Is science materialistic?

[qcrisp]

I am starting this thread for anyone interested in continuing a discussion about science that flared up briefly here:

http://www.ligotti.net/showthread.php?t=12645&page=4

The discussion begins with my comment here:

http://www.ligotti.net/showpost.php?p=151624&postcount=40

and continues for about two screens.

There are other questions related to the question heading this thread, such as: What is materialism? Is materialism bad? and so on.

I don't, myself, have much time at the moment to contribute. However, I'll start with some food for thought from the philosopher William G. Lycan's article (from the Australian Journal of Philosophy) 'Giving Dualism Its Due':

I have been a materialist about the mind for forty years, since first I considered the mind-body issue. In all that time I have seen exactly one argument for mind-body dualism that I thought even prima facie convincing. And like many other materialists, I have often quickly cited standard objections to dualism that are widely taken to be fatal, e.g. notoriously the dread Interaction Problem. My materialism has never wavered. Nor is it about to waver now; I cannot take dualism very seriously.

Being a philosopher, of course I would like to think that my stance is rational, held not just instinctively and scientistically and in the mainstream, but because the arguments do indeed favour materialism over dualism. But I do not think that, though I used to. My position may be rational, broadly speaking, but not because the arguments favour it: though the arguments for dualism do (indeed) fail, so do the arguments for materialism. And the standard objections to dualism are not very convincing; if one really manages to be a dualist in the first place, one should not be much impressed by them. My purpose in this paper is to hold my own feet to the fire and admit that I do not proportion my belief to the evidence.

I might post more source matter when I get time, if this thread appears to be of interest to people.

 

[qcrisp]

And another quote from Lycan's article:

Arguments for materialism are few. Tyler Burge and others have maintained that the naturalistic picture of the world is more like a political or religious ideology than like a position well-supported by evidence, and that materialism is an article of faith based on the worship of science. That is an overstatement. But it is true that the original 20th-century materialists felt no need to defend materialism itself. Ryle gave no such argument that I can recall; he only inveighed against the particularly Cartesian 'dogma of the Ghost in the Machine'.

There's a footnote from Lycan:

I believe my own faith in materialism is based on science-worship; for a justification of the latter attitude ... see Armstrong's 'Epistemological Foundations for a Materialist Theory of Mind'.

 

[gveranon]

Qcrisp, I think you might find this paper to be of great interest: "Zero-Person and the Psyche," by Graham Harman. http://dar.aucegypt.edu/bitstream/handle/10526/3384/Zeroperson.pdf?sequence=5

"We no longer need to defend the lonely stockade of the cogito against the materialist Golden Horde, since the materialists do not even get bodies right."

"Chalmers portrays himself as a former materialist who was finally forced to admit that consciousness must be irreducible to matter. Yet the most striking point is that even though Chalmers is no longer a materialist about consciousness, he remains a materialist about everything else. Now, the main problem with materialism was cited by Chalmers himself: it is a purely relationist model of the world. As Russell observed, scientific matter is defined only by its relational effects on other things, never in its own right. But since these effects are always measurable in mathematical terms, this makes materialism a form of idealism, not of realism."

And much, much more. It's a 30-page paper exploding with insights on every page.

 

[qcrisp]

Qcrisp, I think you might find this paper to be of great interest: "Zero-Person and the Psyche," by Graham Harman. http://dar.aucegypt.edu/bitstream/handle/10526/3384/Zeroperson.pdf?sequence=5

"We no longer need to defend the lonely stockade of the cogito against the materialist Golden Horde, since the materialists do not even get bodies right."

"Chalmers portrays himself as a former materialist who was finally forced to admit that consciousness must be irreducible to matter. Yet the most striking point is that even though Chalmers is no longer a materialist about consciousness, he remains a materialist about everything else. Now, the main problem with materialism was cited by Chalmers himself: it is a purely relationist model of the world. As Russell observed, scientific matter is defined only by its relational effects on other things, never in its own right. But since these effects are always measurable in mathematical terms, this makes materialism a form of idealism, not of realism."

And much, much more. It's a 30-page paper exploding with insights on every page.

Thank you. I hope to read the whole thing when I get a bit of time. On the first page there's a mention of policing:

"Unfortunately, materialism leaves the nature of relations between bodies in obscurity. In this sense it is less a metaphysics than a police action, offering a fairly bleak vision of the harmony that will ensue once the final obscurantist holdouts are crushed."

One way, of course, in which materialism leaves things in obscurity is the termination, always, in 'brute fact', despite the much-vaunted explanatory powers of materialism. I would like materialists to try changing 'brute fact' for 'just magic' and see what effect this has on the sentences they employ.

Harman's talk of policing also reminds me of something I wrote in my notebook on the 24th of February. I shall copy and paste:

On page 19 of Physicalism, Daniel Stoljar writes:

"... any Weltanschauung worth its salt is going to generate a series of placement problems. For a world picture with any content is going to place some constraints on what is in the world, and these constraints will render some claims about what is in the world initially implausible. From this point of view, philosophers emerge as those who police the world-view - the Weltanschauungpolizei, i.e., those who seek out sites of conflict and make those conflicts disappear."

But if police create order - generally considered a good thing, though not unquestionably so - they can also be corrupt, partisan and/or oppressive. The phrase "make those conflicts disappear" could easily be seen as a euphemism eliding the fact that one side or another is judged illicit and crushed 'with the full force of the law', whatever that might be. The police are not necessarily peacemakers in the sense of finding, always, win-win solutions.

Raphael Wolf describes philosophy as "the art of asking stupid questions". This seems quite a different vision of the philosopher's role.

When the logical positivists decreed that the only knowledge is scientific knowledge - meaning the physical sciences - and that metaphysical talk, therefore, rather than being right or wrong, not belonging to the domain of knowledge, was meaningless, they might well, as far as they were concerned, have been policing a conflict. They did it by saying that certain questions cannot be asked - are stupid.

I sometimes feel that I, too, am being policed into accepted philosophical language. One must be wary as to whether this is a true solution to conflicts in worldview or merely a means of crushing dissent by fiat.

 

[Sad Marsh Ghost]

Science is generally materialistic, which isn't inherently a problem. The scientific method is well applied to behavioural/cognitive/social sciences concerning the existence of things that exist beyond the material. I think the Arthur Machen-esque extreme total resistance to materialist scientific progress is kind of poorly argued and prejudicial, but a valuable lesson I took from his work is that it is important society keeps in mind that reality and its seemingly infinite processes and connections go beyond the reductive elements of the physical. I hope Frankenstein is still required reading as it was when I was a child.

 

[cannibal cop]

If science is materialistic, it is because science is concerned with phenomena we can observe, measure, and test the truth of in a somewhat objective fashion. The beauty of science is that it is constantly self-improving, both in its understanding and in its methods, and that it is and always has been traditionally averse to dogmatic thinking. It is fundamentally a process of ongoing discovery, not one of feigning absolute certainty.

This is not to say that all scientists across all disciplines always live up to those standards, but the best minds invariably have.

 

[qcrisp]

Science is generally materialistic, which isn't inherently a problem. The scientific method is well applied to behavioural/cognitive/social sciences concerning the existence of things that exist beyond the material. I think the Arthur Machen-esque extreme total resistance to materialist scientific progress is kind of poorly argued and prejudicial, but a valuable lesson I took from his work is that it is important society keeps in mind that reality and its seemingly infinite processes and connections go beyond the reductive elements of the physical. I hope Frankenstein is still required reading as it was when I was a child.

Yes, I suppose it might be good to distinguish another question: Is science necessarily materialistic? There would be questions that follow on from this, depending on the reply: If it's not necessarily materialistic, why is it generally materialistic? Or, if it is necessarily materialistic, what, if anything, does this say about its truth-seeking abilities?

In the material quoted above, Lycan paraphrases someone as saying, "materialism is an article of faith based on the worship of science" and says his own materialism is precisely of this kind. But should (worship of) science lead to materialism?

There is, of course, also the question of what materialism is, which turns out to be very complicated. 'Materialism' might even end up being an artefact of archaic language that is skewing our interpretation of what we actually see.

I've posted this elsewhere, but this is a fairly concise and, I think, clear, overview of some of the problems of materialism from a philosophical viewpoint:

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVOi8cvEl5Y[/ame]

The audio begins:

"It is often expected that a position be defined before it be rejected. In the case of physicalism, however, a reason for rejecting the position is the fact that it cannot be properly defined."

One might disagree with this, of course, but then there is the need to come up with an adequate definition.

The above quote is the introduction to the first of four reasons given, which I think are visible in the inset preview.

 

[Robin Davies]

How would a non-materialistic/non-physicalistic science work?

 

[Ibrahim]

How would a non-materialistic/non-physicalistic science work?

Well, it seems that part of the question here is: how sure can materialistic science be that it does not itself work at least partly on a non-materialistic/non-physicalistic level? Or, how does one reach out and touch knowledge.

 

[qcrisp]

How would a non-materialistic/non-physicalistic science work?

Good question.

Perhaps there needs to be a further distinction made here. Science might have to be methodologically physicalist, but need not assume a physicalist philosophy.

However, then we can look at the word 'science' again. In fact, we're blurring the distinction between the physical sciences and the other sciences. Unless we want to rename them, it should be no surprise that the physical sciences are methodologically physicalist. But other sciences exist. Does the fact they are not physicalist (if they are not) invalidate them?

 

[qcrisp]

And we need a definition of 'materialist/physicalist' as mentioned above. I'm still only on Chapter 4 in Stoljar's Physicalism and he's already rejected quite a few definitions. In fact, he warns early on that he will conclude there is no 'physicalism' he can think of (I don't want to paraphrase incorrectly, so I'll look this up later and get the actual quote) that both:


a) is true, and
b) deserves the name.

 

[gveranon]

How would a non-materialistic/non-physicalistic science work?

I don't think that critiquing the philosophical concepts of materialism and physicalism entails critiquing the methodologies or the findings of the sciences themselves. The methods of the sciences work, obviously. It's well-known that many of the historical originators of those methods weren't inclined to physicalist beliefs themselves; yet they managed to devise, develop, and use scientific methods for the sorts of investigations in which scientific methods are effective.

Someone (Nietzsche? Cioran? Valéry?) wrote an aphorism that went something like "Every method is a metaphysic." I can't find that aphorism now, but I know I read it somewhere. I think that statement, at least in its strongest form, is mistaken. And I suspect that's the hasty jump that many have made from science to what might be called naive materialism/physicalism. There are philosophical problems with materialism/physicalism, at least as it is currently conceived. There are philosophical problems with every other metaphysical position, too. Metaphysics is (apparently unavoidably) a speculative enterprise. It may be informed in some ways by science, but it is not the same thing as science. Basic philosophical questions are often not directly amenable to scientific research; should we just stop philosophizing about them?

Bertrand Russell (whom I don't think anyone would accuse of being ignorant of science) called himself a "neutral monist" on the mind-matter question, and in this he was philosophically influenced by Spinoza and Whitehead. Some of the most recent Speculative Realists (though not Harman) are working directly in the tradition of Whitehead. Speculative metaphysics might seem quite strange and even preposterous, but it has to be in order to grapple imaginatively with what we know of the strangeness of reality.

In linking to Harman's paper, I am certainly not taking an anti-science position, and I don't think the sciences themselves need to be reconceived or anything like that. (I'm wary of technology, though.) Any attempted reconception of science along philosophical lines would probably result in pseudoscientific nonsense (the sort of thing that really should be ruthlessly policed, lest we lose the knowledge of what science actually is). Future reconceptions of science will probably be driven by advances in the sciences themselves. Scientists are sometimes motivated by metaphysical questions, but insofar as they are scientists they know better than to undermine the nature of their enterprise with unscientific methods.

My interest in and esteem for science sets me apart from some others in this thread, I believe. To make my feelings about this known, I'll link to a couple of things I find very funny:

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/the_economic_argument.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_2xGIwQfik

 

[matt cardin]

Thanks for the thread, Quentin. Good idea, and good conversation thus far. As has already been said, I think some disambiguation of what we mean by "science" could be helpful. The standard use of the word refers to a field of knowledge for which the answer to the presiding question here is, I think, affirmative. When most people say things like "science says" or "according to science," or when terms and phrases like "scientific evidence" or "the findings of science" are bandied about, what's being referred to is clearly the results of the empirical scientific enterprise. And this kind of science is indeed materialistic, or at least operationally so. Like others have pointed out, it isn't necessarily philosophically so. And obviously things like quantum physics have led to serious questions about what's meant by "matter" anyway. But the whole thing with its basis in empiricism, experimentation, testing, replication, etc., is aimed in a certain highly specified direction that only allows or enables it to perceive certain things while other things elude it. It's set up in a specific way that effectively makes it a kind of net or filter that captures some things and lets others through. The mistake is to take the captured or filtered findings for the whole of reality and possibility.

This is pretty basic, I know, but it's where my thoughts always go when the issue at hand is raised. I was influenced early on by Huston Smith's helpful breakdown of how worldviews work. He describes the process of worldview formation as a four-stage or four-level phenomenon. First, a person or a people start with a basic set of motivations and goals. Second, these lead them to adopt certain epistemological methods and moves that deliver the necessary knowledge to enable them to achieve those motivations and goals. Third, the application of this epistemology to the realm of experience at large generates an ontology, a world view, what Robert Anton Wilson would call a reality tunnel, consisting only of the field of things that are seen and "caught" by this particular epistemological filter. Fourth, and in effect retrocausally, this worldview or reality tunnel generates or is accompanied by an anthropology, a kind of feedback view that locates the perceiving subject in this newly created cosmos, providing a position and identity within its schema. In the case of the modern materialistic science we're talking about, the motivation was power over nature, as comes out quite clearly in early writings about it by such major figures as Francis Bacon. (Side note: The alchemical motivations expressed by Newton may muddy the water somewhat.) The epistemology adopted was empiricism, which proved effective. The resulting ontology or worldview was and is naturalistic materialism. The accompanying anthropology is the view of humans as biological machines possessing alienated intellects and existing tragically, or perhaps meaninglessly, or perhaps both, in a blind and uncaring cosmos. It's at stages three and four that unwarranted assumptions and a lack of philosophical self-awareness come in to play, leading to the widespread philosophical error of scientism.

Btw, for reasons related to this line of thought, I agree with Neil Postman's damning indictment of the so-called social sciences, which pose as sciences in the sense being discussed here because they want to achieve its perceived legitimacy, but which in reality can never be any such thing, nor should they seek to be.

Separately: The Dawkins vs. Tyson clip is wonderful. Thanks for that, gveranon.

 

[Ibrahim]

Being the simple person that i am, i wonder if anyone better read in philosophy can tell me if thought & consciousness, in all variations of materialism, are simply brushed aside as ‘side- effects of physical activity or presence,’ without serious consideration of the quiddity of their ( non-) substance?
Any recommendations as to who delves into this cogently?

 

[qcrisp]

Hello Matt:

Those four stages are very helpful conceptually, I think. Unfortunately, I can't write at length and with much precision at the moment.

This is one of my favourite quotes, from Lafcadio Hearn, and written, apparently, in 1898:

But whatever belief we have, or have not, as regards religious creeds, one thing that modern science has done for us, is to prove beyond question that everything which we used to consider material and solid is essentially ghostly, as is any ghost. If we do not believe in old-fashioned stories and theories about ghosts, we are nevertheless obliged to recognise to-day that we are ghosts of ourselves—and utterly incomprehensible. The mystery of the universe is now weighing upon us, becoming heavier and heavier, more and more awful, as our knowledge expands, and it is especially a ghostly mystery.

I think the ghostliness that results from science can be divided into at least two kinds.

One is that matter is not what our original conceptions of matter told us it was. This can be subdivided into: a) the weirdness of 'stuff', of which we can, however many layers of onion we peel away, continue to ask, "What is it?" b) The fact that at our current layer we know it not to be solid.

The second kind is the way in which science has apparently left us with a world divided into primary and secondary properties, or into phenomena and noumena, or some version of this dichotomy. What we actually experience is precisely what 'science' calls secondary, and some are led to question whether the phenomenal world exists at all.

I would guess that, with this second form of ghostliness, in which we are the phenomenal ghosts that some philosophical side-effect of science has made us, there was some turning we made at the third stage that led to this great divorce - the divorce between what we primarily experience (and the very means - consciousness - by which we experience it) - and what we consider (if we are materialists) most real.

 

[qcrisp]

Being the simple person that i am, i wonder if anyone better read in philosophy can tell me if thought & consciousness, in all variations of materialism, are simply brushed aside as ‘side- effects of physical activity or presence,’ without serious consideration of the quiddity of their ( non-) substance?
Any recommendations as to who delves into this cogently?

The most popular stance, I believe, at present, is 'property dualism'. That is, mental experience exists, but is a property of physical reality. There are various permutations of this.

Other physicalist theories are identity theory, in which mental states are simply nothing over and above brain states (sometimes hard to distinguish this from property dualism, perhaps), and eliminativism, in which there simply aren't any mental states. Or they are 'illusions', or some such thing.

Not sure who to recommend at the moment as a starting point, but will have a think.

 

[qcrisp]

Being the simple person that i am, i wonder if anyone better read in philosophy can tell me if thought & consciousness, in all variations of materialism, are simply brushed aside as ‘side- effects of physical activity or presence,’ without serious consideration of the quiddity of their ( non-) substance?
Any recommendations as to who delves into this cogently?

I've been thinking about this, and I'm not sure I know of a modern (analytic) philosopher who gives conscious experience its due. This could quite easily be down to my own lack of knowledge, of course. The general attitude, though, seems to be one of embarrassment that such a thing as consciousness exists, and "How can we deal with subjective experience?" Even the rare dualists such as Chalmers seem to be reluctant. I could almost begin to feel that the fact that so many people who are supposedly engaging in 'the life of the mind' in academia, are so obviously embarrassed by the mere existence of the mind is an absolute scandal.

But once more it is past eleven and my brain is weary, and I must think again another day in order to make reading recommendations.

 

[qcrisp]

Okay, some pointers.

This was my entry point to philosophy of mind:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/873860113?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1

I think it's a good place to start - lucid, but also pretty solid. I didn't need (if I recall properly) to be armed with any jargon going in.

There are current philosophers who might be giving consciousness its due, but I haven't read (much of) their work yet. I posted a link on this thread to a brief paper (read aloud) by Peter Sjöstedt-H. I've read a little of his work online and find it readable and compelling. His position, or certainly the position he seems most interested in, is panpsychism. Galen Strawson is another current panpsychist, though I know him only by reputation.

In terms of a modern philosopher who really focuses on consciousness - on its quiddity, that is, rather than on 'the problem of consciousness', 'the headache for we physicalists', etc., if it's not the above two, I'm not sure who it would be. Chalmers might be another candidate, but I've only read a little of his work - not enough to comment.

Of course, this is an area I would like to focus on myself, but I am a very long way from being able to write something both scholarly and notable in this area. (Maybe someday. I am drafting tentative plans.)

Phenomenology might be something else to consider looking into. I've read a little around the area, though not the primary texts - Husserl's Logical Investigations looks forbidding, but I am hoping to climb that mountain in the near future.

I hope this is of some help.

 

[qcrisp]

Raymond Tallis also looks like he might be interesting - he's on my list.


https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/345338.Raymond_Tallis

 

[gveranon]

Beginning with his 1993 book Problems of Philosophy: Limits of Inquiry, Colin McGinn developed a position he calls "transcendental naturalism." His position is more widely known as mysterianism. Basically, he thinks that there is a naturalistic explanation for consciousness, but that the human mind, due to its own natural limitations, will never be able to figure it out. He discusses this further in The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in the Material World. Now, one could say that mysterianism simply shrugs away the problem of consciousness (claiming we'll never know) while retaining naturalistic assumptions, but I think it's noteworthy that McGinn refuses unsatisfactory explanations/deflations and mulls over the insoluble (?) difficulties of the problem at length.