Marigolds, and the measuring thereof

A meaningless statement. Ethics are effectively synonymous with morality, and are correspondingly relative.

To say, "you can't study the soul because it is wrong to tamper with god's domain" is closed-minded, if not necessarily invalid (though I would qualify it as such unless you could prove that your god exists and that his domain is logically off-limits for a reason other than "because god would kill you"). To say "you can't study the soul because it would require harm to others and/or would simply provide some piece of harmful technology (of course, most likely would be some form of weapon)." are completely valid objections.

Yet, despite being valid, that doesn't mean they're taken seriously. People object to abortion and stem cell research on the basis that it involves the destruction of a person, but the very definition of a "person" and what that entails is meaningless, because it's relative. To say "so long as we have ethics, science is perfectly alright" is, effectively, a useless idea, because ethics are not objective.

Scientists also have a bad habit of ignoring the will of larger society—especially with the support of governments that care little about the will of the society they supposedly represent.

edited 29th Aug '11 4:57:28 PM by USAF713

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@ Best Of and Clarste: That seems like a rather large metaphysical assumption to make. I don't see how we can calculate the probability of something like that.

edited 29th Aug '11 5:02:08 PM by BobbyG

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Which one?

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I wasn't saying anything about tampering in God's domain (I figure if we can actually mess with it, it's within our domain.) But I suppose I am making a huge assumption that attempting to dissect a soul would be harmful to the individual in question.

For the record, I am not against stem cell research. I'm more 'meh' on the subject, but I know if that gets the furor out of other people it does to day, actually being able to do something to our souls would cause an even greater outcry. (I suppose my partially neutral stance is due to not knowing anyone personally right now that would benefit from it.)

Sorry, edited my post too late.

That concepts "probably" don't exist outside our heads.

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Probably in the sense that it's pretty simple to come up with a scenario that fits the evidence in which they don't, and therefore postulating them adds unnecessary complexity.

While it's certainly true that we can't disprove it (which was the point of my post), that doesn't mean it gets a 50-50 chance.

Presumably everyone would benefit from knowing more about souls. Wouldn't they? Medicine didn't get really started until people started dissecting bodies, so why would souls be different? Don't you want a healthy soul, for yourself and everyone you know?

edited 29th Aug '11 5:08:27 PM by Clarste

Occam's Razor exists for convenience; it says nothing about the nature of reality.

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Neither does randomly postulating random things. Maybe we're all brains in a jar. Maybe no one else exists. Maybe I'm a butterfly dreaming I'm a man. Maybe concepts exist outside our mental world. All of these things are not falsifiable. Does that mean they're equally likely?

They are equally likely. It just means we should only really worry about what we can prove or not...

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I mean equally likely with respect to the stuff we do think we know.

I'll agree that postulating random things wouldn't tell us anything about reality.

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(NOTE: This was directed at Bobby, post #30, and ninja'd.)

OK.

We perceive a Universe in which concepts are entities in the sense that their effects on the behaviour of individuals can be perceived. I'm sure this is not a controversial statement.

Modern science does not yet know exactly how our brains function, but there exists plenty of evidence that supports the idea that the mind is mostly a function of the brain. We have case studies of people who have received damage to their brain, and as a result they've lost congnitive functions, to name just one kind of evidence for the above statement.

We know some of the processes that factor in on the workings of the mind. Though we don't know all of them, we know enough that it seems (to me, at least,) reasonable to propose that ideas that we have - including concepts - influence our actions by participating in the functions of the mind.

So, now that we (I hope) have come to accept that human behaviour demonstrates signs of the use of concepts, and that concepts affect human behaviour by participating in the processes of the mind, and that we can understand some of the workings of the mind by understanding some of the workings of the brain, all we need to determine is the nature of the concept.

The two competing hypotheses here are that concepts have an existence outside of the mind in the functions of which they participate, or that human behaviour, and the functions of concepts, are explainable without assuming that the concepts exist outside of the mind.

For the latter hypothesis, the underlying assumption is that the laws of nature (not just the ones that we know, but all of them together) are enough to explain the human mind and the function of concepts in a way that would result in the Universe (or, for this discussion, human behaviour) as we observe it.

If this were the case, there would be no need for us to assume the existence of each concept as an entity with an existence outside the mind.

The former hypothesis assumes that concepts exist outside the minds in the function of which they participate.

In other words, the hypothesis that concepts have a separate existence assumes entities (which I would argue are relatively complex ones) that the competing hypothesis has no need to assume. Instead, it assumes that what we don't understand of the workings of the human mind is explainable by the laws of nature, at least in theory, even if we don't currently know how exactly it happens.

Then it becomes, to the pragmatic philosopher, a matter of choosing the hypothesis that makes less or less complex assumptions than the alternative(s). If you ask me, the hypothesis that concepts don't have a separate existence makes less assumptions.

Ninja'd.

edited 29th Aug '11 6:54:02 PM by BestOf

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Best Of, while I agree with what you're saying, it's worth noting that similar arguments have been made in favor of completely ignoring emotion in behavioral science, instead studying human behavior in terms of the chemicals that produce emotions. I consider that form of study incomplete, so I'm a little wary here.

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And what do we gain from reducing people to chemicals?

Psychology and sociology are sciences. The practitioners of the hard sciences just don't like them because there are so few—if any—absolutes. When you reduce people to chemicals and reactions, you're done nothing but devalue society as a whole.

I am now known as Flyboy.

This was originally an edit on the previous post, but I moved it here to keep up with the conversation.

If we were to assume unnecessary entities just because, we'd have to assume an unlimited number of them, including ones that have zero reason to exist. For there to be any hope of a working model of a rudimentary understanding of the Universe, we need to establish criteria by which we judge entities that are being proposed. It makes sense to only assume entities that are necessary - strictly necessary - to explain the Universe as we see it. If we do this, we can avoid mistakes and confusion to the greatest degree reachable under the circumstances.

If two hypotheses are equally strong when it comes to their power to describe and predict natural phenomena (which we define - at least in this train of thought, if you're willing to go along - as phenomena that we can detect, either directly or indirectly, via our senses and our mind,) we should pick the one that does the explaining and predicting while assuming less entities. Note that entities are not assumed unnecessarily if they already serve as components to another hypothesis, unless of course if that hypothesis is not the strongest one we have available to us.

Using this process and derivatives of it, humanity has arrived at the science we have now. If we accept that we don't know everything, it's safe for us to propose theories with gaps in them, as long as they are still more useful than having no theories at all or theories that explain less than the one we're going to be working under.

If our models are too simple (which they don't have to be, even if we use the Razor, as it still requires that our theories describe phenomena accurately before we assign them any value, in which case complex theories, if they are more accurate than simpler ones, would still be chosen) and they don't reflect reality, we'll find out eventually when we come across phenomena that require a more complex theory that can explain the phenomena more accurately, thus justifying the extra entities we're going to have to assume to make the theory work.

The bits I added here are intended to clarify the basis of the previous post (off of which, some of you might have noticed, I clipped bits.) Reading both this post and my previous one, you will (I hope) find that my reason for adopting a model in which things (concepts) that can be described as functions of other entities (minds) without increasing (as I consider conceptualisation to be a natural, implicit feature of the mind) the complexity of the hypothesis, without the hypothesis ending up with less explanatory or predictive power than the alternative, is solid within the system I described.

@ &:

I agree that reducing humans to chemical processes is not a good way of doing sociological (or, after a certain point, psychological) research. The methods that we apply to our research need to match the scale and nature of the subject of the research. Even if we did have a complete theory that would predict exactly the behaviour of a group of individuals in a particular setting (in which case we'd have to know, on the molecular level, almost everything about each individual,) it would be too complicated to be of any use. (Arguably) less accurate, but practically superior methods are to be preferred.

I disagree, however, with USAF on the point that society (or an individual) would somehow lose value if it/they were reduced to (basically) a list of molecules.

edited 29th Aug '11 7:00:30 PM by BestOf

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Computers are made up of a ridiculous number of little switches. Everyone knows this, especially people who work in computer related fields. However, you don't program like that. Programming is done at a certain level of abstraction at which it's much easier to keep track of.

Assuming humanity can be reduced entirely into chemical reactions, that does absolutely nothing to devalue the human experience or the study thereof, because there are a ridiculous number of reactions and it's unbelievably complicated.

Personally, I don't even know why our value as thinking, feeling, individual organisms that are capable of self-consciousness would be somehow attached to the arrogant notion that we're somehow different, on some fundamental level, from the rest of the Universe.

If you ask me, we have value because we are capable of inventing and assigning value.

To paraphrase a much earlier post from me in a thread that's probably gone (though I did back-up some of my posts there because I felt that I had expressed some ideas in them with a certain degree of clarity that I didn't expect to reach any time soon, and because I felt that it would be convenient to have those posts around,) there is an answer to the question: "does a falling tree make a sound?"

The answer is this: It creates vibrations in the air and the ground. But those vibrations are not "sound", unless there is something there to detect it and experience it as sound. Typically, there are plenty of animals around, but if there are none, it doesn't make a sound, just vibrations. If there was an animal that experienced those vibrations as vision or heat, then a falling tree would create vision or heat, but no sound, for that animal.

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Unless science does something different than engineering, this is wrong. Ethics are written down codes of behavior that you're supposed to follow, regardless of whether or not you think they're good ideas.

Fight smart, not fair.

Traditionally, the same is true of morality, which historically has not denoted a subjective concept (or at least, not a personal one). Enjoying murder would not make murder moral.

I think the fact that we are human and that this is the perspective we have should be reason enough to treat humans as different. It need not be an objective fact about reality (even most religions make mention of other sapient beings, after all), it could just be a matter of relevance to ourselves.

As for the claim that everything can be studied by science, I detest it. That would imply that all non-scientific fields were meaningless. Possibly including mathematics, which would be rather a problem for science, unless you choose to define "science" in such a way that it encompasses mathematics in spite of the vastly different methodology involved.

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We can study molecular gastronomy, but cooking will never be a science. That does not make cooking meaningless.

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AFAIK, Maths is a core part of science (at least thats what mah A-level chem tutor said )

@USAF: Ethics are Serious Business in science. if you act unethical, chances are you get thrown out of any field you're in and your research gets scrubbed. So in fact you could end up being a person non grata.

edited 30th Aug '11 4:27:36 AM by whaleofyournightmare

Dutch Lesbian

^^ Then science cannot study cooking.

^ Mathematics is absolutely vital and fundamental to science, yes.

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I agree. It's just like concepts: even if there is no such thing as "society", "infection" or "galaxy" (instead, all of these are composed of individual entities or processes that function under the laws of nature and as parts of it,) these concepts are still useful to have around. This is the whole point of inventing (and defining and re-defining) concepts in the first place.

I don't see where the claim that everything can be studied by science implies that non-scientific fields are meaningless. Instead, they're different perspectives from which to approach these things.

Besides, even if we were to discover how, say, art causes us to experience the thoughts and emotions that it does, and we knew every chemical process that goes into it, creating art on that level would still be much more complex and difficult than going about creativity the ordinary way, which is what comes naturally to us anyway.

Wikipedia:

Does mathematics build and organise knowledge in the form of testable explanations about the universe? Well, frankly, yes, it does; though part of the beauty of mathematics is that since it's 100% logic, you don't have to test it if you know that the principle is sound. A mathematical formula can be tested by expressing it with different methods (such as linear equations) and applying all the rules that are used to check formulae in that model. You can even turn it into a prediction about the Universe, like so:

Theory: The line that is defined by y=2x is straight and goes through points (0,0) and (2,1).

Test: Draw a table of coordinates and draw the line in it. If the line matches the description, it means that our theory did make a testable prediction about the Universe and passed.

I've never in my life heard anyone argue that mathematics was not science.

Science can study cooking, but it's more practical to study it with other methods. We can know and name every molecule in a food and explain why it's delicious, but this is too time-consuming to be worth the effort.

edited 30th Aug '11 5:42:15 AM by BestOf

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Mathematics is not science; scientific results are not a priori true in the way mathematic results are. Correct mathematics is infallible, whereas correct science is only less wrong than every other method.

edited 30th Aug '11 5:51:59 AM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.

I can understand the grouping of mathematics with the sciences for the sake of practicality given the close relationship between the two, and I can see how, if one defines "science" broadly enough, one can argue that mathematics is to be counted among the sciences on a technicality. Otherwise, though, in my experience, most people do distinguish between mathematics and science.

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