[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:38:25 GMT ]
You can hear it claimed-- or in any case read it on the interwebs -- sometimes by religious people, sometimes by young men who think selfishness is cool, that if you take a scientific worldview, there is no reason not to place your personal pleasure above that of everyone else.
I do not think that claim holds water. It is true that science itself cannot give you a reason for why you should value pleasure, or oppose to suffering. Pleasant and unpleasant are subjective, not directly measurable concepts. We can measure things that associate with suffering -- we can measure blood pressure or stress hormones, we can observe nutritional state and death, we can ask people to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10 -- but the fact that we designate pain and suffering as unpleasant is, well, consensus based on personal observation.
At the heart of science is a set of core assumptions of how knowledge can be acquired. One of these is that personal observation is not enough to draw conclusions about external realities, but that to be considered true, the result of an experiment must be replicable -- that is, others must be able to say "yes, I did the same experiment, and I saw the same thing". Another is the so called "Occam's razor" principle, which states (among other things) that if an explanation is sufficient to fully explain a phenomenon, there is no need to, and indeed you should not, add to that explanation something that there are no consistent observations of.
If we accept the personal observation that pain and suffering are unpleasant and something we would like to avoid, I do not think there is any scientific way to claim that you should consider your pain and suffering any more (or any less) important than that of someone else. Science, first of all, assumes at its core that other humans exist; the whole idea of trying to contruct experiments that function the same regardless of who performs them has built-in the idea. Second, even if it did not, I think Occam would force us to conclude that the likeliest explanation for our perception that others like us exist is that they indeed do so.
In any case, given that other people do exist, it does seem to me that there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that would suggest that our own pain and suffering are somehow more important than those of others. We can of course construct possibilities where it might be so -- maybe all the world is illusion except our own consciousness, say -- but by the Occam's razor principle these must then be discarded.
Science does not give you any reason why you should value the avoidance of pain, or the gain of pleasure. But given that you do value them in your own case, I think science does not give you any excuse to not value them in everyone else's case too.
Posted in Plain English | Tags filosofia, filosofia, tiede, tiede | 4 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:38:25 GMT ]
You can hear it claimed-- or in any case read it on the interwebs -- sometimes by religious people, sometimes by young men who think selfishness is cool, that if you take a scientific worldview, there is no reason not to place your personal pleasure above that of everyone else.
I do not think that claim holds water. It is true that science itself cannot give you a reason for why you should value pleasure, or oppose to suffering. Pleasant and unpleasant are subjective, not directly measurable concepts. We can measure things that associate with suffering -- we can measure blood pressure or stress hormones, we can observe nutritional state and death, we can ask people to rate their pain on a scale of 1 to 10 -- but the fact that we designate pain and suffering as unpleasant is, well, consensus based on personal observation.
At the heart of science is a set of core assumptions of how knowledge can be acquired. One of these is that personal observation is not enough to draw conclusions about external realities, but that to be considered true, the result of an experiment must be replicable -- that is, others must be able to say "yes, I did the same experiment, and I saw the same thing". Another is the so called "Occam's razor" principle, which states (among other things) that if an explanation is sufficient to fully explain a phenomenon, there is no need to, and indeed you should not, add to that explanation something that there are no consistent observations of.
If we accept the personal observation that pain and suffering are unpleasant and something we would like to avoid, I do not think there is any scientific way to claim that you should consider your pain and suffering any more (or any less) important than that of someone else. Science, first of all, assumes at its core that other humans exist; the whole idea of trying to contruct experiments that function the same regardless of who performs them has built-in the idea. Second, even if it did not, I think Occam would force us to conclude that the likeliest explanation for our perception that others like us exist is that they indeed do so.
In any case, given that other people do exist, it does seem to me that there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that would suggest that our own pain and suffering are somehow more important than those of others. We can of course construct possibilities where it might be so -- maybe all the world is illusion except our own consciousness, say -- but by the Occam's razor principle these must then be discarded.
Science does not give you any reason why you should value the avoidance of pain, or the gain of pleasure. But given that you do value them in your own case, I think science does not give you any excuse to not value them in everyone else's case too.
Posted in Plain English | Tags filosofia, filosofia, tiede, tiede | 4 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:55:26 GMT ]
I do not claim to know anything about philosophy or metaphysics or anything related, but I will now proceed to talk about it/them anyway. You have been warned.
Namely, following from the sidelines some more knowledgable people discussing things, I seem to notice that they think in dyads. That is, they ask questions like, are morals more defined by the society or by the individual? Are an individual's beliefs shaped by the physical world or the other way round? Is what we perceive as reality really physically real, or is it a social construct?
To me, the obvious answer to all of those and similar opposing concepts is "both". Depending on case, it could be more one or the other, and the questions are typically not even answerable in the general case.
But what's even more interesting to me that most of the amateur philosophers I listen to seem to always picture it as a question between two entities, while it seems to me that it is always a triad: the individual mind, the physical reality, and social interactions between individuals are all three involved and interacting.
Posted in Plain English | Tags filosofia | 6 comments
[ Posted by Janka
Sat, 06 Dec 2008 10:50:22 GMT ]
This is probably the hardest of the parts of this series to write. And in addition, it goes out in English, because it has a target audience of two (hi guys!) who do not speak Finnish. Not that the hardest part is the language.
Rant about basic and profound philosophical concepts by someone with very little training in philosophy follows. You have been warned.
The one, and only, universal truth is that we cannot know anything. In the end, everything we know is filtered through our senses and our internal representations and interpretations of those sensations. There is no way whatsoever to prove that anything outside my mind exists. In fact, even "I think, therefore I am" is not true—my current feeling of continuity of "my" self could be an illusion, and I would have no way to know. So, the best we can do is "I think, therefore something exists".
While blaming your favourite argument opponent for not realizing the above, in my experience what separates worldviews is not disagreements on it. I do not think I have raised this point with anyone above age 15 who would not have agreed with it, at least in principle. Most fervently religious people I know agree with it as well as do most jealously scientifically-minded atheists. What separates worldviews is what you do with it.
On the very basic level, there is two ways to treat this problem of not knowing. (Well, in addition to totally ignoring it and making a choice without being conscious about it, and then changing your mind as it suits your purposes.)
Either, you can say that since we cannot know, the question of real truth values of beliefs is not meaningful. You can still discuss how useful beliefs seem to be for some specific purpose such as a person’s happiness or his/her experience of being able to predict what happens, but "truth" becomes totally subjective, a question of whether something is true for a particular person. Belief or "inner certainty" constitute proof as good as any—for the person with the certainty, though not necessarily for others.
Or, you can say that while our senses are not reliable, they still "very likely" correspond at least partly to some real, external reality, and then start figuring out what we can (and cannot) guess about that reality given that this basic assumption of it existing and interacting at least with some predictability with our internal realities holds. Of course, if you are honest, the answer boils down to "not a whole lot", but you can still argue it is better than nothing. The concept of "truth" becomes external to the concept of an observer, and at least somewhat testable even if in the end unknowable. Of course, truth-values of a lot of things we experience are still irrelevant (to us, or in general).
This is, naturally, a simplification. But the major point I am trying to make that this is a choice. There is nothing you can experience to say which stance is the true one. The first one has the advantage that it can "explain" the latter - my taking the latter stance is simply my subjective truth, the absolute truth value of which is irrelevant. The second one has the advantage that it actually fits to how we experience the world - it is very hard for a human being to really to work from the assumption that there are no "facts". But it is, in the end, an arbitrary choice.
People have told me that since there is this underlying arbitrary choice, a scientific worldview - which the latter, in my opinion, leads to - is nothing but another religion. I do not think that this is true. It could be true if religions honestly admitted that they take the first choice, but in my experience they rarely do. I suppose most religions developed in conditions where the "what can we really know" was not a relevant question, and so the conscious choice was never made. In addition, I also feel that statement belittles religions. Religions have social, mystical, and historical dimensions that you cannot simply reduce to a "worldview that includes some irrational elements". "A worldview that includes some irrational elements" is simply that—a worldview.
Any worldview.
Like you probably have guessed, I have chosen to assume - assume, not believe - that our senses give us very distorted but still somewhat predictable information of a very real external reality, and that the concept of "truth" is not completely subjective. That assumption is arbitrary and I make it partly for simply esthetic preferences. But since I have chosen to make it, I do my best to stick to it.
Posted in Plain English | Tags filosofia, Losing my religion, self, uskonto | no comments
