Ascribing agency to inanimate things is a return to the pre-scientific past and an abandonment of science.
I rather happen to like my antibiotics and weather prediction more than sacrifices to the gods.
please I highly recommend Facing Gaia by Bruno Latour, mentioned in the article. he's not by any stretch anti-science. it's about recognizing that's things as such have agency, even if they are "inanimate" and when we treat them that way we are actually better prepared to deal with the impact they impose.
in fact, his probably most famous work, We Have Never Been Modern specifically addresses the concern you raise, with regard to exactly what science is supposed to be. but you have to read trying to understand that science ignores philosophy at its own peril.
They are expressing wholly unsupported beliefs.
That's fine, but beliefs aren't knowledge, and they aren't science, and they have nothing at all going for them anymore except that they make people feel warm fuzzies. Those aren't science either.
Philosophers have a relevance problem, but as long as you can slap "quantum" on any jumble of nonsense and have a million people agree with it, they'll at least have an audience.
They’re not, but some scientific terms might help demystify the actual point being made—
1. Emergence means that higher levels of matter can have behaviors that are not determinable from its constituents (e.g. chemistry).
2. In cybernetics, Downward Causation means that the constituents’ behaviors can actually be influenced by behaviors at higher levels.
I’m not a physicist so I’m not sure how much of the “quantum” weirdness can be isolated to its domain, but complex systems appear to be mysterious across the entire hierarchy.
> They are expressing wholly unsupported beliefs... beliefs aren’t knowledge and they aren’t science
Science is an instrument for verifying beliefs about very specific things though. My favorite definition of science is that it is a system for drawing out the patterns (regularities) of nature that are the same across space and time. It can only focus on “common denominators” of reality (not the whole of it) in order to reduce it to the parts which can be predicted (material prophecy). But it’s not an instrument that you can use to verify beliefs about segments of reality that it’s designed to ignore. Like it can’t deal with its own foundational question (i.e. “can we truly deduce the unseen by only what is seen?”), and surely Truth is larger than we can know by any single tool for ascertaining it.
systems theory is the crux here. and Latour's Actor Network Model is basically just systems theory. if you refrain from reducing the scope of your systems to a single chemical reaction but looks at the complex interplay withing systems, you start to see what I'm actually talking about.
From the article:
"A piece of shiny plastic on the street pulls your eye toward it, turning your body in a different direction—which might make you trip over your own foot and then smash your head on the concrete, in a series of events that’s the very last thing you planned or intended. Who has “acted” in such a scenario? You have, of course. Human beings have agency. But, in her telling, the piece of plastic acted, too. It made something happen to you."
No, your reaction to seeing the shiny plastic on the ground is what happened to you. Your brain recognized it as something potentially interesting and/or valuable. The shiny piece of plastic did not somehow will you to pick it up, it cannot and does not have agency. (I can't believe we're having this conversation on HN. WTF is going on in the culture that makes animism suddenly attractive?)
EDIT: Thought experiement: If you were blind or it was night time and you were walking by the shiny plastic you would not even notice it to pick it up.
Your thought experiment doesn't hold; if someone were trying to dress attractively and a blind person doesn't see them, does that mean they're not trying?
Ok, but the intent does not reside in the plastic, the intent was in the person who designed the piece of plastic to catch the eye.
> Your thought experiment doesn't hold; if someone were trying to dress attractively and a blind person doesn't see them, does that mean they're not trying?
The article seems to imply that these inanimate objects exert some kind of influence on us (and possibly on other inanimate objects?). If they possess this kind of woo-woo influence why does it matter if we can see them? The philosopher in the article seems to be saying that they can draw her form a distance without her even seeing them.
What if the creator is dead? The only place the intent can reside, then, is in the things they left. And the only thing I'm trying to say here is that 'intent' is a word with undefined semantics. Its only job is to be useful, not to actually point to a thing in the physical world.
> If they possess this kind of woo-woo influence why does it matter if we can see them?
I'm not sure where in the article 'influence' was described in this way - as an aether, basically. It doesn't follow that if inanimate things have influence, we don't need to interact with them in order to feel it, or that if I were 300 light years away, I would still be able to feel the influence of a shiny plastic thing. What the writer is talking about isn't well defined, but it's not acausal either.
Then the intent died with the creator. The can opener doesn't have as it's intent the opening of cans. The designer of the can opener designed it with that intent in mind. The can opener has no mind. We can see the designers intent in the can opener, sure, but the can opener has no intention in itself to open cans and cannot do so without some human picking up the can opener and using it to open the can.
This is very poetic, but it's incorrect. The divide between religion and science is largely historical, not inherent. Latour was mentioned and is a great read, and I'd also recommend Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which characterizes knowledge and how we refine it. It doesn't really talk about gods all that much.
If we ever find evidence for the existence of god(s), science will happily accept it like any other provable theory. Science couldn't care less about religion one way or another.
This is just so wrong. That these things are inanimate is not a scientific view it is an interpretation, period. People are allowed to interpret the world in other ways and most of the greatest scientific minds did not have this atheistic view. If you look you’ll find this is a relatively modern condescension.
>I rather happen to like my antibiotics and weather prediction more than sacrifices to the gods.
This is hyperbole at best. Irrelevant to the discussion.