Aside from "indeterministic laws" being a questionable idea in general, why would one have to believe in indeterministic laws? — Terrapin Station

If one assumes there is an objective reality in which there are constraints, how could one believe in anything else than deterministic or indeterministic laws to describe these constraints?

By the way when I talk about indeterministic laws I refer to laws such as in quantum mechanics, in which things do not have a definite trajectory but rather there is only a specified probability of finding them in such or such volume of space.

In any event, it could work that you're able to bias probabilities. — Terrapin Station

If physical things behave according to laws, and you're able to bias the probabilities in these laws, then you're not following these laws, so there is some part of you that is not physical.

If you want to remain physical, then the best you can do is select outcomes so that the probabilities remain the same (which means that in some instances you won't have any freedom to choose).

He mentioned he's giving up posting on the internet altogether, so I doubt he will see our messages, unless he changes his mind. But he is probably alright, he felt he needed to stop posting on the internet, so you assuming he was gaslighting you might have just comforted him in his decision. And you're probably more thinking about it than he is right now.

That's all fine and dandy, but where in there is it explained how photons of a given wavelength give rise to the perception of a color at all? Saying that "cones are composed of three different photo pigments that enable color perception" does not explain by what mechanism these give rise to color perception. What they do is they measure how some parameters of the eye change as a function of the wavelength of incoming light, there is no explanation as to how this gives rise to any experience of color. They're not explaining the very fact of experience, they're explaining it away.

The problem is not why the wavelength 460nm corresponds to the color blue rather than some other one, but why it gives rise to any experience at all.

Again, if we build a model that describes what we see, that model can never explain why we see, because at no point we are modeling the modeler, we're just modeling our view of the modeler. We're just finding correlations within our experiences, how could they tell us why we experience? If we find correlations within a movie, how could they tell us how the TV works?

I was in the middle of writing my responding post when Kippo posted his/her response while mine was underway. Now Kippo, I'm not saying I know you have insight on my activities, cyber, physical local or otherwise, but, my paranoia is urging me to accept you have at least some cyber knowledge of my ongoings, since the coincidence is too convienent. I also get the impression you are both patronizing me and gas lighting me in doing this. — THX1138

I do not get the impression at all that he was patronizing you or gaslighting you, I saw him as an individual who expressed sincerely how he felt. The coincidence is not that extraordinary, this thread has turned into a discussion about mental health issues, he identified with it, he replied at the time he did because Wallows had just posted beforehand and so this thread appeared at the top of the forum. Keep in mind that other people have feelings too and that not all their thoughts and feelings revolve around you, just relax mate.

If you are in a situation where you do not feel safe and you feel threatened, that paranoia is a normal defense mechanism. At this point I think the two things that would help you most would be to find some community in which you can feel welcomed so you stop feeling so isolated, and a home so you can feel less unsafe. There must be some social workers who can help you with that.

Schizophrenia isn't only composed of delusions. — Wallows

I never claimed it was, I said feeling bad + delusions is enough to be labeled as schizophrenic.

There are phases in the life of a schizophrenic. Such as prodromal periods, frank psychosis, and eventually a persistent struggle to form an identity. — Wallows

In the example where the label of schizophrenic stems from a delusion (that is a specific kind of belief), there are obviously phases in the life of a belief, which has an influence on the life of the person holding it. Not knowing whether to hang onto the belief or not is a struggle to form an identity.

This simply does not follow and I don't even know what you are trying to say here. — Wallows

It does follow, you not seeing the logical connection is not my issue.

One doesn't have to believe that physical things are deterministic. — Terrapin Station

Sure, but if your mind is physical and follows indeterministic laws, then it doesn't have the ability to choose anything. There is a given probability that your mind will be in such or such state, and that's it, your mind is not making the choice, the indeterministic law is making the choice, the choice is not determined, it is selected randomly while following a given probability distribution.

Basically, there needs to be an additional ingredient for your mind to actually select wilfully one possibility among those that fit the indeterministic law. If your mind is physical, there is no such ingredient, everything simply follows the indeterministic law, and outcomes are selected randomly with various probabilities.

The free will I care about is the ability to choose between a tuna and a turkey sandwich, or between which of a handful of movies to watch, etc. — Terrapin Station

But do you believe you are choosing freely, or that some (in)deterministic law made the choice for you and you are becoming aware of it after the fact?

So there are a number of experiences described there, some are Alice's, some are other people's, some are interactions between other people, or between her and others. All within the broad scenario of Alice catching a train to work.

Alice is modeling her experiences, which includes modeling the people she encounters (who, in turn, are doing the same, at least when they're not preoccupied) and she is even modeling herself (e.g., evaluating her morning, reflecting on her pains).

It's not a formal scientific model in the sense of a mathematical hypothesis that has been rigorously tested. But the basic elements are there. That is the human-oriented view with the experiences that ground scientific investigation and enable self-referential modeling. — Andrew M

She isn't modeling herself nor the people she encounters, she is modeling her experiences of herself and of the people she encounters. From her perspective she might say she is directly modeling people and herself, but from anyone else's perspective she is modeling her experiences of people and herself.

If you assume she is actually modeling other people, you quickly encounter the problem that these people exist and do not exist at the same time. They exist to Alice, but they do not exist to those who have never met them. Isn't it more coherent to say that she is modeling her experiences of them?

That's precisely in that sense that physicists neglect the human perspective. They equate their perspective with "how the world really is outside of their perspective". And so they end up building models that omit the human perspective, these models describe how what they see behaves, and so they cannot explain how is it that they see.

It is impossible to derive from their models that photons of wavelength 460nm stimulating an eye will give rise to an experience of the color blue. It is impossible because they have neglected the human perspective. They are not modeling the world, they are modeling their perspective while believing they are modeling the world, that's a crucial distinction to understand.

When we spend time listening to and conversing with other people, we realize that they sometimes have very different perspectives, and it is when we realize that that we really stop neglecting the human experience. On the other hand, when we call our perspective "observations of the objective world" is when we are neglecting the human experience.

Minds aren't technically part of the mind-independent world, but they're part of a world that mostly consists of mind-independent stuff. — Terrapin Station

Yes, but I'm not actually a realist on physical laws; at least not as physical laws are usually characterized. — Terrapin Station

Ok, so in that view both minds and things that aren't mind are part of a world, and both are constrained in how they can behave.

Even if you're not a realist on physical laws, you're a realist on laws that apply to the world (even if we don't know them exactly), because what we call laws are precisely constraints that dictate how things behave or how they can behave.

After some thought, I agree that in such a world there can be some free will if the constraints are fundamentally indeterministic, albeit that's a limited free will that cannot go beyond these constraints.

For instance, if we were to assume that quantum mechanics is fundamentally indeterministic and is a correct description of the world at very small scales, it doesn't leave much place for free will: the mind might act freely on the indeterministic part, but it has to do that in a way that the spatial and temporal probabilities in the laws remain respected, and it isn't clear that we could have an effective free will that way, the mind might only have an imperceptible effect that would hardly qualify as free will.

So objective reality does not necessarily imply absence of free will, but it does imply limited free will at best.

Well, if someone can figure out a way to make the notion of a nonphysical something/anything coherent, that would be a start. ;-) — Terrapin Station

The above allowed for the possibility of limited free will if the mind has a non-physical part that can act freely on the indeterministic part of laws, but now it seems to me that if you assume there is no such non-physical part then there can be no free will in such an objective reality.

If you assume physicalism is true then it's obvious you would see anything non-physical as false, but otherwise why would you say anything non-physical is incoherent?

"There is a mind-independent world" is another way of saying that there are things that exist aside from our minds. It's not saying that we can't influence the mind-independent world. — Terrapin Station

"Mind-independent world" doesn't imply realism about laws, and it doesn't imply strong determinism. — Terrapin Station

There are a few things to clarify here otherwise we will just keep talking past each other.

Do you agree with the idea that in a mind-independent world, minds are part of that world?

Then do you agree with the idea that in a mind-independent world, there are constraints to how things can move and what minds can do?

Innately. All my life I haven't learned a thing, at most I've just remembered things. — Shamshir

How would you respond to someone who would claim they know innately that the world is not mind-independent?

There is flux and flux allows you to not follow laws. Flux is objective and so a law. Hence the mind is ambivalent. Hence you have free will - and your free will has borders. — Shamshir

Are you saying the mind can choose to not follow laws?

I don't see how they're mutually exclusive - I see one arising from the other. — Shamshir

You see objective reality as arising from free will? But then if that reality was willed it does not exist independently of us, it is not objective, which is why I don't see how they are not exclusive.

Then how did you arrive at this conclusion?

I realize that words can be interpreted in many different ways.

By mind-independent world I mean a world that exists even if there are no minds in it, in which everything behaves according to laws including the minds. If we assume that in a mind-independent world minds follow such laws, then minds have an influence on the world in the sense that they are a part of the world that follows laws that act upon other parts of the world, but they don't have an influence on the world in the sense that they can't act outside of these laws.

So the fundamental question is, can we do things that doesn't follow these laws or not? I'm saying that if we are assuming we are part of an objective reality (which implicitly assumes that everything behaves according to unchanging laws, even if these laws include some randomness, and we're just observing parts of it), then it immediately follows that we are assuming we can't do anything outside of these laws, we can't even act on the randomness in these laws, we don't have free will.

And so if we assume instead that we have free will, then there can't be such a thing as an objective reality, we are the ones shaping through our will what we and others experience, and even physical laws would be limits we impose on ourselves rather than limits existing out there independently of us.

I don't see how we could assume objective reality and free will at the same time.

It clearly is — Shamshir

You're saying the world is clearly mind-independent?

You don't depend on me and I can freely act upon you; same with the world. — Shamshir

But then such a world is not mind-independent, it is not objective, which is my point.

My point is that this is a dumb dichotomy. Say there was a 'little free man'. What accounts for 'his' freedom? Another little free man? And so on ad infinitum? As if 'brains' were free or not free. Meaningless claptrap. — StreetlightX

I just used your term, I wouldn't call it a man in the first place, that would prevent the infinite regress. More like there is some element to us that doesn't reduce to a brain or body, some element that gives us the potential ability to shape the world in the way we want, in a way that doesn't depend entirely on the state of our brain or body.

Experience, which is "the practical contact with and observation of facts or events (OED)", is implicit in any scientific model. And that "practical contact" can itself be modeled scientifically.

In a general sense, there's the world, and there are separable systems within the world, from particles to human beings to galaxies, that we can seek to describe, explain and interact with. It takes a human (or similarly sentient being) to experience and model that world but there's nothing preventing the modeling of the modeler themselves.

As I see it, the puzzles of experience are front and center in science rather than neglected. — Andrew M

There is an implicit assumption in there, the assumption there is such a thing as facts and events existing independently of experience. But how did we arrive at these 'facts' and 'events' if not through our experiences?

Then if you start from these 'facts' and 'events' and attempt to model the modeler through them, you're not actually modeling the modeler, you're modeling your experience of the modeler. Most scientists don't realize that.

So they're not addressing the puzzles of experience that way, they just believe they're addressing them because of poor philosophizing.

Why would a mind independent world impede your ability to act upon it freely? — Shamshir

Precisely because that world would not depend on you?

You're assuming a thoroughgoing, strong causal determinism to be the case.

Not everyone assumes that — Terrapin Station

Let's take my original argument:

1. Assume we belong to a mind-independent world
2. Then that world doesn't depend on our minds (that's a tautology)
3. So our minds don't have an influence on it
4. So we don't have free will (we have the illusion of choice)

Where does an underlying assumption of strong causal determinism happen?

If we assume indeterminism instead, how does that change the argument?

"Mind controls body": what a strange phrase, as if 'mind' were a little man in the head with a bunch of control levers pushing the body about. — StreetlightX

That's the thing, is there a little free man along with the brain, or is there only a brain enslaved to laws? It's a matter of belief.

Admit it leo. You have no idea what schizophrenia actually is... — Wallows

Sure I do Wallows, here are the criteria again, just need to know the meaning of the words mentioned https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519704/table/ch3.t22/

A psychiatrist doesn't know better what schizophrenia is, they just know who to lump into the schizophrenia box by applying the criteria, and who to lump into some other box by applying some other criteria.

Again, feeling bad and having delusions is enough to be labeled as schizophrenic. Now what is a delusion? A belief contradicted by reality. But who gets to decide what reality is? If you have philosophized some, you would know that people and social consensus play a great part in defining reality. So, fundamentally, if you feel bad and you have beliefs that do not follow the consensus (and as a result you behave in ways that do not follow the consensus), you're labeled as schizophrenic.

As to why coming to accept your diagnosis was a relief to you, I would say some of the reasons are likely that you came to agree with some authority you were previously in conflict with for not accepting what they told you, and that you put down your defenses and agreed to let people help you, but I don't know your story so there are probably reasons I don't know about that pertain to your particular case.

No, I asked how the observer could be included in the observations in, for example, biology, chemistry or geology. If you can imagine how, then explain or describe. The question of the mind-dependence or mind Independence of what is observed is irrelevant to what is observed, as far as i can tell. — Janus

I gave an example for geology, saying how the desires of living beings can have an influence on it. If these desires are shaped in part by what these beings observe, then the observer is involved in the way the world changes. Whereas the current widespread view is to see living beings as passive machines obeying to unchanging laws.

As to chemistry, it could be possible that what is desired has an influence on the way some molecules behave within the body, for instance in the brain. And before you say that would violate 'proven' laws of physics such as the conservation of energy, consider that these laws are mostly tested in passive and basic situations where life has a negligible influence, not within complex organisms.

How do you know it would be "so different that you can't imagine", if you can't imagine how it would be different? — Janus

I can imagine what it would be like, you were the one who seemed to not be able to imagine how we could include the observer in the natural sciences (besides in quantum mechanics). I presumed that you couldn't imagine it precisely because you were assuming that the world is mind-independent (and how could the observer be relevant in such a world?)

Sure what we do affects the climate and may (apart from the immediate effects of, for example, drilling and excavation) over much longer timescales even affect the geology. But the climate and geology prior to the existence of humans would not have been affected by us, would it? — Janus

There again you're implicitly assuming a mind-independent world. What we think the world was like in a distant past depends on what we assume has an influence on that world. If instead you assume that humans and other living beings do have an influence on the world through what they desire, then you can't easily turn back the clock to infer that there ever was a time when there was no life or minds in any form whatsoever. And even if it is the case that there was a time when there wasn't any mind, it doesn't follow that climate and geology today are not affected by minds.

That we might be thought of as "heaps of particles that blindly follow physical laws while having the illusion of choice" just shows one way of thinking that obviously does not tell the whole story of human, or even animal, beings. Contemporary science is not so reductive as this outmoded Newtonian vision; but that seems to be taking longer to sink in with some of those who like to call themselves philosophers than it should. By reacting against this reductionist model you are actually perpetuating it, because you see only the "either/or" of (necessarily reductively materialist) science versus some kind of idealism. — Janus

It is certainly valuable that there are some physicists and scientists who are willing to interpret quantum mechanics as showing an influence of the observer on the world. And some interpretations of quantum mechanics do get far away from a Newtonian vision. But I cannot help but see that despite this, the widespread view is still reductive. The standard model of particle physics, which was built on quantum mechanics among other things, refers to the fundamental constituents of reality as being elementary particles, interacting with one another through forces, which is definitely heavily imbued with a Newtonian vision.

The thing is, quantum mechanics the way it is presented is too inintuitive, physics students are told that they cannot understand it, that all they can do is "shut up and calculate". So these future scientists mostly never really adhere to a quantum mechanical view of the world, they retain deep down a Newtonian vision that they can grasp, and only forget about that vision when they manipulate quantum mechanical equations, which again is why the standard model of particle physics that came later is made of particles interacting through forces, just like in a Newtonian vision.

And besides, the observer effect in quantum mechanics doesn't have to be interpreted as the influence of consciousness on reality. Many simply choose to view it as the idea that any measuring apparatus that is introduced changes the setup of the experiment, and so changes the result of the experiment. Contemporary scientific experiments do not force scientists to adhere to such or such view, they are the ones who force their view onto the experiments.

Can a mind change the world so it has whatever it desires? No. — Banno

That's hard to say, maybe it is possible and we just haven't found out how? If we acknowledge that our minds change the world and that a mind might change at least some of what it desires, it is possible that our minds might change the world so they have what they desire.

So you have everything you desire? — Banno

I don't, but that some things are harder to get or some desires are harder to change does not imply that we cannot change what we desire.

I have some desires I didn't use to have and I used to have desires I don't have now. It seems to be a matter of belief whether we assume the outside world alone changes our desires or whether we participate in changing them.

Of course minds change the way the world is. Can a mind change anything it desires? No. — Banno

How would we know that a mind cannot change what it desires?

Reality is the stuff that does not care what you say or think. — Banno

But if "the cat is on the mat" is reality, why does the cat care about what you say and leave the mat when you call its name? Isn't it that your mind has an influence on reality?

But if you call the cat for a feed, and in doing that you're saying you use your mind to change the way the world is, then what does it mean to say the world is mind-independent if minds are constantly changing it?

Once my mind has control over my body, I already have a physical instrument, namely my body, with which to affect the world. — fishfry

But if my mind controls my body, and my body is part of the mind-independent world, then my mind controls a part of the world, so that world is not mind-independent.

It seems to me that if we assume our mind controls our body then we assume our mind has control on the world, while if we assume the world is mind-independent then we assume our mind has no control on the world, and then we just have the illusion of controlling our body.

Sure, but if the world is mind-independent then it is not minds that move things around in it, it is the environment that acts on bodies which automatically react to their environment, no?

This all serves to set up the thesis that science neglects experience and the human perspective when, to the contrary, science has always been grounded in experience and observation. That's why it works. — Andrew M

Physicists do not neglect what they experience when they build their models of reality, but they neglect the fact that they experience, and that's a huge omission. They claim to describe the fundamental constituents that make up everything, but because of their initial omission their constituents cannot be used to explain why we experience anything at all. What makes a particular arrangement of particles conscious rather than not conscious? Their equations don't say, they can't say. But then many say that because fundamental physics describe the fundamental constituents that make up reality, then choice is an illusion and we are simply machines behaving according to laws of physics, our feelings and desires do not cause anything and life is an accident. Which are beliefs that do not follow from observation.

Basically, if we want to assume that there is such a thing as a mind-independent world, and we claim to have a model that describe the fundamental constituents of that mind-independent world and how they behave, then that model ought to be able to explain, even in principle, why we experience anything at all, otherwise we haven't built a model of that mind-independent world, we have just built a model of what we experience, which is definitely not the same. And if we acknowledge that we have just built a model of what we experience, then we can't use that model to say what we are made of and what we can or cannot do, because it is not a model of ourselves, it is a model of what we experience.

I really can't type more than one sentence with you, or you'll ignore stuff. — Terrapin Station

I haven't ignored stuff, you just haven't understood how what I said addressed what you believe i ignored.

At the risk of a second sentence, what's the difference between the fact that you experience and an experience you have? — Terrapin Station

If you don't see the difference I don't believe I can make you see it, it will just be an endless back and forth with you asking a question and me answering, and you asking another question and so on and so forth, I don't see an end to it so unless you want to say where you're going with it it's probably best we stop here.

All I will give you here is an analogy. "The fact that there is a thing in a box" is not the same as "the thing that is in the box". Maybe you will then ask "why do you think this analogy applies?" or something of the sort, and I will then answer, and you will pick something I said and ask another question, and if I give a well-thought-out reply you will stop reading after the first sentence and ask a question on that while ignoring all the rest, and I don't want to have to deal with that. You have a pattern of focusing on semantics and technicalities and detracting threads from their original subject, to me there is really not much point in debating endlessly on whether "lived experience" is redundant or not.

But if you want to play the game the other way, I can ask the questions and you answer. Why do you think the fact that you experience and an experience you have are the same?

What can it refer to that experience alone can not, if experience is necessarily lived? — Terrapin Station

I explained that in the second paragraph. "Lived experience" can refer to "the fact that you experience", while experience refers to "an experience you have".

How would you say "the neglect of the fact that we experience" more succinctly? "The neglect of lived experience" doesn't sound bad to me, there could be worse choices. What better choices do you have? It would have been clunky to name the article "The blind spot of science is the neglect of the fact that we experience". Or maybe that would have been better, if "lived experience" is so confusing to some.

Why are you talking about neglecting experiences in that section anyway? That part wasn't about that. This quote: "You completely ignored that referring to experience is referring to something that was necessarily "lived," necessarily processual" is about whether "lived" is redundant.

You're confusing the second half with the first half. (Hence a reason why the best course of action is to stick to one thing at a time . . . against my better judgment, I addressed more than one thing in a post and you're conflating the two.) — Terrapin Station

It is precisely because you want to always focus on one thing at a time that you fail to see the connection. Sure an experience was necessarily lived. I claim that this does not imply that "lived experience" is redundant, because "lived experience" can be used to refer to something that "experience" alone cannot.

Do you agree that "neglecting an experience" is not the same as "neglecting the fact that you experience"? If so, how would you call the neglect of "the fact that you experience"? The authors of the article have chosen to call it "lived experience", that's all. Sure, "lived experience" might seem like a pleonasm, but only if you insist on focusing on the fact that an experience was necessarily lived, rather than on the idea that "an experience you have" is not the same as "the fact that you experience".

What is the non-lived sense of experience that you'd be referring to there?

Let's just solve that first, because this is going way too many rounds without you clarifying that. — Terrapin Station

I clarified it in the rest of the post, but I can't clarify it to you if you don't read what I say.

As succinctly as I can, the physicist neglects the fact that he experiences when he builds his models of reality, while the employer neglects the experiences listed on a resume. It wouldn't be accurate to say that the physicist neglects experiences, because he doesn't neglect what he sees, but he does neglect the fact that he sees (when he builds his models).

For the more detailed version, see above.

You completely ignored that referring to experience is referring to something that was necessarily "lived," necessarily processual. — Terrapin Station

That an experience was necessarily lived does not imply that "the neglect of experience" has only one meaning. Again, if I hire you without looking at the experience you listed in your resume, I neglect experience.

Now if I'm a physicist and I assume I am dealing with a mind-independent world, and I model that world and hypothesize what its fundamental constituents are and how they behave, and I find that I can predict a lot of things that way and call my model a success, and conclude that myself and others are made of these fundamental constituents and nothing else, but I don't pay attention to the fact that all this time I have been experiencing, and that my model cannot hope to predict that any arrangement of these fundamental constituents is going to be experiencing anything at all, then I have neglected experience in a much more profound and different way than by neglecting the experience on your resume.

Usually we use different words to refer to different things, so how do I differentiate the latter neglect of experience from the former? The former was about experience listed on a resume. The latter is about experiencing, living, feeling, being aware, conscious. So it is useful to qualify the latter as action-oriented to differentiate it, and I find that "lived experience" does the job fine. Myself I usually use the verb "to experience" instead of "lived experience", to differentiate it from "an experience".

For example, no materialist neglects ("lived") experience. — Terrapin Station

I think what I just wrote above answers this. They do not neglect that they experience, but they neglect the fact that they experience when they attempt to make a model of everything that exists, and seem to assume that somehow the fact that they experience will emerge from their equations, but it can't if they don't take it into account right from the start.

That's an abbreviated way of referring to processes one has gone through which were "lived." It just seems like a stupid term, where we're adding words where there's no need to add words--adding words to make it sound more "intellectual"/theoretical. We can't come up with an example where simply "experience," unmodified by a redundant adjective, wouldn't do just as well. — Terrapin Station

And there is a distinction between going through a process and referring to a process, between experiencing a feeling and talking about a feeling. In saying "lived experience" we're putting the focus on what it's like to go through that experience, rather than merely referring to it. The "neglect of lived experience" is the neglect of what it's like to experience, rather than the neglect of the experience you listed in your resume when we decide whether to hire you or not. You not seeing the distinction does not mean we're "adding words to make it sound more intellectual/theoretical".

How about addressing the fact that you're forwarding strawmen? — Terrapin Station

How about describing what you see as strawmen, instead of expecting others to do the work for you?

The gulf between a belief being widespread and being universal and a necessary part of engaging in science as claimed by the article in the OP is unfathomably wide. — andrewk

I don't see the article claiming that materialism is a necessary part of engaging in science.

Many of us like to think that science can give us a complete, objective description of cosmic history, distinct from us and our perception of it. But this image of science is deeply flawed. In our urge for knowledge and control, we’ve created a vision of science as a series of discoveries about how reality is in itself, a God’s-eye view of nature.

the belief that physical reality has absolute primacy in human knowledge, a view that can be called scientific materialism. In philosophical terms, it combines scientific objectivism (science tells us about the real, mind-independent world) and physicalism (science tells us that physical reality is all there is)

Objectivism and physicalism are philosophical ideas, not scientific ones

Note the focus on how we view science, rather than on science itself. It is not a criticism of science, it is a criticism of a widespread view of science.

Science has no metaphysical dogmas. Plenty of scientists do — andrewk

If you view science as the attempt to find apparent regularities in what we experience and to tentatively make predictions from them, then I agree. But as soon as you see science as being guided by a specific method, or as approaching truth, or as telling us what things are really like beyond what we experience, or as proving or disproving such or such belief or theory, there are metaphysical dogmas involved, and the problem is applying these dogmas while being unwilling or unable to identify them as such.

can we stop saying "lived experience"? What other sort of experience is there? — Terrapin Station

There is experience in the sense having knowledge or skill about some subject. "Lived experience" puts the focus on the state of experiencing. I never used that term before but I don't see anything wrong with it, no need to be pedantic about it.

And then how powerful is this group of scientifically illiterate philosophy interested people? I do get that religious people who are skeptical about science as a whole, at least in arguments, has a decent amount of power, but these are not people who are interested xin philosophy - for the most part.

But that's a secondary issue. A very important one. My main reaction is 'so what?' if there is a problem as brought up in the OP, then the fact that there are scientifically illierate people who focus on philosophy is not relevant. If there is no problem as presented in the OP, then it is still not relevent. So the issue is: is that problem there? — Coben

I thought it was relevant because we are on a philosophy forum, and some of the reactions stem from people who know a lot about philosophy but don't seem to know much about science, and so they don't see the problem presented in the OP, and that's part of the problem presented in the OP, if everyone saw this problem then it wouldn't be such a problem, it would have been addressed long ago.

If we discuss the subject on scientific forums we are met with people who don't see the problem because they are mostly philosophically illiterate, and if we discuss the subject on philosophy forums we are met with people who don't see the problem because they are mostly scientifically illiterate, so it becomes difficult to find a place where this kind of subject can be discussed freely without getting heated reactions from those who don't see the problem, and so it is difficult to address the problem.

And how would it be possible by only looking at physics, the movement of particles to derive how elephants behave in groups? — ssu

If elephants are made solely of particles, and the motion of these particles is completely determined by fundamental laws of physics, then in principle knowing the state of these particles at a given time would allow to predict the future behavior of these particles, and so the behavior of these elephants. Now materialists do not claim that the current laws of physics are complete (they might say they are almost complete), but they would claim that complete fundamental laws of physics would allow to do that in principle, and that the only practical obstacle would be that of knowing the state of the particles that make up an elephant at a given time.

You are simply dismissing issues like entropy, randomness and quantum mechanics or that not everything in the phenotype is explained with the genotype. And with social sciences it's totally obvious that things simply don't get explained by movements of particles. Nobody would believe such reductionist crap. — ssu

There are misconceptions there. Entropy is not a fundamental law of physics, well it was two centuries ago, entropy is not a force that causes things to move, it is a high-level description that is a consequence of fundamental laws of physics, the increase in entropy can be explained as a consequence of fundamental laws of physics. Same goes with randomness, the apparent randomness of the motion of a leaf falling down a tree can be explained as a consequence of fundamental laws of physics, with air molecules interacting with the particles that make up the leaf, and predicting the trajectory of the leaf would be a matter of knowing initially the position/velocity of the particles that make up the air and the leaf.

Quantum mechanics has some randomness built-in, but even if you assume that complete fundamental laws of physics include some fundamental randomness, that does not imply that you couldn't predict in principle the behavior of elephants. Because there are regularities in the behavior of elephants, their behavior is not random, and so these regularities could be predicted in principle from a complete fundamental law of physics even if it has some built-in randomness.

You say nobody would believe such crap, but materialists do, and many scientists are materialists, if you accept that fundamental physics describe the behavior of the fundamental constituents that make up everything then you're a materialist, and that's the way fundamental physics is presented in school and in the media, and it has all kinds of depressing implications, and this is why people such as the OP and the individuals cited by the OP and David Bohm and myself and others are critical of this state of affairs.

And these people have a powerful influence on the way society moves and changes and interpersonally are often quite harsh and dismissive. I honestly can't believe that this is being denied by people in this thread. The fact that they are like this does not mean science is bad or should be overthrown. It means what it means. There is a closemindedness and oversimplification by this culture or significant subculture - and one that is really quite philosophically illiterate despite their intelligence - and this is problematic. — Coben

Exactly. And this is also the case with the scientifically illiterate who are otherwise well-versed in philosophy, they can't philosophize well about science.

The naive view is seeing science as this great enterprise that brings comfort and technology and maybe gives access to truth, so they don't like seeing it be attacked, but they don't realize that what is attacked is not the tools that science provides, it is things that people and scientists say and do in the name of Science, things that have a great negative influence on the lives of many, while these things are not accurate theories of the world that have demonstrated their practical usefulness, they are beliefs that are disguised as scientific and pushed and imposed onto others.

Simply put it, physics cannot answer to every question there is in science. Hence the observation that everything is made of particles doesn't take us anywhere in a huge field of scientific topics. Add social sciences into the mix and physics is totally useless in those fields of inquiry. — ssu

"everything is made of particles" is not an observation, it is a belief.

Sure we can't use the laws of physics to derive how elephants behave in groups or what it's like to watch a sunset, but materialists would claim that in principle, it is possible.

The subject is not about the usefulness of physics, it is about the belief of materialism that permeates the natural sciences, schools, and society, and how it neglects lived experience, which in the words of David Bohm leads "people who want to hold onto spirituality to be incoherent in various aspects of their lives" and to a loss of meaning.

Materialism tells us we are nothing more than a bunch of particles moving according to unchanging laws, which implies that choice and will are an illusion and which leaves no place to spirituality. The problem is that many believe that science shows materialism to be true, including many scientists, while this is not the case, and that's what the article in the OP is about.

Physics doesn't claim anything like that. — ssu

Physicists and many scientists do.

Yet a quantum-physicist has no clue based his own field how mammals communicate or what the monetary policy ought to be. The idea that one phenomenon can be reduce to other more fundamental phenomena and in the end "everything would be physics" is just silly as physics has a limited scope to the field of science. — ssu

Can be reduced to particles in the sense that "how mammals communicate" or "what the monetary policy ought to be" would be thoughts held by a human being, and these thoughts would correspond to a specific pattern of electrical activity in a brain, and that electrical activity would correspond to many electrons moving in some specific way. So basically in that view everything you think and you feel and you do is simply particles moving and interacting according to physical laws, and that view is usually called physicalism or materialism.

Many have commented that this view exists, and offered their opinion that it is a problem. I have said as much myself, many times. Those who are open to this message have already received and accepted it. Those who really need it are those whose emotional attachments to their personal beliefs are so deep that they cannot even hear discussion like this one. A shame, but there it is.

So where to go from here? :chin: — Pattern-chaser

Attempt to solve the problem? By for instance changing the way physics is taught in schools so that kids don't leave it believing they are nothing more than particles behaving according to laws of physics.

Also I believe many people are potentially open to this message but have never heard it. I desperately needed to hear this message during my scientific studies, but I was surrounded by scientists who boasted that their view is the truth and that anything going against it is essentially religious crackpottery. Took me a while to escape this madness and find some sanity in the words of philosophers such as Feyerabend who, unsurprisingly, was designated by many scientists as an enemy of science, or even the worst enemy of science, while all he was an enemy of was the bullshit that scientists spouted.

And this message definitely hasn't been heard nearly enough, just need to look at some of the reactions in this thread.