Susan Blackmore on consciousness, science and explanatory power
When Andrew Brown first posed this week’s question to me he asked “Can science describe everything?”. My instant, unreflective reply was “No”. He implied that this might be a less restrictive question than “Can science explain everything” and yet my instant reaction to this one was “Yes”. I’d like to explore this curious difference.
Science can (potentially at least) explain everything because its ways of trying to understand the universe by asking questions of it should not leave any areas off-limits. The methods of openness, inquiry, curiosity, theory building, hypothesis testing and so on can be adapted and developed to explore and try to explain anything.
But what is “everything”? I look out of my window and see green trees and grass and grazing cows, a river, a pond, birds, sky, clouds …. but everything? This is where description becomes so hard. There is just so much stuff in the universe and it’s all so complicated. Let me give two examples, a simpler one and a really tough one.
Continues: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jul/12/science-religion-philosophy
Susan Blackmore is a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association.
We are all individual parts of a greater universe (as far as our senses and technology tells us exists) and the magic of our existence is that we experience “everything” differently. Because our experiences (which shape the way we see the world) are unique, Science cannot possibly describe every minutiae of it. But it doesn’t have to, because we create our own meaning about our experience through what we know of the world.
Science’s ability to describe everything benefits us by explaining, or at least hypothesizing, why things are and how we experience them, and allows us to understand our place and existence in this universe. That explanation may be revised in the light of future knowledge, but at least an objective informed theory provides a good foundation for further exploration of facts.
I’m not at all a scientific-sort of person, and most of the jargon flies way above my head. But what I do understands makes me appreciate the wonders of my universe – the explanations revealed to me, and my experience of it that only I can describe.
Well said Susan, loved “The Meme Machine” – perhaps the only book I’ve managed to actually finish this year. Loved the twist at the end, self-as-meme or memeplex; a brilliant expansion of Dawkins’ original postulate and a joy to read to boot. Even, if not especially, for the non-scientist (like me). I’ve seen other books about memes, but I’m not overly sure whether to take them seriously, they seem more like popular self-help books than real science writing, but a bit of research on some Amazon reviews might prove me wrong.
Re the questions posed above by Andrew Brown “Can science describe everything?” my first impulse would be to say “It can try.” but then description, as you so rightly say, is a knotty thing to grasp. I need only to thing of the mind boggling array of wine descriptors (i.e. – words that are “meant” to articulate taste) to become completely befuddled by the irreconcilability of subjective experience.
The same goes for “You know what I mean?!” a phrase that has become something of a cliché in recent times, and one which I find totally irritating, if only because it roles so easily off the tongue without the least bit of consideration for what it means to know what one means!