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Abbas Raza, at 3 Quarks Daily, (who seems to be a decent guy, FWIW), has chosen my assumed identity as a commenter on that site to stand for all that is wrong with relativism. Yes, I am the mighty Deets.
I think the response in comments by Seth Edelbaum does a better job than I do in pointing out the deficiencies in Raza's argument, as he really presses the point that extreme rationalism is itself a delusion. The analogy to autism is particularly apt.
There was a piece on Scientific American Frontiers a few years ago (I can't find the transcript on the PBS website) in which a woman with a large portion of her brain missing is asked to copy some drawings: different shapes, maybe a flower or a face--I don't quite remember what, exactly, but I think they were all symmetrical. She was able to render one side of each object fairly accurately and precisely, but the other side was undeveloped, crude, sometimes totally absent. Then Alan Alda asked her if her drawings really were fair representations of the originals. She averred they were. Then Alda pointed to the undeveloped side and said, don't you see how much your drawing leaves out here? To which she replied, looking closely, "oh, yeah, look at that. I guess you're right." To all appearances this woman was bright, capable, and sane, so it was a little astonishing to see demonstrated this blind spot, big enough to drive a truck through.
This is what I take Charles Fort to mean when he writes science is "a turtle that says his shell encloses all things." Fort wasn't anti-science, he was anti-monist. It's not as though the shell were empty; it's just finite.
Alan Watts makes the beautiful observation in one of his lectures that the existence of God in the Abrahamic traditions is just one piece of the mythic structure borne by those traditions, a model of the manufactured world. When the Enlightenment philosophers decided to extract God from the equation in the 17th century, they left the rest of the scaffolding intact: we take for granted, today, that the universe is a world of objects, because there is no contest on this matter between the religious and scientific worldview. The world is now self-manufactured, but it is still manufactured. We see this as a fact, not a myth; all of our science rests on this foundation. So deeply does it rest within our language and culture that it can't be "disproved" because all the tools we might use to do so presuppose it to be true! We might as easily take as our our template the Indian cosmological frame of the universe as drama. Or we might say that the universe is made of processes, not objects. Or some other story.
This is an incredible heresy in our culture, which is the main reason why it so insufferable to find hyper-rationalists like Dawkins, Harris--and Raza?--position themselves as slayers of the sacred cows. Objectivity is every bit as sacred to them as any scripture, and no less dependent on authority for its perpetuation.
posted by underverse at 11:27 AM permalink
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we take for granted, today, that the universe is a world of objects, because there is no contest on this matter between the religious and scientific worldview. The world is now self-manufactured, but it is still manufactured. We see this as a fact, not a myth; all of our science rests on this foundation. So deeply does it rest within our language and culture that it can't be "disproved" because all the tools we might use to do so presuppose it to be true!
I was under the impression that the development of quantum mechanics has led to many scientists considering field-based or relational metaphors in order to explain the universe, rather than the traditional object-based approaches. Authors/physicists like Capra, Bohm, Zohar, etc have been holding forth on the limits of "object based" or "newtonian" or "reductionist" thinking for some 30 years now. So it looks to me like the tools actually were able to undermine some of the premises embedded in their own development...
sxl, I agree to a point.
Bohm and Capra (also Heisenberg and Bohr) imported many of thier ideas from outside the turtle. Hindu cosmology and Chinese philosophy, e.g.
In other words thay had to presume (or at least hypothesize) new or different definitions about the nature of reality before they could order the facts coherently in a non-reductionist way.
But the passage you quote may have been a little rhetorically extreme, I agree.
"When the Enlightenment philosophers decided to extract God from the equation in the 17th century, they left the rest of the scaffolding intact: we take for granted, today, that the universe is a world of objects, because there is no contest on this matter between the religious and scientific worldview. The world is now self-manufactured, but it is still manufactured. We see this as a fact, not a myth; all of our science rests on this foundation. So deeply does it rest within our language and culture that it can't be "disproved" because all the tools we might use to do so presuppose it to be true!"
When i linked over from 3qd, I thought that he might have mischaracterized you as a "depends on what your defininition of 'is' is" kind of person. But he was right on. How can you argue what is logical and debate at all if you won't accept the common language? If you have to argue about "objects" and what we mean by "things" and "stuff", then why bother? You are in a realm of the imaginary, and the only thing you'll debate on is whether a tizzy is a florrie, or a werie could create a pourie without methanica.
Sheesh.
I agree with the broad theme of your post. But, I think you're mistaken in some points :
"When the Enlightenment philosophers decided to extract God from the equation in the 17th century, they left the rest of the scaffolding intact: we take for granted, today, that the universe is a world of objects, because there is no contest on this matter between the religious and scientific worldview."
You don't seem to acknowledge the fact that Science has gone beyond its roots in enlightenment long ago - Scientific method itself is (partly) a scientific theory and it has undergone much change and we have understood it better than our ancestors given our better experience.
And the history of physics is replete with instances where physicists have not hesitated to question what constitutes reality. In fact, it is not difficult to find writings which precisely go into this issue - Bohr being the prominent example.
And I am confused by your statement that "The world is now self-manufactured, but it is still manufactured. We see this as a fact, not a myth; all of our science rests on this foundation."
If at all anything, most scientists I know would agree that to use the word "manufactured"(self or otherwise) to the world is at best just a (convenient but sometimes misleading) metaphor to the kind of rich ontology that science points towards.
Scientists use all kind of metaphors - including "universe as a drama" or "processes and not objects" , but, most of them realise the limitations of the metaphors - especially when innocuous looking metaphors they coined get twisted into meanings that are known to be quite opposite to what was intended.
For example, I think the commenter above is an unfortunate victims of such a distortion of quantum mechanics. I just hope he/she learns more about quantum mechanics sometime to actually realise how off the mark his/her remarks are. By the way, I will be the first one to accept that physicists themselves (especially people like Capra) are to blame for coining such bad metaphors .
For a post which intends to criticise how scientific world view is culturally prejudiced, I think you need a more sophisticated argument than repeating popular misconceptions on science. You need to at least allow for the possibility that whereas some parts of science might indeed be prejudiced, some parts need not be.
And as far as your comment on how "Objectivity is ... no less dependent on authority for its perpetuation", do you think anti-authority views are any less dependent on the authority for its perpetuation ?
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