What can science tell us about truth, goodness, freedom, justice, beauty and love?

[Jewel34]

balto:

I’m not sure that prevalence is sufficient to explain beauty though. I agree that societal influences are powerful, but there are a lot of things that are common but not beautiful. For instance, greedy and dishonest behavior is quite ubiquitous but I think that you’d be hard-pressed to find people that consider it beautiful (even greedy and dishonest people would probably not find it beautiful).

If you think about it, you will find that greedy and dishonest behavior is the exception and not the norm. Besides, not everything produces the proper chemicals which give us the feeling of well-being. The fact of being exposed to stimuli is only a necessary, but not sufficient requirement to find something beautiful.

balto:

I think this is the crux of the matter though. If Mozart was not initially considered beautiful, then why is it considered beautiful now? Making recourse to societal influences doesn’t quite explain it because at its inception, Mozart had to at least find it beautiful and then convince others that it was beautiful.

Some people found it beautiful, since their brain produced chemicals which elicited the feeling of well-being. Others were exposed to it, and started to see the subtlety and the beauty of it. We have the ability to adapt to different stimuli and environments. Learning is one of our most important features.

balto:

I don’t think there is a reason in principle why concepts, morals, and abstractions cannot exist independently of matter.

This is precisely the Platonic worldview. He considered the “ideal abstractions” to be primary, and the material manifestations of them just a crude approximation of the ideal forms. A typical example of putting the cart in front of the horse. Here is a question for you: “what is the ideal, perfect, abstract excrement, the crude approximation of which we produce every morning”? Does it have a “perfect, ideal, abstract stench”?

balto:

I understand that we don’t know exactly when ensoulment occurs, but ensoulment doesn’t necessarily entail that the soul is created at the moment of ensoulment.

If to be a “human” one needs that “soul”, then it is essential to p(name removed by moderator)oint to moment of ensoulment. Prior to that, by your standards, there is only a conglomerate of cells, but no human being. The fact that the church does not have an official teaching on the subject is very important.

balto:

If abstractions and morals exist, we cannot connect to them using material objects alone.

Let me paraphrase. If “walking” exists, we cannot connect to it by our leg muscles alone. Even the language disagrees with your approach. We observe the concrete objects and we create abstractions of them.

 

[balto]

First off, I hope you are having a very merry Christmas and I thank you for giving me things to think about over the past few days.

If you think about it, you will find that greedy and dishonest behavior is the exception and not the norm. Besides, not everything produces the proper chemicals which give us the feeling of well-being. The fact of being exposed to stimuli is only a necessary, but not sufficient requirement to find something beautiful.

Well maybe you’re more optimistic than I am . I agree that being exposed to stimuli is necessary but not sufficient, but what else is necessary? Aren’t the stimuli all that there can be if we are not considering anything immaterial?

Some people found it beautiful, since their brain produced chemicals which elicited the feeling of well-being. Others were exposed to it, and started to see the subtlety and the beauty of it. We have the ability to adapt to different stimuli and environments. Learning is one of our most important features.

If beauty is really only pleasant physical feelings, then whether we find any particular thing to be beautiful is just a random occurrence. But you seem to be suggesting that beauty can be a learned trait. If that’s the case, then what is causing us to reconsider our previous negative feelings about it. Say I am in an art museum and there’s one particular painting that I find repulsive at first glance. But only after staring at it for a while I begin to appreciate the subtlety of the painting as you said. That says to me that there is a meaning behind (not using behind in a physical sense) the artwork that I am realizing after contemplating it for a while. The physical sensory (name removed by moderator)uts I am receiving before and after this realization are the same, so what is the difference between the before and the after?

This is precisely the Platonic worldview. He considered the “ideal abstractions” to be primary, and the material manifestations of them just a crude approximation of the ideal forms. A typical example of putting the cart in front of the horse. Here is a question for you: “what is the ideal, perfect, abstract excrement, the crude approximation of which we produce every morning”? Does it have a “perfect, ideal, abstract stench”?

Well there may be some truth to Plato’s worldview, although I am not sure it’s necessary that the abstraction is 100% and the material object is <100%. I think it’s more likely that the abstraction is the “pure” form and any material instance of it will have added qualities that are unnecessary to the pure form. To answer your question, the concept of excrement would be something from which a living organism has taken all the usable nutrients. The shape, color, smell, etc. are all not necessary to the abstraction. Any particular instance of the abstraction would satisfy the abstraction, but have extra dimensionality that is not required by the abstraction. Not sure if that’s a roundabout way of saying the same thing though.

If to be a “human” one needs that “soul”, then it is essential to p(name removed by moderator)oint to moment of ensoulment. Prior to that, by your standards, there is only a conglomerate of cells, but no human being. The fact that the church does not have an official teaching on the subject is very important.

As I said before ensoulment is believed to occur at conception because before conception there is no distinct body. Even if the Church were to say that ensoulment happens at some point of physical development people would still be asking why it doesn’t happen later, so we’d just be in the same predicament only at a different point in bodily development. Although the Catechism does not use the word “ensoulment” it speaks of defending the embryo as a person from conception as we would with any other human being (CCC 2274).

Let me paraphrase. If “walking” exists, we cannot connect to it by our leg muscles alone. Even the language disagrees with your approach. We observe the concrete objects and we create abstractions of them.

Yes, but the abstractions correspond to a real understanding of walking. We don’t need to witness every possible act of walking to understand what it means for something to walk and recognize it.

 

[Aloysium]

An infinite number of monkeys, given an infinite amount of time at a keyboard could come up with these lines.
Their effort, the final product would reproduce what is written here, but would be intelligible only because it contains meaning.

The world of meaning is of a different order than that of biological processes, chemical reactions and random physical events.
To say that one explains the other may keep things paradox-free, but denies reality.
There are different structural “dimensions” to creation, superimposed on each other. The study of each, in its own way describes some aspect of the totality.

A person is mind, body and soul as a single entity. I am talking about you and me.
We can carve ourselves us up intellectually, in terms of biology, psychology, sociology etc. Each field has its own methods in arriving at an understanding of the person.
For example, descriptions of feelings are different from those of biochemical processes; different models must be employed to describe each approach to the person-in-the-world.

We can come to know ourselves as participants in a cosmos composed of the chemical, mental, social, political, spiritual, etc; each view, each type of relationship requires the appropriate metaphor to be understood and communicated.

Seriously, tell your boss, he/she is a sack of chemicals. People do not do to the powerful, what they do to the weak.

 

[tonyrey]

Nothing matters is everything consists of nothing more than matter!

Correction:

Nothing matters** if** everything consists of nothing more than matter!

(Thought cannot come from things any more than we can get blood out of a stone.

 

[balto]

An infinite number of monkeys, given an infinite amount of time at a keyboard could come up with these lines.
Their effort, the final product would reproduce what is written here, but would be intelligible only because it contains meaning.

Exactly. This is the fundamental point I’ve been trying to make. I don’t think that appealing to the brain states of we, the observers, helps at all because the brain states need to have semantic meaning as well. The best we can get from brain states would be an educated guess the strength of which depends on the researcher’s ability to understand the subject’s brain semantics.

 

[inocente]

Well to my understanding the form of some object would be the way the matter composing it is organized. For instance, a tree is not simply a collection of bark, leaves, sap, etc. but all those materials organized into a particular form. That would describe the soul of the tree. It’s interesting to note that it is taught that all life forms have souls, but humans differ in that their soul is rational and capable of expressing intellect and will.

This need not be a Cartesian answer as body and soul may be two sides of the same coin. I do admit that I am not as well-versed in these matters as some of the other posters, so I may not have answered to your satisfaction, but that was my understanding anyway. I remember reading a neurology review paper a while back that was linked to on a thread around here about life being at the intersection of entropic and syntropic processes, syntropy being order coming from chaos. Not sure how much of it I buy, but if true it may contain the answer to the body/soul paradox. It was interesting nonetheless.

Very few posters seem to agree about what a soul is in relation to a body, so I think you are as well-versed as the rest of us .

Not sure about that neurology paper either, sounds a bit out there.

 

[inocente]

Newton’s laws of physics don’t work at all in relation to nuclear physics.

Correct. They won’t predict tomorrow’s weather either, or tell you who will win the world series. There’s a whole bunch of things they can’t do. Because they were never intended to.

*“Down with dogma?” I thought you were saying Newtonian physics is dogma. *

No. Next you’ll be telling me that your dogma doesn’t allow irrational numbers and so you think Pi should be 3.

*You may have trained as an artist, but I don’t think you believe scribbling is art.

Scribbling is ugly. Only a moron would say it is beautiful. So rules absolutely apply.

My wife and I agree that my handwriting is marginally acceptable. We also agree that her handwriting is beautiful. A moron might not be able to read either of us. *

Your moron, like everyone else, is entitled to his opinion on whether he finds something beautiful. You do not get to decide for him.

I’ve seen a lot of Picasso drawings, and for me he’s incapable of ever making an ugly line. So I would probably find Picasso’s scribbling beautiful. That’s the thing about beauty, we are all equally moronic.

I didn’t say they were wrong. I said they don’t apply to the umpteen trillions of atoms that make up all the stars and planets in space … in other words, the greater realm of reality that inhabits us but we cannot grasp except by a physics Newton could not even imagine because he came too early in history. Newton was enough of a genius to know that he was not the last and absolute word in physics.

innocente’s position is peculiarly contradictory. He is against dogmatism (especially in theology and philosophy) yet he is open to dogmatism in physics because, for example, the laws of physics discovered by Newton work.

When you think someone is “peculiarly contradictory”, it would be a good idea to consider that your understanding may be at fault before blaming it on others.

In this case, you seem to have jumbled up a number of misconceptions. Unlike philosophy, a scientist does not need to try to explain everything, only enough to say something non-trivial. Unlike philosophy, there are no authority figures in science, and no reason why Newton should have anything to say on every topic under the sun. The only authority in science is the evidence. A physical law must not depart from the evidence, it must give the correct results.

So, for instance, when relativistic effects are minimal, Einstein’s field equations simplify to yield Newton’s equation of gravity. For all we know Einstein’s law may also be limited and turn out to be a special case in some more general theory. It’s often the case that earlier theories are replaced by more general and powerful theories in this way. Electricity and magnetism were once treated as separate, now they, along with the weak force are unified.

We have no way of knowing if a scientific theory is true in any absolute sense, all we can know is that it agrees with the evidence. But this is a great advance on philosophy. It means that science will chip away at something like an explanation of consciousness until there is nothing left for the philosophers of mind to quibble about.

 

[Phil_Marinus]

You guys like to use a thousand words when twenty will do…

If you read the question correctly you should realise it is a ridicules question…

Ridicules in the context it is asked… What can the Bible tell you about Paracetamol ,

Radiation therapy, thermonuclear energy ,or how to wire up your house ?

Nothing at all, because it is a ridicules question…