I think that in your research you failed to read the bits of the Bible that covered God’s great grace and love. You missed the Crucifixion and its relevance. I hope you go back and read the Bible again and read the whole thing this time. God bless.
or How Science [Scientists] Can Sometimes Get Things a Little Wrong,
or One Dioptre*, Two Dioptres*, Three Dioptres*, Four…
Dear B&W Team,
I hope that you’re keeping well and not working too hard; and I suspect that you’ll enjoy this email (I hope so, anyway). Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or suggestions – if and when you have time…
The multiple perspectives and critiquing at all times of Post Modernism reminds me of how flawed science can be; not because the scientific method is flawed, but because scientists are human beings (yes, it’s true), with all the perspectivistic consequences of falling into the trap of mistaking their particular world model (i.e. the model through which they experience the world) for reality.
Coincidentally, I’ve just read a short article on placing baby monkeys in goggles and tiny cages in an effort to better understand myopia, in order to learn how to improve children’s eyesight – surely a worthy cause. However, there’s just one minor problem with this whole spectacle-wearing thing: if you ask any expert in control theory how to keep an adaptive system centred around an optimal position, he or she will say “apply a suitable amount of negative feedback” – or words to that effect. If you ask “what happens if I apply positive feedback instead?” the answer will be that the system will progressively deviate more and more from the optimal, resulting in the need for larger and larger amounts of externally applied correction.
That is, with negative feedback an adaptive system is self-correcting whilst with positive feedback the system is maladaptive, and needs progressively more and more help in order to work effectively.
Coincidentally, once one is on the road to wearing glasses, the required prescription becomes progressively stronger year on year (that is, your eyesight becomes progressively worse) as long as you keep on wearing the glasses. You will probably not be surprised to learn that this is positive feedback – which progressively destroys your eyesight.
I know that doctors have to take the Hippocratic oath, which states “first, do no harm,” but I don’t know if this is the case for opticians (forgive them, for they know not what they do).
So how, in the context of eyesight, would negative feedback work? Well, it could be applied through a combination of glasses which make your eyes work harder (instead of correcting for their offset) and eye exercises. Looking at lots of close work makes you myopic because your eyes adapt to the task they are put to. If you compensate by doing exercises which allow them to focus into the distance you can either prevent damage in the first place or recover from existing damage (just as ever stronger prescriptions can make your eyesight worse year on year, appropriate exercise – possibly combined with negative feedback lenses – can make your eyesight become better day by day.)
Probably a good analogy is to imagine that you’ve managed to damage both of your legs simultaneously in some bizarre accident, and so you’re given crutches in order to help you get around. In physiotherapy, your legs are exercised appropriately until they (unless you’re very unlucky) regain most or all of their original function, and you can hand back the crutches. …but what would happen if, instead, they just gave you the crutches and told you to use them at all times, and to come back in a year or so for a check-up. A year later, your arms and shoulders may be stronger, but your legs are, if anything, weaker. Keep on like this and you may end up in a wheelchair… in physiotherapy they try as much as possible to fix what’s broken; in the opticians they give you a set of crutches and recommend that you use them at all times…
Not surprisingly, there is a book available (out of print now, unfortunately, I believe) on this very subject, which many opticians and scientists (who should know better) ridicule. Just in case you’re interested in helping people get rid of those “eye-crutches”, it’s called Better Sight Without Glasses: A Complete Illustrated System of Self-treatment for Defective Vision and Diseases of the Eyes, by Harry Benjamin. My copy was 7/6 – but it’d probably be a little more expensive now. Anyway, enough of my waffle for now! Look after yourself, and don’t work too hard!
With kind regards,
James (Morrow)
ps you may be aware of the (heavily ridiculed) “old wives’ tale” that glasses ruin your eyesight…
pps I could mention a number of other minor errors within the field of science – but I don’t want to “perm” your hair…
Joseph Hoffmann’s article, “When the Devil Still Matters,” reminds me that I once tried to convey what I saw as an ameliorative meme to a believing Muslim – that the view held by Muslims that God is omniscient, omnipotent and needs what are essentially thugs and despots to fulfill his will is both self contradictory and an insult to God.
After all, an omniscient and omnipotent God would have the knowledge and power to convince to find more subtle ways to convince the unbeliever than slaughter and political oppression. For instance a few signs, apparent coincidents, such as a butterfly landing on your shoulder during just the right moment of introspection could inspire faith… If an omniscient and omnipotent God wishes a person to be convinces, clearly he infinitely better choices at his disposal than torture, slaughter, loss of family, loss of freedom, oppression, maiming and despair.
I’m not sure, but I think my subject responded only with shock.
I have doubts that a believing Muslim could ever listen to an unbeliever, consider his words and change his mind, but that’s a different subject.
Oops I left some horrible editting and spell-checker errors in my comment. Please allow me to repost it with a correction.
Joseph Hoffmann’s article, “When the Devil Still Matters,” reminds me that I once tried to convey what I saw as an ameliorative meme to a believing Muslim – that the view held by Muslims that God is omniscient, omnipotent and needs what are essentially thugs and despots to fulfill his will is both self contradictory and an insult to God.
After all, an omniscient and omnipotent God would have the knowledge and power to find more subtle ways to convince the unbeliever than slaughter and political oppression. For instance a few signs, (apparent coincidences) such as a butterfly landing on your shoulder during just the right moment of introspection could inspire faith.
If an omniscient and omnipotent God wishes a person to be convinced, clearly he infinitely better choices at his disposal than torture, slaughter, loss of family, loss of freedom, oppression, maiming and despair.
In short, militant religion is not compatable with the belief in an omnicient God, unless you posit an unnecessarily sadistic God. And if (as (Islam also seems to hold) it is possible to insult God, positing that God a thug must surely be the greatest possible insult.
I’m not sure, but I think my subject responded only with shock.
I have doubts that a believing Muslim could ever listen to an unbeliever, consider his words and change his mind, but that’s a different subject.
My initial enthusiasm for Wikipedia waned after a few surfs. If any Tom, Dick & Harry can enter/edit, it makes it untrustworthy.
The Wikiproject seems to conflate ‘elite’ with ‘standard’. This kind of thinking doesn’t understand the difference between ‘opinion’ and ‘advice.’ Carried to its logical conclusion,it would ‘democratically’ solicit the ‘advice’ of a mechanic on a broken ankle, or a doctor’s ‘advice’ on how to fix a bent crank-shaft.
Date: 29/04/2006 which was a response to my own post.
Paul Power: Yashendra Prasad writes “The traditional modern science has been based on the assumption (still taught is schools and colleges) that the material world,as wee see it, it REAL. But, the advances in quantum-physics itself has shattered this assumption !!! ” This is beyond nonsense. If it is saying that Quantum Mechanics shows reality not to exist, it is plain wrong…..
Yashendra comments: The experiemnt in Germany (1997)…which discovered Leptoquarks…. showed that these leptoquarks exists for mere some billionth of a nano-second. In other words they are ephemeral. And, as the entire material world is made of these leptoquarks…. obviously this too is ephemeral. …Thus, without doubt, we can say that the world which is we see is not real !! Now, the Indian spirituality has been saying this since time immemorial. That the ‘reality’ of the material world is a mirage. The findings of Lepto quarks proves this. And, pls note, leptoquarks are NOT the ultimate building block of the universe ! …. Indian spirituality puts it this way: The world of absolute reality is not what we see… This is just an apparent reality -an illusion called Maya. As long as our consciouness doesnt transcend the layers of Maya, we cant comprehend the absolute reality. Till then we need to follow the rules of this illusiory world. Trying, at the same time to cross this. “Maya” can help us transecnd “maya”. …The multiplicity of things is maya..illusion. Becoz there is only ONE that exists !! Call it by any name.
Paul Power write:Whereas India, ….. with a caste system, animal worship and the murder of babies on the grounds that the child is of the wrong sex, to name but a few of its more advanced practices.
Yashendra replies: Caste system is a too advanced biotechnological science to be understood by modern science. But modern science can definitely understand if proper reseraches are made….. A ‘Varna’ is a group on the basis of inborn insticts. Genetics and heredity play a major role. NO two human beings are alike or identical. The ‘Varnas’ ( 4 major divisions called caste)are divided on inborn genetic insticts. And they are maintained thru Eugenics, a highly developed breeding scienc for humans. India has maintained its human biodiversity. Not only in plants and animals !! Its not possible to write complete detail here.
secondly, animal worship. In India everything is respected. Not only animals, but trees, soil, rocks. “worship” word is a misnomer. There is nothing life-less in this creation, they are various levels of working consciousness. Wroship for all objects means respect & adoration. If Paul is referring to cows, then I will say cows are respected as they are not only amazingle useful but emanate some very positive vibrations. Details can be found by corresponding with me directly.
But, Paul, yes, there are some uneducated socieits in India which eliminate the girl child. But its not all Indians do this. Such ppl are in minority. Like every society India has also some ills. … R u aware that we Indians consider all westerns to be unclean and highly unhygeinc becoz they do not wash their rear with water after toilet !! They use paper. A paper cant remove all the shit from there. U can experiement this on a table full of dust. Compare its cleanings by water and paper. U urself will realize which cleans most and fully !!! So much so to the scientific development and “developed” countries !!… I can cite 1000 such examples……
The latest contribution of Yashendra Prasad (hereafter YS) is a right old muddle. YS claims that the reality of the material world is a mirage because there are particles known as leptoquarks that exist for no longer than billionths of a nanasecond and because these particles are building blocks of matter we can see, such as atoms. The problems with this notion are various. The experiment which YS refers to as showing the existence of such particles is not considered as definitive: later experiments rule out the discovery of such particles, which remain only a theoretical possibility. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptoquark. It is rather strange to claim to have shown the unreality of the material world by invoking the properties of particles which seem not to exist.
Even if leptoquarks do exist, we still have matter which is stable over millions of years: protons. We are not free to declare the unreality of the material universe just because some parts of it have properties very far outside our experience.
I do not know where to begin with YS’s twisted defence of India’s reprehensible caste system as being based on genetics and as preserving India’s “human biodiversity”. No self-respecting biologist would utter such nonsense, which is more likely to produce all the defects of in-breeding.
People should know that most Israelis, and most of the religious ones also, have no respect for the Israeli Rabbinate. So the silly words of the Sephardic Chief Rabbi should not be considered the beliefs of the Israelis he supposedly administers to.
First, there may be a survival benefit conferred upon those who are able to shield themselves from the blistering light of unbuffered reason with comforting, anxiety and despair reducing concepts of divine regard and concern.
Second, I was recently persuaded to reverse a decision to withdraw from a long-running and mostly unproductive experience with group psychotherapy by the observation, “Where else are you going to find seven people willing to put up with your shit for two whole hours once a week?”
Never, apparently, in the entire recorded history of mankind has a faith-based approach to knowledge, i.e., that approach which largely centers on an intuitive feeling of belief as its final test, ever produced even a single, verifiable truth, except by chance.
Yet the mass of mankind, even including I would guess most university graduates, suffers mightily from thinking that the use of faith is a perfectly valid alternative to the correct use of fact, logic and method in their daily lives.
And this some 2500 years after Hippocrates of Cos reportedly observed, “To really know is science; to merely believe you know is ignorance.”
I wonder if the only way to draw more attention to the failure of faith might not be an appeal to that most compelling of human forces, Greed, by offering a huge amount of ready cash to the first believer who can demonstrate the first-ever instance of faith producing real knowledge.
I’ll add a little more heat to zen quote. Zen is really just about removing these inclinations to jump to a quick judgement of anything and everything. At it’s heart is pure logic. As for the anecdotes about it’s practioners, well, I can only speak for myself, but there is a lot internal cringing going on. Zen doesn’t make you infallible. It is a painful process that shows you how really foolish you are.
I like definitions and find communication impossible without them. To that end I define reality as, “That grasp of our surroundings that best enables us to predict the future”.This definition can easily be tested by stepping in front of a bus that you believe to be unreal. If you are unharmed then you have an excellent grip on reality, plus the courage of your convictions.
The word just seems to pop up so often undefined, and hence endlessly debatable.
I marvel that a Senior Fellow in the Scientific Study of Religion can come up with this sentence:
“The Evangelicals are better off; for them church history begins with the birth of Jesus, ends with the Acts of the Apostles, and then skips frames to the twenty first century where, no thanks to the Catholics, the Bible has been marvelously preserved. It is easy for fundamentalists, however the discussion is sliced, to reject Da Vinciism outright since “this isn’t about the Bible.” Who in surfing past innumerable “expert” interviews and schlock specials on the “truth” behind the Da Vinci code has not noticed that the clueless Protestants seem to be standing on a rock, Word of God aloft, while the Catholics are caught shuffling ancient papers as the flood water encircles them?”
A more sneering bit of nonsense it would be hard to compose. Do you know anything of the actual literature or history of ‘evangelicals’ [as distinct from ‘fundamentalists’]? It seems not.
Despite your obvious prejudices and, I guess, ill-will, toward those you claim to have studied, you do make a lot of pertinent criticisms of the Davinci Industry.
That is because both intelligent evangelicals and sceptics are not lovers of the New Age nonsense.
“This book means to suggest, through sample instances in a number of subject areas, that there is no such thing as deep knowledge, in the sense of insight so compelling that it needs no validation. There is only knowledge, period.”
Non-conceptually, non-verbally, *existence* is known. Not ‘I think therefore I am’, but just self-validating, non-deniable ‘is-ness’. Knowledge occurs in, and depends upon, is-ness.
All else, including the ‘I’ of ‘I am’ (any and all thoughts of a ‘me’ and an outside world, and any ‘knowledge’ about it) is *conceptual* knowledge. Period.
Some conceptual knowledge (in principle refutable) enables us to fly to the moon and nuke thousands of human beings.
Some conceptual knowledge (neither verifiable nor refutable by any known means) enables us to see the above as evidence of a super-space-daddy who loves us all, even as some wither and die in agony.
The fact that Frederick Crews can marshall such a powerful argument against the existence of God is itself a kind of miracle that requires some explanation. I find, ironically, more proof of the existence of God in Crews’ brilliant refutation of God’s existence than in the theologican’s apology for God. Besides this, if Crews is right and the theologicans are wrong, then he has to account for why it is he is permitted this intellectual freedom and objectivity, whereas the theologican is not (he presumably wills to be deceived). Something profound is missing in Crews’ analysis, because it begs the question: what is there about Frederick Crews that enables him to be more in contact with reality than, for example, John Henry Newman? Can we tell by what is intrinsic to the mind of Frederick Crews in comparison to the mind, say, of Newman, that the one can take hold of empirical reality, whereas the other cannot? I think Plato (who is a soft-headed mystic of the worst kind) has a quality of mind that just per se is superior to the mind of Frederick Crews. Surely when Plato is spouting nonsense (if it is nonsense, that is, and it must be according to Frederick Crews) his mind loses an accordance with reality, and thus must become less compelling than the mind of FC. No, the real mystery in all this is: what is it about Frederick Crews that makes him take the position he has taken, heedless of any question as to what motivates others to believe differently (like Newman)? Frederick Crews is not equipped to answer this question–but perhaps his Creator is. To be morally sensitive to the existence of evil as proof of God’s non-existence is itself evidence of an intelligence that has to be explained. And as cogent and beautiful as Crews’ prose is, I cannot intuitively sense that more of reality is contained in his mind in comparison to the mind of Newman. Frederick Crews is too certain of himself to be right. Has he ever met someone as intelligent and sincere and reasonable as he is who believes the opposite of what he does? Does Darwin explain this for him? Crews may in the end be right, but he is far too metaphysically invulnerable to have the satisfaction of knowing it.
I’m delighted that Frederick Crews is gathering together is Collected Wisdom. I remember how disemburdened I felt when I read his first debunkings of Freud in the NYTBR. I also venerate his two volumes of Pooh criticism. But I’m astonished that so many readers feel a need to log on with whines of protest that were old hat in the days of Spinoza. Here’s the story, people of faith. We don’t share your faith, and we think it inane and childish and certainly insupportable. That doesn’t mean we can’t dine at the same restaurants, but perhaps we should agree not to convert each other, especially if the means employed is talking louder.
I’m delighted that Frederick Crews is gathering together is Collected Wisdom. I remember how disemburdened I felt when I read his first debunkings of Freud in the NYTBR. I also venerate his two volumes of Pooh criticism. But I’m astonished that so many readers feel a need to log on with whines of protest that were old hat in the days of Spinoza. Here’s the story, people of faith. We don’t share your faith, and we think it inane and childish and certainly insupportable. That doesn’t mean we can’t dine at the same restaurants, but perhaps we should agree not to convert each other, especially if the means employed is talking louder.
Whenever I try to comment on any of the varied forms of the science vs. religion controversy, I find myself in a very awkward position. Since I stand outside all of the contending camps, every one of the opponents assumes that I am aligned with the opposite side and I end up falling with bad company. Let me therefore state at the outset that I am radically opposed to all theology, supernaturalism, and otherworldliness. Hence I side with Professor Crews when he attacks all varieties of pseudo-science; and yet I find that I have a quarrel with his general stance or perhaps with his emphasis.
Professor Crews writes, “We chronically strain against our animality by inhabiting self-fashioned webs of significance – myths, theologies, theories – that are more likely than not to generate illusory and often murderous ‘wisdom’.” I love this. In fact I have been saying it in almost the selfsame phrasing in all of my published books and in many of my published articles. But I suspect there is an important difference of attitude between us here. I glory in the web of myths and theories I inhabit and see that as what constitutes my humanity. As a human being I live in a dream world of our own making, including the E=mc² which you can never locate anywhere out there in the objective world but is a formula created by Einstein’s mind, with which we can work wonders with the phenomena of the world. The “illusory and often murderous ‘wisdom’” that our myths generate are, in my view, a necessary danger which we must be prepared to face and for which there is a remedy. The remedy is to acknowledge that our myths are myths, that our theologies are fables and fairy tales – some beautiful, some atrocious –, and our theories .. well, ‘theory’ is too flabby a terms: theories of physics, theories of economics, theories of education, theories of medicine differ widely, but in the end they are all conceptual schemes that enable us to deal with natural phenomena.
In my view, those who oppose or try to curb the claim of scientific empiricism to have sole jurisdiction over factual questions – both the theologians with whom I have no sympathy and the idealists with whom I sympathize – defeat themselves on two counts: first by making truth-claims and secondly by venturing into the perilous arena of causation. Both ‘truth’ and ‘causation’ are slippery, much entangled themes surrounded by much confusion. Fortunately (for me), I do not have to touch these hornet nests. I surrender both fields unconditionally to empirical science.
If a poet were to say that poetry is a vehicle of truth, I would fully sympathize with her/his claim but say that s/he is foolish in using the term ‘truth’. Let us assign truth to objectively observable facts. Poetry is not concerned with facts. Poetry discovers reality, or rather, creates reality. (Don’t jump to my neck yet; hear me out.) I maintain that the same holds true of philosophy. Philosophy mistakes its proper character when it seeks or claims to lead to discoverable or demonstrable truth. Poets have the advantage over philosophers here in that poets are free of the error of most philosophers in confounding the role of philosophy with that of science.
At this point the scientific empiricist/materialist might say, “Well, if you reject entirely the claims of theology and even of metaphysics to objective truth, I have no problem with conceding you your poetical truth.” I wish it were as simple as that. For my main concern is to emphasize that our subjective life, that the myths we create, that the ideas, ideals and dreams we breed, are what constitute our distinctive character as human beings and our proper worth; that our ideas, ideals, and dreams are our reality and the sole locus of reality .. aye, there’s the rub! For just as I conceded to science all truth I want science to concede to poetry and philosophy all reality.
This is not to contend about a word. Humanity badly needs to sift its values. As much as we need rationalism and freedom from superstition, supernatural illusions, and otherworldliness, we also need release from the false values of the materialist and worldly ideology and values that reign supreme even in putatively religious societies. Today, religion claims to be the sole custodian of spiritual values. We need a purely human spirituality. Science is not in essence or in principle opposed to that. But science in campaigning against the false claims of theologians and metaphysicians to objective knowledge, unwittingly shoves spiritual values into obscurity. We have to draw a clear line between the realm of objective fact, the domain of science, and the realm of ideals and values, the domain of philosophy, a philosophy that lays claim to no discoverable or demonstrable truth.
Having just finished reading ‘Why Truth Matters,’and reading today’s note, I am surprised that the authors didn’t make any comment on the purges at BYU’s history department.
No one can take the LDS seriously without a tremendous amount of wilfull ignorance or denial.
The BYU authorities tried to enhance the reputation of the history department by opening the door to real scholarship. When the resulting works were found to be insufficiently ‘faith affirming’ the historians were purged from the faculty.
I welcome this dialogue and thank the respondents.
To Robert Wood: I’m afraid you have badly misread my Introduction as upholding my inherent intellectual superiority to others–e.g., Newman. The text says exactly the opposite: that my (and everyone else’s) proneness to error points to the need for reliance on impersonal, consensual means of testing propositions for cogency.
To Tyler Simons: Yes, Hume deserves great homage, but until The Origin of Species there was no convincing scientific answer to the argument that the existence of complex creatures requires the positing of an even more complex designer.
To D. R. Khashaba: Your statement is both passionate and eloquent. But why do you think you’re disagreeing with me? We both regard the most exalted and the basest human potentialities as stemming from the same freedom to inhabit invented webs of significance. I also share your wish (but perhaps I didn’t clearly say so) to keep “ideals and values” distinct from science, which can’t, as such, possibly address such matters. (In calling myself a materialist, I meant only to reject the prelates’ contention that the human mind couldn’t have arisen as an emergent product of evolution.)
If you and I have any difference of outlook, it’s over your belief that philosophy can have no usefulness to the quest for truth. Granted, 99.9% of philosophy from Plato onward has been hot air. But at its best philosophy can sharpen our wariness of presumptuous metaphysical claims–many of them advanced by philosophers!–and thus render us more aware of the need for a rigorous empiricism. Hume’s critique of miracles is the loveliest example.
I’ve been aghast at the revival of the “MMR linked to autism” claims in the last few weeks (as I am at the increases in cases of measles among children now being reported), and I’m a fan of Ben Goldacre, but when he writes ” ‘US study supports claims of MMR link to autism,’ croaked the Times, a day later” he is misrepresenting the article by Sam Lister, Times Health Correspondent. The headline, of course, would have been written by a sub-editor. Here is what the Lister actually wrote about the claims:
>The research, which is being presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Montreal this week, has yet to be published in a scientific journal and subjected to peer review.
>Mainstream science has repeatedly examined the theory of a link between MMR and autism and found no evidence to back it. Supporters of the theory are accused of interpreting two biological occurrences as a causative relationship that does not exist.
>Uptake of MMR, which was introduced into Britain in 1988, has improved in recent years, but remains as low as 70 per cent in the wake of ongoing questioning of its possible side-effects. The World Health Organisation recommends 95 per cent coverage, and the shortfall has been blamed for contributing to rising rates of measles and mumps in recent years.
>A recent analysis of 31 MMR studies by the Cochrane Library, one of the most authoritative sources of evidence-based medicine, showed no credible grounds for claims of serious harm.<
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2201494.html
Goldacre could, with greater accuracy, have reported that the Times treated the claims with as much scepticism as he himself has done.
Surely privately-owned universities, such as Brigham Young, can require their staff to believe in, or at least to pretend to believe in, whatever absurdities they choose. Intelligent and rational people will judge the scholarship of those so employed accordingly.
Someone who takes a job at such a place, which is not really a university but a center of higher indoctrination, falls into one of two cases. Either they must either know what they are agreeing to in advance, in which case they really have nothing to complain about. Or they change their minds about the doctrine, or the advisability of submitting to it, in which case the honorable course is simply to resign.
It is only at real universities that issues of academic freedom can arise in the first place.
There’s a bit of an irony in the story. A religious belief, no matter how bizarre, does not interfere with scientific and technical studies, as long as the religion is not aggressively anti-intellectual (i.e., condemns all non-religious study), and as long as the science and the religion can be compartmentalized and kept separate.
Well known historical examples include many scientists who were orthodox Jews or Communists (not to lump the two — but I do insist that Orthodox practices are bizarre by secular standards).
Less well-known examples include Faraday (a member of a protestant sect) and Newton (who spent years on Bible exegesis.)
Driven by their religious beliefs and geographic situation, Mormons have made contributions to linguistics, water management, and genealogy. I have been told that disproportionate numbers of Mormons and ex-Mormons can be found in many of the sciences.
My theory is that members of extreme religions often have a strong work ethic, a willingness to accept counterintutitive ideas, and a trained ability to learn or memorize large amounts of apparently meaningless data — an ability which is more important in science than philosophical descriptions of science will usually tell you.
>Contrary to Crews’s essay I think that the scientific-empirical attitude (though admirable in itself) is no defense against such an witty, sophistic, approach to truth and focusing on it sidetracks attention from the problem. Pyschoanalysis had no problem in the former century producing an endless number of empirical studies and books on everything under the sun from Moses to Ghandi.<
There are actually two different issues here. The first sentence raises a fascinating conundrum – how is it that so many people who no doubt claimed allegiance to a scientific-empirical attitude were nevertheless convinced by many of Freud’s clinical claims and theories? There’s no simple answer to that one, but I believe an important part of it is (i) that when bona fide investigator describes so convincingly his experiences there is an assumption that the accounts are accurate – to conceive otherwise would be to impugn the honesty of the investigator (ii) very few people were able to appreciate that whereas Freud’s mode of presentation indicated that his “findings” came from his patients, in fact they overwhelmingly were products of his analytic interpretative/ reconstructive procedures.
Re the second sentence quoted above, I would dispute that the studies and books alluded to were genuinely “empirical” – I would call them pseudo-empirical because, as a generality, the findings of Freud and his followers were a consequence of a self-fulfilling interpretative procedure. As early as 1915 Janet wrote of the Freudian methodology it is “serviceable because it is guided by a previous conviction”. It is this “serviceability” that is illustrated by the stream of publications in question, not a genuine empirical methodology.
>His correspondence with Fliess suggests that he was carried himself by such tricky constructs; just as all of us until recently.<
Let’s not underestimate the opposition there has always been to Freudian pretensions to knowledge, e.g., from some contributors to the volume *Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and Philosophy* (ed. Sidney Hook, 1959).
>He was a true believer, not an ordinary and lucid charlatan, who lied about his cases and cures because he genuinely believed that he was ultimately right and the future research would bear him. After all Freud hoped to cure and “analyzed” not only Dora but his own daughter Anna! It did not help Anna but such fact speaks for Freud being deceived by Freud rather than being a brazen and ruthless con-man.<
I agree that Freud was the first true believer in his psychoanalytic methodology, which he was convinced was an epoch-making discovery of a means of accessing unconscious ideas and memories in an individual’s mind. Interestingly, Wilhelm Fliess recognized this around the time of their estrangement (1902), when he wrote of Freud as the “reader of thoughts” who perceives nothing in the other, but merely projects his own thoughts. Unfortunately Freud’s exceptional talents as a story-teller enabled him to conceal that this is what he was doing much of the time.
A follow-up to my last comments on classical psychoanalytic methodology.
That historically most people have been deceived by my Freud’s mode of presentation is indicated by the once familiar criticism that he generalised from a limited sample of middle-class Viennese women. This implies that he was reasonably accurately providing information about the psyches of his patients, whereas he was for the most part merely ‘finding’ by analytic inference and interpretation what his theories predicted – for example, the supposed psychosexual stages of infancy first set out in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905), including the absurd castration complex that purportedly predisposes males towards adult neurosis. This criticism also fails to recognise that an appreciable proportion of his early psychoanalytic patients were men (three of very few major case histories were Little Hans, the Rat Man, and the Wolf Man).
That such criticism completely failed to get to the heart of Freud’s methodology is also evident from the fact that, as he spelled out in 1935, his theories of psychosexual development for the first 30 years of psychoanalysis were developed in terms of males!
Another misplaced criticism is that he got things wrong as far as women were concerned because he failed to rise above the prejudices of his social milieu. This implies that had he not had these prejudices he would have been more accurate in his accounts of, e.g., female psychosexual development. This is vitiated by the fact that his theories of male psychosexual development were just as absurd as his corresponding theories for women. What was wrong were not Freud’s social prejudices, but his psychoanalytic methodology. People who make this particular criticism need to explain why a supposedly gender-neutral clinical procedure for accessing unconscious ideas and processes should not work equally well for women as it does for men. My response on this would, of course, be to argue that his analytic procedures were fundamentally flawed, and failed to provide accurate information about the psychosexual development of either women or men.
I’m charmed that Allen Esterson can rely on his intuition or common sense to tell him that a theory – such as the castration complex – is absurd. If this is really a good enough reason for rejecting psychoanalytic theory, then no other arguments are needed, and all the books ever written attacking Freud and psychoanalysis, including even Esterson’s book, were a wasted effort.
>I’m charmed that Allen Esterson can rely on his intuition or common sense to tell him that a theory – such as the castration complex – is absurd.<
Where did I say that it was on the basis of intuition or common sense that I came to the conclusion that the castration complex is absurd?
The answer to Vedic Physics is the 1080mm 42inch yard the measuring system for Intelligent Design http://www.themeasuringsystemofthegods.com this is the hidden geometry of the Da Vinci code 1080mm is the sum of three circles.
>The ‘seduction scenes’ were “phantasies which my patients had made up, which I had perhaps myself forced on them” (“Phantasien, die meine Patienten erdichtet, die ich ihnen vielleicht selbst aufgedrängt hatte”)
That was one stage (1925) of Freud’s ever-changing account of his clinical experiences in 1895-1897, what elsewhere on B&W I’ve described as “A Seductive Story”:
>here Freud begins to get slippery<
Ovidiu Stoica provides cogent comments on Freud’s 1925 account of the seduction theory episode, which I examine in more detail in my article “The mythologizing of psychoanalytic history: deception and self deception in Freud’s accounts of the seduction theory episode” (History of Psychiatry, xii, 2001, pp. 329-352). In fact I dissect each of his several accounts to show how Freud contrived to produce a compelling story of truth triumphing over error – only it was built from the very first on a false foundation. A prepublication version of the article is at:
I read Weiseltier’s original essay attacking Dennett, and I think that our reviewer missed Weiseltier’s essetially existentialist point, which is this: Science can tell us what happens, what may happen, and what has happened, but it does not tell what our next move, as individuals, should be. For example, it may be that there is a great deal of evolutionary momentum behind religous behavior, but no amount of “is” can tell us what we “ought” to do in the next moment. Science cannot tell us whether religion is or is not something that we should practice. Only we can decide this (on what basis is another matter). The devil or our genes don’t make us “do” anything. In this sense, Weiseltier is a believer in freedom and is (consciously or unconsciously) echoing Sartre. Weiseltier reads Dennett as invoking a form of determinism with regard to our behavior. I think in this instance that Weiseltier is unfairly reading Dennett, but his caution ought to be registered. Weiseltier is also an excellent and subtle writer and in no way (that I can tell) a religious extremist. I think that any attempt to paint Weiseltier into an orthodox corner for taking Dennett to task is ridiculous.
I think that in your research you failed to read the bits of the Bible that covered God’s great grace and love. You missed the Crucifixion and its relevance. I hope you go back and read the Bible again and read the whole thing this time. God bless.
or How Science [Scientists] Can Sometimes Get Things a Little Wrong,
or One Dioptre*, Two Dioptres*, Three Dioptres*, Four…
Dear B&W Team,
I hope that you’re keeping well and not working too hard; and I suspect that you’ll enjoy this email (I hope so, anyway). Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or suggestions – if and when you have time…
The multiple perspectives and critiquing at all times of Post Modernism reminds me of how flawed science can be; not because the scientific method is flawed, but because scientists are human beings (yes, it’s true), with all the perspectivistic consequences of falling into the trap of mistaking their particular world model (i.e. the model through which they experience the world) for reality.
Coincidentally, I’ve just read a short article on placing baby monkeys in goggles and tiny cages in an effort to better understand myopia, in order to learn how to improve children’s eyesight – surely a worthy cause. However, there’s just one minor problem with this whole spectacle-wearing thing: if you ask any expert in control theory how to keep an adaptive system centred around an optimal position, he or she will say “apply a suitable amount of negative feedback” – or words to that effect. If you ask “what happens if I apply positive feedback instead?” the answer will be that the system will progressively deviate more and more from the optimal, resulting in the need for larger and larger amounts of externally applied correction.
That is, with negative feedback an adaptive system is self-correcting whilst with positive feedback the system is maladaptive, and needs progressively more and more help in order to work effectively.
Coincidentally, once one is on the road to wearing glasses, the required prescription becomes progressively stronger year on year (that is, your eyesight becomes progressively worse) as long as you keep on wearing the glasses. You will probably not be surprised to learn that this is positive feedback – which progressively destroys your eyesight.
I know that doctors have to take the Hippocratic oath, which states “first, do no harm,” but I don’t know if this is the case for opticians (forgive them, for they know not what they do).
So how, in the context of eyesight, would negative feedback work? Well, it could be applied through a combination of glasses which make your eyes work harder (instead of correcting for their offset) and eye exercises. Looking at lots of close work makes you myopic because your eyes adapt to the task they are put to. If you compensate by doing exercises which allow them to focus into the distance you can either prevent damage in the first place or recover from existing damage (just as ever stronger prescriptions can make your eyesight worse year on year, appropriate exercise – possibly combined with negative feedback lenses – can make your eyesight become better day by day.)
Probably a good analogy is to imagine that you’ve managed to damage both of your legs simultaneously in some bizarre accident, and so you’re given crutches in order to help you get around. In physiotherapy, your legs are exercised appropriately until they (unless you’re very unlucky) regain most or all of their original function, and you can hand back the crutches. …but what would happen if, instead, they just gave you the crutches and told you to use them at all times, and to come back in a year or so for a check-up. A year later, your arms and shoulders may be stronger, but your legs are, if anything, weaker. Keep on like this and you may end up in a wheelchair… in physiotherapy they try as much as possible to fix what’s broken; in the opticians they give you a set of crutches and recommend that you use them at all times…
Not surprisingly, there is a book available (out of print now, unfortunately, I believe) on this very subject, which many opticians and scientists (who should know better) ridicule. Just in case you’re interested in helping people get rid of those “eye-crutches”, it’s called Better Sight Without Glasses: A Complete Illustrated System of Self-treatment for Defective Vision and Diseases of the Eyes, by Harry Benjamin. My copy was 7/6 – but it’d probably be a little more expensive now. Anyway, enough of my waffle for now! Look after yourself, and don’t work too hard!
With kind regards,
James (Morrow)
ps you may be aware of the (heavily ridiculed) “old wives’ tale” that glasses ruin your eyesight…
pps I could mention a number of other minor errors within the field of science – but I don’t want to “perm” your hair…
* Bananas
Re: “or How Science [Scientists] Can Sometimes Get Things a Little Wrong”
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s an ad.
Joseph Hoffmann’s article, “When the Devil Still Matters,” reminds me that I once tried to convey what I saw as an ameliorative meme to a believing Muslim – that the view held by Muslims that God is omniscient, omnipotent and needs what are essentially thugs and despots to fulfill his will is both self contradictory and an insult to God.
After all, an omniscient and omnipotent God would have the knowledge and power to convince to find more subtle ways to convince the unbeliever than slaughter and political oppression. For instance a few signs, apparent coincidents, such as a butterfly landing on your shoulder during just the right moment of introspection could inspire faith… If an omniscient and omnipotent God wishes a person to be convinces, clearly he infinitely better choices at his disposal than torture, slaughter, loss of family, loss of freedom, oppression, maiming and despair.
I’m not sure, but I think my subject responded only with shock.
I have doubts that a believing Muslim could ever listen to an unbeliever, consider his words and change his mind, but that’s a different subject.
Oops I left some horrible editting and spell-checker errors in my comment. Please allow me to repost it with a correction.
Joseph Hoffmann’s article, “When the Devil Still Matters,” reminds me that I once tried to convey what I saw as an ameliorative meme to a believing Muslim – that the view held by Muslims that God is omniscient, omnipotent and needs what are essentially thugs and despots to fulfill his will is both self contradictory and an insult to God.
After all, an omniscient and omnipotent God would have the knowledge and power to find more subtle ways to convince the unbeliever than slaughter and political oppression. For instance a few signs, (apparent coincidences) such as a butterfly landing on your shoulder during just the right moment of introspection could inspire faith.
If an omniscient and omnipotent God wishes a person to be convinced, clearly he infinitely better choices at his disposal than torture, slaughter, loss of family, loss of freedom, oppression, maiming and despair.
In short, militant religion is not compatable with the belief in an omnicient God, unless you posit an unnecessarily sadistic God. And if (as (Islam also seems to hold) it is possible to insult God, positing that God a thug must surely be the greatest possible insult.
I’m not sure, but I think my subject responded only with shock.
I have doubts that a believing Muslim could ever listen to an unbeliever, consider his words and change his mind, but that’s a different subject.
Re: Wikipedia
Robert McHenry’s piece is bang on the money.
My initial enthusiasm for Wikipedia waned after a few surfs. If any Tom, Dick & Harry can enter/edit, it makes it untrustworthy.
The Wikiproject seems to conflate ‘elite’ with ‘standard’. This kind of thinking doesn’t understand the difference between ‘opinion’ and ‘advice.’ Carried to its logical conclusion,it would ‘democratically’ solicit the ‘advice’ of a mechanic on a broken ankle, or a doctor’s ‘advice’ on how to fix a bent crank-shaft.
Will we ever learn the difference?
I am replying to the Post by Paul Power
Date: 29/04/2006 which was a response to my own post.
Paul Power: Yashendra Prasad writes “The traditional modern science has been based on the assumption (still taught is schools and colleges) that the material world,as wee see it, it REAL. But, the advances in quantum-physics itself has shattered this assumption !!! ” This is beyond nonsense. If it is saying that Quantum Mechanics shows reality not to exist, it is plain wrong…..
Yashendra comments: The experiemnt in Germany (1997)…which discovered Leptoquarks…. showed that these leptoquarks exists for mere some billionth of a nano-second. In other words they are ephemeral. And, as the entire material world is made of these leptoquarks…. obviously this too is ephemeral. …Thus, without doubt, we can say that the world which is we see is not real !! Now, the Indian spirituality has been saying this since time immemorial. That the ‘reality’ of the material world is a mirage. The findings of Lepto quarks proves this. And, pls note, leptoquarks are NOT the ultimate building block of the universe ! …. Indian spirituality puts it this way: The world of absolute reality is not what we see… This is just an apparent reality -an illusion called Maya. As long as our consciouness doesnt transcend the layers of Maya, we cant comprehend the absolute reality. Till then we need to follow the rules of this illusiory world. Trying, at the same time to cross this. “Maya” can help us transecnd “maya”. …The multiplicity of things is maya..illusion. Becoz there is only ONE that exists !! Call it by any name.
Paul Power write:Whereas India, ….. with a caste system, animal worship and the murder of babies on the grounds that the child is of the wrong sex, to name but a few of its more advanced practices.
Yashendra replies: Caste system is a too advanced biotechnological science to be understood by modern science. But modern science can definitely understand if proper reseraches are made….. A ‘Varna’ is a group on the basis of inborn insticts. Genetics and heredity play a major role. NO two human beings are alike or identical. The ‘Varnas’ ( 4 major divisions called caste)are divided on inborn genetic insticts. And they are maintained thru Eugenics, a highly developed breeding scienc for humans. India has maintained its human biodiversity. Not only in plants and animals !! Its not possible to write complete detail here.
secondly, animal worship. In India everything is respected. Not only animals, but trees, soil, rocks. “worship” word is a misnomer. There is nothing life-less in this creation, they are various levels of working consciousness. Wroship for all objects means respect & adoration. If Paul is referring to cows, then I will say cows are respected as they are not only amazingle useful but emanate some very positive vibrations. Details can be found by corresponding with me directly.
But, Paul, yes, there are some uneducated socieits in India which eliminate the girl child. But its not all Indians do this. Such ppl are in minority. Like every society India has also some ills. … R u aware that we Indians consider all westerns to be unclean and highly unhygeinc becoz they do not wash their rear with water after toilet !! They use paper. A paper cant remove all the shit from there. U can experiement this on a table full of dust. Compare its cleanings by water and paper. U urself will realize which cleans most and fully !!! So much so to the scientific development and “developed” countries !!… I can cite 1000 such examples……
Yashendra Prasad:
No offence, but English obviously ain’t your first language.
If it was, you’d realise that you are conflating ‘reality’ with ‘materialism’.
Check Roger Penrose for the best exposition around on the difference between the two.
The latest contribution of Yashendra Prasad (hereafter YS) is a right old muddle. YS claims that the reality of the material world is a mirage because there are particles known as leptoquarks that exist for no longer than billionths of a nanasecond and because these particles are building blocks of matter we can see, such as atoms. The problems with this notion are various. The experiment which YS refers to as showing the existence of such particles is not considered as definitive: later experiments rule out the discovery of such particles, which remain only a theoretical possibility. See for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptoquark. It is rather strange to claim to have shown the unreality of the material world by invoking the properties of particles which seem not to exist.
Even if leptoquarks do exist, we still have matter which is stable over millions of years: protons. We are not free to declare the unreality of the material universe just because some parts of it have properties very far outside our experience.
I do not know where to begin with YS’s twisted defence of India’s reprehensible caste system as being based on genetics and as preserving India’s “human biodiversity”. No self-respecting biologist would utter such nonsense, which is more likely to produce all the defects of in-breeding.
People should know that most Israelis, and most of the religious ones also, have no respect for the Israeli Rabbinate. So the silly words of the Sephardic Chief Rabbi should not be considered the beliefs of the Israelis he supposedly administers to.
Two comments, one speculative and one personal:
First, there may be a survival benefit conferred upon those who are able to shield themselves from the blistering light of unbuffered reason with comforting, anxiety and despair reducing concepts of divine regard and concern.
Second, I was recently persuaded to reverse a decision to withdraw from a long-running and mostly unproductive experience with group psychotherapy by the observation, “Where else are you going to find seven people willing to put up with your shit for two whole hours once a week?”
Never, apparently, in the entire recorded history of mankind has a faith-based approach to knowledge, i.e., that approach which largely centers on an intuitive feeling of belief as its final test, ever produced even a single, verifiable truth, except by chance.
Yet the mass of mankind, even including I would guess most university graduates, suffers mightily from thinking that the use of faith is a perfectly valid alternative to the correct use of fact, logic and method in their daily lives.
And this some 2500 years after Hippocrates of Cos reportedly observed, “To really know is science; to merely believe you know is ignorance.”
I wonder if the only way to draw more attention to the failure of faith might not be an appeal to that most compelling of human forces, Greed, by offering a huge amount of ready cash to the first believer who can demonstrate the first-ever instance of faith producing real knowledge.
Just a thought.
I’ll add a little more heat to zen quote. Zen is really just about removing these inclinations to jump to a quick judgement of anything and everything. At it’s heart is pure logic. As for the anecdotes about it’s practioners, well, I can only speak for myself, but there is a lot internal cringing going on. Zen doesn’t make you infallible. It is a painful process that shows you how really foolish you are.
Perhaps ‘wincing’ is a better word than ‘cringing’.
I like definitions and find communication impossible without them. To that end I define reality as, “That grasp of our surroundings that best enables us to predict the future”.This definition can easily be tested by stepping in front of a bus that you believe to be unreal. If you are unharmed then you have an excellent grip on reality, plus the courage of your convictions.
The word just seems to pop up so often undefined, and hence endlessly debatable.
You have just kicked the rock and “refuted them, thusly”.
I marvel that a Senior Fellow in the Scientific Study of Religion can come up with this sentence:
“The Evangelicals are better off; for them church history begins with the birth of Jesus, ends with the Acts of the Apostles, and then skips frames to the twenty first century where, no thanks to the Catholics, the Bible has been marvelously preserved. It is easy for fundamentalists, however the discussion is sliced, to reject Da Vinciism outright since “this isn’t about the Bible.” Who in surfing past innumerable “expert” interviews and schlock specials on the “truth” behind the Da Vinci code has not noticed that the clueless Protestants seem to be standing on a rock, Word of God aloft, while the Catholics are caught shuffling ancient papers as the flood water encircles them?”
A more sneering bit of nonsense it would be hard to compose. Do you know anything of the actual literature or history of ‘evangelicals’ [as distinct from ‘fundamentalists’]? It seems not.
Despite your obvious prejudices and, I guess, ill-will, toward those you claim to have studied, you do make a lot of pertinent criticisms of the Davinci Industry.
That is because both intelligent evangelicals and sceptics are not lovers of the New Age nonsense.
“This book means to suggest, through sample instances in a number of subject areas, that there is no such thing as deep knowledge, in the sense of insight so compelling that it needs no validation. There is only knowledge, period.”
Non-conceptually, non-verbally, *existence* is known. Not ‘I think therefore I am’, but just self-validating, non-deniable ‘is-ness’. Knowledge occurs in, and depends upon, is-ness.
All else, including the ‘I’ of ‘I am’ (any and all thoughts of a ‘me’ and an outside world, and any ‘knowledge’ about it) is *conceptual* knowledge. Period.
Some conceptual knowledge (in principle refutable) enables us to fly to the moon and nuke thousands of human beings.
Some conceptual knowledge (neither verifiable nor refutable by any known means) enables us to see the above as evidence of a super-space-daddy who loves us all, even as some wither and die in agony.
The fact that Frederick Crews can marshall such a powerful argument against the existence of God is itself a kind of miracle that requires some explanation. I find, ironically, more proof of the existence of God in Crews’ brilliant refutation of God’s existence than in the theologican’s apology for God. Besides this, if Crews is right and the theologicans are wrong, then he has to account for why it is he is permitted this intellectual freedom and objectivity, whereas the theologican is not (he presumably wills to be deceived). Something profound is missing in Crews’ analysis, because it begs the question: what is there about Frederick Crews that enables him to be more in contact with reality than, for example, John Henry Newman? Can we tell by what is intrinsic to the mind of Frederick Crews in comparison to the mind, say, of Newman, that the one can take hold of empirical reality, whereas the other cannot? I think Plato (who is a soft-headed mystic of the worst kind) has a quality of mind that just per se is superior to the mind of Frederick Crews. Surely when Plato is spouting nonsense (if it is nonsense, that is, and it must be according to Frederick Crews) his mind loses an accordance with reality, and thus must become less compelling than the mind of FC. No, the real mystery in all this is: what is it about Frederick Crews that makes him take the position he has taken, heedless of any question as to what motivates others to believe differently (like Newman)? Frederick Crews is not equipped to answer this question–but perhaps his Creator is. To be morally sensitive to the existence of evil as proof of God’s non-existence is itself evidence of an intelligence that has to be explained. And as cogent and beautiful as Crews’ prose is, I cannot intuitively sense that more of reality is contained in his mind in comparison to the mind of Newman. Frederick Crews is too certain of himself to be right. Has he ever met someone as intelligent and sincere and reasonable as he is who believes the opposite of what he does? Does Darwin explain this for him? Crews may in the end be right, but he is far too metaphysically invulnerable to have the satisfaction of knowing it.
Sincerely,
Robert Wood
I’m delighted that Frederick Crews is gathering together is Collected Wisdom. I remember how disemburdened I felt when I read his first debunkings of Freud in the NYTBR. I also venerate his two volumes of Pooh criticism. But I’m astonished that so many readers feel a need to log on with whines of protest that were old hat in the days of Spinoza. Here’s the story, people of faith. We don’t share your faith, and we think it inane and childish and certainly insupportable. That doesn’t mean we can’t dine at the same restaurants, but perhaps we should agree not to convert each other, especially if the means employed is talking louder.
I’m delighted that Frederick Crews is gathering together is Collected Wisdom. I remember how disemburdened I felt when I read his first debunkings of Freud in the NYTBR. I also venerate his two volumes of Pooh criticism. But I’m astonished that so many readers feel a need to log on with whines of protest that were old hat in the days of Spinoza. Here’s the story, people of faith. We don’t share your faith, and we think it inane and childish and certainly insupportable. That doesn’t mean we can’t dine at the same restaurants, but perhaps we should agree not to convert each other, especially if the means employed is talking louder.
Darwin forged an exit from the previously airtight argument from design
Previously airtight? What about Hume’s Dialogue on Natural Religion, written 30 years before Darwin was born?
I write about this here.
INTRODUCING FOLLIES OF THE WISE
Whenever I try to comment on any of the varied forms of the science vs. religion controversy, I find myself in a very awkward position. Since I stand outside all of the contending camps, every one of the opponents assumes that I am aligned with the opposite side and I end up falling with bad company. Let me therefore state at the outset that I am radically opposed to all theology, supernaturalism, and otherworldliness. Hence I side with Professor Crews when he attacks all varieties of pseudo-science; and yet I find that I have a quarrel with his general stance or perhaps with his emphasis.
Professor Crews writes, “We chronically strain against our animality by inhabiting self-fashioned webs of significance – myths, theologies, theories – that are more likely than not to generate illusory and often murderous ‘wisdom’.” I love this. In fact I have been saying it in almost the selfsame phrasing in all of my published books and in many of my published articles. But I suspect there is an important difference of attitude between us here. I glory in the web of myths and theories I inhabit and see that as what constitutes my humanity. As a human being I live in a dream world of our own making, including the E=mc² which you can never locate anywhere out there in the objective world but is a formula created by Einstein’s mind, with which we can work wonders with the phenomena of the world. The “illusory and often murderous ‘wisdom’” that our myths generate are, in my view, a necessary danger which we must be prepared to face and for which there is a remedy. The remedy is to acknowledge that our myths are myths, that our theologies are fables and fairy tales – some beautiful, some atrocious –, and our theories .. well, ‘theory’ is too flabby a terms: theories of physics, theories of economics, theories of education, theories of medicine differ widely, but in the end they are all conceptual schemes that enable us to deal with natural phenomena.
In my view, those who oppose or try to curb the claim of scientific empiricism to have sole jurisdiction over factual questions – both the theologians with whom I have no sympathy and the idealists with whom I sympathize – defeat themselves on two counts: first by making truth-claims and secondly by venturing into the perilous arena of causation. Both ‘truth’ and ‘causation’ are slippery, much entangled themes surrounded by much confusion. Fortunately (for me), I do not have to touch these hornet nests. I surrender both fields unconditionally to empirical science.
If a poet were to say that poetry is a vehicle of truth, I would fully sympathize with her/his claim but say that s/he is foolish in using the term ‘truth’. Let us assign truth to objectively observable facts. Poetry is not concerned with facts. Poetry discovers reality, or rather, creates reality. (Don’t jump to my neck yet; hear me out.) I maintain that the same holds true of philosophy. Philosophy mistakes its proper character when it seeks or claims to lead to discoverable or demonstrable truth. Poets have the advantage over philosophers here in that poets are free of the error of most philosophers in confounding the role of philosophy with that of science.
At this point the scientific empiricist/materialist might say, “Well, if you reject entirely the claims of theology and even of metaphysics to objective truth, I have no problem with conceding you your poetical truth.” I wish it were as simple as that. For my main concern is to emphasize that our subjective life, that the myths we create, that the ideas, ideals and dreams we breed, are what constitute our distinctive character as human beings and our proper worth; that our ideas, ideals, and dreams are our reality and the sole locus of reality .. aye, there’s the rub! For just as I conceded to science all truth I want science to concede to poetry and philosophy all reality.
This is not to contend about a word. Humanity badly needs to sift its values. As much as we need rationalism and freedom from superstition, supernatural illusions, and otherworldliness, we also need release from the false values of the materialist and worldly ideology and values that reign supreme even in putatively religious societies. Today, religion claims to be the sole custodian of spiritual values. We need a purely human spirituality. Science is not in essence or in principle opposed to that. But science in campaigning against the false claims of theologians and metaphysicians to objective knowledge, unwittingly shoves spiritual values into obscurity. We have to draw a clear line between the realm of objective fact, the domain of science, and the realm of ideals and values, the domain of philosophy, a philosophy that lays claim to no discoverable or demonstrable truth.
D. R. Khashaba
Website: http://www.Back-to-Socrates.com
Weblog: http://khashaba.blogspot.com
Having just finished reading ‘Why Truth Matters,’and reading today’s note, I am surprised that the authors didn’t make any comment on the purges at BYU’s history department.
No one can take the LDS seriously without a tremendous amount of wilfull ignorance or denial.
The BYU authorities tried to enhance the reputation of the history department by opening the door to real scholarship. When the resulting works were found to be insufficiently ‘faith affirming’ the historians were purged from the faculty.
I welcome this dialogue and thank the respondents.
To Robert Wood: I’m afraid you have badly misread my Introduction as upholding my inherent intellectual superiority to others–e.g., Newman. The text says exactly the opposite: that my (and everyone else’s) proneness to error points to the need for reliance on impersonal, consensual means of testing propositions for cogency.
To Tyler Simons: Yes, Hume deserves great homage, but until The Origin of Species there was no convincing scientific answer to the argument that the existence of complex creatures requires the positing of an even more complex designer.
To D. R. Khashaba: Your statement is both passionate and eloquent. But why do you think you’re disagreeing with me? We both regard the most exalted and the basest human potentialities as stemming from the same freedom to inhabit invented webs of significance. I also share your wish (but perhaps I didn’t clearly say so) to keep “ideals and values” distinct from science, which can’t, as such, possibly address such matters. (In calling myself a materialist, I meant only to reject the prelates’ contention that the human mind couldn’t have arisen as an emergent product of evolution.)
If you and I have any difference of outlook, it’s over your belief that philosophy can have no usefulness to the quest for truth. Granted, 99.9% of philosophy from Plato onward has been hot air. But at its best philosophy can sharpen our wariness of presumptuous metaphysical claims–many of them advanced by philosophers!–and thus render us more aware of the need for a rigorous empiricism. Hume’s critique of miracles is the loveliest example.
Re the B&W “MMR is Back” link to the Guardian article by Ben Goldacre: http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/badscience/story/0,,1789609,00.html
I’ve been aghast at the revival of the “MMR linked to autism” claims in the last few weeks (as I am at the increases in cases of measles among children now being reported), and I’m a fan of Ben Goldacre, but when he writes ” ‘US study supports claims of MMR link to autism,’ croaked the Times, a day later” he is misrepresenting the article by Sam Lister, Times Health Correspondent. The headline, of course, would have been written by a sub-editor. Here is what the Lister actually wrote about the claims:
>The research, which is being presented at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Montreal this week, has yet to be published in a scientific journal and subjected to peer review.
>Mainstream science has repeatedly examined the theory of a link between MMR and autism and found no evidence to back it. Supporters of the theory are accused of interpreting two biological occurrences as a causative relationship that does not exist.
>Uptake of MMR, which was introduced into Britain in 1988, has improved in recent years, but remains as low as 70 per cent in the wake of ongoing questioning of its possible side-effects. The World Health Organisation recommends 95 per cent coverage, and the shortfall has been blamed for contributing to rising rates of measles and mumps in recent years.
>A recent analysis of 31 MMR studies by the Cochrane Library, one of the most authoritative sources of evidence-based medicine, showed no credible grounds for claims of serious harm.< http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2201494.html
Goldacre could, with greater accuracy, have reported that the Times treated the claims with as much scepticism as he himself has done.
Surely privately-owned universities, such as Brigham Young, can require their staff to believe in, or at least to pretend to believe in, whatever absurdities they choose. Intelligent and rational people will judge the scholarship of those so employed accordingly.
Someone who takes a job at such a place, which is not really a university but a center of higher indoctrination, falls into one of two cases. Either they must either know what they are agreeing to in advance, in which case they really have nothing to complain about. Or they change their minds about the doctrine, or the advisability of submitting to it, in which case the honorable course is simply to resign.
It is only at real universities that issues of academic freedom can arise in the first place.
Doug
There’s a bit of an irony in the story. A religious belief, no matter how bizarre, does not interfere with scientific and technical studies, as long as the religion is not aggressively anti-intellectual (i.e., condemns all non-religious study), and as long as the science and the religion can be compartmentalized and kept separate.
Well known historical examples include many scientists who were orthodox Jews or Communists (not to lump the two — but I do insist that Orthodox practices are bizarre by secular standards).
Less well-known examples include Faraday (a member of a protestant sect) and Newton (who spent years on Bible exegesis.)
Driven by their religious beliefs and geographic situation, Mormons have made contributions to linguistics, water management, and genealogy. I have been told that disproportionate numbers of Mormons and ex-Mormons can be found in many of the sciences.
My theory is that members of extreme religions often have a strong work ethic, a willingness to accept counterintutitive ideas, and a trained ability to learn or memorize large amounts of apparently meaningless data — an ability which is more important in science than philosophical descriptions of science will usually tell you.
Ovidiu Stoica writes:
>Contrary to Crews’s essay I think that the scientific-empirical attitude (though admirable in itself) is no defense against such an witty, sophistic, approach to truth and focusing on it sidetracks attention from the problem. Pyschoanalysis had no problem in the former century producing an endless number of empirical studies and books on everything under the sun from Moses to Ghandi.< There are actually two different issues here. The first sentence raises a fascinating conundrum – how is it that so many people who no doubt claimed allegiance to a scientific-empirical attitude were nevertheless convinced by many of Freud’s clinical claims and theories? There’s no simple answer to that one, but I believe an important part of it is (i) that when bona fide investigator describes so convincingly his experiences there is an assumption that the accounts are accurate – to conceive otherwise would be to impugn the honesty of the investigator (ii) very few people were able to appreciate that whereas Freud’s mode of presentation indicated that his “findings” came from his patients, in fact they overwhelmingly were products of his analytic interpretative/ reconstructive procedures. Re the second sentence quoted above, I would dispute that the studies and books alluded to were genuinely “empirical” – I would call them pseudo-empirical because, as a generality, the findings of Freud and his followers were a consequence of a self-fulfilling interpretative procedure. As early as 1915 Janet wrote of the Freudian methodology it is “serviceable because it is guided by a previous conviction”. It is this “serviceability” that is illustrated by the stream of publications in question, not a genuine empirical methodology. >His correspondence with Fliess suggests that he was carried himself by such tricky constructs; just as all of us until recently.< Let’s not underestimate the opposition there has always been to Freudian pretensions to knowledge, e.g., from some contributors to the volume *Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and Philosophy* (ed. Sidney Hook, 1959). >He was a true believer, not an ordinary and lucid charlatan, who lied about his cases and cures because he genuinely believed that he was ultimately right and the future research would bear him. After all Freud hoped to cure and “analyzed” not only Dora but his own daughter Anna! It did not help Anna but such fact speaks for Freud being deceived by Freud rather than being a brazen and ruthless con-man.< I agree that Freud was the first true believer in his psychoanalytic methodology, which he was convinced was an epoch-making discovery of a means of accessing unconscious ideas and memories in an individual’s mind. Interestingly, Wilhelm Fliess recognized this around the time of their estrangement (1902), when he wrote of Freud as the “reader of thoughts” who perceives nothing in the other, but merely projects his own thoughts. Unfortunately Freud’s exceptional talents as a story-teller enabled him to conceal that this is what he was doing much of the time.
A follow-up to my last comments on classical psychoanalytic methodology.
That historically most people have been deceived by my Freud’s mode of presentation is indicated by the once familiar criticism that he generalised from a limited sample of middle-class Viennese women. This implies that he was reasonably accurately providing information about the psyches of his patients, whereas he was for the most part merely ‘finding’ by analytic inference and interpretation what his theories predicted – for example, the supposed psychosexual stages of infancy first set out in “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” (1905), including the absurd castration complex that purportedly predisposes males towards adult neurosis. This criticism also fails to recognise that an appreciable proportion of his early psychoanalytic patients were men (three of very few major case histories were Little Hans, the Rat Man, and the Wolf Man).
That such criticism completely failed to get to the heart of Freud’s methodology is also evident from the fact that, as he spelled out in 1935, his theories of psychosexual development for the first 30 years of psychoanalysis were developed in terms of males!
Another misplaced criticism is that he got things wrong as far as women were concerned because he failed to rise above the prejudices of his social milieu. This implies that had he not had these prejudices he would have been more accurate in his accounts of, e.g., female psychosexual development. This is vitiated by the fact that his theories of male psychosexual development were just as absurd as his corresponding theories for women. What was wrong were not Freud’s social prejudices, but his psychoanalytic methodology. People who make this particular criticism need to explain why a supposedly gender-neutral clinical procedure for accessing unconscious ideas and processes should not work equally well for women as it does for men. My response on this would, of course, be to argue that his analytic procedures were fundamentally flawed, and failed to provide accurate information about the psychosexual development of either women or men.
I’m charmed that Allen Esterson can rely on his intuition or common sense to tell him that a theory – such as the castration complex – is absurd. If this is really a good enough reason for rejecting psychoanalytic theory, then no other arguments are needed, and all the books ever written attacking Freud and psychoanalysis, including even Esterson’s book, were a wasted effort.
Richard R. Warnotck writes:
>I’m charmed that Allen Esterson can rely on his intuition or common sense to tell him that a theory – such as the castration complex – is absurd.< Where did I say that it was on the basis of intuition or common sense that I came to the conclusion that the castration complex is absurd?
The answer to Vedic Physics is the 1080mm 42inch yard the measuring system for Intelligent Design http://www.themeasuringsystemofthegods.com this is the hidden geometry of the Da Vinci code 1080mm is the sum of three circles.
>The ‘seduction scenes’ were “phantasies which my patients had made up, which I had perhaps myself forced on them” (“Phantasien, die meine Patienten erdichtet, die ich ihnen vielleicht selbst aufgedrängt hatte”)
That was one stage (1925) of Freud’s ever-changing account of his clinical experiences in 1895-1897, what elsewhere on B&W I’ve described as “A Seductive Story”:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=195
See also:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=10
>here Freud begins to get slippery< Ovidiu Stoica provides cogent comments on Freud’s 1925 account of the seduction theory episode, which I examine in more detail in my article “The mythologizing of psychoanalytic history: deception and self deception in Freud’s accounts of the seduction theory episode” (History of Psychiatry, xii, 2001, pp. 329-352). In fact I dissect each of his several accounts to show how Freud contrived to produce a compelling story of truth triumphing over error – only it was built from the very first on a false foundation. A prepublication version of the article is at:
http://www.esterson.org/Mythologizing_psychoanalytic_history.htm
See also:
http://www.esterson.org/Masson_and_Freuds_seduction_theory.htm
I read Weiseltier’s original essay attacking Dennett, and I think that our reviewer missed Weiseltier’s essetially existentialist point, which is this: Science can tell us what happens, what may happen, and what has happened, but it does not tell what our next move, as individuals, should be. For example, it may be that there is a great deal of evolutionary momentum behind religous behavior, but no amount of “is” can tell us what we “ought” to do in the next moment. Science cannot tell us whether religion is or is not something that we should practice. Only we can decide this (on what basis is another matter). The devil or our genes don’t make us “do” anything. In this sense, Weiseltier is a believer in freedom and is (consciously or unconsciously) echoing Sartre. Weiseltier reads Dennett as invoking a form of determinism with regard to our behavior. I think in this instance that Weiseltier is unfairly reading Dennett, but his caution ought to be registered. Weiseltier is also an excellent and subtle writer and in no way (that I can tell) a religious extremist. I think that any attempt to paint Weiseltier into an orthodox corner for taking Dennett to task is ridiculous.