Boundaries of Science
I almost wrote “limits” of science, but that implies a negative claim, what science cannot do, as well as a positive one, that there are certain facts, truths, etc. beyond the scope of science. To follow-up on my last post, I want to talk briefly about why philosophy of mind is a useful tool beyond the boundaries of science (and, of course, sometimes permeating those boundaries). A thousand responses came to me after my conversation, but in the midst, I was baffled. Isn’t it obvious that philosophy is useful for motivating scientific questions, helping to frame them, and to connect them to human experience? Not for everyone.
So here are a few bullet-point areas where philosophy is useful in developing topics around the human mind:
- Personal Identity / the Self - unless we want to beg all kinds of questions and assume a radical reductionism to physics, there are questions about what it means to be a “self” that fMRIs cannot answer. In contrast, the more we learn about medical and psychological conditions like schizophrenia, the more questions we have about a “self.” Are there two “selves” before and after a debilitating stroke that causes radical personality changes? Answering “what counts” across time (diachronic) or within an individual moment (synchronic) for a “self” is not a simple question.
- Perception - one of the possible answers to what we are is that we are a bundle of perceptions. Here seems to be an area where neuroscience reigns supreme. But wait–what about questions of justification? What kind of role do our sensory mechanisms have to play in supporting our beliefs and in causing them? What kinds of claims can we rationally make based upon our perception of the world? What role do concepts have to play in perception?
- Consciousness - it is difficult to see how we can bridge the explanatory gap between neuronal structures, vectors, and chemical mechanisms to the subjective qualia we experience in consciousness. While it is not necessarily impossible, this project requires not only neurological analysis, but also conceptual analysis of what an explanation is, how reductions and bridges between theories function in science, and so on.
I’m highly sympathetic to Daniel Dennett, the Churchlands and other philosophers who are taking seriously the scientific knowledge giving us a better picture of how our brain functions. Perhaps the Churchlands are correct that our folk psychology will one day be eclipsed by talk of C-fibers firing instead of pain, though I doubt it. I still think, though, we need to pay attention to our intuitions and rational inferences about ourselves as mental/intentional creatures in order to motivate and interpret some of this data.
Too, in terms of what I am interested in, which is how the mind interacts with religious beliefs, it is an unjustified leap to start with statistically similar fMRI images of mystical experiences and end by rejecting any distinction between concepts of God, union with Christ, self/Brahman identity, Buddhist enlightenment, etc. We still need to explain why these different concepts exist, have changed, and how these religious ideas influence perception of reality. Doing this requires asking questions about reducibility, normativity, truth and falsity (can that be, as the Churchlands suggest, reduced to chemical and physical reality?), etc.
At the end of the day, these questions require philosophy. I’m not yet ready to worship at the altar of Scientism.
September 12th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Even the word “boundaries” seems to me to carry a certain assumption, which is that science is the center where we start, and other kinds of knowledge are on the periphery, or even out there in the wilderness. I’ve gotten into the habit of reminding myself that whatever means of knowing we use shapes the knowledge it produces, giving a certain kind of character to it. The use of science to know the world produces a certain kind of knowledge, which is not the only kind of wisdom. The use of faith to know the world produces a very different kind of knowledge, but is also not the only knowledge available to us. Poetry, service, contemplation, experience, and so on… we encounter the world in many different ways, and each gives its own shape to the knowledge it produces. None of them are the entirety, and it’s not obvious to me that any of them are necessarily the center. What an amazing life!
September 12th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
Scott, thanks for coming by (your blog and project looks interesting). Your thoughts are good:
1. I’d say that yes, the idea that science is at the center is problematic. It would only be at some kind of center in the way that human knowing is central (it is the only way we can engage with the world). But there is a certain “character” to scientific knowledge–third-person, repeatable or objective, publicly available, etc.
2. I am not sure about faith/knowledge–I think that, as a human activity, faith has something in common with science. But I have some reservations about whether it can provide knowledge, depending on how you construe “knowledge.” If we deflate faith to the kind of unjustified, every day trust we have in the existence of other minds, that a chair will hold us up, etc., then I don’t think we’re talking about the sort of religious faith most practitioners mean.
But that’s all beside the point of this post and your comment!
September 13th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
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