Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Thank non-God for Science and thank Science for non-God!

So, the claim is that modern physical science is the deliverance of our Stone Age brains from the cognitive myopia we evolved over eons, yes?

Science at last gives us the precise apparatus we need as a species to overcome the crude folk theories of ontology, physics, biology, and ethics which we have simply picked up and confected for survival value, yes?

Our natural, common sense assumptions about the world, while helping us survive and procreate, are woefully off-base about the actual workings of the physical cosmos, correct?

Natural selection, therefore, has given us a range of useful but misguided capacities just so we can pass our genes along, right? We are, in other words, naturally wrong about the world we inhabit (at least on a theoretical, if not perceptual, level)?

There is, then, no inherent need for us, as products of natural selection alone, to understand, say, quantum mechanics and electrodialysis, since, obviously, numerous species (and all our pre-scientific ancestors) passed along their genes just fine without such heavy-duty rational insight, yes?

Is it not, then, almost axiomatic that natural selection has no selective "interest" in how impressive or dull our theories are? As long as we can function well enough, at a perceptual and kinesthetic level, to survive early death and pass on our genes, what need is there for nature to select for advanced theoretical truth about the non-genetic world?

In light of the above considerations, what grounds do we have for saying natural selection has brought us to a true grasp of the world? Scientific knowledge is not a normative, predictable result of natural selection. If it were, we would have all evolved scientific instincts, but, again, we actually have crude, anthropocentric, small-range, large-scale myopia about the world. Therefore, we are at our most procreatively fit without any theoretical baggage confabulated by modern exact science. Therefore, the theory of natural selection alone lacks a cogent basis for the emergence of scientific theoretical knowledge. In which case, however, what grounds do we have for adhering to the theoretical confabulation called "natural selection"? Do we need to understand natural selection in order for our societies to function stably enough that our species can procreate? Clearly not.

Only if advanced scientific theories are construed as deductive elaborations of our brute sensory grasp of the world can we say that exact theoretical science naturally emerges from the process of natural selection. Unfortunately, it is harder to find a worse caricature than that of how exact science has actually developed and how it actually works.

1 comment:

Mr Understood said...

science? Its just the fashoin anyway. I remember when I went to uni, in first year and we were dissecting fish. I aske dwhat are those things? Oh they are the lampules of blah blah blah, and just about all fish hev em, they're not important. I was think hey! justabout all fish heve em and they are not important? I asked what they were for and was told that they sense electromagnetic field in water.... anyone got a question? I tought this was the most amazing thing I had ever heard of and asked how I could study that... and was told that noone did! because it was.... why7 would you want to? Anyway, if you want to search something interesting you can search the Rife report. Rife was a scientist who cracked the meaning of the magnetic fields that living things have and claimed to be able to cure diseases that were against US law to cure. You've seen kurlean photoraphy? They raided his labs and the dude died in custody. Are we talking about science, or science, or are we talking about science? I think there are like medievel guilds that control what is good and bad science. 15 years ago we had junk genes, but now we had innate latent ability to preempt and adapt... how did we get that? science? LOL