A fine choice for the House Committee for Science, Space, and Technology

[Sasaki Kojiro]

That's a nice one. Science and logic are not anywhere close to replace the real thing, but it'll help to filter out wich one of the tips you picked up from media, family and friends that's actually useful (and that's not counting that those tips are science in a broader way, since it's data gatering). There's thousands of situations that you might experience or not, where science can be a helpful starting point. There's also many situations were you'll have to pick the girl without dating them first, so to speak. How does Sasaki do it then?

Science is good because it helps you filter out all the bad science? That's an argument for understanding science and statistics and how psychological studies are done, sure. But not an argument in favor of the studies themselves.

Because coming up with the idea 200 years ago, that a 2000-year old book should be taken as the literal truth (except when it doesn't), sounds reasonable? And the main difference is yet this: According to the principles of science, the college kid is doing it wrong if he's taking the latest scientific study as gospel. According to the principles of "science" based from fundamentalism, the college kid is doing it perfectly correct if he's taking creationism as gospel.

This is great for, say, chemistry. But if you are going the "big questions", it is no longer significant praise of the principles of science to say that according to them the college kid is doing it wrong if he's taking the latest study as gospel. Because in that case, according to the principles of science, we should limit our beliefs in accordance with the scientific evidence--and therefore, if we lack scientific evidence that something is good or bad we should not venture too far in saying it is. This mindset often leads straight to naturalism--"people naturally do x, so what we say about it is that it's not really bad".

In other words, the only reason the principles of science are so inherently undogmatic is because science should rightfully be limited to a small area.

Needless to say, scientists and religious people have similar attitudes towards people who accept as gospel certain moral principles that they think are true and important.

Anyway:
Tradition: ...Right, the big questions, we solved those ages ago, the answer was... Look a big wizard in the sky! "Runs away."
Religion: We've been thinking about this a lot and the answer is... The big wizard in the sky did it, using diamonds!
Science: The big wizard in the sky holds all the answers? Amazing! Do we have any real, useful data on him? No? Booring! Wake me up when you do.
Scientists: It would be really cool to know all the answers that the big wizard in the sky is supposed to know. Let's try! Even if we fail we might learn something.
"Moral" philosopher: The big wizard doesn't exist so we can make up what we want.
Moral philosopher: Let's try to generalize the best ideas the big wizard is supposed to have, mix it and see if we can get a better standard.

???

I think it's really hard to summarize these things and not be goofy but can't we do better than that?

Tradition: old people have had more time on this earth, they have seen and experienced more...I remember being dumb when I was younger, I know better about stuff now, I expect to mature as I get older, so I expect some old people to be smarter than me...things that generation after generation have supported have some truth in them

Religion: I feel this strongly by intuition, I had an epiphany, the world is a beautiful place/the sun god will kill us all oh ****, I feel physical disgust when people are dishonest/eat random innocuous foods sometimes even though no harm comes to it, some people are more like animals and that's bad, some people seem somehow pure and more divine, we should emulate them and respect them/build giant statues made of gold in their honor

Scientists: this herb does seem to help cure this disease, but there is nothing in it that has that effect, it is peoples belief in the herb that cures them. Therefore irrational beliefs can be good. But perhaps if we experiment with other herbs we will find one that works better

Good moral philosopher: After much experience of life and thinking and learning from others I have come to understand some things, which I will try to express in a way that will hopefully be helpful to others, perhaps by writing them down in the form of letters to my nephew

Rationalist moral philosopher: When asked whether they would divert a trolley that was on track to kill 5 people on to a track that would only kill one person, most people said that they would divert the trolley, thus showing that they have at least some support for utilitarianism. However, they refuse to consider chucking a fat guy in front of the trolley to divert it. The masses (unlike we moral philosophers) are inconsistent and confused in their moral thinking

"Continental" moral philosopher: This other philosophy is too boring, I don't want to be a boring person, so I will express things in an exciting way with lots of flourishes and work real hard to make it kind of obscure so that people can't figure out exactly what I'm saying and then see how wacky it is

There are no clear answers on the big questions, that's part of why they're big. And any tool is flawed. But more information is always helpful and in sometimes it can even give an almost full answer

Sometimes in psychology the randomly select a group of people and do something experimental and analyze the results.

Other times they do case studies and just try to understand people...similar to how we do things in our regular lives. If you don't respect the first, but respect the second which you still think of as science then we don't disagree in this regard...

I'll clarify: I mentioned doctrine, which is basically most organized religion. It can be misused in both senses of the word: misapplied and mispurposed. Science - the scientific method - can be both misapplied and mispurposed as well. Personal religion, or spirituality, however, can not be misapplied - it is too nebulous and idiosyncratic.

Ok, I agree, and I think I talked about this in my 2nd bit above to ironside.

But I also think that people have personal religions that we can see will not lost given other realities about the world and their personality.

Why should religion be granted more prestige or authority?

It shouldn't. But we should understand that we cannot take passion and emotion out of our thinking about moral questions. When we understand that, religion is changed from something to be scorned to something that is interesting.

I find it strange that you so easily ignore all the great ethical dilemmas generated by the fruits of science.

I said that some new philosophy is needed as the world changes. But I'm curious what you mean here. Gattaca type stuff?

Your moral beliefs are not consistent? They seem consistent to me. You seem to be applying rational principles, or what is usually deemed rational: "This is harmful, so I should attempt to mitigate its expression."

They aren't consistent.

This is like saying my social beliefs are consistent because I generally interact with people the same way and thinking I must be applying rational principles therefore. But if I actually tried to state any rational social principles I had I would come up with something that wasn't true or that was trivially true.

I think you have everything backwards from the usual manner.

backwards is forwards as we would know if we didn't bow down before the dogmatic authority of linguists

'Presidential debates are not about facts, they're about principles'. You evidently hold many principles. What are you on about?

Well, let's say Mitt Romney has a principle that "america shouldn't apologize for her values". The debate would be about that more than about specifics. But my pointing that out doesn't mean I have much respect for taking that principle as a starting point.

I don't object entirely to attempts to take a stab at explaining something by stating a principle. But principles are usually considered to be more than that-- "I'm a principled person" etc.

Can you give an example?

Lying and honesty...but I'm not sure what to say if you can't see how complicated moral judgments are in that regard. What's the definition of lying? Many people disagree. How do you judge how bad it is that someone said something untrue? There's a lot going on.

Philosophical debates on the subject are usually either simplistic and wrong or absurdly laborious.

How do you? You're the biggest moralist in the forum!

I don't decide on premises. I'm influenced by what I see, read, hear, etc and my thoughts about it and my attempts to express it. Then when I come into contact with a situation I react to it in a way that relates to my previous experiences/thoughts/feelings. So does everyone by the way, it's just that some people have intuitions but also notice that the situation matches up to a principle they heard of, and go by that principle.

Which is not necessarily bad--in fact the real point of having cut and dry moral principles like that is to counter weakness and vice that will otherwise have much more wriggle room. But that's another issue.

If I'm the biggest moralist it's because I treat a disgusted reaction I have to something as morally significant, and say something, instead of asking myself whether "the harm principle" is involved or whatever...


****************

Anyway, going back the OP and the different reactions people have to creationists.

Let's say that you were someone who believed in a fairly moderate view of abortion. First trimester, or something. And it was clear to you that there was no way that first trimester abortion was going to be made illegal in your country. But, there was a strong movement in favor of "until birth", and the arguments and mindset of the people arguing for it gave you no reason to believe that these people wouldn't extend their support to infanticide. And lets say these people often avoided making a decent and comprehensive case for their own belief and mocked the position of the "life begins at conception" religious believers instead. Wouldn't you be put off by them doing that?

That doesn't describe me in the case of abortion, but you understand if its expanded to a general disagreement, yes?

[Montmorency]

backwards is forwards as we would know if we didn't bow down before the dogmatic authority of linguists

Pass the bong, Jimmy.

Gattaca type stuff?

Think back to the neuroscience crypticism. I believe we covered Gattaca in another thread.

as the world changes

Evolution, auto-evolution, etc. It's not just the world that is changing.

They aren't consistent.

This is like saying my social beliefs are consistent because I generally interact with people the same way and thinking I must be applying rational principles therefore. But if I actually tried to state any rational social principles I had I would come up with something that wasn't true or that was trivially true.

I don't decide on premises. I'm influenced by what I see, read, hear, etc and my thoughts about it and my attempts to express it. Then when I come into contact with a situation I react to it in a way that relates to my previous experiences/thoughts/feelings. So does everyone by the way, it's just that some people have intuitions but also notice that the situation matches up to a principle they heard of, and go by that principle.

Well, that technically is a principle. Not a moral principle, perhaps, but a behavioral one. It's certainly a broadly consistent behavioral pattern.

But, there was a strong movement in favor of "until birth", and the arguments and mindset of the people arguing for it gave you no reason to believe that these people wouldn't extend their support to infanticide. And lets say these people often avoided making a decent and comprehensive case for their own belief and mocked the position of the "life begins at conception" religious believers instead. Wouldn't you be put off by them doing that?

The opposite is fairly common. But the "extend their support to infanticide" bit is redundant, as 3rd-trimester abortion would already be infanticide to such an individual.

[Papewaio]

Entropy not linguistics determines that backwards does not always equal forwards.

It helps with the historical narrative that entropy makes reversing nigh on impossible.

Now the assumption is that religion is more moral then no religion.

I would contend that literacy has a greater impact on human rights then any particular religion.

200 years ago as England tipped the 50% literacy rate the age of Enlightenment was stirring in the Western world.

Christainty had an 1800 year head start to get rid of slavery, imbue equal rights to woman and a host of other rights. It wasn't religion of any sort it was widespread literacy that improved humanity. The printing press, books, newspapers, radio, TV, Internet, google, Facebook and Twitter... Literacy and communication has tamed the wild beasts that are us humans.

Thousands of years of slavery, child abuse , inequality, animal abuse, torture and murder. Not stopped by religion of any form, instead held at bay by the ability to read and write about our fellow man.

[Strike For The South]

Entropy not linguistics determines that backwards does not always equal forwards.

It helps with the historical narrative that entropy makes reversing nigh on impossible.

Now the assumption is that religion is more moral then no religion.

I would contend that literacy has a greater impact on human rights then any particular religion.

200 years ago as England tipped the 50% literacy rate the age of Enlightenment was stirring in the Western world.

Christainty had an 1800 year head start to get rid of slavery, imbue equal rights to woman and a host of other rights. It wasn't religion of any sort it was widespread literacy that improved humanity. The printing press, books, newspapers, radio, TV, Internet, google, Facebook and Twitter... Literacy and communication has tamed the wild beasts that are us humans.

Thousands of years of slavery, child abuse , inequality, animal abuse, torture and murder. Not stopped by religion of any form, instead held at bay by the ability to read and write about our fellow man.

This same enlightenment allowed the industrialize killings of the holocaust and the weaponization of the atom.

The written word has been used to draw lines in the sand more often than not.

Progress is an illusion

[Papewaio]

Statistics say otherwise.

Even rolling in the world wars a 20th century human has less chance of dying by murder then one in the 19th century. Go back eight hundred years and the chance of such murder goes down by an order of magnitude.

Progress is pretty easy to point to when the sheer number of retired people is so large that the western economies are barely able to cope with such an unprecedented number of people living so long.

Show me a Roman Emperor who ate chocolate, drank coffee, ate pizza, flew in an airplane, used the Internet, had access to antibiotics. Then you might have a point that there is no progress.

[Strike For The South]

I didn't say there wasn't any

I said it was an illusion

[ICantSpellDawg]

I didn't say there wasn't any

I said it was an illusion

Nonsense, c'mon. It is an objective fact that time progresses and new technology is discovered that provides new potential for the human race. Are you a surrealist now? I disagree with Pape's assertions, but not that there has been objective progress that is not illusory unless everything is.

[Ironside]

Science is good because it helps you filter out all the bad science? That's an argument for understanding science and statistics and how psychological studies are done, sure. But not an argument in favor of the studies themselves.

Nah, alternatives are making theories by yourself (hardwired popular, but leads often wrong), go only on your own experience (insufficient), or going by "common sense", which can be summarized as all the experience you've picked up. So it's usually the best by those options, but since you have media with its false data and insufficient data from friends and family, you'll need something more as well.

Ever done a good psychology test (there's planty of bad ones though)? It'll go something like this on the points: Lol totally wrong. Wrong, but I can see how you got there. Correctish. So true. Man, I would never have come up with it, but everyone agrees it's an excellent fit, including me in retrospect. The last part is really hard to get otherwise.

This is great for, say, chemistry. But if you are going the "big questions", it is no longer significant praise of the principles of science to say that according to them the college kid is doing it wrong if he's taking the latest study as gospel. Because in that case, according to the principles of science, we should limit our beliefs in accordance with the scientific evidence--and therefore, if we lack scientific evidence that something is good or bad we should not venture too far in saying it is. This mindset often leads straight to naturalism--"people naturally do x, so what we say about it is that it's not really bad".

In other words, the only reason the principles of science are so inherently undogmatic is because science should rightfully be limited to a small area.

Needless to say, scientists and religious people have similar attitudes towards people who accept as gospel certain moral principles that they think are true and important.

You're not familiar with advanced chemistry and biochemistry I take it? Those got areas worse than social science when it comes to vagueness. Statistics are the only thing that works, maybe.

I'm going to put it this way. Have some of the big questions changed because of science? Yes, well rather thanks of the knowledge gathered by science. If that's the case, what does rejecting science tells us?

???

I think it's really hard to summarize these things and not be goofy but can't we do better than that?

It was probably a bit missed when I went on with the goofy list, but the original point was that traditions don't really have an answer to the big questions, they rather fumbled together something and since it's traditions, that's how it works.

Religion are dealing with the big questions, but often falls back to that the gods did it. And since the gods did it according to my interpretation, I'm really right on the matter.

So no method is really equiped for it, partially because some depends on your values and people will have different values.
Will that authority searching person change with any system? No, so why bother picking him up as science is bad? He would be as bad in the other systems as well.

Sometimes in psychology the randomly select a group of people and do something experimental and analyze the results.

Other times they do case studies and just try to understand people...similar to how we do things in our regular lives. If you don't respect the first, but respect the second which you still think of as science then we don't disagree in this regard...

Both are useful. The first is good for extreme situations and to understand single or a few factors, the second one provides interactions and context. Take neurology for example, without shutting down braincenters, you'll never understand how they work and are linked together, yet on a normal person they're all (somewhat) functional. This have a massive influence in understanding human psychology.

Let's say that you were someone who believed in a fairly moderate view of abortion. First trimester, or something. And it was clear to you that there was no way that first trimester abortion was going to be made illegal in your country. But, there was a strong movement in favor of "until birth", and the arguments and mindset of the people arguing for it gave you no reason to believe that these people wouldn't extend their support to infanticide. And lets say these people often avoided making a decent and comprehensive case for their own belief and mocked the position of the "life begins at conception" religious believers instead. Wouldn't you be put off by them doing that?

In your example, you're allying yourself with the "abortion after conception is murder and deserves the death penalty"-crowd. Pick your battles.

Pape, while I agree that literacy and communication certainly have helped, it's a multitude of factors behind the lesser violence.

[Papewaio]

Multitude of factors, yes. Very very much so. Other factors include wealth, distribution of it, lifespan and of course general education.

The decrease in violence is closely linked to increase in communications that includes better roads, healthier livestock which until a hundred years ago was the main powered transport, libraries, monasteries, universities, scholars and teachers. Which in themselves are an increase in social wealth and infrastructure.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

So,

1) What are the basic science advances that have changed our view of the big questions, and which questions?
2) What are some psychology studies that really show us things we couldn't have known otherwise on the important topics? Treating the abnormal, understanding sensation/perception, and medical therapeutical stuff is a different category.
3) Same as 2, but for the neuroscience, brain imaging type studies

The stuff I've read about falls into three categories: 1) wrong, 2) not really important, 3) laborious and questionable support for something that you will likely come across in the course of a humanities education, which psychologists don't have

But obviously I quit looking into it at a certain point.

We know that science and reason can work well destructively, in pointing out flaws and impossibilities, and this can open peoples eyes. But we are talking here about a direct advance.

[Kralizec]

By your own admission, you're not a creationist. I assume you "believe" in the standard scientific view of self-replicating molecules being generated by chance and evolving into life forms that are more recognisable to us. I can understand why someone wouldn't really care about the evolution/creationism controversy, but I can't for the love of god understand why you take the side of the creationists.

Science literally means "knowledge". There's also something called "the scientific method" as advanced by Popper foremost (allthough he was probably too dismissive of inductive reasoning). Defined in it's simplest terms, I can't think of any rational reason why people would oppose either.

I'm getting the impression that you have a warped view of what Humanities is. Psychology is part of it, by the way. With the possible exception of religious studies, they're all sciences that concern themselves with the human mind and it's products. Religious studies can be scientific provided that they follow an empirical setup, but a strictly theological study (i.e. reasoning from religious premises) isn't. In any case the humanities are irrelevant when we're dealing with subjects that fall out of the scope of human society, such as the origin of life which goes beyond humans.

About your questions:

1 - I interpret this as "which scientific advances led to a drastic change in which humans see things". Evolution is an obvious one. Other ones include metereology and seismology, which have shown us that natural disasters really aren't Acts of God, or at least provided a natural explanation we can understand and believe. The discovery of the atom and molecule debunked the whole ancient concept of "elements" as conceived by Greek philosophers.
Or an example that's relevant to pretty much everyone: historically many children died in shortly after birth, and the parents would ask "why, God, why?". The local priest would likely mutter something along the lines of "God works in mysterious ways we can't comprehend, also she's in a better place now". By inductive reasoning people discovered that if midwives and doctors washed their hands before assisting in childbirth, the fatalities dropped enormously. Later on we discovered that microbes were responsible for most diseases. I would not dismiss the priest's words as useless, because they serve a real social purpose, but they're not much help in answering the "big questions that really matter"

2 - a flawed question, I think. If you don't think treatment, understanding of sensation/perception or having an emperical understanding of why humans act the way they do is important, then the answer is invariably "there are none". I fail to see what other discipline could produce the same knowledge without becoming part of what we'd call "psychology" - since it's the study of the human mind.

3 - same as 2 really. I'll add that neuroscience has revealed that there are physical causes, instead of metaphysical reasons like a "it's the soul", that are responsible for how humans think and perceive things.

[Montmorency]

Well, this one is well-known: interfering with the activity of certain brain regions by means of magnetic fields causes a temporary change in how those affected approach and respond to moral dilemmas - to put it simply. It's part of a larger subset of behavioral changes that can be produced via transcranial magnetic stimulation. I'd love to see how you would react to such a treatment.

We can dial it up from there if you think this one's trivial?

As someone who conceives of moral perception as stemming from the sum of one's own experiences, shouldn't you be interested in what neuroscience can tell us about how decisions and thoughts with respect to morality are represented in the brain?

[Sasaki Kojiro]

By your own admission, you're not a creationist. I assume you "believe" in the standard scientific view of self-replicating molecules being generated by chance and evolving into life forms that are more recognisable to us. I can understand why someone wouldn't really care about the evolution/creationism controversy, but I can't for the love of god understand why you take the side of the creationists.

Like I said--it's as if I'm defending a "life begins at conception" person (who I'm confidant is not going to effect change in our country) vs some people I have profound disagreements with. In other countries, the creationist types are much more of a problem.

An unfortunate side effect of the left's hero worship of famous progressives of the past is that they want the world to face the same problems so that they can be just as heroic--that's how you end up with people accusing others of racism left and right and occupy wall street protesters singing civil rights tunes.

The real world has moved on.

Science literally means "knowledge". There's also something called "the scientific method" as advanced by Popper foremost (allthough he was probably too dismissive of inductive reasoning). Defined in it's simplest terms, I can't think of any rational reason why people would oppose either.

I'm getting the impression that you have a warped view of what Humanities is. Psychology is part of it, by the way. With the possible exception of religious studies, they're all sciences that concern themselves with the human mind and it's products. Religious studies can be scientific provided that they follow an empirical setup, but a strictly theological study (i.e. reasoning from religious premises) isn't. In any case the humanities are irrelevant when we're dealing with subjects that fall out of the scope of human society, such as the origin of life which goes beyond humans.

Let's say you have a piece of music. If you listen to it, that's observation, and will result in you knowing things about it. Simply doing that and then trying to express what you think is part of the humanities. Trying to go beyond that, doing brain scans of people listening to music, coming up with theories about different tones and how the effect mood, testing those theories, etc, that's science. Make sense?

1 - I interpret this as "which scientific advances led to a drastic change in which humans see things". Evolution is an obvious one. Other ones include metereology and seismology, which have shown us that natural disasters really aren't Acts of God, or at least provided a natural explanation we can understand and believe. The discovery of the atom and molecule debunked the whole ancient concept of "elements" as conceived by Greek philosophers.
Or an example that's relevant to pretty much everyone: historically many children died in shortly after birth, and the parents would ask "why, God, why?". The local priest would likely mutter something along the lines of "God works in mysterious ways we can't comprehend, also she's in a better place now". By inductive reasoning people discovered that if midwives and doctors washed their hands before assisting in childbirth, the fatalities dropped enormously. Later on we discovered that microbes were responsible for most diseases. I would not dismiss the priest's words as useless, because they serve a real social purpose, but they're not much help in answering the "big questions that really matter"

Yes, we know that science can have destructive ability. They can disprove a humanities kind of theory that people come up with. I'm just rather indifferent to this ability when it comes to what we're talking about. For one thing, it's much simpler to just avoid writing the kind of goofy humanities nonsense that silly professors come up with. For another, science in that capacity is hostile to all myth, and sometimes myths and stories are the means by which someone has grasped at an important truth. Third, often it's merely a weapon in the hands of people who don't have any better ideas, or who have worse ideas, which they are able to make immune to attack by the best abilities of science at the time. Fourth, you still have to arrive at the important truths...

I don't think the question in your example is "Why did this happen?" by the way. It's "how do I deal with this". I've heard that people were simply less attached to their children until they reached a certain age back when infant deaths were common, don't know if it's true or not though. I'd be surprised if you think scientific knowledge has helped us deal with the death of a child though.

2 - a flawed question, I think. If you don't think treatment, understanding of sensation/perception or having an emperical understanding of why humans act the way they do is important, then the answer is invariably "there are none". I fail to see what other discipline could produce the same knowledge without becoming part of what we'd call "psychology" - since it's the study of the human mind.

3 - same as 2 really. I'll add that neuroscience has revealed that there are physical causes, instead of metaphysical reasons like a "it's the soul", that are responsible for how humans think and perceive things.

Treatment is important, sorry, I meant not important for what what we are disputing: the overreach of science. No one is saying that mystical medicine would be better--regardless of the excessive faith people have had in scientific medical studies.

So what do we know now that we believe in physical causes instead of metaphysical ones? That's the question I'm asking you guys.

Well, this one is well-known: interfering with the activity of certain brain regions by means of magnetic fields causes a temporary change in how those affected approach and respond to moral dilemmas - to put it simply. It's part of a larger subset of behavioral changes that can be produced via transcranial magnetic stimulation. I'd love to see how you would react to such a treatment.

We can dial it up from there if you think this one's trivial?

Well, I've never seen what's interesting about it. It sounds like a curiosity to me.

As someone who conceives of moral perception as stemming from the sum of one's own experiences, shouldn't you be interested in what neuroscience can tell us about how decisions and thoughts with respect to morality are represented in the brain?

I'm interested in personal, subjective knowledge of how decisions and thoughts with respect to morality occur. Just like I'm interested in my own experience of listening to a piece of music and not reading an article about the effect of heavy bass on the neural system. I'm not interested in knowledge for knowledge's sake here.

[Montmorency]

The real world has moved on.

How did you come to be possessed of such an uncommon and piercing insight?

Make sense?

Neuroscience would tell us far more about that experience than the humanities could.

So what do we know now that we believe in physical causes instead of metaphysical ones?

There is evidence for physical causes, to put it simply.

Fourth, you still have to arrive at the important truths...

Why, and how do you know your method is the most appropriate?

Well, I've never seen what's interesting about it. It sounds like a curiosity to me.

Seriously?

I'm not interested in knowledge for knowledge's sake here.

That's with magnetic fields, and is temporary.

We now have the ability to semi-invasively target specific neural circuits and activate or deactivate them, using the installed genetic expression of neuronal structures sensitive to predetermined stimuli. As we understand more of the brain cell classes and their functions, we will learn more of how neural circuits operate, how they interact with other neural circuits to produce complex behaviors - enduce a subject to pull a lever over and over again through neural manipulation -, sensation - switch pain processing with pleasure processing and cause the subject to cut itself with a knife voluntarily - and abstract attributes - including thought, belief, memory, value, consciousness, etc. We would be able to directly and permanently manipulate these thing, even to specification.

This is being done now, at the level of behavioral patterns, with small mammals. How many years before we move up to the hominids? You can't see the implications, or possible applications, of all this?

I'm interested in personal, subjective knowledge of how decisions and thoughts with respect to morality occur.

Trivial.

[HoreTore]

So,

1) What are the basic science advances that have changed our view of the big questions, and which questions?
2) What are some psychology studies that really show us things we couldn't have known otherwise on the important topics? Treating the abnormal, understanding sensation/perception, and medical therapeutical stuff is a different category.
3) Same as 2, but for the neuroscience, brain imaging type studies

The stuff I've read about falls into three categories: 1) wrong, 2) not really important, 3) laborious and questionable support for something that you will likely come across in the course of a humanities education, which psychologists don't have

But obviously I quit looking into it at a certain point.

We know that science and reason can work well destructively, in pointing out flaws and impossibilities, and this can open peoples eyes. But we are talking here about a direct advance.

I can start out with my own profession, education:

1. Piaget's theory of cognitive development.
2. Vygotsky's zones(I'm sorry to say I don't know the english term for his theory, and the norwegian one won't help you).
3. Jerome Bruner showed how language is learned.
4. John Dewey's "learning by doing", and much more.

All four are, among other things, psychologist, and reached their insights through the scientific method, not by looking in old books written a thousand years ago or through "common sense" alone.

And now, with the advent of neuroscience, our knowledge has expanded even further.

[Tellos Athenaios]

1) What are the basic science advances that have changed our view of the big questions, and which questions?

Advances in measuring time, through advances in physics, have lead us to redefine length in terms of time (and speed of light) as opposed to being a "distinct" type of domain. That is we do not define speed in terms of distance over delta in time, but we define length in terms of a constant speed (of light) times a particular delta of time! So how tall are you is now officially defined in terms of how long would it take light in a vacuum to travel from top to toes?

Advances in physics in general have had striking implications for our day to day lives, including the questions "what are we made of?" and "where do we come from?"

2) What are some psychology studies that really show us things we couldn't have known otherwise on the important topics? Treating the abnormal, understanding sensation/perception, and medical therapeutical stuff is a different category.

Herd mentality type things. Mass psychology is key to designing safe buildings and vessels, to building user friendly and desirable products, or effective marketing (people don't like going back for seconds so you make more by selling larger portions up front, for instance). Also it turns out that people are terrible with quantities: one, two, three, more, many is roughly what the average Joe can deal with. Questions like "which is bigger: 10^6 or 2^19?" are very hard to do correctly.

3) Same as 2, but for the neuroscience, brain imaging type studies

How the brain works, of course; and by extension how we might aid people with e.g. Alzheimer's to remain mentally able for as long as possible and correctly diagnosing brain damage. Additionally study of the brain also has application in information science, AI, and CS (algorithms, neural networks, distributed systems). Understanding our brain's response to audio and visual input can help us design places which are more "friendly"/"soothing" on the nerves.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

I can start out with my own profession, education:

1. Piaget's theory of cognitive development.
2. Vygotsky's zones(I'm sorry to say I don't know the english term for his theory, and the norwegian one won't help you).
3. Jerome Bruner showed how language is learned.
4. John Dewey's "learning by doing", and much more.

Thanks, I forgot all about this stuff. But I think it's in the same category as therapy. Children and people with mental illnesses are outside the normal humanities because we can't remember/don't know what it's like to be them. Scientific study is a very important assist to normal methods in both education and therapy.

Advances in measuring time, through advances in physics, have lead us to redefine length in terms of time (and speed of light) as opposed to being a "distinct" type of domain. That is we do not define speed in terms of distance over delta in time, but we define length in terms of a constant speed (of light) times a particular delta of time! So how tall are you is now officially defined in terms of how long would it take light in a vacuum to travel from top to toes?

Advances in physics in general have had striking implications for our day to day lives, including the questions "what are we made of?" and "where do we come from?"

This makes me curious...I don't find those questions interesting or significant, what do you see in them?

Herd mentality type things. Mass psychology is key to designing safe buildings and vessels, to building user friendly and desirable products, or effective marketing (people don't like going back for seconds so you make more by selling larger portions up front, for instance). Also it turns out that people are terrible with quantities: one, two, three, more, many is roughly what the average Joe can deal with. Questions like "which is bigger: 10^6 or 2^19?" are very hard to do correctly.

How the brain works, of course; and by extension how we might aid people with e.g. Alzheimer's to remain mentally able for as long as possible and correctly diagnosing brain damage. Additionally study of the brain also has application in information science, AI, and CS (algorithms, neural networks, distributed systems). Understanding our brain's response to audio and visual input can help us design places which are more "friendly"/"soothing" on the nerves.

I think people have had a pretty good understanding of mass psychology, difficulty with large numbers, and what made a building look nice before science. These benefits you describe are technological improvements or of simply utilitarian value. I'm not knocking technology, utility, better education, better medicine, etc etc...far from it...but this is exactly what I mean, we all know that there are so many improvements in our world due to science that we try to apply the method in areas where we should not apply it.

Are you praising science for making marketing more insidious by the way?


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I will say that after considering it I think you guys may be right in part--I'm probably undervaluing the destructive ability of science and reason, and the more rigorous ethos those can produce in some people. That would make an interesting historical question that I can't really answer.

That's with magnetic fields, and is temporary.

We now have the ability to semi-invasively target specific neural circuits and activate or deactivate them, using the installed genetic expression of neuronal structures sensitive to predetermined stimuli. As we understand more of the brain cell classes and their functions, we will learn more of how neural circuits operate, how they interact with other neural circuits to produce complex behaviors - enduce a subject to pull a lever over and over again through neural manipulation -, sensation - switch pain processing with pleasure processing and cause the subject to cut itself with a knife voluntarily - and abstract attributes - including thought, belief, memory, value, consciousness, etc. We would be able to directly and permanently manipulate these thing, even to specification.

This is being done now, at the level of behavioral patterns, with small mammals. How many years before we move up to the hominids? You can't see the implications, or possible applications, of all this?

So you are thinking about, say, giving someone endless willpower through technological manipulation? What should they do with that willpower? Should they choose willpower over endless contentment?

This is science fiction at the moment anyway

[Montmorency]

I think people have had a pretty good understanding of mass psychology

One of the major findings of cognitive psychology is that popular understandings of psychology and brain function are crap. This "common sense" approach is actually useless and wrong.

Here's another one: you can't see how any of this matters a whit. You go apenuts over animal rightists and science lovers. These are your values. Yet what happens when there is damage to brain areas responsible for value?

Decision-making becomes near-impossible. Because internal representations of value drive pretty much all voluntary action, the loss of these curtails voluntary action. If going to work is no more valuable - food on the table is no more valuable - than the next thing, how could you pursue it? Certainly logic is only useful for such individuals in coming to a decision abstractly - not practically. What does this show? That certain 'butthole' economists are spot on when they say that value is all in the head.

And you question the usefulness of a neurological approach to this?

[Tellos Athenaios]

This makes me curious...I don't find those questions interesting or significant, what do you see in them?

Only the basis of pretty much all meta physics.

I think people have had a pretty good understanding of mass psychology, difficulty with large numbers, and what made a building look nice before science.

Nope, they didn't. Mass psychology and difficulty with things like large numbers are not about "people will trample on each other in a bid to get out first when the building is on fire", or "doing sums is hard". It is about appreciating the consequences of that, specifically why certain designs work well even when everyone is a blind panic and why others don't. It also explains why people will frequently behave in a manner that goes against their own self interest, which has important application in economics for instance.

These benefits you describe are technological improvements or of simply utilitarian value. I'm not knocking technology, utility, better education, better medicine, etc etc...far from it...but this is exactly what I mean, we all know that there are so many improvements in our world due to science that we try to apply the method in areas where we should not apply it.

Well it is not so much about the improvements themselves (although that is what you asked for) but rather the implication: science brings us improvements in our understanding no matter the subject.

Are you praising science for making marketing more insidious by the way?

On the one hand, yes, but on the other hand it also allows us to understand when marketing needs to be reigned in or to communicate more effectively...