BigMike wrote: ↑Mon Nov 18, 2024 5:47 pm
Your critique brings up valid concerns but also hinges on a conflation of materialism, determinism, and the reliability of knowledge. Let’s unpack this systematically.
First, the “overwhelming explanatory power of physical causation” resides in its track record of providing consistent, testable, and predictive models for understanding phenomena in the natural world. Has it helped us understand the human psyche? Absolutely. Neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science have made remarkable strides in explaining thought processes, emotions, and behaviors by exploring the brain’s physical mechanisms. Are these explanations complete? No, but incompleteness doesn’t invalidate the framework; it simply highlights the frontier of inquiry.
Perhaps art, love, ambition, literature and culture may one day bee "reduced" to physics. But we aren't there yet -- or even close.
We must muddle through as best we can, given our limitations. We study literature by looking at motifs, trends, in (you guessed it!) literature. We study human behavior and culture not by looking at neurons (although that might occasionally be helpful), but by studying history and culture. Science (one hopes, rather vainly given your pronouncements) is a practical discipline, If we can guess the future more accurately by looking at history than by looking at neurons let's have a go in that direction, shan't we?
Regarding materialism and knowledge, you suggest that if thought arises from mechanical brain processes, we have no reason to trust it. But this skepticism undermines itself. If our evolved cognition were entirely detached from reality, it wouldn’t have enabled survival in a complex environment. The alignment of sensory input, memory, and reasoning with objective reality is what allowed humans to outcompete other species. Science is a refinement of these cognitive abilities, structured to minimize error through systematic observation, hypothesis testing, and peer review.
Now you're making this up. Isn't it more than a trifle "unscientific" to posit what would and would not "enable survival in a complex environment". Ants seem to have done a pretty good job of it (judging by my pantry), and I don't assume their rationality or ability to use reason to contemplate the universe. Maybe I'm wrong.
Your point about trusting sources is interesting but ultimately flawed in its equivalence. Trust in science rests on evidence-based, reproducible results—not on unverified narratives. The claim that Barry Bonds hit more home runs than anyone is supported by extensive, documented statistics. In contrast, claims like Jesus rising from the dead rely on unverifiable, non-reproducible accounts. These aren’t equally credible just because both are written down.
Finally, logic and math are indeed non-empirical, but they complement science rather than contradicting it. They provide the frameworks through which scientific theories are formulated and tested. Their abstract nature doesn’t make them incompatible with materialism; it simply means they operate at a different level of description. The materialist view isn’t undermined by the existence of logic and math—it is enriched by them.
In sum, while reductionism and materialism aren’t panaceas, they are indispensable tools for unraveling the complexities of the universe. To dismiss their contributions is to ignore the vast body of evidence they’ve produced and the progress they’ve enabled. Science’s success lies precisely in its adaptability and ability to integrate diverse methodologies, including those that explore culture and language as emergent phenomena.
Of course. But history is non-scientific. It's not repeatable. Nor (actually) are any scientific experiments. Each is a unique, historical event, described in the "scientific literature". Are you suggesting we can learn more about human behavior by studying neurons, instead of human behavior? History is the study of the past -- but it is not scientific. Are you claiming it is not worthy of our time or interest?
My point about trusting sources is simply this: the religious and the scientific world view are less distinct than you may imagine. Of course you think your sources are trustworthy. So do religious people. Religion is more akin to history than to science (as are Barry Bonds' home run records, although, being modern, they are more credible). The Old Testament and the Gospels are a history (and in the case of the Gospels read more like biography,, if we are to be persnickety about literary forms). All myths are oral histories. Whether they are accurate is, of course, debatable. But there is as much "evidence" in their support as there is to support historical "facts" we never doubt. So it's not the "evidence" that is important. it's our preconceptions and prejudices about how the world works. (My prejudices are pretty much the same as yours when it comes to a scientific world view, although I think the most elucidating way to study art is to study art, not physics.
The problem, of course, is that those areas for which reductionism provides little insight are the ones we care most about. Love, friendship, literature, politics, art. The astronomer who "lectured to much applause" about the charts, graphs and diagrams missed the importance of the stars. I posted the Whitman poem earlier, but it's worth another look.
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
