What a lot of people label metaphysics is nonsense; but I blame the new agers for co-opting the term to talk about their crystals and channeled entities. In the popular sense of the word, metaphysics in a synonym for pseudo-science and even superstition. When I use the word metaphysics, I mean the branch of philosophy that deals with issues like ontology, causality, identity, teleology and the question of free will. Wikipedia has an informative article on it if you need clarification.
Rainbow_Troll
JoinedPosts by Rainbow_Troll
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147
Scientism - Nothing But a Childish Insult?
by cofty init is not uncommon for theists to accuse rational people on this forum of "scientism".. in my opinion it is nothing but a cheap shot from those who know they lack evidence for their beliefs.
if something like "scientism" actually does exist then i have never encountered it.. here is part of an exchange from another thread - i have brought it here as it was off-topic.... scientism = claim of scientific method being universal and the only valid method of knowledge.
followers of scientism always demand scientific evidence to anything.
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147
Scientism - Nothing But a Childish Insult?
by cofty init is not uncommon for theists to accuse rational people on this forum of "scientism".. in my opinion it is nothing but a cheap shot from those who know they lack evidence for their beliefs.
if something like "scientism" actually does exist then i have never encountered it.. here is part of an exchange from another thread - i have brought it here as it was off-topic.... scientism = claim of scientific method being universal and the only valid method of knowledge.
followers of scientism always demand scientific evidence to anything.
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Rainbow_Troll
I have read a lot of writers who are scientists, but I can't think of even one who's views could properly be considered 'scienticism'. Richard Dawkins comes as close as anyone, but even he admits that science can't answer every question. He has an enlightened disdain for Freud's psychological theories (which are empirically unprovable), but he doesn't reject the field of psychology or think it should be replaced with neurology.
I do know one person who's views might rightly be described as 'scientism'. But he isn't a scientist and in fact knows very little about science (though he is good at math). I think his 'scientism', though, boils down to a hatred for religion. He hates religion so much that I can't make an allusion from the Bible or quote a saying of the Buddha's without hearing his objection to such nonsense. He roundly rejects the existence of anything that cannot be seen, touched and measured precisely because this is the last refuge of religion now that science has so thoroughly refuted all of its claims about the origin of humans and cosmology.
Some lay people who don't understand science and have a chip on their shoulders when it comes to religion may very well be guilty of scientism, but I don't think they represent the mainstream in science. The late David Bohm wrote an extremely fascinating philosophical book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Roger Penrose and Douglass Hofstadter are at least two living scientists and writers who seem to be very comfortable with metaphysics. I'm certain there are plenty of others.
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147
Scientism - Nothing But a Childish Insult?
by cofty init is not uncommon for theists to accuse rational people on this forum of "scientism".. in my opinion it is nothing but a cheap shot from those who know they lack evidence for their beliefs.
if something like "scientism" actually does exist then i have never encountered it.. here is part of an exchange from another thread - i have brought it here as it was off-topic.... scientism = claim of scientific method being universal and the only valid method of knowledge.
followers of scientism always demand scientific evidence to anything.
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Rainbow_Troll
cofty
So basically just maths then?Math is the subject least prone to error, but logic, as a subset of math, can also help us with other questions that I don't think would be easily amenable to scientific experiments. Just off the top of my head:
What is matter? What would its properties be if it could exist in a higher spacial dimension? Or what if we removed a dimension? Is matter infinitely reducible to smaller and smaller components or are their fundamental particles that cannot be reduced any further? And how does matter relate to consciousness? Is consciousness an epiphenomena of matter arranged in a particular configuration or is it essentially independent of matter? Can consciousness survive the destruction of the body? Is there a God? If there is, what would such a being be like?
These questions are much harder to answer than any math problem. Most of them are actually interdependent on one another and so could not be answered in isolation; in fact, even a single wrong answer could through off the entire equation! But these questions are nonetheless amenable to a sustained exercise of logical deduction. I will not try to answer any of them here (that would require an entire book at least!) but I encourage anyone who is interested to read Aristotle's Logic, Plato's Dialogues, Plotinus' Enneads, René Descartes' Meditations on the First Philosophy, Baruch Spinoza's Ethica and Wilhelm Leibniz's Metaphysics and Monadology. I strongly recommend George MacDonald Ross' excellent survey of Leibniz's thought. His book, Leibniz, is long out of print, but can still be obtained via the interlibrary loan system. There is also a decent ebook on Leibniz available from Amazon by Mike Hockney: The Last Man Who Knew Everything. Hockney is a good enough writer and very brilliant, but in my opinion he wastes a lot of space criticizing anyone who disagrees with his views.
There is a logical progression in the works of these thinkers and those who are patient and willing to think through the questions they raise, using their own powers of deduction, will find the answers to these questions and many more besides. None of these philisophers got everything right. They all made mistakes. But philosophy is not dogmatic like religion. Properly, there should be no Platonists, Aristotelians or Nietzschians. Don't read them looking for answers. Read them so you'll know which questions to ask so you can arrive at your own answers!
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147
Scientism - Nothing But a Childish Insult?
by cofty init is not uncommon for theists to accuse rational people on this forum of "scientism".. in my opinion it is nothing but a cheap shot from those who know they lack evidence for their beliefs.
if something like "scientism" actually does exist then i have never encountered it.. here is part of an exchange from another thread - i have brought it here as it was off-topic.... scientism = claim of scientific method being universal and the only valid method of knowledge.
followers of scientism always demand scientific evidence to anything.
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Rainbow_Troll
cofty
Rainbow Troll - Thank you for your answer. I get the impression that the only example of things that cannot be known through empirical scientific evidence is pure mathematics. Is that correct?I used math because it is really the simplest example, but essentially I believe logic can address any question of metaphysics (which is mostly math, but also touches on things like theology and ethics) Logic can give us intuitions about physics as well (Einstein's thought experiments being a good example), but these intuitions should always be tested empirically when possible, since it is very easy to make logical errors when the subject is as complicated as what happens at light speed or how subatomic particles behave.
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147
Scientism - Nothing But a Childish Insult?
by cofty init is not uncommon for theists to accuse rational people on this forum of "scientism".. in my opinion it is nothing but a cheap shot from those who know they lack evidence for their beliefs.
if something like "scientism" actually does exist then i have never encountered it.. here is part of an exchange from another thread - i have brought it here as it was off-topic.... scientism = claim of scientific method being universal and the only valid method of knowledge.
followers of scientism always demand scientific evidence to anything.
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Rainbow_Troll
Rainbow Troll - Please give me a specific example of something that can be known without science.
There are many examples I could offer, but the arguments are complex and I fear they might lead to off topic detours, so instead of discussing Leibniz, I will use a simple example that anyone can understand and agree with: mathematics.
It would be a mistake to say that mathematics is exclusively a priori, since some very simple mathematical operations can be demonstrated empirically (add one apple to a basket of seven and you have eight apples); but excluding the simplest arithmetical operations, most mathematical truths are forever beyond empirical demonstration and must be arrived at deductively through reason alone. A common example that everyone deals with everyday are negative numbers: no one can demonstrate their ontological reality - you cannot remove apples from an empty basket - and yet negative numbers are invaluable in physics, which is a branch of science that is devoted to studying what most people would consider the real world. The roots of negative numbers, known as 'imaginary' to mathematicians and the fact that by performing operations on them with 'real' numbers gives us 'complex numbers' which scientists use every day to solve problem in the real world is yet another example of demonstrably real entities that can never be detected with any physical instrument for the simple reason that they are not physical entities. How could any scientist - no matter how brilliant - prove through experiment that some infinities are 'bigger' than others? Yet the German mathematician Georg Cantor proved it without any laboratory equipment, through simple deduction.
Now, some physicists (and even mathematicians) have argued that mathematics is only a human invention and that there are no 'laws' of physics, only generalizations drawn from many observations over time and translated into mathematical terms. In other words: the 'laws' of physics do not dictate the behavior of the real world, they only describe that behavior in terms that the human mind can comprehend. I admit that I see no way of really refuting this line of thought, but I nontheless see it as absurd. It is simply an unacceptable coincidence that an invention of the human mind should be able to not only describe physical phenomena so precisely, but also predict it with little to no error. Pythagoras was right: the world is composed of numbers and equations. What we know as physical reality is only our experience of a mathematical, metaphysical reality filtered and organized through our imperfect sense organs. The 'real world' is scentless, colorless and insubstantial; all those latter qualities being (to use Aristotle's terms) accidental, not essential. Though I think it is unlikely that our world is a computer simulation, I believe that The Matrix is a pretty good analogy for reality.
But it is not just that logic can prove things to which science has no access to, it can also disprove erroneous ideas which science could never refute; ideas than have plagued humankind for centuries, resulted in untold death and misery, and held us back for long enough. I think the worst of these errors is the monotheistic God concept. Even Richard Dawkins has admitted that he cannot prove that God does not exist. On a scale of belief with 10 representing implacable atheism and 1 perfect faith, he places himself at 9 or perhaps 9.9999... His theist opponents have wrongly and unfairly interpreted Dawkins humility on this point as a weakness and have used it to argue that theism offers certainties that atheism could never provide.
Well, I am not as humble as Dawkins. On Dawkin's scale of belief/unbelief, I place myself squarely at 10. I am absolutely certain that God, as he is understood by Christians and Muslims, does not exist; that he cannot exist. And I know this NOT through omniscience, but through simple logic. In a former post I gave a summary of my position which anyone is free to try and refute if they wish. But they will not because they cannot. There is no such thing as an omnipotent, omniscient creator of the universe. There can't be because the very qualities of this alleged being are incompatible with each other. He is a logical impossibility with no more probability of existing than a five sided triangle. Behold the power of logic!
Again, I don't want to dis science. I think that science, properly understood, is applied mathematics which is the mother of science, logic, and philosophy. But as the daughter of math, science should no her place and not defy her mother or ignore her sisters. But some recent scientific theories have proceeded to just that; a perfect example being Quantum Mechanics. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle rightly states that when a scientist uses an electron microscope to discover the position or velocity of a particle this very act of observation (the electron beam) causes the particle to deviate from the trajectory it would have taken had he not attempted to observe it. Therefore we cannot know, in principle, the simultaneous position and velocity of any given particle. Okay, I agree; but then scientists apply logical positivism to Heisenberg's principle and say that, since we cannot measure one without changing the other, the particle has no position/velocity until we measure it and it is in fact our act of measurement which "collapses the particle's eigenstate". Once I accept this non-sequitur, I open myself to all sorts of madness: parallel universes, cats that are simultaneously dead and alive, observer created reality.
It's ironic that scientists who use the scientific method, with its double blind experiments that are specifically designed to protect the subject(s) of the experiment from being affected by the observer, have now rejected the reality principle in favor of solipsism! Niels Bohr, one of founders of quantum physics, famously argued that there is no way to prove that the moon exists when we are not looking at it and, if one takes logical positivism seriously, he's right! But all this madness could easily be avoided if scientists embraced the logical (but empirically unprovable) assumption that particles DO have both a specific velocity and position even if we are incapable of measuring both simultaneously. This would not be a wild leap of faith, it would only be an acknowledgement of the reality principle upon which the very philosophy of science depends. Otherwise, if reality is not objective but generated by the observor, then the scientific method becomes useless.
I could give you other examples but I trust I have made my point. Strict empiricism is a dead end road, a cul de sac, that ends in madness. The only way that science can save itself is by retracing its path back to the point just before it accepted Wittgenstein's error, and then go from there.
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147
Scientism - Nothing But a Childish Insult?
by cofty init is not uncommon for theists to accuse rational people on this forum of "scientism".. in my opinion it is nothing but a cheap shot from those who know they lack evidence for their beliefs.
if something like "scientism" actually does exist then i have never encountered it.. here is part of an exchange from another thread - i have brought it here as it was off-topic.... scientism = claim of scientific method being universal and the only valid method of knowledge.
followers of scientism always demand scientific evidence to anything.
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Rainbow_Troll
Rainbow Troll - Science gets around the limitations of our subjective senses. That is kind of the whole point of science.
Yes, it tries and often succeeds brilliantly. My point is that it is nevertheless still bound by the limitations of the senses and it is demonstrably true that there are facts out there than cannot ever be arrived at through even the most refined sense organs or the most meticulous experiments. Even hardcore empiricist scientist Richard Dawkins has declined to answer certain questions presented to him because he admitted that he, as a scientist and not a philosopher, was not qualified to answer such questions.
Wow. I will be so excited for you when you get your Nobel Prize.
Wow. I give you a thoughtful reply to your question and the best you can come up with is a cheap shot at my intellect? For the record, I'm not claiming to be a genius. In fact, I later discovered that most of the conclusions I had arrived at were already reached over 300 years ago by a real genius: Wilhelm Leibniz. You know Leibniz? The guy who invented calculus, the binary system and was the to first conceive of and take practical steps toward creating an artificial intelligence? The fact that my little mind could reach the same conclusions as this genius demonstrates the power of logical thought to guide us toward the right answers.
I'm glad you take science seriously. That already gives you an advantage over most human beings. But by dismissing metaphysics, you are only handicapping yourself in the search for truth.
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"Abuse of free will" - an Oxymoron?
by doubtfull1799 inthe society loves to talk about how adam and eve abused their gift of free will.
doesn't free will mean the freedom to choose?
how can exercising that freedom to choose then be classed as abusing the gift?
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Rainbow_Troll
I once brought up this question to a JW. His answer was shocking: "Jehovah gave me free will so I could choose what to have for breakfast and what tie to wear to the meetings."
I swear it, I'm not joking! Right now I'm smiling about it, but back then my jaw just dropped open.
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147
Scientism - Nothing But a Childish Insult?
by cofty init is not uncommon for theists to accuse rational people on this forum of "scientism".. in my opinion it is nothing but a cheap shot from those who know they lack evidence for their beliefs.
if something like "scientism" actually does exist then i have never encountered it.. here is part of an exchange from another thread - i have brought it here as it was off-topic.... scientism = claim of scientific method being universal and the only valid method of knowledge.
followers of scientism always demand scientific evidence to anything.
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Rainbow_Troll
Cofty: I am interested in examples of ways to know things by means that are not available to the scientific method. I strongly suspect such examples exist but I can't think of any.
I am an atheist, but I do not believe the scientific method is our only means to knowledge or even the most reliable means. The scientific method is ultimately empirical - it relies on the testimony of the human senses. The problem is that the human sense organs were not designed to give us universal truth, they evolved to give us very limited information about our environment - just enough to avoid falling off a precipice or getting eaten by a sabor-toothed tiger! For example: the actual EM spectrum is enormous - encompassing everything from radio waves to gamma rays - but the portion of it that we can actually perceive as visual light and heat is almost infinitesimal. Furthermore, human senses are subject to all sorts of illusions and hallucinations. They just aren't that reliable beyond mundane day-to-day purposes.
Science is strongly aligned with the philosophy of logical positivism. Logical Positivism is a philosophical position originated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Vienna circle of philosophers. Briefly, LP states that that which cannot be perceived by the human senses or mechanical extensions of those senses (such as microscopes) is, for all practical purposes, nonexistent; in otherwords: absence of evidence is evidence of absence. This is frankly an absurd proposition! For thousands of years humans possessed no ability to perceive bacteria, but those bacteria nonetheless made their existence felt in the form of terrible diseases! I can understand Wittgenstein's motives: he was fighting religion and superstition; but his commitment to empiricism blinded him to its inherent limits.
So if the senses are unreliable, what can we depend upon? The answer to this question was discovered nearly 2500 years ago by the philosopher Socrates, whose thoughts were recorded in the books of Plato. Socrates realized that since the human senses were limited, unreliable and easily deceived, we must rely on something else that each of us has but few humans ever develop: logic. Logic can allow us to discover things about the universe that our sense organ never could. A good example of this is from the realm of mathematics. It is impossible for any sense organ to perceive something like negative or imaginary numbers, and yet simple reasoning from the axioms of mathematics tells us that these entities exist beyond any doubt. But logic is not limited to mathematical and metaphysical truth. Albert Einstein arrived at most of his conclusions on the nature of space, time and light not through the scientific method - at the time most of his theories would have been impossible to test - but purely through mathematical deduction and thought experiments that he carried out in his imagination! Einstein's theories have since been empirically verified.
When it comes to universal truths - Truth with a capital 'T' rather than the mundane facts of every day existence - logic has proven itself time and again to be the superior method. Truth arrived at empirically is always contingent, always vulnerable to the discovery of new facts which might contradict it (and in fact science is always changing its mind on things). Truth arrived at through logic can never be refuted so long as the logic is sound. Notice that, unlike science, mathematical theorems are never refuted. The body of mathematical discoveries has always grown, but nothing is ever discarded as outdated. Calculus did not replace trigonometry, it grew out of trig as a logical extension of it.
I don't mean to demean the scientific method as useless. Clearly it given us many fruitful discoveries. But as a rationalist, empiricism will always take the backseat when I'm trying to figure something out. This post is long enough already so I won't go into details, but I will say that the exercise of reason has allowed me to solve many longstanding metaphysical question - such as the nature of consciousness and its relationship to matter - that I don't believe scientists will ever be able to arrive at using their methods.
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Animals, Blood, Food, and JW Beliefs
by dubstepped ini'm just thinking aloud here.
i watched a show yesterday and they were talking about how the largest mammals of the sea (whales) fed on such small creatures (plankton) rather than eating some other large creatures.
anyway, it got me thinking about how as jws we thought that in paradise animals would all be herbivores, that they would no longer eat other animals.
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Rainbow_Troll
When I got my first job at McD's I realized how much blood is contained in just a quarter pounder, let alone a steak. If JWs are really serious about abstaining from blood, they should either do their own kosher butchering or become vegetarians.
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What will you be doing on the evening of the 11th ?
by Phizzy inmrs phizzy and myself will be eating out, sure in the knowledge we will not have jw's using the same restaurant.. i may have a cigar along with my brandy at the meal's end to celebrate my (our) freedom..
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Rainbow_Troll
I will be participating in a black mass. Unfortunately, it won't be the kind that has an orgy at end.