs you attribute to most human beings.
What I find most revealing is your claim:
> Even a secular society is supported by certain mythic ideals concerning the founding of their nation, the value of their money, the principles of justice upholding their legal system, the goals of their economy, etc.
Exactly. And science will ultimately destroy all of this too.
Viewed with the hard, cold analytical approach engendered by science, yes, nationalism is just mendacious nonsense, our monetary and financial system is simply an unstable Ponzi scheme that persists only as long as the masses can be tricked into believing in it, and our justice system… well, we have an admitted former cocaine user in the White House who presides over a “justice” system that sends people to prison for doing just what he did (just like his immediate predecessor, of course).
Yes, Matthew, the scientific attitude, if carried to its logical conclusion is indeed just as corrosive of government and other social institutions as it is of religion.
You and I differ about that only in that you find this to be a bad thing; whereas, it causes me to bubble over with joy.
I hate lies.
Society as we know it is indeed founded on lies (“myth-making” and “mythic ideals” as you euphemistically call them), and I am therefore very pleased to agree with you that the ultimate logic of hard, cold, mechanistic science is the destruction of society as we know it.
Let the fireworks begin!
All the best,
Dave
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 28, 2009 4:49 PM
Yawn, still nothing from Matthew. Forget the
philosophysophistry, show us the science.Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 28, 2009 5:07 PM
Knockgoats wrote to me:
>On philosophy, you are somewhat too dismissive:
Oh, I’m not dismissive of all philosophers: my main objection to philosophers is simply to those who do not take into account the best science of their time and acknowledge that science has primacy over philosophy and to those who fail to adjust their philosophical views as science advances. Of course, I strongly object to kooks like Matthew who play games with philosophers such as Kant whose ideas have been conclusively disproved by the advance of science.
Historically, for example, Locke played a significant role in the rise of the mechanisitc/empirical way of thinking, although we now know that some of his ideas were false (I don’t think that would have surprised him that much!).
I know of Dennett of course: I think he is a bit too optimistic about how easy it will be to explain consciousness, but in the end we’ll all just wait and see what the neuro guys work out.
I’ve already mentioned Ernest Gellner, whose main focus was on the philosophical implications of the scientific revolution. Another very good contemporary philosopher is Colin McGinn: I particularly recommend his “The Mysterious Flame” as a counterpoint to Dennett. Just as I think Dennett is too optimistic about reducing mind to brain processes, I think McGinn is too pessimistic about understanding the mind scientifically.
Colin is, however, a good guy (I’ve communicated with him personally) who is bright, honest, and well-informed scientifically.
I’ll look into Andy Clark.
Of course, one of the reasons I bothered to communicate with Matthew besides my little experiment that disproved the M & K hypothesis was that it helped clarify in my mind exactly why his insane views are wrong: as the old saying goes, “I never know what I think until I hear what I have to say.”
All the best,
Dave
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 28, 2009 5:16 PM
Matthew wrote disparagingly of me:
>Though PhysicistDave seems uninterested in reading anything he doesn't already agree with…
Lying again, Matt, eh?
No, I read a lot I disagree with (I actually read your quite insane essay about live rocks, etc. all the way through, for example).
But life is short – millions of books out there, can’t read them all.
And I therefore prefer not to read lengthy books by those who are unquestionably insane.
And, Matt, while you may function more or less on a daily level, your own views are unquestionably insane: as evidence I quote again your own words:
>> We endeavor in the present essay to coherently define every actual entity as a living creature. The reason is that no scientific account of life can, without incongruence, explain its emergence in a physical universe that is otherwise devoid of purpose and feeling.
The prosecution rests.
Dave
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 28, 2009 5:24 PM
“M & K” (a pseudonym, I suppose – John Kwok, is that you?) wrote to me:
> Thus, blogging about science has brought out, in some cases, the loud, angry, nasty, and profanity-strewing minority of the science world that denounces the rest of America for its ignorance and superstition.
Interesting hypothesis. That’s why I tried my experiment of doing things the M & K way with our young test subject Matthew.
Experimental result: M & K hypothesis proven false.
Scientific method at work.
Quid erat demonstrandum.
Dave
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 28, 2009 5:42 PM
I find Clark's ideas about extended cognition to be fascinating! - Matthew Segall
Whereas we can be absolutely certain he would find your blitherings about panexperientialism completely insane.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 28, 2009 7:50 PM
Dave,
The mechanistic worldview has been the dominant one in the West since the Scientific Revolution, though it wasn't until more recently that the Cartesian dualism responsible for initiating it was thrown out such that human beings themselves began to be considered automatons (at least by some). In practice, no sane person actually buys this -- everyone seems to lead their day to day lives as though they were actually persons (that is, moral agents). One of my problems with the mechanistic myth (a myth is not simply a lie) is that it is largely responsible for the ecological crisis, as the non-human earth community is understood to be a mere store of raw materials, valueless until brought into our economy, produced, sold, and consumed (and then piled up in landfills). The mechanistic worldview has provided our civilization with meaning, but it is an extremely anthropocentric meaning that has literally destroyed the planet. Myth-making is not telling lies, it is what forms the very basis of our values. Our planetary civilization needs a new myth to replace the mechanistic story and the church of consumerism it fosters (at least if our species hopes to avoid extinction). Modern cosmology is a great place to start telling a new story about how we got here and where we ought to be headed. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry have written a book called The Universe Story that tries to do just this. Here is Swimme describing it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRykk_0ovI0
I couldn't agree more about nationalism and our exploitative (of people and earth) economic system, but I don't think it requires "cold, analytic science" to see this. It just requires taking a step back and recognizing that capitalism has become our modern, secular religion.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 28, 2009 7:52 PM
Knockgoats,
If you take Clark's ideas about mind not being in the brain, but rather extending through the body, into the world, and back again, then I don't see what you find so insane about panexperientialism. Clark's ideas are basically a slightly more modest version of panexperientialism.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 28, 2009 7:54 PM
Matthew is still spouting nonsense. Try the peer reviewed scientific literature Matthew. Not the sophist books of philosophy.
Posted by: SC, OM, Blogmistress | July 28, 2009 8:36 PM
You're deeply, deeply confused.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 28, 2009 8:41 PM
Matthew will remain confused until he stops reading woo, and starts reading real science. But, from the report of PhysicistDave, he is afraid or unable to do this. So, he will never get his head out of wooland.
Posted by: Feynmaniac | July 28, 2009 9:39 PM
For Christ's sakes, I already explained this to you weeks ago when you were using materialism instead of "the mechanistic myth" :
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 28, 2009 9:52 PM
Feynmaniac,
The religious US is by far the biggest polluter and consumer, but Christianity is based on a myth similar to the mechanistic. Only humans have souls and the rest of nature is made only for our use. As I said, more recently, materialists have chopped Descartes' ontology in half (rather than re-thinking it from scratch), keeping only the extended substance. However, none of us would be able to lead sane lives if we actually believed we were non-conscious robots (the fact that we can have beliefs in the first place is evidence enough against the idea). So in effect, materialists are just covert dualists.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 28, 2009 9:58 PM
Yawn, boring inane philosophy. Try some real science...
Posted by: John Morales | July 28, 2009 10:02 PM
In response to your claim that "Cartesian dualism" was the genesis of science (@174 above), I addressed it when the Ken Wilber fanboi made it.
Everything I said there to the KWf is applicable to you, though he was much more cogent than you are, in my estimation.
Posted by: E.V. | July 28, 2009 10:07 PM
Prove it. Show me this ghost in the machine, then we'll talk. Logic and concept fail. My, my - you just love red herrings.Posted by: Kel, OM | July 28, 2009 10:16 PM
If M&K wonder why some of us are so hard on unscientific believers, one only needs to look at the likes of Matthew. He's typical of a true believer, as evidenced by his arguments last time around. He appeals to the consequences, a huge warning flag that he cares not about the truth but protecting his beliefs. Creationists do the same thing, the truth of evolution rests with morality and purpose as opposed to what the evidence says. This should be a red flag whenever one is arguing, it's a logical fallacy.
What can you do when one is convinced of a position? We can't really blame scientists for the anti-scientific positions that individuals take. It's not that Matthew hasn't had the answers properly explained to him, just as it's not like morality and purpose in an evolutionary context have been explained to creationists. To me, it's that they don't want to accept the explanations given because it doesn't fit into their worldview, and thus they'll never learn.
"Smart people are great at rationalising things they came to believe for non-smart reasons" - Michael Shermer. You just can't reason with someone who has rationalised a non-scientific idea. The only tool we have is ridicule, and it is an important social tool at that. It demonstrates that in this social group, such ideas are not worthy of respect. It may be that we are rejecting a truth, but it's up to those who push their ideas to show they have merits. Appealing to consequences or making straw man attacks against certain philosophical positions is not the way to go about things.
Posted by: Feynmaniac | July 28, 2009 10:17 PM
I don't see how that's even close to being "mechanistic".
Of course no one (here at least) thinks people are "non-conscious robots". You keep saying that materialism, or mechanistic view or whatever the fad word is this week, can't produce conscious minds but you have yet to show proof. You have only either asserted it or used an argument from personal incredulity.
Medicine basically treats the human body like a very complicated machine and it's been very successful. When people suffer serious head injuries their minds frequently get damaged in some way. All this makes perfect sense in the "mechanistic" view.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 28, 2009 10:28 PM
John Morales,
Bacon and Descartes were both geniuses who contributed much to the scientific revolution. But Bacon, as much as Descartes, developed a way of thinking which in the end has lead our civilization to bring about a mass extinction.
Bacon also believed that "knowledge is power," thereby conflating the difference between science and technology (what he referred to as "art"). For him, the value of science was principally derived from being able to control and exploit nature. It seems clear to me that industrial civilization's attempt to do so has lead us and the planet to near ruin in a few short centuries.
I don't mean to vilify him, or Descartes for that matter. They were both amazing thinkers who did much to advance humanity. They could not have foreseen the eventual effects of their way of thinking. Nonetheless, it is time to rethink their worldview.
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 28, 2009 10:32 PM
And there comes the straw man.Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 28, 2009 10:34 PM
If you wish to do so, do it elsewhere. You are a tiresome bore without a point. You have no evidence, just woo-woo-woo. Time to take your woo on the road.Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 28, 2009 10:52 PM
Yes, Nerd, I will leave. I think Mooney and Kirshenbaum are right, "The single biggest blogging negative...is the grouping together of people who already agree about everything, and who then proceed to square and cube their agreements, becoming increasingly self-assured and intolerant of other viewpoints. Thus, blogging about science has brought out, in some cases, the loud, angry, nasty, and profanity-strewing minority of the science world..."
I enjoy being challenged, which is why I stopped by Pharyngula to shake things up. I'll take my ideas elsewhere, though, so you can all continue patting each other on the back. Good luck with your crusade.
Posted by: John Morales | July 28, 2009 11:09 PM
Sorry Nerd, SIWOTI.
Matthew:
1. What conflation? Both science and technology are knowledge, this doesn't mean that they're the same thing.
Besides, are you denying that, all else being equal, greater knowledge doesn't convey greater power?
2. That's your interpretation; I consider that he thought knowledge was valuable in itself, quite apart from its practical utility.
3. Actually, the knowledge science has given us is what has shown us that unsustainable practices are detrimental to our environment, not to mention averted various Malthusian crises; for example, the environmental rehabilitation of much of Western Europe since the 1960's has been driven by scientific understanding as much as by cultural awareness.
I submit that anthropogenic environmental reshaping/degradation is as old as humanity.
I further submit that the planet is hardly on the brink of "ruin".
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 28, 2009 11:16 PM
SIWOTI? At Pharyngula? The shock! the horror! It's enough to drive me to bed. ;) *g'night all*Posted by: John Morales | July 28, 2009 11:20 PM
Matthew, you are no more tolerant than us; you have been the one doing the challenging*, and you are the one running away.
Your views are tolerated, and it's not intolerant to point out that they're infantile and logically and empirically unsustainable.
Just so it's clear.
--
* Need I search out and link to your very first post? :)
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 28, 2009 11:40 PM
Exactly!Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | July 29, 2009 12:01 AM
Yep, I think John put it about as well as it can be put.
I guess it's natural Matthew's chosen to subscribe to the Chris & Sheril position where they describe as hostile anyone who doesn't subscribe to an ideology making claims without evidence having the temerity to point out that those on the other side of the divide a) have none for theirs, and b) should perhaps show some character and admit it rather than dodge the issue by claiming there are 'other ways of knowing' that are equally valid.
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 29, 2009 1:31 AM
It seems quite the tragic situation. A True BelieverTM comes on here, makes a huge range of logical fallacies and bad arguments, yet it's us who are intolerant and closed minded for calling them out as such. When you've got someone who argues to consequences, it doesn't matter the evidence.
Matthew can create an elaborate strawman against materialism, talk in pseudoscience, and show not even the slightest capacity to learn from others - yet we are the bad guys because we don't play accommodationist? What good does being an accommodationist do other than allow for nonsense to go unchecked?
Anyone who argues from consequences doesn't have an argument worth considering. In matters of understanding reality, the last thing anyone should be afraid of is the consequences - all that should matter is striving towards the truth; however uncomfortable the truth makes you feel.
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | July 29, 2009 2:03 AM
Well, if the fluff gathered around the pretty lace doilies on the Intersection blog is anything to go by, it allows the one doing the accomodating to feel like they're a much better person for being nice and friendly and tolerant - and not like those awful
new, militantnasty, mean atheists who are just plain rude with their pointing out that it's foolish to believe in pixies, leprechauns, unicorns and magic sky fairies with zombie offspring.I put a lot of the blame on the direction society has taken regarding so-called spirituality, i.e. that if you don't embrace something non-material - be it astrology, karma, Thetans or Jesus - then you're somehow cold, joyless and unfeeling.
Apparently it's 'cool' to believe in something rather than nothing, no matter how inane.
Sadly, people don't want to be labelled as 'uncool' and so choose to attack criticism of all woo, even if they don't actually believe in any particular ooga-booga themselves. Combine that with a few people who are less interested in facts than they are in photo-ops and selling books and you get what we've got now.
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 29, 2009 2:34 AM
Matthew wrote to me:
> One of my problems with the mechanistic myth (a myth is not simply a lie) is that it is largely responsible for the ecological crisis, as the non-human earth community is understood to be a mere store of raw materials, valueless until brought into our economy, produced, sold, and consumed (and then piled up in landfills). The mechanistic worldview has provided our civilization with meaning, but it is an extremely anthropocentric meaning that has literally destroyed the planet.
So what?
Look, we most assuredly have not “destroyed the planet”: the US is more heavily forested than it was at the beginning of the twentieth century. Go to Monticello, and the guides will explain that you cannot see the landscape as Jefferson saw it, because it is much more forested now. In my own hometown of St. Louis, a guy used to change his white shirt at mid-day in the ‘40s (coal-burning days), much cleaner air now.
Sure, we are fouling our own nest in some different ways now, and we may come to regret it.
But even if that is due to the mechanistic philosophy, even if we actually had “destroyed the planet,” so what?
Bad consequences of people learning the truth do not prove that the truth is false.
Often quite the contrary: it is because the physicists of the 1940s recognized certain truths about nuclear physics that they were able to create a horrible weapon that incinerated tens of thousands of human beings in an instant.
Not a Good Thing.
But that did not prove nuclear physics was false. Quite the contrary: it was a shockingly horrifying proof that the physicists' understanding of nuclear physics was correct.
Look, you have pretty much come out and admitted what you are doing: you decide what makes you feel good and what, in your opinion, will cause others to behave as you wish, and then you just pretend it is true.
I’m tempted to call this sort of careless and reckless disregard for the truth “lying”: perhaps “confabulation” is a more polite term.
Frankly, I find this more contemptible than intentional, outright lying: at least, an outright liar is honest with himself, if with no one else.
Matthew, you are intentionally and rather openly playing games with words in order to deceive people.
That is dishonest.
Dave
Posted by: M & K | July 29, 2009 11:41 AM
Prof. Corey Anton on belief: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncxYzvxRQ9I
Posted by: Knockgoats | July 29, 2009 12:00 PM
Clark's ideas are basically a slightly more modest version of panexperientialism. - Matthew Segall
Just in case anyone's wondering - this is crap of the same order as the rest of Matthew's blitherings. Clark is well aware that consciousness requires a complex, highly-structured material basis.
Posted by: Lynna | July 29, 2009 12:05 PM
Matthew is a postmodernist/sophist zombie. His brain has been rewired for maximum obfuscation. Paradoxically, his body continues to function.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 29, 2009 12:19 PM
I suspect Matthew will be back eventually. I think he wants to revolutionize science, but hasn't learned enough history of science to realize that any changes are going to have to come from within the discipline, and not imposed from the outside by woo-infested philosopher. As I mentioned when he first posted, philosophy without evidence is sophistry. And Matthew presented no evidence. Which makes it hard for any scientist to take him seriously.
Posted by: thalarctos | July 29, 2009 2:58 PM
My "favorite" (for very narrow, perverse values of "favorite") bit is how he lectures us about ecology:
Because, of course, it would never occur to a materially-oriented scientist to care a whit about the environment without a unique snowflake like Matthew to set us straight.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 29, 2009 5:22 PM
Sorry to poison Pharyngula with more heterodox views, but I must clear a few things up.
First: An argument from consequences against a mechanistic/materialistic metaphysics is not a fallacy if there is no way to prove said metaphysical assumptions. The fact that many mechanistic scientific theories work proves only that various natural processes can be partially controlled based on such assumptions. It doesn't prove that said processes really are nothing but blind mechanisms. The consequences of a metaphysical belief system therefore become the strongest argument against them.
Second: As Thalarctos points out, many scientists do indeed recognize the severity of the ecological crisis. E.O. Wilson is probably the most outspoken about the continued destruction industrialization is bringing to the planet, and has made some rather alarming predictions about species loss if we don't drastically change course. My point in blaming the materialist/mechanistic worldview for the crisis is that shifting the values of an entire civilization requires a wholesale transformation of our basic metaphysical assumptions. It doesn't matter if a few scientists who understand the trend of the data recognize something needs to give if billions of people believe the myth of capitalism/consumerism is simply the way of nature.
Third: Knockgoats writes: "Just in case anyone's wondering - this is crap of the same order as the rest of Matthew's blitherings. Clark is well aware that consciousness requires a complex, highly-structured material basis."
Panexperientialists argue no differently: consciousness is only possible within a highly developed physical organ. But consciousness is an advanced extension of a more primordial level of experience present at simpler levels of material organization. Consciousness is the end product of billions of years of organic evolution. Panexperientialism is an attempt to do away with dualism and so of course is in line with the idea that experience is only present within self-organizing material bodies (not rocks, they are not self-organizing, but mere aggregates of smaller self-organizing molecules). Straw men are easy to knock down, and even easier to construct (I know I'm guilty of this, too). If you're interested in what panexperientialism actually entails and how it can be applied in the sciences, read this article in the journal "Foundations of Chemistry" by Ross Stein titled, "A Process Theory of Enzyme Catalytic Power – the Interplay of Science and Metaphysics": http://www.springerlink.com/content/n10380520304r027/?p=0c6265a0b15b43589192f40ce68cc672&pi=0
The abstract:
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 29, 2009 6:54 PM
Nerd of Redhead wrote:
>I think he [Matthew Segall] wants to revolutionize science, but hasn't learned enough history of science to realize that any changes are going to have to come from within the discipline, and not imposed from the outside by woo-infested philosopher.
I have a bit different take on young Matthew.
Remember when he commented that he guessed he’d have to learn some real physics/biology before scientists would take his philosophical nonsense seriously (of course he hasn’t yet)?
I don’t think he really expects to make any discoveries in science.
I think his real purpose is simply to “de-fang” science, to domesticate science and make it comfortable for people like him.
Have you read his live-rock essay ( http://karmabuster.gaia.com/blog/2008/12/on_the_matter_of_life_biology_mental_and_integral_consciousness )?
He makes it quite clear in that essay that he is truly terrified by a universe which lacks a pre-constructed “meaning,” “purpose,” “feelings,” etc.
Now, of course, a lot of us who are scientists like science, and went into science, precisely because we really *love* a universe devoid of gooey, messy things such as pre-constructed, universal “meaning,” “purpose,” “feelings,” etc.
But Matt’s probably right that more people feel as he does than as we do.
There are plenty of people out there (Deepak Chopra comes to mind) willing to produce swill for the general public that assures them that science is not as horribly inhuman as they all think.
But the problem is that any knowledge of science, and actual outspoken scientists such as PZ, Dawkins, etc., show any moderately intelligent member of the public that Chopra et al. are lying.
So, Matthew has, I think, decided to take the battle to the “belly of the beast,” to try to convince us scientists that we are wrong in the scientific view we have of a universe devoid of “meaning,” “purpose,” “feelings,” etc.
Of course, he is finding out that all the tricks that worked so well in his humanities courses at Central Florida University in Orlando -- the quoting of stupid, dead philosophers, the word play, the guilt trips, etc. – do not work so well with us scientists.
It will be interesting to see if Matthew eventually gives up on us scientists and tries to make himself just another Deepak Chopra: can he out-Chopra Chopra and all the other con artists already in the field? A quote from Chopra to show Matthew’s competition ( http://www.skepdic.com/chopra.html ) :
> Quantum healing is healing the bodymind from a quantum level. That means from a level which is not manifest at a sensory level. Our bodies ultimately are fields of information, intelligence and energy. Quantum healing involves a shift in the fields of energy information, so as to bring about a correction in an idea that has gone wrong. So quantum healing involves healing one mode of consciousness, mind, to bring about changes in another mode of consciousness, body.
Lying about science is certainly a highly competitive industry, nowadays.
Dave
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 29, 2009 7:06 PM
Good analysis PhysicistDave. I think you are right in that both Matthew and Ken Wilber Fanboi want to "weaken" science. I took it to be jealousy, in that philosophy is now rather out of vogue. I'll accept your analysis of the bigger picture.
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | July 29, 2009 7:19 PM
Matthew's argument is just a worded-up version of Silver Fox's 'other ways of knowing', which I've also seen paraphrased on Chris & Sheril's blog by one of the New Militant Accomodationists:
And yet none of them has managed, after being asked on more than one occasion to answer the question about what to do when presented with two contradictory and mutually exclusive claims made for 'knowledge' gained in this fashion.
If the woo-burdened (of any kind; it's all the same to me) want to claim they believe in something, that's fine. But to claim that they know that it's true is something else entirely. Attempting to build a logical defence around it - and claiming that it is 'compatible' with science - is just ridiculous. It's the fucking antithesis of science.
Posted by: John Morales | July 29, 2009 7:30 PM
Matthew:
You keep asserting science holds to a metaphysical belief system; you keep being told it doesn't, I even explicitly mentioned what minimal and necessary assumptions it makes when you first made that claim. You clearly fail to distinguish between a working assumption and a metaphysical belief, as you've clearly failed to understand the principle of parsimony.*
You also disingenuosly qualify scientific theories as saying "many" work; care to specify any that don't?
Your final sentence in my quote is perverse.
The consequences [they work] are the strongest argument about them [scientific theories]?
--
* Natural philosophy (proto-science) did hold the metaphysical assumptions you advocate; as science developed, it became clear that these were unnecessary. Mechanism suffices, thus far.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 29, 2009 7:35 PM
Re: "live rocks" and pre-constructed, universal “meaning,” “purpose,” “feelings,” etc.
Rocks are not "actual entities" in Whitehead's ontology, but societies of actual occasions. Rocks are not alive or experiential because they have no dominant occasion of experience.
I'm not sure what you mean by "pre-constructed" or "universal," but Whitehead's ultimate metaphysical category is creativity (even more fundamental than God, which is a creature of creativity). Therefore, nothing is "pre-constructed" about the particular path the universe has taken in our cosmic epoch.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 29, 2009 7:40 PM
Yawn, reference to philosophy which is meaningless. Boring.
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | July 29, 2009 7:45 PM
Matthew Segal wrote:
That's a very interesting claim. How do you know they don't?
Posted by: E.V. | July 29, 2009 7:47 PM
John Morales:
Molly-worthy arguments. I clicked over to see what bat shittery our Facilis/Silver Fox surrogate has written. He's no Friar J.
Posted by: John Morales | July 29, 2009 7:58 PM
Matthew:
WTF? Rocks aren't entities?
Are you aware this assertion is contrary to your claim of panexperentialism?
Your word-salad is stupid. Let me do a simple substitution of terms (yours):
"
Rocks→societies of actual occasions are not alive or experiential because they have no dominant occasion of experience."PS: If you want to wank on, why not do it in the open thread? You will still be derided, but won't be hijacking the thread.
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 29, 2009 8:18 PM
You can never prove in science, only disprove. It's a fallacy because you're arguing that it reinterprets how man is in a way that is undesirable. How is this not arguing from consequences in the fallacious way? However, none of us would be able to lead sane lives if we actually believed we were non-conscious robotsIt shouldn't matter what people believe, whatever the truth about reality is should never be decided by what makes people sane. Consider the following statement: However, none of us would be able to lead sane lives if we actually believed we were just animals - this is exactly the kind of thinking creationists use. Your position is no different.
Then argue on the direct observation that the evidence doesn't support observation. By arguing to consequences, you are framing the argument to what comforts as opposed to what is true. Do the blind forces of interacting particles over time explain all that we see in nature? Surely you can frame this argument without having to appeal to emotion, which is what you are doing by arguing to consequences.
What do we observe about humanity? What do we observe in other animals? In non-organic matter? What best explains what we observe on the very small and very large scales and everything in between? Surely these are questions that could be asked without even making reference to how one could handle it. Because as you observe here, there's not one of us who can't live with this notion that we are the product of blind forces at work, that contra-causal free will doesn't fit with how the brains work, and that all 'decisions' we make are but the cause and effect of neurons in the brain. Are you saying we're insane?
But I can't help but feel you've missed the spirit of my criticism. It wasn't that you were appealing to emotion, rather that because you did it signified A True BelieverTM; that you wouldn't be swayed from your position. A number of different arguments you made raised red flags in my baloney detection kit, it demonstrated that your position was pseudoscience and that you weren't willing to change. You may think that your logical fallacies are justified, but again that's a sign of A True BelieverTM.
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 29, 2009 8:25 PM
So please, don't justify one logical fallacy with another, special pleading doesn't suddenly make it okay.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 29, 2009 8:35 PM
Kel, OM
Kel is not the only one who thinks you were here just to preach, and your weren't here to learn or truly debate. As a 20+ year skeptic I saw the same signs. Preaching here gets you nowhere. Showing hard (not philosophical) evidence to back up your assertions earns you respect. Not showing hard evidence loses you respect. Your present respect is measured in picometers since you never showed any hard evidence to back up your claims. Of course, doing so would defeat your woo arguments.Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 29, 2009 8:42 PM
John Morales,
I don't think the scientific method depends upon any metaphysical interpretation. It operates independent of metaphysics. It is only when we want to explain or understand scientific findings within a larger system of thought that metaphysics becomes necessary. Mechanistic philosophy is a candidate for such an interpretation, but I think it is inadequate as it cannot account for the emergence of life, and especially not for the emergence of consciousness and self-consciousness. The paper that PhysicistDave keeps linking everyone to is my more developed argument as to why Whitehead's philosophy of organism is a more adequate and coherent interpretation of scientific findings.
That a scientific theory works is evidence only of its predictive power, not of its ontological truth. For example, for many years, the equations behind Ptolemy's geocentric model were more accurate than Copernicus' heliocentric model, even though the latter was true and the former false.
In the absense of incontrovertable proof of a particular metaphysical interpretation (strictly empirical proof will forever be lacking for any interp.), the interpretation's practical and moral implications must enter into our judgment about their adequacy. As I've argued before, science is a cultural activity; the data it produces, as soon as it is interpreted, becomes value-laden. "Truth" independent of "Goodness" and "Beauty" is an empty notion so long as we remain culturally-embedded human organisms.
Re: rocks not being actual entities (or actual occasions--an entity is just an enduring process in Whiteheadian ontology): this is a technical term Whitehead uses to refer to any organic unity. A rock is not a unity, it is an aggregate composed of many smaller unities. Only organic unities have dominant occasions of experience.
Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 29, 2009 8:44 PM
Nerd,
Feel free to read the paper published in Foundations of Chemistry by Ross Stein I linked @ 203.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 29, 2009 8:50 PM
Matthew, due to your avoiding real evidence, I will not do anything you suggest. Just more woo. Prove yourself by going away for a while. You can't put up, and you can't shut up. Only con men keep talking like you are doing in such a situation...
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | July 29, 2009 8:57 PM
Matthew wrote:
If I were to tell you that, when I touched a rock I could 'feel' it was alive and capable of experience, what reason would you have - based on the arguments you've presented here - for doubting my claim?
Posted by: John Morales | July 29, 2009 9:01 PM
Matthew:
That you elevate your own opinion regarding interpretation of scientific findings over that of actual scientists (given you don't understand the math or the science itself) says it all, really.
There's a word for that: hubris.
Posted by: E.V. | July 29, 2009 9:02 PM
Matthew:
If there is no empirical evidence for the metaphysical how can it be relevant or given credence beyond a label as a fantasy construct (how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?)
Any way you slice it, it's still
bullshitbaloney.Posted by: Matthew Segall | July 29, 2009 9:15 PM
Apologies to Nerd, but so long as questions are asked, I will continue to respond.
Wowbagger,
The earth as a whole could be considered a living rock (leaving the biosphere out of the picture for the moment), as it is a self-organizing unity. The fact that its surface is continually remade and that its core is quite active, even producing an EM field that protects us from solar radiation, bolsters this claim. As for your specific claim that a rock is alive and can experience, I wouldn't totally disagree. The unities (atoms, molecules) that make up the rock are the experiential bodies, however (the rock itself is not a whole, it is just a random collection of actual entities. It's sort of like a society of human beings. There is no Big Person that all our individual consciousnesses adds up to that has an experience of itself. But nonetheless, a society is obviously experiential in a more limited sense because of its components.
E.V.,
Don't confuse what is sold at Barnes and Noble in the "metaphysical" section with the branch of philosophy called metaphysics. Science cannot tell us much about the nature of the universe as a whole unless we give the data it collects a metaphysical background. Metaphysics isn't simply fantasy constructs, its the foundation of any coherent picture of reality.
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | July 29, 2009 9:33 PM
Matthew Segall,
Thanks for responding; it gives me a better idea of your position on things. I don't agree, but I'm not really well-versed enough in the relevant science (or philosophy, for that matter) to debate you on it.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 29, 2009 9:40 PM
Wowbagger, all you need to know is that the science doesn't exist, and the philosophy is sophistry. Matthew is a con man. Ignore his glib talk and always ask for hard physical (scientific) evidence. And note it never comes...
Posted by: John Morales | July 29, 2009 9:52 PM
Matthew:
Only by being perverse and misrepresenting the facts; by that logic humans as a whole could be considered to be skin.
The only "rocky" part is the crust, less than 1% of its volume.
Earth's crust.
Posted by: John Morales | July 29, 2009 9:56 PM
Wowbagger,
Bah. Such trivial considerations don't stop Matthew from so doing... :)
But yeah, therein lies a salient difference.
It is one reason why you're respected here.
Posted by: Kseniya | July 29, 2009 10:02 PM
Last night I saw an old s/f movie in which the ship's captain was told (by the brain of his deceased predecessor) to utilize Phenomenology in his critical effort to talk a sentient bomb out of detonating itself while still attached to the ship.
Posted by: E.V. | July 29, 2009 10:05 PM
Forgive me Matthew, I should have delineated it as ontology and specifically teleology. It's an exercise in conscious abstractions and ultimately, like gods and demons, a purely human construct - sometimes useful but never real.
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 29, 2009 10:14 PM
Science defines metaphysics. Look at quantum mechanics and then tell me that science cannot tell us about the nature of the universe itself. You're going about it the wrong way. You should be basing understanding metaphysics on the physics, not basing understanding of physics on the metaphysics.Simple way to put this: what is metaphysics that doesn't take into account: special relativity, big bang theory, darwinian evolution, wave / particle duality, quantum entanglement, quantum electrodynamics, etc.? Metaphysics needs science if it wants to be coherent about reality, science doesn't need metaphysics. Your argument is no better than one who posits a transcendant god to explain what we see in nature.
You're doing nothing short of proposing that physics is wrong, yet you aren't showing evidence for this. You keep pushing your position beyond the realm of evidence, again another red flag that indicates A True BelieverTM. Someone who is intellectually honest would want their position challenged and would do what they can to make it falsifiable. Because if you want to argue that the atoms in a rock have different metaphysical properties to those in living organisms, then you better show some damn evidence for it. Otherwise all you have is conjecture, and to believe in conjecture is an act of faith. You're A True BelieverTM
Posted by: John Morales | July 29, 2009 10:17 PM
Kseniya @227, Dark Star, I presume?
I loved it as a teenager.
Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | July 29, 2009 10:25 PM
Basically, my problem with what Matthew is claiming is fairly simple, and lies at the heart of why I'm an atheist and a skeptic and an awooist in general; namely: if something isn't able to be determined via 'science' (in the broadest sense) then by what standards is it measured for validity?
The standard response is that religions claims are outside of science and there are 'other ways of knowing'.
So, with this in mind, I kept asking Silver Fox and the other supposedly-atheist-but-suspiciously-pro-woo-sounding types on Chris and Sheril's blog was 'if you are faced with two contrary and mututally exclusive claims based on a scientifically unsupported 'way of knowing', how do you distinguish between them?'
Funnily enough, I didn't get an answer.
It's like saying you've got a friend who's six feet tall but, because he's intangible you can't measure him to verify it. Which is fine until someone else with an invisible friend comes along and claims that his invisible friend is taller than the first person's.
Matthew is, at least, consistent; he appears ready to believe pretty much anything. Which sets him apart from the Christian contingent who like to appear pluralistic but - when it comes down to it - firmly believe that the only true woo is their woo.
Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | July 29, 2009 10:48 PM
Especially the one from 11/11/73 Winterland. That one was awesome. The whole band was on fire
oh wait, you're talking about a different Dark Star.
Posted by: Matthew Segal | July 29, 2009 10:57 PM
Kel,
Quantum mechanics isn't the science I would have chosen to prove your point. There are are quite a few interpretations of the experimental findings. Eddington's famous line pretty much sums it up: "Something unknown is doing we don't know what." Again, the predictive accuracy of quantum mechanics is unmatched by any other science; but the ontological nature of the quantum world is anything but easily understood.
I think there is a reciprocal relationship between science and metaphysics. Whitehead put it this way:
"The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation [science]; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization [metaphysics]; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation [further experimentation]."
I do not think the experimental observations and mathematical descriptions of physics are wrong. You seem to be misunderstanding the role of metaphysical speculation. It is not to challenge scientific data, but to interpret it within a larger system of general ideas. Scientific theories can be falsified; metaphysical generalization is meant to provide the unobservable background that explains the observable phenomena. Theories do this on a more narrow scale for specific experiments. Metaphysics is an attempt to fit all the theories together into some Big Picture.
I do not want to argue this. The atoms in a rock have the same properties as those in an organism. The only difference is that the atoms in an organism belong to a larger society of actual occasions organized in a hierarchical fashion due to billions of years of inherited order.
Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM
|
July 29, 2009 11:02 PM
Yawn, more woo by the woomeister. There is no big picture. Absolutely no hard evidence. Con man plying his trade.
Posted by: John Morales | July 29, 2009 11:07 PM
Matthew @145:
@233:
Why do you think it's called quantum mechanics? :)
(Hint: it superseded classical mechanics).
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 29, 2009 11:24 PM
Matthew wrote to me:
> Rocks are not "actual entities" in Whitehead's ontology, but societies of actual occasions. Rocks are not alive or experiential because they have no dominant occasion of experience.
Oh, Matthew, you are such an amusing little child – you have almost learned how to use words like the bigger children.
I kinda think you know that the distinction you try to draw is a distinction without a difference: whether rocks are alive or whether rocks have parts that are alive… well, either one is enough to make a grown-up laugh until they cry.
Look, everyone here knows that you are just playing games with words in order to create a kind of fantasy game, sort of like D&D, in which the big, mean, cruel, unfeeling, purposeless universe of mainstream science is replaced by a nice, soft, messy, icky universe dominated by “feelings,” “purpose,” “meaning” and such gooey, disgusting stuff.
A lot of us liked math and science better than, say, literature courses precisely because in the math and science courses we did not have to pretend that those icky things were widespread in the universe at large.
But I certainly do not want to prevent you from engaging in your little role-playing Whiteheadian D&D game!
The truth (and you know this, as well as we – that is why you work so hard at your little role-playing game) is that all the great scientific discoveries for more than a century have been made by scientists who supposed that the universe followed the cold, heartless, meaningless model of mechanistic science. And all the sweet little goofballs who tried your wonderful touchy-feely approach to science have discovered nothing at all.
The heartless mechanistic approach has succeeded in figuring out an enormous amount about how the universe works (and in building everything from nuclear bombs to antibiotics). Your sweet little touchy-feely approach has resulted in nothing at all.
And that is why the ancient old humanistic lies (oops!—I mean “traditions”) that you so love are doomed to be swept into the trashbin of history.
Scientia potestas est.
Dave
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 29, 2009 11:24 PM
I'm with you on that one Wowbagger. The fact that people weasel out of empirical responsibility to keep a position that is otherwise untenable in the context of secular thought - that is that one needs good reasons to maintain the position they have.
New Age thinking riles me especially, because it is pseudoscience - it uses scientific terminology to give their particular brand of woo undeserved legitimacy. It's deceptive to the core. What the @#$% do we know? We know that if you give an answer that sounds sciency, people will be more inclined to believe it.
I'm reminded of Tim Minchin's Storm, where nearing the end of a long rant he asks "isn't this enough?" Why isn't this enough? In the last few hundred years we've seen almost as far as physically possible to the early galaxies (then) over 13 billion light years away. We've seen almost as small as it can go, not only splitting the atom but the components therein revealing the very fundamental nature of our reality. We've been able to piece together the beginning of the universe itself, down now to ~10-35 of a second.
Our desires, our thought processes, these are neurochemical interactions in the brain. Ultimately the purpose of these wirings translates back to the ability to reproduce, where the code that gets passed down has been crafted over billions of years in order to make damn good survival machines. We are all but one iteration of what is now a 3.5 billion year continuous lineage.
We think, we feel, we love, we desire, we find patterns and find purpose, form connections with others and non-human objects - even with the universe itself. We are star stuff, crafted over billions of years, we are a way for the universe to know itself. There's no greater connection with the universe we could possibly have.
Yet this isn't enough, it's never enough for some. This grand story, much more grand than anything that imagination has ever offered humanity, doesn't give the right answers. Apparently it's not enough that we are part of the universe, our dualistic tendencies and thought processes that work so well for human to human interaction tell us that there's something more to reality.
This is the year 2009, we have supercomputers on every desk. We have cracked the genome. Sent a man to the moon and found water on mars. Transport tens of thousands of people around the world each day. Have a global communications system. 300 years ago, arguably the greatest intellect the world has ever known was spending most of his time trying to turn lead into gold with alchemy. We are doing magic our ancestors could not even comprehend, yet this isn't enough?
Posted by: PhysicistDave | July 29, 2009 11:37 PM
Matthew wrote:
>Nerd,
> Feel free to read the paper published in Foundations of Chemistry by Ross Stein I linked @ 203.
Do you realize Matthew that a good way to get some of us *not* to read something is for you to recommend it?
You are an excellent BS detector: if you like something, it must be BS.
Dave
Posted by: John Morales | July 29, 2009 11:41 PM
Kel @237, I think that's a very insightful comment.
Shame colloquial English is so embedded with teleological terminology*:
It's amazingly difficult to be aware of (so as to avoid) using such terminology, which can colour our cognitions.
Had I had the nous to express those sentiments, I'd likely have written, instead:
* the
purposeeffect of these wirings*
has been craftedevolved*
in order to makeresulting in--
* Sexist terminology is much easier to spot!
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 29, 2009 11:47 PM
Then you've misunderstood my point completely.You say:
then say It might be just me, but this feels like a shell game with you. It always has really, the last thread you kept making attack after attack on materialism then when challenged you agreed that with materalism. But to this point......science is the tool that allows us to explore the frontier between what is known and unknown. You're missing my point, and missing it badly. If we observe something falling, the observation of falling is going to remain regardless. But if you want to make statements on reality, you have to take in account the observation of falling. This is all I'm trying to say. You can't wrap metaphysics around science because metaphysics no matter what you do is a slave to science.
What would change in metaphysics when the science changes? Say we go from Newtonian to Einsteinian gravity or Galilean to Einsteinian relativity? Does science need metaphysics to interpret that? No, science is a self-contained enterprise. But your metaphysics is useless if it doesn't adapt from 17th century ideas to 20 century ones. Just as when General Relativity is superseded, your metaphysics needs to change.
Big Picture? Again, a red flag has come up. Why do you assume that science isn't one big picture on its own? After all, all disciplines of science are linked. You can't talk about biology without talking chemistry, and can't talk chemistry without talking physics. While the scientific method focuses on the specifics, the realm of science as a whole makes a far bigger picture than you could ever hope to understand. Good, then you'll agree that by observing how atoms work on a fundamental level, we can understand the nature of nature itself. That brain function when it comes down to it is blind forces working, and any experience we have is the brain working mechanistically thanks to the wiring crafted over billions of years of evolution. Glad we can finally agree that there's nothing to fear from being material ;)Posted by: Kseniya | July 29, 2009 11:57 PM
Yup - released in '74, one year after Rev's classic Dead show. My dad told me it was a popular "stoner" s/f film in its day. I can see why. Anyway, the reason I mentioned it is because the "phenomenology" sequence immediately reminded me of Matthew, and anyone who's seen the movie knows where it led.
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 30, 2009 12:11 AM
Good point. You've expressed it far better than I have, and if I could do it again I would take your advice on. A couple of things though.I've been watching quite a bit of Dan Dennett talking recently and he uses such terminology, talking about design as possible either through agency or a blind process. Another thing is that such language illustrates what I was trying to say, that the human mind works in such a way as to ascribe purpose. On Dawkins latest series, he and Randolph Neese kept dropping the d-word then catching themselves afterwards. Your point is spot on in my opinion, one should seek to avoid such misleading language.
Posted by: John Morales | July 30, 2009 12:35 AM
Kel,
Yes, but rationalists understand that such usage is idiomatic, not literal.
At the end of the day, it's the semantics that count; the beauty of natural languages is (paradoxically) that their very ambiguity and need for context and interpretation allows for creativity and poetry — though it also allows for misinterpretation and confusion.
In my opinion, it's a bit of a shame that artificial languages remain no more than a curiosity, and are (in my estimation) unlikely to ever gain traction.
Posted by: Kel, OM | July 30, 2009 3:05 AM
Fair enough. I would hope that when I use such language, given what I'm saying one would know that I'm not meant to be taken literally, but I guess I can't count on that. I'll strive to improve in the future, in the end my goal is to communicate my position as effectively as possible so anything that can help me improve in my communication is more than welcome. I'm trained to talk in gen 3 code, not english ;)