by The progress of science in the last 400 years is mind-boggling. Who would have thought that we would be able to trace the history of our universe back to its origins 14 billion years ago? Science has increased the length and quality of our lives, and the technology common in the modern world would have seemed like magic to our ancestors.
For all these reasons and more, science is rightly celebrated and respected. However, a healthy pro-science attitude is not the same as “science”, that is the attitude that the scientific method is the only way to establish truth. As the problem of consciousness emerges, there may be a limit to what we can learn through science alone.
Perhaps the most developed form of science was the movement in the early 20th century called logical positivism. The logical positivists adhered to the “verification principle”, according to which a sentence whose truth cannot be tested by observation and experiment was logically trivial or meaningless. With this weapon, they hoped to dismiss all metaphysical questions as not just false but nonsense.
These days, philosophers almost universally reject logical positivism. For one thing, logical positivism is self-defeating, because the verification principle itself cannot be scientifically tested, and therefore can only be true if it is meaningless. In fact, something like this offends all kinds of unqualified scientists. There is no scientific experiment that we can do to prove that science is true; and therefore if true to science, its truth cannot be established.
Despite all these deep problems, much of society accepts science as true. Most people in the UK don’t know that “metaphysics” continues in almost every philosophy department in the country. Metaphorically, philosophers do not mean anything scary or supernatural; this is just the technical term for a philosophical, rather than a scientific, inquiry into the nature of reality.
Truth without science
How can you find out about reality without doing science? The distinguishing feature of philosophical theories is that they are “empirically equivalent”, meaning that you cannot decide between them with experiment.
Take the example of my area of research: philosophy of consciousness. Some philosophers think that consciousness arises from physical processes in the brain – this is the “physicalist” position. Others think it’s the other way around: consciousness is primary, and the physical world arises from consciousness. A version of this is the “panpsychist” view that consciousness goes all the way down to the basic building blocks of reality, with the word coming from the two Greek words pan (all) and psyche (soul or mind).
Others think that consciousness and the physical world are both fundamentally but completely different – this is the “dualist” view. Crucially, you cannot distinguish between these views with an experiment, because, as with any scientific data, each view will interpret that data in its own terms.
For example, we may discover scientifically that there is a correlation between a certain type of brain activity and the conscious experience of an organism. The physicist will interpret this as a form of organization that turns unconscious physical processes – such as electrical signals between brain cells – into conscious experience, but the panpsychist will interpret it as a form of organization that links individual conscious particles into a larger conscious one. system. Thus we see two very different philosophical interpretations of the same scientific data.
If we can’t work out which perspective is right for an experiment, how can we choose between them? In fact, the selection process is not that different from what we find in science. In addition to being attracted to experimental data, scientists also appeal to the theoretical virtues of a theory, such as how simple, elegant and unifying it is.
Philosophers can also appeal to theoretical virtues to defend their preferred position. For example, the aspects of simplicity seem to be opposed to the dualistic theory of consciousness, which is less simplistic than its rivals in that it posits two basic kinds of stuff – physical stuff and consciousness – but physicalism and panpsychism are equally just as simple as standing straight. only basic stuff (physical stuff or consciousness).
It may also be that some theories are inexplicable, but in subtle ways that require careful analysis to uncover. For example, I have argued that physical views of consciousness are incoherent (although this is controversial – like much in philosophy).
There is no guarantee that these methods will produce a clear winner. There may be multiple, coherent and equally simple theories of certain philosophical issues, in which case we should be agnostic about which is correct. This in itself is a significant philosophical result regarding the limits of human knowledge.
Philosophy can be frustrating because there are so many disagreements. However, this is also true in many scientific fields, such as history or economics. And there are some issues on which there is moderate consensus, for example, on the subject of free will.
A tendency to conflate philosophy with a growing anti-science movement undermines the united front against the damaging anti-science opposition we find in climate change denial and anti-vax conspiracies.
Like it or not, we cannot avoid philosophy. When we try to do that, what happens is that we end up with a bad philosophy. The first line of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s book The Grand Design boldly declared: “Philosophy is dead.” The book then went on to tackle some really raw philosophical discussions of free will and objectivity.
If I were to write a book making controversial statements on particle physics, I would be rightly ridiculed, as I am not trained in the appropriate skills, I have not read the literature, and my views in this field have not been subjected to peer scrutiny. . And yet there are many examples of scientists with no philosophical training publishing very weak books on philosophical topics without compromising their credibility.
This could be bitter. But I truly believe that society would be greatly enriched by being more knowledgeable about philosophy. I hope that one day we will move on from this “scientific” period of history, and realize the vital role that both science and philosophy play in the noble project of discovering what reality is.
This article from The Conversation is republished under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Philip Goff has received funding from the Temple Foundation.
