At the other end of the spectrum are the opponents of reductionism who are appalled by what they feel to be the bleakness of modern science. To whatever extent they and their world can be reduced to a matter of particles or fields and their interactions, they feel diminished by that knowledge....I would not try to answer these critics with a pep talk about the beauties of modern science. The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works.
Yeah… I understand the sentiment, but as someone who delivers those pep talks, I do think, in all seriousness, that the guy’s wrong. If we weren’t made out of particles we’d be made out of something else. Particles is just the stuff that stuff turns out to be made of. Anyone who has a problem with this has misunderstood something, or their real problem is something else.
For example, it is very depressing that people who die are gone forever. But this is not a matter of them being made out of particles. It would be just as bad if they were made out of freeplegrunge and then ceased to exist forever.
I recently watched your second bloggingheads debate with Adam Frank and the point you make above is one I think you should have stated clearly in that debate. Mr (Prof?) Frank based part of his argument on the feeling of fulfillment that one receives being in a relationship and believing that there is a metaphysical element to the relationship (and similar situations). Yet he does not actually believe that metaphysical element exists...only that the belief has some kind of psychological benefit. The way you addressed your position made it sound like the reductionist view is one in which feelings of fulfillment and “meaning” (a term that I think is fairly weakly defined in these discussions) cannot exist or exist differently. I know this was not your point.
Someone who has a fuzzy warm feeling from a metaphysical belief is still getting warm and fuzzy in a physical world in which their belief is wrong. There is nothing inherent about the nature of the world or knowing things about the nature of the world that precludes feeling satisfied, happy, warm, complete, or fulfilled. Those feelings exist within the substrate of physical material that makes up the world already. As you have pointed out before, those feelings would be all the more genuine and meaningful if they were founded on beliefs that more closely matched the actual working world.
I think in that debate you were approaching this topic somewhat from the side of things.
“I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.”
Actually, I agree. I’m not entirely clear on why people being made out of particles might be a bad thing. It’s just the last clause of the last sentence that I find awesome. People talk about how atheists have no morality, or how there is no point to living if you’re an atheist, as if this is bayesian evidence against atheism. Besides the fact that they’re wrong.
Although that is true, I think people who believe in freeplegrunge also believe that freeplegrunge implies immortality; indeed, that’s the reason they believe in freeplegrunge, although they rarely admit it. So your statement misses the mark a bit; it’s not the lack of freeplegrunge people object to, it’s the lack of immortality. And that is not only depressing, it really is a property of particles as opposed to freeplegrunge; at least this is true in the minds of freeplegrungists, because of the very strong coupling between their freeplegrunge-belief and their immortality-belief.
At the other end of the spectrum are the opponents of reductionism who are appalled by what they feel to be the bleakness of modern science. To whatever extent they and their world can be reduced to a matter of particles or fields and their interactions, they feel diminished by that knowledge....I would not try to answer these critics with a pep talk about the beauties of modern science. The reductionist worldview is chilling and impersonal. It has to be accepted as it is, not because we like it, but because that is the way the world works.
--Steven Weinberg
Yeah… I understand the sentiment, but as someone who delivers those pep talks, I do think, in all seriousness, that the guy’s wrong. If we weren’t made out of particles we’d be made out of something else. Particles is just the stuff that stuff turns out to be made of. Anyone who has a problem with this has misunderstood something, or their real problem is something else.
For example, it is very depressing that people who die are gone forever. But this is not a matter of them being made out of particles. It would be just as bad if they were made out of freeplegrunge and then ceased to exist forever.
I recently watched your second bloggingheads debate with Adam Frank and the point you make above is one I think you should have stated clearly in that debate. Mr (Prof?) Frank based part of his argument on the feeling of fulfillment that one receives being in a relationship and believing that there is a metaphysical element to the relationship (and similar situations). Yet he does not actually believe that metaphysical element exists...only that the belief has some kind of psychological benefit. The way you addressed your position made it sound like the reductionist view is one in which feelings of fulfillment and “meaning” (a term that I think is fairly weakly defined in these discussions) cannot exist or exist differently. I know this was not your point.
Someone who has a fuzzy warm feeling from a metaphysical belief is still getting warm and fuzzy in a physical world in which their belief is wrong. There is nothing inherent about the nature of the world or knowing things about the nature of the world that precludes feeling satisfied, happy, warm, complete, or fulfilled. Those feelings exist within the substrate of physical material that makes up the world already. As you have pointed out before, those feelings would be all the more genuine and meaningful if they were founded on beliefs that more closely matched the actual working world.
I think in that debate you were approaching this topic somewhat from the side of things.
“I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.”
Virginia Woolf
Actually, I agree. I’m not entirely clear on why people being made out of particles might be a bad thing. It’s just the last clause of the last sentence that I find awesome. People talk about how atheists have no morality, or how there is no point to living if you’re an atheist, as if this is bayesian evidence against atheism. Besides the fact that they’re wrong.
I should have pointed that out.
Although that is true, I think people who believe in freeplegrunge also believe that freeplegrunge implies immortality; indeed, that’s the reason they believe in freeplegrunge, although they rarely admit it. So your statement misses the mark a bit; it’s not the lack of freeplegrunge people object to, it’s the lack of immortality. And that is not only depressing, it really is a property of particles as opposed to freeplegrunge; at least this is true in the minds of freeplegrungists, because of the very strong coupling between their freeplegrunge-belief and their immortality-belief.