The least science can do is to stop pretending that such a reality does not exist." — darthbarracuda
"The first person's point of view is not accepted as a valid source of data in the physical sciences... — darthbarracuda
We need a science that admits and takes seriously the reality of the inner subjective world. — darthbarracuda
the world is populated with molecules, atoms, electrons, gravity, quarks, and who knows what else (dark energy, strings? branes?).
By whatever means science attempts to deny that consciousness exists (as they do with the concept of choice) the singular goal remains the same, that is to deny any possibility of the immaterial or more precisely the unmeasurable. The myth of science as being the sole holder and means to be truth must be upheld at all costs. There is a tremendous cost in quality of life for anyone who buys into the myth that only the material is real and everything else is an "illusion". — Rich
...and the attempt to apply scientific method to the kinds of philosophical issues that can only be properly addressed in the first person is the precise meaning of 'scientism'. — Wayfarer
If subjective, first-person experience is a part of the world — darthbarracuda
I don't agree that scientism is merely the utilization of science for "first-person" projects. If we are being completely honest, if science can't answer questions about consciousness, then probably nothing can — darthbarracuda
Perhaps the most important move in the scientific revolution was Galileo’s declaration that mathematics was to be the language of natural science. But he felt able to do this only after he had revolutionised our philosophical picture of the world. Before Galileo it was generally assumed that matter had sensory qualities: tomatoes were red, paprika was spicy, flowers smelt sweet. But it’s hard to see how these sensory qualities – the redness of tomatoes, the spicy taste of paprika, the sweet smell of flowers – could be captured in the abstract, austere vocabulary of mathematics. How could an equation capture what it’s like to taste spicy paprika? And if sensory qualities can’t be captured in a mathematical vocabulary, it seemed to follow that a mathematical vocabulary could never capture the complete nature of matter.
Galileo’s solution to this problem was to strip matter of its sensory qualities and put them in the soul. The sweet smell isn’t really in the flowers but in the soul of the person smelling them; the spicy taste isn’t really in the paprika but in the soul of the person tasting it. Even colours, for Galileo, aren’t really on the surfaces of objects but in the soul of the person observing them. And if matter had no qualities, then it was possible in principle to describe it in the purely quantitative vocabulary of mathematics. This was the birth of mathematical physics.
But of course Galileo didn’t deny the existence of the sensory qualities. Rather he took them to be forms of consciousness residing in the soul, an entity outside of the material world and so outside of the domain of natural science. In other words, Galileo created physical science by putting consciousness outside of its domain of enquiry.
I also don't agree that there is a strict demarcation between science and philosophy — darthbarracuda
All too often the intentional limiting of science is an unconscious mechanism meant to curb the perceived threat of meaningless objective nihilism or what have you. — darthbarracuda
Emphasis added.In his essay Barbarism, Michel Henry examines science, which is founded on the idea of a universal and as such objective truth, and which therefore leads to the elimination of the sensible qualities of the world, sensibility and life. There is nothing wrong with science in itself as long as it is restricted to the study of nature, but it tends to exclude all traditional forms of culture, such as art, ethics and religion. Science left to its own devices leads to technology, whose blind processes develop themselves independently in a monstrous fashion with no reference to life.
Science is a form of culture in which life denies itself and refuses itself any value. It is a practical negation of life, which develops into a theoretical negation in the form of ideologies that reduces all possible knowledge to that of science, such as the human sciences whose very objectivity deprives them of their object: what value do statistics have faced with suicide, what do they say about the anguish and the despair that produce it? These ideologies have invaded the university, and are precipitating it to its destruction by eliminating life from research and teaching. Television is the truth of technology; it is the practice par excellence of barbarism: it reduces every event to current affairs, to incoherent and insignificant facts.
This negation of life results, according to Michel Henry, from the "disease of life", from its secret dissatisfaction with the self which leads it to deny itself, to flee itself in order to escape its anguish and its own suffering. In the modern world, we are almost all condemned from childhood to flee our anguish and our proper life in the mediocrity of the media universe — an escape from self and a dissatisfaction which lead to violence — rather than resorting to the most highly developed traditional forms of culture which enable the overcoming of this suffering and its transformation into joy. Culture subsists, despite everything, but in a kind of incognito; in our materialist society, which is sinking into barbarism, it must necessarily operate in a clandestine way.
The third-person perspective can be primary for methodological reasons, but why grant it ontological primacy? Dennett's answer, ultimately, is "because it's useful to do so." — Pneumenon
So people are more brutal now than ever before, and brutality has increased in the world? Where? In what senses? — Wosret
Powered by Darwin, modern science proceeds, in Dennett’s phrase, as a “universal corrosive,” destroying illusions all the way up and all the way down, dismantling our feelings of freedom and separate selfhood, our morals and beliefs, a mother’s love and a patient’s prayer: All in reality are just “molecules in motion.”....
While it is true that materialism tells us a human being is nothing more than a “moist robot”—a phrase Dennett took from a Dilbert comic—we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that “for general purposes” the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist—that colors and sounds exist, too—“just not in the way they think.” They “exist in a special way,” which is to say, ultimately, not at all.
Michel Henry examines science, which is founded on the idea of a universal and as such objective truth, and which therefore leads to the elimination of the sensible qualities of the world, sensibility and life. There is nothing wrong with science in itself as long as it is restricted to the study of nature, but it tends to exclude all traditional forms of culture, such as art, ethics and religion. Science left to its own devices leads to technology, whose blind processes develop themselves independently in a monstrous fashion with no reference to life.
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