Can science REALLY explain Reality?

[Qoeleth]

Why are mental concepts fictions? That is kind of like saying that there is no difference, in actuality, between things we might classify as “trees”, say, and things we might classify as “planets”.

I would certainly agree that there can only be one reality, as such - that anything supposedly outside the reality we experience, in any way, is a mere fiction. But at what point do you consider that the reality of an experience, in and of itself, may depart from the reality of that which is experienced? This is not to say that the experience itself did not happen - far from it. It is a question pertaining to the precise nature of the experience and where its origins might lie. There is no doubting the reality of mental experience, after all - we may only be mistaken in judging the reasons for said experience.

To offer a fairly simple example, a person may have an experience that they take to be a direct vision of God. If one wanted to analyse this experience, and get to the bottom of what was really happening, in that one and only reality that obtains, does one simply take this claim at face value, and assume that the person claiming the experience actually did see God? Or does one attempt to break it down into the component parts, such as the person’s upbringing and the beliefs they have formed throughout their life, the physical circumstances that obtained both in their own minds (might they have been encouraged by chemical processes in their brains, or under the influence of particular drugs, for example?) and in the external environment (a particular play of light upon a particular surface?) at the time they supposedly saw God? Again, the question must be asked - what is the value of truth, to us, if not to increase our confidence that what we think is the case at any given time actually is the case?

A mental concept, such as “tree” does not really exst. There exists only individual things, some of which may be labelled “trees”, but the class itself has not existence outside the mind, and is therefore a fiction. There is no actually unity between the things mentally placed together in the class “tree”. What if I developed a new mental class “tranets”, which included the both the objects currently called trees and the objects currently called planets? Would this mean these objects had anything in common? No, but science could still study “tranets”.

Since science is concerned with statements pertaining to classes of things, and since such classes do not exist outside the mind, science is just imagination.

You talk about what is ‘really happening’. But perceptions vary- animals see things differently from people, people see things different from people. We cannot make statements with surety, except about our own perceptions (“Object X appears blue to me.”) But even such statements work on the assumption that other people understand the words we use in the same way we do (e.g. other people understand “Blue” to mean the same that it does to me.) So, there would seem to be no access to ‘reality’.

So, I would say the existence of ‘reality’ remains a hypothesis. As for our experiences, the extent to how closely they match reality (if indeed it exists) is an interesting question. Possibly, 1) our experiences match reality exactly, BUT perception differ, which would seem to make this illogical; or 2) Possibly our experiences do not match reality at all (if indeed it exists), BUT then what is the grounds of our perception?

All in all, the whole question remains undecided, But there appears to be no particular reason for favouring scientific discourse.

 

[atheistgirl]

But there appears to be no particular reason for favouring scientific discourse.

Feel free to ignore gravity - at your peril

Sarah x

 

[Ben_Quincy]

Official reminder:

Post charitably.

 

[tonyrey]

Love is an inherently relational experience - the object of love, as such, inspires affection and the desire for the well-being of said object, to the extent that one’s actions are motivated to bring about the well-being of the object. In some circumstances, love may have a sexual origin, but that is not the only origin possible. It certainly was not the origin of what I considered to be the love I felt towards my dog, nor is it the origin of my love for members of my immediate family or certain of my friends. It sounds like you are trying to oversimplify a complex phenomenon.

Your previous view:

However, as a somewhat more prosaic explanation than the one you’ve offered, when we interact with people whose company we enjoy, especially when we are in the intimate company of a person to whom we feel a sexual attraction, endorphins are released in the body, which result in feelings of euphoria, contentment, satisfaction - depending upon the extent to which we are affected.

forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=5958722&postcount=50

Is love a physical reaction caused by a desire for physical satisfaction over which we have no control ?

 

[Julia_Mae]

Love is an inherently relational experience - the object of love, as such, inspires affection and the desire for the well-being of said object, to the extent that one’s actions are motivated to bring about the well-being of the object. In some circumstances, love may have a sexual origin, but that is not the only origin possible. It certainly was not the origin of what I considered to be the love I felt towards my dog, nor is it the origin of my love for members of my immediate family or certain of my friends. It sounds like you are trying to oversimplify a complex phenomenon.

Re: bolded portion:

How?

 

[Gaber]

Interesting post--------------I would say the closer one gets to “reality,” the better. Which sort of puts science near the top of the “list.”

Yes, though approximatios aell “it,” except sometimes as pointers. Science certainly does have a great edge, relative to surfaces, or things labled “it” and “they.” W see that as it moves from Newtonian to going past Einsteinian paradigms at an accelerating pace. Not so good at “I” and “me,” save, again, as superficials. The only method of dealing directly with Reality is the one that has been with us since the begining. That would, in our day, be the method of self inquiry which leads to the “off” switch for the discursive mind, so one can learn to listen to the Stillness God said He/She is. That way of knowledge has devolved into religions during the brutaly dark times of human intellect from about 4K years ago, those times reaching their depth about the time of the Roman empire. World wide there wer tragedies of disruption going on about then. Only now are we starting to climb out of that, back to the thankfully longer cycle where our awareness is again Edenic.

But fortunately, despite the state of the race, there are always individuals who get “there.” We are at a time where they are notuc any longer in fear fo bieng cast out or stoned, so they are again being publicly heard from. Eventually, even the institutions that sponsor the current views of “spirituality” will change and merge into a very much more homogeneous Understanding.

 

[jimmy]

A mental concept, such as “tree” does not really exst. There exists only individual things, some of which may be labelled “trees”, but the class itself has not existence outside the mind, and is therefore a fiction. There is no actually unity between the things mentally placed together in the class “tree”. What if I developed a new mental class “tranets”, which included the both the objects currently called trees and the objects currently called planets? Would this mean these objects had anything in common? No, but science could still study “tranets”.

Since science is concerned with statements pertaining to classes of things, and since such classes do not exist outside the mind, science is just imagination.

You talk about what is ‘really happening’. But perceptions vary- animals see things differently from people, people see things different from people. We cannot make statements with surety, except about our own perceptions (“Object X appears blue to me.”) But even such statements work on the assumption that other people understand the words we use in the same way we do (e.g. other people understand “Blue” to mean the same that it does to me.) So, there would seem to be no access to ‘reality’.

So, I would say the existence of ‘reality’ remains a hypothesis. As for our experiences, the extent to how closely they match reality (if indeed it exists) is an interesting question. Possibly, 1) our experiences match reality exactly, BUT perception differ, which would seem to make this illogical; or 2) Possibly our experiences do not match reality at all (if indeed it exists), BUT then what is the grounds of our perception?

All in all, the whole question remains undecided, But there appears to be no particular reason for favouring scientific discourse.

Frankly, this whole post is a big pile of bs. It may sound uncharitable to you if I call your post **** but to me it sounds like the most kind and good hearted thing I could say. You it is all in theh mind and we all perceive it as we like. I think I said your post is crape but you think I said it was awesome, Nobel prize worthy.

The fact is that all trees have characteristics that put them in the class of tree. They aren’t just a bunch of randomly chosen objects smacked together and called’tree’. Your treenets have nothing in common. The fact is that the characteristics of a tree are as real as your mind and to deny them is a break from sanity. The most you can say is that the word tree is in the mind.

 

[Qoeleth]

Frankly, this whole post is a big pile of bs. It may sound uncharitable to you if I call your post **** but to me it sounds like the most kind and good hearted thing I could say. You it is all in theh mind and we all perceive it as we like. I think I said your post is crape but you think I said it was awesome, Nobel prize worthy.

The fact is that all trees have characteristics that put them in the class of tree. They aren’t just a bunch of randomly chosen objects smacked together and called’tree’. Your treenets have nothing in common. The fact is that the characteristics of a tree are as real as your mind and to deny them is a break from sanity. The most you can say is that the word tree is in the mind.

Do the class of object called ‘trees’ really have much in common? They differ in size, shape, texture, colour, locality, etc. There is no unity within the class, apart from unity the imposed by the mental concept “tree”.

In the same way, the mental concept “tranet” unifies objects we currently call ‘trees’ and ‘planets’. Some tranets are big and round and in space, while others are long and upright and planted in the ground. Just like some trees are small, twisted, and brown, while others are immense, straight and green.

 

[jimmy]

Do the class of object called ‘trees’ really have much in common? They differ in size, shape, texture, colour, locality, etc. There is no unity within the class, apart from unity the imposed by the mental concept “tree”.

In the same way, the mental concept “tranet” unifies objects we currently call ‘trees’ and ‘planets’. Some tranets are big and round and in space, while others are long and upright and planted in the ground. Just like some trees are small, twisted, and brown, while others are immense, straight and green.

They share cell structure, photosynthetic function, similar physical structure, and etc. Just because you can point out differences doesn’t mean there isn’t unity in the class. The class is based on a definition and that definition includes certain characteristics. Things that contain those characteristics fall into that class.

As I said above, the most you can say is that the word is in your mind. The characteristics are in the objects.

Unless you are a solipsist who says that everything is one of yoir illusions. If that’s the case this discussion is pointless.

 

[In_Spiration]

I’m sorry, but I do not think so.

Science’s domain concerns explaining the world of nature and its phenomena.

It is PHILOSOPHY (and Religion) that explain Reality, not science.

Anybody who thinks Science=Reality is under the spell of Scientism, and that is faith-based.

And true science is NOT faith-based in any way. It concerns studying and explaining (defined) natural phenomena. NOT reality.

But the Scientific Method is faith-based. It relies primarily on dubitable abductive logic, inference to the best sufficient explanation. And of course that’s only the “best” in a somewhat subjective manner – that is, the best at time t, and given a particular amount of (limited) experience. Here’s a better account:
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on C.S. Peirce:

Peirce began to hold that there were two utterly distinct classes of probable inferences, which he referred to as inductive inferences and abductive inferences (which he also called hypotheses and retroductive inferences).

. . . The most important extension Peirce made of his earliest views on what deduction, induction, and abduction involved was to integrate the three argument forms into his view of the systematic procedure for seeking truth that he called the “scientific method.” . . . Scientific method begins with abduction or hypothesis: because of some perhaps surprising or puzzling phenomenon, a conjecture or hypothesis is made about what actually is going on. This hypothesis should be such as to explain the surprising phenomenon, such as to render the phenomenon more or less a matter of course if the hypothesis should be true. Scientific method then proceeds to the stage of deduction: by means of necessary inferences, conclusions are drawn from the provisionally-adopted hypothesis about the obtaining of phenomena other than the surprising one that originally gave rise to the hypothesis. Conclusions are reached, that is to say, about other phenomena that must obtain if the hypothesis should actually be true. These other phenomena must be such that experimental tests can be performed whose results tell us whether the further phenomena do obtain or do not obtain. Finally, scientific method proceeds to the stage of induction: experiments are actually carried out in order to test the provisionally-adopted hypothesis by ascertaining whether the deduced results do or do not obtain. . . . The entire procedure of hypothesis-testing, and not merely that part of it that consists of arguing from sample to population, is called induction in Peirce’s later philosophy.

An important part of Peirce’s full conception of scientific method is what he called the “economics (or: economy) of research.” The idea is that, because research is difficult, research labor-time is valuable and should not be wasted. Both in the creation of hypotheses to be tested and in the experiments chosen to test these hypotheses, we should act so as to get the very most cognitive bang for the buck, so to say. The object is to proceed at every stage so as to maximize the reduction in indeterminacy of our beliefs. [Emphasis by In Spiration.]

The Scientific Method is fundamentally a method for gradually reducing, not eliminating, the uncertainty of whatever promising hypotheses we’ve come to believe in after having deemed them sufficiently explicative of new raw data that initially wasn’t covered by one’s prior set of theoretical convictions. It is probability-based, and thus there’s room, however slight, for error.

Therefore any time one chooses to accept a conclusion from the Scientific Method, he’s making the choice to proceed in the face of a specific risk for error. He’s effectively gambling with what he finds to be his best odds in a game that’s undetermined (as far as he knows), with faith in a probability that he personally considers high enough to justify that leap from suspension of belief to adoption of belief. Or in other words, belief results once one thinks the probable good of the belief (the “juice”) is worth the possible evil of the risk (the “squeeze”).

 

[Sair]

Re: bolded portion:

How?

You’re asking how the object of love inspires the feelings of love? Well, I don’t actually know. There’s some evidence to suggest that human mothers are genetically and chemically programmed to bond with their infants, and that we have been known to extend this sort of response to anything that roughly resembles a human infant, in terms of being small, soft, helpless and with proportionally large features relative to the size of the head - puppies are a good example, and baby harp seals. There are hormones and sundry other chemicals at work in our bodies that make us feel happy and safe in the company of certain people - oxytocin, for example, the so-called “cuddle hormone”, production of which is stimulated by such things as sexual intercourse and also breast-feeding, tends to facilitate bonding between either sexual partners in the first circumstance, or mother and infant in the latter circumstance. We also tend to bond with others, in general, with whom we feel safe and confident.

These are things we have been able to discover thus far. It’s far from being the whole story about how and why we experience love for certain others. However, I’m not prepared to claim that just because I don’t have a complete biological explanation for the experience of love and the motivation to action it provides, that love must therefore be some supernatural phenomenon that can only be experienced by a supernatural soul. That is just another form of the god-of-the-gaps argument.

 

[Sair]

Is love a physical reaction caused by a desire for physical satisfaction over which we have no control ?

I do maintain that we have no ultimate control over our feelings of love towards any other. Love, in my view, means comprehending the welfare of the loved one as our own, and I do consider this to be an ultimately physical, practical sense that we have. I certainly did not exert any conscious control over the attraction I felt towards the man who is now my husband - but I was certainly content to let my feelings motivate my actions, in moving across the country to be with him (though with the practical consideration of securing employment beforehand!) Nor do I have any conscious control over my response to members of the canine species - I feel immense affection, respect and a sense of protectiveness over them, and cruelty against them makes my blood boil (figuratively speaking, of course). These feelings motivate my actions. I could deny the motivation and not act upon it, if I chose - but the consequences of that would almost certainly be a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing, because I would be acting against my inclination. I would be, as before, unable to govern these feelings or make them go away.

We can exert control over the actions we undertake, and we can thus behave with charity to those with whom we are not personally familiar - through what we generally consider the moral notion of doing towards others that which we would like others to do for us were we in the same circumstances. There is also a sense of solidarity and security that results from these kinds of actions. I donate to charities and give money to people in the street for this very reason. Yes, this moral notion has a practical basis, and acting towards others in this way does indeed give us satisfaction that I would say is, ultimately, physical. What I don’t understand is why its physicality should somehow diminish its significance for our lives.

 

[tonyrey]

I do maintain that we have no ultimate control over our feelings of love towards any other. Love, in my view, means comprehending the welfare of the loved one as our own, and I do consider this to be an ultimately physical, practical sense that we have. I certainly did not exert any conscious control over the attraction I felt towards the man who is now my husband - but I was certainly content to let my feelings motivate my actions, in moving across the country to be with him (though with the practical consideration of securing employment beforehand!) Nor do I have any conscious control over my response to members of the canine species - I feel immense affection, respect and a sense of protectiveness over them, and cruelty against them makes my blood boil (figuratively speaking, of course). These feelings motivate my actions. I could deny the motivation and not act upon it, if I chose - but the consequences of that would almost certainly be a sense of inadequacy and self-loathing, because I would be acting against my inclination. I would be, as before, unable to govern these feelings or make them go away.

We can exert control over the actions we undertake, and we can thus behave with charity to those with whom we are not personally familiar - through what we generally consider the moral notion of doing towards others that which we would like others to do for us were we in the same circumstances. There is also a sense of solidarity and security that results from these kinds of actions. I donate to charities and give money to people in the street for this very reason. Yes, this moral notion has a practical basis, and acting towards others in this way does indeed give us satisfaction that I would say is, ultimately, physical. What I don’t understand is why its physicality should somehow diminish its significance for our lives.

I appreciate your heart-felt sincerity, admire your consideration for others and understand your viewpoint but I believe you implicitly believe in free will. To be able to “deny the motivation and not act upon it, if I chose” implies that you can control yourself when you make the effort to do so. The question is where you obtain this power and how you exercise it…

If you cannot explain it biologically then it is more reasonable to have an open mind rather than categorically deny the existence - or ignore the possibility - of a supernatural dimension of reality.

 

[Sair]

I appreciate your heart-felt sincerity, admire your consideration for others and understand your viewpoint but I believe you implicitly believe in free will. To be able to “deny the motivation and not act upon it, if I chose” implies that you can control yourself when you make the effort to do so. The question is where you obtain this power and how you exercise it…

If you cannot explain it biologically then it is more reasonable to have an open mind rather than categorically deny the existence - or ignore the possibility - of a supernatural dimension of reality.

It’s certainly true that I take what is called a compatibilist view of free will - that is, I don’t absolutely deny that we have the ability to govern our actions to some extent, despite being part of a deterministic universe. I think the actual extent to which we have such an ability - an ability that involves the capacity to comprehend the probable consequences of our actions (and this comprehension being amongst the determiners of our behaviour) - tends towards being evidence against a supernatural aspect to the self, or the kind of free will that consists in being the conscious originators of our thoughts and actions, as opposed to our consciousness being simply one component of the deterministic process. In any case, it remains an open question, although I must admit to being thoroughly intrigued by the possibility of an ultimate explanation of how it is that we feel ourselves to be (and might well actually be) responsible agents, despite being enmeshed in the causal web of the universe.

 

[inocente]

Love is not a subjective feeling. If you’re talking about feelings, that’s infatuation. Measuring feelings are outside of jurisdiction of the natural sciences I’ve listed in my original question.

Love, and to be specific, agape - unselfish, giving, love, cannot be measured using the natural sciences I have listed, because doing so is outside of their jurisdiction.

Au contraire. Love in all its forms is emotion, and as such it has subjective aspects which are not open to natural science, and objective aspects which are. For instance, science can investigate whether compassion has societal survival benefits and so on. It can’t explain what the subjective feeling of compassion feels like, but then nothing else can either.

*If you believe that love is not part of reality, then neither are feelings like hatred, anger, sadness, depression.

I doubt you are going there.*

I’m suggesting that the human experience of reality cannot help but be a mix of the objective and subjective, since ultimately we can only look at the world through the eyes of our own species, and probably only through our own culture. A girl in a nomadic tribe in the Maghreb experiences a very different reality to you or me, and her reality is just as valid.

Perhaps, but philosophy is another science that may be better to explain agape. However, since agape is not a natural thing but supernatural, you’ll have to use a supernatural science like theology to explain that better.

I’d say they give complementary explanations rather than rule any out.

 

[inocente]

And, indeed, I’ve seen dowsers accurately dowse and when I tried it nothing happened. Same for some of the other devices in the book.

Some people are amazed that dowsers find water. They seem to imagine that water flows in “veins”, underground streams, whereas of course virtually anywhere you drill you’ll find water in an aquifer. Dowsing is an interesting example of how people have fooled themselves for millennia.

Does that mean that there isn’t some realm of sensibilities that account for, say, a dog knowing its master is leaving for home at a time randomly selected by someone else, or other such phenomena? We now know that there is some concentration of iron in the human nose, and moreso in other animals beaks, etc, that now gives credence to the phrase “a nose for North.” Or maybe like some folks in the past, some of us believe we as a race already know everything, despite just starting to come out of ages of materialism?

I think we’ll do just fine exploring natural explanations, and find it very strange when some talk of the spiritual as if it’s another world.

 

[inocente]

But the Scientific Method is faith-based. It relies primarily on dubitable abductive logic, inference to the best sufficient explanation. And of course that’s only the “best” in a somewhat subjective manner – that is, the best at time t, and given a particular amount of (limited) experience.

If science is faith-based and subjective, how come it cures diseases when theologians can’t, how come it put a man on the Moon while philosophers could only stand and watch? Name a philosopher/theologian in the last hundred years who had as much influence as, say (just for starters) penicillin, big bang theory, genetics or computers. Science works, other disciplines not so much.

Therefore any time one chooses to accept a conclusion from the Scientific Method, he’s making the choice to proceed in the face of a specific risk for error. He’s effectively gambling with what he finds to be his best odds in a game that’s undetermined (as far as he knows), with faith in a probability that he personally considers high enough to justify that leap from suspension of belief to adoption of belief. Or in other words, belief results once one thinks the probable good of the belief (the “juice”) is worth the possible evil of the risk (the “squeeze”).

Granted that ultimately a mustard seed of faith is always needed but imho you’re not comparing apples with apples. You pointed out that scientists go to great lengths to calculate the error bars so as to minimize reliance on faith, but then ignored that this is very different from, say, the religious fundamentalist’s absolute certainty in their absolutely blind faith.

 

[inocente]

If you cannot explain it biologically then it is more reasonable to have an open mind rather than categorically deny the existence - or ignore the possibility - of a supernatural dimension of reality.

Agreed, but I’m not sure that’s possible, since any attempt to draw out a detailed explanation from a “supernaturalist” gets the closed response that the supernatural can’t be explained, and any attempt to find out how to test it draws the closed response that the supernatural can’t be tested.

 

[Julia_Mae]

Do the class of object called ‘trees’ really have much in common? They differ in size, shape, texture, colour, locality, etc. There is no unity within the class, apart from unity the imposed by the mental concept “tree”.

In the same way, the mental concept “tranet” unifies objects we currently call ‘trees’ and ‘planets’. Some tranets are big and round and in space, while others are long and upright and planted in the ground. Just like some trees are small, twisted, and brown, while others are immense, straight and green.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linnaean_taxonomy

You mig ht want to think about taking a simple biology course to understand why, by whatever name, we group living things into the various groups.

Linneaus was a brilliant man who, understood, long before the advent of Darwin, that shared traits were the key to these groups.

For instance, in the animal kingdom, some animals have spinal chords, some do not. You do which makes you part of the group of chordates. In that group, some have vertebrae, some don’t. You do, you are in a group called (vertebrata) and those without (invertebrata). See here: anthro.palomar.edu/animal/table_humans.htm

I don’t know much about biology except that all plants are also subject to the same rules.

So when you say trees have nothing in common, what you really mean is that you don’t know what it is that made someone give that group a single name. Do trees have anything in common with planets? Sure, you can divide the universe into things material and immaterial and they would both be in things material. But they can’t be the only two material things, and so there is no tranet because it’s less imaginative than nonsensical.

Of course, you are free to think of reality any way you wish.

 

[Julia_Mae]

The Scientific Method is fundamentally a method for gradually reducing, not eliminating, the uncertainty of whatever promising hypotheses we’ve come to believe in after having deemed them sufficiently explicative of new raw data that initially wasn’t covered by one’s prior set of theoretical convictions. It is probability-based, and thus there’s room, however slight, for error.

Therefore any time one chooses to accept a conclusion from the Scientific Method, he’s making the choice to proceed in the face of a specific risk for error. He’s effectively gambling with what he finds to be his best odds in a game that’s undetermined (as far as he knows), with faith in a probability that he personally considers high enough to justify that leap from suspension of belief to adoption of belief. Or in other words, belief results once one thinks the probable good of the belief (the “juice”) is worth the possible evil of the risk (the “squeeze”).

Nice post, I agree. Ultimately, the thing we can know is what we experience, IMO. And even then, we need to have that experience validated by another, to be sure it isn’t an hallucination. They don’t necessarily have to experience with us, but we seek to find those who have similar experience which we determine by the way they describe it. Science does this by replicating experiments and observations. We do it by talking to each other or reading each other’s accounts.