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rrrADAM
Trad climber
LBMF
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...sprituality and science/intellect can coexist separately in one human being. They can, but only proportionally to how moderate one's views are, and how willing they are to adjust their views given new evidence. But, if one's views are rigid to the point that they CANNOT adjust their views given new evidence, under any circumstances, they cannot coexist, under any circumstances.
In other words, in the case of Fundamentalists, ANY science that competes with their views (E.g., Cosmology, Evolution, even Geology [Young Earth]). And this is achieved by Morton's Demon.
Plus... Why should they exist 'separately' anyway? Why the need for separation? I know many who's science and religious faiths coexist together, BUT they are very moderate, and/or have a religious faith other than Christian.
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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Thanks, Ed - good stuff!
A lot of ordinary folk don't necessarily have a good understanding of what science is and scientists do. They see something on television or in the newspaper about some new discovery or treatment, do a bit of science in high school, and maybe not a lot more. It's a shame - our prosperity is very much based on applied science, which is to say using discoveries to generate wealth.
The New York Times has quite a good science and technology section every Tuesday, which I try to buy and read. Then I pass it on to my father, a retired engineer, although he's mostly interested in the hard science and engineering stuff.
A lot of science is simply measuring things really really precisely, and figuring out why they're doing what they're doing. The recent discoveries of exoplanets by the Kepler satellite being an excellent example. We knew there are exoplanets, although the theories for their formation aren't settled - too much chaos involved, maybe. But the Kepler observations suddenly provide a lot more information on what's out there, in much more detail.
A friend is a nominally retired scientist, who worked in remote sensing. A PhD. He spent time in Antarctic and the Arctic, including developing gadgets to look under ice shelves to find submarines and such. Anyway, I ran into him today and chatted. He's quite interested in how magnets, in particular those in transformers and generators, "decay". (I may have the wrong terms, but you get the idea.) Our entire civilization is based on magnets and generators, and superconductors and new alloys (rare earths etc) are adding to that. Anyway, after decades of thinking about it, and fleshing out a theory, he found a paper recently with lots of experimental data to support his idea, and is now writing a paper about it. Then the experimentists will have at it.
The neat thing was the excitement in his voice, that after decades of thinking about this, he'd been able to put the pieces together in a way that made sense. He'd discovered something new, just as climbers sometimes do.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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That O'Reilly link is really something. The term "educated moron" is appropriate, I think.
EDIT
Unless the humans can get to figuring this out, we will never progress as a species, I don't believe, but will continue to muddle along killing each other over ridiculous phantoms of religion.
Anyway, science offers us a really excellent way to analyze our universe and has thus vastly improved the living standard of our species over the centuries. But it is only half the job.
Well said Branscomb. Where are you when I need you?
Highest priority should be stabilizing human growth.
How ethical is it to perpetuate the biggest problem?
Yeah, good luck with that:
http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/1115083/Stop-Making-Babies
rrrAdam, you were needed on the science vs religion thread, today, where were you.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Since the population problem was brought up, I'm going to mention the role of social science research, anthropology specifically, in obtaining quality data and in changing behavior in spite of misperceptions by government planners and the general public.
As with the hard sciences, we first need detailed data. Particularly in social science, many people have already formed opinions about behavior and social problems which may or may not be borne out by the facts. The facts themselves are complex and interlocking and often surprise us with unanticipated connections. One of the problems always, is to know when to limit the variables.
All of this takes time so it is a joke in applied anthropology that anthropologists are never called in to analyze a social problem or a troubled development project until everything else has failed and the bureaucrats and planners have already wasted lots of money on quick surveys and the statistical reports based on them.
Even so, we are constantly pushed to produce statistics. I wish I had a dollar for every time that I've been told, interviews and case histories are anecdotes and statistics are facts, oblivious that in social science the statistics come from the interviews and the more in depth the interviews, the more accurate the statistics.
The reward for quality analysis is often, since it reveals thought patterns on the part of the subjects being targeted that are at odds with those trying to change their behavior, disbelief and then anger at the researcher. They pay us to tell them what the locals think and then they get mad at us for doing a good job of it.
Bottom line, science in any form always seems to push the comfort zone of the status quo, that's one of our big jobs in life, and our other big job it seems to me, is learning how to communicate with those who are initially uncomfortable with our results.
In my experience with family planning in Nepal, the problem was not the illiterate village women, but the highly educated Swiss bureaucrats I worked for who had very firm preconceived notions about those village women. Given a culturally appropriate approach, individuals, including illiterates, make decisions that lower the population growth rate.
Population planning is working. There are not more than two or three countries in the world where population growth has not been lowered. Think how much more could have been done, if culturally appropriate measures, based on science instead of opinion had been employed 50 years ago.
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neebee
Social climber
calif/texas
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hey there say, ed.... happy supertopo eve to you!!
i am jumping in here a bit late, as i have been doing lately...
so much going on, now...
well, i "second" what daphne said, a ways back:
as to HER quote, i'll say there here,as well:
Hey Ed, Thanks for this.
(I have nothing intelligent to add here, I just wanted you to know how much I appreciate you.)
god bless, always nice to see you here, ed...
:)
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jstan
climber
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Being a data junkie I have no choice but once more to ignore what happens when data is quoted. Do you suppose I will ever realize the error of my ways?
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopgraph.html
To go on a bit more I` looked at US population. Afain pou;ation and then rate of growth.
You see population rates in the world at large by 2050 are dropping very quickly as compared to that of the US. Indeed by 2050 the US rate is projected to be about twice that of the world taken as whole.
Taking our que from the fact education provided women has been found to be the largest determiner as regards the number of births
collapse of the US system of education may be an important determiner of future US population.
Someone out there needs to look at population trends among the banana republics. I have not the heart to do it.
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HighTraverse
Trad climber
Bay Area
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I have to wonder about the underlying assumptions of the population graph. It's suspiciously linear.
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Norton
Social climber
the Wastelands
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What is the implication of the growth rate going down while population goes up?
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jstan
climber
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Growth rate is the number of new people divided by the population. It says births per person have been decreasing since about 1990.
If you look at the curve it switches from concave upward to concave downward around 1990. Look hard and you can see it. When you get such a shift a curve tends, at first glance, to appear linear.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Yep. Find the inflection points. Kinda hard to do looking only at the top graph!
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jstan
climber
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I asked that question too. Jan, as usual, has some info.
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Fort Mental-
Is this a general theoretical question involving neurobiology and linguistics or one pertaining to anthropology and the cross cultural situation?
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Jan
Mountain climber
Okinawa, Japan
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Speaking of graphs, they are one of the ways to communicate cross culturally. The kind of graphs jstan posted and comparative population pyramids really came across well to illiterate villagers when I was talking about family planning and why they were poor. We went from we're poor because God didn't make enough land to we're poor because of what we've done - a big leap.
When we talked about why they had so many children, sometimes it was they didn't know how to prevent it, but mostly I heard about the high infant and child mortality rates and how their children are their old age security. This of course makes controlling the population a lot more complicated than just getting people to stop having children. Pretty soon you're involved in Third World governments and imperial foreign policies.
jstan is right however, that the solution rests with educating the women. In Nepal village women were hiking three days to have a laparotomy with local anesthetic, then getting off the operating table and walking back home a few hours later. They were tough, they were motivated and they were still illiterate, but they had understood the problem not in terms of saving Nepal's ecology but of their own self interest. This was of course after their children had been vaccinated and almost no children died in their villages for several years as a result.
Scientific research and social progress are both very time consuming.
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altelis
Mountain climber
DC
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Fort Mental, not sure if this is what you're getting at exactly, but there are some interesting case studies about the intersection of language, our brain, and our consciousness.
We have pretty decent maps of the brain's major centers. Language (spoken and auditory), hearing, vision, motor, sensory, etc.
People who have issues in their language centers see this manifested in other areas totally apart from language.
For example, (I think I remember this right), a person who had damage to the motor cortex and was no longer able to jump demonstrated great difficulty in recalling the word "jump".
Similarly there was a case-study of a person with damage to a part of their language center that caused them great difficulty with recall of color words. A few specific colors, if I remember correctly. That same person also had difficulty "seeing" those same colors. Functional brain images and other testing was done, and his eyes and visual centers were all working fine. It turns out that part of our interpretation of visual input occurs in our language centers before "arriving at conscious thought" (for lack of a better more accurate description of the process). Loss of the ability to recall the WORDS describing a color directly affected this person ability to SEE that color.
I think these examples point at how central our language centers are to our very conscious experience of the world. Given that, I do tend to believe that our language skills, the metaphors of our specific language, religion, slang, etc., all very much DO affect in some way our conscious understanding of the world.
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jstan
climber
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The question that came to me was, "If I have no language do I also have no voice in my head? Jan had some data on cases where people did not have language and their development was studied, as I remember. If one can only grunt, I suppose that will be the voice in your head too.
Following that thought, you have to think very literate and highly educated people have voices very different from others. Libs possibly would have voices asking them questions all the time. And people very conservative in their outlook have voices speaking very assuredly at all times.
Do we have a positive feedback loop here????????????
Very suggestive.
Good grief! Rush Limbaugh in my head. The word "Hell" just took on real meaning for me.
With Rush in there he can use his little rubber hammer to make me do exactly as he pleases.
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MH2
climber
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"The word "Hell" just took on real meaning for me."
Ah, a new consciousness arises.
A couple years out of date, but from a popular science magazine on the lunch table at work the other day:
Old time skeptic asked what God was doing before he created us and everything?
Fair religious thinker answered, "He was preparing Hell for those who probe too deep."
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Ed wrote: “. . . and finally there are those who think that science is nothing more than another elaborate "story" that has no firmer basis than any other story...”
This is in fact an old story in philosophy that is widlely misunderstood.
In the sense “story” is used in Ed’s context, we can look back to the dictionary which states (roughly) that a story is the narration of the events in the life of a person or the existence of a material thing. Also, a report or account of a matter; statement or allegation.
Basically, “story” in Ed’s context means a representation of some thing or things, ergo the representation (the “map”) is not the thing itself (the “territory”), any more than 3 is the selfsame thing as the three brain cells still firing in my bean. That is, “3,” or any mathematical representation of a “thing” is never the thing itself, because the map (story) is not the territory, any more than Vin Scully announcing a Dodger game is the game itself as it's played on the diamond. Vin is telling a story. And no matter how accurate Vin's represtation, he has no bat and no ball and therefore is not playing ball at all. The players are playing the game itself.
The tricky part here is that people tend to get stuck on one story and one set of “things” for which their story works particulary well, not realizing that even the best story in one context might be of little value in another context.
For instance, Science is certainly the leading “story” in dealing with physical reality. The “story” for working with the unconscious has traditionally been ritual, dreams, myth, certain canny cognitive/emotional processes, and so forth. The fact that the unconscious is not effectively known through numerical evaluating strategies is not a knock on either on physical science or the unconscious. Unless you reckon that science is the only valid story (scientific fundamentalism), and physical reality is the only subject worth investigating. But you’d be betting against yourself on that one.
As they say, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like nail.
But it ain’t.
JL
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
Full Silos of Iowa
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The tricky part here is that people tend to get stuck on one story and one set of “things” for which their story works particulary well, not realizing that even the best story in one context might be of little value in another context.
Got that right.
But then here's where Largo lapses:
But you’d be betting against yourself on that one.
The Scientific Story has shown (i.e., proved) its validity, its accuracy, its practicality, time after time. Going back decades to centuries now depending on measure.
EDIT
My view is that Largo keeps insisting on fighting the tide. Clearly it means a lot to him to preserve his notion (which is to say, the traditional notion maintained by the Abrahamic religions and their theologies) that some part of consciousness is not a product of the brain's metabolism. Really, it's not that big a deal to make the switch: Accept the scientific wisdom that all mental faculties (e.g., feelings to thoughts to decision making) are a product of the brain. Then you get to spend your limited time and energy adapting to the many wonderous implications of that instead of fighting them.
re: scientific fundamentalism
This is really a biased term. By design, I think. Biased by fundamentalism's negative connotations, perjorative usage, esp since 2001.
I support ("believe in") The Scientific Story as the best model (or "map" or representation) for Nature's Story or The Universe Story. But I would never call myself a "scientific fundamentalist."
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