Ideas & Religion & Science Posted by christian h., 10 Apr 2007 12:12 pm

More Science and Belief.

By Dr. Free-Ride

Before I have a go at addressing some of the comments from the original post, I need to express my gratitude (and frankly, my amazement) at the quantity and quality of those comments. Long live civilized discourse in cyberspace!

Questions and comments that can be answered briefly, answered briefly.

1. In comment 69, Janus said:
“I have never read anything by a theistic scientist who understands the scientific method so well.”

I never said I was theistic. And, while I was trained as a physical chemist, I am not a working scientist. I am currently working as a philosopher of science — which is to say, understanding the scientific method is part of my job.

2. I am not claiming that atheists don’t take a lot of crap in the U.S. at this moment in history. They do. Nor am I claiming that “believers” are persecuted in the halls of science. To the best of my knowledge, they are not.

My initial post wasn’t trying to establish a point about current power relations in American society at large, nor in the community of science in the U.S. Rather, it sought to establish that proper use of scientific methodology to answer scientific questions need not keep a scientist from holding certain beliefs that aren’t certified as knowledge by the scientific method.

3. Hank Fox, in comment 8:
“The generosity you allow religious, faith-based, subjective believers is not shared by the other team. AND … all of this takes place against a political backdrop — a statistical field in which, no matter the eventual real-world benefits and results of the two mindsets, NUMBERS of believers on both sides matter.”

I agree that, in the current political landscape in the U.S., religion has an unfair advantage and appealing to folks on the basis of reasoned arguments is generally not a winning strategy. This depresses me like you would not believe. (Lately, I have this hunch that the real reason Socrates drank the hemlock was that he was fed up with folks who should have been susceptible to reasoned arguments but stubbornly resisted them.) However, I think it would be unfair to cast all the “faithful” as enemies of reason. (The Jesuits who trained my dad, for example, were huge fans of reasoned arguments.)
Even if the “faithful” fight dirty, I personally am not ready to say that scientists and science fans should sink into the mud as well. To my mind, intellectual honesty and fighting a clean fight go hand in hand. Then again, there’s probably a reason that the whole “philosopher kings” idea never caught on, so don’t let me stop you from formulating your own political strategy.

4. Several commenters raise the issue that various flavors of religious belief involve a deity who intervenes upon the material world from time to time. Religious beliefs of this sort would seem to have an empirical content that might render them testable using scientific methodology, thus making them eligible to be supported or undermined as “knowledge”.

I purposely avoided using any beliefs of this sort as examples in the original post because I agree that there’s a serious challenge in maintaining these kinds of beliefs while still embracing scientific methodology. But this is not the only sort of belief to which the hard core scientific-method camp objects. (And, there are people who identify themselves as believing in a deity who don’t believe in an intervening deity.)

5. In response to the fine points raised by Aloysius (comment 42ff.), I won’t make any further claims about David Bowie’s best album. While I have strong opinions on this matter, it’s really not my area of expertise.

The issues that require longer responses:


1. Christian H. in comment 3:

“I disagree that the belief in the existence of God, for example, is the same kind of belief as the belief that the laws of nature are homogeneous in space and time. The former cannot be disproved even in principle; the latter can. If objects suddenly started falling upwards next week, scientists would quickly (before they all die) change their opinion on the immutability of the laws of nature. So while it is certainly true that science rests on certain assumptions, those assumptions have largely been made explicit and can therefore be argued (maybe the one exception is the scientific method itself).”

What should we say about beliefs for which there could someday be relevant empirical evidence that might support (or undermine) them? Are these relevantly different from beliefs for which, in principle, there could never be any relevant empirical evidence one way or another?

I think it depends.

If one were to treat beliefs that are (at least potentially) susceptible to empirical test as being stamped with an expiration date, beyond which date if no empirical support has presented itself the belief will be kicked to the curb, then I think you can make the case that these beliefs really are different. They would be acting as place holders or promissory notes for “knowledge” produced with the appropriate empirical and logical support, and a failure to produce the right kind of support in a reasonable amount of time would be taken as a strike against the belief.

But I don’t think a scientist’s belief that the laws of nature are homogeneous in space and time works this way. It is not sufficient to line up all the empirical support for this claim to date and holler “QED!” If spatiotemporal heterogeneities in the laws of nature presented themselves, we’d certainly have good reason to modify our belief, but the mere fact that such heterogeneities have not yet presented themselves is no kind of proof that they will not. And what that means is that while we are holding the belief, we can’t be sure it won’t turn out to be false. Which is to say: it’s still functioning as a belief rather than as knowledge.

I tend to agree with Christian that scientists at least try to make their assumptions explicit so that they can be scrutinized. However, scientists being human, it would be surprising to me if there weren’t at least some implicit assumptions that aren’t laid out or even noticed by the scientists. Possibly they aren’t laid out because they seem so utterly obvious to the scientists, so very difficult to doubt. The laws of logical inference work. The future will be like the past. I’m not just a brain in a vat. I’m not saying scientists are wrong to believe such things — I believe them too! But a quick visit to Descartes’ first Meditation reminds us that even such sensible beliefs can be doubted.

(Getting out of doubt, and to the point where you can identify your belief as knowledge, is no mean feat. Descartes thought it required a proof of the existence of a God who is not a deceiver, so that we could count on our clear and distinct perceptions as building blocks for knowledge. I daresay this is not a move most empirical scientists today would be inclined to make in order to support their practice.)

Finally, I should note that some people are counting on their belief (or non-belief) in the existence of God being susceptible to empirical testing of a sort — it’s just that they’re expecting the decisive data to come in when they die and end up someplace heavenly or hellacious.

2. The epistemic underpinnings of science are part of our toolbox even when we confront the world in non-scientific contexts. (Brian, comment 30)

“[I]t seems to me that the strong form of the ‘living a lie’ argument is that if you are committed to things like logic, reason, and observation (which in order to be a scientist you need to be), then you should be just as committed to them when addressing questions outside the purview of science as in.”

I think I agree with Brian about this, largely because I see scientific methodology as a more rigorous relative of common sense. So a crucial question here is just what “faith” involves.

Some people use “faith” to mean a belief that goes against what reason (and empirical evidence and such) would tell you. Exercising this kind of faith might well put some pressure on a person’s other epistemic commitments. How could you know when it was appropriate to go with the deliverances of reason and when it was appropriate to go against them? Maybe one wouldn’t necessarily be living a lie, but one would certainly be walking a tightrope.

But there’s another sense of “faith” that indicates beliefs one has for which reason (and empirical evidence and such) cannot conclusively settle the matter. Different possible states of affairs fit with the available evidence, and reason does not anoint a single one of these as correct. In such a situation, you can form a belief which reason neither supports nor undermines.

The uncertainty in such a situation bugs a lot of people. Why not wait to form a belief until reason and the available evidence can eliminate all but one of the possibilities? Why not remain agnostic in the meantime rather than preferring one of the possibilities over the others? My sense is that this comes down to a disagreement about where to place the burden of proof. Should we refrain from holding beliefs until we are forced into them by something like the methodology we use to build scientific knowledge? Or, is it acceptable to hold beliefs in matters where the scientific method hasn’t yet weighed in, always with the understanding that future information might undermine those beliefs?

And, in areas where science by its own lights cannot weigh in (because there’s nothing like empirical evidence to get our hands on), are we allowed to form beliefs? Or ought we to treat those areas as suspect because science cannot grapple with them?

Now I loves me some science, but I don’t know that we do ourselves a service if that’s the only tool in our box. And, since the scientific method itself is not something that we could count as supported by the scientific method, I think a push for too much epistemic purity might leave us with no tools at all.

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Responses to “More Science and Belief.”

  1. on 11 Apr 2007 at 11:05 am 1. James Killus said …

    The difficulty that I have with discussions of science itself, the “meta” discussion, as opposed to discussions about some particular bit of science, is that such discussions rarely reflect the actual science that I’ve seen being done, and they all too often gravitate towards certain exemplars and narratives that are rare, or pathological, or fit too easily into some philosophical structure that isn’t particularly useful.

    To put it more bluntly, I’ve found that whenever a scientist uses words like “paradigm,” “falsification,” or even “Bayesian,” the train has left the tracks. Similarly, whenever any discussion, within science or about science begins using analogies to Einstein, Newton, Gallileo, Darwin, or Feynman, we’ve reached the scientific discussion equivalent of Godwin’s Law.

    The fact is that there is no “objective” way of determining which phenomena are worthy of study, nor of formulating hypotheses. The former occurs because one can get funding, or personal curiosity, or religious aspiration, or atheistic agenda, or because of some good or bad formative experience. The latter can come from dreams, guessing, or a desire to raise the status of one’s department in the academic hierarchy. Any of these has resulted in both good and bad science and attacking or defending them misses the point. Science is good at what it does and lousy at what it doesn’t do and while reason may be used to separate those two things, it isn’t scientific reasoning that we use to do it, because not all reasoning is science and not all science is reasonable.

  2. on 11 Apr 2007 at 11:26 am 2. Aloysius said …

    What does it even mean to say that one believes that a non-falsifiable statement is true?

    For example, as you mentioned, most scientifically-minded people these days accept the homogeneity of the laws of nature. This is not just a matter of blind faith, though, because it could be disproved. It’s just that nobody’s ever observed an instance of it failing yet. At the same time, scientists are very open about the fact that this homogeneity is not a settled matter. There have been theories proposed in which in fact the laws of nature are not homogeneous at all, and coupling constants shift over time or in different inflationary domains or what-have-you. No scientist worth his salt would have the arrogance to declare either the homogeneity or the inhomogeneity of the laws of nature to be the capital-T Truth, because honestly we just don’t know. We do know that things seem to be homogeneous at least locally across time and space, though, so homogeneity is a reasonable assumption to make when for practical purposes one must make any assumption at all. In that sense one can call it little-t truth. For now. Approximately. Subject to all these fascinating caveats and disclaimers, at least; and it is precisely these caveats and disclaimers that seem to me to define what it means to believe, in an intellectually-honest scientifically-minded way.

    Can one really understand the truth-value of a belief in God in the same way? In terms of a transparent process of inquiry based off of observations open to all interested parties, in which the believer is honest about what kind of new data it would take to shake his belief?

  3. on 11 Apr 2007 at 12:47 pm 3. Dr. Free-Ride said …

    James Killus, I am very sympathetic to the worry that there’s a big difference between the idealized scientific method (and Science) and science as actually practiced in a particular discipline. Of course, the claim that good scientists ought not to have errant “non-scientific” beliefs in their heads is usually made on the basis of the presumed superiority of (idealized) Science as a knowledge-making methodology. The problem is, even if (idealized) Science were what people were practicing, one still can’t use it as the basis to support the epistemic purification project.

    Science is good at what it does and lousy at what it doesn’t do and while reason may be used to separate those two things, it isn’t scientific reasoning that we use to do it, because not all reasoning is science and not all science is reasonable.

    That’s a very nice way of saying it!

    Aloysius, there are philosophers (Bas van Fraassen is a good example) who take various claims about entities that are not observable as meaningful but not falsifiable. They run into resistance because people get fussy about whether there’s a clear line to be drawn between observables and unobservables. For example, van Fraassen says that electrons are unobservable (because they’re not the kind of thing a human can detect with unaided senses), yet scientists make all sorts of claims about them that seem to be meaningful. (He also draws a distinction between “detection” and “observation” — conceivably, we could set up instruments to interact with presumptive electrons to produce certain observables, even if we can’t observe electrons directly.)

    Here’s another claim that might be meaningful yet might not be verifiable by appeal to observations (which is perhaps not quite identical to falsifiable, but maybe close enough):

    The meaning of a sentence consists in its method of verification.

    I even know people who believe that claim.

  4. on 11 Apr 2007 at 12:52 pm 4. James Killus said …

    “What does it even mean to say that one believes that a non-falsifiable statement is true?”

    Well, see, here is where philosphy can get so very cute and precious. A statement like “The sun will rise tomorrow,” is non-falsifiable today, while a statement like “I will go to heaven when I die,” isn’t falsifiable until I die. So both would seem to have a certain equivalence, except they don’t.

    But as I say, I’ve never seen the concept of falsifiability used productively in actual science.

  5. on 11 Apr 2007 at 3:00 pm 5. Aloysius said …

    He also draws a distinction between “detection” and “observation” — conceivably, we could set up instruments to interact with presumptive electrons to produce certain observables, even if we can’t observe electrons directly.

    I don’t want to seem rude, but isn’t that awfully silly? Our basic human senses don’t give us priviliged unfiltered raw and direct data about the world around us. Our sensory organs react in various ways to phenomena in the outside world, and these reactions are converted by our brains into a reasonably coherent simulation of things. Yet as any psychologist will tell you there remains a great gulph between sensation and perception. Sophisticated scientific instruments do exactly the same. Exactly. The only difference is that we have to think consciously about what the instruments are telling us; we have built into our brains automatic procedures for processing eye-data but not for processing oscilloscope-data. (Until we figure out how to make our brains USB-compatible, at least.)

    Well, see, here is where philosphy can get so very cute and precious. A statement like “The sun will rise tomorrow,” is non-falsifiable today, while a statement like “I will go to heaven when I die,” isn’t falsifiable until I die.

    Not even then! If one does find oneself in Heaven then the statement is proven true, but if one just decomposes quietly minding one’s own business one will no longer exist to know the statement was false.

    On the other hand, “I will decompose quietly minding my own business when I die” would seem technically falsifiable…Although a fat lot of good that’ll do any of us.

  6. on 11 Apr 2007 at 3:59 pm 6. Janus said …

    “Now I loves me some science, but I don’t know that we do ourselves a service if that’s the only tool in our box.”

    There are other tools? A tool is something that is used to make a certain objective achievable. What are these non-scientific tools which can be used to understand the Universe?

    Also, if it’s rational to believe in things that are “beyond” science, it’s OK to believe that my cat is the avatar of the Egyptian goddess Bast, isn’t it? You see, She exists in spirit-form within my cat, so Her existence is unfalsifiable, and since She is very shy, she never provides evidence that would allow me to demonstrate her existence empirically.
    I’ve just spent $30,000 on materials to build an altar in Her Holy Name, because She has so commanded me. But we wouldn’t want to push for too much epistemic purity, so there’s no reason for me to seek treatment or anything, right?

  7. on 11 Apr 2007 at 11:03 pm 7. JP Stormcrow said …

    There are other tools? …
    What are these non-scientific tools which can be used to understand the Universe?

    Well, we and our fellow animals had all come to a pretty useful “understanding” of the universe long ago. (At least good enough to get on about our business and successfully dodge hazards and exploit energy and matter long enough to reproduce.) And humans expanded that understanding greatly using their cognitive skills long before “science” was around. And what is more, I continue to understand many “true” local aspects of the universe without resorting to science - generally minor in the grand scheme of things, but often of great interest to me, such as - there is a truck coming at me.

    But of course I do not know any of this “really”, nor does “science”, we just have models - some precise, some not; some of limited scope and utility, some general and ubiquitous. I do think science is our best system (so far) at developing and improving general models of properties of the universe which are relatively precise and have a wide scope of application. And further, I believe the other mechanisms of gaining understanding work best to the extent that they incorporate “elements” of the scientific method within the constraints of processing power, information storage and time. This places science as the most complete method we have for gaining understanding of the universe, but clearly not always the best in every situation, and its current manifestation is undoubtedly but a step in a long progression of successful “reality-based” mechanisms for creating useful models of the world.

    As for the $30K cat altar - go for it.

  8. on 12 Apr 2007 at 6:10 am 8. jimmiraybob said …

    And humans expanded that understanding greatly using their cognitive skills long before “science” was around.

    I’d argue that science has always been with us, or at least since we’ve been able to apply cognative skills to interpret our natural world and to formulate actions based on these empirical observations rather than fear and superstition.

    Someone somewhere was the first one to fashion a sharp object on the end of a stick and then hurl it at a mastadon. What kind of cognitive process was going on? Was it something like one of our more primative ancestors sitting around the fire one evening who suddenly realized that sharp things cut the skin. And then the observation that the rocks that they’ve been using for the fire ring break to form sharp edges.

    And then the hypothesis: maybe if you put a sharp pointy rock on the end of a stick you might be able to do damage to other living things from a more reasonable distance than hand to hand combat? Then comes the experimental stage…er, let’s just say that the first series of experiments were problematic. But eventually success. And publication…in the top journals of the time…cave walls in France.

    Sure, the whole process is a lot glitzier now but isn’t the process the same - 1) observation of the natural world, 2) an idea based on those observations that leads to a testable hypothesis, 3) experimentation, 4) publication, and 5) fame and fortune?

    …there is a truck coming at me.

    So you’re insinuating that stepping out in front of the truck is a bad thing? Are you relying on past observations of the natural world? Is your hypothesis that you would get smashed? Is it testable? Has the experiment already been performed and the results published?

    Of course. You don’t have to do the experiment - there’s already a large volume of results and the concensus is that it IS a bad thing. I refer you to the the Theory of Heavy Moving Vehicles (sometimes referred to as the Theory of Jaywalking). Of course it is only a theory. And, if your faith is true and strong, you may wish to disregard the theory.

    I propose a new ad campaign: Got Science?

    Or maybe (given my above ramblings): Science, Don’t Leave Home Without It.

  9. on 12 Apr 2007 at 7:01 am 9. christian h. said …

    jimmiraybob - this all-inclusive definition of science seems too expansive to be useful. Still, I agree that jumping out of the way of an onrushing truck doesn’t quite contradict Janus’s point.

    Janus - it may not be rational to believe your cat houses a supernatural being. But it’s OK. Not all our beliefs and feelings are rational. Would you institutionalize someone for giving an expensive gift to a loved one, for example?

  10. on 12 Apr 2007 at 8:40 am 10. jimmiraybob said …

    My all too tongue in cheek example actually wasn’t all inclusive, I did make allowance for a faith system that would allow for mindlessly walking in front of the truck while believing, against all evidence to the contrary, that an invisible entity would shield them from harm. So, to that small extent, I did make an exclusion to what could be considered science.

    I guess the point that I was trying to make is that at some time there was a divide in how humans viewed and responded to the world. On the one hand our ancestors viewed their surroundings as a mysterious and frightening place controlled by gods and such (the supernatural). At some point our ancestors learned that their observations could be viewed without reliance on the supernatural, relying instead on empirical evidence and reason - the fundamental process of science. And since then, we’ve amassed a pretty impressive body of knowledge and understanding from which everyone gets to benefit. And, of course, the divide is alive and well today in the culture wars.

    If the process of science, or the scientific method, fundamentally rests upon our recognition of empirical evidence and reason, devoid of the supernatural, then an individual can choose to accept or reject this process. But if they accept it then they are participating in the fundamental act of what has been branded as teh science. If so, then aren’t we all science now? And by we all I mean those that reject the supernatural and opt instead for a natural explanation for our surroundings?

    I guess that I’m just a bleeding heart inclusionist afterall. Therefore I say, “science to the people!” “A scientific principle in every garage!” “The GNF is science in action!”

    PS Of course, this all rests on whether or not we exist.

  11. on 12 Apr 2007 at 9:34 am 11. Janus said …

    christian h. wrote:
    Janus - it may not be rational to believe your cat houses a supernatural being. But it’s OK. Not all our beliefs and feelings are rational. Would you institutionalize someone for giving an expensive gift to a loved one, for example?

    I don’t see why you would consider feelings and emotions irrational. An irrational decision is a decision which is based on an irrational belief; an irrational belief is a belief which isn’t supported by evidence.
    I love someone, therefore I want to give that person a gift. That I love the person is a fact, and wanting to please a person you love is perfectly logical.

    Now, on the other hand, if I wanted to buy a gift for an imaginary friend…

    Isn’t that what insanity is? Being disconnected from reality? Of course, few people are completely disconnected from reality, and it may be true that no one’s beliefs are completely rational. Still, isn’t it a good idea to be as sane as we can be?

  12. on 12 Apr 2007 at 11:15 am 12. James Killus said …

    The word Jung used was “arational.” There are certain aspects of life and thinking that may be analyzed by rational means, but their workings are not rational as such. You cannot, for example, prepare a rational argument or an algorithm for how you recognize your mother’s face.

    Similarly, some people need explicit directions for driving to some location (my wife, for example). I usually just need to know where I am and where I’m going, and even if I’m completely unfamiliar with an area, a few minutes with a map will suffice. Reading a map isn’t particularly rational, but you can derive rational, algorithmic directions from it.

    In the essay I noted earlier, I observed that there was a great deal of research into the photochemistry of chlorine gas right after WWI. Why? The gas was used in warfare. The research was rational; the war was not. in other words, the research had an irrational “first cause.”

    Ultimately, any analysis of purposes will hit the axiom that “the heart wants what the heart wants.” You may enshroud that desire with any amount of reasoned analysis, but at the core, desire is not a rational process. Attempting to pretend that it is rational will inevitably lead not to rationality, but to rationalization.

  13. on 12 Apr 2007 at 1:15 pm 13. spyder said …

    I don’t have sufficient time at the moment to really honor and respect the depth of this post (thanks Dr Free-ride) and its comment thread, but i do want to throw in my left-handed monkey wrench.

    Isn’t that what insanity is? Being disconnected from reality? Of course, few people are completely disconnected from reality, and it may be true that no one’s beliefs are completely rational. Still, isn’t it a good idea to be as sane as we can be?

    Herein lies the conundrum; the assumption that there is an a priori reality from which all realities are consensually generated, and that rational-thought processes manifest the constructs of our particular consensual reality in such a way, that all of us can make determinations about others rationalities and “sanities.” Going back to the truck for a moment. Upon what basis do we rationally conclude that a person–who chooses to jump in front of a moving semi, claiming to do so because they have faith that after impact their soul will be taken unto a paradise with their loved ones–is insane?? We have no verifiable capacity to falsify their belief in that seemingly (on the surface) rational decision, other than consensually agreeing that acting in this way would be outside our norm of what we agree is rational? Yet millions of our fellow Earth citizens hold that the view we may consider to be insane, is, in point of fact, quite real and, for them, most rational.

    Religions have their own sets of coherent facts upon which their theologies, soteriologies, ontologies, etc., are predicated. We who study religions use hermeneutical interrogations to determine the internal coherencies, assessing the depths of the creeds of faith, and so far forth. One thing i have learned over the last 40 years, from my studies, is that consensuality of shared hermeneutically-sound statements of faith/belief (the commons of the congregations), are extraordinarily powerful, and tend to predicate “reality” within the religion. Scientists can analyze things such as the “spiritual molecules” of tryptamines (entheogens such as DMT, psilocybin, etc.) and make observations about the neuro-biological chemical reactions that occur in the human brain, but no amount of scientific inquiry can enlighten us about the symbolic, archetypal, mythic, language and arrangements that occur in a congregation who come together to share their revelations and visions.

    I am reminded of one of the great classics of history of religions–Scharer’s NGAJU RELIGION: The Conception of God Among A South Borneo People–in which the reader is led to ponder the role of the spirit dog in determining the “nature”of the unborn child. So far, even our best genetic researchers have yet to offer a more rational and reasoned explanation about this everyday event. Perhaps, someday not so far in future, research will provide us with clones that are perfect identical matches of ourselves, and thus determining that humans are completely and utterly products of their genome and bio-chemistries interactions with the world around them. But not yet; and until that time, the spirit dog in the Star Sirius has just as valid and explanation for the Borneo natives, as to what determines the future child, as any other.

    Interestingly research scientists still don’t know how aspirin actually works, yet human beings have been using willow bark and other salicylics for thousands of years. 21st century scientists would love to be able to say that humans achieved this through trial and error (that rational scientific process) whereas anthropological materials gleaned from 6000 years and more of records reveal that most indigenous people say that the plant spirit told them. Go figure.

  14. on 12 Apr 2007 at 2:58 pm 14. Brian said …

    Well said Dr. Free-Ride – I think we do, in fact, agree. I too think a lot of this falls out of just how you parse the various meanings/subtleties of the words faith, belief, meaning, and even design, etc. It also depends heavily on exactly what kind of religious beliefs one holds, as many of them can quite readily fit into the gaps you describe, where “Different possible states of affairs fit with the available evidence“.

    Even though we might generate a good deal of controversy here, the young-earth creationist faith healers haven’t joined our little discussion for some reason…

    I think you also really cut right to the quick when you bring up uncertainty and what to do with it. This seems to be where a lot of previously agreeable people start to part company. You can’t really quantify uncertainty, but you know it’s not equal in all cases either, and so we argue about whether tomorrow’s sunrise is really more unlikely than the existence of God. (Note: I wasn’t trying to make that sound ridiculous)

    To be fair to the laws of nature though, I think we have to acknowledge just how radical a change in our understanding of the universe it would be if some spatiotemporal heterogeneities simply cropped up one day. We (scientists and others) don’t just believe that one of these heterogeneities aren’t going to crop up simply because one never has before, but rather because we think we have a pretty detailed and sophisticated understanding of the laws of nature, and we know that some things just aren’t possible. We know the sun will rise tomorrow not because it always has, but because we have an understanding of gravity, orbits, and rotational axes – no sunrise tomorrow would mean a lot more than just a break in the pattern.

    In short, some beliefs are closer to knowledge than others.

  15. on 12 Apr 2007 at 3:02 pm 15. Brian said …

    Oh, and as for that lousy spirit dog in the Star Sirius, he said my sons eyes would be brown, but they’re blue as the deep sea.

    In your face, Bornean Spirit Dog!!!

  16. on 12 Apr 2007 at 3:05 pm 16. christian h. said …

    Brian, how old is your son? Babies often have blue eyes, and that can change later on.

  17. on 12 Apr 2007 at 3:49 pm 17. James Killus said …

    Interestingly research scientists still don’t know how aspirin actually works…

    Well, at least it wasn’t another claim that science doesn’t know how bees fly:

    http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~cmg/Demo/pdb/cycox/cycox.html

    Or was this some meta statement about what “actually” means?

  18. on 12 Apr 2007 at 4:05 pm 18. Brian said …

    Yes, someone always brings that up — first when he was born people would say by 6 months they could change. Then at six months we would hear they could still change at a year, then at a year someone would mention a year and a half. I sometimes wonder if there’s a brown-eyed booster club out there rooting for all the blue-eyed babies to go brown…

    I’m not accusing you, of course.

    He turned 3 in January. Still blue. Because of his grandfathers/great grandfathers eye colors, we know he could have both green and brown alleles, so they could be methylated now and somehow be unmasked at a later date, although I don’t know how. (maybe exposed to radiation, or bit by radioactive spider - so many possibilities!)

    Still, they’ll never be red.

  19. on 12 Apr 2007 at 4:09 pm 19. Brian said …

    But as I say, I’ve never seen the concept of falsifiability used productively in actual science.

    Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it used in actual science. One of those ‘goes without saying’ kind of things, I guess…

  20. on 12 Apr 2007 at 4:14 pm 20. JP Stormcrow said …

    Since I introduced the somewhat questionable extension to ScienceLite® (SL) methods for discovering truths about the world, I should probably chime in here and muddy the waters some more attempt to clarify. (Although if spyder’s insightful comment is what I don’t have sufficient time to really honor and respect the depth of this post looks like, then by defintion I have not sufficient time to even “not have sufficient time” …)

    I think that I am promoting a basically objectivist position on the underlying nature of the universe. It has a structure and “logic” which can be discovered to various levels of precision, and the scientific method is the best one we have come up with so far - but almost certainly not the best (see below). My contention is that in the evolution of lifeforms, one differentiator is having a better “future state of a relevant portion of the universe” predictor, (i.e. Truck!! iff there is an actual Truck!!). ScienceLite® (or even ScienceVeryVeryVeryLiteYouAreRuiningAPerfectlyGoodWordYouAsshole) methods have proven “best” (most advantageous) and that is what you see in organisms (including our own cognitive substrate.) I think I have gotten myself into some kind of NeverNeverLand here in regards to what is going on in humans above the “substrate” and below actual “Science”, so will stop out of honor for the post, while I think it through a bit more.

    However, I have no such reservations about predicting that we have not seen the last of changes to the consensus scientific method (maybe it will be called something else.). Two directions I could see it evolving in:
    1) More explicit accounting of the tradeoffs in the cost/benefit of gathering more information (for example: Appeal to authority is an efficient, rational strategy much of the time - better specification of when and how is it used within science.)
    2) More explicit use of “network models” of scientific understanding - (What does the network “know”?, What does any one node “know”? Dependency of the latter on the former.)

    Others? Or is the thesis that it will continue to develop controversial?

  21. on 12 Apr 2007 at 5:03 pm 21. christian h. said …

    JP, I agree. The way science is done will change. I’d add:

    3) Under which circumstances should output from machines be accepted even when the process employed by the machine is too complicated to be fully comprehended by a human mind?

    Brian: No brown-eye mafia here. That spirit dog really must have it in for you.

  22. on 12 Apr 2007 at 5:52 pm 22. Oaktown Girl said …

    I’m at work, so I’m in the “not enough time to read everything well” category. But I’ll chime in anyway.

    Janus said-
    an irrational belief is a belief which isn’t supported by evidence.

    My problem with this statement is that it appears to leave no way to account for or acknowledge personal, internal experiences without labeling them as insane, because the existence so many of those cannot be “supported” by scientific evidence. What I mean is that you can “believe” in something simply because you’ve had a direct experience of it. Just because you can’t “prove” it to anyone else does not make it delusional. spyder says it very well:

    that all of us can make determinations about others rationalities and “sanities.”

    Yes. Take the “experience” of déjà vu. There are several theories that attempt to explain it, yet nothing that constitutes definitive “proof”. Yet almost everyone has had the déjà vu experience. Is everyone just having little moments of insanity since it doesn’t meet the burden of scientific proof?

    And what about in meditation? People get all kinds of insights and experiences during meditation. Some people even claim to have had direct experiences of places and dimensions and realities completely different from our own “reality” here. And because they have experienced them so directly and profoundly, as “real” if not more so than anything here on earth, they “believe” in the existence of those things/places. Can they “prove” it to anyone else? No. Does that make them all just a little bit insane?
    I don’t think so.

  23. on 12 Apr 2007 at 7:46 pm 23. Brian said …

    I have never experienced déjà vu.

  24. on 12 Apr 2007 at 7:47 pm 24. Brian said …

    I have never experienced déjà vu.

    (sorry)

  25. on 12 Apr 2007 at 8:02 pm 25. Janus said …

    Oaktown Girl,

    I’ve already addressed this point in a reply to Dr. Free Ride’s original post, but I’m willing to repeat myself.

    I don’t deny the fact that people have personal, internal experiences, nor do I think the people who have them are insane or irrational. What is irrational is to conclude from these experiences alone that whatever it is that was experienced is real, that it exists outside the person’s mind.

    I think it’s irrational because:

    1) We know for a fact that the human mind is prone to fooling itself. Things that seem perfectly real to the subject can be completely illusory. This is even more true in the case of “internal” experiences, and even more true when these things are experienced when then subject is in so-called alternate states of consciousness. Of course, not all internal experiences can be tested to see if they’re about something real, but some of them can (such as when someone claims to have seen the future). These tests show that for the purpose of describing and understanding reality, internal experiences are, at the very least, rather unreliable.

    2) The logic employed to make claims about external reality based on internal experiences is badly flawed. In the case of religious faith, it usually goes something like this:
    i) I get a feeling of immense Love and Joy when I pray to Jesus.
    ii) Therefore, the universe was created by the Judeo-Christian God.

    Needless to say, to make such an extraordinary claim based on such flimsy evidence is pretty foolish. The same goes for people who think they’ve discovered alternate dimensions when meditating.

    The one exception I would make is people who use meditation to inquire about the nature and workings of the human mind. It seems reasonable to think that some insights can be gleaned about our minds by doing “internal” experiments. I would hesitate to treat these insights as anything more than potentially useful hints until we have more empirical data, however.

    So, yes, I do think that people who draw conclusions about external reality from exclusively internal experiences are being irrational, and a little insane.

  26. on 12 Apr 2007 at 9:18 pm 26. James Killus said …

    Janus,

    The difficulty here is that you have a theory, which you call “reality” that is, nevertheless, ultimately based solely on subjective experience, yours and others’. In this theoretical construct, you give differing weights to certain sorts of phenomena, while calling others “illusions” or even “delusions.”

    I also make distinctions among varying assemblages of subjective experience, and I do believe in a “material world” that is different from various other kinds of experience, and I’m sure that we’d agree on a lot of what constitutes a theory of material reality from other theories about other things. But, and here’s the crux of it, I believe that these other constructs also have a claim on the word “reality” and that raising material reality above those other experiences is a value judgement, which isn’t in itself a material construct.

    I further think that this insertion of subjective value judgements into the realm of classifying different assemblages of subjective experience is (correctly) perceived by those on the receiving end of rationalist disdain as being somehow unfair, even if they can’t quite put their finger on how the trick is worked.

    And sometimes, this value judgement trick has practical implications:

    http://www.sff.net/people/james-killus/Text/GOAT.TXT

  27. on 12 Apr 2007 at 11:02 pm 27. Janus said …

    James,

    I acknowledge that I don’t _know_ there is an external reality, and even if there is one I don’t _know_ that it’s the one I think I perceive. My senses might be completely unreliable, I might be completely insane. The belief that there is an external reality which more or less matches my internal representation of it is an assumption. It’s an assumption that all humans must make in order to survive; even the solipsists act in all ways as if solipsism were false.

    That said, the whole point of an assumption (especially an assumption as basic and essential as this one) is that once it’s made you take it for granted. If, after making this assumption, I eventually conclude that the Earth is round, it is foolish to suddenly remember that, after all, I don’t _know_ that anything is real, so it would be unfair of me to call flat-earthers idiots. The assumption has been made, the flat-earthers make it too, the Earth really isn’t flat, and those who think it is are absolutely, objectively wrong (and probably idiots too).

    If you accept that, I don’t see how you can claim that “other constructs” also have a claim on the word reality. Most or all “constructs”, except the initial assumption which all humans make, can be tested to see if they match the reality described and understood by making that initial assumption and nothing else, i.e. material reality; failing that, they can be evaluated logically. This has nothing to do with value judgments, it’s a conclusion from empirical data and logical analysis. See my previous comment, as well as comment #69 in Dr. Free-Ride’s previous thread.

    As for your goat story… I’m afraid the Indonesian women were deluded. They didn’t see ghosts, they saw air bubbles, or they were simply hallucinating. Much like the naive Christian in my previous post, their logic went something like this:
    i) I occasionally see these vague ghost-like things after a long day at work.
    ii) Therefore, the human mind somehow survives after death and lingers on Earth in incorporeal but visible form.

    They leapt from ridiculously flimsy evidence to an extraordinary claim about objective reality.

    Their perceptions were real, their thoughts were real, their concept of “ghost” was and is real… in their minds, not outside of them. Likewise, the meaning of this sentence is real… within your mind, not outside of it. The light emitted by your PC monitor is objectively real, but the meaning of the words is only subjectively real. To say that the ghosts were real is to play with words. By “ghost”, the Indonesian women didn’t mean that they chose to give air bubbles a poetic interpretation, they meant that magic souls of dead people were wandering around in the lab.
    The irrational belief isn’t to accept that the women thought they saw a ghost, it’s to believe that ghosts were actually out there.

    As for your story’s moral lesson, yes, it’s often easier to go along with a patient’s delusion in order to solve a problem… if you don’t mind treating the person like a child, that is. That’s what parents do with children: Pretend along with them that their imaginary friend is real, “Yes honey, Momo the Green Dragon can come with us to McDonald’s.” And the child is happy and the parents don’t have to deal with screams and tears. If you have the smallest amount of respect for the adults you’re dealing with, however, you won’t take the easy, patronizing way out. You’ll sit down with them and explain where their logic is flawed, and why we can’t trust our senses 100% of the time. You’ll make critical thinkers out of them. It may not work, but if it does you won’t just have solved a single problem, you’ll have solved all of them.

  28. on 13 Apr 2007 at 1:12 am 28. The Constructivist said …

    Here’s a fun question to make this great discussion a little bit more specific: is race real? I ask because in over a year of blogging, this is the question that has gotten the most hits of any of my posts–mostly by people googling “racialization” or various DNA/genomics-related searches. (The follow-up debate is a close second.) And at the time it started my first and only comment war, with the boyz at Gene Expression. (Keep in mind that for most of the initial comments I was playing it pretty dumb to draw the boyz out.)

  29. on 13 Apr 2007 at 5:04 am 29. Zeus said …

    “Can one really understand the truth-value of a belief in God in the same way? In terms of a transparent process of inquiry based off of observations open to all interested parties, in which the believer is honest about what kind of new data it would take to shake his belief?” — Aloysius

    “There are other tools? A tool is something that is used to make a certain objective achievable. What are these non-scientific tools which can be used to understand the Universe?” — Janus

    Poetry is observable, and unless one is a complete anti-aesthete, more than simply the random scrawling of one’s emotions. The creative process is observable, and moreso, experience-able (to some a deeper kind of verification than “observation”). Some poetry is “better” than others even as people experience it differently. It’s measure lies in its ability to evoke to create deeper and more meaningful experiences. This is both a rational (see “art critics”) and a non-rational (see “inspiration” “intercourse with beauty”).

    In a similar vein, God is both observable and experience-able. The “senses” or (in a somewhat downgraded description) “tools” of spiritual experience require an admission of the “felt”, as well as the “seen”, as a legitimate avenue (if not exactly a methodology). Yet they have productive, and often intensely beautiful, creative, or devotional human effects. This goes beyond mere belief, even as it goes beyond mere observation. It is the danger that such experience will be interpreted and acted upon in destructive ways that lead many to discount it and cling to science (which has been the major progenitor of monstrous behavior in the 20th century– hello Nagasaki– some fine success that move gave us).

    Any describable but largely “felt” phenomenon, whether it be racism or spiritual inspiration, often lie less in their means or intention than in their effects. Those effects are observable. The means are often more inscrutable, but not beyond description or discussion. They do require, an opened mind (and soul?) to realms of experience that are non-rational in nature, though as I have often said, they ought also embrace the rational.

    None of my belief in God requires anti-empiricism, an erasure of the injustice or justice, the fossil record, or the meaningfulness of my own existence, that I can discern before me. It does require, in addition however, a creative and inspired move beyond observation and materialism, toward a receptivity and recognition of the felt and non-material has having “reality.”

    Those of quantum thinking might choose to describe this as different “dimensions” of experience and assessment. In some sense this move is already happening in the sciences. For instance measuring “non-local” effects (not to mention chaos theory, string theory, dark matter, and dark energy) in quantum physics would seem the stuff of spiritualism and pure science fiction, but these are currently accepted scientific models that describe (the effects of) phenomena in a useful, compelling, and perhaps even “inspirational” way.

    Citizen Zeus

  30. on 13 Apr 2007 at 5:38 am 30. Zeus said …

    Re: James Killus: “Interestingly research scientists still don’t know how aspirin actually works…
    Well, at least it wasn’t another claim that science doesn’t know how bees fly:
    http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/~cmg/Demo/pdb/cycox/cycox.html
    Or was this some meta statement about what “actually” means?”

    “Actually” reading the link above, one still sees conjecture about several proposed “mechanisms” by which aspirin ostensibly works. Much like gravity, we experience it, measure it, model it, but largely still don’t know what “it” is or often “why” it works even according to our reductive models.

    There is a similarly opaque “scientific explanation” of bumblebee flight. I found the “explanation” laughable from an engineering standpoint when I attempted to look it up: “The apocryphal story about bees not being able to fly arose because the roughness and flexibility of their wings was neglected in a quick calculation. The wings of a bumblebee bend to create vortices that provide lift on both the upward and downward strokes, and a full analysis of the bee’s flight involves many factors: wing angle, wing deformation, aerodynamic and inertial forces on the wing, and so on. All of these parameters are expressed in terms of ‘body vector’ - that is, the exact orientation of the insect’s body.” (http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/5/10/9). [The article goes on to measure and describe “body vector” but does not really explain how these movements may actually add up to create sufficient lift.] And aspirin’s effects involve chemicals interacting in many interesting ways. This is a description, not an explanation.

    Science is often as constrained as theological belief in understanding certain phenomena. We can slap a label on something and measure it, but still not “know” what it is and why it does what it does. This is okay, both science and spiritual belief are works in progress, and there should be humility in both, and perhaps even a recognition that there are some very common things in our lives that we may not be able to adequately explain.

    Citizen Zeus

  31. on 13 Apr 2007 at 10:58 am 31. James Killus said …

    Zeus,

    Our understanding of how aspirin works is sufficient to design other drugs that operate on similar principles to varying degrees on the biochemical mechanisms that we believe aspirin affects. Those drugs work, often better than aspirin for specific functions, such as anti-inflamation.

    You may have some other notion of what “actually” means, but having a set of testable hypotheses that then pass the stated tests is what I use as my own rule of thumb (”testable” being of far greater value in the science that I have seen and done that “falsifiable”), so I am reasonably satisfied.

    To use another example, we cannot presently calculate the behavior of an atom of lithium directly from quantum mechanics, but i’m reasonably sure that we have a good idea of how lithium chemistry “works” under most conditons. However, we do not know exactly how it “works” on bipolar mood disorder; if we did, we would have designed safer alternatives.

    Janus, I believe that you are still missing my point, because you are trying to force it into an “is there an objective reality” framework, and to deny the objective reality of certain sorts of abstractions. I don’t think I can make it any clearer, but I can observe that my answer to the old canard “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” is “The one I’m thinking of does.”

  32. on 13 Apr 2007 at 1:49 pm 32. spyder said …

    Or was this some meta statement about what “actually” means?

    Exactly.. as well as to all those other statements of the same ilk, actually! My soft point would be that the predictive descriptive science of non-steroidal anti-inflammatories does not dispute the claims of indigenous tribal people around the planet who use red willow bark (and its cousins) because they (claim) were informed by the plant (or some other spiritual entity) to do so.

    This gets to Janus’ point that once he makes his first a priori assumption about his personal relationship with reality (he did leap for a moment right back into Plato’s cave, did he not?) he feels comfortable to describe reality in terms that must, by his own assumptions, be real for everyone and every thing.
    That said, the whole point of an assumption (especially an assumption as basic and essential as this one) is that once it’s made you take it for granted
    Actually (hehe) you make it (the assumed principle foundational base) intuitively known. I am always reminded, in moments such as these, of the perception studies ‘describing’ the inputs to the human eye; and how we process that information through assumptions, quite literally and necessarily believing that such and such is true. Our eye receives nothing more, nor less, than wavelengths of visible (and invisible) light, stereoscopically collected in the occipital lobes and processed in both the cerebellum and cerebral cortices. It is an amazing process, by which we not only make sense of photons, but also of the constraints of time lapsing. At best our brains can process at speeds around 1/32 of a second, with physical reaction time running at 1/10 of second, and so forth. Not even considering deviations in the eye’s capabilities to process (cornea and retina issues), we are always experiencing the world in the past tense.

    Thus we necessarily believe that we can trust in this process–input, processing, ascribing form and shape and distance, reacting, reprocessing, constructing etc. etc. et al et al, within a time frame of less than a second–intuitively, to work predictively and proportionately at some optimal degree so as to function in a greater consensual community of other beings (human and otherwise). About a decade ago, UC Berkeley released a study on the capability and capacity of human beings to safely drive motor vehicles. They wired up people, both in labs and on the road, inside of cars and processed their brains’ reactions and responses to driving on I-80 between University and Ashby at different times of day. The conclusions were quite revealing with regard to human consciousness. It was revealed that human beings cannot physically and psychologically process and react to all of the necessary and essential information to proceed safely along the highway. We must, in point of fact, make predictive assumptions based solely on sets of “beliefs in the phenomena of the world around us” because we cannot take in all of the information, and process even a reasonable portion of that information, that is required to drive safely. Driving requires holding intuitive assumptions (axioms) through which our minds and consciousnesses can then navigate the vehicle along a complex maze of space and time; all in reactions to past tense phenomena.

    Again i refer back to the principle of consensually-derived assumptions concerning relational reality in which we choose to share our experiences. Each of the drivers on that freeway are making similar responses and decisions based on consensual ideaologies (and the motor vehicle code of CA). The research scientists are making better nsaids based on models that approximate (with as much axiomatic accuracy as they can derive) all human brains, though their models are only categorically different than a Borneo tribal member’s model of the use of this or that plant’s alkaloids to facilitate decreasing inflammation, based on communication with spiritual entitites.

    Janus is right that in the beginning we make assumptions and hold them up to others in consensual conversation to be shared, confirmed, rejected, identified, described, and modelled. Some of us are concerned with the models and others with the assumptions. In the end, we can just never really know it all, but does it really fundamentally matter?

  33. on 13 Apr 2007 at 4:19 pm 33. James Killus said …

    The Constructivist said …

    Here’s a fun question to make this great discussion a little bit more specific: is race real?

    Given that we’ve run off the tracks on the general issue, I’ll use this specific to suggest where my sentiments lie. “Race” is a useful concept in sociology and psychology, and irrelevant concept in chemistry, physics, and astronomy, and a pernicious concept in biology or genetics.

    In the non-scientific sense, “Ghosts of Mississippi” is a phrase that is neither meaningless nor without content, and a race riot is as real as anything you’ll ever see.

  34. on 13 Apr 2007 at 4:30 pm 34. The Constructivist said …

    James, I’m with you (adding anthropology to the first category), but I get the sense from the debates at O v. C v. T and work from some historians of post-WW II science that more biologists and geneticists think it’s real than admit publicly. The new genomics is providing some with the tools to argue that the life sciences can finally get race right–i.e., prove its reality in a non-racist manner.

  35. on 13 Apr 2007 at 10:12 pm 35. James Killus said …

    Constructivist,

    Anyone who thinks that should be required to calculate planetary orbits in epicycles.

    Actually, that is letting them off too easy. Identifying genetic differences in sub-populations and then trying to tie them to prior ideas about “race” is a good way to generate confusion within your science, misunderstandings outside of your science, and give aid and comfort to racists and bigots.

    But it does give people an ever so delightful sense of being naughty and thinking “dangerous thoughts,” so I’m sure it’s worth it.

  36. on 14 Apr 2007 at 4:18 am 36. The Constructivist said …

    Funny, they didn’t like to hear that when I told them so and then went back to their blog and claimed victory months afterward. Classy!

  37. on 15 Apr 2007 at 6:07 am 37. The Constructivist said …

    Now some of them are taking on teh Crooked Timber. Reminiscent of last May’s follow-up debate on IQ at O v. C v. T.