I have kept close to the point of view of natural science throughout the book. Every natural science assumes certain data uncritically, and declines to challenge the elements between which its own 'laws' obtain, and from which its own deductions are carried on. Psychology, the science of finite individual minds, assumes as its data (1) thoughts and feelings, and (2) a physical world in time and space with which they coexist and which (3) they know. Of course these data themselves are discussable; but the discussion of them (as of other elements) is called metaphysics and falls outside the province of this book. This book, assuming that thoughts and feelings exist and are vehicles of knowledge, thereupon contends that psychology when she has ascertained the empirical correlation of the various sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions of the brain, can go no farther -- can go no farther, that is, as a, natural science. If she goes farther she becomes metaphysical. All attempts to explain our phenomenally given thoughts as products of deeper-lying entities (whether the latter be named 'Soul,' 'Transcendental Ego,' 'Ideas,' or 'Elementary Units of Consciousness') are metaphysical. This book consequently rejects both the associationist and the spiritualist theories; and in this strictly positivistic point of view consists the only feature of it for which I feel tempted to claim originality. Of course this point of view is anything but ultimate. Men must keep thinking; and the data assumed by psychology, just like those assumed by physics and the other natural sciences, must some time be overhauled. The effort to overhaul them clearly and thoroughly is metaphysics; but metaphysics can only perform her task well when distinctly conscious of its great extent. Metaphysics fragmentary, irresponsible, and half-awake, and unconscious that she is metaphysical, spoils two good things when she injects herself into a natural science. And it seems to me that the theories both of a spiritual agent and of associated 'ideas' are, as they figure in the psychology-books, just such metaphysics as this. Even if their results be true, it would be as well to keep them, as thus presented, out of psychology as it is to keep the results of idealism out of physics.
William James, The Principles of Psychology [1890]
William James's extreme caution in conditioning his treatment of human minds with the methods and presumptions of natural science in 1890 is admirable if not question begging in the extreme. Later treatments, from then up to today, would take his presumptions without the enormous range of governors and breaking systems that James clearly knew were essential to keep psychology from veering wildly this way and that. If people engaged in the study of the mind would forget and ignore those cautions almost immediately, those who took assumptions from that study but who were engaged in studying non-thinking objects would prove to, most often, go totally overboard.
Why psychologists at the beginning of the formal study of psychology would begin with the assumption that minds, thinking, consciousness, etc. were the kind of "thing" that the methods of natural science was invented to study is an interesting one. There was no reason to believe that minds, invisible, unobservable, incredibly variable and obviously immaterial are subject to the same kinds of physical forces, conditions and mathematical analysis that objects are. James could be forgiven for his naive faith in the power of scientific methods to divine such occult entities in 1890, he hadn't seen the subsequent history of Freudianism, Behaviorism, various "Humanistic" and other psychological systems, as they rose, in some cases dominated, gained political and, so, legal power, wreaked havoc in lives and nurtured insane societal delusions and, eventually, teetered and crashed into the bone yard of discontinued science, filling an enormous section of that seldom visited cemetery. If, as I heard a biologist say recently, nutrition isn't the most uniformly successful of the sciences, psychology certainly is less successful.
It wouldn't be surprising if a lot of the earliest assertion of the scientific nature of the new field of psychology was due to university politics, using the prestige of science to gain support for including it into the curriculum. There was certainly little to no evidence to support that designation at the time.
I no longer believe that human minds are entities like physical objects that are susceptible to scientific and mathematical analysis of the kind which constitutes natural science. I am entirely skeptical of that presumption based on the failure of the effort and the fact that enormous amounts of human thinking, human perception, the reports of people of the experiences of which those people are the only possible source of information that have to be set aside in order to make some alleged scientific claims about them even cohere as a story. I think psychology is an enormous effort at regularizing the file drawer effect into a science. I think other behavioral sciences also practice that, collecting confirming confirmation, discounting or debunking anything that is inconvenient for the researcher or scribbler. Ignoring the enormous range of possible problems with the effort that no less a figure than William James warned of at the very beginning of the "science".
I've read that James gradually diminished his involvement with psychology, I wouldn't be surprised that as he saw it develop he saw some of these problems with it.
In reading about the truly bizarre, largely atheist generated, idea of Boltzmann Brains, I've come to believe that they are an artifact of the materialistic and scientistic faith in the power of, not only scientific method, but of the power of the mathematics of probability and statistics. The idea that these disembodied cosmic brains, remarkably anthropomorphic as considered in everything I've read, could come about by the power of probability is an extraordinary act of faith, not far removed from the power of the Creator to create human minds which the atheists among these physicists, cosmologists, etc. ridicule. Considering the place that mention of that Creator, the desire to debunk God, plays in the talk surrounding this stuff, it's clearly relevant to the consideration. As with the cult of the universe creators, they set up physics and, now it is obvious, mathematics as competing creators, coming up with their own competing creation mythology and, now, the equivalent of the invention of orders of archangels, gods, demons, etc. After all, if probability creates thinking entities so much like us, then probability, operating in enormous time spans, even into effective infinity, must generate all kinds of minds, those which we can understand as more like animal minds, perhaps units of volition or taxis comparable to those of bacteria, and an infinite number of conscious entities we can't even conceive of. If anything, the accounts of creation deriving from the Jewish tradition is parsimonious in the extreme by comparison. As an aside, this stuff is such a basic violation and refutation of Occam's Razor that no one who makes recourse to it should ever be able to wield that weapon against the ideas of anyone else.
Given the growing range of supreme entities that contemporary atheism is generating, various quantum vacuums, other alleged originators of the universe, random fluctuations, probabilities,.... and the mania for aggressive, hegemonic atheism in the culture of science, and so in wider academic life in 2013, things will only get worse. Some physicists and cosmologists have been on this quest to use science to destroy religion for a couple of centuries, the literature of that attempt is not an inconsiderable part of the wider literature of and about science. These days that effort is bigger than it ever has been, more public, more aggressive, more conceited and more arrogant. Of course, the effort to destroy God was never supposed to fall within the study of the physical universe as it can be subjected to the observation and analysis the comprises science. It is decidedly extra-curricular, an extension of scientific methods beyond anywhere they can competently be applied. To deny that is to erase the limits of those methods, without which science ceases to exist as a definable entity. Now that physicists and cosmologists and others are delving into a consideration of invisible, disembodied minds created from probabilistic fluctuations as part of the effort that decadence has reached an extraordinary range. Those guys, the self declared champions of science and mathematical logic, who would make those the substitute for God in human culture, have turned that effort in on itself and it has imploded into an ever deeper and darker spiral of metaphysical fantasy. Turning probability into God carries the added irony that probability is as much a human conception as anything found in Genesis or any other attempt at explaining creation.
There is no evidence at all that human minds obey or operate within laws of probability. There is no evidence that minds of any kind are created out of some kind of probabilistic fluctuations. The validation of probability is found in the physical universe of non-living objects. The most that probability seems to be able to do is to come up with a range of chances that a universe capable of bodies capable of hosting consciousness exist. There is no evidence, whatsoever, of the power of probability to create disembodied brains. That these "brain only" types discuss such stuff seriously should show the world how hypocritical and silly they can be. In the end probability is a rough human attempt to impose order on the observable universe, it isn't a force within itself. It is a net that can catch what it can, anything that escapes it would be imperceptible to probabilistic analysis. The same is true for any such method. None of them are supreme, in the end.
Update: Thinking about it, I'll give you the next paragraph in William James's text.
I have therefore treated our passing thoughts as integers, and regarded the mere laws of their coexistence with brain-states as the ultimate laws for our science. The reader will in vain seek for any closed system in the book. It is mainly a mess of descriptive details, running out into queries which only a metaphysics alive to the weight of her task can hope successfully to deal with. That will perhaps be centuries hence; and meanwhile the best mark of health that a science can show is this unfinished-seeming front.
The treatment of thoughts as integers is a pretty drastic reduction and conflation of what were unobservable, intangible, immaterial experiences, not known in anyone else but by secondhand report of unknowable though presumably variable accuracy and honesty was an extremely bold, if not wild, if not obviously audacious, leap of assumption. The extremely tenuous attempt to impose order and make reliable predictions about thoughts and, withi its own cargo of assumptions and prejudices, behavior, should have been shown James how far out on a limb he was climbing. Perhaps his brother and his colleagues in producing fiction could have advised him of doing that with entirely made up people.
The next clause about their "coexistence with brain-states" is both audacious and, obviously, an essential warning to the attempt. Assuming coexistence assumes that the thoughts are as real as the brain-states and as valid. James rejected the attempt to turn those assumptions into a "closed system". Almost immediately his fellow psychologists and those who began to use the new science would start constructing closed systems. That lead within a decade of James's death the rise of Watsonian Behaviorsm and onward to the denial that thoughts were much of anything but mistaken physical processes. The metaphysics that James considered essential for any kind of successful treatment of his "descriptive details" would seem to be unlikely to come from the science that psychology that aspires, eternally and unsuccessfully, to be. Now that the materialists as physicists and cosmologists are imposing their biases on the problems of studying thoughts, minds, even entirely fictitious "brains," things will only get worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment