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Against Scientific Materialism

exchemist

Veteran Member
Scientific materialism is a disease of the mainstream.

When is it going to hurry up and die and wake up to and catch up with true reality?
Ah yes the dreaded "mainstream". Why not bring in "sheeple" while you are about it? :D

Anyway it's not clear what you mean by "scientific materialism". You could mean either the methodological naturalism which is part and parcel of the scientific method but has no metaphysical connotations, or you could mean physicalism, the worldview - which is far from intrinsic to science - that the scientifically observable world is all there is.
 
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viole

Ontological Naturalist
Premium Member
Assuming only negative or "something wrong" as "causes" of qualia seems completely one-sided though. Whereas a completely clear, well-functioning mind and healthy body seem as likely and the things that people commonly experience with alcohol and such don't qualify as much of an exclusive experience.

I think that assuming that WE are the WORKING of a certain amount of neurons, ergo that our conssciousness, feelings, love, etc, are ultimately reducible to physical processes and information theory, is much more parsimonious than postulating weird metaphysical realities for which there is no evidence.

And simplifies things. It makes it obvious why physics (vodka, neurodegeneration, hammers on the head) can affect the I so easily. No need for funny theories like the brain being a radio capturing metaphysical waves or similar nonsense, lol.

Ciao

- viole
 

PureX

Veteran Member
Experiences, qualia, consciousness etc are very likely the result of the computation of a set of neurons. There is nothing metaphysical about it. Or it is as metaphysical as the propulsion generated by an engine when it burns fuel.

For sure, they seem to be easily affected by very material causes. Like ingestion of alcohol, deprivation of oxygen, degenerative processes, etc.

Ciao

- viole
You are falsely presuming the "metaphysical" means "not of the realm of physics". It doesn't. No does it mean "supernatural", as many also wrongly presume.
 

viole

Ontological Naturalist
Premium Member
You are falsely presuming the "metaphysical" means "not of the realm of physics". It doesn't. No does it mean "supernatural", as many also wrongly presume.

Well, I am not a professional philosopher, obviously, so I figured that “meta” meant something like “beyond” or something.

Ciao

- viole
 

PureX

Veteran Member
Well, I am not a professional philosopher, obviously, so I figured that “meta” meant something like “beyond” or something.

Ciao

- viole
Think of a single candle burning, in your mind. Is there a candle burning in your mind? No. Can you see it there, burning, in your mind's eye? Yes.

That candle you see burning in your 'mind's eye' is a 'metaphysical' candle. It transcends the possibilities and limitations of all the various physical phenomena from which it has sprung. This does not mean, however, that it's non-physical, or unnatural. It is comprised of energy, and matter, and the "natural" inter-relatedness of these. Yet it does mean that physics, and nature, are capable of transcendence. And, in fact, it's happening all the time. Life is an example of metaphysical transcendence. So is consciousness. Neither of these is non-physical, or unnatural. Yet both of them opened up a whole new universe of possibilities that were not present in any of the physical phenomena from which they sprung.
 
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Fool

ALL in all
Premium Member
This is a very interesting essay on the problems inherent in the stance of scientific materialism as a comprehensive worldview. Please read it and comment or rebut. Would be a good starting point for a debate or discussion. :) I am quoting relevant section from the first part of the essay. The next part proposes their own corrective version, which we can discuss later.
The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience | Aeon Essays

Excerpts of interest:-
Definition of scientific materialism
Many of us like to think that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it. But this image of science is deeply flawed. In our urge for knowledge and control, we’ve created a vision of science as a series of discoveries about how reality is in itself, a God’s-eye view of nature.

Such an approach not only distorts the truth, but creates a false sense of distance between ourselves and the world. That divide arises from what we call the Blind Spot, which science itself cannot see. In the Blind Spot sits experience: the sheer presence and immediacy of lived perception.


Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is).

Problems with Scientific Materialism

To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty. If ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it, then the assertion that only physical phenomena exist is false. Why? Because physical science – including biology and computational neuroscience – doesn’t include an account of consciousness. This is not to say that consciousness is something unnatural or supernatural. The point is that physical science doesn’t include an account of experience; but we know that experience exists, so the claim that the only things that exist are what physical science tells us is false. On the other hand, if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness.


Faced with this quandary, some philosophers argue that we should define ‘physical’ such that it rules out radical emergentism (that life and the mind are emergent from but irreducible to physical reality) and panpsychism (that mind is fundamental and exists everywhere, including at the microphysical level). This move would give physicalism a definite content, but at the cost of trying to legislate in advance what ‘physical’ can mean, instead of leaving its meaning to be determined by physics.

Objectivism and physicalism are philosophical ideas, not scientific ones – even if some scientists espouse them. They don’t logically follow from what science tells us about the physical world, or from the scientific method itself. By forgetting that these perspectives are a philosophical bias, not a mere data-point, scientific materialists ignore the ways that immediate experience and the world can never be separated.

Husserl, the German thinker who founded the philosophical movement of phenomenology, argued that lived experience is the source of science. It’s absurd, in principle, to think that science can step outside it. The ‘life-world’ of human experience is the ‘grounding soil’ of science, and the existential and spiritual crisis of modern scientific culture – what we are calling the Blind Spot – comes from forgetting its primacy.

Whitehead’s so-called process philosophy is based on a rejection of the ‘bifurcation of nature’, which divides immediate experience into the dichotomies of mind versus body, and perception versus reality. Instead, he argued that what we call ‘reality’ is made up of evolving processes that are equally physical and experiential.


Insights from Quantum Physics
For several schools of thought, quantum physics doesn’t give us access to the way the world fundamentally is in itself. Rather, it only lets us grasp how matter behaves in relation to our interactions with it.
Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr, for example, the wave function has no reality outside of the interaction between the electron and the measurement device.
A relatively new interpretation known as Quantum-Bayesianism (QBism) – which combines quantum information theory and Bayesian probability theory – takes a different tack; it interprets the irreducible probabilities of a quantum state not as an element of reality, but as the degrees of belief an agent has about the outcome of a measurement. Advocates of this interpretation sometimes describe it as ‘participatory realism’, because human agency is woven into the process of doing physics as a means of gaining knowledge about the world.

In short, there’s still no simple way to remove our experience as scientists from the characterisation of the physical world.

Experience and Consciousness
There’s still no scientific explanation of qualia in terms of brain activity – or any other physical process for that matter. Nor is there any real understanding of what such an account would look like.There’s also the question of subjectivity. Experiences have a subjective character; they occur in the first person. Why should a given sort of physical system have the feeling of being a subject? Science has no answer to this question.
Philosopher William James (whose notion of ‘pure experience’ influenced Husserl and Whitehead) wrote in 1905 about the ‘active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us’. That active sense of living doesn’t have an inside-outside/subject-object structure; it’s subsequent reflection that imposes this structure on experience.
More than a millennium ago, Vasubandhu, an Indian Buddhist philosopher of the 4th to 5th century CE, criticised the reification of phenomena into independent subjects versus independent objects. For Vasubandhu, the subject-object structure is a deep-seated, cognitive distortion of a causal network of phenomenal moments that are empty of an inner subject grasping an outer object.
To bring the point home, consider that in certain intense states of absorption – during meditation, dance or highly skilled performances – the subject-object structure can drop away, and we are left with a sense of sheer felt presence. How is such phenomenal presence possible in a physical world? Science is silent on this question.

What the Scientific Method actually Does
First, we set aside aspects of human experience on which we can’t always agree, such as how things look or taste or feel. Second, using mathematics and logic, we construct abstract, formal models that we treat as stable objects of public consensus. Third, we intervene in the course of events by isolating and controlling things that we can perceive and manipulate. Fourth, we use these abstract models and concrete interventions to calculate future events. Fifth, we check these predicted events against our perceptions. An essential ingredient of this whole process is technology: machines – our equipment – that standardise these procedures, amplify our powers of perception, and allow us to control phenomena to our own ends.

But experience is present at every step. Scientific models must be pulled out from observations, often mediated by our complex scientific equipment. They are idealisations, not actual things in the world. They are abstract mental representations, not mind-independent entities. Their power comes from the fact that they’re useful for helping to make testable predictions. But these, too, never take us outside experience, for they require specific kinds of perceptions performed by highly trained observers.

For these reasons, scientific ‘objectivity’ can’t stand outside experience; in this context, ‘objective’ simply means something that’s true to the observations agreed upon by a community of investigators using certain tools. Science is essentially a highly refined form of human experience, based on our capacities to observe, act and communicate.

So the belief that scientific models correspond to how things truly are doesn’t follow from the scientific method. Instead, it comes from an ancient impulse – one often found in monotheistic religions – to know the world as it is in itself, as God does. The contention that science reveals a perfectly objective ‘reality’ is more theological than scientific.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For someone who has been a scientist, and a person outside of the West (India), the incompatibility of the scientific methodology with scientific materialism and the monotheistic theological superstructure of the basic idea has long been evident. I agree with most of the issues this essay and their authors raise. What do you folks think?


reality is both objective and subjective. and reality is physical it just isn't static forms and vibrating faster/slower.

my studies in both alchemy,hermeticism, hinduism, buddhism, and all relate mind, body, and force as one thing. three in one, or the thrice great, or the trinity.
 

ecco

Veteran Member
Think of a single candle burning, in your mind. Is there a candle burning in your mind? No. Can you see it there, burning, in your mind's eye? Yes.
Not a pretty picture.

cartoon-big-brain-man-fire-and-fever-HM5168.jpg
 

atanu

Member
Premium Member
The definition of materialism I use (from Smart and Armstrong) says it's the view that only such entities and processes exist as are recognized by the physical sciences from time to time.

From time to time? How do you constrain that?
 

QuestioningMind

Well-Known Member
Think of a single candle burning, in your mind. Is there a candle burning in your mind? No. Can you see it there, burning, in your mind's eye? Yes.

That candle you see burning in your 'mind's eye' is a 'metaphysical' candle. It transcends the possibilities and limitations of all the various physical phenomena from which it has sprung. This does not mean, however, that it's non-physical, or unnatural. It is comprised of energy, and matter, and the "natural" inter-relatedness of these. Yet it does mean that physics, and nature, are capable of transcendence. And, in fact, it's happening all the time. Life is an example of metaphysical transcendence. So is consciousness. Neither of these is non-physical, or unnatural. Yet both of them opened up a whole new universe of possibilities that were not present in any of the physical phenomena from which they sprung.

So you are defining metaphysical as imaginary.
 

QuestioningMind

Well-Known Member
If you want to spend you time working at not understanding me, be my guest.

Hey, if you want to cop an attitude just because I asked a question, fine. OR you could attempt to explain why stating that ..."That candle you see burning in your 'mind's eye' is a 'metaphysical' candle..." isn't akin to stating that an imaginary candle and a metaphysical candle are the same thing.
 

sealchan

Well-Known Member
This is a very interesting essay on the problems inherent in the stance of scientific materialism as a comprehensive worldview. Please read it and comment or rebut. Would be a good starting point for a debate or discussion. :) I am quoting relevant section from the first part of the essay. The next part proposes their own corrective version, which we can discuss later.
The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience | Aeon Essays

Excerpts of interest:-
Definition of scientific materialism
Many of us like to think that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it. But this image of science is deeply flawed. In our urge for knowledge and control, we’ve created a vision of science as a series of discoveries about how reality is in itself, a God’s-eye view of nature.

Such an approach not only distorts the truth, but creates a false sense of distance between ourselves and the world. That divide arises from what we call the Blind Spot, which science itself cannot see. In the Blind Spot sits experience: the sheer presence and immediacy of lived perception.


Behind the Blind Spot sits the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is).

Problems with Scientific Materialism

To put it bluntly, the claim that there’s nothing but physical reality is either false or empty. If ‘physical reality’ means reality as physics describes it, then the assertion that only physical phenomena exist is false. Why? Because physical science – including biology and computational neuroscience – doesn’t include an account of consciousness. This is not to say that consciousness is something unnatural or supernatural. The point is that physical science doesn’t include an account of experience; but we know that experience exists, so the claim that the only things that exist are what physical science tells us is false. On the other hand, if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complete physics, then the claim that there is nothing else but physical reality is empty, because we have no idea what such a future physics will look like, especially in relation to consciousness.


Faced with this quandary, some philosophers argue that we should define ‘physical’ such that it rules out radical emergentism (that life and the mind are emergent from but irreducible to physical reality) and panpsychism (that mind is fundamental and exists everywhere, including at the microphysical level). This move would give physicalism a definite content, but at the cost of trying to legislate in advance what ‘physical’ can mean, instead of leaving its meaning to be determined by physics.

Objectivism and physicalism are philosophical ideas, not scientific ones – even if some scientists espouse them. They don’t logically follow from what science tells us about the physical world, or from the scientific method itself. By forgetting that these perspectives are a philosophical bias, not a mere data-point, scientific materialists ignore the ways that immediate experience and the world can never be separated.

Husserl, the German thinker who founded the philosophical movement of phenomenology, argued that lived experience is the source of science. It’s absurd, in principle, to think that science can step outside it. The ‘life-world’ of human experience is the ‘grounding soil’ of science, and the existential and spiritual crisis of modern scientific culture – what we are calling the Blind Spot – comes from forgetting its primacy.

Whitehead’s so-called process philosophy is based on a rejection of the ‘bifurcation of nature’, which divides immediate experience into the dichotomies of mind versus body, and perception versus reality. Instead, he argued that what we call ‘reality’ is made up of evolving processes that are equally physical and experiential.


Insights from Quantum Physics
For several schools of thought, quantum physics doesn’t give us access to the way the world fundamentally is in itself. Rather, it only lets us grasp how matter behaves in relation to our interactions with it.
Copenhagen interpretation of Niels Bohr, for example, the wave function has no reality outside of the interaction between the electron and the measurement device.
A relatively new interpretation known as Quantum-Bayesianism (QBism) – which combines quantum information theory and Bayesian probability theory – takes a different tack; it interprets the irreducible probabilities of a quantum state not as an element of reality, but as the degrees of belief an agent has about the outcome of a measurement. Advocates of this interpretation sometimes describe it as ‘participatory realism’, because human agency is woven into the process of doing physics as a means of gaining knowledge about the world.

In short, there’s still no simple way to remove our experience as scientists from the characterisation of the physical world.

Experience and Consciousness
There’s still no scientific explanation of qualia in terms of brain activity – or any other physical process for that matter. Nor is there any real understanding of what such an account would look like.There’s also the question of subjectivity. Experiences have a subjective character; they occur in the first person. Why should a given sort of physical system have the feeling of being a subject? Science has no answer to this question.
Philosopher William James (whose notion of ‘pure experience’ influenced Husserl and Whitehead) wrote in 1905 about the ‘active sense of living which we all enjoy, before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us’. That active sense of living doesn’t have an inside-outside/subject-object structure; it’s subsequent reflection that imposes this structure on experience.
More than a millennium ago, Vasubandhu, an Indian Buddhist philosopher of the 4th to 5th century CE, criticised the reification of phenomena into independent subjects versus independent objects. For Vasubandhu, the subject-object structure is a deep-seated, cognitive distortion of a causal network of phenomenal moments that are empty of an inner subject grasping an outer object.
To bring the point home, consider that in certain intense states of absorption – during meditation, dance or highly skilled performances – the subject-object structure can drop away, and we are left with a sense of sheer felt presence. How is such phenomenal presence possible in a physical world? Science is silent on this question.

What the Scientific Method actually Does
First, we set aside aspects of human experience on which we can’t always agree, such as how things look or taste or feel. Second, using mathematics and logic, we construct abstract, formal models that we treat as stable objects of public consensus. Third, we intervene in the course of events by isolating and controlling things that we can perceive and manipulate. Fourth, we use these abstract models and concrete interventions to calculate future events. Fifth, we check these predicted events against our perceptions. An essential ingredient of this ...

For someone who has been a scientist, and a person outside of the West (India), the incompatibility of the scientific methodology with scientific materialism and the monotheistic theological superstructure of the basic idea has long been evident. I agree with most of the issues this essay and their authors raise. What do you folks think?

I read the first few paragraphs...I think that the limitation might be defined as science cant see the objective outcomes of subjective and arbitrary circumstance. This is due to not being able to restate any more succinctly that which is systemic in nature. However, science will demonstrate this very clearly as it reaches that proverbial wall at the end of the Universe which it also self-defines.

The description of anyones experience involves a great heap of arbitrary conditions that science finds too tedious to trace out. The complex entanglements of causality on the stage of actuality is too subjective and parochial to be of much interest to a scientist. It is all random noise and unpatterned trivia.

But this unpatterned trivia is significant to the being who finds him/her self in its center. The self-aware being, reviewing the particulars of its circumstance finds in them the ultimate meaning for good or ill. This self-evaluation in the name of self improvement is often far from the fires that feed a science whose practice seeks to make the individual irrelevant.

But there is no special "substance" one might label "experience" or "consciousness" which we can adequately explore independently of science. There is simply a need for each individual to reincarnated knowledge of the world the best way they can. Finding one's path to truth then is inherently a matter of and also aside from science.
 

blü 2

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Are you having an experience now? If so, let me assure you that science has nothing to say regarding how there exists such things as experiences.
You're referring to self-awareness?

Indeed, as far as I'm aware there does not exist at this stage a confirmed description of the mechanisms that generate self-awareness in functioning brains.

That doesn't mean no such description is possible. Any such description, when it's found, will need to be in scientific / materialist terms because otherwise it won't describe self-awareness, consciousness, qualia, whatever, in terms of reality. And if it doesn't do that, then it will be neither meaningful nor useful.
 

blü 2

Veteran Member
Premium Member
From time to time? How do you constrain that?
Truth is retrospective, not absolute. I don't constrain it ─ it constrains itself.

Put it this way: it was once true that the world is flat and the heavenly bodies go round it. Now it isn't; and seen from the 21st century the ancients were wrong. But they weren't wrong when they were alive.

And it used to be true that gravity was an instantaneous force. Now it's neither. Phlogiston once accounted for fire. No more. Light used to travel in the medium of the lumeniferous ether. Now it doesn't. The earth's crust used to be uniformly solid. Now it isn't.

Who knows what's true now ─ is the best opinion of our best brains ─ that won't be true in the future? The Copenhagen interpretation, perhaps, as Einstein wished?

Watch this space.
 
Ah yes the dreaded "mainstream". Why not bring in "sheeple" while you are about it? :D

Anyway it's not clear what you mean by "scientific materialism". You could mean either the methodological naturalism which is part and parcel of the scientific method but has no metaphysical connotations, or you could mean physicalism, the worldview - which is far from intrinsic to science - that the scientifically observable world is all there is.

We cant abserve other peoples dreams, but dreams are real. Also, out of body experiences and near death experiences and extra sensory perceptions are a phenomonon in the human race, but we cant directly observe those either. But theres enough of them to know there real.

Science needs to increase its scope of exploration.

Luckily there are scientists who do just that. They are not in power to change the mainstream, but, they still do science in these areas.
 

sayak83

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
You're referring to self-awareness?

Indeed, as far as I'm aware there does not exist at this stage a confirmed description of the mechanisms that generate self-awareness in functioning brains.

That doesn't mean no such description is possible. Any such description, when it's found, will need to be in scientific / materialist terms because otherwise it won't describe self-awareness, consciousness, qualia, whatever, in terms of reality. And if it doesn't do that, then it will be neither meaningful nor useful.
Let us assume we find a sophisticated information processing system floating around in deep space. What could possibly be the criteria by which we could ever say that "this set of physical processes occuring inside its system implies that there is an experiential component to what that system is doing, i.e. it is something like being this infomation processing system." What would ever connect the phenomena of "having an experience" with "observed set of physical process" for any general entity in this universe?
What we are doing for us is crude similarity analysis. Our brains have these "X processes" and they are correlated with these "Y experiences". But science works with universal laws that need to be predictive and verifiable. How would we go about building any such thing based on a specific crude correlation occuring within a very specific organic system in one specific little corner of the universe?
 

sayak83

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
I think that assuming that WE are the WORKING of a certain amount of neurons, ergo that our conssciousness, feelings, love, etc, are ultimately reducible to physical processes and information theory, is much more parsimonious than postulating weird metaphysical realities for which there is no evidence.

And simplifies things. It makes it obvious why physics (vodka, neurodegeneration, hammers on the head) can affect the I so easily. No need for funny theories like the brain being a radio capturing metaphysical waves or similar nonsense, lol.

Ciao

- viole
This holds for a camera too. Physical processes inside the camera impacts the photo it is taking. Does it mean that the camera is also experiencing the photo it is printing out?
 

Sunstone

De Diablo Del Fora
Premium Member
Well, I am not a professional philosopher, obviously, so I figured that “meta” meant something like “beyond” or something.

Ciao

- viole

You are correct, although the term -- outside of philosophy and in popular usage -- can mean almost anything.
 
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