Horgan is wrong because he's apparently never really examined what
sceintific "comprehension" consists of. It is the ability to tell a
consistent story about what happens that has predictive power. It's not
necessarily a story that satisfies people pre-conceptions of what story
would be entertaining and satisfying and they could tell to kids a
bedtime. Those are the stories religion tells. Sceince tells stories
that work...and that's their defining characteristic. Chalmers can call
consciousness "the hard problem" because he doesn't like the story in
which it is a brain process. It doesn't satisfy his intuition that in
the story "consciousness" should be something he likes. The same thing
happened when life was shown to be metabolism and
reproduction...chemical processes. But it's a story that works. And
when neuroengineers and consciousness mechanics are designing and
building human like AIs nobdy will worry about whether Chalmers likes
the story or not.
Brent
On 9/6/2019 1:06 PM, Philip Thrift wrote:
via John Horgan @Horganism
*The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience*
/As time passes, the claim that science can comprehend everything
looks increasingly nutty/
By John Horgan on September 4, 2019
Does anyone still believe that science can explain, well, everything?
This belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot
scientists proclaimed that they were solving the riddle of existence.
They would soon explain why our universe exists and takes the form it
does, and why we exist and are what we are.
For years I believed this claim, out of deference to scientists
propagating it and desire to believe. The vision of a revelation to
end all revelations thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I
spelled out in The End of Science and other writings. Lately, I’ve
begun to look at the vision of total knowledge as a laughable
delusion, a pathological fantasy that should never have been taken
seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated it.
Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988
mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that
physicists would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how
our cosmos came into being. He compared this achievement to knowing
“the mind of God.” This statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist,
wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine creator.
I’ve often suspected that Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor,
was goofing when he talked about an “ultimate theory.” The success of
Brief History nonetheless inspired lots of similar books by
physicists, including Theories of Everything by John Barrow (1991),
The Mind of God by Paul Davies (1992) and Dreams of a Final Theory by
Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.
Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he
envisioned a final theory. He argued that with the help of a new
“supercollider” in Texas (which ended up being canceled), physicists
might soon “bring to an end a certain kind of science, the ancient
search for those principles that cannot be explained in terms of
deeper principles.”
Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped that the final theory would crush, once
and for all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent
deity. “It would be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan,
prepared by a concerned creator in which human being played some
special role,” Weinberg wrote. “I find sadness in doubting that they
will.”
Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of
omniscience. “I take the position that there is nothing that cannot be
understood,” Peter Atkins, a religion-bashing British chemist, stated
in his 1981 book The Creation. “Fundamental science may almost be at
an end and might be completed within a generation.” He added,
“Complete knowledge is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving
across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise.”
Then there was biologist Richard Dawkins, who declared in his 1986
bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that the mystery of life had already
been solved. Our existence “once presented the greatest of mysteries,”
Dawkins wrote, but “it is a mystery no longer, because it is solved.
Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add
footnotes to their solution for a while yet.”
One of those “footnotes” concerns the problem of consciousness. In the
late 1980s Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix (and
another hard-core atheist), proposed that consciousness, the subject
of interminable philosophical speculation, might be scientifically
tractable. Science could “solve” consciousness by finding its “neural
correlates,” processes in the brain that correspond to conscious states.
In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick declared that
“’you,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions,
your sense of personal identity and free will, are no more than the
behavior of a vast assembly of neurons.” That statement might have
been the high water mark of scientism and its corollaries, materialism
and reductionism.
Meanwhile, researchers were claiming that advances in computers and
mathematics were illuminating chaotic and complex phenomena that had
resisted traditional scientific analysis. These scientists, whom I
like to call chaoplexologists, were finding common principles
underpinning brains, immune systems, ecologies and nation-states.
Economics and other social sciences would soon become as rigorous as
chemistry and nuclear physics. Supposedly.
To be charitable, all this hubris wasn’t entirely unjustified. After
all, in the 1960s physicists confirmed the big bang theory and took
steps toward a unified theory of all of nature’s forces, while
biologists deciphered the genetic code. You can see how these and
other successes, as well as advances in computers and other tools,
might have persuaded optimists that total scientific knowledge was
imminent.
But the concept of scientific omniscience always suffered from fatal
flaws. Read Brief History and other books carefully and you realize
that the quest for an ultimate theory had taken physicists beyond the
realm of experiment. String theory and other major candidates for an
ultimate theory of physics can be neither experimentally confirmed nor
falsified. They are untestable and hence not really scientific.
Let’s say physicists convince themselves that string theory is in fact
the final theory, which encodes the fundamental laws from which nature
springs. Theorists must still explain where those laws came from, just
as believers in God must explain where He came from. This is the
problem of infinite regress, which bedevils all who try to explain why
there is something rather than nothing.
As for life, Dawkins’s claim that it is no longer a mystery is absurd.
In spite of all the advances in biology since Darwin, we still don’t
have a clue how life began, or whether it exists elsewhere in the
cosmos. We don’t know whether our emergence was likely or a
once-in-eternity fluke.
Brain scientists still have no idea how our brains make us conscious,
and even if they did, that knowledge would apply only to human
consciousness. It would not yield a general theory of consciousness,
which determines what sort of physical systems generate conscious
states. It would not tell us whether it feels like something to be a
bat, nematode or smart phone. As I argue in my new book Mind-Body
Problems, science appears farther than ever from understanding the mind.
There may still be a few true believers in scientific omniscience out
there. Big Data boosters indulge in hype reminiscent of the heyday of
chaoplexity (although the phrase “social science” remains as
oxymoronic as ever). And in his 2011 book On Being, Peter Atkins, who
is now 79, reiterated his “faith” that “there is nothing that the
scientific method cannot illuminate and elucidate.” But I doubt many
scientists share this view any more.
Over the last decade or two, science has lost its mojo. The
replication crisis has undermined the public’s confidence in
scientists, and scientists’ confidence in themselves. It has made them
humble--and that is a good thing. Because what if scientists had
somehow convinced themselves, and the rest of us, that they had
figured everything out? What a tragedy that would be. We’re better off
in our current state of befuddlement, trying to comprehend this weird,
weird world even though we know we’ll always fall short.
The older I get, the more I appreciate what philosopher Paul
Feyerabend said to me in 1992 when I broached the possibility of total
knowledge. “You think that this one-day fly, this little bit of
nothing, a human being--according to today's cosmology!--can figure it
all out?” he asked me with a manic grin. “This to me seems so crazy!
It cannot possibly be true! What they figured out is one particular
response to their actions, and this response gives this universe, and
the reality that is behind this is laughing! ‘Ha ha! They think they
have found me out!’”
I’ll close with a quote from Philip Anderson, a Nobel laureate in
physics and leading chaoplexologist. When I interviewed him in 1994,
Anderson derided the claims of some of his fellow scientists that they
could solve the riddle of reality. “You never understand everything,”
Anderson said. “When one understands everything, one has gone crazy.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens
Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science, The End
of War and Mind-Body Problems, available for free at mindbodyproblems.com.
source:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/the-delusion-of-scientific-omniscience/
@philipthrift
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
an email to [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>.
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/9a41eef3-3584-43dd-b9b7-dd0034a78932%40googlegroups.com
<https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/9a41eef3-3584-43dd-b9b7-dd0034a78932%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Everything List" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/64291c27-3637-3fd1-d066-c91463aeccca%40verizon.net.
