Andrew Brown of the Guardian—whose continued tenure there remains a mystery to me—spends a lot of his time trashing New Atheism and telling us what’s good about faith. Although he is, I think, a nonbeliever himself (correct me if I’m wrong), his regular and splenetic tirades against atheism cross the bounds of mere philosophical disagreement. I think the man has a sneaking desire to go to church.
But as I’ve followed him over the years, his columns have become not only more vitriolic, but more incoherent. Such is his latest: “Science has nothing to tell us about the soul? I disagree.”
It’s a strange title, and gives no idea what he’s going to say. Certainly his respect for science isn’t huge, and so what is its connection with the soul?
It turns out that Brown just wants to diss atheism again, but also use “science” to tell us what the soul is not. He also throws in some incoherent philosophy-boosting at the end. His point remains unclear to the end.
First, Brown never defines what he means by “soul,” even though he says science tells us something about what its properties don’t consist of. But before he begins that disquisition, he takes a gratuitious swipe at “scientism”:
Generally, and like most of the RSA audience, I am wholly on the side of [Iain] McGilchrist when he argues against scientism, as in his wonderful squelching of Steven Pinker:
“There is more truth about the human predicament in King Lear than in a thousand textbooks of genetics, irrespective of whether the play is a faithful account of the historical Lear or not, and indeed of whether there was ever a King Lear at all. And on whether there is a God or not, true science can have precisely nothing to say.”
If you wish, have a look at that “squelching.” It’s not impressive; just turf defense. What’s striking, about McGilchrist’s comment and Brown’s reaction, though, are two things. First, the notion that science has little to say about the “human predicament”. That’s not really the case. If our “predicament” involves bad behavior or selfishness of others, or anything that results from evolution or quantifiable effects of the environment, science can help with that. (The problem is that Brown doesn’t define “predicament,” either.) If you have a feeling of Weltschmerz or ennui, maybe antidepressants can help. If our predicament is lack of food or affliction with disease, call on Mr Science. If we’re feeling alone, maybe we’re suffering from the need for social interaction that evolved in our ancestors. If we’re suffering from the nihilism of unbelief, as Brown wishes we would, ask why we feel a need for religion. Science has some ideas.
What King Lear can tell us is how it feels to descend into madness. It makes us think about modernity, senility, the loss of family. It stirs us emotionally, but does it really inform us about the human predicament? If it has, how has it helped us solve that “human predicament”? And, indeed, scholars are divided on what the play really means.
This bears on the age-old question of whether art can tell us something about the world, or even about ourselves. (I’ll leave religion aside, as I think it tells us nothing meaningful about either the human predicament or the universe.) What art does is enable us to experience—sometimes—what it’s like to be in another’s shoes; it tells us that we are not alone in feeling some emotions; and it makes us ponder and question our lives. It makes us see objects from other angles. It is, perhaps, a tool or incitement to gain knowledge, but is it knowledge itself?
But art sometimes simply (and I use that word lightly) incites our emotions in an ineffable way. I am deeply moved by some works of Beethoven: they stir in me some emotions that are ineffable—but some day might be understood by science! In principle, science may also be capable of telling us why some people, like me, are moved by Beethoven but not Mozart, for this may be a matter of neurology and life experience. (Don’t expect such explanations to be forthcoming soon.) Science is at present unable to explain why we react as we do to art, music, and literature, but is that all really beyond its ambit? I wouldn’t hasten to say “yes.”
I would, however, be dubious about what the humanities tell us about “the human predicament,” for that implies that the humanities impart some knowledge about the world beyond what we could learn in other ways. Of that I’m not sure.
If you’re a regular here, you probably know that one of my favorite pieces of literature in English is James Joyce’s “The Dead.” But what does that tell me about the human predicament? I’m hard pressed to say. I am irked by Gabriel’s pomposity and moved by his realization of his own solipsism as well as the futility of life. His wife Greta’s revelation that she once loved another man, and much more deeply than she loved Gabriel, tells us that we cannot really know others in the deepest sense, and that our knowledge of intense love may be deficient. Gabriel’s musings on the future death of his aunts reinforces our feelings of the ephemeral nature of life, and may make us resolve to live more intensely.
But does that help us with the human predicament? Is that really “knowledge”? For one can say “life is short” in much more mundane ways, and it tells us exactly the same thing. What moves me about Joyce’s last paragraphs—the most lovely prose ever put down in English—is the melding of scene, emotion, and character in beautiful and stirring words. It is the music of language. It doesn’t say much about the human predicament, but always brings me to tears.
But I digress—hugely, I’m afraid; but I always bristle when someone says that the arts tell us things that are beyond science. Perhaps that’s true—and readers can weigh in—but it doesn’t strike me as immediately correct. The arts provide satisfactions that science doesn’t, but that’s a different matter.
Back to Brown. He decides to tell us what science has discovered about the soul, or rather what it tells us the soul is not. (Again, he fails to define “soul”):
But the idea that science has nothing at all to tell us about souls seems to me clearly wrong. It can tell us a lot about what they are not. For one thing it seems clear that souls are not things on which arithmetic can be performed. Science can tell us that the soul can’t be found by scientific inquiry.
Not necessarily, for that depends on what you mean by a soul. If it’s something that has definite effects, or lives on after the brain, it is in principle subject to empirical study.
Science, or at least empirical inquiry, can tell us that there is no reason to believe in an afterlife.
Well, here Brown is on the mark. For the absence of evidence for an afterlife, when there could be such evidence (the return of the dead, credible messages from beyond, and so on) tells us that in all probability there is no afterlife. But if Brown agrees that the absence of evidence—evidence that should be there—is evidence of absence, why, then, does he sign onto McGilchrist’s statement that “on whether there is a God or not, true science can have precisely nothing to say.” For there is precisely as much evidence for a god or gods as there is for the afterlife—that is, none. That also goes for the soul (if Brown would only define it!) Let Brown add, then, that “Science can tell us that there is no reason to believe in God.”
He goes on with his apophatism:
Science tends to strengthen the argument of Aristotle that the soul is the form of a living thing – this is also the position of Thomas Aquinas, and so of classical Christian theology.
Wait a minute! If Brown hasn’t defined “soul,” how can he say that science strengthens its existence as something “living”? Without a definition, this kind of analysis is useless. Finally, Brown tells us that souls cannot be immortal:
Science, it seems to me, gives us reasons for supposing that nothing can go on for ever. You don’t need science to believe that. But at the very least the discovery of the big bang shows that the universe had a beginning and will have an end. This shows that while something might be eternal, it cannot be immortal, and that must go for souls too.
Well, yes, if our souls must remain within the universe (which most religious people don’t accept) then they can’t be immortal. But that holds only if they must disappear with the universe. How do we know that souls can’t transmigrate to other universes, or flee to a heaven that is beyond the universe?
In the end, I’m not clear what Brown is on about here. He claims that science can tell us something about the soul, but is nevertheless impotent before the equally nebulous and unevidenced notion of god. But on that he’s wrong. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Science also can tell us that “there is no reason to believe in a god,” and if there is a god, that he is either apathetic, powerless, or malicious.
In the end Brown rabbits on about the relationship between science and philosphy, but I can’t figure out what he’s trying to say (maybe he can’t either). He lapses into incoherence, and perhaps I have, too. But at least I’m not getting paid for writing this stuff!
I’ll close with a bit of doggerel:
Reading this palaver makes me frown;
Did He who made the lamb make Brown?
“Andrew Brown” is an anagram of “incoherent troll-bait” or something.
It seems Brown’s arguments distill down to this: “Scientific journal language is straightforward and unpoetic while literature is poetic and lyrical; the latter appeals to me emotionally more than the former, therefore I don’t like the former”. The rest is just him trying to right a comprehensive argument to fit his bias.
+1
Oops – “right” = “fit”. Now that’s an odd Freudian slip. I think I was thinking prove right.
Or “write”?
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You’re making it worse! 🙂
I tried reading Brown’s piece when I ran into it yesterday. I gave up almost immediately.
Me too!
Ditto.
I always enjoy reading your pieces Jerry, particularly the woo tear-downs. But this Mr Brown, pointless puffed-up ludicrous pommy wanker, really does not deserve the honor of your response.
Jerry, it is important that you not get too far ahead of yourself here. While it is important to point out idiots who have the freedoms of the press and the bully pulpit to write or say anything they want, the whole wonderful thing about freethinking is that people are totally free with whom they read, listen to, or follow…biases notwithstanding.
I read and follow you – and people like you – not to reinforce my own beliefs and opinions (although it is refreshing to see someone like you write eloquently and present ideas cogently) – but to garner knowledge.
One thing we atheist freethinkers do not want to do is wring our hands at the behest of some idiot like Brown who happens to have the pedestal presently. I feel safe and secure in my own beliefs (50+ years now) that I can winnow out the bad sardines from the can. In other words, have, er, faith that we readers are usually with you and, in some instances, ahead of you when it comes to what we take in or discard.
Keep up the good work.
Thank you and also “Fry,” for your chiding, but I don’t think you’ve fully grasped what I was trying to say. Much of it was meant to use Brown’s article as a stimulus to my own thoughts about the value of the arts as “ways of knowing,” something I’m thinking about constantly and haven’t yet resolved (that ambiguity shows up in my wrote). The criticism of Brown, to me, is ancillary in this piece; I hoped to stimulate readers not to fulminate against Brown, who hardly deserves our energies, but to think about whether the arts are “ways of knowing,” and whether, as some of us maintain, their effects on us might fall largely in the ambit of science.
Now my goal might not have been clear, but you might also ponder what it feels like to have readers tell you what to write about, and that a piece was superfluous.
It wasn’t my intent to chide, or even to suggest what you write about; just the opposite. I just wanted you to know that we “get it” and not worry so much about some idiot who is sorely misguided.
Sorry you took my post the wrong way.
Sounded like finger-wagging to me …
For me science offers a way of knowing (or at least to some definable probability) while the arts provide a way of perceiving.
To the degree that arts are a “way of knowing” it is NOT that they !*tell*! us things !*beyond*! the purvue of science but that they powerfully !*convey*! certain insights into the human condition in a way that is viscerally !*effective*! to ordinary people because they are couched in a story-narrative that captures people’s attention.
However, in this respect art is both powerful and dangerously fallible. “Birth of Nation” and “Triumph of the Will” are powerful paeans to the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis respectively. What does the promoter of art as a “way of knowing” have to say about these works?? Sometimes something that appeals powerfully to our passions is better examined in a calm cool and collected and rational way.
Even much better & nobler works of art need a bit of rational analysis as every non-religious reader of Dostoevsky knows- one always wants to disentangle his genuinely great insights into humanity from his passionate commitment to Russian Orthodox Christianity.
Brown’s column seems to be in two parts. He says “I don’t like scientism, BUT I think science CAN say something about the soul, i.e. it is mortal” without a clear definition of what the soul is. The swipe at scientism is gratuitous insofar as it somewhat conflicts with his central thesis, and so he feels a need to got in his dig at the beginning.
“Chiding”- not meant, sorry. “Superfluous” – no way. Always a great read. I back up my statement that Brown does not “deserve” your response – he should thank you for getting one.
So if I write a beautiful and moving novel/play/song that celebrates naturalism and the absence of souls… Andrew Brown will caper with joy over the ‘knowledge’ in this ‘other way of knowing’? It seems unlikely.
Works of art can evoke feelings of ‘wisdom’, sure. But the ‘wisdom’ is in the brain of the beholder. It is contextual. It is part of the beholder’s World of Ideas, not facts. Some other beholder might draw completely different ‘wisdom’ from the same work of art. Wisdom is not factual knowledge.
Jerry, if I may comment on your digression, I also prefer Beethoven to Mozart. However, I wonder if it’s possible that you might prefer the “darker” and less playful side of Mozart. If this might be the case, you have to give his Clarinet Quintet a listen.
And then there’s Chopin, and Brahms, and Sibelius, and…
Agreed, I like a lot of Beethoven and Bach but almost all the Mozart I’ve heard sounds horribly MOR to me, so thanks for the suggestion.
At the risk of going OT from the digression, the link below shows a 2-d graph (electronic v organic and dense v sparse) of every musical genre you have ever heard of, and many you have not, including a clip from an example of each. I find it very amusing, anyway.
http://www.statslife.org.uk/significance/1095-every-noise-at-once-using-big-data-to-explore-new-music
” . . . sounds horribly MOR to me . . . .”
I’ve never heard “MOR” applied to Classical/Romantic, only in “Pop.” Guess I’ve been sheltered. Exactly what does that moniker mean in this context? (I’ll take Beethoven over Mozart any day, though the latter did write some something with “No. 40” [?] as part of the title, which really caught my ear.)
Mozart wrote plenty of “throw away” stuff: divertimenti or serenades intended only as background “muzak” at soirées.
Even that stuff ain’t bad, but compared to what he was capable of, you can tell he didn’t put much effort into it.
I would suggest the slow mvt from the Gran Partita, or Symphony No 40, among others.
I would recommend Mozart’s great operatic works (Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro, Così fan tutte). And Requiem, of course.
All great stuff.
(Of course, only the first half of the Requiem is by Mozart – up to (and sort of including) the Lachrymosa.)
What an arrogant and frankly dickish statement.
Those thousands of textbooks on genetics have had a much, much larger impact on improving and saving the lives of millions, if not billions, of people who couldn’t care less about the human “predicament” and a 400 year old play.
How the deuce can he possibly know that his understanding of the human condition is somehow superior to those billions of people who haven’t read King lear?
Furthermore science and art feeds on eachother and there’s plenty of research where they intertwine.
And the Christian god-hypothesis is thoroughly debunked if the bible is anything to go by. Infallible and all that.
There are people who haven’t read “King Lear”?
Not the Jeffrey Jones?
I tend to agree.
Lear tells people like Brown more about the human predicament than science because he’s male, comparatively wealthy, and lives in a modern society where science has solved many many problems to the point where they are no longer predicaments. Its an extroadinarily dick move to ignore the life-threatening predicaments faced by earlier generations (and today’s poor) which science has helped address. Brown doesn’t have to worry about the predicament of “do I risk drinking the dirty water, or thirst?” “Do I serve my seed corn to my kid and risk us all starving, or do I starve him?” “Do I stay and help my plague-ridden family, or do I leave for my own safety?” And of course being male and living in a society in which both birth control and medical care is quite extroadinarily effective, he’s never had to deal with the predicament which was probably one of the most important for women throughout history: “do I risk sex, given that having a child could result in my immediate death?”
These types of very agonizing, life-threatening predicaments are not part of Brown’s world. Why? Because for someone of his background, science has solved them. Science has left him free of worse predicaments so he can contemplate the far more ethereal and speculative predicaments of Lear.
Couldn’t have said it better. Spot on.
Excellent point.
I’m betting Lear doesn’t even ‘tell’ him anything really. Rather it repeats themes he already knows and sympathizes with in a way that appeals to him. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s not like Brown was sitting around thinking ‘Life is fair and children are grateful, sanity is the only response to a world of trustworthy allies and secure legacies’ until Shakespeare set him straight.
lol
Bulleye. That left a mark on Brown, whether he knows it our not. Bam!
Exactly. I’m quite sure many Elizabethans would’ve gladly swapped Lear – indeed, Shakespeare himself – for a plague-free life where they had enough to eat and a good chance of living through childbirth. And that includes the royal family.
No, Brown, Shakespeare obviously won’t tell you the same things about the world, or what it’s like to be human, as science. This is because they’re asking and responding to completely different questions in the first bloody place.
You may as well complain that the field of geography can’t tell us “as much about the Spanish predicament” as The Man of La Mancha.
Git.
sub (there must be a more elegant way to do this…)
//
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The problem with the Lear example is the same problem Pinker himself has described: it would be ridiculous to talk about WWII in terms of molecular interactions; that is, it’s not particularly useful to try to explain things only at the utmost (or near utmost) level of reduction.
It’s stupid (disingenuous?) to compare a Shakespeare play to a genetics textbook and say “they tell us different things!” Of course they do. A better comparison would’ve been a psychology textbook, but then the “squelching” goes away because we can learn the same lessons about the “human predicament” from either the textbook or the play. The play might be a much more interesting read.
In fact, we could even say Shakespeare was doing very rudimentary science in the field of human psychology: observing how people behave, interact, etc. Then he represented those observations with compelling stories – compelling because of their accuracy. We can relate.
Well said. The very fact that someone thinks this is an argument against Pinker shows that they don’t understand Pinker. He’s also married to a philosopher and writes books on writing books. Pinker is not a caricature scientist who thinks Shakespearean plays have no value if they ‘didn’t really happen.’
There’s also a huge disconnect between “Lear is fictional” and “therefore science can’t tell us if God is fictional or not.” Wait, what? Is God supposed to be like the theme of the play King Lear … or like King Lear? Where is this analogy going? Or perhaps — where did it start?
Brown simply has it in for Pinker. Witness his panning “review” of Pinker’s latest book, where he shamelessly admitted he hadn’t actually read it but still felt entitled to say it was rubbish. Of course, when commenters say the same thing about his columns, he gets most indignant!
Or the play could be more accessible. It is possible that people who hold these “other ways of knowing” opinions are comparing the familiarity of emotion evoked through plays, music, literature, etc. with scientific knowledge that doesn’t supply an immediate understanding, but requires long, difficult study. The cannot know an atom or an epoch but they can know how it feels to to age, to be happy, to be alone, etc. So, in other words, this “other way of knowing” is an illusion brought on by the familiarity of what it is like to be human.
Not sure its an illusion so much as confusing or conflating “knowing” with “experiencing.” To most people, reading Lear will give them an experience that they won’t get from reading a physics textbook. It evokes emotions, as you say, that aren’t evoked by the textbook. Calling that ‘knowing’ is to dodge the issue, though, since I think most people who want other ways of knowing are looking for other ways to gain a confident understanding of how the universe works – not just experience its workings.
I suppose it could also be how people work things out. It could be that you come to understand certain human psychological facts through their expression in art only because art and language comes easily to humans. This doesn’t mean there is another way of knowing but another way of understanding or experiencing as you say.
Bunge in vol. 6 of the _Treatise on Basic Philosophy says that Shakespeare, Moliere, Balzac, Tolstoy, Chaplin and Costa Gavras have taught us more about ourselves than all of behaviorist psychology. However, part of the point is that *behaviourism* is shallow. Moreover, that this knowledge from the great artist is *compatible* with the great scientists. The theologian’s claims are not.
I would say there’s a false choice here.
Insofar as Molière, Balzac, etc have communicated insights about psychology, they were able to do so as the result of empirical observation, ie science broadly construed. With their art they were then able to communicate the knowledge thus gleaned (see Bruce Gorton’s comment at 17).
The play/novel/poem itself is no more the source of the psychological knowledge than the chemistry textbook itself is the source of the knowledge that water is composed of digydrogen monoxide molecules. I myself might learn that water = H2O from the textbook, but the textbook is not how this knowledge was originally discovered.
“First, the notion that science has little to say about the “human predicament”. That’s not really the case. ”
Yes. King Lear tells us nothing about the human predicament that we don’t already know; that’s why the play resonates, if it does.
Science, on the other hand, tells us things we don’t know, which is why they often don’t resonate. That’s how you know you’ve learned something new.
That’s very nicely put, Greg.
No, I think King Lear or other plays can tell us things we don’t know in the same way that our own human relationships can tell us things we didn’t know. Have people never surprised you, puzzled you, or shocked you? We learn about people every day. Shakespeare’s plays are trying to reveal us to ourselves.
I was about to write exactly the same sort of answer. Well said, Sastra. +1
“Have people never surprised you, puzzled you, or shocked you? ”
People, yes, but characters in a work of fiction, no. That’s because they aren’t real, and you should not accept their behavior as real.
Yesterday I finally got around to seeing “August, Osage County.” (Oklahoma) (If’n you’uns knows whut Ah’m talkin’ about.) Those carrying-ons likely would raise Lear’s and The Bard’s eyebrows.
It could be that we don’t already know what a play tells us but we are at least familiar with it. Science disturbs familiarity and shows us what we can’t immediately see using a mechanism that is not natural.
This other way of knowing stuff is most likely a manifestation of discomfort with how things are learned through a method (science) that does not come natural to humans.
This is why sometimes Plato seems(subjectively, as it were) right about knowledge being recollection.
“It could be that we don’t already know what a play tells us but we are at least familiar with it.”
I will grant that a play might help crystalize experiences that we have had.
My above objection is basically the same one that has been advanced towards the “wisdom” in religious texts; the fact we recognize something as wise means that we already had the wisdom within us, or we would not have been able to recognize wisdom for what it was. That’s why we don’t recognize child sacrifice as wise.
I didn’t think it is wisdom necessarily that we recognize, but the human condition. It can be a way to explore what it means to exist as a human in this or that culture. It may even be a way to tell the story of science in an accessible way.
King Lear says absolutely nothing at all about the predicament of humanity if one reads it as a straight narrative without considering any of the implications. Same with genetics. It’s all just boring chemistry if you don’t bother thinking about the implications.
But people who don’t read or understand Shakespeare don’t go around crowing about how shallow it all is. Whereas with genetics, people like Brown seem to think a shallow reading or a solid ignorance of it is something to proud of.
Shakespeare’s plays are just strings of funny little squiggles on paper… how is that anything like being human?
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Well it is true that when asked what he was reading, Hamlet replies, “words, words,words”
Good point. Two can play at this absurd game.
Two comments:
1) defining art is a risky and probably futile exercise. However you try, you’ll never capture it all, ’cause art, as all things complex enough, does not have a unique platonic essence. It is constantly redefined.
2) What knowledge can we gain from the undefinable set of artefacts that we usually call “art”?
As Jerry writes: one frequent feature of artworks is that they stir emotions, with a force that dry (evidence-driven or not) logic can rarely match. So the question becomes: what’s the relation between emotions and knowledge? Or, can the stirring of emotions produce knowledge? The answer I’d give (expecting disagreements) is “Yes”.
Why? Because emotions and intuitions are a form of fast-thinking that have a clear and fundamental adaptive value. Explaining why here would be an insult to both our host and fellow readers, so I’ll refrain. I’ll offer two links instead:
an excerpt to Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and a short essay that also mentions Jerry’s recent exchange with Bloom.
In this context one may conclude that art frequently influences (provides information to) our fast thinking processes, informing and shaping our intuitions and biases, thus exerting a powerful and hard to track influence on all our cognitive functions. It’s a double edged sword: it can powerfully help us in our efforts to generate reliable knowledge, but it can also easily stir us away from it.
I suppose most humanities scholars recognise this power and seek to use it to approach truth. It is not a worthless effort, but it’s one that comes with big difficulties, it’s inherently dangerous and may generate huge missteps (AKA the most absurd and self referential forms of postmodernism).
The upside is that artworks that have been around for centuries or millennia usually were able to survive the test of time because our ancestors have intuitively (or rationally?) recognised their value, presumably because these artworks seemed to steer our emotions in useful (or just powerful?) ways. This again may be correlated with the ability of a given artwork to generate valuable insights (a form of knowledge), and one can argue that most valuable insights are valuable because they point in the direction of the (one and only, but sadly never perfectly knowable) truth. In other words, the stakes are high: it’s a powerful way of seeking truth, but its power its compensated by the high degree of inaccuracy.
It’s a feeble argument, but it’s strong enough to explain why it is not pointless to argue that art can generate knowledge. The other argument is that art certainly shows us what can move us emotionally (and that’s without any reasonable doubt useful knowledge in itself).
Another strong hunch here is that you need art (or intuition, fast-thinking, emotional drive, creative/imaginative effort) to provide the first spark that can then drive empirical investigation (science): without that initial “fast-thinking” intuition (that we may, at least as a ‘working hypothesis’ link to the fuzzy idea of art) no science (or no innovative science) will ever happen. This process (science) is painfully slow, but generates more dependable knowledge.
So that was my mini-essay (by a formerly active scientist, for scientists) on the value of humanities and their role in knowledge creation. Hope it doesn’t drive anyone mad!
At first I did not know what to make of the paper, but as I read along, I found it to be pretty interesting and useful. This is clearly written from the standpoint of social sciences, or some other discipline, though, since it makes no effort to describe what is the biological basis for ‘system I’ and ‘system 2’ thinking. But I found myself nodding along with it pretty much. Interesting.
Well, once we know the biological basis of consciousness is, the bases of S1 & S2 will become clear!
Kahneman is v good.
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“it seems clear that souls are not things on which arithmetic can be performed”
What can that possibly mean? I have a soul, and Brown has a soul, but Brown hasn’t even a guess at how many souls we have between us?
I read it this way. Since there is no evidence for the existence of souls, doing math problems that assume they do exist is sort of a NAN error.
It’s my understanding from a video I saw featuring Sean Carroll (physicist) that with the finding of the Higgs boson (and thereby verifying the existence of the Higgs field), that the standard model of particle physics is now complete.
And the upshot of that completeness is that there is no afterlife. There is no mechanism by which “souls” can exist beyond death.
So, science indeed can tell us something about the soul. It’s made-up nonsense.
(Violates the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics in any event; and good luck with that.)
This approach can not and will not work if people think it’s perfectly legitimate to postulate another realm which isn’t described by any of these laws. And they do.
But also want the other realm to interact with ours. (E.g., so we can act or what not not.) *That* runs into the conservation laws.
True, but consider the model they’re modeling it on: substance dualism. The mind interacts with matter but doesn’t violate any conservation laws.
WE know that this is because the workings of the brain fit within natural laws, but to a mind/brain dualist the causation is mysterious and spooky.
But substance dualism (if taken Cartesian style) *does* violate conservation laws. In fact, Descartes himself was objected to in that manner. He had an out: the conservation laws were incompletely known at the time, and it looked like there was “room”. We’ve known for 150 years or so that this is wrong.
Yeah.
This is the point gluonspring made a week ago or so: anything is possible when your argument is “Magic!!”
Yes. If you invoke magic, then all rules break down and nothing can be concluded.
If magic is introduced, then the rules of cause and effect are broken, any effect can be assigned any cause and you are left with incomprehensible chaos.
They like their magic; but don’t think any further than that. Their magic is special (don’t you know?! 🙂 ).
Every day this week I have found and placed a story about penises on the website I work for. The one that got the most hits involved a rather credulous man in Zambia getting his penis eaten by a hyena. (What’s the harm in non-scientific thinking you ask?)
But I still find Andrew Brown an embarrassment to my profession.
Art is great at communicating, it is not however a means of investigation. To posit it as such, something ‘reveals great truths about the human condition’ is to essentially miss the central point.
King Lear, is ultimately supposed to communicate a range of ideas. Those ideas weren’t born of King Lear, but rather the observations and thoughts of Shakespeare.
While it may inspire further thought, that simply is something that happens with any form of communication.
When I write poetry the poem can help me organise my thoughts, but it is ultimately born of my observations and imaginings. The poem is a means I have for expressing things, it is not ultimately how I come up with the things I want to express.
Art is not like science, it is not supposed to be like science. They are different things, intended for different purposes.
To try and play one off against the other, like Brown does here, is like a handyman throwing away his screwdriver because he’s got a hammer.
Andrew Brown frowns
and tries to find middle ground
only to find himself halfway to Crazy Town.
I find the reference to Blake highly appropriate!
Upon seeing a tiger for the only time in his life (one captured in Africa was brought back alive to England and put on display in a cage in the Tower of London). Until then he had conceived of a God who had made lambs, meek and mild like Jesus; but the vision of a ferocious tiger completely rattled his conception of God.
The central question of the poem is an honest one — “Did He who made the Lamb make thee?” And, writing 70 years before Darwin, he left it open.
In my humble opinion, that was the most honest and most potent question mark in English literature! Theology has nothing to compare with it.
And yet the tigers that accompanied Blake’s poem (his poems were illustrated – and illuminated I believe) were cute, cartoonish tigers.
Yep, great as he was, he couldn’t draw tigers for nuts!
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Tyger.jpg
I think he could draw what he wanted to draw. In other words. I think he purposely made this tiger look like a toy tiger. The Tyger appears in the Songs of Experience and that transition from Innocence is a nasty one. Perhaps the cute lion reflects the need to cling to innocence.
That’s an interesting idea. I’ve only ever read critics complaining about it. He certainly didn’t even attempt to make it look scary, and the fact that he went so deeply into the idea of “Innocence” and “Experience” makes it likely that there’s a deeper idea behind the innocent looking tiger.
After twenty years experience teaching children I’ll stick to the “Tigers are hard to draw” position.
Tiger “captured in Africa was brought back alive to England”?
Not likely, all tigers are from Asia. 🙂
Speaking of the soul, here’s James Moreland’s latest book:
* Moreland, J. P. The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters. Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2014.
Moreland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._P._Moreland) belongs to the bunch of contemporary “sophisticated” theologians, and I recommend the above-mentioned book to those atheists/naturalists who want to know what the arguments of their philosophical opponents are. In this case, the arguments are ones for property dualism and for substance dualism. (Note that property dualism alone isn’t per se supernaturalistic.)
One chapter is titled “Why the Findings of Neuroscience are Largely Irrelevant to the Debate.” (The debate is the one over the mind-body problem.)
“It is not science per se, but philosophical or methodological naturalism that is the main dualist opponent here, and dualists argue that naturalists beg important questions in their employment of science to justify physicalism. In most cases, physicalism and dualism are empirically equivalent theses (i.e., consistent with the same set of empirical observations of the brain and body) and, in fact, there is no non-question-begging theoretical virtue (e.g., simplicity, fruitfulness) that can settle the debate if it is limited to being a scientific debate. Read any book in philosophy of mind, including the earlier chapters of this book, look at the issues and arguments central to the mind/body problem, and it becomes evident that science cannot formulate, much less resolve, those issues.”
(Moreland, J. P. The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters. Chicago, IL: Moody Publishers, 2014. p. 97)
Mighty confident, isn’t he?
He might want to review the record of science versus the record of theology, philosophy. Why does he expect that trend to change?
Great googlymoogly.
“Of course having a soul is going to look just like not having a soul, but it is you naturalists who beg the question when you ask us dualists why we posit an extra, unnecessary bit of theory.”
I don’t have the energy to criticize all of Brown. Science can tell me that criticism-worthy it is not.
But at least I can nitpick his science:
Oy vey.
– The recognizable form of our universe had a beginning in the Hot Big Bang. But not the spacetime that it comprises.
Here is the father of string theory, Gabriele Veneziano, on the cosmology that he has worked on:
“GM: What’s the problem with common usage of the term “big bang”?
GV: People are confusing two things in my opinion. There is something which we may call an effective big bang. We have known for quite a while that the universe had to be hot at some time, because without that hot moment, we would not have been able to have big-bang nucleosynthesis and all sorts of processes that needed this high temperature. That hot moment, according to the modern view, is what must have happened after inflation. So, clearly the effective big bang was not the beginning of time. There was something before that. The “bang” in people’s mind is the idea that there had to be a beginning. But we don’t know, really, what preceded inflation.
GM: What about the theorems that say there had to be a singularity—a beginning to time?
GV: You can always talk about the hypothetical big bang that should be there if you use general relativity all the way, but the fact you need to apply quantum mechanics to the theory of general relativity invalidates the arguments that there must have been a singularity. I’m not saying you can prove there was no beginning; this is still something which people have not been able to settle. What went on before inflation—if there was a singularity, if there was a beginning of time—is up in the air. There is a certain amount of fine-tuning needed for inflation, and these initial conditions are really still very mysterious.
GM: So, you’re saying that we should mark the end of inflation as the big bang?
GV: I would define the big bang as the moment when the temperature reaches it maximum value, right after the end of inflation. Inflation cools down the universe, but then inflation ends and the energy in the inflaton field immediately converts into heat—so-called reheating. And then the expansion makes the temperature decrease it again. So, presumably the temperature went down and up and down again. If I had to identify a special moment, I’d look at when the temperature reached its maximum value and call that the big bang.
There was also something before that moment, and that was inflation.”
[ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/critical-opalescence/2014/04/03/gravitational-waves-reveal-the-universe-before-the-big-bang-an-interview-with-physicist-gabriele-veneziano/ ; my bold]
It’s by the way interesting in the context that now that inflation has become a hot topic, the pedagogical task before cosmologists have now been grasped and worked on. (E.g. for “Big Bang”, substitute “Hot Big Bang”.)
– The end of the universe, if you accept the hypothesis of AdS/CFT holography and so the same type of entropy as used for black holes, is a heat death.
It is also up in the air if protons, or even spacetime itself, is stable. If supersymmetry is true, the former is suspect. If the current standard model is all matter there is (but it isn’t, e.g dark matter), the latter is suspect.
If spacetime and diluted structure is stable, there is no “end” to the current form of the universe.
If inflation spawns multiverses, which seems likely, there likely isn’t any end to that either.
Edit:
If spacetime and diluted structure is stable, there is no “end” to the current form of the universe. It “just” runs down and end with quantum fluctuations. (Which, if you wait long enough, can start inflation all over again.)
Art is a mirror of the human “soul” in that it mirrors everything, culture, upbringing, personality, ideas, contexts, the zeitgeist, our way of thinking and not only that of the artist themselves, but as if through a prism, the way the artist sees these things. It is imprecise and a big muddle, but in a sense like a statistic of everything together. Even though no two pieces of art are alike (unless on purpose), there is still some clustering of themes and styles, and expressions. Genuine art of the middle ages just looks more similar to each other than to art created in the Victorian Age.
That we couldn’t genuinely learn from it is false. We can. But there is, of course, no miracle there. It is just way more difficult to discern what’s going on and what the information refers to. What is “noise” and what a reflection of the zeitgeist, how humans in general think or feel, or people of the period, or people in similar conditions as the artist, or the artist individually.
But art and the artificial always was related to the supernatural and the unconcious, as we are pattern-seeking monkeys who know that the things we spill on paper have a meaning. But as we unaware of it, and the complexities are fare greater than we can understand, humans believed something else — the supernatural — was placing hidden meaning into it.
While we are at it, the artifacts of religion is art. Not “just” art and yet still just art. No more meaningful or meaningless than a comic book or theatre play.
As far as I’m concerned, this is the only type of soul worth having, or even wanting:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7EA9PrtBy0
Cheers,
b&
Well, there is the food-kind, too.
🐟?
Like this.
Yeah, yeah, yeah …
/@
…she loves me? Or she loves me not?
b&
Fillet of soul? So long as it’s not the Chik- type, I’m down with that!
b&
All right for Aretha, but how does Andrew Brown explain the tragic case of Don “No Soul” Simmons?
http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=5028
Satin. Or maybe statins. But definitely one or the other.
b&
“It is the music of language.”
That is what I think of Joyce. Cool.
Aaaand …. Andrew Brown wins the Chutzpah Award for the sheer effrontery of bringing up the term “category mistake” in an article which both fails to clearly define any category very well and then plays fast and loose with what goes in where.
What is “the soul?” I seriously doubt that St. Thomas of Aquinas and what Brown calls Classical Christian Theology believed that “the soul is the form of a living thing” in the way scientists today might talk about interacting patterns of matter and energy. Nor did they think “the soul is the form of a living thing” the way poets and artists might talk about themes and metaphors of poems and art. Those would be category mistakes. No, I am pretty darn sure they really were invoking supernatural essences which existed apart from the living thing.
And what science can tell us about “supernatural essences” is going to be suspiciously similar to what Andrew Brown concedes it can tell us about an afterlife. “No.”
What is this weird faitheist fetish for helpfully massaging human errors into concepts and ideas which make sense on some other terms? It would be like claiming that science showed us what the aether was NOT — it wasn’t capable of being discovered by science — and then going on to claim that the mysterious substance which was thought to suffuse the universe and help light and radio work is much better described as the way curiosity inspires us to search for answers.
Yes, much better… IF you want to be thought aetherial. You know — higher and purer than the rest of us — those grubbling around here on the ground, trying to communicate in ordinary ways and avoid actual category mistakes, as opposed to the ones existing in Andrew Brown’s head.
“Form” is a technical term in Aristotlian philosophy, and a bastardized version of this continues in the theological philosophers, like Aquinas. This is what allowes it to work for “religious reasons”, etc. A failure to mention this on the part of Brown, etc. seems to suggest another form of ignorance or dishonesty.
I read once about how we sometimes form false beliefs about people. It was an argument from spurious correlations. If you have a small number of subjects and for each one you measure a large number of properties, when you start looking for correlations, you will find some spurious ones.
The point being that we all have a limited number of friends who we know a lot about. We then draw conclusions about people, some of which will be wrong, because we have observed a spurious correlation among the small group of friends we have eg “In my experience, the cleverer someone is, the more honest he is”.
There is bound to be a certain amount of literature where the author thinks he has captured something of human nature but where he is just plain wrong
Which is a good argument for literature giving us knowledge. If a book can demonstrably fail at teaching us about human nature or mislead us, then there is an internal standard of truth it didn’t meet.
I don’t quite understand the presence of the word “apophatic” in the title of this post, unless it’s meant to be a slightly snarky way of pointing to the vagueness of his argument. If so, that isn’t clear.
I think it comes from this:
Given this, science is slyly limited and naturalism has turned into the weak tea of Methodological Naturalism. Science can only tell us which things CAN’T be proven through science … and is helpless for indicating what might or might not exist.
But then Brown allows that it can rule out the afterlife. But it can’t rule out ETERNAL life. Sheesh.
These “other ways of knowing”,what are they and do they even exist? And if they exist, what is their scope? Taking this last question first. Well, let’s see.
Will “other ways of knowing” help in physics? No, not a chance. In biology? Nope. Psychology, History, Geography, Criminology, even plumbing all use the scientific method.
So where CAN “other ways of knowing” help ? Well I can’t think of anywhere. If a question can’t be answered scientifically then it can’t be answered at all.
So if they have no scope then it doesn’t really matter if they exist or not.
“Reading this palaver makes me frown;
Did He who made the lamb make Brown?”
Ah, “The Rubaiyat of Jerry Coyne”!
Ha. I would’ve thought the term would be “d*ggerel”.
Jerry,
You said that you think religion has nothing useful to say about the “human predicament” and later that perhaps you’ve lapsed into incoherence. If indeed you did, it’s sometimes hard not to when you’re trying to answer something that is itself incoherent.
I think you’re wrong that religion has nothing to tell us about the “human predicament;” first, because this term isn’t clearly defined in the context of Brown’s article, and you didn’t do anything to further clarify it.
I’ll take the liberty of filling in the blanks a little, and assuming that by “human predicament,” Brown means something at least along the lines of answering the question of the meaning of life, why we’re here, how to deal with the knowledge of death, etc. As for the meaning of life and why we’re here, that question doesn’t necessarily have an answer. But I think religion can certainly tell us something about the human predicament with regard to angst, suffering, and the knowledge of mortality. It tells us that humans have evolved to crave certainty and in the quest of that certainty, we are prone to fooling ourselves, not only about the unknown, but in the case of religious fundamentalism, about what is known when knowing it requires a certain level of rigorous study to understand.
I also interpret your post as meaning that religion really has nothing useful to say that cannot be derived by secular means. There are religions that have certain tenets that are useful, but the method of arriving at those was either pure luck, or it was based on some evidence gathered about the human condition. I think your idea that religion has nothing meaningful to tell us about the “human predicament” would be more coherent if qualified with the idea that it can’t tell us anything meaningful on its own; i.e. through the “other ways of knowing” that you do a consistently thorough job of dismissing.
Brown (and anyone else who’s interested) would benefit from a free course through Coursera from Rutgers, ‘soul beliefs’. It runs out in 2 weeks, but presumably you can still enrol and download the lectures. I’ve found the clear thinking and everything else about this course superb. Highly recommended.
I do believe that the Humanities have ways of helping us understand about the world: look at the way they analyse the structure of mythologies, how they determine patterns in the story-making ways of ancient cultures.
Look, for example, at the 150 year history of rational, secular historiography of the Bible as a literary, historical source. Without that there would barely be any question of checking its historicity in the archaeological (and of course scientific) record.
While we remain as limited in our knowledge of ourselves as we are, historians can and must bring to the table their knowledge, experience and wisdom to test these questions. It is quite probable that we will never know what precisely happened in the past: that is one area of knowledge that is not possible to know absolutely, nor even with the degree of certitude that makes a scientific hypothesis fact.
Slaínte.
Btw. another commenter recently made the similar point that ‘Je’ means ‘I’. I know this. And it’s not a scientific form of knowledge, unless you want an extremely elastic, and almost meaningless, definition of ‘scientific’ or way of knowing. I could be wrong and I need convincing.
Cheers.
Oh, that one’s easy.
What evidence do you have supportive of the theory that “Je” is the French equivalent of the English “I”? And is your belief in the proposition proportional to the strength of the evidence?
If so, you have scientific knowledge of the fact.
And it doesn’t matter how you first came to the idea; just that you’ve got empirical evidence, a rational analysis, and your belief is proportioned accordingly.
(You could well be crazy, or there could well be some conspiracy making you incorrectly understand French, but that’s about the extent of the doubts you should have about this particular proposition. Now, that dark matter is a WIMP with a mass of ~35 GeV you should be tentatively hopeful, but that’s about as much confidence as that deserves at this point.)
Cheers,
b&
As some of your readers have already pointed out (so pardon my redundancy), “knowing” may have two components cognitive or epistemological and feeling or emotional. Within a single human being or an emotionally committed (read religious) community it is possible for these to overlap. The purpose of the arts and humanities is often to create this feeling or emotional connection to the subject addressed by created work and draw us in emotionally but is that really a way of objectively knowing. It can be so only if we can know with our “hearts” which is highly questionable,always subjective and open to confusion because of the emotional filter. There are two people whose opinions I wish I had on this who have written before on the interplay of emotion and cognition, Antonio Damasio in the “Feeling of What Happens” and possibly Daniel Dennett in his “Intuition Pumps”.