Science and Atheism

[Shaker]

This is mostly nonsense.

Generous of you.

[Jack Knave]

This is mostly nonsense.  Clearly scientists are human and as individuals subject to the range of human biases but I don't think we can extrapolate to a sort of racism-like group bias for the scientific community as a whole. 'Materialism' is largely a strawman hurled by theists at non theists for not believing in the supernatural.  What scientists would admit to is 'naturalism', that being what science is all about, the study of what is natural, clearly anything supernatural would not be amenable to investigation by definition. When we follow what the evidence suggests we are following the evidence not some 'ideology', that is just conspiratorial thinking.

You're really having to clutch at straws to fight back, aren't you. And you should note I'm an atheist.

But that is one of my points that the sum of the individual scientist's biases is a collective ideological bias because they have pretty much all come from the same school and culture. A kind of tribal chant. To pick on the word materialism is sad. It is a word that clearly conveys a general idea of what is being expressed and has no invidious overtones to it, when applied to a group - people understand the gist of what is being said - but I can use naturalism if you want.

There's no such thing as supernatural as everything is natural, unless one provided a restrictive definition of what is natural.

You can't follow the evidence because it does not go anywhere as it is not capable of leading. One goes where one thinks it is pointing to based on ones education and world view. We see this when young children come up with odd conclusions, to us, to situations they are presented with or come across.

[torridon]

And the explanation for almost all  'natural' phenomena is 'emergence'....right?!

Emergence is ubiquitous and fundamental throughout nature; every incremental level of complexity only persists because of its emergent properties

[torridon]

You can't follow the evidence because it does not go anywhere as it is not capable of leading. One goes where one thinks it is pointing to based on ones education and world view.

Well, yes, obviously, this applies to everyone.  Learning to think outside the box of our inherited culture is a process. Einstein had to think outside the Newtonian box to account for the constancy of the speed of light. We shed our cultural inherited biases slowly - we cannot adopt a policy of not following what the evidence appears to suggest - that would be counterproductive in the long run.

[Sriram]

Emergence is ubiquitous and fundamental throughout nature; every incremental level of complexity only persists because of its emergent properties

Which does not explain anything at all. It is just a label.   

[Walter]

Jack Knave

being atheist is separate from understanding science , which is what you appear to show in some of your posts

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Emergence is ubiquitous and fundamental throughout nature; every incremental level of complexity only persists because of its emergent properties

incremental? How incremental? so incremental there isn't a real distinction between levels of complexity so what we have is a clever way of preserving reductionism?
Where is the novelty here on which emergence is defined? Where is the saltatory essence of emergence?

[Jack Knave]

Well, yes, obviously, this applies to everyone.  Learning to think outside the box of our inherited culture is a process. Einstein had to think outside the Newtonian box to account for the constancy of the speed of light. We shed our cultural inherited biases slowly - we cannot adopt a policy of not following what the evidence appears to suggest - that would be counterproductive in the long run.

I notice you now include the term "appears" which your previous statement didn't have and was almost categorical in nature.

[Jack Knave]

Jack Knave

being atheist is separate from understanding science , which is what you appear to show in some of your posts

Or which you fail to understand the nuances and perspicacity of them.

[Walter]

Or which you fail to understand the nuances and perspicacity of them.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt this time. We'll see.

[torridon]

I notice you now include the term "appears" which your previous statement didn't have and was almost categorical in nature.

Well, to be pedantic, that is true of all things.  My wife appears to be a sentient being with inner conscious experience and not a zombie.  So I run with the most reasonable assumption, that she is in fact sentient.  So it is with brain science, all the evidence suggests that mind and brain are the same thing experienced from different aspects, so that is the most reasonable assumption to work with. It is nothing to do with ideology, there is no other viable hypothesis to rival it currently.

[Walt Zingmatilder]

Well, to be pedantic, that is true of all things.  My wife appears to be a sentient being with inner conscious experience and not a zombie.  So I run with the most reasonable assumption, that she is in fact sentient.  So it is with brain science, all the evidence suggests that mind and brain are the same thing experienced from different aspects, so that is the most reasonable assumption to work with. It is nothing to do with ideology, there is no other viable hypothesis to rival it currently.

But a GOOD scientist will be motivated to look beyond the appearance. In the case of humans, whether we are really a unitary conscious self or a biological mechanism which JUST gives that impression.

Your method seems to avoid investigation of that.

[Jack Knave]

But a GOOD scientist will be motivated to look beyond the appearance. In the case of humans, whether we are really a unitary conscious self or a biological mechanism which JUST gives that impression.

Your method seems to avoid investigation of that.

That's a good one.

[Jack Knave]

Well, to be pedantic, that is true of all things.  My wife appears to be a sentient being with inner conscious experience and not a zombie.  So I run with the most reasonable assumption, that she is in fact sentient.  So it is with brain science, all the evidence suggests that mind and brain are the same thing experienced from different aspects, so that is the most reasonable assumption to work with. It is nothing to do with ideology, there is no other viable hypothesis to rival it currently.

So following on from Vlads last post. If there was something like a soul, or something, involved in the process of consciousness what would you scientists expect to see in the data and evidence that you aren't seeing now? Considering you haven't the methods or means or framework for looking for such things and so even if it was there your whole focus and approach is geared to have a blind spot. Shouldn't science come up with a hypothesis on what to see if a soul, or something of that kind, was helping to create and form consciousness?

[torridon]

But a GOOD scientist will be motivated to look beyond the appearance. In the case of humans, whether we are really a unitary conscious self or a biological mechanism which JUST gives that impression.

Your method seems to avoid investigation of that.

I think that is unavoidable ultimately, at heart it is the 'problem of other minds', it is the problem of subjectivity, it is the Turing test, and we cannot ever really truly bridge the objectivity/subjectivity gap.  The only way to know what it is like to be a bat is to be that bat; the only way to be certain that my wife is not a p-zombie is to be my wife and I cannot be her as I am busy being me. All I can do is observe her manifest behaviours and I assume some correlation of her inner experience to my inner experience when I do those same behaviours. In the lab we can be more scientific about it for instance we can measure subconscious signals like galvanic skin response or heart rate or pupil dilation but even so this is still not providing 100% certainty that she is not a zombie, merely it would rule out her deliberately trying to skew any results. So I just live with the most reasonable assumption that she is sentient like me, and that is essentially what we do in neuroscience in assuming that the apparent correlation between subjective experience and objective measurement of brain activity is real.  It is the least fantastic assumption we can make under the circumstances.

[torridon]

So following on from Vlads last post. If there was something like a soul, or something, involved in the process of consciousness what would you scientists expect to see in the data and evidence that you aren't seeing now? Considering you haven't the methods or means or framework for looking for such things and so even if it was there your whole focus and approach is geared to have a blind spot. Shouldn't science come up with a hypothesis on what to see if a soul, or something of that kind, was helping to create and form consciousness?

That rather hinges on how you define soul.  If we define it as supernatural then that would eliminate any scientific investigation by our own definition. If we define it as immaterial, then, really, what is meant by immaterial ? We can't look for something when we don't know what it is we are looking for.  If it is not immaterial, but just some undiagnosed force of nature, then we would need some sort of hypothesis to work with so that we can devise a testing framework. It might just be that we need to up our understanding of what we already know about; physics has some profound gaps in understanding and it may be that brain science and the drive to understand consciousness and research in artificial intelligence will all overlap with developments in fundamental physics.  For my money, I don't see a strong case for new fundamental forces, and certainly not for some ephemeral being distinct from the body but 'inhabiting' it somehow, such ideas are way over the top imv, rather we just need to better understand many things that we are just starting to understand now - subjectivity, emergence, quantum biology, proprioception,  information theory as well the classical neurobiology (clearly).