We've talked quite a bit recently about neuroscience, not to mention scientism -- which again, I take to be:
the idea that science is applicable to any domain of inquiry that is meaningful, and will inevitably provide a solution to all meaningful questions
Mark calls it "the dreaded scientism," I think because he doubts it's so prevalent or powerful; whereas I find it a constant, cultural irritation, and I've been meaning to catalog the examples as they come up.
Here's one: V.S. Ramachandran has written the kind of book that for me has the effect of something like crack: The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human.
generally lucid, charming, and informative, with much humor to lighten the load of Latinate brain disquisitions. He is a leader in his field and is certainly an ingenious and tireless researcher. This is the best book of its kind that I have come across for scientific rigor, general interest, and clarity—though some of it will be a hard slog for the uninitiated.
But McGinn also criticizes Ramachandran's "reductive discussion" of aesthetics and "speculative chapter on the brain and self-consciousness:"
It is undoubtedly fascinating to read of these bizarre cases and learn about the intricate neural machinery that underlies our normal experience. It is also, in my opinion, perfectly acceptable to propose bold speculations about what might be going on, even if the speculation seems unfounded or far-fetched; as Ramachandran frequently remarks, science thrives on risky conjecture. But there are times when the impression of theoretical overreaching is unmistakable, and the relentless neural reductionism becomes earsplitting.
And more importantly, when it comes to free will:
Learning about the parts of the brain responsible for free choice will not tell us how to analyze the concept of freedom or whether it is possible to be free in a deterministic world. These are conceptual questions, not questions about the form of the neural machinery that underlies choice. His book has all the charm of an enthusiast’s tract—along with the inevitable omissions, distortions, and exaggerations.
This review has led to one of the New York Review of Books' famous, testy exchanges. Here's the most unfortunate (but telling) part of Ramachandran's reply to McGinn's review:
Early in any scientific enterprise, it is best to forge ahead and not get bogged down by semantic distinctions. But “forging ahead” is a concept alien to philosophers, even those as distinguished as McGinn. To a philosopher who demanded that he define consciousness before studying it scientifically, Francis Crick once responded, “My dear chap, there was never a time in the early years of molecular biology when we sat around the table with a bunch of philosophers saying ‘let us define life first.’ We just went out there and found out what it was: a double helix.”
For which he gets soundly spanked:
Ramachandran’s reply confirms my impression that he combines scientific expertise with philosophical naiveté.
...
Crick’s dismissive response to the question of defining consciousness shows a total blindness to the possibility that “consciousness” might be a highly ambiguous word, covering very different types of phenomena—sensory experience, cognition, attention, wakefulness, self-consciousness. Obviously any investigation of something called “consciousness” will have to be clear about which of these senses might be in question—for instance, distinguishing self-awareness from simple perception. Philosophers have done much to clarify these distinctions.
...
Again, Ramachandran reveals his lack of understanding of philosophical problems in suggesting that neurology can resolve questions like free will and qualia—though it may provide relevant data. Philosophers want to know whether free will is possible in a deterministic world and whether qualia are reducible to brain states (among many other things): these questions are not going to be resolved by discovering the neural correlates of such things. Here I suggest that he consult an introductory text in philosophy of mind.
...
My advice would be to spend some time studying some basic philosophy, instead of caricaturing it (“‘forging ahead’ is a concept alien to philosophers”); that might lead to a neuroscientist with philosophical sophistication—which would be something of real value in today’s intellectual culture.
Harsh. I'll wait until I've read Ramachandran's book to pass judgment on him in particular; but it seems to me in general that the popularizers of science (themselves usually prestigious scientists) often feel compelled to engage in philosophical speculation, even while they have little respect for the discipline of philosophy. And in Ramachandran's case, the fact that a prestigious philosopher has called him out seems to mean very little to him. Philosophy, after all, isn't a hard science, doesn't involve the same prestige as the hard sciences, and as far many are concerned does not involve a subject matter that won't one day simply be dissolved in a scientific elixir. That's the position of scientism, and I think we have many good reasons to believe that it's false. But in the meantime, it's a dominant cultural idol, and to the extent that there is a public discourse on such subjects, they will be dominated by sophomoric, pseudo-philosophical speculations that are hardly better than astrology.
On a related note, the New York Review of Books also has Searle's review of Damasio's Self Comes to Mind
-- Wes
So, Wes
Scientism is “the idea that science is applicable to any domain of inquiry that is meaningful, and will inevitably provide a solution to all meaningful questions”
All scientists say this? I bet what they actually hold to is the efficacy for uncovering reality thru a scientific method of foregoing prejudgment and instead nurturing a healthy skepticism toward interim findings until such time as hard work has revealed a strong theoretical explanation of observations.
The kind of things I tried to get you to discuss in the Eagleman combox but you would not.
Instead of forgoing prejudgment, like a professional scientist, prior to actually reading it, you give us a critical analysis of a body of scientific work (Rama’s neuroscience) from a professional philosopher’s newspaper post of trivial rantings against the work.
I’ll side with your mangled interpretation of scientism quoted above long before granting any credibility to your hyper-opinionated, beyond any reproach/discussion, NY Times mode of seeking the most likely nature of reality.
If you know someone with a brain tumor causing cognition problems, send them to Rama, not McGinn.
And if you want to stay alive as a professional philosopher, listen to the good doctor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8aWBcPVPMo
You might learn about the scientific method by following the many vid links with this video where Feynman philosophizes – or just do your typical search for truth in the NY Times for some ass-wipe criticism of his work.
Burl — I have a degree in the history of science, interned in nuclear physics at the Naval Research Laboratory, and write about engineering for a living. And I’ve long been a fan of Feynman.
And as I’ve made clear from these posts, my interest in cognitive neuroscience is strong enough to make it hard for me to put these books down, whatever my philosophical objections.
So it’s not a hostility toward science that motivates these remarks, a lack of due reverence for the scientific method.
And that you wish to settle the debate based on who’d you send to for your brain tumor really just underscores my point.
The only thing I will take issue with, for fear of being demolished again, is this, “it’s a dominant cultural idol.”
When a majority of Americans don’t believe in evolution, and it’s good politics to proclaim that global warming either isn’t real, or isn’t contributed to by humans, despite the most ardent assertions of the scientific community to the contrary, than I think it’s hard to say that scientism is so dominant in our culture.
Science isn’t even required for the last year of most high school curriculum.
That’s a good point. Normally I restrict the domain when I’m talking about such things to the kind of people who are culturally engaged at this level. Although I think it’s conceivable that some are influenced by both opposing trends here at the same time.
Then again, their are arrogant lab rats like these about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEbSABWJiJc
“Back off man…I’m a scientists!”
lol, yes
Likewise to what you mention as good about science, I am not all up on science and all down on philosophy. I attempted to discuss the matter here with PELers, to no avail.
Recall that I was quite taken aback when (I think) I understood that Whitehead argued w/ Einstein against gravity being warped spacetime on philosophical grounds. W said E was mixing apples and oranges saying the right side of his equations of GRT containing terms for energy density and matter (= brute facts of past physical events) was ontologically equivalent to the left-hand side of the equation concerning geometry of the universe (= conceptual entity, a universal like Plato’s Forms).
I argued that philosophers and scientists alike swallowed E’s error against W’s simpler and more elegant GRT (that has still to be disproven) because the fame of E and societal scientism overwhelmed scienctists who felt no need to look into phil that they did not understand, and philosophers who maybe grasped the two GRTs but were all into words and anti-Whitehead to even bother.
W said gravity is due to a field action, and dark energy/matter and/or gravitons prove him presciently accurate.
So in the interests of phil, science, scientism, history of science, Naval Academy, etc., is anyone willing or able to spend some time explaining this? If correct, it has been disasterous insofar as it has set us behind 80 years in understanding gravity – no trivial faux pas for phil or science.
I’m having a hard time finding anything on the internet that says W’s view of gravity is alive and well. Could you point me to some reading burl?
From my bookmarks, I only have these
http://www.andrewhyman.com/articles/whitehead.pdf
http://www.wbabin.net/weuro/anderton64.pdf
I linked to some on PEL in the past that I don’t think I bookmarkrd
Sorry to leave you hanging. Our local no-kill shelter is having AC issues that pulled me away.
I think the following gives the most poignant taste of W’s intensity of feeling about E’s bad ontology. I always double check myself when a humble man disagrees w/ me, but I bet E did not share this attitude – he was the celeb.
http://www.ctr4process.org/publications/SeminarPapers/30_2-DesmetR.pdf
Oy. I just read that whole article. I certainly don’t feel like I have any clear idea of what Whitehead’s position was (I guess I’ll need to look at your links in your previous posting), but I know that relativity was abused as much as natural selection was in terms of trying to drag it into different realms… using relativity to justify ethical positions? That does not sound good.
Thanks burl. So is it your feeling, as this author suggests, that Whitehead should be given more discussion time when considering the philosophy and history of science?
Or that his accoutn is actually correct?
I am rereading the pdf on W and E’s meeting at Lord Haldane and googling some of the references.
Yes, I really believe it is a great probability that W’s equations of R will resurface because they are meant to handle gravity as a field (which gravitons or dark energy represent), and they explicitly are not about a mass curving an etherless spacetime (there never was a vacuum in space, as Whitehead often repeats when discussing his actual entities).
The pdf is a fine work of the history of science and it helps somewhat in establishing Whitehead’s GRT as a simpler, though just as accurate, model as E’s. W’s is not as radical a departure from Newton’s work – in fact it does not depart at all.
So set me straight here. What am I to make of this?
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0611/0611006v1.pdf
Whoa, Ethan
At first glance of the title, I’d say things don’t look so good for Alfie.
Our Peanut says its time for her and sister Red to get their walk. I have converted your pdf to size 38 font in Word so my bad eyes can take in what bad news seems to await my return.
Thanks for the search.
Well, I’m not able to follow the math and physics in required detail to comment beyond the point that unless the astrophysics journals show counter arguments to these, it would appear to a non-physicist like me that W got shellacked, here.
I see no definition of gravity posited, nor mention of dark energy/matter or of gravitons; neither is there mention as to whether these things would add support to W or not.
This is a great instance of what Wes likes to discuss about scientism – the scientists killing anything that smacks of philosophic considerations. Here, it is turned on my buddy Alfie. I tend to tip my hat to science in such arguments, but I have definitely made this Whiteheadian alternative to Einstein based on W’s philosophic convictions a strong case for opposing scientism.
I spent most of my career in governmental institutions (Universities and DOTs), so I know how science can be politicized. I wonder why the NSF funded this study, and I will, as best I can, look into any critical discussions of this work.
For the time being, Alfie, things look bad. Perhaps Wes can draw a few lessons from this to share w/ us.
Thanks for the interest, Ethan. Good work.
From the same journal that the Redebunking of Will was located, I actually found this just before Ethan found Will’s second pass at killing ANW (the first was his erroneous attempt of 1971). This mathematical physicist is very supportive of ANW – I am reading it now
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0704/0704.2223v1.pdf
OMG!
All the hunches I have formed from so many snippets googled over the last year or so about ANW’s physics are confirmed ib Coleman’s paper
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0704/0704.2223v1.pdf
Guys, please read this paper – it is world changinging.
Ethan, here’s a quote related to our discussion
“As Whitehead noticed betweem 1917 and 1920, any theory of gravitation
which makes the metric of Space-Time dependent on the circumambient masses is
not viable.
Einstein became famous and GTR thereafter dominated our thinking because
of the claim that GTR predicted the two Classical Tests. In fact, the observed results
were predicted not by GTR but what I now call the ”mongrel” version of GTR
TRILOGY OF ANW 11
which implicitly assumes that ST is flat. ANW’s consistent Theory (iv) explicitly
makes the same predictions. In my lectures about GTR, following Eddington and
most textbooks I justified the mongrel theory by arguing that locally the gravitational
fields are so weak that the Einsteinian and Newtonian metrics could not be
observationally distinguished. This may be true ”observationally ” currently but
there is a distinction or the earth would not move in an ellipse! But this justification
fails completely for the strong fields which increasingly are of cosmological
interest.
In my opinion, Theory (iv) will probably be easier to reconcile with QM and
it is not based on a vicious circle. So currently it is the best available theory even
though, thanks to Clifford Will, we know that as Whitehead expected it is not
Final.
have you encountered the Paul Ricoeur / J-P Changeux discussion, “What makes us think?” ? (princeton UP, 2002)
I’m afraid i don’t feel of sufficient level to give a solid assessment of how successfully it does with this kind of philosopher-neuroscientist exchange, but it has a good ‘meander quotient’, and, from what i remember, went into some interesting and fertile areas.
As well, it didn’t suffer from the “oh go read some basic philo/science” difficulties; they both seem very aware and respectful of each other’s field.
Thanks; I haven’t, but I’ll check that out.
If you guys are interested in neuroscience and how it causes our behavior, I cannot recommend Panksepp enough.
http://www.viddler.com/explore/npsa/videos/26/
His new field is still at the underdog ststus, so John Searle will not be fucking it up for awhile. This is good, because Jaak and followers will lay groundwork (as Whitehead and Darwin before him) to combat and win over the entrenched anthropocentric establishment of cognitive neuroscientists (Damasio being a refreshing exception) who followedgovernment grants from strict behaviorism to gray matter in MRI machines.
In Part II http://www.viddler.com/explore/npsa/videos/27/
at about 1/3 thru, Jaak’s 2 hr summary of his work is applied to affective neuropsychiatry by Mark Sohms, who points out that the SEEKING affect is limbid – it is appetitive drive. This plays a key role in Whitehead’s metaphysics…it is what takes over every occasion of experience after it has prehended the physical feelings of its enviornment; whereupon it seeks to satisfy the urge to most novelly (freely) self-advance into the future. It is Plato’s Eros.
libidinal
Not sure McGinn gives a spanking when you consider the stalemate that analytic/post analytical philosophy has been in over issues in philosophy of mind, free-will, agency. He has a point though that some of the popular science books are quite sloppy in their writing and they gain widespread cultural credence. Science writers are never going to be as careful as philosophers are when stating their claims but they do need to forge ahead and let the philosophers play catch up.
“Learning about the parts of the brain responsible for free choice will not tell us how to analyze the concept of freedom or whether it is possible to be free in a deterministic world. These are conceptual questions, not questions about the form of the neural machinery that underlies choice.”
Philosophers are still arguing about whether it is possible to be free in a deterministic world. They reached a stalemate back in the sixties over the semantics of ‘could of’ and ‘would of’.
So it is time to “forge ahead” as philosophers were getting nowhere with this, and in fact with the expansion of science to philosophical areas we have indeed forged ahead (and all without sitting around and endlessly arguing about the semantics of free will. This is not an either or question (either it is a conceptual question or an empirical one).
We can gain a better understanding of our concepts through testing them against different scenarios as experimental philosophers like Nahmias who you seem to like are want to do.
We can also get a better understanding of subjective experience of freedom through the neuroscientific research. I think the days are gone when philosophers could declare a sharp distinction between conceptual issues and empirical ones as if they could erect a little flag with “Do not Trespass” on they favorite conceptual spaces.
Surely you protest to much to really think that science does not intrude on all areas of human life? Why wouldn’t it? Is there an immortal immaterial soul at work somewhere? The causal-explanatory framework might not provide the best explanation for all areas of life, ignoring the subjective conscious choosing, norms of rational decision making, epistemic warrant etc but it does impinge on everything we do as none of our philosophical musings, intuitions, or emotional responses take place independently of our neurophysical set up and hence no serious thinker can afford to ignore the latest science writing.
I think the smackdown was the other way around.
Philosophers seem too pre-occupied with conceptual analysis and recourse to intuitions and thought experiments. Sitting an armchair, asking in a deep portentous voice, “But what does 2+2 REALLY equal?” gets you absolutely nowhere. The answer is still four.
Ramachandran was perfectly right to point that out. Alas, I don’t think that he did it forcefully enough. Most of mainstream philosophy needs a great big slap in the face.