The Folly of Scientism

[Reefs]

I am aware that we have a number of very scientifically minded people here. And as some of you may have noticed, the credibility of science took a bit of a hit in recent years, mainly due to increasing scientific overreach and questionable methodology, especially lately. A while ago I found an interesting article on this topic, "The Folly of Scientism - Why scientists shouldn’t trespass on philosophy’s domain" which addresses this problem of scientific overreach, its origins, characteristics and developments:

www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-folly-of-scientism

It is very well written, IMO, but it is a rather long article (or essay), so I thought I'd better break it up into several parts and just quote the main points, or else, I'm afraid, no one here is going to read it.



Part 1  - What is Scientism?

• The typical scientist seemed to be a person who knew one small corner of the natural world and knew it very well, better than most other human beings living and better even than most who had ever lived. But outside of their circumscribed areas of expertise, scientists would hesitate to express an authoritative opinion.
  
  
• The temptation to overreach, however, seems increasingly indulged today in discussions about science.
  
  
• Both in the work of professional philosophers and in popular writings by natural scientists, it is frequently claimed that natural science does or soon will constitute the entire domain of truth.
  
  
• All too many [scientists] have accepted without question the hype that suggests that an advanced degree in some area of natural science confers the ability to pontificate wisely on any and all subjects.
  
  
• The chemist Peter Atkins, who in his 1995 essay “Science as Truth” asserts the “universal competence” of science. This position has been called scientism — a term that was originally intended to be pejorative but has been claimed as a badge of honor by some of its most vocal proponents.
  
  
• Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy.
  
  
• Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering such questions, but the only means of answering them.
  

... and some dictionary definitions:

scientism noun


excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques

the uncritical application of scientific or quasi-scientific methods to inappropriate fields of study or investigation

an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities)

the belief that the assumptions, methods of research, etc., of the physical and biological sciences are equally appropriate and essential to all other disciplines, including the humanities and the social sciences

the view that science and scientific method are the best or only objective means by which people should determine normative and epistemological values, or that the natural sciences constitute the most authoritative worldview

[andrew]

I see it as over reliance, or over-trust, in the rational aspect of the mind, the critical thinking aspect of mind. It becomes dogma when it places negative value on other forms of knowing. Science has no business judging those other forms of knowing, and there's a sort of irony there, when these often very smart people fail to recognize the boundary, or context, of science.

Spirituality is perhaps the most illustrative example.

A dogmatic scientist would say that because God hasn't been rationally proved, that you cannot know if God exists. They will place negative value in 'knowing' in the form of intuition, or cosmic experience or gnosis. At its extreme, scientism ridicules the intuitive, will accuse them of 'believing in fairy tales' for example.

[Reefs]

Part 2 - The Abdication of the Philosophers

• Philosophical training would be very useful to a scientist. Scientists ought to be able to recognize how often philosophical issues arise in their work — that is, issues that cannot be resolved by arguments that make recourse solely to inference and empirical observation.
  
  
• These issues arise because practicing scientists, like all people, are prone to philosophical errors. To take an obvious example, scientists can be prone to errors of elementary logic, and these can often go undetected by the peer review process and have a major impact on the literature — for instance, confusing correlation and causation, or confusing implication with a biconditional.
  
  
• Philosophy can provide a way of understanding and correcting such errors. It addresses a largely distinct set of questions that natural science alone cannot answer, but that must be answered for natural science to be properly conducted.
  
  
• One group of theories of science can broadly be classified as “essentialist.” These theories attempt to identify the essential traits that distinguish science from other human activities, or differentiate true science from nonscientific and pseudoscientific forms of inquiry.
  
  
• Among the most influential and compelling of these is Karl Popper’s criterion of falsifiability outlined in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).
  
  
• A falsifiable theory is one that makes a specific prediction about what results are supposed to occur under a set of experimental conditions, so that the theory might be falsified by performing the experiment and comparing predicted to actual results. A theory or explanation that cannot be falsified falls outside the domain of science.
  
  
• Advocates of Popper’s definition would seem to place on the same level as pseudoscience or nonscience every statement — of metaphysics, ethics, theology, literary criticism, and indeed daily life — that does not meet the criterion of falsifiability.
  
  
• The everyday, commonsense nature of the falsifiability criterion has the virtue of both showing how science is grounded in basic ideas of rationality and observation, and thereby also of stripping away from science the aura of sacred mystery with which some would seek to surround it.
  
  
• We have seen in recent years a growing tendency to treat as “scientific” anything that scientists say or believe.
  
  
• If we confine our definition of the scientific to the falsifiable, we clearly will not conclude that a particular ethical view is dictated by science just because it is the view of a substantial number of scientists.
  
  
• The same logic applies to the judgments of scientists on political, aesthetic, or other nonscientific issues. If a poll shows that a large majority of scientists prefers neutral colors in bathrooms, for example, it does not follow that this preference is “scientific.”
  
  
• Popper’s falsifiability criterion and similar essentialist definitions of science highlight the distinct but vital roles of both science and philosophy. The definitions show the necessary role of philosophy in undergirding and justifying science — protecting it from its potential for excess and self-devolution by, among other things, proposing clear distinctions between legitimate scientific theories and pseudoscientific theories that masquerade as science.
  
  
• By contrast to Popper, many thinkers have advanced understandings of philosophy and science that blur such distinctions, resulting in an inflated role for science and an ancillary one for philosophy.
  
  
• Some philosophers go so far as to use “institutional factors” as the criteria of good science. By this criterion, we would differentiate good science from bad science simply by asking which proposals agencies like the National Science Foundation deem worthy of funding, or which papers peer-review committees deem worthy of publication.
  
  
• The problems with this definition of science are myriad. First, it is essentially circular: science simply is what scientists do. Second, the high confidence in funding and peer-review panels should seem misplaced to anyone who has served on these panels and witnessed the extent to which preconceived notions, personal vendettas, and the like can torpedo even the best proposals.
  
  
• Confronted with such examples, defenders of the institutional approach will often point to the supposedly self-correcting nature of science.
  
  
• The history of science provides examples of the eventual discarding of erroneous theories. But we should not be overly confident that such self-correction will inevitably occur, nor that the institutional mechanisms of science will be so robust as to preclude the occurrence of long dark ages in which false theories hold sway.
  
  
• The fundamental problem raised by the identification of “good science” with “institutional science” is that it assumes the practitioners of science to be inherently exempt, at least in the long term, from the corrupting influences that affect all other human practices and institutions.
  
  
• This assumption is at best naïve and at worst dangerous. If any human institution is held to be exempt from the petty, self-serving, and corrupting motivations that plague us all, the result will almost inevitably be the creation of a priestly caste demanding adulation and required to answer to no one but itself.
  
  
• Reading the work of philosophers of the positivist tradition, one is struck by the aura of hero-worship accorded to science and scientists.
  
  
• They have taken the strange step of identifying that reliability with the institutions and practitioners of science, rather than with any particular rational, empirical, or methodological criterion that scientists are bound (but often fail) to uphold.
  
  
• Thus a (largely justifiable) admiration for the work of scientists has led to a peculiar, unjustified role for scientists themselves — so that, increasingly, what is believed by scientists and the public to be “scientific” is simply any claim that is upheld by many scientists, or that is based on language and ideas that sound sufficiently similar to scientific theories.
  

[Reefs]

Mar 14, 2022 17:26:57 GMT -5 andrew said:

I see it as over reliance, or over-trust, in the rational aspect of the mind, the critical thinking aspect of mind. It becomes dogma when it places negative value on other forms of knowing. Science has no business judging those other forms of knowing, and there's a sort of irony there, when these often very smart people fail to recognize the boundary, or context, of science.

Spirituality is perhaps the most illustrative example.

A dogmatic scientist would say that because God hasn't been rationally proved, that you cannot know if God exists. They will place negative value in 'knowing' in the form of intuition, or cosmic experience or gnosis. At its extreme, scientism ridicules the intuitive, will accuse them of 'believing in fairy tales' for example.

I think this attitude and overreliance on the intellect alone may have something to do with our modern educational system which has become increasingly one dimensional over the last decades. People like Einstein still had a classical education which was a lot more well-rounded. So that great scientists were usually also great philosophers. Nowadays, with all the overspecialization in every field, not just in science, people seem to have lost sight of the big picture or any idea for why they do what they do.

[Reefs]

Part 3 - The Eclipse of Metaphysics

• There are at least three areas of inquiry traditionally in the purview of philosophy that now are often claimed to be best — or only — studied scientifically: metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• There has arisen a curious consilience between the findings of modern cosmology and some traditional understandings of the creation of the universe. For example, theists have noted that the model known as the Big Bang has a certain consistency with the Judeo-Christian notion of creation ex nihilo, a consistency not seen in other cosmologies that postulated an eternally existent universe.
  
  
• Likewise, many cosmologists have articulated various forms of what is known as the “anthropic principle” — that is, the observation that the basic laws of the universe seem to be “fine-tuned” in such a way as to be favorable to life, including human life.
  
  
• It is perhaps in part as a response to this apparent consilience that we owe the rise of a large professional and popular literature in recent decades dedicated to theories about multiverses, “many worlds,” and “landscapes” of reality that would seem to restore the lack of any special favoring of humanity (Hawking and Mlodinow).
  
  
• The multiverse theory holds that there are many different universes, of which ours is just one, and that each has its own system of physical laws. The argument Hawking and Mlodinow offer is essentially one from the laws of probability: If there are enough universes, one or more whose laws are suitable for the evolution of intelligent life is more or less bound to occur.
  
  
• For Smolin, not only is our universe bound to occur because there have been many rolls of the dice, but the dice are loaded in favor of a universe like ours because it happens to be a particularly “fit” universe.
  
  
• The problem with this argument is that certainty in the sense of probability is not the same thing as necessary being: If I toss a coin, it is certain that I will get heads or tails, but that outcome depends on my tossing the coin, which I may not necessarily do.
  
  
• Likewise, any particular universe may follow from the existence of a multiverse, but the existence of the multiverse remains to be explained. In particular, the universe-generating process assumed by some multiverse theories is itself contingent because it depends on the action of laws assumed by the theory.
  
  
• The latter might be called meta-laws, since they form the basis for the origin of the individual universes, each with its own individual set of laws.
  
  
• So what determines the meta-laws? Either we must introduce meta-meta-laws, and so on in infinite regression, or we must hold that the meta-laws themselves are necessary — and so we have in effect just changed our understanding of what the fundamental universe is to one that contains many universes. In that case, we are still left without ultimate explanations as to why that universe exists or has the characteristics it does.
  
  
• When it comes to such metaphysical questions, science and scientific speculation may offer much in fleshing out details, but they have so far failed to offer any explanations that are fundamentally novel to philosophy — much less have they supplanted it entirely.
  

[Reefs]

Mar 16, 2022 2:35:29 GMT -5 @wally said:

Mar 15, 2022 10:49:18 GMT -5 Reefs said:

I think this attitude and overreliance on the intellect alone may have something to do with our modern educational system which has become increasingly one dimensional over the last decades. People like Einstein still had a classical education which was a lot more well-rounded. So that great scientists were usually also great philosophers. Nowadays, with all the overspecialization in every field, not just in science, people seem to have lost sight of the big picture or any idea for why they do what they do.

Perhaps the Ppl you speak of

are still Ignorant

as we all were/are

when not knowing

what mind is?

Mind has been externalised in this new-age

and our children don't have much choice choosing

as all choices are made for them, by their Government,

who owns our Birth Certificates.

I see science as a product of the intellect. Which means at best, at least theoretically, the limits of the intellect are also the limits of science. So science will never be able to understand the intellect, let alone mind or what lies beyond. For that, it takes an intuitive approach, as Andrew mentioned. And in practical terms, the limits of science aren't really the limits of the intellect, science is a lot more limited than that because of the scientific method and its basic principles that science has to adhere to in order to be considered proper science as opposed to pseudoscience. So don't expect science to find answers to existential questions!

[Reefs]

Mar 18, 2022 6:42:41 GMT -5 @whynot said:

Mar 14, 2022 13:05:42 GMT -5 Reefs said:

I am aware that we have a number of very scientifically minded people here. And as some of you may have noticed, the credibility of science took a bit of a hit in recent years, mainly due to increasing scientific overreach and questionable methodology, especially lately. A while ago I found an interesting article on this topic, "The Folly of Scientism - Why scientists shouldn’t trespass on philosophy’s domain" which addresses this problem of scientific overreach, its origins, characteristics and developments:

www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-folly-of-scientism

It is very well written, IMO, but it is a rather long article (or essay), so I thought I'd better break it up into several parts and just quote the main points, or else, I'm afraid, no one here is going to read it.



Part 1  - What is Scientism?


... and some dictionary definitions:

Maybe some specific scientist have taken a hit of late.. but surely Science, itself, is fine.

This is what the Science Council calls their definition of science. Do you have any concerns?

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

Scientific methodology includes the following:

Objective observation: Measurement and data (possibly although not necessarily using mathematics as a tool)

Evidence

Experiment and/or observation as benchmarks for testing hypotheses

Induction: reasoning to establish general rules or conclusions drawn from facts or examples

Repetition

Critical analysis

Verification and testing: critical exposure to scrutiny, peer review and assessment

The point of the article is not against science itself but scientism, i.e. the improper use or role of science in recent years. Said that, I actually think entire branches of science have taken a hit due to the 'institutional factor' as mentioned in the article. There's a lot that comes along as science these days that is actually pseudoscience when you really take a closer look at it. And often it is basic logical errors or epistemological issues that expose the alleged science as pseudoscience. And what is probably the weakest link in the methodology you've posted is the peer review process. Think about it, if you've got a new theory and have tested it, but all your peers have decided that what you propose is ridiculous and not even worth a try, and they all stick together and refuse to peer review or publish your work, what will happen to your work and your new theory? Will your work be know to the public as science of pseudoscience? Will the public hear about your work at all?

[zazeniac]

Mar 18, 2022 6:42:41 GMT -5 @whynot said:

Mar 14, 2022 13:05:42 GMT -5 Reefs said:

I am aware that we have a number of very scientifically minded people here. And as some of you may have noticed, the credibility of science took a bit of a hit in recent years, mainly due to increasing scientific overreach and questionable methodology, especially lately. A while ago I found an interesting article on this topic, "The Folly of Scientism - Why scientists shouldn’t trespass on philosophy’s domain" which addresses this problem of scientific overreach, its origins, characteristics and developments:

www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-folly-of-scientism

It is very well written, IMO, but it is a rather long article (or essay), so I thought I'd better break it up into several parts and just quote the main points, or else, I'm afraid, no one here is going to read it.



Part 1  - What is Scientism?


... and some dictionary definitions:

Maybe some specific scientist have taken a hit of late.. but surely Science, itself, is fine.

This is what the Science Council calls their definition of science. Do you have any concerns?

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

Scientific methodology includes the following:

Objective observation: Measurement and data (possibly although not necessarily using mathematics as a tool)

Evidence

Experiment and/or observation as benchmarks for testing hypotheses

Induction: reasoning to establish general rules or conclusions drawn from facts or examples

Repetition

Critical analysis

Verification and testing: critical exposure to scrutiny, peer review and assessment

Just glad to see you here posting again.

[Reefs]

Part 4 - The Eclipse of Epistemology

• Hawking and Mlodinow, in the chapter of their book called “The Theory of Everything,” quote Albert Einstein: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
  
  
• In response, Hawking and Mlodinow offer this crashing banality: “The universe is comprehensible because it is governed by scientific laws; that is to say, its behavior can be modeled.” Later, the authors invite us to give ourselves a collective pat on the back: “The fact that we human beings — who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature — have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph.”
  
  
• Great triumph or no, none of this addresses Einstein’s paradox, because no explanation is offered as to why our universe is “governed by scientific laws.”
  
  
• Moreover, even if we can be confident that our universe has unchanging physical laws — which many of the new speculative cosmologies call into question — how is it that we “mere collections of particles” are able to discern those laws? How can we be confident that we will continue to discern them better, until we understand them fully? A common response to these questions invokes what has become the catch-all explanatory tool of advocates of scientism: evolution.
  
  
• More recently, scientific theories themselves have come to be considered the objects of natural selection.
  
  
• Richard Dawkins has famously extended this analysis to ideas in general, which he calls “memes.”
  
  
• These invocations of evolution also highlight another common misuse of evolutionary ideas: namely, the idea that some trait must have evolved merely because we can imagine a scenario under which possession of that trait would have been advantageous to fitness.
  
  
• Unfortunately, biologists as well as philosophers have all too often been guilty of this sort of invalid inference. Such forays into evolutionary explanation amount ultimately to storytelling rather than to hypothesis-testing in the scientific sense. 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.
  
  
• To speak of a “Darwinian” process of selection among culturally transmitted ideas, whether scientific theories or memes, is at best only a loose analogy with highly misleading implications. It easily becomes an interpretive blank check, permitting speculation that seems to explain any describable human trait.
  
  
• Moreover, even in the strongest possible interpretation of these arguments, at best they help a little in explaining why we human beings are capable of comprehending the universe — but they still say nothing about why the universe itself is comprehensible.
  

[zendancer]

Mar 18, 2022 9:02:21 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Part 4 - The Eclipse of Epistemology

• Hawking and Mlodinow, in the chapter of their book called “The Theory of Everything,” quote Albert Einstein: “The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible.”
  
  
• In response, Hawking and Mlodinow offer this crashing banality: “The universe is comprehensible because it is governed by scientific laws; that is to say, its behavior can be modeled.” Later, the authors invite us to give ourselves a collective pat on the back: “The fact that we human beings — who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature — have been able to come this close to an understanding of the laws governing us and our universe is a great triumph.”
  
  
• Great triumph or no, none of this addresses Einstein’s paradox, because no explanation is offered as to why our universe is “governed by scientific laws.”
  
  
• Moreover, even if we can be confident that our universe has unchanging physical laws — which many of the new speculative cosmologies call into question — how is it that we “mere collections of particles” are able to discern those laws? How can we be confident that we will continue to discern them better, until we understand them fully? A common response to these questions invokes what has become the catch-all explanatory tool of advocates of scientism: evolution.
  
  
• More recently, scientific theories themselves have come to be considered the objects of natural selection.
  
  
• Richard Dawkins has famously extended this analysis to ideas in general, which he calls “memes.”
  
  
• These invocations of evolution also highlight another common misuse of evolutionary ideas: namely, the idea that some trait must have evolved merely because we can imagine a scenario under which possession of that trait would have been advantageous to fitness.
  
  
• Unfortunately, biologists as well as philosophers have all too often been guilty of this sort of invalid inference. Such forays into evolutionary explanation amount ultimately to storytelling rather than to hypothesis-testing in the scientific sense. 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.
  
  
• To speak of a “Darwinian” process of selection among culturally transmitted ideas, whether scientific theories or memes, is at best only a loose analogy with highly misleading implications. It easily becomes an interpretive blank check, permitting speculation that seems to explain any describable human trait.
  
  
• Moreover, even in the strongest possible interpretation of these arguments, at best they help a little in explaining why we human beings are capable of comprehending the universe — but they still say nothing about why the universe itself is comprehensible.
  

Ironically, perhaps, the quote from Einstein is also an aspect of scientism because what the universe IS is incomprehensible. That which is comprehensible lies only within the realm of cartoons generated by the intellect, so his statement is, essentially, a huge conceit. In fact, what the universe IS is NOT governed by scientific laws. Scientific "laws" are nothing more than concepts about the universe of abstractions that scientists imagine--a meta-reality rather than an actuality. Anyone who has seen deeply into the true nature of THIS will be humbled by what is seen. That humility is rarely seen in proponents of scientism.

Last night at a dinner party a 70 year old guy said, "It's too bad that we were born when we were because in another twenty years or so, scientists will be able to reverse aging and humans will be able to live forever." He went on to claim that science would also soon cure all major diseases, reverse global warming, and learn how to create lasting peace on earth. His statements reminded me of well-known silicon valley reductionists who talk about consciousness being uploaded into machines so that messy fallible illogical human bodies will no longer be necessary. One of those fellows (I think it was Thiel) has stated that the human digestive system also needs to be improved so that excrement comes out in small odorless pellets! One has to smile at such a naive faith in technology.

[ouroboros]

Mar 18, 2022 6:42:41 GMT -5 @whynot said:

Maybe some specific scientist have taken a hit of late.. but surely Science, itself, is fine.

This is what the Science Council calls their definition of science. Do you have any concerns?

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

Scientific methodology includes the following:

Objective observation: Measurement and data (possibly although not necessarily using mathematics as a tool)

Evidence

Experiment and/or observation as benchmarks for testing hypotheses

Induction: reasoning to establish general rules or conclusions drawn from facts or examples

Repetition

Critical analysis

Verification and testing: critical exposure to scrutiny, peer review and assessment

Objective observation is a concern, given the potential 'observer effect'.

The above seems like a pretty classical definition, and would likely be a concern even for quantum theorists.

[laughter]

Perhaps ironically, there's a clue to scientism that can be had from that most disreputable of "sciences": psychology. "Hard" scientists, after all, dismiss psychology, and I understand why. But psychologists offer us the notion of a "blind spot".

We're coming up on the century mark from the Copenhagen Interpretation. That's where you'll find the clearest demarcation between science and philosophy you'll ever encounter. The implications of the underlying discoveries weren't missed by everyone, but there are just as many offshoots from it that keep the mind spinning as there are denials. Both the offshoots and the denials are mental rabbit warrens.

This is a sort of macrocosm of someone who encounters a silent mind ("internally", for themselves), but then just lets the thing spin up again, going on it's merry way. Like a brief interruption during a din of conversation in a crowded room when someone says something particularly controversial that everyone ignores out of polity, the way they might ignore a loud fart.

To truly question and consider the implications of questioning the subject/object split, is to present many people today with a chasm, a cliff, over which there is nothing but a free fall.

[laughter]

Mar 18, 2022 6:42:41 GMT -5 @whynot said:

Mar 14, 2022 13:05:42 GMT -5 Reefs said:

I am aware that we have a number of very scientifically minded people here. And as some of you may have noticed, the credibility of science took a bit of a hit in recent years, mainly due to increasing scientific overreach and questionable methodology, especially lately. A while ago I found an interesting article on this topic, "The Folly of Scientism - Why scientists shouldn’t trespass on philosophy’s domain" which addresses this problem of scientific overreach, its origins, characteristics and developments:

www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-folly-of-scientism

It is very well written, IMO, but it is a rather long article (or essay), so I thought I'd better break it up into several parts and just quote the main points, or else, I'm afraid, no one here is going to read it.



Part 1  - What is Scientism?


... and some dictionary definitions:

Maybe some specific scientist have taken a hit of late.. but surely Science, itself, is fine.

This is what the Science Council calls their definition of science. Do you have any concerns?

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

Scientific methodology includes the following:

Objective observation: Measurement and data (possibly although not necessarily using mathematics as a tool)

Evidence

Experiment and/or observation as benchmarks for testing hypotheses

Induction: reasoning to establish general rules or conclusions drawn from facts or examples

Repetition

Critical analysis

Verification and testing: critical exposure to scrutiny, peer review and assessment

I've read authors that point out at the dawn of science there was this bargain that was made between scientists and the oppressive Vatican: scientists were studying the body and the Earth, the creations of God and how they express God's will. The mind, the spirit and the heavens were reserved for the clerics. These authors speculate that this led to a "mind/body" duality in Western thought that isn't mirrored in Eastern thought. They put the start of this split at the aftermath of Galileo and finalize it with Descartes.

Eventually, predictably and understandably, the scientists threw off this constriction, and the Church has always been their enemy. This is punctuated most succinctly by Laplace answering Napoleon:

N: "And where is God in your theory?"
L: "I have no need for that hypothesis"

What the transhumanists are about to learn is the meaning of the old myth of Icarus. Some wisdom, is quite timeless.

There will always be curious people who experiment and make discoveries that both benefit and vex mankind, regardless of this current cultural cycle. It's something that was going on long before even the invention of the notion of "science", after all, and it's quite likely that we've forgotten much of what those curious people discovered in the distant past, a trend which is likely to continue on very long time scales.

[ouroboros]

Mar 18, 2022 16:30:37 GMT -5 @whynot said:

Mar 18, 2022 12:14:59 GMT -5 ouroboros said:

Objective observation is a concern, given the potential 'observer effect'.

The above seems like a pretty classical definition, and would likely be a concern even for quantum theorists.

Well most sciencey stuff is over my pay grade but I do enjoy some of the fruits of their labors.


But hey that new James Webb telescope is a pretty cool evolution of science. We come out of the Savannah and then yada yada we're placing autonomous objects in space beyond the moon..

Absolutely, you just have to marvel at some of those fruits, and presume some level of objectivity too, for all that to be possible.

I'm also very excited by that JW telescope, can't wait to see what it can do. I can never quite get my head around how those things can be literally looking into the distant past in 'real-time' …. so to speak.

[Deleted]

Mar 19, 2022 6:34:04 GMT -5 ouroboros said:

Mar 18, 2022 16:30:37 GMT -5 @whynot said:

Well most sciencey stuff is over my pay grade but I do enjoy some of the fruits of their labors.


But hey that new James Webb telescope is a pretty cool evolution of science. We come out of the Savannah and then yada yada we're placing autonomous objects in space beyond the moon..

Absolutely, you just have to marvel at some of those fruits, and presume some level of objectivity too, for all that to be possible.

I'm also very excited by that JW telescope, can't wait to see what it can do. I can never quite get my head around how those things can be literally looking into the distant past in 'real-time' …. so to speak.

I always feel that competent science does not conflict at all with spirituality. It just reveals details about Nature (aka Creation) that we can't easily see with the naked eye. And sometimes what it reveals is just awesome. Those details could be hidden from obvious sight by being too small, too large, too distant, or requiring some deduction from observations. 

That's a key difference: do you look at science as a way to reveal and be in awe of Creation (good), or do you look at science like your intellect is dominating life and "knowing" everything (nope). 

In addition to the folly of scientism, there is also a folly of science denial, or ignorance. But that would be another thread.