http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/the-folly...

". . . . Hughes is an evolutionary biologist with wide-ranging interests, and I’ve really liked some of his papers."

. . . .

"The big problem with Hughes’s essay is that despite his claim that there are other ways of apprehending truth beyond science—ways that involve the three areas of ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology—he gives not a single example of a question that those disciplines have answered."

To give one ridiculous example, I had a graduate student in anthropology suggest to me that science needs to be democratized and taken away from the scientists and verified and decided upon by the common man. I asked by what method the common man could do such verification and make any such decisions, as the obvious answer to both is Science.

I do not think criticisms of this type are worth much, especially when they are written on a computer, posted on the internet, and then discussed on forums like this. In a dictum: "Science works, bitches."

The irony here is that your argument against the anthropologist is very similar to Hughes' argument against the institutional understanding of science.

The point he's making is that if we reject the institutional understanding and take science to have a special legitimacy because of some property of the scientific method (say, theories are falsifiable by empirical data), the arguments of scientists, and the citing of empirical data don't provide this special legitimacy when the method employed doesn't possess that property. Yet when Hawking does metaphysics, the reverence for science as an institution leads people to treat it as they treat science.

I don't know what sounds anti-science about having a problem with that. Being careful about what we call science is a defence against pseudoscience.

This simply is not true. If this sort of a priori judgement occurs, it occurs because Hawking is a famously intelligent and thoughtful person. Of course people take what he says seriously. However, he is also continually engaged in debates with other scientists, often publicly, and is in no way walled off from questioning by either the institution of science or his own fame.

Additionally, I have heard the exact opposite of the sentiment you stated claimed. His biographer, Kitty Ferguson, ludicrously criticized Hawking's atheism as him going beyond his field. As if because one is not a theologian, one cannot discuss religion. What tripe.

You might think that to be the case but there is no evidence for it being so.

Hawking's pontificating on metaphysics are of no more interest to me than Linus Torvald's on laptop screen resolutions or Richard Dawkin's theoretical thoughts on cosmology.

Of course there is no such implication, nor did I make this claim. But it is absolutely true that certain people are simply better at reasoning than other people. This may be because of biological traits, educational difference, difference of habit, etc., but it is certainly true. Any experience with any human will reveal this to you, I think.

> Hawking's pontificating on metaphysics are of no more interest to me than Linus Torvald's on laptop screen resolutions or Richard Dawkin's theoretical thoughts on cosmology.

I am not at all clear why you would say this. In fact, I think you are committing an argument from authority in the reverse. You refuse to listen to this guys because you assume that they are not authorities. That's just bogus and I am sure you know that. Instead, you should listen to Hawking discuss metaphysics and decide if he is worth listening to. You would, I think, do exactly that if it were philosopher speaking.

Why should I listen to Hawking discuss metaphysics? I only have limited time, and I'm entirely unconvinced that would be a good use of it. It's not that I'm refusing, merely that I have no inclination to because I don't have any expectation of particular insight.

-- The famous "reverse" Ad-Hominem attack? WAT

TLDR: Famously intelligent and thoughful people are frequently full of shit, evil, or amoral. Same rules apply. [1]

_________

[1] Its worth noting [a] ad-hominem is not a per-se fallacy; And [b] its useful to questions motives. But since many serial killers, terrorists, and supporters of the hollocaust could be considered "famously intelligent and thoughtful people", it goes without saying that arguments should be evaluated on the merits.

== Fixed that for ya.

. . . Carry On.

The kind of abstraction that works is greatly influenced by its surrounding context. In more complex issues (say in law), appeal to common sense is sometimes more preferable than using the most fashionable 'scientific theory'. You don't like your spouse? How about teaching her evolutionary biology/psychology?

Dogmatism breeds the act of taking these out of context. Some parts of math works in their internal framework(i.e. math), but taking it out of context is at best, dumb, and at worst, harmful. Having theorems giving infinite-length messages yield certain events of probability one makes all 'realistic' outcomes probability zero. Same for theorems too sensitive to perturbation in axioms that removing a single point turns things upside down.

We don't need 'institutional science', or dogma, or 'mathematics strictly contained in universities', all we need is science, is mathematics, is reason, and understanding their application context.

Such debate often occurs with confusing science with 'opinions of the majority of scientists in academia of what's right'. No, science is not the latter.

[TL;DR] Science and math are useful in a very specified context, and as such is a framework of thinking. Those who take some of their context-dependent results universally and urge everyone to accept it is dogmatic, not scientific.

To rephrase this, science is the only thing we know. Show me something that's not science that we know. Of course, you can't. You've given yourself the answer before you begin to ask the question.

Effective science and humility have to go hand-in-hand. Otherwise you're just creating a new religion with the rubric "science" stuck on it.

"Science works, bitches" -- to answer particular types of questions which have certain properties. Questions about ethics (that is, what one "should" do) can be informed by science, but there is no such thing as a falsifiable ethical framework; an ethical framework must by its nature involve assumptions which are not determined by science.

Thus, an "answer" or "truth" within ethics is a different type of thing than an "answer" or "truth" within, say, chemistry. Coyne glosses over this by assuming the only type of "answer" or "truth" that matters is the type that comes from science or can be verified by science. This is not an isolated misstatement; he has previously said that "Only science has the ability to answer questions" [0]. Rather amusingly, this is a philosophical and non-scientific assumption.

This is why Coyne's response is essentially useless. Science is an awesome tool, but there are questions it can only address within a framework dependent on non-scientific assumptions.

[0] http://vimeo.com/31505142 around the 34:20 mark

Er, isn't that the entire point? Coyne didn't set this trap; Hughes did by contrasting science with ???, where ??? is some as-yet undefined way of apprehending truth. It's incumbent on Hughes to solve that dilemma, not Coyne. And, of course, Hughes doesn't. At all.

But since some theoretical physicists can't tell you why the universe exists and evolutionary psychologists still publish papers, the periodic table of elements, Maxwell's equations, and the theory of evolution are all part of a religion. QED!

I'm speaking broadly here, but qualia are not scientific. My internal experiences aren't scientific. So I'd say that, on one sense, at least half of what I experience is not scientific.

No one actually knows what is going on inside of my head at this moment. Yet I know my own thoughts, emotions and experiences. Science may know that I can experience love, for example. But it can't tell me that I am experiencing love at this moment, as I write this comment, or who I fall in love with.

The question I was responding to was: "Show me something that's not science that we know". My response is that there are lots of things that we, as people, actually know but can't study scientifically.

For example, if I'm hungry and eat a good meal the changes in my brain chemistry that induce the sense of well being that follows are well understood.

That doesn't tell me anything at all about the actual subjective experience of feeling pleasure though. That is something distinct.

Let me make an argument by analogy.

You are saying that understanding the chip architecture and the instruction set of a computer does not allow you to understand what it is like for that chip to run a given program. Is that a fair analogy? Can you improve it?

If this is a fair analogy, then I think it is clear that you are wrong. We absolutely can understand what running a given program is like. We may need to use a different vocabulary and abstract away detail in order to efficiently communicate the idea of running the program (say, talk about a data structure rather than the individual bits that compose it), but that is true in every field. This is basic tool of reasoning.

If that is not a good analogy, please let me know how. I am not satisfied at all that I understand what you mean when you write "the actual subjective experience". I understand what those words mean but I cannot match them with an object.

The problem with this argument is that your conscious perception is actually the only thing you can know to exist. Everything else is sense data fed into that consciousness. You assume that the external world that manifests itself via sense data exists because it appears consistent.

But as I sit here typing this the only thing I can know with certainty is that 'I' exist and am conscious (by definition).

This process of being conscious, of perceiving the world, is what I am arguing is outside the realm of science.

Now I know a number of people are of the opinion that if you have a sufficiently complicated machine, biological or otherwise, consciousness will become some emergent property. And maybe this is so. But just saying 'it emerges' is not science. It's hand waving. So instead we have to just accept that for the moment we cannot speak of it.

Do you think they'll remain unscientific?

As a matter of fact, there is an interesting book about it: [What We Believe but Cannot Prove](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_We_Believe_But_Cannot_Prov...).

Just off the top of my head, I'd say the most obvious thing that people know that isn't scientific is to make creative leaps and discover/invent new ideas. Science can tell us a lot about how it happens, but there is no scientific formula for creating new, true, useful, or provocative ideas. When people make a creative leap, do they know it's true, in the scientific sense?

Or how about humor? Can you scientifically prove a joke to be funny? I know what I find funny, but humor is not provable, or created following the scientific method.

Demonstrably false. Going by Steve Martin's autobiography, as just one example, stand-up comics routinely submit their new material to controlled tests with sample audiences. Jokes (and performance details) that fail to elicit laughter and post-show satisfaction (i.e. as practical a demonstration of "funny" as any), are judged provably false and left out of the routine.

> Similarly, modern theorists imply, the multiverse has necessary being even though any given universe does not.

No. What's implicit is that arguments of necessary being will not ever be found.

As I'm fond of saying (a bit unfairly): a philosopher is someone insightful enough to ask the fundamental questions and thick enough to try to answer them.

Yeah, he goes too far. There are areas involving qualia that could probably be handled by science eventually but the tools at our disposal are too crude for the moment so the humanities get them. There are also ought-questions in ethics and aesthetics that science isn't built to answer. They ought to stay in humanities too, chiefly because humanists are good at poking holes in arguments for certitude.

Most importanly, /we don't want/ the kinds of Big Why questions Hughes is laying on us. Humanities academics are busy toiling away on little subspecialties and trying to be as methodologically rigorous as possible given the limitations of the subject matter.

We do not want the responsibility of answering why people exist or proving that someone's religious fantasies are true. We can give you a historical tour of thinkers who tried to do so, or point out weird side-effects of some of their arguments, or point out some major religious traditions that don't actually care very much about those two questions - we can do all that and more, and I'd argue that's valuable stuff, but we are not going to be errand boys for crypto-creationists.

So, one demerit to Coyne for being a little too dismissive humanities. Infinity demerits to Hughes for trying to make humanities something it doesn't want to be and shouldn't be.

Here's a Greek manuscript. There's a lacuna in the text. What is the most likely correct emendation? If you use a statistical method to answer, explain how you compiled your corpus of comparisons.

>explain a) Why, if science cannot be done with these questions, is anything else worth doing?

Oh my yes, just like football and gourmet cooking are worth doing. Besides which, your science labs are going to need industrial designers and lawyers, and at least a couple historians of science to warn you away from past methodological errors. Which means you also need at least a few scholars of rhetoric, fine arts, philology, general history and archaeology to train them.

>Try putting forward a psychoanalytic theory (not to keep stomping on that already crushed horse)

And yet you do. Why do you guys always use psychoanalysis for your examples? Why not numismatics? Why not 16th century Dutch history? Why not philosophy of mathematics, Meso-American archaeology or Song-period Chinese textual criticism?

>Try putting forward a psychoanalytic theory…in front of chemists and physicists and see what you get. They will have no trouble at all shredding it.

Or try putting it forward in front of social anthropologists. They will have even less trouble - and they were on to Freud a couple of decades before the alleged scientists in the medical profession caught on.

That describes the basic pattern-matching mechanism employed by the neural networks that constitute our brains. Developments like natural language processing (NLP) continue to turn that mental black box increasingly transparent.

> Here's a Greek manuscript. There's a lacuna in the text. What is the most likely correct emendation? If you use a statistical method to answer, explain how you compiled your corpus of comparisons.

This lacuna is going to be filled using scientific thinking employed by the humanities scholar doing the. He is going to make comparisons to other documents and to other knowledge about the period, language, etc. That is to have some hypotheses about the lacuna, he is going to gather data, and then he is going to analyze that data in the context of the lacuna and propose solutions.

As has been pointed out, there are existing computational systems that do this kind of work. There is a long history of work on this kind of problem from information theory and cryptography.

> Oh my yes, just like football and gourmet cooking are worth doing. Besides which, your science labs are going to need industrial designers and lawyers, and at least a couple historians of science to warn you away from past methodological errors. Which means you also need at least a few scholars of rhetoric, fine arts, philology, general history and archaeology to train them.

I did not make my point clearly. Let me make it again: if your methodology does not produce parsimonious models of the world that can be used to make accurate predictions, then what is the point of doing it? If you cannot produce testable claims of fact about the world, what is the point in doing it?

I was suggesting to you, to take a jocular example, that if you know that astrology does not work, then it is not worth doing, even if it is your only method of making predictions.

Your point about industrial designers and lawyers is a non sequitur in this context. I am talking about methods of discovery and methods of testing knowledge claims.

As to psychoanalysis, the reason I brought it up is that it is still rampant in large parts the humanities: intellectual history, comparative literature, and English the chief problem fields.

Psychoanalysis isn't popular because it gives an accurate depiction of reality. It's popular for an opposite reason. It helps talk about things that aren't present in the world. How do you propose the laboratory to account for that?

Relevant:

"recent advocates of scientism have taken the ironic but logical next step of denying any useful role for philosophy whatsoever, even the subservient philosophy of the positivist sort. But the last laugh, it seems, remains with the philosophers — for the advocates of scientism reveal conceptual confusions that are obvious upon philosophical reflection. Rather than rendering philosophy obsolete, scientism is setting the stage for its much-needed revival. [...] In contrast to reason, a defining characteristic of superstition is the stubborn insistence that something — a fetish, an amulet, a pack of Tarot cards — has powers which no evidence supports. From this perspective, scientism appears to have as much in common with superstition as it does with properly conducted scientific research. Scientism claims that science has already resolved questions that are inherently beyond its ability to answer."

For more information, I strongly recommend:

"Naturalism and the Human Condition: Against scientism" by Frederick A. Olafson

and

"Scientism" by Tom Sorell

Quoting Wikipedia: "Eugenics became an academic discipline at many colleges and universities, and received funding from many sources. Three International Eugenics Conferences presented a global venue for eugenicists with meetings in 1912 in London, and in 1921 and 1932 in New York. Eugenic policies were first implemented in the early 1900s in the United States.[8] Later, in the 1920s and 30s, the eugenic policy of sterilizing certain mental patients was implemented in a variety of other countries, including Belgium, Brazil, Canada, and Sweden,..."

We now believe the negatives of the eugenics movement, justifying the genocide done by the Nazis, outweighs any social good which might be possible from the scientific principles behind eugenics.

2) Should the US develop and use Orion-style nuclear propulsion?

Quoting Freeman Dyson: "this is the first time in modern history that a major expansion of human technology has been suppressed for political reasons." In short, it's better to ban nuclear bombs because of the increased mortality due to radioactive fallout than to have a single-stage-to-Saturn lift technology.

But it is getting harder and harder to do that in this day and age thanks to easy access to information and vigilance of the scientific community.

    1) Should the US sterilize the mentally retarded? [...]
    2) Should the US develop and use Orion-style nuclear propulsion?

Also, you seem to be confused between the differences between science and technology. Can you not differentiate between basic and applied research?

The scientific answer, 100 years ago, to this reworded question was "yes." Quoting from the Wikipedia article on eugenics: "Many members of the American Progressive Movement supported eugenics, enticed by its scientific trappings and its promise to cure social ills." Again I point out that there were academic posts in eugenics, conferences, and funded scientific research, and the result of this work guided government policy decisions, including government mandated sterilizations in Sweden up until 1975.

Remember, the topic I'm responding to is "Name one question for which a scientific answer no matter how inadequate was once the best, but for which now a philosophical or religious one is the best one?" The premise to the topic allows inadequate science, so I'm justified in using this case even though we had a poor understanding of genetics 100 years ago.

Oh! You should read the comments to Galton's "Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims", for The American Journal of Sociology, Volume X; July, 1904; Number 1 at http://www.mugu.com/galton/essays/1900-1911/galton-1904-am-j...

There are two dissenters, Benjamin Kidd and John M. Robertson. Kidd gives another counter-example for this thread:

> Many examples of a similar kind might be given. It may be remembered, for instance, how a generation or two ago Malthusianism was urged upon us in the name of science and almost with the zeal of a religion. We have lived to see the opposite view now beginning to be urged with much the same zeal and emphasis.

And I completely don't understand your statement about any confusion I might have in recognizing the differences between science and technology, or between basic and applied research.

This is science and politics, and partially based on the science of modern genetics, which shows that a number of things we thought could be stopped using sterilization really cannot be ended in that fashion. Down Syndrome, for example, is genetic but not always inherited, so sterilization wouldn't eradicate it.

> In short, it's better to ban nuclear bombs because of the increased mortality due to radioactive fallout than to have a single-stage-to-Saturn lift technology.

This is, again, a scientific decision based on evidence and reason. Orion may have been stopped for unscientific reasons as well, but that argument is scientific.

Politics is partially an applied philosophy. Many of the views of a political party are based in philosophical viewpoints. The idea that everyone has the "inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" is a philosophical viewpoint, and not a scientific one. What is the scientific basis for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

The planks of the Republican platform, which include opposition to RU-486 and similar drugs because they "terminate innocent human life after conception" is a philosophical viewpoint, and not a scientific one. What is the scientific definition of "human"? Can we scientifically determine when a cell is 'human'? Are frozen blastocysts human? What about HeLa lines? and so on.

So when you say "science and politics", I respond with "yes, what's your point?" Science is a knife. We use it poorly, and we get hurt. We use it one way and we make art, and homes. We use it another way and we kill.

We have to decide how we want to use science. Eugenics does work for crops. It does work for livestock. It should work for people. If we sterilize the ~2.5 million Americans (and any new immigrants) who carry the sickle cell trait, then sickle cell disease - which is definitely inherited - will be effectively eradicated in the US within 60 years.

Why don't we do that? Does science tell us why not?

Well, it does in a fashion. We can say that it's an emergent behavior of free actors who are the descendants of a species of primates, talk about population dynamics, and so on. But that emergent behavior is a round-about way of describing philosophy, ethics, and religion.

If we were an absolute dictatorship, then our Glorious Leader (praise be the Leader) could require sterilization of anyone with poor genetics, and it would happen.

Science just doesn't care. We are the ones who care, and have have to decide what it is we want to become.

It is dangerous to go against science. We should not do so lightly. But the scientific input is only one of many inputs. Yes, Orion is estimated to increase mortality by approximately one lifetime per launch, averaged out over the world. What is the increase in mortality caused by burning coal? By building cars? It's much higher. Yet we decided to kill Orion and still promote (and subsidize!) the auto industry. What is your scientific explanation for that?

The observation that, in reasonably-controlled (albeit retrospective) studies, societies that hew closer to them than others tend to do better over the longer term.

> What is the scientific definition of "human"?

If philosophy isn't meant to answer questions, why do you think science is meant to provide definitions?

Science is about figuring out how things work, which informs philosophy and, therefore, politics, to the extent that even if you ignore reality, reality won't ignore you: Having a philosophy that says rattlesnake venom is healthy won't make it not kill you.

> Science is a knife. We use it poorly, and we get hurt. We use it one way and we make art, and homes. We use it another way and we kill.

I agree with all of this.

Here's my take on philosophy: In order to figure out how the world should be, you first have to have a cogent and well-informed grasp on how it is. Your philosophy must be founded on science or else you're trying to derive Is from Ought. Figure out how the world works first, and then attempt to derive Ought from Is, if that's your thing.

> If we were an absolute dictatorship, then our Glorious Leader (praise be the Leader) could require sterilization of anyone with poor genetics, and it would happen.

Which, incidentally, would likely be the result of an unscientific policy, because science says we don't know enough about genetics to do a very good job of it.

Science tells us old-fashioned eugenics is nonsense. Stop trying to use it to discredit science.

> What is your scientific explanation for that?

Cognitive biases in humans are also studied by science, and science is a prime way to overcome cognitive biases using a stringent methodology.

Then I have failed to get my point across. This is nothing about discrediting science. This is everything about the difficulties of understanding what the scientific evidence means.

I was responding to a poster who asked "Name one question for which a scientific answer no matter how inadequate was once the best, but for which now a philosophical or religious one is the best one?" My first response was to show a case where there was a scientific answer based on inadequate knowledge, and where the modern ethical belief is so strongly against that there's effectively no modern scientific research on the topic.

Read Galton's 1904 paper on Eugenics (http://www.mugu.com/galton/essays/1900-1911/galton-1904-am-j... ) and especially that of the commenters. You'll see that their worldview colors their understanding of the science. G. Bernard Shaw wrote "We kill a Tibetan regardless of expense, and in defiance of our religion, to clear the way to Lhassa for the Englishman; but we take no really scientific steps to secure that the Englishman when he gets there, will be able to live up to our assumption of his superiority." Most of the others have similar views of the superiority of the white race and the upper classes.

What blinders do we ourselves have? How do we recognize the ring of truth? Those two questions express the self-doubt which is the essence of scientific investigation, and you'll see even 108 years ago that Benjamin Kidd commented "The point of Mr. Galton's paper is, I think, that, however we may differ as to other standards, we are, at all events, all agreed as to what constitutes the fittest and most perfect individual. I am not quite convinced of this."

Now going to the other topics. "Having a philosophy that says rattlesnake venom is healthy won't make it not kill you." That leads directly to the handful of Pentacostal churches where members believe that if one has faith then one can handle snakes without getting bitten. Getting bit obviously means the handler didn't have enough faith. It's a nasty self-referential and self-supporting logical loop. Restating your words, the person ignores reality, reality hurts back, that failure reinforces a false understanding of the world.

There will always be semi-stable/chaotic attractors in the phase space of human civilization. Some of the scientific observations are only true around some of those attractors. We haven't had enough time to figure out if the UDHR has the effects you've described. How does one tell how well a given country hews to the UHDR? How does one measure how well a country is doing? Can you plot those two values and see if the relationship is statistically significant? Has anyone? In the analysis, should you weight the factors according to population size? Does Belgium count as two (or three) different governments? What about the Swiss cantons?

Now suppose let's consider adding the "Right to Refuse to Kill" to the UDHR. I believe your view is that we could look a countries which already have laws like UDHR+RRK and determine if those countries are doing comparatively better or worse than those which don't, and use that to decide if the RRK should be added to the UDHR or not? Doesn't have quite the ring as "we hold these truths to be self-evident", and your error bars are likely going to overwhelm the analysis.

"Science says we don't know enough about genetics to do a very good job of it."

I'll narrow that down a bit. Is there any genetic disease where we know enough about the disease that we can do a good job of eradicating it through eugenics? If not now, do you think that we ever will? When would forced sterilization be appropriate government policy for the US?

"Cognitive biases in humans are also studied by science"

Yes, indeed. My point is that some of those "cognitive biases" go by other names, including "religion" and "ethics." Using the term 'cognitive bias' does little except recast those into science-friendly terminology.

"science is a prime way to overcome cognitive biases using a stringent methodology"

My point is that I think most people doing science aren't pessimistic enough about their own research. I am not convinced that we are doing enough work in science to overcome our biases. I point you to 'Why Most Published Research Findings Are False', by John P. A. Ioannidis , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/ : "It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false."

According to an article in "The Atlantic", Ioannidis analyzed "49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years". "Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated."

There's a very good book on this called "The Wisdom Of Insecurity" by Alan Watts. It's very short and definitely worth a read if this question interests you.

While charming, these sound to me as borderline serious new-age dualist contraptions. Consciousness and experience are under active investigation by neuroscientists and we have no reason to believe they won't be explained away.

Imho, the most valuable domain of philosophy is still the domain of Ethics.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

2) It is my understanding that 19th Century science would have asserted authority on the subjects of things like consciousness it should not have, and which 21st Century science does not assert. On the other hand at least the Roman Catholic church has withdrawn from over exerting its authority on at least some matters addressed by biologists.

3) non science has abdicated its authority on any non scientific questions by its assertions that no means exists that can assure that anything is true, because there is nothing to any statement but its social context. The obvious consequence of that movement should have been its instantaneous invalidation by its own social construction by Marxists, or as the observer Mandy Rice-Davies might have said, They would say that, wouldn't they?

Feeling better about something or wishing it were so are not good enough criteria in my mind. Finding consolation in illusion is not a worthy goal either.

All questions are scientific questions. What is right, what is moral or what we should do follows from what is true. Science happens to be the only sure way to discover what is true on the other hand. All other methods fail us.

Science isn't about truth. Science is about three things. Making hypothesis, making decisions based on hypothesis and testing them. It has no singular answer and that answer changes depending on scales we operate.

What is right follows directly from what is true. For example, if animals are indeed sentient, if they are self-aware even, if they can suffer, are scientific questions. If scientific answers to these questions are positive, then some of us sufficiently evolved, aware humans can't ignore the fact, and we have no choice but to treat animals differently than what we do now. Some countries like Spain have gone so far as to give protection and right to life to higher primates, our closest cousin apes.

We can decide slavery is not a good idea. We can decide that fairly applied laws, rather than nepotistic favoritism, is a good idea. We can outlaw certain punishments with treaties. We can encourage accountability with the invention of writing. We can consciously expand our circle of empathy. These are all inventions, products of our minds, as much as lightbulbs and telegraphs are.

Is it wrong to steal? Is it wrong to steal to feed yourself when you are starving? Is it wrong to lie? Is it wrong to lie to a known murderer that was asking about your friends whereabouts, knowing that he will hurt him? What if we have no free will, but we behave better when we are lied about it? Should the system lie about nature of our decisions? What else should system (i.e. state, school, college...) lie us about?

Science is good when there is objective reality underlying its assumptions. When there isn't any strong objective reality it kinda doesn't work as well.

Human well-being entirely depends on events in the world and on states of the human brain. Consequently, there must be scientific truths to be known about it. A more detailed understanding of these truths will force us to draw clear distinctions between different ways of living in society with one another, judging some to be better or worse, more or less true to the facts, and more or less ethical. Clearly, such insights could help us to improve the quality of human life.

We may not be able to resolve every moral controversy through science. Differences of opinion will remain. But opinions will be increasingly constrained by facts. And it is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer. Exactly how many people were bitten by mosquitoes in the last sixty seconds? How many of these people will contract malaria? How many will die as a result? Given the technical challenges involved, no team of scientists could possibly respond to such questions. And yet we know that they admit of simple numerical answers. Does our inability to gather the relevant data oblige us to respect all opinions equally? Of course not. In the same way, the fact that we may not be able to resolve specific moral dilemmas does not suggest that all competing responses to them are equally valid. Mistaking no answers in practice for no answers in principle is a great source of confusion.

People who want to argue moral questions are not scientific are in effect saying reason is powerless to answer the most important questions in human life. And how a person perceives the gulf between facts and values seems to influence their views on almost every issue of social importance— from the fighting of wars to the education of children.

This rupture in our thinking has different consequences at each end of the spectrum: religious conservatives tend to believe that there are right answers to questions of meaning and morality, but only because the God of Abraham deems it so. They concede that ordinary facts can be discovered through rational inquiry, but they believe that values must come from a voice in a whirlwind. Scriptural literalism, intolerance of diversity, mistrust of science, disregard for the real causes of human and animal suffering, this is how the division between facts and values expresses itself on the religious right.

From the point of view of popular culture, science often seems like little more than a hatchery for technology. While most educated people will concede that the scientific method has delivered centuries of fresh embarrassment to religion on matters of fact, it is now an article of almost unquestioned certainty, both inside and outside scientific circles, that science has nothing to say about what constitutes a good life. Religious thinkers in all faiths, and on both ends of the political spectrum, are united on precisely this point; the defense one most often hears for belief in God is not that there is compelling evidence for his existence, but that faith in him is the only reliable source of meaning and moral guidance. Mutually incompatible religious traditions now take refuge behind the same non sequitur.

It seems inevitable, however, that science will gradually encompass life’s deepest questions—and this is guaranteed to provoke a backlash. How we respond to the resulting collision of worldviews will influence the progress of science, of course, but it may also determine whether we succeed in building a global civilization based on shared values. The question of how human beings should live in the twenty-first century has many competing answers—and most of them are surely wrong. Only a rational understanding of human well-being will allow billions of us to coexist peacefully, converging on the same social, political, economic, and environmental goals. A science of human flourishing may seem a long way off, but to achieve it, we must first acknowledge that the intellectual terrain actually exists.

Neurology has a lot of information about where consciousness comes from. It's not complete, but nothing we know is.

> experience, spontaneity

More neurology, from what I can tell that these words mean. However, they're vague, and can be defined in so many ways that I don't know precisely what you mean.

> 'the present moment'

This is amazingly vague. It could be related to time, to consciousness, or to who-knows-what.

I guess as a primary example, art is non-scientific, but it is an equally valid way of communicating the understanding of our experience to others. We understand beauty. The meaning of symbols in our society seems unlikely to ever come under some scientific theory but forms a very large part of our experience. The search for meaning in life is not a scientific one.

It is probably true that science is the only objective, factually accurate, rational, logical, and methodical approach to understanding the world. This does not invalidate other approaches, since we are more than objective, factually accurate, rational, logical, and methodical beings. Your subjective experience is yours and yours alone and totally resistant to the scientific method.

    Well, science is based on the rational interpretation of our five senses.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense

Given the incredible variance in available descriptions of "the conscious experience", I would posit that "consciousness" itself exists only as a mental grouping and nothing distinct.

As an exercise: explain what exactly constitutes a "car", including the point where such an item officially "stops being a car" during the process of disassembly. Show your work.

To illustrate: there is no such thing as the movie "It's a Wonderful Life", just a series of individual frames that our eyes and brains perceive as a whole unit only because of perceptual and cognitive limitations (basically, compression). We know far less of anything beyond the present moment - speaking of individual experience - than most believe. I posit that "consciousness" exists as nothing more than a cognitive compression artifact.

These are both scientific.

I'd like a slice of roast dodo bird please.

It sounds like you're assigning omniscient characteristics to science.

How about pizza? (no scientific evidence involved in this response)

Emotions, both feeling and decoding, are smack-dab in the realm of neurology.

(Yes, it's probably pattern-matching taken to an extreme, but can we quantify it? Why not?)

I do not see how intuition gives you anything other than -- maybe, and only maybe -- a smaller set of hypotheses to test scientifically.

This is just the kind of dismissive attitude that makes philosophers unpopular.

Those are your mirror neurons, I think.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/mirror-neurons.html

Or maybe not. We'll find out using science.

It is not clear, at least to me, how an astronomer looking at Saturn and saying "Gee, how pretty" is going to lead him to a better measurement of Saturn's gravity. It is not a matter of what big brother Science wants. It is a matter of what is useful in answering the question being asked. Draw a line between beauty and gravity measurements and show a reliable connection and you have done all you need to do to convince people to apply this data.

The point here is that just as non-science is useless for understanding the world in objective scientific terms, science is useless for understanding the world in non-scientific, subjective terms. This seems to follow from the definition. You cannot apply the scientific method to create art, but art is nevertheless created to communicate an understanding of the world.

To experience an emotion is to understand the nature of existence at a personal and subjective level. Science cannot give you this. You cannot know the 'truth' about what anger feels like by reading it in a book, you have to feel it for yourself. This kind of truth is non-scientific.

This is only true in so far as "subjective" things are poorly defined. Give me any subjective principle that is clearly defined and laid out and we can talk about scientifically.

> You cannot apply the scientific method to create art, but art is nevertheless created to communicate an understanding of the world.

This is false. People use scientific methods to create art every day. Record labels use machine learning and data analysis to understand what people find aesthetically pleasing in music and then go that route when they select bands to fund and songs to spend advertising money on (they have been doing this since the 1970's). Hollywood does intense studies of people and their tastes to guide script choices. They also use science directly to build art. Take Pixar for example. Blue screens.

Science is everywhere in the creation of art. Paint and pigment, we can go that basic, are the product of science. Understanding of light and art and perspective directly progressed art during the Renaissance, as did Leonardo's work on anatomy.

Are you basically saying there is no point to any understanding of our lives that does not count as science? Or are you saying that it is impossible to have such an understanding? Is each and every artform a subdiscipline of science? Is making art fundamentally the same thing as performing scientific experiments?

Where do you believe that you got your opinions about the supreme utility of science? Were they derived using the scientific method?

I'm not asking these questions to attack you, I'm just curious. Maybe there's something I'm missing.

Really, I'm not certain you would be convinced even if I did a better job, though. All I'm really looking for is less of a skeptical "explain it to me in terms of science" viewpoint, and more of a "huh, interesting" response. I've never seen someone even try to work with me when discussing these things. It's always shut down so they can claim their Internet points.

Not intellectually engaging in the slightest.

Where is your evidence for this?

Humor aside, this is absolutely not the case. Traditional religion stems from human intuition, a natural sense of reality that was shaped my many, many years of evolution. A process of trial and error.

Trial and error, of course, is the natural equivalent of the scientific method. Continuous iteration and refinement.

If anything, our intuitive sense is more refined than our sense of reason and tells us much about the world around us that our capacity for reason simply does not.

So, religion and faith comes down to bending yourself, making yourself suspend your disbelief and accepting premises without seeking any evidence. It comes down to wishful thinking really.

You have no capacity to determine if something is true without the process of trial and error. This is the founding principal of the scientific mindset and is the basis of the scientific method. Form a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, repeat.

How do you "test" a religion? Not with any feeble investigation by your primitive rational mind. You try the belief system.

If it makes you happier, if it makes you a better person, you've found a winning formula. If it gives you good results, you win. It is entirely irrelevant whether it passes some "truth" test concocted by your imagination.

It either has real, relevant results in your life or it doesn't. Religion is a way of life, a guide for living ... not merely a creation mythology.

If you bother asking, you will find the overwhelming majority of human beings on the planet get this, understand it, and will actually tell you just how it improves their lives.

Unfortunately, engineers seem to be brain-damaged in some specific way that prevents them from thinking in this manner. You need to work on that. It's not very scientific.

But more importantly for this discussion, religion is not some guide for moral living. If it were so, there would be no problem with religion. No, religion is all about absolutism, it is a totalitarian world view by definition. It is argument from certainty. Religion comes down to some people claiming not only they know with absolute certainty there is a god, but they also know his mind, what he wants us to do. It is about gods that care about human beings, that interfere in their lives, that tell you what you should do, what you should eat, on what days, who you may sleep with and in what position, gods who break the known laws of nature for their people, god who stops the motion of the sun around earth so certain people in the Bible can finish their work, god who takes "our" side in a war, a god that gives itself body so it can kill it to save the humanity.

And how do they know? Personal revelation of course, god told them something (often times contradictory to what he told others). Yet, no ordinary evidence is ever offered for these claims, let alone extraordinary evidence it would take to prove the claims.

Religion (and I'm referring to the three monotheistic ones, the three desert dogmas) are claiming that without this absolute divine supervision we would not know right from wrong.

So, if religion is just a way of life, and if you don't accept the required dogmas wholesale, in what way is it a guide for you? If you get to pick and choose out of all the required supernatural dogmas, does that not show that your morals in fact don't come from religion, but you already know what is good and what is right? Of course, morals and our civility to each other predate religion. We would not have gotten this far without it.

And seriously, believing something as absolute because it makes you feel good is a definition of delusion. Can you be any more dishonest with yourself? But some of us care about what is actually true.

And besides what religion you get indoctrinated into has nothing to do with the truthfulness of your particular religion, but more to do with where you were born, and the religion of your parents.

This strikes me as scientific fundamentalism. Many religions seem to incorporate a great deal of questioning and reflection, like Wicca and Buddhism.

> And seriously, believing something as absolute because it makes you feel good is a definition of delusion.

Few people could conceive and systematize people as tending to become trapped in a cycle of appetites and fears, and deduce ways of thinking to help escape from the cycle. The Buddha could. You need not accept every letter of dogma to improve yourself with Buddhism, any more than you need to accept alchemy to learn from the teachings of Newton.

Unfortunately philosophers alienated scientists with their postmodern (de-)constructivism to the point of creating enmities (such as the Sokal affair[1]). At this point, when scientists speak to philosophers, one gets the impression that there's nothing to learn from them that they don't already know (or even worse, that philosophers dance around subjects).

The author seems frustrated that philosophers are no longer the highest authorities, but that's just the current state of philosophy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

As for who alienated who in the Sokal affair, it should be remembered that Sokal was the original perpetrator of the hoax, and appeared to have initiated it with the sole aim of discrediting philosophers he did not approve of.

On the Continental side, the classic essay is Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology".

I'd also recommend Jacques Ellul's "Technological Society".

And, while not dealing directly with science, I think Foucault's critiques of power in discourse are very relevant.

Earlier in this thread I'd mentioned:

"Naturalism and the Human Condition: Against scientism" by Frederick A. Olafson, whose critique comes from a phenomenological perspective.

and

"Scientism" by Tom Sorell, who's a neo-Kantian.

None of the above are postmodernists.

Yes, but why was he capable of doing so? The whole point of his paper was to use scientific words out of context in a way that fed into the postmodernist mindset, and the postmodernists ate it up.

Sokal was victorious to the extent he validated his idea that postmodernists wanted to use the trappings of science without having to apply any of the rigor of science to their own ideas.

Regardless of whether one agrees with him or not, his argument makes NO sense to me. The relevant question is not whether science can have all the answers, but whether science yields better or more accurate answers than those other approaches.

We know that most published scientific research results are wrong.

http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal...

Therefore flipping a coin and always guessing "heads" yields more accurate results than science.

Now what? Has this insight taught us anything?

Second: it remains a question of degree. Most preliminary medical research, for example, suffers from heavy biases, but it remains far more predictive than the "alternative medicine" beliefs that are more than 90% incorrect.

Now that a higher level of certainty is available for some subjects people have higher expectations about what level of confidence they demand from an idea purporting to tell them something about reality. They also have a lot more scientific knowledge about the ways in which and the reasons why these other methods fail, often spectacularly.

I guess I'm guilty of scientism. I assume that if these "other ways of understanding" failed nearly completely at discovering truth in every subject that has been touched by science I assume this extrapolates to the subjects we cannot apply science to.

I fail to see why accepting our current limitations about what it's possible for us to know is anything other than the opposite of hubris.

Once another system of thought actually makes predictions that answer questions about reality then I will happily change my mind. Until then I'm not satisfied with the horrible levels of accuracy they have been shown to have. I'll just stick with the humble scientific opinion: "We don't know yet, we haven't figured out how to move beyond conjecture about this issue".

Should.

Science works to find scientific conclusions. But the trappings of science are sometimes applied in ways that have little to do with actual science.

[0] http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/09/17/12091... -- note that sociobio/ev psych can produce real science. In my experience, though, most of what they produce is "just-so stories", as Gould's comment points out.

For example the author concedes, in the first half of one paragraph, the existence of "genuinely scientific" evolutionary psychology. Then he spends the second half on the abundance of unserious -- not just philosophically unserious, but scientifically unserious -- material in the same field. And that's all he has to say about the actual content of evolutionary psychology.

But good science speaks for itself:

"""The left side of the [neanderthal] skull had a large dent, apparently from a ferocious blow, and the rib cage -- also on the left side -- had the head of a spear lodged in it.... [He] had died roughly 50,000 years ago, the earliest known homicide victim. His killer, judging from the damage to the skull and rib cage, bore the lethal weapon in his right hand.

The fossil record of injuries to bones reveals two strikingly common patterns (Jurmain et al, 2009; Trinkaus & Zimmerman, 1982; Walker, 1995). First, the skeletons of men contain far more fractures and dents than do the skeletons of women. Second, the injuries are located mainly on the left frontal sides of the skulls and skeletons, suggesting right-handed attackers. The bone record alone cannot tell us with certainty that combat among men was a central feature of human ancestral life. Nor can it tell us with certainty that men evolved to be the more physically aggressive sex..."""

...and even if they could, our ancestors habits offer limited guidance on how we should act today. Stabbing people with pointed sticks is now frowned upon. Do we need to be told this by a tenured philosophy professor?

But note how much clearer the prospects and limits of science become when you know something about what it has already told us in the here and now. When your knowledge is limited, all you can talk about is the limits of knowledge.

>What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? ... Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.

>Though physicists might once have been dismissive of metaphysics as mere speculation, they would also have characterized such questions as inherently speculative and so beyond their own realm of expertise. The claims of Hawking and Mlodinow, and many other writers, thus represent a striking departure from the traditional view.

It's weird that the author takes a non-scientific introduction to a pop-science book that is aimed to appeal to the layman's understanding of the world, and makes it out that Hawking and Mlodinow are departing from traditional views in their science.

and it's currently half price for subscriptions and only $10 delivery international. i just signed up for two years :o) thanks for posting this.

Simple answers to this: (a) we have far too few examples of life (on a galactic scale) to gauge the actual "Goldilock" range for life suitability, and (b) we have a documented tendency to assume agency even in its manifest absence, which renders all such anthropomorphic impressions highly suspect.

"In that case, we are still left without ultimate explanations as to why that universe exists or has the characteristics it does."

Begs the question of whether "why" even matters at such a scale. Like the "then what created god?" question, the chain must either stop somewhere or recede infinitely to a "bad question" asymptote.

"For a complete evolutionary account of a phenomenon, it is not enough to construct a story about how the trait might have evolved in response to a given selection pressure; rather, one must provide some sort of evidence that it really did so evolve."

Apply that same criteria to all other non-evolutionary explanations, then come back with their relative measures of predictive value. Who wins that tournament of efficacy?

"For comparison, we know a quite a lot about the physiology of digestion, and we are able to describe in great detail the physiological differences between the digestive system of a person who is starving and that of a person who has just eaten a satisfying and nutritionally balanced meal. But this knowledge contributes little to solving world hunger."

The discovery and implementation of a system that makes hunger more objective, for example, would help address work hunger by freeing up overeaten food for those in greater need. Unimpressed.

"Harris seems to think that free will is an illusion but also that our decisions are really driven by thoughts that arise unbidden in our brains. He does not explain the origin of these thoughts nor how their origin relates to moral choices."

What about the receipt of controlling, "unexplained" "unbidden thoughts" contracts a disbelief in free will? The claim that Harris leaves them "unexplained" or unrelated to moral choices speaks more to the author's ignorance of Harris's work than anything else.

"This view [emphasizing the impact of genes and circumstance on the frequency of "moral behavior"] undermines the possibility of happiness and moral behavior for those who are dealt a bad hand, and so does more to degrade than uplift at the individual level."

Try telling that to had their "moral" capacity demonstrably inhibited by damage to their frontal lobes.

Any hope of addressing such organic damage to impulse control lies in the advancement of neuroscience, which might provide an actual fix.

The alternative equates to expecting a computer user to search online for their own answer as to why their Internet connection is down.

"Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence."

A straw-man, then begging the question. Given how much we know of the foibles of human cognition, perception, and recollection, the responsibility for taking something out of the sphere of science lies with those who would attempt the removal. Best of luck doing so without hard data, i.e. science, though.

tl;dr: a biologist reaches far outside her area of experience (and into, e.g., neuroscience) in order to try and fault the scientists actually in those fields for finding scientific answers to once-philosophical questions in their own fields. That, and the author's ultimate position boils down to an argument from consequence.