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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Mar 23, 2015 - 11:31am PT
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You’re either woefully ignorant of the premises of scientific investigation, obtuse, misdirecting, or stupid (sorry).
Beneath every formal field of study are all of those assumptions about what time, space, being, human being, things, matter are. Without those, you’re building sandcastles in the air—pure unadulterated imaginative storytelling. You shouldn’t make out that you have ground under your feet other than conventional consensus. I don’t care how smart my colleagues or you are, no one really has anything solid to stand on. Even empiricism is available only through experience.
And you berate religion or myth? Sheesh.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Mar 23, 2015 - 11:43am PT
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It'll be a long time coming before a Cruz or Huckleberry envisions life in evolutionary physico-chemical cellular neuro terms - in other words mechanistic terms bound by rules, processes, causality. In fact, I think nigh impossible without years and years of hands-on science lab where the processes and dynamics have a chance to sink into one's psyche or psychology (in this way not unlike pretty much every other subject or field that calls on expertise and the so-called 10,000 hrs of experience).
We are talking about political candidates here,whether it be the individuals mentioned above, or Obama marching off to Reverend Wright's church with a bible in his hand. (There is an actual photo of Barack doing just that very thing-- sometime early in his first POTUS campaign-- and now mysteriously difficult to find on the internet)
From time to time it is essential to remind ourselves that science was never designed to be a guiding political philosophy, it is a methodological investigation of the natural world.Period.
Hitherto the only states we have clear evidence of deliberately putting science foremost in its political pretensions and formulations were the Marxist-oriented totalitarian communist states, which all eventually became organically driven personality cults surrounding narcissistic psychopaths.The ruling political gangs in these monolithic states,like their ideological founder Marx, were unabashed atheists, who therefore founded their ideological precepts on what they saw as a materialism based upon causal determinism (for example,historical determinism) inherent in a strictly scientific ordering of human society; and therefore a human society reflecting the natural order.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 23, 2015 - 11:56am PT
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OMG.
Reading the last couple posts, I'm inclined to want to move to Germany or China. OMG! my inner pramaticist screams....
Then I recall Elon Musk or Francis Crick or Paul Berg or Steve Wozniak or Dean Kamen, or further back, the Wright Brothers or Thomas Edison or Jonas Salk, and I feel good again.
:)
From time to time it is essential to remind ourselves that science was never designed to be a guiding political philosophy, it is a methodological investigation of the natural world
Yes, an investigation that has not only yielded (a) bodies and bodies of knowledge, useful practical knowledge; but (b) together, a modern story or modern narrative for how the world works. (cf: Abrahamic narrative, half of which is primitive, barbaric, or just plain wrong.) A modern narrative - which serves as an unbeatable organizing principle for modern times and its challenges. To which American politics (esp (R)) it seems hasn't a clue.
"Beneath every formal field of study are all of those assumptions..."
Yeah, and thank God they're holding up [i.e, your premises, assumptions, provisionals, whatever] for that airliner at 40k' zipping across the sky over my head right now. lol
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Mar 23, 2015 - 12:14pm PT
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A modern narrative - which works as an unbeatable organizing principle for modern times and its challenges.
Science is nothing of the sort.If it is magically transformed into a generalized "narrative" then someone has to do such organizing.There are no "principles" or precedent for this sort of project-- except those advanced by Marx and carried out by his adherents.Precisely my point.
We know Obama is not part of this scientific narrative because there are pictures of him marching off to Reverend Wright's church with his bible in his hand.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 23, 2015 - 12:17pm PT
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Science is nothing of the sort.
Maybe not for you. (If not, I am sorry for you.)
But for me, and for umpteen million others, The Scientific Story (aka The Evolutionary Epic), for instance as rendered by Sagan and Tyson in their Cosmos series, is empowering.
At bottom, it is a narrative of facts. It's got its creation stories, its history and end-time predictions (its eschatology). It's got tons and tons and tons of explanations for just about everything in our umwelt, even beyond. Really, how could the dots be any closer? The mystery here is why so many in the general pop fail to pick up on it - even in the absence of any college chemistry or biology courses.
Ward, how could you watch Cosmos by Sagan or Tyson and not get what I'm saying?
Even if, in the end, this narrative somehow is not for you, you should at least be able to see that there is a narrative there, one based in fact, and that Sagan and Tyson and millions of other including myself employ it, are employing it in their daily lives, without issue, as a basis for their inner operating system, or, in different terms, as basis for their getting on in the world.
Enough said I think.
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Ward Trotter
Trad climber
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Mar 23, 2015 - 12:25pm PT
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which works as an unbeatable organizing principle for modern times and its challenges.
You're right, in that,for me, science does not work on the level implicit in the above.Instead it works as a collection of astounding discoveries and wonderful advances in our understanding of the universe.
I think that what you are saying is that science as an organizing principle for modern times is more of a personal psychological thing for you. Which is fine--up to a point.
At bottom, it is a narrative of facts.
What does the narrative say? For you personally it says something probably relatively benign. For Marx and Lenin it said something else.
(Sagan attended the tail end of a lecture in my astronomy class at the then state of the art planetarium at the college I attended. Unbeknownst to me he entered the dark planetarium and sat in the empty seats directly behind me. When the overhead lights came on and we all arose to leave it was then that I was astounded to behold none other than Carl Sagan seated directly behind me.Later on he gave his scheduled standing room only presentation in the main auditorium--to which we earned class points for attending.Thanks Mr.Sagan...we hardly knew ye)
Ward, how could you watch Cosmos by Sagan or Tyson and not get what I'm saying?
Because I watched those shows in the spirit of entertainment and education and not as an all-inclusive blueprint for life in its totality.
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WBraun
climber
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Mar 23, 2015 - 12:55pm PT
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How modern materialistic science views the human species .....
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Mar 23, 2015 - 01:13pm PT
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Perhaps we are dark energy or something else science has failed to observe . Perhaps the "ghost in the machine" is real.
My favorite hypothesis which is admittedly VERY weak is that "we" or "i" is something real but not made of anything science has yet discovered. Something that does interacts back and forth with matter as we know it but in ways so far undetected or measured.
So far that is the only explanation that seems to fit my experience.
Pretty useless and unprovable at this time unfortunately. Easy to consider it a desperate reach towards some sort of religion or immortality. I don't mean it that way at all ..I just think we are missing something fundamental because nothing so far explains well to me the reality that there is a "me" experiencing stuff right now.
That how we perceive is affected by our physical bodies is an obvious reality. that this perception can be modified greatly. That this in turn has come about via evolutionary principles that constrain us to useful survival behaviors and input data is all quite reasonable.
While these things affect what I perceive they don't seem to affect my experience identity. I still recognize myself as me. I am still experiencing each moment.
What the heck is this me? Still the biggest question I have after decades.
An odd thing about it.. there are periods of time that quite apparently existed.. such as before I was born (actually seems to me like quite some time after I was born) or when I was dreamlessly asleep sometimes and when I have been under surgery.. the universe apparently exists sometimes without me. The me that exists does not seem exist at all times that the physical universe exists.
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High Fructose Corn Spirit
Gym climber
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Mar 23, 2015 - 02:42pm PT
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I too am of the Dennett Camp (a) when it comes to understanding volition, agency and moral responsibility and their inter-relationships; and (b) when it comes to being a member of the Moral Agent Club. There's no better alternative, it seems to me. Over time we can hope and strive to optimize it. Moreover, we can teach our offspring it's the rules of the game, like it or not, for better or worse, and to make it known it is their choice in the end whether to play along and in what style or manner.
"I don't think we have to change a lot of laws. We should certainly change our whole system of punishment. It is, as I say, obscene." -Dan Dennett
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climbski2
Mountain climber
Anchorage AK, Reno NV
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Mar 23, 2015 - 06:39pm PT
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science is just science.. To say believing in verifiable facts is religion.. well that seems kinda disrespectful to religion.
I suppose some folks get their knickers in a bunch about it kinda like some folks do with religion or for that matter many strongly held opinions. Some people do overstate the completeness of sciences body of knowledge or its limits regarding types of inquiry.
As for creation and history of the universe.. science has a verifiable narrative. Still plenty of questions too.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 23, 2015 - 07:31pm PT
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feralfae
I offer this for consideration:
Quantum mechanics explains efficiency of photosynthesis
which appeared earlier this year in Nature Communications
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140109/ncomms4012/full/ncomms4012.html
The paper does a calculation on a model system built to represent the essential mechanism of photosynthesis and then shows that a type of non-equilibrium dynamics can explain features of photosynthesis that have remained puzzling.
"What is clear is that exciton energy transport depends not only on the topology of electronic couplings among pigments but is critically determined by exciton–phonon interactions: molecular motions14 and environmental fluctuations14, 15, 16 drive efficient transport processes in light-harvesting antennae. In fact, it is well known that exciton–phonon interactions in these complexes have a rich structure as a function of energy and generally include coupling to both continuous and discrete modes associated to low-energy solvated protein fluctuations and underdamped intramolecular vibrations, respectively14. Moreover, evidence is mounting that the interaction between excitons and underdamped vibrations whose energies commensurate exciton splittings may be at the heart of the coherence beating probed in two-dimensional (2D) photon echo spectroscopy17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23. Although some insights into the importance of such resonances can be gained from Förster theory24, the wider implications for optimal spatio-temporal distribution of energy19, 25, 26, for modulation of exciton coherences19, 20, 21, 22 and for collective pigment motion dynamics23 have just recently started to be clarified."
It is quite possible that this model has some validity, and it goes on to propose a way of measuring it:
"These non-trivial quantum phenomena are predicted for a variety of initial excitation conditions including statistical mixtures of excitons indicating that such non-classicality can be activated even under incoherent input of photoexcitations. Transient coherent ultrafast phonon spectroscopy29, which is sensitive to low-phonon populations of high-energy vibrations30, may provide an interesting experimental approach to probe the phenomena we describe."
and the generalization of the idea:
"We have also illustrated how in our prototype dimer with biologically relevant parameters, exciton–vibration dynamics can lead to non-exponential excitonic energy distribution whereby dissipation into a low-energy thermal bath can be transiently prevented. From this view, coherent vibrational motions that do not relax quickly and whose fluctuations cannot be described classically may be seen as an internal quantum mechanism controlling energy distribution and storage. Further insights into the advantage of these non-trivial quantum behaviour may therefore be gained in a thermodynamic framework62, 67."
which is a way to overcome the objection that I had voiced above.
How this relates to mind would be why we would consider such an article, accepting the physical manifestation of "mind" to be related to the physical mechanism of the brain, which I take as a totally reasonable hypothesis.
The article is very specific about the types of bio-chemical structures for which these quantum effects might appear. But importantly, the work is based on various experimental findings on photosynthesis, similar work does not yet exist for the brain.
The physics we don't know about that would explain "life" is very likely to be along this line of research to understand non-equilibrium, finite temperature systems. We don't yet understand these systems, and by understand I mean we are not able to calculate the behavior of these systems and predict the outcome of observation and experimental measurement.
And in this thread, we (the participants) are a long way from even agreeing that "mind" could be so explained. Invoking an apparently mystical phenomenon like quantum mechanics to provide another mystical phenomenon, like "mind", side steps all the hard work that has to be done to makes it relevant.
...over 100 years of research on this important biological process still has us searching for a complete explanation of what is going on...
It would be nice if the paper cited above provided the final pieces. We'll see.
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MikeL
Social climber
Seattle, WA
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Mar 23, 2015 - 07:38pm PT
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Ward,
I like.
Your language is a bit erudite and stifled, but what you say sometimes strikes home.
(Why are you picking on Mr. Obama?)
HFCS: Really, how could the dots be any closer?
Probabilities? Is this your argument? Are you about to argue for “likelihood”?
. . . you should at least be able to see that there is a narrative there, one based in fact, . . .
Could you show me one of those, without a theory or a model or an abstraction underlying it?
Any of you? Please?
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Mar 23, 2015 - 08:42pm PT
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can anyone take a crack at analogizing what Ed posted for us dummies? the photosynthesis stuff that is.
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MH2
Boulder climber
Andy Cairns
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Mar 23, 2015 - 09:15pm PT
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Moosedrool:
I hold people responsible for their actions, but I don't think it's their fault. Which in turn, means, we should educate rather than punish.
Isn't it possible that in some cases education would not work? What then?
When people do something good, do you give them credit? Or do you educate them?
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Mar 23, 2015 - 10:23pm PT
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um...yeah. got that part all by my lil ole self.
i was hoping a physicist would explain the science for us mere mortals.
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Mar 23, 2015 - 11:45pm PT
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Sounds to me like Ed is saying that recent developments in quantum mechanics have shed light on aspects of the process of photosynthesis, and perhaps similar developments could do so for the brain as well.
actually, feralfae referred to the article as an counter argument to my skepticism that quantum mechanics provides the "randomness" that has been proposed here as a possible explanation of "free will."
While we can say that it is self evident that there is a "physical theory of the mind," it is quite another thing to come up with it. This extends to a physical theory of life, also... to those who would protest I would simply ask that they provide the theory, this is just the question Largo has asked, and it is a legitimate question.
The paper addresses the issues which are probably important, but I do not have the time to give the paper a thorough reading to see if it actually accomplishes what it set out to do.
But our current science does not adequately describe important details, which is what science is all about. Failing to do so, one cannot yet claim that there is a physical theory.
Arguing that there must be a physical theory is a philosophical issue, not a scientific issue. Science will continue whether or not the philosophers can agree what it is that science is and what it is that it does.
One might consider whether or not "randomness" gets you where you want to be in terms of free will. If your action is ultimately determined by the "roll of the dice" you can't claim absolute responsibility for the intent.
Let's say the mind is some quantum device where the "ideas" are superpositions of various quantum states. You encounter a situation where you have two choices, but the quantum mechanics that would make the action non-deterministic would have those two choices "entangled." The action forces the intent into one or the other choice, but you don't have any way of determining which it is going to be...
...how could you claim "free will"?
So, why does this "randomness" help with your argument of having "free will"?
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Mar 24, 2015 - 02:03am PT
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if by theory of life you mean how life first evolved from inanimate molecules - no, we dont have a complete theory, but science is closing in one one. if one starts with the definition of life - a multi criteria description of bioligical systems, one must describe the steps by which these criteria were first satisfied on early earth given the materials at hand and the environment. how were life's first containers constructed? how was genetic information first stored, replicated, and shuffled? what was its energy source?
then, we need to create the story of how those first biological systems evolved to create the components shared by all life today.
does this story have multiple possible beginnings and trajectories? a discovery of life on, say, Europa would indicate a yes.
its a fantastically complex business and, in the end, we'll have experiments and simulations for plausibility, and the ability to create life from our version if scratch, but we'll never be able to go back in time, or have the time necessary for a more complete verification.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Mar 24, 2015 - 02:06am PT
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im still interested in deciphering the role quantum mechanics plays in photosynthesis, btw, but the language presented is far too dense for my paygrade to even get a toe hold.
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Tvash
climber
Seattle
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Mar 24, 2015 - 02:13am PT
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as for our choices, we do know that the mind creates lists of options from which we choose by some scoring system - much like any AI system (or killer robot from the future) does. complex and dynamic, but mysterious and inscrutable?
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