Can science answer philosophical questions?

General Discussion
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I got into some argument over someone online who said that the self isn’t real because science said so:

"There is no inherent ‘self,’ and research supports this. Like a group of cells working together, where each cell performs specific functions. On its own, a cell doesn’t exhibit self-awareness, but when cells group together, they coordinate and can perform more complex tasks, like tissue formation or organ development.

It may appear as if a ‘self’ is emerging, but this is not true self-awareness. There is no singular, central ‘self.’ What we perceive as coordinated behavior is a quasi-self, an emergent property arising from the interactions between cells. The ‘self’ is a concept we impose, while in reality, it’s a product of collective responses and emergent behavior. Its just chemicals reacting to responses ,period. If anyone doesnt come to that same conclusion they havent dug deep enough."

"Its a hard concept, people can look and act normal. But thats just a response from them internally. For example… Love is not a thing, love is just beinf familure with something.Being familure is knowing something is not a threat and its helpful.

This means your cells dont need to give out stress responses so they release good feeling chemicals. This makes you smile and enjoy the interaction. Doesnt mean you choose to do this. It just happens from inside. We just justify it as our decision but its not
Its hard to understand if u dont study it"

“Im not non binary but see people as people not sexes being thats what we all are is a pile of cells and qwerky personalities. And the more connections we have the longer we can live and thrive so thats me. I sleep well but i dont think you meant it in the proper sense.”

Following that it was about how moral and ethical questions can just be boiled down to survival drive and reasons and meaning too. But to me this seems rather reductive, especially since science is ultimately rooted in philosophy (and that’s where it started too). Survival might play a role in it but I think there’s more to it than that, sorta like why survive. Animals have that drive and don’t question it but we do.

Science from what I see is mostly making educated guesses about how things appear to be, but the word here is guess. I mean at the ground level of reality with QM things start to become weird and at that point it becomes more philosophy than science when things are measured in probabilities.

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I agree though, wouldn’t it be more accurate to say QM is the ground level of the atomic world.
With stable atomic particles emerging out of that.

We live in the macroscopic biological world - seems to me, more realistic to start with complex molecules and conditions that create biology and how evolving biology managed to work together with geology, to create the living world we exist in.

The QM realm fells like more philosophy and math, than hard science to me. Whereas the biological macroscopic realm, that’s solid serious relevant science since it is easier to observe and get a hold of

Also we should be clear, this is all about our own understanding - we make our questions and set our goals, . . .

I look at the same stuff as you and frame completely different questions to wonder about.
Brings it all back to, “what will you be present to?”

Nature knows what it’s doing and doesn’t need us to validate it.

We are the ones lost in the mystery - it’s not Nature’s job to explain itself to us - it’s our job to accurately understand it to the best of our abilities.

Why not?
Your body consists of one basic solid core blueprint DNA/body/brain that produces an aware of being, and moving through a world that never stops speeding us forward. Each of us is unique because of our body and circumstance, love it, or hate it, or be bewildered by it, it is still you inside of there, in all our confusing mood, fighting all sort of battles, often unrecognized, by your unique individual self.

I’m consistently amazed at how close those younger-me’s feels to the now old me.
I mean it’s all still in there, give me an empty room and a good piece of music and it’s like the holodeck - and I hear you moaning about the self not existing - what is not existing?

Do you have memories, do you still stumble through the same sequences that bedeviled you as a kid? If so, then welcome to the club.

I read knowledgeable experts claim that our core character {or the lens through which each of us filters our experiences} is formed by the time you’re a year old. From having watched many babies grow into functions humans, dealing with what life throws at them, I know the truth in that.

Like a landscape undergoing uplift, earnly random rivulets become established waterways. The baby’s brain experiences an explosion of neuron networking and then a dramatic pruning back, that pruning is directed by environmental signals.

Windows of opportunity come along and then shut, the lucky child is enriched during those moments and it is forever reflected. The unlucky is left without, or worse depending on what happened during those moments of receptivity, and that likewise goes into making the self, that we are stuck with for the rest of our life.

Heck, come to think of it, isn’t that proof enough that the self exists, you can never out run it, or escape it. Isn’t that a pretty good indication?

Yeah, but your inside, is you! What’s the problem?

Before talking about what the cell can or can’t do, you gotta learn a lot more. It’s weirder than you think. Consider just one element:

‘The hard problem of consciousness’: A lecture by Professor Mark Solms at the Freud Museum London

Premiered Jul 16, 2024
‘The hard problem of consciousness’

In this lecture, as part of our Freud’s 4 pm Sessions series at the Freud Museum, Mark Solms addresses the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, taking the view that we have made so little progress with this problem because we have been focusing on the wrong sort of consciousness (perception and cognition) and the wrong part of the brain (the cortex). Professor Solms argues that the problem becomes less hard when considered in relation to affect and the brainstem. He also discusses the relevance of two Freudian ideas to the solution of the problem.

The event was introduced by Dr Giuseppe Albano, Director of the Freud Museum London.

You know you are going to get a resounding YES!! from me. :wink:

But, I see it more like science provides building blocks of knowledge that we ourselves need to learn to understand and piece together to create our own understanding of the world around us and ourselves in the process, and seem to me that philosophy is the organizer of that deluge of scientific information.

Which for each of us is different.

I mean my reality consists of a small cabin on a mesa ridge over looking a Pleistocene river channel, a sweet wife, an equally sweet but demanding doggie that has me constantly walking around our parkland. The old west feels a fence away, with my mind getting filled with observing the ground and tracks, and vegetation, rocks and touching the memories of ancients that used to roam this land. Not to mention musing on seven decades of memories, within the awareness of my current relevance to young grandchildren I’m able to caretake, etc., etc…

All that stuff goes into making me the me I am. Excuse me for rambling. :bouquet:

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QM is very hard to explain to a non-mathematician. It certainly involves probability (sort of), but it is very solid, serious, and relevant science. We would not have solar panels, lasers, transistors, GPS, or so much more without QM.

God loves to play with dice. Electron shells can be thought of as probability fields, but are more accurately defined as Eigenfunctions. I trust the mathematics of a good theoretical physicist but also need the applied physicist experimentation in order to be convinced. While my maths are quite rusty, I have had the exposure that comes with engineering.

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I dunno, science can’t answer question about morality or meaning or why we should live or do X or Y.

HUmans are able to question their own existence and why we do the things we do, unlike animals who just do it without really wondering.

Even when it comes to the self science doesn’t have an answer but some scientists have taken stances on it.

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Yes but many questions which were seen as philosophical questions are nowadays in the demesne of science.

In ancient times, philosophers were astronomes, mathematicians, and so.

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Like what? Science by default resets on philosophical axioms so it’s not like we escaped it. Even more troubling when you factor theory ladeness into it: Theory-ladenness - Wikipedia

Science isn’t some field detached from emotion and our thoughts about it but dependent on it. Heck even the definitions we use affect what we research and look for to explain things. It’s actually quite laden with philosophy.

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Though you’ll forgive me as someone I’m talking to now just said that science solved the trolley problem (mind you, a problem not meant to have a solution).

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Yeah, I’ll give you that, from the perspective of all the recent modern marvels that utilize QuantumMechanical effect. Still, it seems to me that bringing QM into a discuss about human behavior, and philosophy, or even evolution for that matter - doesn’t make any sense.

We are biological beings, we are not interacting elemental energy particles .

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Indeed.
I never had much patience for those kinds of contrived questions, because life is always more complicated.
But you got me surfing on the t

The Trolley Problem - David Schmidtz

2:10 We’re trying to get at a fundamental truth about ethics. {That seems a bit presumptuous, hasn’t ethics shown us that “truth” only has relevance within a specific framing. Billions of people out there, and everyone see the world through their own unique eyes & circumstance.

3:20 response; it’s a lie, there is always another way.

Ideals v. the real world

Here’s a good look at it, only two minutes.

Can Science Answer Philosophical Questions? - Dr. Graham Oppy (Test Of Faith Panel Discussion 2012)

This is interesting, especially the punch line:

“Questions that science can’t answer are questions that can’t be answered, full stop.”

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We are BOTH, but I get your point.

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And I get your’s - those molecules, cells and systems emerge out of that QM matrix.

But our senses can only become aware of the stuff on this side of the macroscopic cosmos. Guess that’s my benchmark.

:+1:

Although if we really want to step it up in this dialogue, check out my virtual pal, SubAnima.

Inthedark, this will blow your mind, … but in a good way.

Organisms Are Not Made Of Atoms

Feb 11, 2022 #philosophy #individuality #organism

“What am I?” is one of the oldest questions in philosophy but we may have been asking the wrong question this whole time. We are dynamic processes moving through time, informational aggregates predicting our future selves, but we are not made of atoms.

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A lot of people online pretend like they know QM or Buddhism, but really they don’t. They take some odd bit data or some seeming contradictory statement about what’s “real” and play with words. It doesn’t help.

https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/17340

A few quotes

So “free of being caused” is not what anyone in any real world application means by freedom of the will. Rather, my will is free when nothing and no one interferes with - when what I will is allowed to happen - and that means, no one tries to replace my will theirs (like someone coercing me to act against my own will), and nothing thwarts my will (like a defective thermostat that constantly resets to to some value I did not set it to). We might even be able to vet the desires we were inalienably given to assent to them - on objective analysis it makes sense that we should desire to eat and be loved or get along with others; if we were soundly informed and had the power to change these desires, we wouldn’t.

He gives an example of robot that is programmed to do something, but what if others what to “free” that robot from its programming, by, well re-programming it?

Fact is, far from there being no difference, there is a universe of difference between his being programmed to believe something, and his being programmed to believe only claims he can personally vet with actual evidence and reason.

And, something to really think about, what happens when you embrace the idea of hard determinism in a way that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, like believing that everything is determined all the way to the Big Bang…

Hard determinism thus condemns you to being the victim of manipulation, coercion, external control, violation and subversion of your autonomy, by denying there is any difference between their presence or absences; it then even virally recruits you into trying to make other into victims of these themselves.

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Man! Ain’t that the truth.
I love Richard Feynman quotes.

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Uhh that’s the point of the problem, it’s complicated and meant to illustrate our intuitions about it rather than have a solution to them. That’s the point of thought experiments.

I don’t think that’s true, it just means not everything can be measured empirically. For example we can’t really measure subjective experience but we know it’s there and there are sensations and feelings going on.

You can even make the case that science doesn’t answer questions because nothing in it is definitive, it’s just a model we make to explain and predict reality.

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He’s incorrect, fully stop. Individuals are made of atoms, what he’s talking about sounds like process philosophy, which has its own problems.

Isn’t the Big Bang more theoretical model of what we think happened? As for what started it all we still don’t know, or even if there was a start. Some theories say that the universe always existed which might have some issues with determinism.

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Ok, I’ll admit that was pretty good, if not just a review of what I already knew. But I can’t help but laugh at the end where it literally loops back to David Krakauer the guy I was having trouble with and a better explanation of his work then anything that other dude went on about.

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Answer to Is a consensus actually necessary in science? by Charles Tips

The list on here was sort of related since it echos my feelings that science isn’t divorced from philosophy.

Though I also don’t agree with most of it, especially with animals being robots.