Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

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Science is downstream from philosophy, and behind any given scientific paradigm there are dozens if not hundreds of philosophical assumptions. This means that if philosophy has taught us essentially nothing, then most likely science has taught us several orders of magnitude less than essentially nothing.

Modern science as it exists today is basically a quasi-religious system that is more or less the next version of alchemy in terms of its intellectual heritage. It's clear to me that in a couple hundred years we'll probably look back on the science of today the same way that most people today look at alchemy. Already research investigating the truth of the spiritual underpinnings of science is one of the hottest areas of research, and you can't go more than a couple weeks without seeing some new finding or treatise. It's only going to be so long before all of these disparate parts get organized into a cohesive whole that's convincing enough to undermine the current establishment.

> Modern science as it exists today is basically a quasi-religious system

No. This is simply wrong on a factual level. Science doesn't have dogma. It isn't religion. See? Your ideas fail because you don't have the facts you need to form good ideas.

> It's clear to me that in a couple hundred years we'll probably look back on the science of today the same way that most people today look at alchemy.

To the extent we do, it will be because of advances in science. Science replaces its own ideas (that is, in fact, the exact opposite of dogma) using evidence and sound mathematical logic, which is why that happens. Trying to use science to prove the weakness of science is a wonderful indication that you haven't the faintest clue what you're talking about.

"Science doesn't have dogma. It isn't religion."

That's simply false. If you don't believe that science has dogma, open up the first chapter of nearly every biology textbook. Most of them start out by discussing the dogma of science, which is roughly as follows:

- We live in a materialist universe.

- There exists nothing magical or supernatural.

- All phenomena are in principle understandable by humans.

- The scientific method is how we can understand the universe.

There are many other assumptions behind science as well, but these are the ones that most textbooks usually enumerate explicitly. Being assumptions, none of them are provable. And in fact there is good reason to believe that many (or all) of them are wrong, which would essentially make all of scientific knowledge wrong as well. And while specific scientific results are at least in theory subject to being replaced, these general principles are considered sacred and unchallengable.

Science is a religion just like any other. And if you actually look at the principles I listed, they actually look a lot like the four noble truths of buddhism. Different content, but still religious just the same.

I've never seen quotes like that. Which is not to say they're not the opinion of the authors. But it's not dogma, it's precision. Strong opinions weakly held as they say. Or more like working assumptions.

> Most of them start out by discussing the dogma of science, which is roughly as follows:

They aren't dogma. They can be refuted with sufficient evidence. The failure of the religious to provide such evidence means they haven't yet been refuted. (It also says nasty things about the religious, but propriety forbids me from being more specific.)

> there is good reason to believe that many (or all) of them are wrong

What reasons? Be precise enough and you get a Nobel Prize and eternal adulation.

> they actually look a lot like the four noble truths of buddhism

Only to someone who totally misunderstands both science and Buddhism.

"They can be refuted with sufficient evidence."

Except for that they can't, because everyone who believes in science just says that the reason they believe that science will be able to explain everything is that it has explained everything so far. This is just begging the question, and it's clear that no matter how much evidence there is that there are some things that science can't explain these will just be written off by those who have 'faith' in science. You can go over to r/science or r/atheism and find literally thousands of examples of this.

>What reasons? Be precise enough and you get a Nobel Prize and eternal adulation.

The obvious one would be that there is absolutely nothing to suggest that consciousness is material in nature. But again, the true believers refute this by listing all the other things that we didn't understand until science came up with some explanation, and saying that therefor science will most likely also be able to explain consciousness one day.

> This is just begging the question, and it's clear that no matter how much evidence there is that there are some things that science can't explain these will just be written off by those who have 'faith' in science.

You don't have any examples of this in this post, though.

> there is absolutely nothing to suggest that consciousness is material in nature

Wrong. The existence of psychoactive drugs and the effectiveness of fMRI scans disproves this statement.

EDITED TO ADD: What evidence would make you change your mind about this statement in particular?

The question in philosophy is "how does consciousness arise from the physical?" While you can claim it's due to some complex interaction in our brains, and while we have significant evidence that this is the case, I don't think that answers the question. Philosophers want to know the mechanism which produces the experience. Arguing that consciousness (or experience) is physical is a tough thing to do from first principles because of our own intuitive sense of it.

For example, how is it that the electrical signals in our brains produce "us" while electrical signals in other things don't produce conscious things? How are they different? What would it take to make a circuit "conscious"?

I can't give you good definitions for consciousness or experience and I can't even say that the question(s) make(s) sense. I'm just trying to give you give you a picture of what some people think.

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