Reductive Materialism as Dogma

[newtype_alpha]

Diagnosis: materialism has become the default philosophical preference of explanation for many scientific thinkers, thus supplanting religious thought as the neccesary dogma.

Consider this scenario: in a quiet room with your eyes closed, visualize a memory of yourself sitting in your high school classroom; try to remember one occasion where someone scratched their nails or a ruler or chalk on the chalk board in order to create that agonizing screeching sound. :mad: What happens when you remember that sound? Just speaking for myself and others I know personally, sometimes just the MEOMORY has the same effect on the body as the sound itself. Sometimes it's even a very small effect, but it is a very real one nonetheless. So here we have these observations: the sound of nails on a chalkboard is unpleasant and causes certain reactions (cringing, gnashing of teeth, etc). The memory of this sound often causes the same reactions. This observation is repeatable in a number of situations and people.

In the example of this particular phenominon, just from the observations on hand, there are a number of possible explanations for the effect:
1) The cause is biological; the memory being recalled in the brain causes a reflexive neurological response that produces physical behavior (cringing, shivering etc). It is simply an effect of a certain nuerological event.
2) The cause is spiritual; the sound of nails on a chalk board creates a disruption in the spirit, and the stored memory of the sound can cause the same disruption as the actual experience.
3) The cause is occult/mythological; the sound reminds humans of the sound that the Demon of Razgriz made when he masscred the inhabitants of the Lost City of Atlantis according to the Book of Namco.
4) The cause is mystical; the sound of nails on a chalkboard is the sound of universal unpleasantness, and all beings, sentient or otherwise, recognize this unpleasantness when they experience it. Thus the memory of the sound is just the memory of this unpleasantness and it causes us to cringe.
5) The cause is superstitious; every time you scratch your nails on a chalk board you release a tiny invisible evil spirit called a Dust Banshe. This spirit latches on to your brain and stays with you for life, and from time to time, attacks your soul by reproducing the sound in your head.

All of these conclusions are purely speculative, each according to a certain philosphical preference. But which one of them follows logically from the observations at hand? The reductive materialist, the spiritualist, the occultist, the mystic, and the superstitious man each will conclude that THEIR belief of the explanation is the most logical choice, which follows directly from the observations at hand. Each will have his own philosphical preference that shapes this view, a common lense through which he generally views the world. But none of the above explanations follows neccesarily from the observations. Each one is speculative, according to what the observer already believes about the nature of the world and his role in it.

In solving questions like these (and this only as a theoretical example, obviously) where does one draw the line between objective science and philosophical proof-testing? There is a preference among some scientists to shed much of their objectivity for what they already expect to be the case. Imagine, for instance, a scientist or researcher seriously testing any of the five conclusions except number 1; to do so would errode his credibiltiy in the eyes of his peers, not to mention the skeptical crowd who may or may not be keeping track of current advances in scientific thought. In effect, a researcher who investigates any of the non-materilaist explanations has just committed scientific heresy, and depending on the magnitude of his violation, he may end up "excommunicated" from the mainstream of scientific thought, and whatever data he might uncover in the process is disfavored by the reader just by name alone.

This constitutes a scientific dogma, a doctrine of reductive materialism, where all "true" answers MUST reflect the view of a clockwork, mechanical world of pure causality. This is just as dangerous in many ways as the dogma that all answers MUST reflect the view of mankind being the pinnacle of creation for some trasncedent deity in the sky.

[Clutch]

Diagnosis: materialism has become the default philosophical preference of explanation for many scientific thinkers, thus supplanting religious thought as the neccesary dogma.

Since you give no reasoning at all in support of this claim, it's hard to know how to take it seriously. Indeed, it's hard even to understand it. What would it be for materialism to be a "philosophical preference of explanation"? What does that phrase mean? What scientists espouse this claim?

Just speaking for myself and others I know personally, sometimes just the MEOMORY has the same effect on the body as the sound itself.

Really? The memory makes your eardrum vibrate?

Or do you mean something very different: a memory of an event can have some physiological effects bearing some resemblance to the reaction to the event itself? Which is hardly surprising to anyone, however neurologically their preferred mode of explanation may be; it requires the thesis that the brain has effects on the body.

Is it your view that this thesis is controversial? Otherwise you are offering nothing to worry anyone, except perhaps a spiritualist.

In the example of this particular phenominon, just from the observations on hand, there are a number of possible explanations for the effect:
1) The cause is biological; the memory being recalled in the brain causes a reflexive neurological response that produces physical behavior (cringing, shivering etc). It is simply an effect of a certain nuerological event.
2) The cause is spiritual; the sound of nails on a chalk board creates a disruption in the spirit, and the stored memory of the sound can cause the same disruption as the actual experience.
3) The cause is occult/mythological; the sound reminds humans of the sound that the Demon of Razgriz made when he masscred the inhabitants of the Lost City of Atlantis according to the Book of Namco.
4) The cause is mystical; the sound of nails on a chalkboard is the sound of universal unpleasantness, and all beings, sentient or otherwise, recognize this unpleasantness when they experience it. Thus the memory of the sound is just the memory of this unpleasantness and it causes us to cringe.
5) The cause is superstitious; every time you scratch your nails on a chalk board you release a tiny invisible evil spirit called a Dust Banshe. This spirit latches on to your brain and stays with you for life, and from time to time, attacks your soul by reproducing the sound in your head.

All of these conclusions are purely speculative, each according to a certain philosphical preference.

Setting aside the dubious definitions and distinctions between some items on that list, your last remark is simply false. Option (1) is neither speculative nor based on philosophical preference; it is eminently testable, and very familiar to cognitive and perceptual psychologists. A great deal of evidence from brain imaging studies suggests precisely that remembering or imagining something perceptual (an image or sound) is a process that employs neural mechanisms responsible for perceiving inputs of that type. (There's some evidence of double-dissociation of the processes, too -- it's an ongoing lively debate.)

In short, this is old hat, and far from sitting around picking an explanation based on favored philosophical presupposition, the scientists in question are proposing competing models and looking for evidence that may support or weigh against them.

I strongly recommend you learn more about how this stuff is actually done before issuing blanket generalizations regarding the practices and presuppositions of perceptual psychologists -- still less scientists in general.

[PoodleLovinPessimist]

Diagnosis: materialism has become the default philosophical preference of explanation for many scientific thinkers, thus supplanting religious thought as the neccesary dogma.

You are confusing a metaphysical system with dogma (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=dogma). The metaphysical foundation of science is is not materialism, it is naturalism: Explananations are necessary only to explain the evidence of our senses.

Materialism in the sense that you give: "A clockwork, mechanical world of pure causality," is, in many cases, a very powerful explanatory paradigm, but it is hardly dogma. One need look only to Quantum Mechanics to see where this paradigm was discarded--fairly quickly--when it failed to provide an adequate explanatory framework.

All of these conclusions are purely speculative, each according to a certain philosphical preference. But which one of them follows logically from the observations at hand?

None of them follow logically. You are assuming naive or Humean Empiricism. The scientist, rather, invents a theory, and tries to see if the observations logically follow from the theory.

]But none of the above explanations follows neccesarily from the observations. Each one is speculative...

This is not a novel or controversial observation for the philosophically aware scientist.

...according to what the observer already believes about the nature of the world and his role in it.

A scientist might use a pre-existing explanatory framework to construct a specific explanation, but this is a matter of convenience.

Imagine, for instance, a scientist or researcher seriously testing any of the five conclusions except number 1; to do so would errode his credibiltiy in the eyes of his peers, not to mention the skeptical crowd who may or may not be keeping track of current advances in scientific thought.

Not because of some philosophical blinders, but because the alternative explanatory frameworks you describe have already been shown to either lack power or entail unnecessary complexity.

This tendency to impute deep close-mindedness to scientists is irritating, especially when applied to paradigms, such as mysticism, that have been demonstrated to be without explanatory value.

In effect, a researcher who investigates any of the non-materilaist explanations has just committed scientific heresy, and depending on the magnitude of his violation, he may end up "excommunicated" from the mainstream of scientific thought, and whatever data he might uncover in the process is disfavored by the reader just by name alone.

:rolleyes: You are projecting your own political attitudes without justification.

This constitutes a scientific dogma, a doctrine of reductive materialism, where all "true" answers MUST reflect the view of [simplisitic materialsm].

No, it constitutes using a powerful explanatory framework with demonstrated value.

This is just as dangerous in many ways as the dogma that all answers MUST reflect the view of mankind being the pinnacle of creation for some trasncedent deity in the sky.

How is it "dangerous" to use a paradigm that has shown its explanatory power and empirical adequacy rather than one that has shown a total lack of the same?

Stop projecting your own religious metaphors on scientists. Especially without citing evidence.

[chapka]

All of these conclusions are purely speculative, each according to a certain philosphical preference. But which one of them follows logically from the observations at hand? The reductive materialist, the spiritualist, the occultist, the mystic, and the superstitious man each will conclude that THEIR belief of the explanation is the most logical choice, which follows directly from the observations at hand. Each will have his own philosphical preference that shapes this view, a common lense through which he generally views the world. But none of the above explanations follows neccesarily from the observations. Each one is speculative, according to what the observer already believes about the nature of the world and his role in it.

Except that they're not "conclusions." They're hypotheses. What do you do with a hypothesis? You examine the evidence for and against it.

If a hypothesis is untestable and otherwise unfalsifiable, we tend not to pay much attention to it. Why? Because it's unlikely to affect us in any way. That is, unless we can tell whether or not the dust demons clinging to our brains exist, we're unlikely to be able to dislodge them or affect them in any direct way.

So we test the testable hypotheses. Your first hypothesis is an example of a testable, falsifiable hypothesis. We can watch the brain working, and see whether the brain's response to the primary stimulus resembles the response to an elicited memory of the same stimulus.

If you honestly think that each of the other hypotheses are equivalent, please suggest an equivalent test for each of them. If there is such a test, and it doesn't reveal such a source, then we can dismiss the hypothesis. (For example, I'd be surprised if animals without ears reacted to the sound of "universal unpleasantness".) If it's not testable, then why should we care about it? What good does it do us to know it?

[newtype_alpha]

Since you give no reasoning at all in support of this claim, it's hard to know how to take it seriously. Maybe you should go and read the rest of the post before you say something like "you give no reasoning to support this claim." :banghead:
Indeed, it's hard even to understand it. What would it be for materialism to be a "philosophical preference of explanation"? What does that phrase mean? What scientists espouse this claim?
Simple: reductive materialism is a philosophy that explains the nature of the universe as a purely material world where any and all observable events can be traced to a purely material cause. The implication follows (hence the "reductive" part) that everything we understand in any sense can be "reduced" to something simpler, quantified in ways that can be calculated and expressed objectively and mathematically.

Really? The memory makes your eardrum vibrate?

Or do you mean something very different: a memory of an event can have some physiological effects bearing some resemblance to the reaction to the event itself? Which is hardly surprising to anyone, however neurologically their preferred mode of explanation may be; it requires the thesis that the brain has effects on the body. Try it and see. Or, perhaps it would be easier for you if you actually performed the experiment. Get five people together and grind a rusty nail on a chalk board or something and observe their physical responses. Then come back to them an hour later and remind them of the rusty nail on the chalkboard and observe their responses to the recolection. We did this experiment in one of my science classes last year, and observed that some people showed the same effects when reminded of the memory as actually hearing it. I.E. reflex actions like shivering, cringing, covering ears, facial expressions, some observable emotional responses.

Is it your view that this thesis is controversial? Otherwise you are offering nothing to worry anyone, except perhaps a spiritualist. Maybe you should go back and read the post from the beginning. I think I made my "thesis" abundantly clear with the first line.

Setting aside the dubious definitions and distinctions between some items on that list, your last remark is simply false. Option (1) is neither speculative nor based on philosophical preference; it is eminently testable, and very familiar to cognitive and perceptual psychologists. A great deal of evidence from brain imaging studies suggests precisely that remembering or imagining something perceptual (an image or sound) is a process that employs neural mechanisms responsible for perceiving inputs of that type. (There's some evidence of double-dissociation of the processes, too -- it's an ongoing lively debate.) I think you're actually proving my point, and perfectly at that. Option 1 is eminently testable, and familiar to cognitive perceptual psychologists. It does NOT, however, follow from the OBSERVATIONS. The reason it doesn't follow is because, in this scenario, we have not yet tested this explanation as proof. So as far as it may or may not be testable, it is at this juncture on equal terms with the other 4 dubious explanations in terms of validity.

Also, you have demonstrated precisely what I mean by "philosphical prefernece." Option 1 may already be familiar to psycholoigsts. Option 2 is already familiar to spiritualists. Option 3 may already be familiar to occulitsts. Option 4 may already be familair to mystics. Option 5 may already be familiar to superstitious people. You have presumed, however, that only the psychologist has a valid explanation, even though you have not tested his explanation scientifically. This is a pressuposition.

In short, this is old hat, and far from sitting around picking an explanation based on favored philosophical presupposition, the scientists in question are proposing competing models and looking for evidence that may support or weigh against them.
Hence my point. The competing models they are looking at are all mostly if not entirely based on a philosphical position of reductive materialism. What would happen to a scientist who proposed a model from a different position? For instance, what would happen to a scientist who conducted an experiment trying to determine the existence of the Dust Banshe? He has proposed a model and looking for evidence that may support or weigh against him. His investigation would be scientifically valid, but would you or other members of the scientific community accept his findings if, for example, he actually found evidence suggesting the existence of the Dust Banshe?

I strongly recommend you learn more about how this stuff is actually done before issuing blanket generalizations regarding the practices and presuppositions of perceptual psychologists -- still less scientists in general.
I made only one "blanket statement,": that some scientists have a pressuposition that their observations will fullfill certain expectations, according to their preferred philosphy of the nature of the world, namely reductive materialism. I have not seen you demonstrate how this could be otherwise, although you have partially vallidated my case. :thumbs:

[newtype_alpha]

You are confusing a metaphysical system with dogma (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=dogma). The metaphysical foundation of science is is not materialism, it is naturalism: Explananations are necessary only to explain the evidence of our senses.
Fair enough :notworthy

Materialism in the sense that you give: "A clockwork, mechanical world of pure causality," is, in many cases, a very powerful explanatory paradigm, but it is hardly dogma. One need look only to Quantum Mechanics to see where this paradigm was discarded--fairly quickly--when it failed to provide an adequate explanatory framework. In a nutshell, that's the point I was making, it is the paradigm, and in some fields a pretty rigid one. Note, however, that I did not specify that materialism is the foundation of science, or that scientists adhere to it as a rule. Just that some scientists tend to approach the evidence with materialist (or naturalist, if you prefer) expectations. This causes them to tend to discard offhand some other explanations that might not neccesarily fit into the materialist paradigm.

In quantum physics, as far as I know it was not discarded "fairly quickly," but only after a preponderance of evidence forced a neccesary paradigm shift.

None of them follow logically. You are assuming naive or Humean Empiricism. The scientist, rather, invents a theory, and tries to see if the observations logically follow from the theory. Ideally, yes. But I've heard of (and known personally) more than a few researchers who, both formally and informally, make such a mistake. On the other hand, as I said before, most of the theories he would invent would probably somehow reflect his own expectations from a materialist or naturalist standpoint; the five options I gave here are five possible theories that an observer might draw from the observations and then attempt to test experimentally. Many scientists would discard Options 2-5 offhand as not even worth testing or attempting to test.

This is not a novel or controversial observation for the philosophically aware scientist. That's true. Then again, I'm not sure we should expect all scientists to be philosophically aware--or honest.

A scientist might use a pre-existing explanatory framework to construct a specific explanation, but this is a matter of convenience. Also true, but as I'm sure it has been stated elsewhere in this board in the context of a theistic discussion, that which is convenient is not always that which is true.

Not because of some philosophical blinders, but because the alternative explanatory frameworks you describe have already been shown to either lack power or entail unnecessary complexity.
Again, hence the tendency towards reductive materialism. Something that is "unnecesarrily complex" does not reduce easily to material, causative explanations. And in some situations the simpler explanation itself neccesitates increased complexity, as I believe the string theorists and supergravity theorists found that out the hard way.

This tendency to impute deep close-mindedness to scientists is irritating, especially when applied to paradigms, such as mysticism, that have been demonstrated to be without explanatory value.
Was not my intention to impute close-mindedness to scientists on the whole. However I do believe that many in the scientific community understand or at least expect their observations to reflect certain expectations about the world. Explanations that do not reflect those expectations may sometimes be disregarded without a fair test of validity. It also doesn't help that in some cases, scientists seeking to break the paradigm commit "scientific heresy," and risk alienating themselves from the intellectual community in the process.

A good example of this is some of the strife experienced by researchers investigating false memory syndrome. The subject is controversial (http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sch/beliefs/b-memory.htm) but the paradigm in many circles has been until recently that recovered memories are to be considred reliable until proven otherwise. This, coupled with a pre-concieved notion that most or many psychological disorders stem from some form of child abuse, have produced some very bizzare and in some cases damaging research.

:rolleyes: You are projecting your own political attitudes without justification.
And just what political attitudes would those be?

No, it constitutes using a powerful explanatory framework with demonstrated value.
Valuable or not, the framework acts as a kind of lense through which some investigators conduct their experiments. This can cause a partial loss of objectivity. It is much easier to make a mistake when you already have certain expectations about the end result.

How is it "dangerous" to use a paradigm that has shown its explanatory power and empirical adequacy rather than one that has shown a total lack of the same?
Only as dangerous as a partial loss of objectivity that may or may not taint the results of an investigation. As far as I recognize that no human can ever by completely objective, the danger is relatively small in most cases. However, in others, it can be quite problematic. I see the commonality of mood-altering drugs in American culture as solutions to various psychological or emotional disorders to be a possible example, which may or may not have some very negative results.

Stop projecting your own religious metaphors on scientists. Especially without citing evidence.
What makes you think I'm projecting my own religious metaphors on scientists? I'm not Catholic or Christian. If I gave you that impression, I apologize.

[newtype_alpha]

So we test the testable hypotheses. Your first hypothesis is an example of a testable, falsifiable hypothesis. We can watch the brain working, and see whether the brain's response to the primary stimulus resembles the response to an elicited memory of the same stimulus.

If you honestly think that each of the other hypotheses are equivalent, please suggest an equivalent test for each of them. If there is such a test, and it doesn't reveal such a source, then we can dismiss the hypothesis. (For example, I'd be surprised if animals without ears reacted to the sound of "universal unpleasantness".) If it's not testable, then why should we care about it? What good does it do us to know it?
To a degree, all of them are testable, and all of them are falsifiable. For instance, you can test the "universal unpleasantness" theory pretty easily; put different animals in a room, some with ears some without, and scratch a chalkboard. Guage their reactions to see if they react in similar ways, if at all.

The Dust Banshe theory is testable as well, and any number of experiments can be conducted to determine whether or not such events take place. Setups range from the logical to the completely bizzare, but the possibilities do exist. As two examples, have the room monitored on closed-circuit television cameras on infrared or other spectra, motion sensors, etc. On the opposite end of, you could try the chalk board experiment with test subjects wearing helmets of various minerals to see if any of them keeps the Dust Banshe away. Either one might yield results or might not, but in either case the results of the experiment would be fairly easy to measure.

The occult one, obviously, is not at all testable, but still remains as a hypothesis. It can fall into the category of "inconclusive" when you move into the testing phase, or you can disregard it offhand because it is inconsequential unless the theory somehow involves the Razgriz Demon actually returning next tuesday night to gobble up your kids (in that case, testing the hypothesis would take place next tuesday night :D ). Interestingly enough, plenty of scientific theories (http://www.heretical.com/wilson/rape.html) are equally unestable, however well they may fit the observations.

I believe the only reason the more material explanations are easier to test is mainly because of some of the prevailing movements that helped shape modern science (namely atheistic positivism) that stunted the pursuit of alternate, non-materialist explanations for things. Scientists never really bothered to find ways to test the immaterial, nor did they really have any means to do so, so they simply did not waste their time with it. Those who might have had a motivation to do so simply did not have access to the educational resources or the lab conditions to make the attempt. The rift between the scientific and mystical may be, in my opinion, merely a philosophical dispute.

[epepke]

Simple: reductive materialism is a philosophy that explains the nature of the universe as a purely material world where any and all observable events can be traced to a purely material cause.

That's circular. It defines materialism in terms of material. Despite my having worked for 13 years as a research scientist in a multidisciplinary program, I still don't know what the hell people mean when they use the term "material," except in the narrow technical sense of "materials science."

All of the human senses that I know of are, as far as I can tell, fundamentally based on light. Sight is obviously based on light, but the other senses (taste, sound, touch, hearing, kinesthesia, and a few more) seem to be fundamentally mediated by virtual photon exchange. Is light "material"? I don't know, but it's what we perceive. Or, rather, we make up a theoretical entity called "light" to describe this.

We make up other theoretical entites, like the electron and other things that we call "particles" but which are points (or collections of points) but with some odd properties that are sometimes wavelike. Is this "material"? I have no idea.

All in all, I think that notions of "material" in the broad sense pretty much went out with the 19th century.

[chapka]

To a degree, all of them are testable, and all of them are falsifiable.

Not in any meaningful sense.

The Dust Banshe theory is testable as well, and any number of experiments can be conducted to determine whether or not such events take place. Setups range from the logical to the completely bizzare, but the possibilities do exist. As two examples, have the room monitored on closed-circuit television cameras on infrared or other spectra, motion sensors, etc. On the opposite end of, you could try the chalk board experiment with test subjects wearing helmets of various minerals to see if any of them keeps the Dust Banshe away. Either one might yield results or might not, but in either case the results of the experiment would be fairly easy to measure.

But they'd be totally inconclusive and wouldn't prove anything.

Consider the first proposed test: looking for the dust banshees. If you can't see them on any given frequency, does that mean that they don't exist? Or are they just invisible? If you do see something on the infrared frequency, does that mean it's a dust banshee?

As for the second: if a brass helmet prevents the effect, does that prove that Dust Banshees are responsible? What part of the Dust Banshee theory predicts this? On the other hand, if the helmets don't block the reaction, does that mean that the Dust Banshees don't exist, or just that they can pass through metal?

The occult one, obviously, is not at all testable, but still remains as a hypothesis. It can fall into the category of "inconclusive" when you move into the testing phase, or you can disregard it offhand because it is inconsequential unless the theory somehow involves the Razgriz Demon actually returning next tuesday night to gobble up your kids (in that case, testing the hypothesis would take place next tuesday night :D ).

But all of your hypotheses are like this, except for the neurological one. If they're true, so what? If they're false, so what? Will praying to the demon stop us from hating that sound? Can we develop anti-Dust-Banshee technology to combat the effect? If so, you've just made them falsifiable. It's not that scientists don't do "distance healing" and "third-party prayer" studies--it's just that those studies report negative results. Then we're told that God doesn't act if scientists are watching--by definition making the hypothesis untestable (and therefore uninteresting) again.

I think the example might be one of the stumbling blocks here. Why not give a real-world example; somewhere where some people propose spiritual or mystical explanations for phenomena, and explain how they could be tested if scientists weren't determined to ignore them. As far as I know, many hypotheses that arise through folklore are tested scientifically, especially in the field of medicine; some succeed (aspirin, quinine, etc.), and some fail (homeopathy, Laetrile, etc.).

[newtype_alpha]

That's circular. It defines materialism in terms of material. Despite my having worked for 13 years as a research scientist in a multidisciplinary program, I still don't know what the hell people mean when they use the term "material," except in the narrow technical sense of "materials science."

All of the human senses that I know of are, as far as I can tell, fundamentally based on light. Sight is obviously based on light, but the other senses (taste, sound, touch, hearing, kinesthesia, and a few more) seem to be fundamentally mediated by virtual photon exchange. Is light "material"? I don't know, but it's what we perceive. Or, rather, we make up a theoretical entity called "light" to describe this.

We make up other theoretical entites, like the electron and other things that we call "particles" but which are points (or collections of points) but with some odd properties that are sometimes wavelike. Is this "material"? I have no idea.

All in all, I think that notions of "material" in the broad sense pretty much went out with the 19th century.
< consults a thesaurus > :banghead:

Material in the sense that the physical is all there is to the world. This has different implications in different fields; for example, in psychology (where this propbably comes up the most) it means that all mental states are ultimately synonymous with certain brain states. In biology it states that all biological conditions have a related, biological cause.

But you're right, this gets rather murky when you get into physics, where you have different forms of energy and interactions tereof that are hardly "material" and often poorly understood. In the past couple years it has seemed that a number of things (at least in particle physics) do not "reduce" nicely to something that can be easily quantified, although they can be measured in a sense.

[newtype_alpha]

But they'd be totally inconclusive and wouldn't prove anything.

Consider the first proposed test: looking for the dust banshees. If you can't see them on any given frequency, does that mean that they don't exist? Or are they just invisible? If you do see something on the infrared frequency, does that mean it's a dust banshee?
Such is the natre of a presupposition. The scientist testing the Dust Banshe theory would be attempting not only to ascertain their existence, but their nature. Technically he does not really know what to look for, so all he can do is report the observations of the experiment. If he sees something on any frequency, he reports, "saw object on such and such a frequency," and then, evaluating the data, may conclude that it is a Dust Banshe or that it is just a visual anomoly or sensor artifact. This, of course, would require some objective investigation, but whatever best fits the data would be his final conclusion. Repeating the experiment would give other scientists a way to validate his conclusions, and if they see the same object and also fail to find an alternate explanation, they might support his conclusions. If they see nothing or if the object is varified to be something else, the hypothesis is discounted.

And of course, if the first scientist sees nothing at all, he can report, "no evidence for Dust Banshe theory."

As for the second: if a brass helmet prevents the effect, does that prove that Dust Banshees are responsible? What part of the Dust Banshee theory predicts this? On the other hand, if the helmets don't block the reaction, does that mean that the Dust Banshees don't exist, or just that they can pass through metal? The second one assumes that the researcher presumes something about the nature of Dust Banshes; namely that they cannot pass through certain metals or that they may be comprised of something similar to electromagnetic waves (heh). If one of the helmets yields the desired result, he can state that his hypothesis does have some evidence to support it. If it doesn't, then further tests are needed; eventually (ideally, anyway) he would test every possible theory and either conclude the Dust Banshe thing as most likely true, discard it as most likely false, or find a better one that fits the facts (for instance, "Dust Banshes are primarily made up of sound waves") which would yield a practical solution for repelling them (ear muffs :D )

But all of your hypotheses are like this, except for the neurological one. If they're true, so what? If they're false, so what? Will praying to the demon stop us from hating that sound? Can we develop anti-Dust-Banshee technology to combat the effect? If so, you've just made them falsifiable. .
How would the neurological explanation be any better equipped at coming up with a solution to the "problem" as the other explanations? All five of them would probably lead to the same prescription, namely earmuffs. (Not really sure if that would work IRL... only one way to find out :mad: ).

It's not that scientists don't do "distance healing" and "third-party prayer" studies--it's just that those studies report negative results. Then we're told that God doesn't act if scientists are watching--by definition making the hypothesis untestable (and therefore uninteresting) again.

On occasion, some of these studies have turned up positive results (not often, but sometimes). The studies are repeated enough times to show a correlation under some conditions, but not all of the variables have been isolated yet (such as the overal probability over natural healing, suggestive/mental affect on healing, the exact nature and types of injuries and conditions that are most/least often healed "miraculously"). In general these are considered negative results, but the experiments do continue.

Unfortunately not everyone approaches these experiments with an open mind, and some are all too willing to dismiss early observations to the realm of "coincidence." Warranted or not, it's a risk of overlooking a possible explanation that might surprise both the scientists AND the prayer-groups.

I think the example might be one of the stumbling blocks here. Why not give a real-world example; somewhere where some people propose spiritual or mystical explanations for phenomena, and explain how they could be tested if scientists weren't determined to ignore them. As far as I know, many hypotheses that arise through folklore are tested scientifically, especially in the field of medicine; some succeed (aspirin, quinine, etc.), and some fail (homeopathy, Laetrile, etc.).
I'd have to do a little hunting for this one at a later time (on the school computer right now). I'll warn you in advance that many of the examples I can think of were those that were generally debunked offhand by a variety of scientists and only later tested and found to have a degree of truth (off the top of my head, the correlation between lunar eclipse and siesmic activity in geologically active areas).

[PoodleLovinPessimist]

In a nutshell, that's the point I was making, it is the paradigm, and in some fields a pretty rigid one.

How do you know it's rigid? How do you know that the rigidity is unjustified?

Just that some scientists tend to approach the evidence with materialist (or naturalist, if you prefer) expectations.

Let's use materialism. Materialism is a very powerful paradigm. It's been shown time and again to be empirically adequate. Why shouldn't they approach the evidence with this explanation? It almost always works.

This causes them to tend to discard offhand some other explanations that might not neccesarily fit into the materialist paradigm.

So what? Given the strength of the paradigm, it's the obvious choice to attempt to exhaust it before turning to an alternative.

In quantum physics, as far as I know it was not discarded "fairly quickly," but only after a preponderance of evidence forced a neccesary paradigm shift.

Sure. Because rigid causality was such an effective paradigm, physicists turned to it first. Once the preponderance of evidence showed that the paradigm was unsatisfactory, the way was paved for Planck, et al. to try a different paradigm. And Nobel prizes were handed out liberally to those who constructed this new paradigm.

The did so quickly (in one generation) compared to the paragons of dogmatism, religious organizations.

Ideally, yes. But I've heard of (and known personally) more than a few researchers who, both formally and informally, make such a mistake.

People make mistakes. You'll have to do more than point to some mistakes to show the sort of profound "dogmatic" bias you're alleging.

On the other hand, as I said before, most of the theories he would invent would probably somehow reflect his own expectations from a materialist or naturalist standpoint; the five options I gave here are five possible theories that an observer might draw from the observations and then attempt to test experimentally. Many scientists would discard Options 2-5 offhand as not even worth testing or attempting to test.

Sure, because we are nowhere near exhausting even classical (non-quantum) materialism in our theories of consciousness. When you hear hoofbeats, you think horses, not zebras.

We also have to distinguish between the metaphysical explanatory framework (which is itself not testable) with the specific mechanism proposed within that framework to explain some set of phenomena. The test, at the metaphysical level, is whether the framework lets us construct specific, testable mechanism. It's not at all clear how your explanatory frameworks 2-5 allow us to do this.

That's true. Then again, I'm not sure we should expect all scientists to be philosophically aware--or honest.

Well, they're usually not all that philosophically aware. I have no evidence, though, to support any conclusion of dishonesty.

Also true, but as I'm sure it has been stated elsewhere in this board in the context of a theistic discussion, that which is convenient is not always that which is true.

I'm not sure what this has to do with scientific paradigms.

Again, hence the tendency towards reductive materialism. Something that is "unnecesarrily complex" does not reduce easily to material, causative explanations. And in some situations the simpler explanation itself neccesitates increased complexity, as I believe the string theorists and supergravity theorists found that out the hard way.

A theory must first of all be empirically adequate: It must explain all the observations. As Einstein said, "A theory should be as simple as possible, and no simpler."

And again I'll say, reductive materialism with strict causality is a very powerful explanatory framework. It's worked for everything in the macroscopic world we have been able to apply it to. Favoring this framework doesn't seem at all objectionable.

Was not my intention to impute close-mindedness to scientists on the whole.

But then you say...

However I do believe that many in the scientific community understand or at least expect their observations to reflect certain expectations about the world. Explanations that do not reflect those expectations may sometimes be disregarded without a fair test of validity.

This seems to impute close-mindedness to scientists as a whole. And again, where is the evidence to support this opinion?

It also doesn't help that in some cases, scientists seeking to break the paradigm commit "scientific heresy," and risk alienating themselves from the intellectual community in the process.

Evidence. We need evidence. Remember, all scientific theories, especially those which change our fundamental views, are expected to survive very strong critical examination. Don't mistake that criticism for oppression. To successfully overturn a paradigm, you have to be both creative and rigorous. Then again, no one gets his name in the history books for adding another decimal point to the mass of the electron.

A good example of this is some of the strife experienced by researchers investigating false memory syndrome.

And the scientific community has, by critical examination, buried this poor science. What's your point?

And just what political attitudes would those be?

Viewing criticism as "oppression of 'heresy'", and viewing the preference for a useful paradigm to be close-mindedness.

Valuable or not, the framework acts as a kind of lense through which some investigators conduct their experiments. This can cause a partial loss of objectivity. It is much easier to make a mistake when you already have certain expectations about the end result.

You always have to view phenomena through a metaphysical explanatory framework. And you have to pick a framework before you examine the evidence; it is the light in which you examine the evidence and test your theories. This has been a known feature of science for decades. You can't do science without any framework at all; there is no such thing as "pure objectivity". So what? If the framework is poor, you'll be unable to construct theories with specific explanatory power. When that happens, you switch frameworks. That's what's happened with Quantum Mechanics, Plate Tectonics, Punctuated Equilibrium, Special and General Relativity, etc. Scientists switch frameworks all the time, when there is reason to do so.

However, in others, it can be quite problematic. I see the commonality of mood-altering drugs in American culture as solutions to various psychological or emotional disorders to be a possible example, which may or may not have some very negative results.

It may or may not. Is it "dangerous"? I don't think so. We have a model, the medical/chemical model of mood disorder. Either it will work or it won't. If it does, groovy. If it doesn't, we'll try something else.

What makes you think I'm projecting my own religious metaphors on scientists? I'm not Catholic or Christian. If I gave you that impression, I apologize.

"Dogmatism" and "heresy" are explicitly religious metaphors. You are claiming that science exhibits behaviors describable by these metaphors without offering evidence.

[Clutch]

Maybe you should go and read the rest of the post before you say something like "you give no reasoning to support this claim." :banghead:

Maybe you should actually produce an argument instead of this rationally empty posturing.

Where, exactly, did you demonstrate that materialism has, for any specific scientists, "supplant[ed] religious thought as the neccesary dogma", for instance? Simply quote the passage where you showed this. Thanks.

Simple: reductive materialism is a philosophy that explains the nature of the universe as a purely material world where any and all observable events can be traced to a purely material cause. The implication follows (hence the "reductive" part) that everything we understand in any sense can be "reduced" to something simpler, quantified in ways that can be calculated and expressed objectively and mathematically.

No such implication follows. Materialism is a metaphysical attitude; reductionism is an explanatory strategy. One can hold that all phenomena are materially constituted while rejecting any reduction of one domain of explanation to another. It's called "non-reductive materialism", and is one of the most discussed topics in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science over the past 40 years. Read Fodor's landmark paper "Special Sciences" (Synthese, Vol.28, 1974) for the most influential presentation of the view, and Kim's "Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction" (Philosophical and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 52, 1994) for one of the more influential replies.

Google is your friend. Learning about this stuff before pronouncing on it is surely a better idea.

Try it and see.

Why the silly evasion? It was a simple question: Are you claiming that the memory makes your eardrum vibrate? Yes or no?

As for the other physiological reactions, of course I did not deny them. Quite the opposite. Your classroom "experiment" is utterly familiar -- though you seem not to have realized this, it was performed as a pedagogical tool for something well-known, not as a proof of something hitherto unsuspected. The question, which you did not even attempt to answer, was: What do you think this shows?

I think you're actually proving my point, and perfectly at that. Option 1 is eminently testable, and familiar to cognitive perceptual psychologists. It does NOT, however, follow from the OBSERVATIONS. The reason it doesn't follow is because, in this scenario, we have not yet tested this explanation as proof.

No. The reason that (1) does not follow from the observations is that no ampliative theory follows from any number of observations. It's called "the underdetermination of theory by data". Probably nothing has been more comprehensively discussed in the past hundred years in the philosophy and methodology of science. Again: Google.

The underdetermination problem is emphatically not that "we have not yet tested this explanation as [sic] proof". No amount of testing will amount to proof in some way that will make the theory follow from the observations.

In short, you're rediscovering the most familiar observation about the relation between theory and evidence, and confusing it for some wholly unrelated fact about materialism.

Also, you have demonstrated precisely what I mean by "philosphical prefernece." Option 1 may already be familiar to psycholoigsts.

Then what you mean is utterly opaque. Psychologists would not adopt (1) as a matter of philosophical preference. They might altogether reject (1), whatever their philosophical preferences. Perhaps what you meant to give was not (1) specifically, but rather an allusion to any explanation pitched at the same level as (1), whatever that might mean. Maybe you mean that psychologists might approach the question of how memory has physiological effects by looking for causal explanations or statistical correlations. Who knows how this was supposed to be a well-formed set of options? But the connections to materialism, and the way in which any of this supports the claim that materialism is a new dogma and has supplanted religion, are simply unfathomable.

You have presumed, however, that only the psychologist has a valid explanation, even though you have not tested his explanation scientifically. This is a pressuposition.

What on earth might this mean? Perceptual mechanisms that mediate vision are activated by mental imagery tasks. This connection survives at least most filters for confounds. What, exactly, do you mean by "you have not tested [this] explanation scientifically"?

I made only one "blanket statement,": that some scientists have a pressuposition that their observations will fullfill certain expectations, according to their preferred philosphy of the nature of the world, namely reductive materialism.

Who? Please show that this is a scientifically operative commitment for some scientists (let's make it easy: three of them). Please explain what it means for "reductive materialism" to condition one's expectations; for example, what should a reductive materialist expect to happen in the memory case that others would not expect? Give some argument, any argument, that for your three chosen scientists, "reductive materialism" is a "presupposition", rather than an inductively warranted expectation. And please give some argument that these three scientists take "reductive materialism" as dogma, rather than as an in-principle-defeasible way of thinking.

Those are the things you're claiming, and so far you've argued not one whit for any of them.

[chapka]

Such is the natre of a presupposition. The scientist testing the Dust Banshe theory would be attempting not only to ascertain their existence, but their nature. Technically he does not really know what to look for, so all he can do is report the observations of the experiment.

But you've rescued the triviality of your "alternative" explanations by attaching them to testable propositions. For example, the idea that discomfort can be avoided with respect to certain sounds by wearing a helmet made of a particular metal. That has nothing to do with your "mystical" explanation. It's a natural phenomenon. If we were to find out that this was true, and you said, "well, obviously, it's because of dust banshees," then the dust banshees would remain untestable and unfalsifiable.

Like I said, the source of a hypothesis is not important. If you tell me that willow trees' bark gives relief from pain because the first willow tree was watered by the tears of Jesus, and someone else tells me that willow trees give relief from pain because God ordained that it did so--neither of those are relevant to the scientific, testable question: does willow-tree bark give relief from pain? And if so, through what mechanism? This isn't an anti-religious question, it's a non-religious question.

Or if you want to debate the mechanism, consider some alternative theories. One is that willow bark replenishes the flow of qi. The other is that it works by suppressing the production of prostoglandins and thromboxanes. Both of these have, in fact, been proposed as explanations for the painkilling effects of aspirin (which is the active ingredient in willow bark). Experimental data has shown that in fact the second theory's predictions are borne out by the experimental data, and a plausible mechanism by which this could happen was presented. As for the qi theory--well, since it doesn't make any predictions, and is totally untestable in any way, doesn't the prostoglandin explanation seem a bit more practical? Especially since it's led to the development of new NSAID painkillers that are more effective than aspirin and with fewer side effects?

I'm honestly not sure what you're proposing scientists should do. Should they pause, every once in a while, and say, "Of course, it's possible that things only fall down instead of up because Zod, Spirit of the Mountain, said they should in the Sacred Book of Dooboogooboo, but there'd be no way to tell, because he always masks his great works in the cloak of science to fool us"?

A testable hypothesis that makes testable predictions is a scientific theory, period, no matter whether it's a guess, an inference, or a statement of faith. A non-testable hypothesis is not science and is not appropriate. "Naturalistic" or "materialistic" has nothing to do with it--except that if your hypothesis involves something immaterial, undetectable, and with no predictable effects, it's unlikely to present a testable hypothesis.

[newtype_alpha]

How do you know it's rigid? How do you know that the rigidity is unjustified?
Try to keep in mind I'm not using the broad brush here. In some disciplines, notably psychology and some practices of sociology, there are certain taboos that are unoficially recognized as "things not to say if you want a research grant." In the 60s and 70s this manifested somewhat in the reluctance of many researchers to comment on the observed correlation between poverty and child abuse and the refusal of many, for strictly political reasons, to dive deeper into the subject with more detailed studies. These kinds of trends tend to be short lived, but during their time they're very difficult to go against and fade either by a research "underdog" who conducts that unpopular study nobody else wants to do.

Some of the more modern taboos pop up as well. I've seen some in the field of education who literally refuse to regard some studies that tend to indicate unintentional disciminitory behavior between students of different minorities/backgrounds/sexual preference. Often this has to do with politics, but in a few cases it definately has something to do with one's personal philosophy or worldview.

So what? Given the strength of the paradigm, it's the obvious choice to attempt to exhaust it before turning to an alternative.
You're appealing to the intellectual honesty of the researchers in question. Not everyone is comfortable with "exhausting" it and moving on to others, and some paradigms only appear strong due to lack of criticism or at the very least visibility of criticism.

Sure. Because rigid causality was such an effective paradigm, physicists turned to it first. Once the preponderance of evidence showed that the paradigm was unsatisfactory, the way was paved for Planck, et al. to try a different paradigm. And Nobel prizes were handed out liberally to those who constructed this new paradigm.

The did so quickly (in one generation) compared to the paragons of dogmatism, religious organizations.Most shifts in religious paradigm take place very suddenly, either by militant action or by intellectual revolutionaries. They're just very far spaced out and not very frequent, due to the tendency of organized religion to favor the "as-is" rule of government, namely that of a monarch or heirarchy of jurists.

But you would expect that; organized religion is about control. Science is about investigation and finding answers. I have a hard time understanding why science would even HAVE paradigm shifts of this nature.

People make mistakes. You'll have to do more than point to some mistakes to show the sort of profound "dogmatic" bias you're alleging.
In all fairness, on reflection this statement, while true of some scientists, is far MORE true of non-scientific figures of authority or influence, mainly philosiphers, educators, writers, some therapists, policymakers, people who must evaluate scientific or even non-scientific data to make decisions. Not al of them can be rightly called "scientists," although in a way the "dogma" would apply to them as well.

I'm not really alleging and kind of "profound dogmatic bias," just a tendency to overlook certain explanations on prejudice. Some (and I will emphasize once again, NOT ALL) scientists operate do harbor such a prejudice, and when I think about it so do alot of non-scientists in positions of authority who should probably know better.

Sure, because we are nowhere near exhausting even classical (non-quantum) materialism in our theories of consciousness. When you hear hoofbeats, you think horses, not zebras.
Unless you're in Africa :D

But keep in mind, the Christians haven't exhausted their little "goddidit" theology either, mainly because it is so self-sustaining that it can never really be exhausted. There's always a danger of supporting a certain framework from the basis of, "well it's always worked before," and thus interpreting or even ignoring some data to support a more comfortable conclusion.

We also have to distinguish between the metaphysical explanatory framework (which is itself not testable) with the specific mechanism proposed within that framework to explain some set of phenomena. The test, at the metaphysical level, is whether the framework lets us construct specific, testable mechanism. It's not at all clear how your explanatory frameworks 2-5 allow us to do this.
I wasn't providing a framework, I was providing alternate hypothesis. Does it indicate anything that you take for granted the fact that reductive materialism assumes the non-existence of things such as spirits, souls, demons, etc? Do not assume horses unless you are sure they are hoofbeats.

I'm not sure what this has to do with scientific paradigms.
The position used to support many theological positions is a logical fallacy of appealing to the most convenient explanation as true, without needing to support that explanation with anything but an even more convenient explanation. This can result in an endless string of speculation that leads nowhere and usually ends up with completely erroneous assumptions.

In some scientific paradigms, a theory may owe it's continued existence simply to the fact that it is convenient. Some of these theories (http://www.sntp.net/eugenics/eugenics_america.htm) are just downright ridiculous, but they fit the paradigms of what the researchers expected to be true, based on the framework they had already agreed on. Some of the more nonsensical aspects of Eugenics, for instance, have gone the way of the Dodo, but in their day were often thought of as pretty authoritative.

A theory must first of all be empirically adequate: It must explain all the observations. As Einstein said, "A theory should be as simple as possible, and no simpler."Good words from Einstein, but also remember that "goddidit" is the simplest theory known to human thought, simple to the point of being utterly meaningless. And despite all scientific data on the nature of the world and the universe, "goddidndoit" is, likewise, not a valid scientific theory.

And how can you evaluated when a theory has become too complicated and needs to be simplified? Christians use "goddidit" because it answers all their questions; incidentally, they don't really ask that many questions so their answer IS empirically adequate to them. Does a scientific theory become "empierically adequate" simply because the researcher has stopped asking questions?

And again I'll say, reductive materialism with strict causality is a very powerful explanatory framework. It's worked for everything in the macroscopic world we have been able to apply it to. Favoring this framework doesn't seem at all objectionable. I'll concede that strict causality is a very good framework. Reductive materialism and some of its implications are not.

This seems to impute close-mindedness to scientists as a whole. And again, where is the evidence to support this opinion?
I don't know what it seems to impute from your view, but it is not my intention to imply and kind of close-mindedness to scientists as a whole. Obviously there are a few bad apples, and obviously most are fairly open in most cases. Some, though, are selectively close-minded, almost to the point of misinterpreting people on purpose just to score a rhetorical point.

Not all scientists do, hence my use of the word "many" and "soime." Obviously, nobody's perfect. :huh:

Evidence. We need evidence. Remember, all scientific theories, especially those which change our fundamental views, are expected to survive very strong critical examination. Don't mistake that criticism for oppression. To successfully overturn a paradigm, you have to be both creative and rigorous. Then again, no one gets his name in the history books for adding another decimal point to the mass of the electron.
Again, you proceed from a false assumption. Critical examination is what preserves the integrity of scientific study. But there is a fine line (or perhaps not so fine) between re-checking or even criticising the theory of a fellow scientist and denying him and his collegues a grant or refusing to publish his findings, sending letters requesting them to stop their research, ridiculing them publically, or organizing social movements to deny or surpress their research. (As in the case of the researchers who first looked into the recovered memory thing, and also many of the psychologists who have come out in defense of the evolutionary/biological basis of sexual assault as opposed to some of the more popular psychiactric theories).

And the scientific community has, by critical examination, buried this poor science. What's your point?
I WISH they burried it. The battle is still going on unfortunately. And that, more than anything, is my point; even with alot of data and reasonable information on the subject, there are still some people who will not let the "repressed memory" thing die, simply because it supports some of their OTHER pet theories that they don't want to let go of. Some of them would probably argue, just as you have, that the framework on which repressed memory is based has yet to be exhausted.

Viewing criticism as "oppression of 'heresy'", and viewing the preference for a useful paradigm to be close-mindedness.
"If a scientific heresy is ignored or denounced by the general public, there is a chance it may be right. If a scientific heresy is emotionally supported by the general public, it is almost certainly wrong" -- Isaac Asimov

You always have to view phenomena through a metaphysical explanatory framework. And you have to pick a framework before you examine the evidence; it is the light in which you examine the evidence and test your theories. This has been a known feature of science for decades. You can't do science without any framework at all; there is no such thing as "pure objectivity". So what? If the framework is poor, you'll be unable to construct theories with specific explanatory power. When that happens, you switch frameworks. That's what's happened with Quantum Mechanics, Plate Tectonics, Punctuated Equilibrium, Special and General Relativity, etc. Scientists switch frameworks all the time, when there is reason to do so.
As I said before, in so far as no human can be 100% objective, this is usually a very small problem. If you're not in Africa, 99% of the time when you hear hoofbeats (and confirm that they are, in fact, hooftbeats) then it's usually horses. A loss of objectivity means making a statement more reaching than it should be or needs to be, as in "when you hear hoofbeats, no matter where you are, think horses not zebras."

It may or may not. Is it "dangerous"? I don't think so. We have a model, the medical/chemical model of mood disorder. Either it will work or it won't. If it does, groovy. If it doesn't, we'll try something else.
Actually I think the medical/chemical mood model works to some degree in some cases, but the tendency to rely on this framework for explanation (namely, pure material causative explanation as it relates to behavior) is guilty of a small army of logical fallacies. The fact is that usage of mood-altering drugs to solve such problems assumes that the source of the problem is primarily in the brain. Common sense, IMO, would dictate some external stimuli, past or present, influencing such effects, ONE of which may be the presence of certain chamical imballances. This seems, to me, a flaw of taking reductive materialism a little too far, where mental states are thought of as "just" brain states, and therefore mental states can be controlled by manipulating brain states with drugs and hormones of various types and dosages. This fails entirely to address the problems which might have caused those mental states in the first place, that any number of these mental states may have purely mental causes that cannot be reduced to a nuerological event that can be easily quantified and treated.

Behavior-altering drugs have had their successes, and to a great degree. But to quote Michael Crichton, "A society where the top-selling prescription drug is valium is a society with alot of skelletons in its closet."

"Dogmatism" and "heresy" are explicitly religious metaphors. You are claiming that science exhibits behaviors describable by these metaphors without offering evidence.
If another metaphor fits for the idea I'm trying to express, it would be good of you to name it. Until then, if it's good enough for Asimov, it's good enough for me. :D

[newtype_alpha]

Where, exactly, did you demonstrate that materialism has, for any specific scientists, "supplant[ed] religious thought as the neccesary dogma", for instance? Simply quote the passage where you showed this. Thanks.
Clutch, the ENTIRE POST was the demonstration. In case it went over your head, the point of the statement is that while scientific explanations about the world have largely supplanted religious/mythical explanations, I draw a parellel to the fact that the method of seeking these answers has also undertaken certain dogmatic attitudes, much like it's earlier religious counterpart. In many cases, "reductive materialism" appears to be this dogma.

No such implication follows. Materialism is a metaphysical attitude; reductionism is an explanatory strategy. One can hold that all phenomena are materially constituted while rejecting any reduction of one domain of explanation to another. It's called "non-reductive materialism", and is one of the most discussed topics in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science over the past 40 years. Read Fodor's landmark paper "Special Sciences" (Synthese, Vol.28, 1974) for the most influential presentation of the view, and Kim's "Multiple Realization and the Metaphysics of Reduction" (Philosophical and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 52, 1994) for one of the more influential replies.
In case you missed it, we're discussing reductive materialism, not reduction, not non-reductive materialism, mind-body dualism, or other philosophical concepts. If your case is that reductive materialism is not as common as other variations of materialism, I'd be happy to hear your argument for that.

Why the silly evasion? It was a simple question: Are you claiming that the memory makes your eardrum vibrate? Yes or no?
Why a silly question? I really have no idea, I've never looked ay my eardrums while in the process of remembering something. :rolleyes:

As for the other physiological reactions, of course I did not deny them. Quite the opposite. Your classroom "experiment" is utterly familiar -- though you seem not to have realized this, it was performed as a pedagogical tool for something well-known, not as a proof of something hitherto unsuspected. The question, which you did not even attempt to answer, was: What do you think this shows?

What makes you think it was designed to "show" anything? It's an example, clutch, to illustrate the point that I made and you obviously missed.

No. The reason that (1) does not follow from the observations is that no ampliative theory follows from any number of observations. It's called "the underdetermination of theory by data". Probably nothing has been more comprehensively discussed in the past hundred years in the philosophy and methodology of science. Again: Google.
So you before posting this, I should have miraculously known to google, "the undertermination of theory by data"? :confused: I'll keep that in mind

Anyway, all you've really done here is re-explain what I stated in my original post. Bravo :rolleyes:

The underdetermination problem is emphatically not that "we have not yet tested this explanation as [sic] proof". No amount of testing will amount to proof in some way that will make the theory follow from the observations.

In short, you're rediscovering the most familiar observation about the relation between theory and evidence, and confusing it for some wholly unrelated fact about materialism.
I didn't present this as a fact about materialism. It was a fact about pressuposition. And, once again, you're providing alot of useful information to strengthen my point. If no ammount or pfoof will make the theory follow from observations, then researchers who jump to conclusions without adequate testing would be comitting a logical fallacy, isn't that right? Hence the tendency to naturally conclude that Option 1 is most likely correct is, as you have just pointed out, illogical.

Then what you mean is utterly opaque. Psychologists would not adopt (1) as a matter of philosophical preference. They might altogether reject (1), whatever their philosophical preferences. Perhaps what you meant to give was not (1) specifically, but rather an allusion to any explanation pitched at the same level as (1), whatever that might mean.
Again, it is a hypothetical setup to illustrate a point. Are you misunderstanding this because you are taking this setup literally?


What on earth might this mean? Perceptual mechanisms that mediate vision are activated by mental imagery tasks. This connection survives at least most filters for confounds. What, exactly, do you mean by "you have not tested [this] explanation scientifically"?
I can't make it any more clear, Clutch. You make this statement as a theory, and presume it to be the most likely scenario even though you have not tested it yourself to confirm that this is the case. Therefore you have a presupposition, based on a reductive materialist philosophy, that the explanation you have just presented must be the correct one.

Who? Please show that this is a scientifically operative commitment for some scientists (let's make it easy: three of them). Please explain what it means for "reductive materialism" to condition one's expectations; for example, what should a reductive materialist expect to happen in the memory case that others would not expect? Give some argument, any argument, that for your three chosen scientists, "reductive materialism" is a "presupposition", rather than an inductively warranted expectation. And please give some argument that these three scientists take "reductive materialism" as dogma, rather than as an in-principle-defeasible way of thinking.

Using memory as an example, imagine three scientists with different philosophical backgrounds (I'll make it easy for you ;) ) one is a reductive materialist, one is a non-reductive materialist, one is a mind-body dualist (as far as these apply to the nature of the mind). Each of the three has their own theory about the nature of memory storage.

The first theorizes that all memory is stored in a system of cellular arrangement within the brain, and that the arrangement of the cells in particular patterns and connections to one another IS memory in its physical form. In other words, he can now open up a human brain and take a picture of what "my 10th birthday" looks like in its raw, material storage form, with all the electrical and chemical details included.

The second theorizes that memory is stored in a system of cellular arrangement within the brain, but that the arrangements themselves do not directly constitute memory although they can be related to it. In his csae, he can open up a human brain and track all of the nuerological activity taking place, with all electrical and chemical details included, but cannot in any meaningful way identify which patterns of nuerons are relevant to which memory, becuase the patterns only have meaning to the brain itself and can't really be quantified.

The mind-body dualist theorizes that memory is stored somehow appart from the brain, and that while brain activity were to suddenly cease, the mind would still have an existence seperate from the brain in the forms of certain, unknown energy patterns. Like the non-reductive materialist, he would be able to observe the workings of the brain as they relate to thoughts, though would be unable to identify those thoughts by observation alone. He, however, would concede that there is more going on here than simply what is observed.

When all three of them work to test their hypothesis (assuming they're not working together) all three of them will come to different conclusions. This occurs because they have different expectations of what the data will show them, and therefore intepret the data differently, even though they are all seeing pretty much the same thing. It is a degree of subjectivity, each according to his prefered intellectual framework. For each one, the reductionist, the non-reductionist, and the dualist, his own philosophical groundwork becomes a kind of mental dogma through which he may interpret his information. I say this is dogma because, as I think poodle said earlier, these metaphysical frameworks are themselves completely untestable and thus not likely to change very easily unless something very dramatic happens.

Those are the things you're claiming, and so far you've argued not one whit for any of them.
Forgive me if the arguments are flying over your head :huh:

[Schneibster]

Diagnosis: materialism has become the default philosophical preference of explanation for many scientific thinkers, thus supplanting religious thought as the neccesary dogma.Actually, this is incorrect. The default philosophical preference of most American and European scientific thinkers is naturalism. Naturalism is derived from materialism, but it is not equal to it.

Materialism expresses the view that all things that exist are reducible to matter and to interactions among material objects. Clearly, this worldview is seriously challenged by the emergence of chaos theory, and also by quantum mechanics. Further clouding this worldview are arguments concerning the reality of ideas, such as memetics. As a result of this, materialism qua materialism is not a credible philosophical stance.

Naturalism expresses the closely allied view that every objective phenomenon is explainable in terms of observable, measurable, reproducible features of reality, and that no phenomena exist that require explanations that are not accessible to scientific explanations. In other words, proposed "phenomena" that are not accessible to such explanations are not phenomena at all, because they are not real.

You have encountered a certain amount of negative commentary on your philosophical and/or political views; this has arisen in great part because a stance that attacks this type of thinking is generally associated with a worldview that proposes the reality of processes (i.e. phenomena) that have no accessible explanation. Such worldviews include religionism, mysticism, phenomenalism, idealism, or vitalism. The problem with such views, with the exception of phenomenalism, from the point of view of the naturalist, is that they need not explain anything; rather than go to the trouble to explain something, its explanation is simply made inaccessible to investigation. Basically, they boil down the answer to "why" to "because I told you so." The naturalist argues, "then why bother to explain anything?" and rejects these viewpoints as a result.

The argument against phenomenalism, which is the only viewpoint left besides rationalism, materialism, and naturalism when "because I told you so" is eliminated, is that it results in solipsism. If I accept that nothing is real, that it is all just based on the evidence of my senses which I cannot prove actually reached my mind based on real events in some world outside my mind, the naturalist argues, then I am faced not merely with "why bother to explain anything," but the far worse "why bother to do anything?"

In the face of these arguments, the naturalist adopts rationalism, which is the view that all processes are accessible to careful thought. S/he then adopts naturalism, which is the view that all processes that exist objectively are accessible to careful investigation; and proceeds to build as complete a view of these processes as is possible, to achieve an explanation of the material world. Finally, the naturalist concludes that noumena, in other words all subjective processes, while not accessible to physical investigation, are accessible to rationalism, and proceeds to build as complete a view of these processes also, to achieve an explanation of the immaterial world of thought.

Consideration of these facts may tend to alter your apparent stance that religionism, mysticism, idealism, vitalism, or phenomenalism are equivalent in some way to rationalism and naturalism; this is because of the futility of any independent thought or action under these other philosophies. Further, if we define "reality" as "that which all of us can see and agree physically exists," then every one of these other philosophies ultimately avoids explanation; rationalism and naturalism are the only philosophies that actually explain things rather than falling back on the authority of some individual who, no matter how upstanding, may be ultimately deluded.

In the example of this particular phenominon, This is not a phenomenon. The screeching is; but our reaction to it, while apparently the same based on our descriptions to one another, is actually a noumenon, that is, something that happens subjectively which we cannot be absolutely certain is the same for anyone else. This is proven by the fact that there are individuals who are not affected by this sound; I know, because I have met some.

just from the observations on hand, there are a number of possible explanations for the effect:
1) The cause is biological; the memory being recalled in the brain causes a reflexive neurological response that produces physical behavior (cringing, shivering etc). It is simply an effect of a certain nuerological event.
2) The cause is spiritual; the sound of nails on a chalk board creates a disruption in the spirit, and the stored memory of the sound can cause the same disruption as the actual experience.
3) The cause is occult/mythological; the sound reminds humans of the sound that the Demon of Razgriz made when he masscred the inhabitants of the Lost City of Atlantis according to the Book of Namco.
4) The cause is mystical; the sound of nails on a chalkboard is the sound of universal unpleasantness, and all beings, sentient or otherwise, recognize this unpleasantness when they experience it. Thus the memory of the sound is just the memory of this unpleasantness and it causes us to cringe.
5) The cause is superstitious; every time you scratch your nails on a chalk board you release a tiny invisible evil spirit called a Dust Banshe. This spirit latches on to your brain and stays with you for life, and from time to time, attacks your soul by reproducing the sound in your head.The problem here is twofold: first, some of these explanations are not proveable by any experimental, scientific enquiry. But that is not the most serious: the biggest problem is that none of them but the first is falsifiable. You have also left out a case: the cause is psychological. In other words, in some way that we do not understand, we are taught to react this way by those around us, or by a concatenation of psychological elements that most humans (remember those who are unaffected) absorb as they mature. Of these six explanations, only the biological and psychological are ultimately falsifiable. Here is why:

2. Spiritual: OK, give me the measurable characteristics of the "spirit" so that I can measure them before, during, and after the screeching, to see what changes and what remains the same. But, you say, the "spirit" is not of the "world of things," and thus cannot be measured! Oops, this is not a falsifiable hypothesis. Throw it on the junk heap.
3. Occult/mythological: OK, let's go back and listen to the sound of Razgriz. But, you say, no one survived in Atlantis/we cannot go back/the book of Namco was destroyed/lost long ago and only these scribblings survive! Oops, this is not a falsifiable hypothesis. Throw it on the junk heap. (I'm sure you can derive the "how do I know the ancient sage Gratzencatz was telling the truth/was not deluded when he wrote the Book of Namco" argument without any help from me.)
4. Mystical: OK, then let's listen to the "sound of universal unpleasantness" and compare it to the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, and then we'll know whether they are the same.
a. But, you say, the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard is the sound of universal unpleasantness! Oops, your argument is circular, which invalidates your hypothesis. Throw it on the junkheap.
b. But, you say, no one can hear the sound of universal unpleasantness! It is not a material thing, you cannot measure it! Oops, your hypothesis is not falsifiable. Throw it on the junkheap.
5. Superstitious/animistic: OK, then let's capture one of the dust demons and find out everything about them, including what they do to us that makes us feel that way. But, you say, the demons are undetectable! Oops, your hypothesis is not falsifiable. Throw it on the junk heap.

Thus we see that the naturalistic explanations are the only ones that survive this test of falsifiability. And if we believe that everything is susceptible to inquiry, then we must perforce reject any non-falsifiable hypothesis.

All of these conclusions are purely speculative, each according to a certain philosphical preference. But not all of them are falsifiable. We reject first all that are not provable, then all that are not falsifiable. Whatever remains, we consider against the evidence. This is the crucial step you left out.

But which one of them follows logically from the observations at hand? The reductive materialist, the spiritualist, the occultist, the mystic, and the superstitious man each will conclude that THEIR belief of the explanation is the most logical choice, which follows directly from the observations at hand. But only the "reductive materialist" will reject hypotheses that are not provable and not falsifiable.

Each will have his own philosphical preference that shapes this view, a common lense through which he generally views the world. But none of the above explanations follows neccesarily from the observations. But all of them except two (I am including the psychological) are either not provable, or not falsifiable.

Each one is speculative, according to what the observer already believes about the nature of the world and his role in it.Yes, but all but two are not provable or not falsifiable.

In solving questions like these (and this only as a theoretical example, obviously) where does one draw the line between objective science and philosophical proof-testing? After the point where one has rejected all explanations that are not provable or not falsifiable.

There is a preference among some scientists to shed much of their objectivity for what they already expect to be the case. No, there is a preference among all scientists to reject all explanations that are not provable or not falsifiable.

Imagine, for instance, a scientist or researcher seriously testing any of the five conclusions except number 1; to do so would errode his credibiltiy in the eyes of his peers, not to mention the skeptical crowd who may or may not be keeping track of current advances in scientific thought. In effect, a researcher who investigates any of the non-materilaist explanations has just committed scientific heresy, and depending on the magnitude of his violation, he may end up "excommunicated" from the mainstream of scientific thought, and whatever data he might uncover in the process is disfavored by the reader just by name alone. No, the researcher has abandoned science, which deals only with propositions that are provable or falsifiable, and is therefore not doing science.

This constitutes a scientific dogma, a doctrine of reductive materialism, where all "true" answers MUST reflect the view of a clockwork, mechanical world of pure causality. This is just as dangerous in many ways as the dogma that all answers MUST reflect the view of mankind being the pinnacle of creation for some trasncedent deity in the sky.You are correct: the dogma is that no proposition that is not probable or falsifiable is science.

Now, let's keep in mind that the lack of provability or falsifiability is a measure of whether everything boils down to some human authority, or the authority of objective phenomena. Personally, I will either look for myself or receive convincing evidence that others have looked and have used sufficient care to avoid errors, before I accept anything whatsoever as a fact. I don't believe that there is any human authority at all that supercedes this; and I also do not believe that there is any reality to anything that I cannot measure, directly or indirectly, or else personally experience (I accept the contents of my own mind as "real," because I am careful about how I reason).

So the fallacy in equating these other philosophical stances with the naturalistic, rationalistic worldview is that ultimately, the authority for naturalism and rationalism is the acceptance of the world as real, but the authority for all the others is some human or other. All humans are fallible, and subject to delusion; however, if I accept the evidence of my senses as real, and it agrees with what others tell me, then I can make a picture of reality without reference to any fallible authority.

[epepke]

< consults a thesaurus > :banghead:

Material in the sense that the physical is all there is to the world. This has different implications in different fields; for example, in psychology (where this propbably comes up the most) it means that all mental states are ultimately synonymous with certain brain states. In biology it states that all biological conditions have a related, biological cause.

But you're right, this gets rather murky when you get into physics, where you have different forms of energy and interactions tereof that are hardly "material" and often poorly understood. In the past couple years it has seemed that a number of things (at least in particle physics) do not "reduce" nicely to something that can be easily quantified, although they can be measured in a sense.

Exactly. Thank you for acknowledging that. Concepts such as "material" and "physical," in your thesaurus sense, only make sense to me in terms of some 1850 classical model of the world. I have known a lot of scientists (and eye were wun), and I haven't run across that. Some fields use classical approximations, but the people working in them are generally aware that they're classical approximations.

As for psychology, there has been some good science done in it, but it's little and far-between. I don't think we know enough about how the brain/mind work yet to consider it a science in general. It's a proto-science. Oddly enough, some of the most scientific experiments in psychology were done a decade ago. There's been a lot of good science in neurology since then, and maybe at some time in the future it will meet up with psychology. There's also been a lot of good work coming from the computational side. But we don't know, yet. And when it happens, I suspect that we'll consider psychology somewhat akin to alchemy.

As for biology, I think that you're misstating things. I did some work with trans-retinal, the chemical that senses light in the retina. Exploring this involved quantum chemistry, rather an esoteric field. But it's still biology, in some sense, because we have it in our biological eyes. In any event, I don't think it's fair to say that the condition has a related, biological cause. What happens is that a visible photon increases the probability that an electron will jump to a higher energy level, which increases the probability that trans-retinal will switch for a brief period of time into a different shape, which shape can be "felt" with receptors.

Quantum chemistry is interesting to me, because the vast majority of chemistry gets along just fine with a classical approximation, but still there are some thing that require getting down and dirty with the quantum stuff.

One of the problems is that scientists are not necessarily articulate. A scientist can be articulate, but it's an extra skill that has to be learned. Another problem is that philosophers of science often don't listen or insist on interpretations from back when the body of knowledge produced by science was a lot different from what it is now.

[newtype_alpha]

But you've rescued the triviality of your "alternative" explanations by attaching them to testable propositions. For example, the idea that discomfort can be avoided with respect to certain sounds by wearing a helmet made of a particular metal. That has nothing to do with your "mystical" explanation. It's a natural phenomenon. If we were to find out that this was true, and you said, "well, obviously, it's because of dust banshees," then the dust banshees would remain untestable and unfalsifiable.
In other words, you're presuming that a mystical theory must have purely mystical explanations, implications, solutions.

Do you mean to imply that something a "natural phenomion" is automatically completely unrelated to a "mystical phenominon?"

Like I said, the source of a hypothesis is not important. If you tell me that willow trees' bark gives relief from pain because the first willow tree was watered by the tears of Jesus, and someone else tells me that willow trees give relief from pain because God ordained that it did so--neither of those are relevant to the scientific, testable question: does willow-tree bark give relief from pain? And if so, through what mechanism? This isn't an anti-religious question, it's a non-religious question.
That is because mythological theories are untestable and irrelevant (unless, of course, the mytholgoy has some present day implication like "Jesus' tears will turn all orange trees into dolphins in exactly one hour"). The religious question would be WHY the bark of a willow tree provides pain relief, once it this has been demonstated to be the case. Depending on the religion you get different answers; the materialist one would have something to do with biochemistry, while the religious one would of course be some weird theological statement like "Jesus' tears were shed on the cross and have healing powers." The spiritual could be any number of things, as could the mystical. In cases like this, the mystical or spiritual might sometimes resmble the bioligical in terms of implication and even lead to the same conclusions (I.E. "the bark of willow trees has a certain enzyme that reduces pain" could be analogous to "there is a benevolent spirit in willow trees that relieve pain")

Or if you want to debate the mechanism, consider some alternative theories. One is that willow bark replenishes the flow of qi. The other is that it works by suppressing the production of prostoglandins and thromboxanes. Both of these have, in fact, been proposed as explanations for the painkilling effects of aspirin (which is the active ingredient in willow bark). Experimental data has shown that in fact the second theory's predictions are borne out by the experimental data, and a plausible mechanism by which this could happen was presented. As for the qi theory--well, since it doesn't make any predictions, and is totally untestable in any way, doesn't the prostoglandin explanation seem a bit more practical? Especially since it's led to the development of new NSAID painkillers that are more effective than aspirin and with fewer side effects?
Very true. But wouldn't the qi-theory be just as practical if someone used it to make an accurate prediction and eventually find entirely different types of pain killers? You can, of course, make the assumption that the theory is completely imrpactical since thus far it has yielded no positive results.... YET.

If later proponents of this theory were to provide data that may support it, or even if a completely different theory were presented (a scientologist states that aspirin supresses a certain type of thetan) what type of reception would he receive from the scientific community? By and large he would probably be ignored or denounced as a hack, even if his research began to yield positive results.

I'm honestly not sure what you're proposing scientists should do. Should they pause, every once in a while, and say, "Of course, it's possible that things only fall down instead of up because Zod, Spirit of the Mountain, said they should in the Sacred Book of Dooboogooboo, but there'd be no way to tell, because he always masks his great works in the cloak of science to fool us"?
I haven't yet prescribed any sort of "doaboutit" solution yet. In general I believe it would be healthy for scientific development if a few of them (not all, but a few) would from time to time step back away from the familiar and take a closer look at the things they commonly take for granted as false. Hence the comparison to "dogma," as it seems in a few cases almost a parellel to how fundies conduct themselves in selective dismissal of things they assume to be false without even a second look.

A testable hypothesis that makes testable predictions is a scientific theory, period, no matter whether it's a guess, an inference, or a statement of faith. A non-testable hypothesis is not science and is not appropriate. "Naturalistic" or "materialistic" has nothing to do with it--except that if your hypothesis involves something immaterial, undetectable, and with no predictable effects, it's unlikely to present a testable hypothesis.
This kinda goes to the root of the OP. Reductive materialism assumes that things that can be measured only by their effects are synymous with their effects. There are many things with very predictable effects, and can present many testable hypothesis, but cannot be measured in any real sense other than by how they interact with things that are well known and understood. If, for example, "mind" can be seen as an emergent property of the complexity of braina activity, then it cannot be easily reduced to a system of numbers and calculations, nor can it be fully quantified. If this is the case, a scientist with the tendency to favor reductionism would come up with slightly flawed data which reflects the activity of brain-states relative to mental states far less accurately than even he is willing to admit.

In a larger scale, it means a tendency to dismiss certain unexplained phenomina to a reductive-materialist-based hypothesis simply because the reduction makes it easier to test and therefore easier to provide simpler, more cut-and-dried observations. What he comes up with is a theory that is much neater and easier to understand, but not neccesarily accurate.

[PoodleLovinPessimist]

I believe the only reason the more material explanations are easier to test is mainly because of some of the prevailing movements that helped shape modern science (namely atheistic positivism) that stunted the pursuit of alternate, non-materialist explanations for things. Scientists never really bothered to find ways to test the immaterial, nor did they really have any means to do so, so they simply did not waste their time with it. Those who might have had a motivation to do so simply did not have access to the educational resources or the lab conditions to make the attempt. The rift between the scientific and mystical may be, in my opinion, merely a philosophical dispute.

I think you're wrong here. I think material explanations are the first place to look because even superficial materialism, that phenomena are explicable in terms of classical matter (protons, electrons and photons) and their arrangements have proven wildly successful. I tend to disagree with Schneibster, that chaos theory and memetics pose any problems at all to even superficial materialism. Quantum mechanics, of course, completely destroys superficial materialism as a fundamental physical theory, but for examining classical phenomena, it's still extremely powerful. It's still the case that there doesn't seem to be any need for talking about consciousness in quantum mechanical terms.

And even QM doesn't much affect metaphysical materialism; we just call the fundamental "material" of the universe the relativistic quantum fields instead of the protons and neutrons that emerge from that field, just as philosophers switched the material from Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, to elements, to atoms, and to subatomic particles. Indeed, part of philosophical materialism is a search for what really is the fundamental material.

To abandon materialism we would have to find some phenomenon that required, for an empirically adequate theory, the inclusion of some factor that was not, directly and indirectly, a manifestation of quantum fields or any other "substance". A phenomenon that, to construct an empirically adequate theory, required something like Plato's Ideal Forms. This state of affairs is certainly possible, but I see nothing in contemporary science where materialism is failing badly under real evidence. The only place we seem to be having trouble is in theories of consciousness and intelligence, but we are still just starting out, and we have no mathematics that yet can handle the enormous volume of purely physical information in even a very small brain, much less a human brain.

[newtype_alpha]

Perhaps one of the most useful posts I've ever seen at IIDF :D

Actually, this is incorrect. The default philosophical preference of most American and European scientific thinkers is naturalism. Naturalism is derived from materialism, but it is not equal to it.

Materialism expresses the view that all things that exist are reducible to matter and to interactions among material objects. Clearly, this worldview is seriously challenged by the emergence of chaos theory, and also by quantum mechanics. Further clouding this worldview are arguments concerning the reality of ideas, such as memetics. As a result of this, materialism qua materialism is not a credible philosophical stance.
I stand corrected.

I'm not as familiar with chaos theory as I am with quantum mechanics, but it could be just that I have a certain number of scientific disciplines in mind when speaking of reductionism. I lean towards naturalism myself, but only to the point of accepting that not everything known can be experienced and not everything experienced can be known.

...from the point of view of the naturalist, is that they need not explain anything; rather than go to the trouble to explain something, its explanation is simply made inaccessible to investigation. Basically, they boil down the answer to "why" to "because I told you so." The naturalist argues, "then why bother to explain anything?" and rejects these viewpoints as a result.
I can see how this point would be held by a naturalist, but I do not see that this is neccesarily implied in mysticism or vitalism. But I guess that's a point of veiw thing more than anything else.

Consideration of these facts may tend to alter your apparent stance that religionism, mysticism, idealism, vitalism, or phenomenalism are equivalent in some way to rationalism and naturalism; this is because of the futility of any independent thought or action under these other philosophies.
From the view or rationlism or naturalism, I can see how this can be the case. But again, I do not see where it follows automatically that mysticism, idealism or even vitalism concludes all explanations to "because I said so." I also don't see the futility of independent thought being implied either, especially in the case of vitalism.

rationalism and naturalism are the only philosophies that actually explain things rather than falling back on the authority of some individual who, no matter how upstanding, may be ultimately deluded. Once again, I don't see how the other philosophies (except for religionism) neccesarily "fall back on authority" in this way. Could you give some examples?

Of these six explanations, only the biological and psychological are ultimately falsifiable. Here is why:

2. Spiritual: OK, give me the measurable characteristics of the "spirit" so that I can measure them before, during, and after the screeching, to see what changes and what remains the same. But, you say, the "spirit" is not of the "world of things," and thus cannot be measured! Oops, this is not a falsifiable hypothesis. Throw it on the junk heap. I don't recal making the underlined stipulation.

Number 3, of course, can be easily tossed.

4. Mystical: OK, then let's listen to the "sound of universal unpleasantness" and compare it to the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, and then we'll know whether they are the same.
a. But, you say, the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard is the sound of universal unpleasantness! Oops, your argument is circular, which invalidates your hypothesis. Throw it on the junkheap. Actually, the validation would come in finding out if the sound is universal. If it isn't (in that some people are not affected by it) then the theory has been falsified.
b. But, you say, no one can hear the sound of universal unpleasantness! It is not a material thing, you cannot measure it! Oops, your hypothesis is not falsifiable. Throw it on the junkheap. I don't recal making the underlined stipulation.
5. Superstitious/animistic: OK, then let's capture one of the dust demons and find out everything about them, including what they do to us that makes us feel that way. But, you say, the demons are undetectable! Oops, your hypothesis is not falsifiable. Throw it on the junk heap. I don't recal making the underlined stipulation.

By the way, there's a REASON I avoided making those stipulations: I don't believe (though my knowledge is limited) that every scientific investigation into the existence or nature of a thing pressuposes characteristics of that thing that far in advance. If it can be known only by its effects, then only the effects are known. Whatever other properties it may have can observed by, as you put it, "capturing" the object in question and learning everything about it. Science itself has a number of these ghostly objects we know little about; dark matter/dark energy, for instance, or the causal mechanism for the creation of virtual particles. We can only speculate about them because they are known by their effects, but thus far we have no real explanation as to what the cause of those effects could be.

Likewise, there are a number of theories in physics that are, in their own way, unfalsifiable.

But not all of them are falsifiable. We reject first all that are not provable, then all that are not falsifiable. Whatever remains, we consider against the evidence. This is the crucial step you left out.
In the way they were stated, they are falsifiable. From a position of rigid esoterism (one might say "irrationlism) this might be the case, but that is not the position I am attempting to describe.

No, there is a preference among all scientists to reject all explanations that are not provable or not falsifiable.
And this, I have stated, is a possibly flawed position. Some explanations would be rejected on the basis that they are not provable or falsifiable simply from a false assumption by either the theorist or the scientist (for example, in the stipulations you added to the alternate theories and then claimed they were "not falsifiable") or by a lack of accurate information on the explanation itself. A question one might ask is, would a scientist re-examine the theory if it were presented to him in such a way as to be no longer, in his judgement, unprovable or unfalsifiable?

For that matter, how would a scientist who attempted to examine such theories be recieved by his collegues in the scientific community? My guess is, not well.

You are correct: the dogma is that no proposition that is not probable or falsifiable is science.
To be sure, and to borrow your words for the occasion, I was stating that the "dogma" is that no proposition that is not probable or falsifiable is worthy of scientific inquiry. That, as a scientific M.O., constitutes a kind of dogmatic thinking.

So the fallacy in equating these other philosophical stances with the naturalistic, rationalistic worldview is that ultimately, the authority for naturalism and rationalism is the acceptance of the world as real, but the authority for all the others is some human or other. All humans are fallible, and subject to delusion; however, if I accept the evidence of my senses as real, and it agrees with what others tell me, then I can make a picture of reality without reference to any fallible authority.
Again, the assumption that all other philosophies (ecxept religionism, which mostly does) appeals to some human authority first and foremost. I can't imagine anyone who would subscribe to a mystical/vitalistic view without some sort of personal experience or reason to do so, in which case the authority he is ultimately referring to is himself. Convincing others to agree would pretty much depend on whether or not they have had similar experiences which might correspond to the philosophical view.

And you would have the same problem convincing a mystic or vitalist to adopt a more rationist belief, since you have had different experiences than he and he from you. In the end, both of you make reference to a fallible authority, though not a singular entity; the authority of community consensus over what the group considers makes the most sense.

[newtype_alpha]

I think you're wrong here. I think material explanations are the first place to look because even superficial materialism, that phenomena are explicable in terms of classical matter (protons, electrons and photons) and their arrangements have proven wildly successful.
Perhaps. I tend to be on the fence on the matter most of the time. :huh:

The only place we seem to be having trouble is in theories of consciousness and intelligence, but we are still just starting out, and we have no mathematics that yet can handle the enormous volume of purely physical information in even a very small brain, much less a human brain.
I for one think that in the end, the materialistic "numerical" brain map, even if it were possible to create one in the future, would not in any way solidify the materialist position. Computer engineers can reproduce just about any sound by adding up the right combinations of sin/cosine waves, in some cases to the point of reproducing a very convincing human voice. But the difference between the artifice and the nature, and the debate between the two, still remains and will probably intensify when a similar feat is accomplished with thought patterns. Basically, the information expressed in a graphic representation of a waveform from--say--the 1812 Overture does not really give an accurate understanding of what the music sounds like. Converting the waveform into a digital image would be meaningless, as would any other medium of expression; the data means absolutely nothing unless it is expressed as MUSIC. The same would be invariably true of a numerical calculation of human thought patterns and brain activity. It cannot be reduced simply to a series of numbers and quantities, because the numbers themselves are meaningless. Even if you were to look at a plot of every value of every nueron in a brain over ten years of thinking, all that data would STILL be meaningless in absolutely every way except as understood within the context of an active brain.

So I lean a bit more towards naturalism in that I believe that most things can be understood rationally, but some things are irrational by nature and cannot be understood without a small (or perhaps large) irrational leap. Even in mathematics, the existence of irrational numbers suggests as much. :thumbs: So a purely rational worldview is an oversimplification and in some cases may yield some innacurate findings. imagine calculating the exact circumfrance of a circle and plugging in the value of Pi as "3.2"

[Clutch]

Clutch, the ENTIRE POST was the demonstration. In case it went over your head, the point of the statement is that while scientific explanations about the world have largely supplanted religious/mythical explanations, I draw a parellel to the fact that the method of seeking these answers has also undertaken certain dogmatic attitudes, much like it's earlier religious counterpart. In many cases, "reductive materialism" appears to be this dogma.

What fact? You've given no argument that materialism is properly called a dogma of anybody's. "In many cases"? Well, I asked you to name three and defend your assertions about them, in particular.

Your reply?

imagine three scientists with different philosophical backgrounds (I'll make it easy for you ;) )

But the Argument From I'm Making This Up is not a very compelling way of showing anything about actual scientists and their actual attitudes. Your imaginary scientists may have all sorts of things proved about them by your equally imaginary arguments, though -- I'll grant that.

one is a reductive materialist, one is a non-reductive materialist, one is a mind-body dualist (as far as these apply to the nature of the mind).

Huh? I guess you forgot what you'd just written:

In case you missed it, we're discussing reductive materialism, not reduction, not non-reductive materialism, mind-body dualism, or other philosophical concepts.

I never mentioned dualism; you seem to be arguing with yourself about that one. Maybe you should try keep track of your various claims, before popping off that others have misunderstood you, hm?

For instance, the reason non-reductive materialism is relevant to showing the poorly-argued nature of your claims is pretty obvious, if you've been reading what you've been writing. You wrote:

reductive materialism is a philosophy that explains the nature of the universe as a purely material world where any and all observable events can be traced to a purely material cause. The implication follows (hence the "reductive" part) that everything we understand in any sense can be "reduced" to something simpler, quantified in ways that can be calculated and expressed objectively and mathematically.

See that? You infer the reductionism from the materialism. The inference is palpably invalid, given non-reductive materialism.

That's how arguments work. You say things like 'hence', or 'therefore', and then, if the reasoning is sound and the premises are reasonable, you've given a good argument. If your reasoning is invalid, or if your premises are themselves largely made up, you haven't. (Invalid structure and unsupported premises is the brass ring!)

Now... once more, who are these scientists for whom it's a dogma? You've already dodged the "generalization" problem by claiming you're only talking about some scientists. So who are they? Can you name three and support your claims from data about their actual scientific practice?

The first [imaginary scientist] theorizes that all memory is stored in a system of cellular arrangement within the brain, and that the arrangement of the cells in particular patterns and connections to one another IS memory in its physical form. In other words, he can now open up a human brain and take a picture of what "my 10th birthday" looks like in its raw, material storage form, with all the electrical and chemical details included.

The second theorizes that memory is stored in a system of cellular arrangement within the brain, but that the arrangements themselves do not directly constitute memory although they can be related to it. In his csae, he can open up a human brain and track all of the nuerological activity taking place, with all electrical and chemical details included, but cannot in any meaningful way identify which patterns of nuerons are relevant to which memory, becuase the patterns only have meaning to the brain itself and can't really be quantified.

The mind-body dualist theorizes that memory is stored somehow appart from the brain, and that while brain activity were to suddenly cease, the mind would still have an existence seperate from the brain in the forms of certain, unknown energy patterns. Like the non-reductive materialist, he would be able to observe the workings of the brain as they relate to thoughts, though would be unable to identify those thoughts by observation alone. He, however, would concede that there is more going on here than simply what is observed.

When all three of them work to test their hypothesis (assuming they're not working together) all three of them will come to different conclusions.

Good, good. Now can you answer the question? You said that "reductive materialism" would lead to different expectations. I asked: How? What predictive difference should reductive materialism make, as opposed to dualism or non-reductive materialism?

Forgive me if the arguments are flying over your head :huh:

Better yet, I'll forgive you for what's actually happened. But I'd appreciate seeing arguments that apply to some scientific practice that really occurs. Beating the tar out of some caricature is pretty boring; doesn't it tip you off to something's being wrong, when you're so resistant to the idea of linking your claims up to actual people and their actual work?

[Clutch]

Materialism expresses the view that all things that exist are reducible to matter and to interactions among material objects.

This too seems to confuse materialism and reducibility. One can be a fully paid-up materialist, holding that all particulars are materially constituted, while yet holding that some particulars are emergent, complex, supervenient, or otherwise subject to proper explanation only in terms of some non-reductive discourse. Restricting oneself only to the descriptive or explanatory resources of the ultimate constituents of things would, on this sort of materialism, be to leave things out, namely, the objects individuated by the principles of non-reductive idiom.

You have encountered a certain amount of negative commentary on your philosophical and/or political views; this has arisen in great part because a stance that attacks this type of thinking is generally associated with a worldview that proposes the reality of processes (i.e. phenomena) that have no accessible explanation.

Why think this? I can't speak for other negative commentary, but my own is based solely on encountering a set of claims about science and scientists offered without anything really resembling an argument. I'd be every bit as negative about equally impoverished claims that scientists are wholly free of all dogmas.

[chapka]

In other words, you're presuming that a mystical theory must have purely mystical explanations, implications, solutions.

In fact, I've stated the opposite. That was the point of discussing aspirin and quinine, both of which started as "mystical" treatments that were evaluated, and confirmed, scientifically.

What I would say is that, if a phenomenon has no apparent observable (that is, naturalistic) explanation, then all non-observable explanations are equally likely, and therefore uninteresting.

For instance, if I leave my office, and when I come back, a picture has been knocked off of my wall, I can assess the probability of various "naturalistic" phenomena. How likely is it that it was knocked down by an earthquake? How hard would someone have to bang on the wall of the next office? Could the drywall or the nail have given way under the weight of the picture? I can figure out the probability of each of these, the forces required, and the evidence of what I'd see if each were true (other pictures knocked down by the earthquake, a broken nail, a dent in the other side of the wall, etc.)

Now consider telekenesis, alien attackers, a holy miracle, a malevolent ghost, or waves of crystal energy from my quartz watch. Unless I can think of some way of measuring one of these forces, or perceiving one of those entities, or somehow repeating the phenomenon, then each of those hypotheses is equally unfalsifiable, and therefore equally useless for my purposes. What would the point be of considering them? Saying "it might have been caused by a miracle" is the equivalent of saying, "I have no idea what caused it."

If you can observe or make predictions, then you move from the second category to the first. People do do experiments, all the time, to try to make this move. The prayer studies, studies of homeopathy, studies of traditional medicine, etc. Sometimes things do move. Leeches are currently being revisited, and there's a potential new antimalarial agent that's been developed based on traditional Chinese medical techniques.

Very true. But wouldn't the qi-theory be just as practical if someone used it to make an accurate prediction and eventually find entirely different types of pain killers? You can, of course, make the assumption that the theory is completely imrpactical since thus far it has yielded no positive results.... YET.

The problem is, qi is still in the first category. How do you make a reasonable prediction based on the behavior of energy that can't be detected in any meaningful way? Observation is required for science.<