tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5747401412673787565.post364017604295391774..comments2024-03-18T06:19:28.852+00:00Comments on NeuroChambers: A response to a wayward defence of a concerted critique of a bad argument about science and religionChris Chambershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10437328364681252945noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5747401412673787565.post-47634182125339086432012-09-28T16:56:39.387+01:002012-09-28T16:56:39.387+01:00I'm not sure I can wade into the debate(s) tou...I'm not sure I can wade into the debate(s) touched on between you and Sarewitz or Ananyo, but I think it might be worth pointing out something from the liberal arts that I think impinges on the general question at stake here, which is whether or not our toolkit must consist of science alone.<br /><br />Science is conducted by human beings, and verified by repetition from one person to another (I accept this as the primary method by which we externalize our knowledge and are able to say "I can reasonably assume that what I know is true not just for me but for all"), which necessitates communication. I say communication and not just observation, because it is necessary for knowledge to be framed. What I mean by this is that we have to give it a sort of beginning and end; a "chunking" of our experience. Part of this is done by our brain; when a young chimp watches her mother use a stick to eat ants, the child must assume that the process begins not at the start of the day but from the moment the stick is selected, or perhaps from the moment the ant mound is discovered. It also must surmise that the success of the endeavor ends when the stick is put away; that what happens "next" is unrelated to the ant eating. Most of this structuring of a thinking being's conscious experience is done by the brain, automatically - perhaps instinctively. Other times a person must actively attempt to indicate beginnings and ends to help their audience along, because the brain often struggles to separate the wheat from the chaff even with all its instinctive chunking and sequencing abilities. <br /><br />Either way, our observations come to us not as pure information, but as narratives. Having briefly outlined how our observations are narratives, I presume it would be fairly trivial for me to illustrate how our subsequent understandings of these constructed narratives involve metaphor, to say nothing of the issue of mentalese vs. thinking in natural languages. Indeed, some fairly good minds do think that narrative and metaphor comprise some of the most basic components of the human thought mechanism: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor#Metaphor_as_foundational_to_our_conceptual_system & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative#Narrative_fallacy<br /><br />It seems to me, then, that not only is non-scientific narrative and metaphor a valuable means of understanding the world (at least, I assume it is valuable because of where our thinking has got us in understanding the universe thus far), but it also necessarily underpins the project of science, at least for human science. I suppose one could refute this by showing me how metaphor and narrative are scientific, but right now (on little sleep) I'm just not seeing it.<br /><br />A science fiction novel, while not scientific in any rigorous sense, can be a useful tool for imagining how things might be. It adds no new information - but it DOES reorganize information (imagined or real) in a way that humans can more effectively parse. It could be that when we first understand things through narratives and metaphors as opposed to science, it later leads to scientific understanding that could not have happened without first understanding its narrative. <br /><br />So I don't think science is the only valid way of understanding the universe. We arbitrarily define things; reduce them according to the scientific narrative. Why and how do we pick out a tree in a forest and say "this is an organism separate from the other organisms around it," or look at a single atom and say "this is a single atom, distinct from the other atoms around it." One might as well say "there is no atom; it is a part of a larger energy field." Indeed, it seems very strange to me that the sciences which have advanced by distinguishing one thing from another seem to be hell-bent on unifying our understanding of the universe and saying "ultimately it is all one thing."<br /><br />I will see your criticisms of this point of view as an opportunity to learn.Adam Wykeshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02534325888137250921noreply@blogger.com