"it reflects the philosophy of Nihilism accurately"
Message 28212648
And the "it" was referring to this post! ( http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=28210218 )
Half true as with most of your postings. If you had bothered to read the post in question and looked at what it was specifically responding to you would have seen that "it" refered directly to the picture of a hanged man which accompanied the series of questions and answers that I posted which was titled "Nice Nihilism"
Your missrepresentation came specifically when you framed my argument to read that I somehow denied that science was "A" (one of many) ways to gain knowledge of the world around us. As usual, you can't be honest even for a moment. Sad for you and telling about the lack of confidence that you have in your own position.
Hard Materialism which underlies Scientism leads DIRECTLY to the conclusions of Nihilism. It sucks to be you, but everywhere you go: there you are!
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Extreme or mechanistic materialism can be traced back at least to Leucippus (fifth century B.C.) and his pupil or associate Democritus. They believed all happens by necessity--there is no chance--and that the universe contains only empty space and atoms. All sensations are the result of atoms impinging on our senses. More than a century later, Epicurus accepted this view of reality and added an ethic giving materialism a double meaning down to our age: although the world is only atoms and space and we are accordingly a natural product, our will is still free to seek happiness. And happiness is the highest goal. Centuries later, the materialism of Democritus and the ethics of Epicurus were expounded in On the Nature of things by the Roman poet Lucretius for whom even the soul was made up of atoms. From the time of Lucretius until the seventeenth century, the belief in a fundamentally spiritual universe and the human soul dominated by God ruled Western philosophy. The rise of the natural sciences, the translations of Greek classics during the Renaissance and the questioning attitude encouraged by their reading, and the loosening hold of the Church due to its moral-spiritual confusion and schisms at the top encouraged a number of naturalistic movements. It was not, however, until the seventeenth century that materialism achieved its revival. One of those responsible for this was the French philosopher, Pierre Gassendi, a most influential thinker of that time. Much impressed by Epicureanism and atomism, he developed a material theory of our psychology and senses. Not completely removed from the spirit of his age, however, he did allow for a God and a nonmaterial mind. Hobbes, whose sociopolitical conception of the state of nature is of considerable interest to students of international relations, was also responsible for the revival of materialism. Hobbes felt that space was filled with an intangible ether in which bodies are in motion. All change in things as well as in our sensations and thought consists of motion, which itself is caused by contact between corporeal bodies. This mechanistic materialism has been carried down to our day in one form or another, and has been encouraged by such developments as those in organic chemistry establishing material substances and interactions as necessary components of life; in biology by Darwin and Huxley, which gave natural explanations for living things; and in physics in which mechanical cause-effect, push-pull, theories have had conspicuous success. In the face of these developments, theology and such supernatural beliefs as vitalism have been in constant retreat since the seventeenth century. Today, in the minds of most Westerners, the material conception of reality dominates. What ontological issues they now see focus on mind. In this context, one can point to four contemporary materialistic movements. The first is dialectical materialism. Although not a thoroughgoing mechanical materialism, especially as elaborated by Engels, it is a materially based, naturalistically and scientifically oriented ideology that has had wide anti-idealistic effects. This perspective largely grew out of Ludwig Feuerbach's naturalistic materialism, which assumed that truth was discoverable only by empirical science and took a realistic view of reality. Feuerbach was much opposed to any idealism that would undermine the importance of sense data and rejected dualism as supernaturalism. Also much influenced by Hegel's dialectical method, he thought that thinking and acting go together, that scientific advancement and improving humanity are inseparable. In line with this pragmatic conception, Marx felt, as Lenin would so forcefully argue later,3 that a belief in materialism is crucial to social improvement. Marx was not much interested in abstract philosophical questions, and it was left to Friedrich Engels to give a more ontological elaboration of dialectical materialism.4 In brief, Engels held that the universe is material and primary, without quite accepting the complete reduction of mind to matter. He believed in a mild dualism: the mind exists and is nonmaterial, but it is secondary in importance and has developed out of a material universe. While opposed to "vulgar materialists," those who think that all is reducible to physical bodies, Engels did argue that material things are, however, reflected in the brain. Like Marx, Engels felt that our utilization of things leaves no doubt about their materiality and that practice itself provides the proof for materialism (as in Johnson's alleged disproof of Berkeley's idealism by striking a stone with his foot and exclaiming, "I refute it thus"). It was left to Lenin to develop these doctrines in a most coherent fashion and to draw out the ideological implications in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. He treated dialectical materialism as not only a philosophy but as a program for socialist development. Socialists must have a correct--a dialectical and material--view of reality if they are to understand the function of ideologies in justifying class interests. Efforts to further proletarian interests are bound up with one's philosophy, and because of this socialists must be watchful against the dilution and pollution of dialectical materialism by religion or idealism. This explains Lenin's concerted attack on the philosopher-physicist Ernst Mach, who tried to rid science of all metaphysics and base science totally on sense data. Lenin saw this forerunner of logical positivism (the second materialist doctrine I will consider below) as undercutting the very supports of dialectical materialism, the belief in causation, the concept of natural law, and the belief in certain, objective knowledge. Lenin felt Machism to be a species of muddled idealism, which by closing science off from certitudes left the door wide open to religion. Since Lenin, no major thinkers have added to dialectical materialism. Stalin was not a theoretician and gave nothing of his own to Marx-Leninism; Mao, whom many (especially among Western youth) considered a major Marxist philosopher, has written some theoretical pieces.5 but these are simply a restatement of Engels and Lenin, with some traditional Chinese Yin-Yang dialectics thrown in. Dialectical materialism is still on the rise and is sustained as the official doctrine of all totalitarian communist countries. Less successful has been that materialist-oriented movement, logical positivism,6 which grew in part out of Mach's sensation-based philosophy and is associated with the work of Otto Neurath,7 Rudolph Carnap,8 and others of the Vienna Circle.9 While not of much influence in continental Europe, where existentialism, phenomenology, and neo-Kantianism have come to dominate, logical positivism (or logical empiricism or positivism) has found fertile soil in the empirically oriented Anglo-Saxon countries, especially among behavioral social scientists.10 Logical empiricism does not contain a doctrine about what reality is, but rather about how we should approach reality. This epistemological materialism asserts that all statements must be meaningful, and that to be meaningful a statement must be intersubjectively testable (the so-called verifiability principle, which is supposed to carve away metaphysics). And what is intersubjectively testable must refer to physical properties, if observers are to agree. Thus, statements of the mind, expressing internal feelings, thoughts, insights, and motives are meaningless unless they manifest some physical change or behavior. If mind is to be given a meaningful place in the universe of physical objects and processes, therefore, it is only according to its physical properties and effects. Two other, materialistically oriented contemporary movements can briefly be mentioned. One is analytic behaviorism associated with Gilbert Ryle11 and to a certain extent, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The major principles of this movement are that mental faculties are reducible to dispositions to behave in certain ways in specific circumstances and that these dispositions are themselves based on the body's physical state. Moreover, references to the state of mind, to inner processes of thought, must be to publicly observable conditions or behavior. The second movement is central state physicalism,12 which emphasizes a neurological--and thus physical interpretation of mind. Physicalists recognize a distinction between dispositions (tendencies to behave, feel, or think in certain ways) and other mental activities, but believe all such mental states are states of the nervous system. Thus, any spiritual quality or uniquely mental faculty (or "ghost in the machine" to use Gilbert Ryle's term) is thereby exorcised. In the historical and contemporary varieties sketched (in very broad brush) so far, materialism has three interdependent characteristics. First, either the world is primarily made up of material things and processes or our knowledge must be limited to such. Second, explanations of the world around us, as well as our mental activities, involve reference to previous physical conditions. And third, the world is deterministic. What was causes what is. Developments in quantitative physics, particularly the indeterminancy principle of Heisenberg, have softened this determinism somewhat, but still the more concrete and spectacular success of classical physics (mechanics) undergirds a mechanical cause-effect world view. Materialism provides a simple and economic perspective, which appears most compatible with our experience and observations. Moreover, materialism seems, and this may be its most attractive element, the only metaphysics most consistent with scientific knowledge and attitude. However, it should be also clear that were materialism correct, the world would be without purpose and our life without meaning. Morality, which must assume free will, and thus responsibility for immoral acts, would be a delusion.13 Practicing this inference is unwarranted however, since the materialist premises are far from established. Materialists make the error of assuming that because most science supports a materialistic view and the immediately sensed suggests a materialistic interpretation, all science supports this view and all reality is material. This hardly follows. Developments in quantum physics raise questions about fundamentally physical interpretations of nature, and the existence of action at a distance14 through little understood magnetic and gravitational fields at least should cast suspicion on a reality wholly made up of matter in motion and physically transmitted causes. For contemporary materialists, however, this may be beating a horse already dead. Agreeing that an attempt to paint the universe completely in terms of matter, space, time, and motion is a naive materialism, they nonetheless may assert that physical laws of some kind govern physical processes, that all that we know, including magnetism and quantum phenomena, are reducible to natural laws, and that mental faculties themselves are so reducible. This milder form of materialism, which treats mind and body as different aspects of the same natural and law-governed (but not God-governed, as with Spinoza) reality, still confronts some difficulties. For one, in spite of the neurological treatments of mind, there is still no convincing explanation of introspective awareness. I think, I know I think, and as I write this I am aware of my mental faculties which are (not seem or appear) a universe apart from the body and external world which I sense. This inner awareness of our minds that we share in common as humans is a type of experience at least as important as that of the external world. Yet, this inner world which we know introspectively is not explicable yet by natural laws and is not reducible yet to natural processes. For the mild materialists to argue that all is reducible to natural laws and processes is to argue from only one realm of experience, that of reality external to mind, while ignoring the experience of the inner mind. However, one does not have to rest the argument on inner experience alone, which is the traditional source of idealistic attacks on materialism, but can point to the parapsychological evidence that has been accumulating.15 It still bothers many scientifically oriented people to talk as though unaided mental communication (telepathy) between people across half the globe, a sixth mental sense, mental control over physical objects (telekinesis), and so on were anything but spiritualism, mysticism, and the belief in miracles and ghosts written in a more modern, perhaps science-fiction-derived terminology. Of course this incredulity implicitly begs the question. Based on a physicalistic or law-like world view, that which does not fit this scheme is of course supernatural. However, to define it as supernatural does not rule out the existence of this paraphenomena. For mild or extreme materialists to ignore this aspect of the mind is to leave materialism where it remains today: the fundamental expression of faith, amenable neither to experience nor argument--a secular theology allied with science.
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