It's Official: Consciousness Is Not Unique to Humans
charbonniers.org
charbonniers.org
(actually 'affective states' means 'emotions' in laymans terms, but in this given context, it's meant to mean 'self-awareness')
It's clear from the document that they already consider primates, cetaceans, and elephants to be in the 'self-aware' group with humans. This has generally been accepted for some time, both from the angle of behavioural studies and that of comparing the complexities of brains. What this declaration is really about is recognising the rather surprising result that some birds can do the behavioural part while not having a similarly complex brain.
Some of the other stuff in the declaration is incredibly humdrum and clearly visible to a layman. Animals are known to experience emotions - seen a happy or scared dog? An angry bird defending it's nest? The question of whether animals experience emotion is different to the one of self-awareness. Similarly, it's obvious that pharmaceutical compounds affect animal awareness - because vets use things like that all the time to sedate animals for surgery. Or if you want mood-altering evidence, check out catnip. Euphoria? vets have drugs for that too.
The only new thing here is "we recognise that self-awareness can be present in birds, which means that you don't need a fancy brain (neocortex) to have it". The stuff about emotion not necessarily being in the neocortex is very old hat, and was in textbooks when I did my degree nearly 20 years ago.
Personally, I'm also not fond of 'consciousness' to mean 'self-awareness' or perhaps 'sentience', because it conflates heavily with anaesthesiology. A vet can knock a dog out for an operation, after which it regains consciousness, but not consciousness, because while it was conscious before the operation, it wasn't conscious... :)
I define conscious as 'having qualia'. I see red, but also, I notice the 'redness of red'. One may consider this a sort of reflexive/recursive self awareness. I am thinking, so I know I am thinking about thinking.
I am interested to hear why you believe a dog is not conscious.
In my opinion, a positive test may be if a dog can count to infinity. Successor functions in mathematics might be an indicator of the presence of the recursive thinking necessary to conceptualise constructions such as "the redness of red" or "thinking about thinking", and these are necessary to understand the infinity of the natural number line. So 1 == S(0), 2 == S(S(0)), 3 == S(S(S(0))) and so on.
My gut response is that it's the 'thinking about thinking' or being able to think in a 'meta' fashion that makes up self-awareness. That you can observe your own actions from a hypothetical third person view. Animal minds are of course a black box - dogs could theoretically be far more intelligent than the smartest humans, but it may just be that their brains don't allow them to express themselves appropriately. As they're a black box, we're reduced to things like the mirror test to try and approximate an idea.
Ultimately I think the real answer will be that consciousness/self-awareness is not a binary thing, but a sliding scale. I think the biggest block in discussing these concepts is the next link in the chain: the unwritten assumption that once something is 'conscious', it has a 'soul' or 'special essence' of some kind and therefore can't be morally farmed/eaten/whathaveyou. Because the label of 'conscious' carries this weight, it becomes a sacred label we have to be cautious about applying. An interesting paradox, in that scientific observation might suggest other animals are capable of consciousness, but there is no scientific evidence to suggest that consciousness is particularly special in a moral sense, yet the latter is largely taken for granted.
At this point in human history, we are standing at the top of a pyramid looking down, wondering what else could be like us. What else could feel things like we do? This is a poor way of attacking the problem though, we only know what we (internally, as an individual person) experience. We never really question when someone says 'I'm happy'. What if it feels like something completely different? It's easier to hear 'happy' and relate to how we feel 'happy'. But that's not necessarily true.
We stand at the top of a pyramid, wondering if other animals, plants, forests, ecosystems, planets can experience. Think of someone who views the world entirely differently than you with essentially the same genome. Now think of what makes them happy, sad, how they see a piece of technology, what they think of when they're alone, or with their best friends, hard right? Now imagine you are completely different species, or groups of species working together, you will never, ever know what kind of experiences could be felt inside the 'mind' of a planet, or a forest).
It's odd thinking that people still hold the belief that humans are the only beings privy to a consciousness, we barely know what that word even means.
I do think we should give animals far more credit than we do. Personality seems like it would be heavily related to and influenced by/influences consciousness, and most animals express personality to some degree.
I don't know why moss can't be (say) indifferent to its own growth. How does one know, other than that it seems to stand to reason?
It seems to me that even cute fuzzy animals are much more indifferent to things than people tend to be. Even people are often pretty indifferent when they are in slightly altered states, without fundamentally changing their brain structures. If I am totally ridiculously zonked on GHB and barbiturates and someone breaks my toe, I might notice that and still be indifferent until I dry up. The outrage only comes after I start making decisions and putting things together, otherwise maybe it is just something that happens.
Not that I suggest breaking bears' toes or anything.
As for what would make a moss "happy", I guess it would be to be a moss. Since I can't begin to know what it's like to be a moss, I can only draw parallels with my experience, and that's what leaps most readily to mind. What makes me happiest as a human is to express my individual humanity most fully, so for a moss, it would be being the mossiest moss it can be.
It's somewhat trite, and rather more tautological, but it's all I've got.
It might help in understanding the conclusion I've reached, to talk about how I got here. See, to my mind, no-one has yet satisfactorily answered Descartes' great question: How can I know that my experiences are at all reflective of an antecedent reality? His answer was to pull the biggest deus ex machina of all time, and asserted that reality is "real" because, well, God. That's a cop-out, if you ask me, and hand-wavy at best. So I'm left, philosophically speaking, stuck at solipsism. And, frankly, that sucks.
In the alternative, I have to look at the data available to me through my experiences, and try to draw some kind of meaningful conclusions from it. The first datum I examined is that all the people I interact with have an external appearance that's similar in form and nature to the thing I see when I look at myself (assuming we first posit that they actually exist, experientially or otherwise, and that my experiences aren't the product of some vast sim in which I'm trapped; if that's the case, it's game over already and there's not much point in playing). So maybe the other people have an inner, experiential nature, too. If so, what's special about people? Don't other animals, in keeping with their forms and natures, act in a way that suggests they're experiential, too? Maybe they are. So what's special about animals?
Follow that train long enough, of course, you end up in a bit of a reductio ad absurdum. You can cut the problem off by drawing some arbitrary line somewhere that says, "Things on this side of the line are experiential, and things on the other side aren't," but where can you meaningfully draw that line without access to the "inner state" of the things immediately on either side of your line? And what is it about those things on the one side that makes them special and privileged enough to be experiential, but not the others?
Following, instead, the principle of positing the fewest number of entities in my attempt to dig my way out of the solipsist hell that Descartes left me in, it seems least arbitrary and hand-wavy to posit that everything in the "external world" of which I have an experience might also somehow have an experience of its own. It's as arbitrary a place as any to draw the line, but unlike every other place, it doesn't require explaining why the line happens to fall there and not somewhere else. Moreover, it cleanly solves the question of how it is that meat can feel. It can, because everything can.
Please note, that's not remotely to suggest that the experience a moss has, let alone a rock, or a lone hydrogen atom, is qualitatively anything like the experience I have. How can they be? The nature of my experience is the product of absolutely squillions of different interactions of all the constituent particles, atoms, cells, organs, systems and structures that make up the vessel in which I have my experiences, each having their own individual experiences of being that part of the vessel. And it's likely some of those interactions are more directly relevant to the nature of my experience than others. My femur, for example, probably has less bearing on what it feels like to be me than my spine, but it's absolutely a factor in the complex interplay that gives rise to the whole thing.
But again, at the end of all that searching — and this literally took me years of pondering, mulling, barking up the wrong tree, false starts, and starting over from first principles — it's the least arbitrary answer I can find, it posits the least number of things in the universe (only one: experiential stuff, otherwise known as "matter"), and seems to me to neatly address some absolutely huge, and eternally open questions.
So, yeah. It's only a theory, but it's the best one I've got, and it beats the hell out of solipsism.
EDITS: there were many.
The only difference is I stop at the "cop-out", but it does leave me puzzling over the nature of experience a lot.
Matter is a pretty well defined thing. 'Experiential Stuff' on the other hand, seems to be less defined. If it means human or human-like experiences, I think we can all agree that moss most probably doesn't have that. If it means something else, then anyone claiming that moss has it should first define what it is.
If I said (for example) that moss is gerclectic, I would first have to define what gerclectic means. Absent of a definition, I actually said nothing.
If 'Experiential' does not mean human or human like experiences, what does it mean?
Moss enjoy the simple things in life, while rocks enjoy even simpler things. To me, these things cannot experience happiness - happiness is a human emotion that requires a memory of the past. Maybe a piece of moss 'remembers' the sun when the sun hasn't shined in a week. When the sun comes out again, it will be energized and start to grow. This would be the 'happiness' in a moss' life. A rock lays dormant until it can find a point of lowest energy to fall to, in which case it does. I think that's all there is to say about rocks though, because they don't seem to do much else. But what about rocks before? They came from lava, maybe they were spewn from a volcano, hurled hundreds of feet in the air before landing and solidifying. To me, if I were a piece of rock, I would prefer flying through the air (maybe when people throw rocks, they allow the rock to relive its previous life as a hunk of lava).
There are a couple things that you may run into trouble with when thinking about experience - humans have an innate sense of time that we base things off of. We have a certain number of experiences in a day, and that's the time frame of our experiences. What if experiences could be drawn out over hundreds, thousands, millions of years? What if suns experienced things on the time frame of hundreds of millions of years, what kind of experiences would be possible?
One (of many) more things to ponder that's inline with this type of thought - the effects of networks on consciousness. Because I have a consciousness, does that make every cell in my body conscious? If every cell is conscious, does that make every organelle? Does that make every strand of DNA? Does that make every atom in my body conscious? I would like to say no, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and because of the configuration of things in my body, I have been allowed access to a consciousness. Maybe a moss can never experience anything, but moss is just a component of a forest. Maybe a forest could? Or are forests at the level of cells? Maybe an ecosystem could experience something?
A rock was likely once a piece of a boulder, can a boulder experience? What about sand, the rock's likely next change in configuration? What about a mountain, where boulders come from?
What changes when we step up levels of complexity?
(sorry for the randomness of this, I write as the questions pop into my head - where do those questions come from?)
This is basically a variation on Pascal's wager and is the logic anyone who can't prove what they are saying insists on. The snowclone is roughly "We should believe X until we can prove Y because of horrible thing we don't want Z"
Militant vegetarians claim it for animal consciousness. Abortion protestors claim it for human consciousness. Theists claim it about God. Atheists claim it about the invisible pink unicorn. etc.
To me its a position to be taken that leads to tautologies. I don't personally think it's a very good epistemological method.
Should you have to ask permission to turn off/throw out your computer because we have to assume it has consciousness until someone proves it doesn't?
This contradicts the "null hypothesis", on which science depends. Without the null hypothesis (the assumption that a claim is false until there's evidence that it's true), the gates are thrown open -- Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and alien visitations are assumed to be true until proven false, and proving them false would require proof of a negative, an impossible evidentiary burden.
The null hypothesis exists for a reason -- and among other things it's how we distinguish science from philosophy.
> cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologiests, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomist and computational neuroscientists
Don't get me wrong, it's great to have their input on this topic. But to not include philosophers of mind for example seems very wrong. In particular because consciousness is very hard to define. The definition there involves "affective states" and "intentional behaviors" which in themselves are also extremely hard to define.
edit: Also, how about psychologists studying animal behavior, ethologists, etc.
The gall of these scientists to claim that not only can they definitively say what consciousness is, but that they can prove that something has it is astonishing.
That isn't what they say. The author of the article is editorializing, and the HN title needs to be changed. (puts up mod alert spotlight).
What they say is what consciousness is not, that is, it does not require a complex brain, that's not a prerequisite. They don't say very much about what it is, just its prerequisites. Buried in their supporting arguments, they state that "birds appear to offer" "parallel evolution" of "near-human-like levels of consciousness". As a non-biologist I am not entirely sure what exactly is meant by that, but it is not within a hundred miles of a "proof".
Have a look at the pannel of the conference where the declaration was published and signed...
Even if they are not philosophers, (human or animal) psychologists or ethologists, the work closely with some.
Among these are some of the smartest people I met in my life (and I never met Stephen Hawing).
Edit: Two of the panelists are animal psychologists, actually.
Again, not a criticism, I have the utmost respect for them. But for such a declaration - which I 100% support - it would have been nicer to have a more rounded panel.
If it's not and the goal is just replicating and accelerating certain cognitive abilities, then it might not be super helpful and possibly disheartening (disheartening because of how much we lack full understanding of consciousness due to limitations of only being able to understand it via our own consciousness).
Kant certainly didn't know what consciousness was. He had some instructive things to say, and massively helped frame the debate for people who came later, but even present-day philosophers who have the benefit of modern science and technology to help in their investigation are no closer to pinning down how it is that meat can feel.
Not until the Singularity, basically. I'm not going to hold my breath for that one.
From a scientific perspective, this elevates philosophy beyond anything reasonable. Philosophers have many things to say, but they tend not to be the kind of people who are trained to ask, "Is there an empirical, falsifiable test of my claim?"
Assuming that it means something to begin with...
Call it what you want, if it works, that's all that matters. Also, presuming that a "thinking" brain must be like a human brain is naive.
Among the weird suggestions of this document are that birds show a "parallel evolution of consciousness," implying that our common ancestors (ancient amniotes, lizardy things) were not conscious; also that whole classes of amniotes are not conscious. The idea that reptiles and possibly certain kinds of mammals are unconscious automata, while we and birds are conscious, is at least worth raising an eyebrow over.
Yes, it may be political, but that's most likely because the field doesn't have any layman-recognisable heavyweights like CERN to say "professional opinion on the matter says -foo-".
The idea that reptiles and possibly certain kinds of mammals are unconscious automata
This is why I think the term 'consciousness' has a problem with conflation, because it leads to responses like this. Just because an entity does not have the 'consciousness' they are talking about does not make then an 'unconscious automata'. You're mixing terms from different contexts.
The behavior you are talking about is not 'latest' or even new. But I can point at any behavior to indicate anything, if my concepts do not have any real relationship to explaining how the behavior is produced or its evolutionary function. Which consciousness doesn't.
You are hand-waving at "latest research" to solve an actually insoluble problem: of nailing down what consciousness is, and also of developing philosophical consensus around that concept. Apparently you think that a random committee vote will do the job. That is the only recent development here, and it isn't scientific.
What you have is some fairly arbitrary experiments with a note attached to them saying 'consciousness!' The issue of consciousness was never about this.
"Parallel evolution" implies that the feature at issue was not present in the common ancestors, and probably isn't present in all the descendants of those common ancestors. This is a deeply weird assumption for which there is NOT scientific evidence. Yet it made its way into this hokey little document, making it abundantly clear that its claims have not seen any serious kind of review.
Your complaint about "conflation" is the tip of the iceberg - consciousness is such a vague concept, and so well detached from observables, that you will never see an end to such problems. In the "best" case you will choose some behavior (such as preening in a mirror) and flatly assert that it is consciousness - while you will get others to agree on the preening you won't get them to agree on the consciousness, leaving you with a pile of data concerning just plain preening.
Yeah, despite all your defensive text, you haven't actually been tracking recent research if you come up with a statement like this.
Ironically, you call as your line of authority some of the kinds of professions who signed the declaration you later denigrate. I guess you could go 'No True Scotsman' on them and say that they're not real neurobiologists...
In the "best" case you will choose some behavior (such as preening in a mirror) and flatly assert that it is consciousness
Seriously, you're simply strawmanning something you don't like. 'Flatly assert'? Utter strawman.
If so, then it is striking, since animal research is fundamental in neuroscience.
> Scientific and philosophical footwork are entirely lacking here
That's unfair. The people there have enormous records of scientific accomplishment.
> Among the weird suggestions of this document are that birds show a "parallel evolution of consciousness," implying that our common ancestors (ancient amniotes, lizardy things) were not conscious; also that whole classes of amniotes are not conscious.
Indeed, that is troubling.
This, to me, significantly cheapens the message. Imagine a group of recognized "authorities" in mathematics coming together to sign the proof of an important theorem in an attempt to further bolster its truth. It almost makes me doubt the truth (or importance) of this statement.
A professional mathematician should confirm this, but my impression is that most of the interesting bits of math are fairly informal and creative--rigorous proofs only come long after the fact, if they come at all, and really just amount to dotting is and crossing ts that few people double check anyways. Absolutely proven is a bit stronger than is warranted, and at least some other fields can produce statements that have the level of "truth" that a mathematical statement has.
This is of course more of a philosophical area than a scientific one. Do most humans perceive "red" as the same experience? It's not really something that can be tested. Sure, you can measure how sensitive cone cells are to certain wavelengths and compare that among groups, but I'll never know if my red is your blue.
The scientific document itself does a decent job of staying out of the philosophical questions. Science concerns itself with reproducible, testable predictions. Using a word that has strong connotations with philosophy (also words like "qualia") should be discouraged in scientific practice simply due to the controversy it would generate that would detract from further progress. Studies of "synaptic activity patterns" is perhaps a better description.
I ask someone 'you know the redness of red', they nod knowingly. Thus I know they have experiences.
Now, suppose you asked one of these NPCs about the redness of red. It nods. Is it somehow suddenly conscious because it could nod sagely in response to your question?
How can you be certain?
For example, suppose we found that temporarily disabling some part of the brain (with a strong magnetic field) temporarily suppresses conscious experience. You try it on yourself. Afterwards you remember doing things but not being conscious of them. This is scientific evidence (note: not proof) that any animal with a corresponding brain part is conscious.
For instance, let's suppose we get advanced enough one day to implant fake memories. You would remember experiencing them even though you never actually did those things. But this is two separate concepts: memory and experience. Experience can only ever occur at the current moment in time.
In essence I'm just saying consciousness affects the world (e.g. it vibrates the air one way instead of another when we talk about it). This implies we can create experiments to learn about it through its effects on the world.
There's no basis for falsification, the claim revolves around denying a negative, there's no testable positive claim, therefore it's not science. And saying "it's official", apart from replacing evidence with authority, adds nothing except to sound like law or politics rather than science.
The sentence you're quoting is a triple negative, not a double negative, perhaps that's the problem.
I see a double negative: "The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states."
The above relies on the negation of a negative state -- the absence of a neocortex.
In any case, to refute the claim would require some heavy lifting -- an objective definition of consciousness, an objective measure of consciousness that somehow evades issues like the Turing test, and a handful of other obstacles. And consensus -- general agreement on the meaning of these terms.
That's why it's philosophy.
edit: There are testable positive claims - things like the mirror test. Yes, it is hard to define consciousness, but dealing with things that are hard to define doesn't mean something 'is not science'. Like I said above, we worked for a century with a model of the atom that we knew was wrong, yet we did a lot of good science with it. People didn't run around saying 'oh, the atom is just philosophy', they accepted that there were shortcomings and took that in as part of their work.
Yes, but the problem with the mirror test (and all similar tests) is not the observation but the conclusion -- one in principle could program a computer to recognize itself in a mirror, but have no other properties we assume define "consciousness".
On could in principle create a list of properties of consciousness, then have a devil's advocate program a robot to display all the required properties -- just to prove a point.
In DARPA road races, robot cars manage to avoid each other and fixed obstacles, mimicking the behavior of human drivers. It's only a matter of time before a car will pass a sort of "Turing test" and be indistinguishable from a (sober) human driver, i.e. be "conscious".
> dealing with things that are hard to define doesn't mean something 'is not science'.
In fact, yes, that is a legitimate argument for calling something non-science. If independent observers cannot agree on their terms, if similarly equipped observers cannot draw the same conclusion from a given observation, this prevents the consensus on which science depends. Science is, after all, ultimately a shared, falsifiable theory about the world, therefore deconstructive post-modernism (the idea that all observations are subjective) cancels science.
> People didn't run around saying 'oh, the atom is just philosophy' ...
They had the right to do that until there were unambiguous observations, and testable theories about the observations, on which different observers could agree. Until then, atoms were philosophy.
Aristotle once claimed that women were inferior to men because they had fewer teeth -- hard to believe but true. It remained philosophy until someone started counting teeth.
It doesn't matter that I understand what they are saying. If you have to use technical language to explain something then you don't really understand it, rather what you know is how to work with it, or manipulate it.
But there isn't. This sort of thing isn't scientific because empirical, falsifiable tests aren't available. So instead of scientific evidence, we have a panel of "experts" declaring something so. It's philosophy, not science, and, all else aside, science is to be preferred.
From what you're saying, exploratory experiments are not scientific, and neither are entire fields like Taxonomy.
No, that is stamp collecting. Science is not merely observing, and it is not merely theory-creation. It is both. Observations (descriptions) lead to theories (proposed explanations). The explanations must be testable and falsifiable.
> This includes, but is not exclusive to, empirical, falsifiable tests.
No, that's not optional. Without falsifiable tests, astronomy and astrology are indistinguishable. Therefore empirical testability and falsifiability are essential to any definition of science.
> From what you're saying, exploratory experiments are not scientific, and neither are entire fields like Taxonomy.
That's correct. Let's say I claim that stars are actually tiny dots pained on a huge glass bowl in the night sky. Shall we stop there, or shall we test my claim?
Let's say I claim that life was created by a supreme being, and natural origins are a myth. Shall we stop there, or shall we test my claim?
Let's say I claim that women are inferior to men on the ground that they have fewer teeth than men do (Aristotle actually made this claim, and it stood unchallenged for centuries). Shall we stop there, or shall we test my claim?
Ideas must be compared to reality, and if reality disagrees, they must be discarded. When reality-testing proves a theory false, a scientist abandons the theory, but a pseudoscientist abandons reality. Take your pick.
You're missing my point. It's not about 'stopping there'. It's about robust observation. The best observations we can make are treated as correct until we can come up with something better. We used the known wrong model of the atom for a long time, but it was the best we had, and we learned a lot in doing so. Your "shall we stop there" argument is utter strawman nonsense, and not what I am arguing. Robust observation allows someone coming along later with better info, because it makes the observation more robust. I have no idea where you pulled this "stop as soon as a claim is made" crap from.
So you're saying that classification like taxonomy, the periodic table, and even SI units are 'not science', because these things are not due to a tested claim? If they're pseudoscience (as you are implying they must be, since they're all just 'claims') then isn't all science that uses them inherently suspect as a result?
Ideas must be compared to reality, and if reality disagrees, they must be discarded.
Which doesn't contradict what I said. Robust observation agrees with this sentiment exactly.
You're trying to paint me as a crazy pseudoscientist, but you're working from a faulty perception of what science is.
Here's another example: in medicine, there's a lot of work done on case studies for diseases with a low number of victims. It's just not viable to run double-blind studies with such low n, and repeat those studies until you find an answer. Case studies are a way of doing robust observation: "In previously similar situations, this was done, and this happened". It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing. It's following scientific principles of do something, observe, report faithfully.
Similarly, the Mars exploration robots are out there looking at stuff for the first time. They are exploratory science. What would you have them do to make them fit your narrow vision of science - launch a robot into empty space to provide a control group representing the 'null hypothesis'?
Observations are part of science, but they are not science in and of themself. Just because you used one doesn't make your science "tainted" as you seem to think.
But to declare that the observation is the complete package is wrong.
Those case studies are called "case studies" for a very good reason: They are not science. If they were science then the exact cause of the disease would be known, instead only correlations can be found - this can lead to science, so it's part of science, but it's not the end result, it's a lower level category. (I hate using the word science this way, but I guess it makes my distinction clear.)
There is no such thing as "exploratory science" unless you mean the science of how to design an exploration. What the rover is doing is called cataloging. From a catalog you can gain scientific conclusions, but not directly. For example you can see that this type of rock is found in this situation - then you find another location and predict the type of rock.
We want to know "what is on mars". Just because that's not a science in and of itself doesn't make it bad. If it were science you could develop rules and laws from it. And maybe we will - like ideas on planetary formation. But right now the rover is doing history - we want to know "what happened" not "what fundamental rule can we learn".
Again, this isn't a bad thing. But it's not at the same level as hard science.
Again, your definition of science is too strict. Do you really think the known faulty model of the atom was 'not science'? We didn't exactly know how the atom was pieced together, yet we had a theory that was best fit. The idea that a theory has to be an absolutely perfect fit for it to be 'science' is garbage. Case studies do form part of science in that properly done, they represent our best informed knowledge on the matter.
Also, cataloguing is definitely science. Science is about trying to collect information that is as true as humanly possible, and catalogues definitely fall into that basket.
But in particular, I find it weird that you consider taxonomy as 'not science', but the periodic table as 'science'. These two things are one and the same: a human-ordered list of natural phenomenon. We chose the way we arranged the elements in the periodic table, just like we choose the way we arrange species in taxonomy - each list being grouped in a way that makes the information more digestible to us.
> Again, your definition of science is too strict.
Unless that level of strictness exists, then astrology becomes science. Here's my proof -- I have a cure for the common cold. My cure is to shake a dried gourd over the patient until he gets better. My cure always works, so it's science. I deserve a Nobel Prize for my breakthrough.
A real scientist would identify the flaw in my thinking (confusion of a simple correlation with a cause-effect relationship), but isn't he being, in your words, "too strict"?.
> Do you really think the known faulty model of the atom was 'not science'?
You're clouding the issue. A faulty model is science if it can be tested and potentially falsified. A faulty model that cannot be tested and falsified isn't.
> The idea that a theory has to be an absolutely perfect fit for it to be 'science' is garbage.
Be that as it may, no one has said this. In fact, science never produces truth, only tentative survivors of falsification.
> Also, cataloguing is definitely science.
No, observation -- description -- is not science. The science threshold is crossed when someone offers a testable explanation for the description.
> Science is about trying to collect information that is as true as humanly possible
No, that's history. Science is about collecting reasons why things happen, or at least the exact cause effect relationship. It is NOT about collecting "what happened". Simply recording what happened in the past is history.
> These two things are one and the same: a human-ordered list of natural phenomenon.
Not even close. Human ordered? The periodic table is not human ordered. The periodic table is fundamental to the structure of the universe. Taxonomy simply records that this thing happens to be related to this. The relationships are historical accidents, not fundamental properties.
I'm quite surprised that you think the periodic table is human ordered. That shows a very large gap in your physics knowledge. If you skipped physics it's possible you were never exposed to how science should really be done, and all your experience is with what they call "soft sciences".
and all your experience is with what they call "soft sciences"
Ah, the meat of the problem. You're prejudiced against disciplines outside of physics.
No it's not. The arrangement is determined by the structure of the atom - specifically the electron orbital. I'm assuming you didn't know this? It's not arbitrary at all, elements in the same column are very similar chemically, and can take each others place in many chemical reactions.
> Ah, the meat of the problem. You're prejudiced against disciplines outside of physics.
Prejudiced? Really? If you are going to practice science you have to do it properly, physics does, so do many other disciplines. Some don't. It's not because they are evil - they have no other choice, they do as good a job as possible with the limitations they have. I don't hold it against them, but at the same time they don't have the same status as those that do, the results from those disciplines can never be considered definitive. And for many of them, it's not science, it's history.
And you appear not to even know any physics, and so you think everything is like what you know, and have no idea how it can be when done properly. It's a form of the Dunning–Kruger effect - you don't even realize what you don't know, so you think everyone doesn't know.
Perhaps another angle: if the periodic table is defined by the structure of the atom, why is there no representation of neutrons? Neutrons are part of the atom, and though an element is able to have differing numbers of neutrons, there is no indication of this in the layout of the table.
the results from those disciplines can never be considered definitive
You seem to have a lexical problem here: in one breath, you demand that science is definitive ("it can't be science if it's not"), but in another you state that defining things is cataloguing, not science.
And you appear not to even know any physics,
I know a moderate amount of physics (certainly enough that hollywood films drive me nuts, and I spent several years as a medical scientist), mostly in the form of chemistry, but you're showing all the typical signs of someone who is clueless about the actual practise of "soft sciences" and is running off prejudice.
There is plenty of good science in fields like psychology; just because the brain doesn't work like particle physics doesn't mean that you can't have the falsifiable hypotheses that lutusp demands. There is plenty of shoddy science in psychology as well, sure. But that doesn't mean that you can simply discount the good stuff - that's a logical fallacy :)
Observation, robust or not, isn't science. If it was, I could say that there are brights spots in the night sky and that observation would count as science. It isn't science until I try to explain what the spots are, and accept a possible falsification of my explanation.
All observations are preliminaries to science. All untested explanations are also preliminaries to science. Science is when an explanation for observations collides with reality, with an attempt to validate an explanation.
> You're trying to paint me as a crazy pseudoscientist,
Not at all -- your words, not mine.
> you're working from a faulty perception of what science is.
I didn't invent the definition of science, and I'm simply repeating the definition that has come to be accepted, by consensus, among scientists, and in courts of law.
Guess how society keeps pseudoscience out of classrooms, for example, "Creation Science"? They do it by asking scientists what science is, discovering that untested claims and observations don't count, and acting accordingly.
In McLean v. Arkansas Board of Education (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mclean-v-arkansas.html), Creation Science was determined not to be science because it failed to meet these scientific requirements:
"It is guided by natural law;
It has to be explanatory by reference to natural law;
It is testable against the empirical world;
Its conclusions are tentative, i.e. are not necessarily the final word; and
It is falsifiable."
Observation doesn't meet these requirements (one cannot falsify an observation). Attempting to explain observations, and accepting falsifications, does.
> So you're saying that classification like taxonomy, the periodic table, and even SI units are 'not science', because these things are not due to a tested claim?
No, they aren't science because they only describe, they don't explain, and descriptions cannot be falsified -- that's reserved to explanations.
This, by the way, is why there is so little science in psychology -- it's mostly description, with rare attempts to explain. For example, Asperger's was accepted as a real mental illness based only on description. It's now being abandoned, again based only on description (i.e. the earlier description described far too many people). But at no point did anyone try to explain Asperger's in scientific terms.
This, by the way, is why there is so little science in psychology
You're also showing prejudice here, and with a profoundly unscientific single anecdotal point used to tarnish an entire field. Psychology is a vast field and yes, there is a lot of shoddy science in some areas, but to say that there's little [good] science in it is just plain wrong. There are thousands of explainable, testable theories in psychology.
No, I never took this position, in fact, the opposite. All theories are tentative, none of them become the "final word", but to be seen as scientific, all of them must be testable in practical experiments and falsifiable in principle. In short, a theory isn't scientific because it cannot be falsified, but because it can -- in perpetuity.
>> This, by the way, is why there is so little science in psychology
> You're also showing prejudice here, and with a profoundly unscientific single anecdotal point used to tarnish an entire field.
What? Recovered Memory Therapy wasn't a single anecdotal point. Facilitated Communications wasn't a single anecdotal point. Prefrontal lobotomy wasn't a single anecdotal point. All of them are symptomatic of psychology's tendency to put unscientific ideas into practice before any effort to establish if there's anything there.
Each of the above therapies became clinical practice without first being studied scientifically, and each of them became a disaster. Recovered memory Therapy, in particular, has been called a "debacle" by psychology insiders, but without anyone suggesting that clinical psychology either adopt scientific standards or be expelled from the field.
> but to say that there's little [good] science in it is just plain wrong.
When theoretical psychology stops clinical psychology from offering pseudoscientific therapies, then you can make this claim. In mainstream medicine, if a practitioner offers treatments that are not vetted in legitimate scientific research, he cannot call himself "doctor" -- it is illegal for an excellent reason (it is why a chiropractor is not a doctor). But a clinical psychologist can ignore both science and theoretical psychology and still call himself a psychologist.
If psychologists want to be known as scientists, they have to stop unscientific psychological practices, just as medical doctors did in the 1920s and 1930s. Until then psychology is not a science -- psychologists can't have it both ways. They can claim to be scientists, but if they do this, they have to reform present clinical practice. And believe me, I'm by no means the only person who is saying this -- Theodore Insel, present director of the NIMH, makes the same argument in his recent Scientific American article "Faulty Circuits":
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...
A quote:
"In most areas of medicine, doctors have historically tried to glean something about the underlying cause of a patient’s illness before figuring out a treatment that addresses the source of the problem. When it came to mental or behavioral disorders in the past, however, no physical cause was detectable so the problem was long assumed by doctors to be solely “mental,” and psychological therapies followed suit.
"Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses."
> There are thousands of explainable, testable theories in psychology.
Yes, true, but think about what you're saying. First, these small theories don't lead to an overarching theory that defines psychology, as is true for all truly scientific fields. Physics has the Standard Model, biology has genetics and evolution, chemistry has quantum theory (borrowed from physics), geology has plate tectonics. Any change in the content of these central, defining theories changes the entire field they control (as the Michelson-Morley experiment changed all of physics, as plate tectonics changed all of geology). There is no parallel in psychology, instead there are a great number of small theories, none of which has any chance to define the field as a whole, or lead to a larger theory that could do that.
Second, the small theories in psychology have precisely no effect on clinical practice, and on this basis, psychology is certainly not a science. Psychologists can either reform or expel clinical psychology, or stop pretending to be a scientific field. One or the other.
In the same way, mainstream medicine had no right to call itself a science until this exact step was taken, until "doctor" actually meant something. And this isn't some academic, philosophical distinction with no tangible consequences -- the victims of Recovered Memory Therapy alone number in the thousands.
Clinical psychologists continue to offer anything that comes into their heads, arguing that theoretical psychology doesn't contain anything relevant to their field, anything that might falsify their practices. And guess what? They're right. But if this is true, then clinical psychologists need to stop calling themselves psychologists, so the public won't be misled any more, so no more lives will be destroyed by pseudoscience (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovered-memory_therapy).
Further reading:
Each of the above therapies became clinical practice without first being studied scientifically, and each of them became a disaster. Recovered memory Therapy, in particular, has been called a "debacle" by psychology insiders, but without anyone suggesting that clinical psychology either adopt scientific standards or be expelled from the field.
That you think this is all psychology is simply shows how little you understand of the field. Psychology is a vast field. My favourite parts have to do with attention and perception and have nothing to do with treating sick people.
You know, there are plenty of cranks in physics as well, like the people that crap on about Tesla's broadcast power. Does Physics stop people from crapping on about 'crystal energy' or 'pyramid energy'? No? Why then do you demand that Psychology work as a unified whole?
Does anyone get 'expelled' from physics? Where is the evidence that this happens in physics, that the right to call yourself a physicist is stripped if you do poor work? If you do shoddy work, serious physicists will ignore you and quality journals won't print you - just like in psychology.
If psychologists want to be known as scientists, they have to stop unscientific psychological practices, just as medical doctors did in the 1920s and 1930s.
Ah, you mean back when most physicians were still smoking, an activity which was not seen as adverse to the health? Apparently medical doctors are allowed time to get their ducks in a row, but clinical psychologists - a considerably younger field - aren't.
"Today scientific approaches based on modern biology, neuroscience and genomics are replacing nearly a century of purely psychological theories, yielding new approaches to the treatment of mental illnesses."
Wow... so... you're saying... that modern psychology is using scientific approaches? Isn't that what I've been saying all along?
You're the one who's trying to have it both ways, by taking a narrow branch of psychology (being psychotherapy) and then claiming it's the entire field of psychology. Similarly, you focus on several admitted failures, that were discredited through the use of psychological science. You're also blaming psychotherapy somewhat for simply being a field that's difficult to work in. Human response to treatment in psychotherapy is extremely varied; it's difficult to find anything that works 100%. That doesn't mean that scientific principles can't be used in working with it, just that it's not as deterministic as physics. RMT was a failure, but unlike in physics where it's relatively trivial to organise most experiements, psychotherapy has long timescales and small datasets to work with.
Yes, true, but think about what you're saying. First, these small theories don't lead to an overarching theory that defines psychology, as is true for all truly scientific fields.
Here's another example of you moving the goalposts. Suddenly, it's not just necessary to have a 'falsifiable' theory to be 'science', you've also got to have an 'overarching theory' for 'truly scientific fields'. This is almost word-for-word a classic No True Scotsman argument.
So... how's that String Theory coming along?