No. 3342Anonymous 1st September 2013 Sunday 11:31 pm3342One man's bullshit is another man's...
Just as a poem plants emotions in us using words, certain philosophical or scientific ideas can achieve the same thing. This, naturally, changes the way we interact with such ideas. For example, reductionist or materialist ideas that make humans to be puppets or Cartesian automata send a chill down the spine, making you feel powerless or fearful. In a similar way achieving a deep understanding of a topic might make one feel powerful and confident.
Although this shouldn't be a problem to the continued dominance of experimental science based on observation and evidence, it does appear to be a problem for the individual who must then interact with the ideas generated from evidence. This is because, as suggested, the individual does not have a dispassionate response to scientific ideas – no matter how much of a scientist they consider themselves.
This poses a particular problem when thinking at the frontiers of science; those areas of science which are still misty and unclear. For it is within those misty areas that ones gut feelings, flashes of inspiration, beliefs and hunches come in to play. It is in those misty areas that people become most passionate and most dogmatic, because of the emotion stirred by the uncertainty.
Consider that the heliocentric universe that we all accept dispassionately caused a great deal of debate, to put it lightly, when the idea was contemporary. There is now a great deal of good psychological evidence showing our emotions and individual interactions with ideas change how we think about them. If it seems likely that emotion and passion runs highest in the areas of science where reason and a detached view are most needed, then perhaps this deserves some consideration.
>>3342 Does this mean that we are guided by emotions and dogmatic views rather than science? Could things that are proven to be something now be something completely different? Are there more ways than one to prove a point?
Interesting thread starter, and I'll contribute more fully in the morning when I'm a bit more awake, but a few observations:
- I've actually found that certain groups of people are highly inclined to embrace humans as puppets or themselves as Cartesian automata. In a book I recently read the author described himself speaking at a lecture for physics and science students, and he asserted that thinking of the brain as a 'hot, wet Turing machine' wasn't just uncontroversial but commonly accepted to the point where he felt no need to include it in the lecture. It's a description I disagree with outright because it belies the intricacies of the relationship between the brain and the body (and then the body and the universe).
I believe this is a direct consqeuence of the phenomenon you mention. As we can't help but have an emotional reaction to scientific observation and evidence, we also have an equally strong counter-reaction where we feel obligated to embrace dehumanising theories and directions for science in an effort to maintain some kind of empirical integrity. In my mind this effect is just as dangerous as tarnishing our integrity, because as you point out, our views going into a science can change the directions we choose to take the study, in what manner we uncover things, how we interpret and implement results. The fallacious over-compromise I've mentioned above has resulted in things like game theory entering politics and almost every area of our lives, making faulty assumptions of people as purely self-interested consumers, and in psychology where people seem to actively want to believe that the social behaviours of animals reflect our own, ignoring human and animal specificities alike.
To me the solution to this kind of problem is to develop a coherent philosophy of science, something where we can attempt to foresee the nature of our studies, to direct our own attitudes so that we maintain our integrity without devaluing life or betraying our ethics. A lot of work has been dedicated to this subject that I intend to read about.
- I also feel that the picture is a bit misleading. Science can be open-ended for the very reasons that you describe in your post. I would argue that all human activity is open-ended, both sciences and arts, and that the only way anyone could argue that science is deterministic is if they believed that we live in a closed universe that can be fully understood, which is a viewpoint contended with at many different levels of physics and philosophy.
>>3345 That's a great post and it makes me think of two camps which exist. One camp is based along the lines of the physicists you mentioned who have this counter reaction to emotion and the other camp is almost deliberately ignorant of scientific ideas and are very purposeful and proud about it.
You can see this quite nicely as having entered the mainstream from The Big Bang Theory. TBBT' allows people to feel clever and superior at the expense of "non geeks" but there are also countless examples of the same set-up the other way around (see "Beauty and the Geek" and others).
All of this could possibly be due to the fact that the emotional responses that people have from honestly engaging with scientific ideas just aren't compatible with how they want to live their lives. They might find them difficult, depressing or frankly all just a bit too real for people to accept when there are easier ways to exist that are less challenging.
The science/art dichotomy is propagated by people who understand neither science nor art.
Music isn't open-ended, it exists within a fairly strict set of constraints. Western ears only recognise 12 notes of the chromatic scale, from which all melodies and harmonies are constructed. The ability of a skilled jazz musician to improvise or to fake an unfamiliar tune depends upon a very rigorous understanding of how the human ear perceives harmony and melody. A saxophonist wailing his guts out isn't just playing what's in his heart, he's thinking in precise algorithmic terms about where the harmonic structure is leading the melody. If the pianist is comping a G7 chord, the soloist can be confident that the notes of the G Mixolydian mode will sound consonant. If the previous chord was Dm7 and the current chord is G7, the next chord is most likely to be Cmaj7, resolving a ii-V-I cadence. The pianist will be thinking that the Cmaj7 (C-E-G-B) could be substituted with an Am7 (A-C-E-G) or Em7 (E-G-B-C), he'll be picturing a dizzying array of reharmonisations and ornaments.
Musicians use a precise and rigorous structure to produce a creative product, while scientists use a creative process to produce something precise and rigorous. The roots of most research lies in simple curiosity, an observation about something in the world that seems interesting. Andre Geim fiddles about with a pencil and some sellotape and discovers graphene, Francis Crick takes LSD and realises that DNA has a double-helix structure. Turning these curious observations or moments of inspiration into useful research is a long and arduous slog, but the roots of most decent research is simple whimsy.
I'm going to bump a three year old thread because, fuck it, this is an interesting topic. And my views have been challenged and changed a bit since I made my post and I want to reopen the discussion.
>>3347 >The roots of most research lies in simple curiosity, an observation about something in the world that seems interesting.
This is a very beautiful and surprisingly accurate idea that I've heard reiterated in a couple of memorable ways by well known figures in science and philosophy. Jacob Bronowski, a mathematician who wrote and presented an ambitious BBC documentary about human discovery called The Ascent of Man, described it as 'asking an impertinent question and finding a pertinent answer'.
Noam Chomsky puts it a little more simply as 'allowing yourself to be puzzled'. Putting that in the context of the history of science, he gives the example of early-modern thinkers accepting that steam rises and objects fall because they are 'returning to their natural place' in a system of 'sympathies and antipathies'. Only later (he says), when people allowed themselves to ask questions about phenomena which seemed intuitively obvious, did we get to any meaningful understanding of the mechanics that cause them.
>>3342 >This poses a particular problem when thinking at the frontiers of science; those areas of science which are still misty and unclear. For it is within those misty areas that ones gut feelings, flashes of inspiration, beliefs and hunches come in to play. It is in those misty areas that people become most passionate and most dogmatic, because of the emotion stirred by the uncertainty.
If you're still around, or anyone who is interested in the above topic, would probably enjoy the work of Karl Popper. He wrote about the idea of falsifiability as a measure of scientific integrity. My explanation here might be a bit clumsy, but it is essentially that only falsifiable (i.e. 'testable') statements are scientific. Eventually all scientific theories are improved, supplanted or changed. This leads to the idea that all scientific knowledge is permanently under construction, and while it may be the best we have at the time, keeping an awareness of that uncertainty is extremely important in maintaining the open-ended nature of inquiry (and limiting the amount of time we spend believing lesser theories).
For Popper this had some pretty interesting connections with society as a whole, and he stressed a better society would take this attitude of uncertainty and openness and apply it to other areas, like political institutions and human relationships more generally.
>>3346 >All of this could possibly be due to the fact that the emotional responses that people have from honestly engaging with scientific ideas just aren't compatible with how they want to live their lives.
I posted >>3345 ages ago, and my views haven't actually changed all that much regarding how scientific ideas can be deliberately misrepresented to suit political goals. I honestly believe that right now there is a serious struggle going on within and across fields like psychology and neuroscience as a direct result of political pressure, leading us to extremely dangerous ideas about human behaviour that are not accurate, but are useful to those in power.
