#scientisms

[1000rh]

…psychiatry assumes that society does not cause distress in biologically normal people, who are considered biologically normal at least in part because they are economically productive. This assumption permits the conclusion that if a person is distressed to the point of unproductivity, it is because that person—not society—is abnormal. Thus, psychiatry’s commitment to biological essentialism not only masks the role of the constructed sociopolitical environment in creating distress but depoliticizes it by characterizing that allegedly irrational distress as induced by biological abnormality.

– Kiera Lyons, “The Neurodiversity Paradigm and Abolition of Psychiatric Incarceration” (2023)

[toadletthethird]

The moment of clarity is so ruthless. Can't believe they made skeptic get a liberal arts degree

[thebardostate]

Is Your Mind Real?

Is your mind "real" in the same sense as a table is "real"?

In the philosophy of mind, materialism is the belief that reality consists of nothing more than interactions between material things like atoms. Physical reality is all there is. That goes for the mind as well, which (if it exists at all) is believed to be generated by the brain. (Materialism's main rival, dualism, is the belief that the mind and brain have independent existence. )

Materialism has been around since the scientific revolution began in the 1600s. Classical materialism was based on the ideas of Newtonian physics and envisioned a clockwork "billiard ball" universe in which:

The same physical laws apply at all measurement scales (micro to macro);

Reality is deterministic and predictable;

Reality is objective, in the sense that it exists independently of any observer;

Everything in existence can be reduced to the interactions between atoms; and

Space and time are absolute, linear, and distinctly separate dimensions.

All of these classical premises have been undermined by modern physics, but materialism has been updated to get around these difficulties, as we shall see.

Physicalism

Physicalism is the view that the world consists of the things that physics says it contains (Ney 2008). But which physics are we talking about? If it's our current understanding of physics, then physicalism is plainly wrong since our current physical understanding is likely to be deprecated by new physical theories just as classical materialism was deprecated by relativity and quantum physics.

Maybe we can couple physicalism to some future, final, and completely accurate version of physics. You've probably heard this claim before: We may not know all of the answers yet, but we'll eventually figure them out. (Karl Popper derisively termed this approach "promissory materialism".) The problem here is that we have no idea what a future physics might entail. Maybe physics will discover that the mind isn't generated by the brain, but is instead a nonlocal phenomenon. In that case, it will be dualism rather than materialism that can claim the imprimatur of a future physics.

But setting that objection aside, who gets to decide "what physics says"? Physics is not monolithic and there are many areas where agreement is by no means universal. For example, relativity and quantum physics have stubbornly resisted a century of efforts to unify them. They each make correct predictions in their own domain, but they don't mesh with each other.

Finally, value-laden concepts like aesthetics and ethics are quite difficult to reduce to the interactions of atoms. That kind of transformation is one-to-many (homomorphic) rather than one-to-one (isomorphic) with important implications:

Under a homomorphism we lose information and cannot preserve the property of whether an underlying system is deterministic or stochastic. This is a major blow to physicalism from the perspective of free will and the philosophy of mind.

Under a homomorphism we cannot conclude anything about what another observer would see when they view "the same" system. In other words, the sort of reductionism that physicalism demands makes objective reality impossible even in principle.

So physicalism is a slippery and difficult form of materialism to defend. It doesn't explain the mind, it simply explains it away.

Scientific Naturalism

Well, if tight coupling to physics didn't work, maybe we should loosen that coupling and try it again. Perhaps reality arises from natural material phenomena in a holistic way, with physics lurking around somewhere at the bottom of it. This scientific naturalism: nothing mental can happen without a corresponding change in a physical object. The philosophical term for this is supervenience, as in "all mental processes supervene on purely physical processes in the brain."

Of course, 'natural' is the biggest weasel word in philosophy, and has been ever since Rousseau. Here it is used to gatekeep the supernatural, which is the entire point of materialism anyway. But how do we know that the phenomena currently termed as supernatural (e.g., near-death experiences, terminal lucidity, children's memories of past lives) aren't precisely the kinds of discrepant edge cases that lead to new theories and scientific revolutions? This is the "future physics" problem all over again. Indeed, one prominent philosopher of mind, David Chalmers, is confident enough in such a possibility that he describes himself as both a naturalist and a dualist - thereby severing the link between scientific naturalism and materialism.

So once again, materialism fails.

Plato's Cave

From a systems philosophy perspective, let us postulate that the physical universe is an operationally closed system, by which I mean all of its causal processes are endogenous to that system (they are self-contained within the physical universe) and it contains no exogenous variables (i.e., no Platonic 'givens' that originate from outside the physical universe.) This is materialism at its most abstract, the metaphysical equivalent to 'what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.'

The biological sciences are closed because they depend on the physical sciences. The physical sciences are closed because they depend on mathematics.

But mathematics is not operationally closed.

As Tarski's Undefinability Theorem has shown, arithmetical truth cannot be defined in arithmetic; and (more generally) for any sufficiently strong formal system, truth cannot be defined within that system.

Therefore, truth is an exogenous variable.

Therefore, the physical universe cannot be operationally closed.

Therefore, materialism fails.

Materialism fails because truth cannot be reduced to interactions between atoms. Since truth is a value, it also follows that at least some values are exogenous to the physical universe.

This difficulty cannot be removed by appealing to a multiverse like the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, since the system boundary can be drawn arbitrarily large without invalidating the syllogism.

So Plato has the last laugh.

In Conclusion

"The intuitive and common-sense feel of materialism seems to last only as long as as one keeps one's statement of it vague."

Edward Feser, Philosophy of Mind: A Short Introduction, pg. 45

Materialism needs science. Science does not need materialism. In fact, to the extent that materialists remain temperamentally opposed to accepting the validity of so-called "supernatural" phenomena like near-death experiences, terminal lucidity, and children's memories of past lives they are actively blocking scientific progress.

Materialism is a "theory of everything" and as such it is brittle to any evidence that the mind is nonlocal to the brain. But there is empirical evidence that the mind can exist independent of the brain, and even survive the death of its host before being reborn in a new host. Over the next few days I will be posting empirical evidence in support of that hypothesis before concluding this series with a grounded dualist theory of the mind.

[awakenedsalamander]

So I’ve been wanting to write about this for a long time (my friends can probably attest to the fact I will talk about it unprompted) but I can’t find it way to do so concisely. Here’s my best try.

Is Mage: The Ascension (in its presentation of the Technocracy in specific) anti-science?

I don’t think so, not anymore. But I want to explain why. By the way, I have to imagine that this won’t be all that accessible if you don’t have much knowledge of Mage, but you’re free to stick around if you want to.

So, here’s the thing— the Technocratic Union is pretty much a stand-in for the advancement of the scientific method, “the Enlightenment,” all that. The whole point in the first edition of Ascension is that the Union is science, the science that dispelled notions of magic, and that this is a Bad Thing. They are oppressive, heartless, and cold. The villains, plain and simple.

In later editions, this gets softened, partly due to the notion of “Science is a conspiracy the elite uses to rule the world and keep you down” becoming less fun and more toxic as it gained more sincere believers, and partly because fans really liked the Technocracy.

I think the common read is that Ascension then took the direction of the Technocracy being anti-villains— the Union has noble goals, and many of its members are sincerely brave and compassionate, but ultimately it is too extreme, too callous. It has to be stopped.

This is, to be fair, an improvement over “science is evil,” but “science is too dangerous,” is still not great. And for a long time, this was my view on Mage: The Ascension. Fun ideas, maybe, but the core conflict of the game was just too reckless a portrayal of what seemed to me like a mirror of real-world conspiracist ideology.

And to some extent, I still think that. Especially in the early editions, this is a very fair critique. That said, the game still spoke to me as I looked into it, and for the longest time I wasn’t quite sure why. A piece of it was my own opening up to the notion of our subjective viewpoints affecting our reality— something that deserves its own rambling essay— but a related part of it was me realizing that there was something about the Technocracy that rung true to me, despite my misgivings. And I think I figured it out.

See, the Technocracy isn’t a stand-in for the scientific method, but for scientism.

If you’ve not heard the term, “scientism” is a controversial (we’ll get into why a bit later) pejorative term for the belief/perspective that science, as a body, composes essentially all useful and/or reliable knowledge about the world.

Notably, those who critique scientism rarely hold the view that scientific knowledge is bad or even inaccurate, just that it is an incomplete model of reality. This is not an anti-science position, but a skepticism towards the trust people place in its ability to solve every mystery. Vaccines, for example, are great! No one can reasonably dispute the benefits and efficacy of vaccination. When it comes to medicine, the scientific method has done incalculable good— the lives saved by vaccination alone are countless.

To be against scientism, then, is not to argue that medical science is a failure, or overrated— but to point out that there is more to life than being healthy. Everyone should be glad we have learned so much about treating illness and alleviating suffering. But what of having a sense of purpose? What about love and compassion and justice? What about satisfaction, having gone through a life worth living?

Again, none of that is to say that science or the scientific community is the problem. But if you take the Technocracy as an example of scientism gone to an extreme, one in which things like kindness and equity must be left behind in favor of only the virtue of material knowledge, I think Mage: The Ascension starts to really work.

(I originally intended to write a MUCH longer piece including references to the military-industrial complex, the rise of automation and AI, as well as the increasingly algorithmic nature of culture but this is so long already. And yet I worry I said essentially nothing. C’est la vie.)

[adamzki]

[solace-philosophy]

These atheists, like Christian fundamentalists, corrupt evolutionary biology. They assert that evolutionary biology implies an absolute materialism that banishes the role of religion.

The Christian fundamentalists do this to discredit science and defend their absurd biblical myths. The new atheists do this to discredit religion and justify their faith in the cult of science.

These atheists use science the way religious fundamentalists use religion: to arrogate to themselves moral authority over all creation including those of their own species who are too dim to see the truth. They alone, they think, understand how to bring about collective salvation and redeem the human race.

— Chris Hedges, I Don’t Believe in Atheists

[noosphe-re]

Is Natural Science finally committed to materialism? There is no doubt that the theories of science constitute trustworthy knowledge, because they are verifiable and enable us to predict and control the events of Nature. But we must not forget that what is called science is not a single systematic view of Reality. It is a mass of sectional views of Reality - fragments of a total experience which do not seem to fit together. Natural Science deals with matter, with life, and with mind; but the moment you ask the question how matter, life, and mind are mutually related, you begin to see the sectional character of the various sciences that deal with them and the inability of these sciences, taken singly, to furnish a complete answer to your question. In fact, the various natural sciences are like so many vultures falling on the dead body of Nature, and each running away with a piece of its flesh. Nature as the subject of science is a highly artificial affair, and this artificiality is the result of that selective process to which science must subject her in the interests of precision. The moment you put the subject of science in the total of human experience it begins to disclose a different character.

Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

[airbrickwall]

[pratchettquotes]

As far as Polly could tell, Igors believed that the body was nothing more than a complicated kind of clothing. Oddly enough, that's what Nugganites thought, too.

Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

[apenitentialprayer]

When Materialist Soviets Just Didn't Get It

Scientific atheists believed that their technological and scientific successes would obviously disprove the validity of religion because the two are fundamentally in opposition. Official Soviet ideology stated that "religion exists where knowledge is lacking, religion is opposed to science." […] Scientific atheists viewed any technology as evidence of atheism because it demonstrated that humans could work "miracles" that were not performed by God. At the very first attempts to industrialize the newly created Soviet Union, scientific atheists seized on the introduction of new technologies as a source for their anti-religious propaganda. For example, farming technology became a means to convince rural residences of their outdated reliance on religious concepts. An anti-religious pamphlet printed in the first Five Year Plan period was entitled "Prayers or Tractor" and a widespread poster crudely elaborated on the alleged contradiction between "cross and tractor." The alternative, "religion or tractor" with which the communists operated, never existed in the minds of the people for who this propaganda was intended. The illusions about "atheist tractor" were therefore soon shattered, especially when peasants affixed crosses to them and when priests celebrated thanksgiving services at their arrival in villages. As this instance demonstrates, scientific atheists simply did not understand the nature of religious belief. The fact that a tractor exists does not translate into a disproof of God and, ironically, Kolarz points out that farmers often interpreted these agricultural advancements as gifts from God. Similarly, scientific atheists thought that atheism was empirically proven because God remained unseen or because certain religious stories were scientifically inconceivable. Following World War II, Soviet officials started a campaign to produce natural-scientific arguments against belief in God. For instance, Soviet scientists placed holy water under a microscope to prove that it has no special properties and [… i]n one of the most famous examples, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin proclaimed upon his return from the very first space flight in history he did not see God in space. Aeronautical technology was often presented as proof of atheism and Soviet leaders viewed every flight as an "assault on heaven." In the Russian language, as in many others, there is only one expression for both "heaven" and "sky" and "assault on heaven" therefore meant both the technical conquest of the air and the conquest of space where God was supposed to live . . . However, before the atheist propaganda was able to exploit the "conquest of the stratosphere" it suffered a tremendous setback when the stratosphere plane "SSSR" crashed after having reached the height of 22 kilometers. As the communists considered these flights to be a challenge to religion . . . the more simple minded believers considered the accident and death of all three pilots as an act of divine punishment. [...] As there examples illustrate, scientific atheists did not recognize the nonempirical character of religious concepts and stories. In most cases, atheist proselytizers had little or no knowledge of actual religious doctrine. In fact, a visitor to the Soviet Union in the 1960s reported that "no atheist ringleader has ever dared to allow those under him to study the Bible, even for the purpose of spying out the enemy's territory in order to more easily conquer it." Under these conditions, atheist recruiters were largely ignorant of the nonempirical tenets of religious belief, which led them to only attack the supernatural using empirical arguments.

- Paul Froese ("Forced Secularization in Soviet Russia: Why an Atheistic Monopoly Failed")

[areadersquoteslibrary]

"If we fail to anticipate the unforeseen, or expect the unexpected in a universe of infinite possibilities, we may find ourselves at the mercy of anyone or anything that cannot be programmed, categorized, and easily referenced."

- Fox Mulder, 'The X-Files: Fight The Future'

[1000rh]

In the twentieth century, few would have ever defined a truck driver as a ‘cognitive worker’, an intellectual. In the early twenty-first, however, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in self-driving vehicles, among other artefacts, has changed the perception of manual skills such as driving, revealing how the most valuable component of work in general has never been just manual, but has always been cognitive and cooperative as well. Thanks to AI research – we must acknowledge it – truck drivers have reached the pantheon of intelligentsia. It is a paradox – a bitter political revelation – that the most zealous development of automation has shown how much ‘intelligence’ is expressed by activities and jobs that are usually deemed manual and unskilled, an aspect that has often been neglected by labour organisation as much as critical theory.

– Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence (2023)

[shrinkrants]

In 2017, a young Black woman of Togolese descent, TG, visited the emergency department due to distress and panic attacks related to previous sexual assaults. She was admitted to an inpatient psychiatric unit and diagnosed with psychosis. Upon discharge, she was prescribed perphenazine, a first-generation antipsychotic with greater side effect risks. Despite her symptoms being primarily related to mood and trauma, her dosage was increased by subsequent providers. In 2021, a team at Yale Department of Psychiatry determined that she had been misdiagnosed with schizophrenia due to racial bias. After a thorough review of her medical records and social history, TG received a re-diagnosis of major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Adjusting her medication led to a significant improvement in her depression, anxiety, and panic attacks.

In an article published in Harvard Review of Psychiatry, physicians at the Yale Department of Psychiatry present the case of TG to explore the mechanisms behind what they call “psychiatry’s longest-standing inequities born of real-time clinician racial bias” and its iatrogenic harm to patients who come to seek their help for other mood or trauma-related disorders. They write:

“For TG, she had consistently been telling providers about her sexual trauma for years only to have ED and outpatient providers doubt her report of abuse as a possible ‘delusion.’ During her second ED encounter in August 2018, documentation depicts her testimony using appallingly insensitive language, including ‘increasingly bizarre statements about supposed rape.’” Here, we can see how “biased perceptions of dishonesty intersect with bias against believing sexual assault survivors.”

[thebardostate]

Susan Blackmore mentions the view that as far as what we call “mind” or “consciousness” is concerned, there are only neurons and their connections (Review, 1 October, and Letters 29 October). In particular she refers to Francis Crick who believes that “our joys, sorrows, ambitions and even free will are nothing more than the behaviour of those neurons”.

Such arguments seem to me to be analogous to saying that, for example, the differential equations of physics are nothing more than the behaviour of the circuits and chips within the computer solving them. The counterpart of “Your mind is nothing but a pack of neurons” is “Computation is nothing but a pack of chips”.

Both are examples of what the late Donald Mackay used to call “nothing-buttery” or, more formally, metaphysical reductionism: the doctrine that if something can be explained by reducing it to its elements at some particular level then it can be dismissed as “nothing but” the activity of those elements.

A. Danielian, letter to the editor of New Scientist, November 19 1994

[stimpunks]

DEIB and Their Adversaries

What are diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging? What are their narrative adversaries? We provide a glossary of terms below. Follow the links for deeply sourced reference materials. DEIB diversity = a range of differences; variety equity = the process of redistributing access and opportunity to be fair and just; the state of being free of bias, discrimination, and identity-predictable…

[solace-philosophy]

Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.

— G.K. Chesterton