Why is science demonized in people's minds?

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In what attribute of the mind are you investing the collective subject 'us'?

It seems to me that the central problem of autism - as well as paralysis, at a different level - is what you go on to describe, i.e. that our consciousness tends to be 'apart from any physical action' more often than not; any external action in both cases is likely to reflect a misalignment between mind and world, such that the former is unable to affect the latter as it otherwise would.

For that reason, I'm surprised that you, as an autist, see consciousness as serving us, rather than us being consciousness - with the more mechanical aspects of mind serving it.

Btw, I chose consciousness as the best example of something that exists that isn't strictly physical, demonstrating the limits of science just as science defines the limits of any valid religious thought.

Everything that really, truly, honest to god exists is physical. The cosmos is natural. There are no spirits, spooks, souls or ghosts.

ruveyn

How is consciousness not physical? It is a manifestation of physical processes. There's no reason to think that we won't one day understand it.

The consequence or effect of any physical cause is physical. Consciousness is the effect of neurons firing.

ruveyn

I can't even count how many times I've said this(the exact same things you talk about) to everyone.

I actually can't come up with a good answer to this question.

Which all means as much to your average Joe, in my country atleast, as 'Jesus died for our sins' or some such nonsense; I hope you and AstroGEEK didn't expect to to moan about your how your beliefs are persecuted and NOT to have them logically dissected - especially on an aspie forum_ After all, you'd expect no less to be doled out to theists!

So, what is existence, and what defines whether something exists or fails to qualify for existence? How can anyone know the sum total of all that exists? And how on earth - even if you believe in miracles performed by a God who is part of a universal Nature - can anything not be natural?

You seem to be speaking from faith rather than from reason, using empty words of 'received wisdom' that in your awe you've never stopped to really analyse. Your hardcore physicalism seems to mandate saying that black is white and white is black, unless I've misunderstood your use of the term 'physical'. {If it doesn't meen 'located in space', I don't see what it can mean without losing any useful meaning.} I do not experience myself as existing in a particular place, merely as observing it; if you (like me) imagine yourself as peering out from behind your eyes, bear in mind that members of other cultures have just as easily imagined themselves centered in their bellies or hearts.

An aside - Spirits, spooks, ghosts and even souls (in the sense of 'subtle/astral body') would in any case be just as physical as us if they were to exist. Furthermore, if there really are parallel universes as the cosmologists suggest, then such beings may for all we know exist there along with fairies and the rest, probably partly visible via wormholes to certain human minds at certain times and in certain places.

Consciousness, or more broadly what has been called 'spirit' (compare 'soul' as strict term), which is what you are using to read this post (rather than it merely being processed by a computer or some such, assuming the computer isn't also conscious by dint of its complexity!), may most probably have a physical aspect and a physical cause. However, not only is certainty about this a different ball game, but also from your own point of view, it can no more be purely physical than you can run and hide from your own awareness, which is what I suggest materialists, psychologically, often try to do, just as theists do - from a negative impression of life and the world.

The only other logical possibility is that the 'physical' is more than just the lumps of dead nothingness fixed into points of time and space that Biology specialists (always behind the other sciences, it seems) often seem to see it as. Both modern physics and consciousness studies are forcing us to try and imagine a broader physical reality that, as you say AstroGeek, may soon embrace consciousness without having to ignore its self-evident ('a priori') qualities. Whether the human mind can short-circuit sufficiently to understand itself in this way remains to be seen.

But ordinary physical processes have, in the case of consciousness, manifested as a cause to produce a consequent effect that is qualitatively different. If this is denied, it is so, I suspect, because ordinary mathematics and even logic cannot be pulled together to show otherwise, even though the truth is obvious given a moment's reflection. In other words, the denial is opportunistically dishonest intellectually. When this matures into a dishonesty to onesself and a consequent brow-beating of others, its motivation of overreaching ambition - the reason why 'science' is demonised - becomes clear. I recognise that these are the concerns of scientists, not of science itself.

I don't side with the Dalai Lama when he claims that mental effects can only have mental causes while physical effects can only have physical causes, as this is making an assumption based merely on the application of 'common sense' outside its proper ambit. I also don't want to believe that some high-functioning autistics lack theory of mind to the extent that, like other animals (it is assumed), they don't know that they know what they know - are not 'sapiens sapiens' - and thus don't sense that they have minds.

Last edited by undefineable on 23 Jan 2012, 8:55 pm, edited 2 times in total.

To sum up, I'm aware that I'm aware - How can this be a purely physical phenomenon? Equally, why must it otherwise be a spirit, soul, ghost, spook, or whatever?

If you just leave this as it is, observing your own power of observation without further speculation, this becomes clear.

Anything else is posturing in cloud cuckoo land.

To the contrary, I've observed the social status of the scientific community, and in western society it's one of the most respected fields. Nobody tries to argue with physics, or chemistry, nobody says "oh, that's just biology, back to my witch craft!". Education, engineering, programming, medicine, first aid, auto work, etc, all have some reliance on science. Moreover, I'll argue that religion is the misunderstood one. Everybody assumes religion is out to destroy science, which is 100% completely WRONG. We are not living in the 15th century where scientists were silenced, in our time, religion and science actually go hand in hand. The Christian bible does not say "God made the sun out of 90% carbon" (when it is in fact made out of 90% hydrogen). Instead, religious institutions elaborate on proper moral codes for society, post-death, pre-life, and other concepts that fly under the radar of science.

But it does imply that the value for Pi (the ratio of a circle to its diameter) is equal to the integer value of 3, which is both incomplete and in error.


Who decides what makes for the 'proper' morality? Polygamist pastors? Pedophile Priests? Alliterative Agnostics and Atheists?

The reason that the concepts you mentioned (and many others like them) "fly under the radar" of scientific inquiry is because they have little, if anything, to do with what is real - they are subjects of discussion for philosophers and theologians, not for scientific research.

You can't prove the unprovable.

Not quite true. In the USA it is common to hear people concerned about such things say "Evolution is just a theory." That is, of course, strictly speaking true, but they completely trivialize how well proven something has to be to achieve theory status. And in the USA it seems to be a badge of honour to deny climate science in certain circles. In both of these cases the scientists are in almost unanimous agreement and yet the public doesn't seem to trust them. Now some of that is caused by certain interest groups deliberately causing confusion over these issues. But by an large I think the scientific community (at least in those areas) is associated with the "liberal elite" (yeah, because the billionaire Bushes are so not an elite ) and hence mistrusted by certain groups. I assumed that that sort of thing is what the OP was referring to.

There seems to be a lot of jealousy involved, as well. Who wouldn't like a job in a nice, quiet office, where all you have to do is surf the Internet, read, write, drink coffee, and collect a paycheck? Who wouldn't like to play the the most cutting-edge gadgetry (i.e., lasers, computers, electron microscopes, robots, et cetera), call it 'research' and collect a paycheck for that too?

Much of the derision against science seems to come from the sector of society that either does not have a scientific education, or that has been 'downsized' due to advances in science and technology.

Ironic, considering I think professors are often struck by the fact that they could make far more money doing something else. And probably without having to bother with the whole grad school thing. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, isn't it?

And THAT hits it spot on! Jealousy, "Grass-is-Greener", or whatever you want to call it, someone will always think that someone else has it better, and will eventually compensate for their feelings by bad-mouthing that "someone else".

Do you think fermions are physical? Just curious.

Philosophy's a slightly arty-farty branch of science, innit? It's an eccentricity of Dawkins to lump this largely agnostic - even atheistic - branch of thought in with theology.

Philosophy -as I see it- is concerned with gaining a broad-brush understanding of REALITY that takes in all conceivable perspectives so as to complete something analogous to a 3D photographic model. Science is about finding out how things work, no less and no more, and, given the specialisation of scientists and sciences (now that more progress has been made than can be absorbed by a single human mind), more about individual phenomena than about 'things' as an all-embracing whole.

But philosophy is informed by science more than by any other endeavour; 'philosophy of science' might simply be a sharing of 'best (intellectual) practice' between the 'separate' branches of science, so as to open up any blind spots and pinpoint any overriding problems. Morality, as much as any other field traditionally covered by philosophers, is no exception to this, reminding philosophers that finding 'ultimate truth' cannot be a straightforward problem.

Further, the present extent of scientific knowledge suggests that the mind -along ewith everything under its purview- is basically a special aspect of brain activity, beginning shortly before birth and ceasing at death; however, since logic is more equivocal, the jury's still out and probably always will be, given the fact that philosophy weighs in with probabilities and logical (or experiential) evidence so as to sketch a fill-in where science hasn't provided -or else can't provide- proof using its emprical evidence. In particular, a mind with direct causes and consequences before birth and after death has arguments in its favour - We all experience randomly being assigned an arbitrarily different individual to be (I'm using the verb in its active sense here) and to help shape with a will that is in turn shaped by it; we also have at our core a basic power of awareness that appears to resemble the indestructible fundamentals of reality such as energy (with its law of conservation), and which therefore seems unlikely -for reasons of categorical consistency- to have no similar states preceding or succeeding.

Politics doesn't mix well with science, religion, or really any other discipline - Look what it did to the 'social science' humanities across the West in general _ _