The Science Delusion: Feeling the Spirit of Enquiry
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Last annotated on June 22, 2016
Introduction The Ten Dogmas of Modern ScienceRead more at location 120
Note: Oggi la scienza gode di grande prestigio ma sin dal 1920 sono emersi problemi che rendono problematico proporre un sistema coerente di conoscenze, forse perchè si vuole a tutti i costi conservare in set di assunzioni (consolidati in dogmi) che hanno tenuto bene in precedenza... Dogmi : 1)tutto è meccanico, anche l'uomo è un robottone 2) la coscienza nn esiste, anche nell'uomo è mera illusione 3) nulla si crea: la quantità di materia è sempre la stessa 4) le leggi fisiche sono immutabili 5) l'universo nn ha uno scopo 6) l'ereditá biologica tra genitori e figli è interamente biologica 7) la mente è nel cervello, ovvero dentro le ns teste 8) la memoria degli uomini è nelle loro teste e sparisce quando spariscono quelle 9) la telepatia è illusoria 10) solo la medicina tradizionale funziona Molti scienziati nn sono nemmeno consapevoli dell'assunzione materialista. Per loro si tratta semplicemente del punto di vista della scienza... In qs libro i 10 assunti vengono messi in questione... La crisi del matrrialismo: 200 anni fa ci fu promesso che alcune incongruenze della scienza sarebbero state alla fine risolte. Per esempio il caso della coscienza, si pensava di poter dimostrare la sua derivazione dal cervello... Oggi,a decenni di distanza, il problema del dualismo resta irrisolto. L'"illusione" della coscienza continua ad illuderd, specie se nn si crede fermamente nel dogma materialista... Anche se sappiamo cosa succede nel ns cervello quando osserviamo il rosso, nulla ci può essere detto in cosa consista l'esperienza del rosso... Poichè problemi del genere si trascinano da troppo tempo possiamo ben dire che le quotazioni del matrrialismo sono in calo... La fisica sembra portare un colpo ulteriore al fisicalismo: 1) la meccanica quantistica sancisce l'indeterminazione degli eventi 2) le teorie del tutto appaiono oggetti misteriosi e nn sono cmq testabili 3) la materia conosciuta è il 4% di quella complessiva, la restante è "materia nera" 4) i tentativi di aggirare il fine tuning sono goffi (violano platealmente il rasoio di Occam) e incompleti (nn escludono l'ipotesi divina) Edit
The ‘scientific worldview’ is immensely influential because the sciences have been so successful. They touch all our lives through technologies and through modern medicine.Read more at location 122
Yet in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when science and technology seem to be at the peak of their power, when their influence has spread all over the world and when their triumph seems indisputable, unexpected problems are disrupting the sciences from within.Read more at location 125
In this book, I argue that science is being held back by centuries-old assumptions that have hardened into dogmas.Read more at location 129
Contemporary science is based on the claim that all reality is material or physical. There is no reality but material reality. Consciousness is a by-product of the physical activity of the brain. Matter is unconscious. Evolution is purposeless. God exists only as an idea in human minds, and hence in human heads.Read more at location 132
These beliefs are powerful, not because most scientists think about them critically but because they don’t.Read more at location 134
But the belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a nineteenth-century ideology.Read more at location 136
Even people are machines, ‘lumbering robots’, in Richard Dawkins’s vivid phrase,Read more at location 142
2. All matter is unconscious. It has no inner life or subjectivity or point of view.Read more at location 143
All biological inheritance is material, carried in the genetic material, DNA,Read more at location 149
Minds are inside heads and are nothing but the activities of brains.Read more at location 150
8. Memories are stored as material traces in brains and are wiped out at death.Read more at location 152
Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that really works.Read more at location 154
Together, these beliefs make up the philosophy or ideology of materialism,Read more at location 156
This belief-system became dominant within science in the late nineteenth century, and is now taken for granted.Read more at location 157
They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis. In everyday usage, materialism refers to a way of life devoted entirely to material interests,Read more at location 159
These attitudes are no doubt encouraged by the materialist philosophy,Read more at location 161
In the spirit of radical scepticism, I turn each of these ten doctrines into a question.Read more at location 163
For more than two hundred years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry.Read more at location 171
Science will prove that living organisms are complex machines, minds are nothing but brainRead more at location 172
Despite all the achievements of science and technology, materialism is now facing a credibility crunchRead more at location 175
Crick and Brenner had recently helped to ‘crack’ the genetic code. Both were ardent materialists and Crick was also a militant atheist.Read more at location 178
They explained there were two major unsolved problems in biology: development and consciousness.Read more at location 179
Crick corrected the manuscript of his final paper on the brain the day before he died in 2004. At his funeral, his son Michael said that what made him tick was not the desire to be famous, wealthy or popular, but ‘to knock the final nail into the coffin of vitalism’.Read more at location 183
(Vitalism is the theory that living organisms are truly alive, and not explicable in terms of physics and chemistry alone.)Read more at location 185
Crick and Brenner failed. The problems of development and consciousness remain unsolved.Read more at location 186
there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistryRead more at location 188
It is either like a shadow, an ‘epiphenomenon’, that does nothing, or it is just another way of talking about brain activity.Read more at location 190
David Chalmers has called the very existence of subjective experience the ‘hard problem’.Read more at location 194
Even if we understand how eyes and brains respond to red light, the experience of redness is not accounted for.Read more at location 195
But physicalism’s own credibility rating has been reduced by physics itself, for four reasons.Read more at location 198
First, some physicists insist that quantum mechanics cannot be formulated without taking into account the minds of observers. They argue that minds cannot be reduced to physics because physics presupposes the minds of physicists.Read more at location 199
Second, the most ambitious unified theories of physical reality, string and M-theories, with ten and eleven dimensions respectively, take science into completely new territory.Read more at location 201
Strangely, as Stephen Hawking tells us in his book The Grand Design (2010), ‘No one seems to know what the “M” stands for, but it may be “master”, “miracle” or “mystery”.’Read more at location 202
different theories may have to be applied in different situations.Read more at location 205
String theories and M-theories are currently untestable so ‘model-dependent realism’ can only be judged by reference to other models, rather than by experiment.Read more at location 208
Third, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, it has become apparent that the known kinds of matter and energy make up only about four per cent of the universe. The rest consists of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’. The nature of 96 per cent of physical reality is literally obscure (see Chapter 2).Read more at location 220
Fourth, the Cosmological Anthropic Principle asserts that if the laws and constants of nature had been slightly different at the moment of the Big Bang, biological life could never have emerged, and hence we would not be here to think about it (see Chapter 3). So did a divine mind fine-tuneRead more at location 223
This multiverse theory is the ultimate violation of Occam’s Razor, the philosophical principle that ‘entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity’, or in other words, that we should make as few assumptions as possible.Read more at location 228
Materialism provided a seemingly simple, straightforward worldview in the late nineteenth century, but twenty-first-century science has left it behind.Read more at location 232
I am convinced that the sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos.Read more at location 234
