Just How Stupid Are We?

[Fucky McFuckerson]

No need to, the matter has been settled hundreds of years ago

by who? scientists?

Like i said, please elaborate. I never said i disagreed, i just want to know how you came to that conclusion.

 

[rekomstop]

anyone else wanna answer?
i'd really like to hear everyone's say..

 

[ThaG]

Like i said, please elaborate. I never said i disagreed, i just want to know how you came to that conclusion.

Richard Dawkins - What Is True?

A little learning is a dangerous thing. This has never struck me as a particularly profound or wise remark, but it comes into its own when that little learning is in philosophy. A scientist who has the temerity to utter the t-word--true--is likely to encounter philosophical heckling that goes something like this:

"There is no absolute truth. You are committing an act of personal faith when you claim that the scientific method, including mathematics and logic, is the privileged road to truth. Other cultures might believe that truth is to be found in a rabbit's entrails or the ravings of a prophet atop a pole. It is only your personal faith in science that leads you to favor your brand of truth."

That strand of half-baked philosophy goes by the name of cultural relativism. It is one aspect of the Fashionable Nonsense detected by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, or the Higher Superstition of Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt. The feminist version is ably exposed by Noretta Koertge, coauthor of Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies:

Women's Studies students are now being taught that logic is a tool of domination. ...The standard norms and methods of scientific inquiry are sexist because they are incompatible with "women's ways of knowing." ...These "subjectivist" women see the methods of logic, analysis, and abstraction as "alien territory belonging to men" and "value intuition as a safer and more fruitful approach to truth."

How should scientists respond to the allegation that our "faith" in logic and scientific truth is just that--faith--not "privileged" over alternative truths? An obvious response is that science gets results. As I once wrote, "Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet, and I'll show you a hypocrite. ...If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there--the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field--is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right." Science supports its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops, and to predict what will happen and when.

But let's go further: Is it just our Western scientific bias to be impressed by accurate prediction, to be impressed by the power to sling rockets around Jupiter to reach Saturn, or intercept and repair the Hubble telescope, to be impressed by logic itself? Well, let's concede the point and think sociologically, even democratically. Suppose we agree, temporarily, to treat scientific truth as just one truth among many, and lay it alongside all the rival contenders: Trobriand truth, Kikuyu truth, Maori truth, Inuit truth, Navajo truth, Yanomamo truth, !Kung San truth, feminist truth, Islamic truth, Hindu truth. The list is endless--and thereby hangs a revealing observation. In theory, people could switch allegiance from any one "truth" to any other if they decided it had greater merit. On what basis might they do so? Why would one change from, say, Kikuyu truth to Navajo truth? Such merit-driven switches are rare--with one crucially important exception: switches to scientific truth from any of the others. Scientific truth is the only member of this endless list that evidentially convinces converts of its superiority. People are loyal to other belief systems because they were brought up that way, and they have never known anything better. When people are lucky enough to be offered the opportunity to vote with their feet, doctors prosper and shamans decline. Even those who do not, or cannot, avail themselves of a scientific education choose to benefit from technology made possible by the scientific education of others.

As religious missionaries claim converts in the underdeveloped world, they succeed not because of the merits of their religion but because of the science-based technology for which it is pardonably, but wrongly, given credit. You can imagine the tribal warrior thinking, "Surely the Christian God must be superior to our Juju, because Christ's representatives come bearing rifles, telescopes, chain saws, radios, almanacs that predict eclipses to the minute, and medicines that work."

So much for cultural relativism. A second type of truth-heckler prefers to drop the name of Karl Popper or, more fashionably, Thomas Kuhn. According to their arguments, there is no absolute truth. Scientific truths are merely hypotheses that have so far failed to be falsified and are destined to be superseded. At worst, after the next scientific revolution, today's "truths" will seem quaint and absurd, if not actually false. In this view, the best we scientists can hope for is a series of approximations that progressively reduce errors but never eliminate them.

The Popperian heckle partly stems from the accidental fact that philosophers of science are obsessed with one piece of scientific history: the comparison between Newton's and Einstein's theories of gravitation. It is true that Newton's simple inverse square law has turned out to be an approximation, a special case of Einstein's more general formula. If this is the only piece of scientific history you know, you might indeed conclude that all apparent truths are mere approximations, fated to be superseded.

There is even a quite interesting sense in which all our sensory perceptions may be regarded as unfalsified hypotheses about the world, vulnerable to change. This provides a good way to think about illusions, such as the Necker Cube.

The flat pattern of ink on paper is compatible with two alternative hypotheses of solidity. We see a solid cube that, after a few seconds, flips to a different cube, then flips back to the first cube, and so on. Thus, goes the argument, sense-data may only confirm or reject mental hypotheses about what is out there. We are lost in a cognitive hall of mirrors, never able to escape our reflection to see the real world.

This line of thought--that all our percepts are hypothetical models in the brain--might lead us to fear for our descendants when the blurring between reality and illusion will be even more pronounced, thanks to computers capable of generating vivid models of their own. But what is new about any of this? Without venturing into the high tech worlds of virtual reality, we already know that our senses are easily deceived. Magicians and professional illusionists can persuade us that, if we lack a skeptical foothold in reality, something supernatural is going on. Indeed, some notorious erstwhile conjurers have made a fat living doing exactly that--a living much fatter than they ever enjoyed when they frankly admitted that they were faking it.

Scientists, alas, are not best equipped to unmask telepathists, mediums, and spoon-bending charlatans. This is a job best handled by professionals, and that means other conjurers. The lesson that conjurers, the honest variety and the impostors, teach us is that an uncritical faith in our own sense organs is not an infallible guide to truth.

Fine, but none of these theories undermines our understanding of what it means for something to be true. If I am in the witness box and prosecuting counsel wags his finger sternly and demands, "Is it or is it not true that you were in Chicago on the night of the murder?" I should get pretty short shrift if I replied, "What do you mean by true?" Or, reverting to the first heckle, I would not expect a jury, even a Bongolese jury, to give a sympathetic hearing to my plea, "It is only in your Western scientific sense of the word in that I was in Chicago. The Bongolese have a completely different concept of in, according to which you are only truly in a place if you are an anointed elder entitled to take snuff from the dried *** of a goat."

It is simply true that the sun is hotter than the earth, true that the desk on which I am writing is made of wood. These are not hypotheses awaiting falsification, not temporary approximations of an ever elusive truth, not local truths that might be denied in another culture. They are just plain true. It is forever true that DNA is a double helix, true that if you and a chimpanzee (or an octopus or a kangaroo) trace your ancestors back far enough, you will eventually hit a shared ancestor.

To a pedant, these are still hypotheses that might be falsified tomorrow. But they never will be. Strictly, the truth that there were no human beings in the Jurassic era is still a conjecture, which could be refuted at any time by the discovery of a single human fossil, authentically dated by a battery of radiometric methods. It could happen. Want to bet? These are just truths, even if they are nominally hypotheses on probation. They are true in exactly the same sense as the ordinary truths of everyday life are true, true in the same sense as it is true that you have a head and that my desk is wooden. If scientific truth is open to philosophic doubt, it is no more so than commonsense truth. Let's at least be evenhanded in our philosophical heckling.

But now, having refuted the two most common attacks on the scientific concept of truth, let me present another, more difficult challenge. It is that science is very much not synonymous with common sense. Admittedly, that doughty scientific hero Thomas H. Huxley said:

Science is nothing but trained and organized common sense, differing from the latter only as a veteran may differ from a raw recruit: and its methods differ from those of common sense only as far as the guardsman's cut and thrust differ from the manner in which a savage wields his club.

But Huxley was talking about the methods of science, not its conclusions. And those conclusions can be disturbingly counterintuitive. Quantum theory is counterintuitive to the point where the physicist sometimes seems to be battling insanity. We are asked to believe that a single quantum behaves like a particle in going through one hole instead of another but simultaneously behaves like a wave in interfering with a nonexistent copy of itself, if another hole is opened through which that nonexistent copy could have traveled (if it had existed).

It gets worse, to the point where some physicists resort to a vast number of parallel but mutually unreachable worlds that proliferate to accommodate every alternative quantum event. Other physicists, equally desperate, suggest that quantum events are determined retrospectively by our decision to examine their consequences. Quantum theory strikes us as so weird, so defiant of common sense, that even the great physicist Richard Feynman was moved to remark, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." Yet the many predictions by which quantum theory has been tested stand up, with an accuracy so stupendous that Feynman compared it to measuring the distance between New York and Los Angeles accurately to the width of one human hair. On the basis of these stunningly successful predictions, quantum theory, or some version of it, seems to be as true as anything we know.

Modern physics teaches us that there is more to truth than meets the eye, or more than meets the all-too-limited human mind, evolved as it was to cope with medium-size objects moving at medium speeds through medium distances in Africa. In the face of these profound and sublime mysteries, the low-grade intellectual poodling of pseudophilosophical poseurs seems unworthy of adult attention.

Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor at the University of Oxford. His books include The Selfish Gene and, recently, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion, and the Appetite for Wonder.

^^^^

 

[Fucky McFuckerson]

Call me stupid, but what does that article have to do with the learning process?

 

[SeriouslyThug]

wow is it me or is thaG just as fundamentalist if not more with his extreme beliefs being his God?

you seriosuly(thug) need to get into philosophy and understand how unstable concepts really are, or how your beliefs are just as extreme and you would do just as jihadists do n blow yourself up in the name of science if it made sense.
admit it...

 

[Formaldehyde Rx]

@ThaG I understand you POV following your explanation, thanks for wasting the time. Sorry for jumping on your ass about it.

@potsmoker
I think the kid who went to india got duped and wasted his talents. Thats just my POV and I've been wrong many times before.....

As to the question of what constitutes science; Karl Popper's method remains the scientific method.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Popper

Philosophy of Science
Popper coined the term critical rationalism to describe his philosophy. The term indicates his rejection of classical empiricism, and of the observationalist-inductivist account of science that had grown out of it. Popper argued strongly against the latter, holding that scientific theories are abstract in nature, and can be tested only indirectly, by reference to their implications. He also held that scientific theory, and human knowledge generally, is irreducibly conjectural or hypothetical, and is generated by the creative imagination in order to solve problems that have arisen in specific historico-cultural settings. Logically, no number of positive outcomes at the level of experimental testing can confirm a scientific theory, but a single counterexample is logically decisive: it shows the theory, from which the implication is derived, to be false. Popper's account of the logical asymmetry between verification and falsifiability lies at the heart of his philosophy of science. It also inspired him to take falsifiability as his criterion of demarcation between what is and is not genuinely scientific: a theory should be considered scientific if and only if it is falsifiable. This led him to attack the claims of both psychoanalysis and contemporary Marxism to scientific status, on the basis that the theories enshrined by them are not falsifiable. Popper also wrote extensively against the famous Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. He strongly disagreed with Niels Bohr's instrumentalism and supported Albert Einstein's realist approach to scientific theories about the universe. Popper's falsifiability resembles Charles Peirce's fallibilism. In Of Clocks and Clouds (1966), Popper remarked that he wished he had known of Peirce's work earlier.
In All Life is Problem Solving, Popper sought to explain the apparent progress of scientific knowledge—how it is that our understanding of the universe seems to improve over time. This problem arises from his position that the truth content of our theories, even the best of them, cannot be verified by scientific testing, but can only be falsified. If so, then how is it that the growth of science appears to result in a growth in knowledge? In Popper's view, the advance of scientific knowledge is an evolutionary process characterised by his formula:

In response to a given problem situation (PS1), a number of competing conjectures, or tentative theories (TT), are systematically subjected to the most rigorous attempts at falsification possible. This process, error elimination (EE), performs a similar function for science that natural selection performs for biological evolution. Theories that better survive the process of refutation are not more true, but rather, more "fit"—in other words, more applicable to the problem situation at hand (PS1). Consequently, just as a species' "biological fit" does not predict continued survival, neither does rigorous testing protect a scientific theory from refutation in the future. Yet, as it appears that the engine of biological evolution has produced, over time, adaptive traits equipped to deal with more and more complex problems of survival, likewise, the evolution of theories through the scientific method may, in Popper's view, reflect a certain type of progress: toward more and more interesting problems (PS2). For Popper, it is in the interplay between the tentative theories (conjectures) and error elimination (refutation) that scientific knowledge advances toward greater and greater problems; in a process very much akin to the interplay between genetic variation and natural selection.
Where does "truth" fit into all this? As early as 1934 Popper wrote of the search for truth as "one of the strongest motives for scientific discovery." Still, he describes in Objective Knowledge (1972) early concerns about the much-criticised notion of truth as correspondence. Then came the semantic theory of truth formulated by the logician Alfred Tarski and published in 1933. Popper writes of learning in 1935 of the consequences of Tarski's theory, to his intense joy. The theory met critical objections to truth as correspondence and thereby rehabilitated it. The theory also seemed to Popper to support metaphysical realism and the regulative idea of a search for truth.
According to this theory, the conditions for the truth of a sentence as well as the sentences themselves are part of a metalanguage. So, for example, the sentence "Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. Although many philosophers have interpreted, and continue to interpret, Tarski's theory as a deflationary theory, Popper refers to it as a theory in which "is true" is replaced with "corresponds to the facts." He bases this interpretation on the fact that examples such as the one described above refer to two things: assertions and the facts to which they refer. He identifies Tarski's formulation of the truth conditions of sentences as the introduction of a "metalinguistic predicate" and distinguishes the following cases:
"John called" is true.
"It is true that John called."
The first case belongs to the metalanguage whereas the second is more likely to belong to the object language. Hence, "it is true that" possesses the logical status of a redundancy. "Is true", on the other hand, is a predicate necessary for making general observations such as "John was telling the truth about Phillip."
Upon this basis, along with that of the logical content of assertions (where logical content is inversely proportional to probability), Popper went on to develop his important notion of verisimilitude or "truthlikeness".
The intuitive idea behind verisimilitude is that the assertions or hypotheses of scientific theories can be objectively measured with respect to the amount of truth and falsity that they imply. And, in this way, one theory can be evaluated as more or less true than another on a quantitative basis which, Popper emphasizes forcefully, has nothing to do with "subjective probabilities" or other merely "epistemic" considerations.
The simplest mathematical formulation that Popper gives of this concept can be found in the tenth chapter of Conjectures and Refutations.. Here he defines it as:

where Vs(a) is the verisimilitude of a, Ctv(a) is a measure of the content of truth of a, and CTf(a) is a measure of the content of the falsity of a.
Knowledge, for Popper, was objective, both in the sense that it is objectively true (or truthlike), and also in the sense that knowledge has an ontological status (i.e., knowledge as object) independent of the knowing subject (Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, 1972). He proposed three worlds (see Popperian cosmology): World One, being the physical world, or physical states; World Two, being the world of mind, or mental states, ideas, and perceptions; and World Three, being the body of human knowledge expressed in its manifold forms, or the products of the second world made manifest in the materials of the first world (i.e.–books, papers, paintings, symphonies, and all the products of the human mind). World Three, he argued, was the product of individual human beings in exactly the same sense that an animal path is the product of individual animals, and that, as such, has an existence and evolution independent of any individual knowing subjects. The influence of World Three, in his view, on the individual human mind (World Two) is at least as strong as the influence of World One. In other words, the knowledge held by a given individual mind owes at least as much to the total accumulated wealth of human knowledge, made manifest, as to the world of direct experience. As such, the growth of human knowledge could be said to be a function of the independent evolution of World Three. Many contemporary philosophers have not embraced Popper's Three World conjecture, due mostly, it seems, to its resemblance to Cartesian dualism.

 

[SeriouslyThug]

id have to agree with philosophers on this one.


"the snow is white" means different things to different people, you might attach yourself to the thought that you are a "white" person, or , like thaG you might try and see everything including sex in your own biological way and define "white" as some photonic frequency

 

[Fucky McFuckerson]

wow is it me or is thaG just as fundamentalist if not more with his extreme beliefs being his God?

...

I was just pondering this after I read his article. The problem is, that everything has to have scientific answer, no matter what. And you are right...that puts him into a scope of faith...only faith in extreme logic with no questions to answer.

Science = form of religion?

 

[SeriouslyThug]

ThaG is the founder of the Church of Science as a friend called it

 

[Formaldehyde Rx]

^
It sounds like your looking for a witch to burn?

 

[SeriouslyThug]

^actually im just sick of dude talkin about the bullshit of religous belief systems while he himself is on the same level if not worse

 

[ThaG]

Funny how I posted an article that was written in a response to exactly the same arguments that followed after I posted it.....

How should scientists respond to the allegation that our "faith" in logic and scientific truth is just that--faith--not "privileged" over alternative truths? An obvious response is that science gets results. As I once wrote, "Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet, and I'll show you a hypocrite. ...If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there--the reason you don't plummet into a ploughed field--is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sums right." Science supports its claim to truth by its spectacular ability to make matter and energy jump through hoops, and to predict what will happen and when.

 

[rekomstop]

ThaG is the founder of the Church of Science as a friend called it

*cough cough*


=)))))

I like ya G, your a cool guy, but damn, i know bible thumpin motherfuckers that dont' even talk about Christianity like that.
lol


"privileged"? says the scientist, am i correct? lol.

and just to refute Mr. Dawkins generalizing essay, i'd have to say, i GREW UP in an atheistic house, with the guidance of "logic" and reasoning by scientifical evidence, Doctors were greatly looked up to (in my family) etc. Religions were not held to any merit, but then I SEARCHED and found that i have enriched myself by learning more than just Western Science. lol



OOOH and formaldehyde, lol i had this crazy dream that you are actually the boyfriend of my coworker, lol cause she's Wiccan and her boyfriend is basically non-religious and tells her that she's just seeing a "glare" or something when she sees ghosts lol.

 

[GrafsiccDesigns]

I am just gonna answer the title of this thread with this:

"we are so stupid we sit here and debate how stupid or ignorant we are and still cant agree on an answer"

 

[rekomstop]

lol, actually you missed the point of the last two pages, dummy!

it was a discussion about the importance of western science and if the POV of each person(even if its not western science) is still valid.

lol @ you dumbing it down to make yourself look stupid.

 

[SeriouslyThug]

Funny how I posted an article that was written in a response to exactly the same arguments that followed after I posted it.....

you are too funny because you keep missing the point.

 

[GrafsiccDesigns]

lol, actually you missed the point of the last two pages, dummy!

it was a discussion about the importance of western science and if the POV of each person(even if its not western science) is still valid.

lol @ you dumbing it down to make yourself look stupid.

maybe cuz i didnt read the last two pages or care about the last two pages since i wasnt involved in the convo of the last two pages therefore i wasnt referring to the last two pages that you speak of.....

like i said i was just answering the title of this threads question....nothing more nothing less....

 

[HiT-2-TiMeS]

“Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even stupider!”

-George Carlin

 

[rekomstop]

maybe cuz i didnt read the last two pages or care about the last two pages since i wasnt involved in the convo of the last two pages therefore i wasnt referring to the last two pages that you speak of.....

like i said i was just answering the title of this threads question....nothing more nothing less....

lol sorry i just realized how rude i came off as. i didn't really mean you were STUPID, but it was a sarcastic joke to go w/ the stupid theme.

i don't really think your a dummy