William has taken exception to the current state of science and its ‘overreach’.
He claims, “IMO, all that is left of materialism/physicalism/naturalism is really nothing more than a hidden (even subconscious) anti-theistic agenda.”
This is a thread for William to guide us in a detailed exploration of the alternatives, their mechanisms, how we might test them and how we might benefit from them.
False, William. I’ve already demonstrated this several times and you continue to ignore it. Neither psychology nor medicine is practiced in a vacuum. Trials for given treatments are analyzed based on population success rates, not on individual success rates. In fact, many people who have tried to pass off medical/mental treatments that showed promise in only a couple of samples have been tried and convicted of fraud. Why? Because such is practice defies the very principle of ethical methodology, to say nothing of sound, practical methodology. This again is why I state that nothing you do is scientific and should be wholly ignored by everyone (but you I guess).
Ironically, this above contradicts your first paragraph. Any methodology that leads to the acquisition of universally applicable models will ignore individual outliers. And in fact, by adopting naturalism, we then dispense with whimsical outcomes that rely on individuals who hold specific delusions/beliefs. And delusion/belief-based approaches are just plainly not practical.
There’s that ignoring of universality and pragmatism again. So much for your methodology being rational.
Reject away. Your rejection doesn’t change what science and/or reality actually are.
Here’s the real issue I have with William’s and similar arguments: they defy the intrinsic principle of science: to provide an explanation of an observed phenomenon. By dispensing with naturalism, one can proffer an hypothesis that sneaks in an assumed phenomenon (an unobserved “magic” or “supernatural” action) that in turn has no explanation or hypothesis to satisfy it. It is misdirection at best and outright dishonesty at worst. I reject such a personalized methodology, happy instead with one hamstrung by the requirement for direct observation, direct testing, and direct explanation.
Posts moved to guano.
For the curious: Link
His enthusiasm seems diminished since posting about Methodological Pragmatism over at UD. But he could be writing another book, or looking for those examples we asked for..
Richard,
Yeah, that didn’t exactly take off, even among the complaisant UDers.
Speculation about absent posters is unseemly. Speculation about absent theories is not.
How sad am I? Complaisant? Surely a mis-spelling of complacent”? But no!
Very good use of a new (to me) word!
For the record I will continue to ask William, upon his reappearance, about the apparent disparity between his claim that FSCO/I can be “easily” calculated and his calculation of FSCO/I that did not result in an actual value for FSCO/I.
While I am grateful for the attempt made, William has to see that he has to discard his earlier claim that it can “easily” be calculated as he has actually yet to do so.
I’d like to think he can adjust according to the plain facts. If you claim it’s “easy” but can’t do it, who are you fooling? Only yourself I think.
Well, for starters, I would not call that a “principle of science”, but rather the purpose of science, or in any case a definition of what science does.
And I’m new to this thread, and haven’t yet had time to work through all the comments yet, but isn’t William attempting to include the non-/supernatural in our attempts to learn about the world in such a way that there is a way to verify made claims? Surely even William would not want to do with the principle of verifiability?
Gralgathor,
First, science doesn’t supply explanations for anything, Robin’s protestations notwithstanding. Science provides descriptions of interactions. Unfortunately for those without critical thinking skills, descriptive models have been reified into actual commodities. Gravity is thought of now as a causal explanation instead of just a description of how matter happens to behave. Sloppy thinking.
Second, but along a similar line, I have suggested that science get out of the sloppy-thinking metaphysics it attempts to impose through the term “naturalism”. What you end up with is a bunch of different scientists around the world with different ideas about the vague, assumed dividing line is between “natural” and “supernatural”, with the take-home result being research frameworks that are unnecessarily predicated on limited concepts about what “nature” can and cannot accommodate.
I gave examples in the past about how the narratives produced by this idea of what nature can and cannot accommodate has impeded scientific progress, and why “methodological pragmatism” might be a better conceptual system. No mucking around the vague boundaries of what the term “supernatural” might mean.
For institutional scientific investigation, of course universal/consensual repeatability is necessary. However, it’s my view that science should also be stripped of its authoritative impritur as a political means to force an increasing tyranny of rules on the lives of individuals and groups.
For instance, there is simply no version of Anthropogenic Global Warming and APG institutional proposals for sweeping economic and industry changes that can be called “pragmatic”. None of the models have realized any practical predictive success. No theoretical overhauls of human activity, even in the models that have thus far produced no successful predictions, even predict any significant climate “repair” that humans could engineer through such overhauls.
To attempt to enforce vast, sweeping economic overhauls involving trillions of dollars based on what amounts to virtually no legitimate, demonstrable practical value based on the “authority” of science is, IMO, no different than religious tyranny. As a tool, science is useful. As an institutional, ideological, metaphysical master, it’s just another priesthood handing down religious edicts.
What used to be called cause and effect.
This is the problem one arrives at when any metaphysical concept of reality has the power to enforce its edicts/findings on the general populace – even those who disagree. Power corrupts. Marginal, politically skewed and even fraudulent “science” can be used to force the ideology of those in power onto the populace, or to simply manipulate laws and economic forces for personal/group gain.
IMO, science needs to be demoted from “arbiter of reality” to “producer of useful models”, and I think the best way to do that is the formal change from “methodological naturalism” to “methodological pragmatism”.
“research frameworks that are unnecessarily predicated on limited concepts”
And we keep asking you for examples of these other concepts that remove the limits.
Just a thought experiment or an outline of a research project.
But you agree that verifiability is very much a necessary part of science?
There’s no reason why an effect cannot be a cause in turn. Regardless of what causes it, we know that matter behaves in a certain way. This pattern can then be used as a starting point for further models.
But do you not agree that truthfulness, accuracy, determine to a large degree – if not completely – how useful a model is?
Gralgrathor said:
I agree that the model is useful in creating further modeling. I was making a point about the distinction between an explanation and a description. Scientific models are predictive descriptions, not explanations. When one reifies a supposedly “naturalistic” model into an “explanation”, and then claim that “the motion of the planets” (or any other regular behavior of matter) has been “explained according to naturalism”, they have moved from pragmatic model to metaphysical ideology via lack of critical thinking, encouraged by the formal, institutionally-promoted terminology: “methodological naturalism”.
That’s where it gets tricky. I agree that for institutional/academic science, universal verification is appropriate, because what they work on is what is consensually, universally practical. However, if science insists or even authoritatively implies that science is the arbiter of all reality, it has become a religion founded on the principle that the only phenomena that are real is that phenomena which is universally repeatable/verifiable.
That may not be what reality is; it may only represent a small aspect of reality. There may be much more to reality that is not universally repeatable, that is not verifiable at all by many or most others.
I consider this the to be a scientific subcategory, even if it isn’t to be formally recognized, but to be formally protected as an individual right. While mainstream science should focus on universal methodological pragmatism, the individual can conduct scientific research in pursuit of their own individual methodological pragmatism, which would still be a form of science – an empirical, personal research into that which works for oneself, even if it doesn’t work for others.
I don’t have a problem with that. I have never thought of science as “arbiter of reality.”
However, “methodological naturalism” was never a formal requirement, so no formal change is needed.
There are only two problems with methodological naturalism:
(1) It isn’t actually needed;
(2) It is often misconstrued by religious critics of science.
Gralgrathor said:
All of that needs to be unpacked according to if we’re talking about the universal or personal science and depends on what you mean by “truthfulness” and “accuracy”. It’s important not to deceive yourself or others about the results of the model, but we are after all talking about a model and not some supposed aspect of “reality”.
Whether or not a model reflects a truth about reality is, IMO, irrelevant. How accurate the model must be in predicting results varies from one thing to another (and from one person to another).
The very definition of mental masturbation.
I would daresay that all of us, including hardened skeptics, have a few secret superstitions. Perhaps some private moments when we hit a machine to make it work. Or carry an umbrella, hoping it will prevent rain.
But that isn’t really what you have been promising or implying, William. Is this really the best you can do to move beyond “research frameworks that are unnecessarily predicated on limited concepts”
By the way, I am sympathetic to the charge that crony capitalism has pretty much neutered any attempt to mitigate global warming. I see nothing being done that has any chance of being effective.
Oh come on, isn’t that what gamblers regularly rely upon to produce huge winnings?
Oops. That always seems to be the Achilles’ heel of magic (personal pragmatism, what-not), why doesn’t anyone ever manage to parlay it into huge winnings on the stock market, in the casinos, or playing Lotto?
Well, it doesn’t work that way… Yes, we know, it’s always lurking nearby, hiding, and only the elect can see it.
Glen Davidson
William,
1. You seem quite opinionated on what doesn’t qualify as an explanation
2. Could you therefore please tell us what does qualify as an explanation?
3. If you can’t, why shouldn’t we write you off a sophist with nothing worth sharing?
4. If you can’t then, PRAGMATICALLY, we should stick with what works.
Grade A Chopra-Woo.
Goodbye external variability. “Science” as personal enterprise. Please unpack for us how this is “empirical”.
The interesting thing is that someone eventually wins Lotto and Powerball.
Some entrepreneurs succeed and get wealthy.
Those that do write books about their formula for success.
Darwin and Kimura have something to say about this.
Richardhughes:
By definition. That a methodology is empirical (personal, first-hand experience) in nature says nothing about whether or not it is verifiable by others.
My wife is back tomorrow and I have been experimenting with ignoring William’s comments. Thus there is a rather narrow window of opportunity to discuss the above quote. I ask William’s indulgence, not having paid attention recently.
I have no idea what you are trying to say here. Do you not think that shared experience is a safeguard against delusion, at least?
how is that better than this:
“In science, empirical evidence is required for a hypothesis to gain acceptance in the scientific community. Normally, this validation is achieved by the scientific method of hypothesis commitment, experimental design, peer review, adversarial review, reproduction of results, conference presentation and journal publication. This requires rigorous communication of hypothesis (usually expressed in mathematics), experimental constraints and controls (expressed necessarily in terms of standard experimental apparatus), and a common understanding of measurement.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence
Also, this please.
That may be true to some degree. Indeed, general relativity is a lot better than Newton’s law of universal gravitation, but still doesn’t tell us about the most basic fundaments of the behaviour of matter and space. Then again, it does explain the behaviour of masses in terms of space curvature, so to some degree it is both a descriptive model and an explanatory model. In a way, explanatory and predictive power are very closely related. At the very least you cannot have one without the other, or vice versa.
Like I said, I’m new to this discussion, and I haven’t had time to familiarize myself with your phraseology, but here’s how I’m reading the above quote: “Let’s stick elves in there, just to be on the safe side.” Am I close?
How could that be tricky? Suppose you have some claim about some phenomenon or other – wouldn’t you want to know with the best certitude that you can obtain that this claim is likely to be true, or at the very least accurate? Would not that certitude come only from the ability to verify it?
Nobody thinks that. What we do think is this: the only phenomena which we can know to be real are the ones which we can show to be real. There may be many real phenomena out there that we haven’t yet demonstrated the reality of. But it makes no sense claiming that they’re real until we can actually show them to be real.
“Personal science”? There’s no such thing. There cannot be any such thing, because it would allow us to hold any belief, regardless of how accurate or truthful it is. There’s no utility in such a concept, nor truth, except perhaps accidentally, on rare occasions.
Do you think we’d confuse the two? Do you know how many supercomputers it takes to make a predictive model of the solar system that even approaches the real thing? But that doesn’t mean that a model cannot represent an understanding of some facet of reality.
Or broadcast on Radio Luxembourg.
Five “reals” and a “reality” in one paragraph! I like the cut of your jib, Sir.
ETA five not four. Even better!
Unreal, innit?
William:
Richard:
What “works” for William is true for William, until it doesn’t work any more, and then it isn’t true for William.
What Richard can’t wrap his brain around is the fact that explanations need only be desirable, not right/wrong, true/not true, verifiable/non-verifiable.
An explanation void of teleology, goal, purpose, planning, gains no traction for the simple reason it doesn’t speak to the ears of the ones that listen. See cuz the ones that listen only see goals, purpose, planning around them and the ones that happen to look into strong magnifying glasses loh and behold see the same thing: goals, purpose, planning, decision making.
The NCSE understands this very well. So does Richard Dawkins. Hence they breathe deep those intoxicating fumes of teleology and voile that deaf/dumb/blind kid of evolution is now a builder, developer, transformer, designer., wizard.
Not even scientists are immune from the desire to see things from a teleological perspective. Its the mentholatum of explanations.
IANS, it works!!!
William’s take is much more pragmatic, realistic then any pithy verbiage you have sneezed upon the world.
Keiths,
What works for William works for billions.
Give it a rest.
Ng?
It’s not that we don’t listen. We just don’t see any need for teleology. It’s a superfluous addition, cut away by Ockhams Razor.
And discard them. The only ones trying to get teleology into science are the ID-clique.
How is discarding the notion of verifiability pragmatic?
Apparently. Although not in the scientific arena, where independent verification is the standard.
Well, you’re going to have people like us – proud, posturing, arrogant, obtuse and materialistic – anywhere. No reason not to consider the content of what we say as well as the tone in which we bring it, right?
Magical thinking indeed “works” but only until something better comes along.
Those millions of Chinese that think that Rhino horn (fingernail) works as a erectile dysfunction cure will quickly find that Viagra works even “better”.
Those people cutting up albino children because of their “magical” properties would proclaim it “works for them” also.
And on and on and on. Sometimes the worlds feels like the rationals are far outnumbered by your lot. And despite that, here you sit using the computer created by minds as far away from William’s type of mind as it’s possible to get.
So if you were to go on the evidence of “what works” you’d soon see the error of your ways. But the whole point of this is that “evidence” is what you want to re-define.
Genital mutilation also “works for millions”. And so? Might makes right now does it?
Keep at it. In 1000 years they’ll look back and laugh at the last gasps of “it’s true for me” thinking.
We don’t perceive the world, we perceive our VR version of it. Work sufficiently hard at it and you can get them to diverge considerably.
That means that what happens in your VR world is as real for you as anything else. But that’s all it means.
Say it is true 10,000 times and it becomes true. But only for you.
It never ceases to be of interest to me that for most people, no matter how many times one says “X”, all they are capable of hearing is “Y”, and will insist you said Y, and mean Y, no matter how exhaustively you correct them.
Yeah, like when I say FCSO/I cannot be calculated, and you say it can then fail to calculate it and say “see, I calculated it”. Despite not being able to calculate it, you insist it can be calculated, despite the fact you can’t actually tell me the ultimate value you came up with actually was.
So yeah. Check the mote in your own eye I’d suggest.
All you have done is say in how many ways a string of a given length can vary.
If it’s your claim that all strings of the same length contain the same FSCO/I then the string
“E = MC²”
contains the same FSCO/I as
“2 + 2 = 4”
Which is obviously absurd.
And of course, the irony is that you’ve already decided that a message is functional before applying the test designed to tell you if it’s functional or not!
That you don’t see a problem with any of this is very telling.
The amusing aspect of OMagain’s statement below:
… is that it relies on the position that FSCO/I is an actual, recognizable, and at least intuitively computable commodity in order for him to assert that it is “obviously absurd” that both of his example strings contain the same amount of FSCO/I.
IOW, if FSCO/I is not an actual commodity, and is not computable (as OMagain insists) how on Earth could OMagain reach the conclusion that his two examples “obviously” do not contain the same amount of FSCO/I?
OMagain said:
Calculating how much functionally specified complex organization and associated information a thing has is not a process that determines if something is functional or not.
If, as you say, I have indeed not done a proper FSCO/I calcuation, please show me how it’s done. After all, in order for you to assert that I am in error about what FSCO/I is and how it is calculable, you must know what FSCO/I is and how to properly calculate it.
I am giving you the benefit of the doubt, and not pre-judging. What is absurd is your claim that FSCO/I measures something other then the length of a string and how many ways a string of that length can vary given that you have not demonstrated otherwise, therefore it is absurd that such claims are made by you but not proven by simply calculating the metric. Simply show me how a string of nonsense and a line from Shakespeare of the same length have different values for their FSCO/I and that’ll have proven me wrong!
You claim it can be simply computed. Please compute it for those two strings.
I am basing the claim that they do not contain the same FSCO/I on what I know of FSCO/I, in that it “measures” the functional information in a dataset. My conclusion is therefore based on that.
If they don’t contain a different amount of FSCO/I then what is FSCO/I measuring? Again, it’s merely the length of the string in that case and given that we already know how to measure the length of a string we don’t need an overcomplicated way of saying the same thing.
To me it is “obvious” (even self-evidently obvious) that there is a difference in information each of those statements provide, one being trivial and the other profound. If the claims made for FSCO/I are indeed accurate, I’d not expect the same value for each. However, if you want to say that the value is the same for each, I’m happy to accept that. It just cements my opinion that FSCO/I is meaningless other then as a measure of the length of a given string.
Let me know when you actually perform such a calculation. But rather it is claimed to show if such a thing is the product of intelligent design (of some sort) or not. If the FSCO/I is above a threshold of (say) X, then it’s probably designed. If under, probably not. In your example that threshold can be reached simply by increasing the length of the string.
I don’t know how it’s done. That’s why I’m asking you to do so, as you claim it can “easily” be calculated. I am basing my claim that you have not done a proper FSCO/I calculation on the simple fact that I could insert any string into your “equation” and come up with the same “value” for FSCO/I. In that case, what is is measuring if not the length of the string itself?
I am willing to accept that your calculation is accurate and “2+2=4” contains the same amount of FSCO/I as “E = MC²”. In which case my judgement is simply that FSCO/I merely measures the length of a string, as that’s how it appears to me.
If you want to demonstrate otherwise, simply calculate the values for each string and show that they differ!
Here’s something for you then. In the Lenski experiment, did the bacteria have
A) More FSCO/I
B) Less FSCO/I
after the citrate mutation?
I don’t “insist” that. What I “insist” is that you have not demonstrated it is anything other them a mere measure of the length of a string.
You can prove me wrong by simply calculating the FSCO/I for
“E = MC²”
and
“2 + 2 = 4″
and showing that their values are different!
If they are in fact the same, then perhaps I’ve misunderstood the whole idea, which is more then possible. I’m asking *you* as *you* claim it’s “easily” calculated.
Why doesn’t he simply plug Shannon entropy into some made up formula and go from there? Or has Shannon been dealt with already?