The progress of science over the past 400 years has been astonishing. Who would have thought that we could trace the history of our universe back to its origins 14 billion years ago? Science has increased the length and quality of our lives, and the technology that is commonplace in the modern world would have seemed like magic to our ancestors.
For all these reasons and many more, science is rightly celebrated and revered. However, a healthy pro-scientific attitude is not the same as ‘scientism’, which is the view that the scientific method is the only way to determine the truth. As the problem of consciousness becomes apparent, there may be a limit to what we can learn through science alone.
Perhaps the most elaborate form of scientism was the early 20th century movement known as logical positivism. The logical positivists subscribed to the “verification principle,” according to which a sentence whose truth could not be tested by observation and experiment was logically trivial or meaningless gibberish. With this weapon they hoped to dismiss all metaphysical questions as not only false, but also nonsense.
Today, logical positivism is almost universally rejected by philosophers. First, logical positivism is self-defeating, because the verification principle itself cannot be scientifically tested, and thus can only be true if it is meaningless. Indeed, something like this problem haunts all unqualified forms of scientism. There is no scientific experiment we could do to prove that scientism is true; and therefore, if scientism is true, its truth cannot be established.
Despite all these deep problems, much of society assumes scientism to be true. Most people in Britain are completely unaware that ‘metaphysics’ appears in almost every philosophy department in the country. By metaphysics, philosophers do not mean anything uncanny or supernatural; this is just the technical term for philosophical, as opposed to scientific, inquiry into the nature of reality.
Truth without science
How is it possible to discover reality without doing science? The distinguishing feature of philosophical theories is that they are “empirically equivalent,” meaning you cannot choose between them with an experiment.
Take the example of my research area: the philosophy of consciousness. Some philosophers think that consciousness arises from physical processes in the brain – this is the ‘physicalist’ position. Others think it is the other way around: consciousness is primary and the physical world arises from consciousness. One version of this is the ‘panpsychist’ view that consciousness goes all the way back to the basic building blocks of reality, with the word derived from the two Greek words pan (all) and psyche (soul or spirit).
Still others think that both consciousness and the physical world are fundamentally but radically different – this is the view of the ‘dualist’. Crucially, in an experiment you cannot distinguish between these views because, for any scientific data, each of the views will interpret that data in its own terms.
Suppose we scientifically discover that some form of brain activity is correlated with an organism’s conscious experience. The physicalist will interpret this as the form of organization that converts non-conscious physical processes – such as electrical signals between brain cells – into conscious experiences, while the panpsychist will interpret it as the form of organization that unites individual conscious particles into one larger consciousness. system. We thus find two very different philosophical interpretations of the same scientific data.
If we cannot determine which view is correct through an experiment, how can we choose between those views? In fact, the selection process is not that different from what we find in science. Scientists not only appeal to experimental data, but also appeal to the theoretical virtues of a theory, such as how simple, elegant, and uniform it is.
Philosophers can also appeal to theoretical virtues to justify their privileged position. For example, considerations of simplicity seem to run counter to the dualist theory of consciousness, which is less simple than its rivals insofar as it posits two kinds of fundamental things—physical things and consciousness—while physicalism and panpsychism are equally simple in positing just stuff. one kind of fundamental things (physical things or consciousness).
It may also be that some theories are incoherent, but in subtle ways that require careful analysis to uncover. For example, I have argued that physicalist views of consciousness are incoherent (although – like much in philosophy – this is controversial).
There is no guarantee that these methods will produce a clear winner. It may be that there are multiple, coherent, and equally simple rival theories about certain philosophical issues, in which case we must be agnostic about which one is correct. This in itself would be an important philosophical finding regarding the limits of human knowledge.
Philosophy can be frustrating because there is so much disagreement. However, this also applies to many scientific areas, such as history or economics. And there are some questions on which there is modest consensus, for example on the subject of free will.
The tendency to conflate philosophy with a growing anti-science movement is undermining the united front against the real and damaging opposition to science found in climate change denial and anti-vax conspiracies.
Like it or not, we cannot avoid philosophy. Trying to do that will only result in bad philosophy. The first line of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow’s book The Grand Design stated boldly: “Philosophy is dead.” The book then moved on to some incredibly crude philosophical discussions about free will and objectivity.
If I were to write a book containing controversial statements about particle physics, it would rightly be ridiculed, because I have not been trained in the relevant skills, have not read the literature and my views in this area have not been subject to peer research. And yet there are many examples of scientists who have no philosophical training whatsoever publishing very poor books on philosophical topics without affecting their credibility.
This may sound bitter. But I sincerely believe that society would be deeply enriched if it were better informed about philosophy. I hope that one day we will leave this “scientific” period of history behind us and understand the crucial role that both science and philosophy must play in the noble project of finding out what reality is like.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Philip Goff has received funding from the Templeton Foundation.