BEFORE GIVING YOU MORE of Joesph Weizenbaum's introduction to Computer Power and Human Reason I should point out for people who may be young enough to not have heard of him that in the early 1970s, B. F. Skinner, a Harvard Behaviorist Psychologist who promoted his dystopian scientistic-materialist vision through writing novels that, for some reason, were promoted and became briefly fashionable even as his school of psychology was falling into discredit and out of fashion. There was a commune set up to put his theory in place, I don't know much about it other than that they made and sold hammocks.
Not that what replaced it was more congenial to the basis of democracy (equality, justice, morality), the neo-eugenics generating Sociobiological - Evolutionary Psychological ideas of, first, E. O. Wilson and, then its popularized off-shoot by none other than the briefly celebrated new-atheist figure, Richard Dawkins.
Skinner did, indeed, assert that human values and freedom were illusory as does, inevitably all materialism, all scientism and, I would assert, all of atheism that clings to materialism and scientisim, which is just about all of it. Even the opponents of Behaviorism and Evo-Psy who are materialists will, eventually, unless they simply choose to ignore those issues, either advocate scientistic nihilism of that sort or will support its precursors. Weizenbaum, if I am recalling correctly, was an atheist but he was someone whose view of science prevented him from falling into scientism and the kind of materialism that other atheists, such as some in the coalition opposed to Sociobiology on the basis of its neo-eugenics character, in fact advocated. Of that group the only one I'm aware of still living is Richard Lewontin who I think it is fair to say avoids the implications of his materialism by choosing to not deal with it. Much as I admire some of these people, I don't think, in the end, that materialism is true and am certain that scientism isn't and like all untruths, they will inevitably lead to catastrophic ends.
It may be that human values are illusory, as indeed B. F. Skinner argues. If they are, then it is presumably up to science to demonstrate that fact, as indeed Skinner (as scientist) attempts to do. But then science must itself be an illusory system. For the only certain knowledge science can give us is knowledge of the behavior of formal systems, that is, systems that are games invented by man himself and in which to assert truth is nothing more or less than to assert that, as in a chess game, a particular board position was arrived at by a sequence of legal moves.
I will break in here to remind readers of the recent series I did on the Chapter "The Concept of Structure" from A. S. Eddington's book, The Philosophy of Physical Science in which he said something very similar on the basis of the foundation of modern physics. I should probably go back and index those and post an index for people who want to go back to see that what Weizenbaum is saying here is similar if not identical to what Eddington said almost forty years earlier.
When science purports to make statements about man's experiences, it bases them on identifications between the primitive (that is, undefined) objects of one of its formalisms, the pieces of one of its games, and some set of human observations. No such sets of correspondences can ever be proved to be correct. At best, they can be falsified, in the sense that formal manipulations of a system's symbols may lead to symbolic configurations which, when read in the light of the set of correspondences in question, yield interpretations contrary to empircally observed phenomena. Hence all empirical science is an elaborate structure built on piles that are anchored, not on bedrock as is commonly supposed, but on the shifting sand of fallible human judgement, conjecture, and intuition. It is not even true, again contrary to common belief, that a single purported counter-instance that, if accepted as genuine would certainly falsify a specific scientific theory, generally leads to the immediate abandonment of that theory. Probably all scientific theories currently accepted by scientists themselves (excepting only those purely formal theories claiming no relation to the empirical world) are today confronted with contradicting evidence of more than negligible weight that, again if fully credited, would logically invalidate them. Such evidence is often explained (that is, explained away) by ascribing it to error of some kind, say, observational error, or by characterizing it as inessential, or by the assumption (that is, by faith) that some yet-to-be-discovered way of dealing with it will some day permit it to be acknowledged but nevertheless incorporated into the scientific theories it was originally thought to contradict. In this way scientists continue to rely on already impaired theories and to infer "scientific fact" from them.
If there is one thing this makes one think of in 2021, it is the invention of "dark matter" and "dark energy" to be the undefined, unobserved, unexperienced, unknown majority of the stuff of the universe because certain equations of the current models of modern physics cannot otherwise be made to include the actual observations of the speed of the expansion of the universe. Just what those two entities are, what their properties are, what they do - other than make the equations come to what is perhaps a temporary balance - is entirely unknown. I would like better to understand how the barren fashion of string theory and M-theory fit into Weizenbaum's description of the game of science but that might require there to be some, actual, predictions or observations that support those theories on which a huge number of theoretical physicists have made their names and supported their often quite lofty careers in science, though the "things" they deal with may not exist anywhere except in their own collective minds and culture, they may lead to the decadence of science that Peter Woit warns they very well may be an expression of.
Another thing this section reminds me of is the fact that the mathematical basis of modern science as an expression of probabilities began with Christian Huygen's mathematical analysis of the probabilities in games of chance, gambling. Which isn't to call into question the moral nature of mathematical probability, it's to point out that, considering that, the description of the basis of all of science being probabilities and not the popular notion of a rock-solid, absolute foundation of absolutely reliable knowledge, that should not be surprising on its history. Science, like philosophy, like religion, like literature that deals with human experience, history, is a product of its historical and cultural development. It is one of the pretenses of the line of historical and cultural development in materialism and scientism and atheism that the actual character of science is not what it is. Richard Lewontin, in a passage I've given before, admitted that that is based, not on a realistic view of what science is, what it can and cannot do, what it can and cannot be, but is based on the preferences of those engaged in it.
Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
You may notice that even here Lewontin, in his explanation of the consequences of his and his colleagues preferences include them creating "an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, NO MATTER HOW COUNTER-INTUITIVE, NO MATTER HOW MYSTIFYING TO THE UNINITIATED." Only he, in the same review of one of Carl Sagan's sillier books he admits that the "uninitiated" inevitably includes all scientists because, unlike perhaps in the time of Huygens, the field of science has expanded to the point where people working within even one of its subspecialties MUST take what their colleagues claim about their even more finely defined specialty on faith because the prerequisite knowledge to those claims is already outside of their expertise.
First, no one can know and understand everything. Even individual scientists are ignorant about most of the body of scientific knowledge, and it is not simply that biologists do not understand quantum mechanics. If I were to ask my colleagues in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard to explain the evolutionary importance of RNA editing in trypanosomes, they would be just as mystified by the question as the typical well-educated reader of this review.
I would not say Weizenbaum is playing Kant in this conversation, but I do wonder if Skinner ever read Hume; or Berkeley, for that matter (and Berkeley was an Anglican priest). Because this argument seems to recapitulate, poorly, the 19th century arguments of empiricism (of which materialism is just a sub-set).
ReplyDeleteEuropean physicists, the ones who developed quantum theory, were well versed in European philosophy. I do think one great weakness of American scientific training is the complete disregard for science and the humanities endemic to American culture and education.
I remember now that Skinner wrote novels. I never read any of them. I do find it interesting how few American writers, with some grounding in science but none in philosophy or, for that matter, literature, write tendentious crap, either as fiction or as “popular” something, because it’s easier than facing an international panel who simply knows better. I know people who still think Dawkins is hot shit on the subject of genetics. People in that field think he’s an idiot.
Anybody who’s so much as had an intro philosophy course, or read a bit on history of philosophy, must wonder what Skinner was on about.
That and, taking Weizenbaum’s comments as read, the idea that science deals in only formal systems rings in Godel’s Theorem of Incompleteness, which undoes the endeavor to make science explain everything as thoroughly as it did Russell and Whitehead’s effort to put all philosophy on a mathematical basis; and for the same reason.
ReplyDeleteSorry, I think that was Eddington I reference. I’m not reading carefully enough.
ReplyDelete