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[Fried Egg]

I read an interesting book called "Galileo's Error" By Philip Goff on the "hard" problem of consciousness and he is basically an advocate for panpsychism. Without wanting to go into that particular subject here, he made a good argument that, since the days of of Galileo, science has been designed intentionally to preclude the subjective and focus strictly on objective, quantitively measurable facts. While that has been so successful in many fields of science, it has set barriers to the ability of science to explain the subjective. Which is why he believes that the problem of consciousness will never be properly understood until that changes.

But that doesn't mean that science cannot investigate the subjective. Imagine we want to find out how many people had ever felt depressed. Or imagine we wanted to get a handle on what a heart attack felt like. With well posed questions and a big enough sample we can do studies that will yield statistically significant results on anything that individuals feel subjectively.

That does not investigate the subjective. No amount of surveys can tell you what it's like to feel depressed or what a heart attack actually feels like. No amount of data can tell a blind person what seeing yellow feels like.

And yet we know consciousness exists, and how it feels to feel the things we feel, because we directly experience it.

Furthermore, science has a problem with teleological explanations. We cannot objectively measurepurpose. And yet we experience our own sense of purpose and our actions that are guided by it. Like consciousness, we assume other humans have purpose because we do ourselves. And yet the scientific approach to many social sciences (including economics) eschews a any form of teleological analysis, preferring to study human interactions as if we were mindless physical entities (through strict statistical analysis) as that's more "scientific".

Note, I'm not arguing against science or the scientific method here. Just that there might be some improvements that need to be made in order to develop our understanding reality in certain fields.

[Pattern-chaser]

I read an interesting book called "Galileo's Error" By Philip Goff on the "hard" problem of consciousness and he is basically an advocate for panpsychism. Without wanting to go into that particular subject here, he made a good argument that, since the days of of Galileo, science has been designed intentionally to preclude the subjective and focus strictly on objective, quantitively measurable facts. While that has been so successful in many fields of science, it has set barriers to the ability of science to explain the subjective.

I agree. As science was growing-up, it needed to specialise, to become the outstanding tool we know today. To do this, I think it abandoned (probably not 'consciously'), subjective topics and subjectivity — the difficult stuff. IMO.

[Lagayascienza]

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I read an interesting book called "Galileo's Error" By Philip Goff on the "hard" problem of consciousness and he is basically an advocate for panpsychism. Without wanting to go into that particular subject here, he made a good argument that, since the days of of Galileo, science has been designed intentionally to preclude the subjective and focus strictly on objective, quantitively measurable facts. While that has been so successful in many fields of science, it has set barriers to the ability of science to explain the subjective. Which is why he believes that the problem of consciousness will never be properly understood until that changes.

How has science set itself barriers against explaining the subjective? The subjective is part of consciousness. If science cannot explain consciousness, then nothing will explain it. Science has already made progress in that regard but we don’t hear a lot about that progress on philosophy forums where a good many want to keep consciousness “spooky”.

But that doesn't mean that science cannot investigate the subjective. Imagine we want to find out how many people had ever felt depressed. Or imagine we wanted to get a handle on what a heart attack felt like. With well posed questions and a big enough sample we can do studies that will yield statistically significant results on anything that individuals feel subjectively.

That does not investigate the subjective. No amount of surveys can tell you what it's like to feel depressed or what a heart attack actually feels like. No amount of data can tell a blind person what seeing yellow feels like.

And yet we know consciousness exists, and how it feels to feel the things we feel, because we directly experience it.

You are talking here about “raw feel” or “qualia”. I don’t want to go down that philosophical rabbit-hole here but, while we might not know for sure that your experience of red is the same as mine, we do know that if we both have normal colour vision, then we will agree that certain objects look red and that others don’t. The philosophical question of whether science can prove objectively and with absolute certainty that your subjectively experience of red is identical to my experience of red is irrelevant. Nothing is ever proven with absolute certainty. And, for practical purposes, it doesn’t need to be. Such questions are of entertainment value only to navel gazing philosophers. We can tell each other how red looks to us and reach a consensus. Scientifically designed surveys in the social sciences do this on a larger scale and they discover truths about what humans think and feel subjectively. For example, medical science has given us a picture of what humans think a heart attack subjectively “feels” like. When we have been told or read what a heart feels like, then we know that it might be a good idea to call an ambulance if we or someone else experiences that subjective “feel”. Medical science has built up a useful picture of what a heart attack subjectively feels like. There are numerous other example of how science investigates the subjective and produces useful findings.


In the end, the concept of “qualia” is a controversial one with no explanatory power. Thought experiments like “Mary’s Room” prove nothing other than our present lack of understanding of exactly how brains do what they do, and perhaps about the limitations of language. Only science will be able to explain consciousness and the emergence of subjectivity.

Furthermore, science has a problem with teleological explanations. We cannot objectively measure purpose. And yet we experience our own sense of purpose and our actions that are guided by it. Like consciousness, we assume other humans have purpose because we do ourselves. And yet the scientific approach to many social sciences (including economics) eschews a any form of teleological analysis, preferring to study human interactions as if we were mindless physical entities (through strict statistical analysis) as that's more "scientific".

We can infer purpose from the way people behave individually and en masse given certain subjective feelings or external conditions. And we can make predictions about how people will act given those feelings or external conditions. For example , if people subjectively feel severe chest pain and shortness of breath, then they are likely to suspect that they may be having a heart attack. That’s what a heart attack “feels” like. And we can predict that if they have that feeling they are likely to call an ambulance. Their subjective “feel” of a heart attack was their purpose in calling an ambulance. As another example, we can ask people what their purpose was in doing X or Y. If we ask enough people then we can get a statistically significant, objective finding in relation to purpose. For example, if we ask people why they took route X to work instead of route Y we may find that they feel that the traffic is worse on route Y. Science can tell us a lot about the subjective and about purpose.

Note, I'm not arguing against science or the scientific method here. Just that there might be some improvements that need to be made in order to develop our understanding reality in certain fields.

Right. And that’s the great thing about science. Its truth claims are always provisional and it is always open to new data and more effective ways of gaining real knowledge. Gaining real knowledge is what science is about.

On the other hand, theological claims about gods, spirits, ghosts, etcetera are not real knowledge. They are merely just-so stories. They may have been a unifying force which helped hold societies together by controlling behaviour, and they may still assuage existential angst in some people, but they have no truth value. The claims of things like astrology , tarot, etcetera are in the same league. They are not knowledge. They are just-so stories to which the value “true” cannot be ascribed.

Science can certainly probe the subjective. In fact science is the only way to obtain new knowledge about anything. Again, I would ask anyone who rejects scientism as I’ve defined it to put forward an alternative “way of knowing” anything that gives reliable knowledge about the world and yet is clearly distinct from the methods used by science. Be sure to include a demonstration that such knowledge is indeed valid and reliable, and thus comparable to scientific knowledge, but without using science in that demonstration.