Stupid Stuff Some Philosophers Say About Science

“Science excludes subjective experience” and other nonsense

Hecht Hechy tunnel in Yosemite.

"Mathematics is not a science"

I suspect that philosophers are secretly envious of science. After all, in a couple of hundred years science has produced an internally consistent explanation of much of the world we experience. In the process, it has given us tools to make our life better, from vaccines that have eradicated entire diseases to food production methods to feed a billowing world population. Meanwhile, for two thousand years philosophers have failed to agree on a common worldview, to the point that they keep going back to thousands of years old doctrines like Stoicism and Epicureanism.

This can explain the need of some philosophers to claim for philosophy some of the triumphs of science. Case in point, mathematics. Philosophers argue that mathematics is pure logic, so it belongs in the realm of philosophy, which deals in logic and deduction, and not of science, which deals with experience and induction.

The reality is that mathematics and science are inseparable because they have grown together, co-creating each other.

The inductive scientific method—deriving general statements from a limited collection of observations—cannot work without statistics, which are a big part of mathematics.

 Another huge chunk of mathematics is differential calculus—integrals, differential equations and such—which was co-invented by Newton and Leibnitz to solve problems of physics. Then calculus played a key role in the development of Quantum Mechanics and most of modern physics.

I would say that mathematics is really a technology, an instrument that is essential for science to work.

"Science is about quantification"

Going to the other extreme, some philosophers say that science needs to quantify everything, express everything in mathematical terms. If it cannot be measured, science cannot deal with it, they say.

This is not true. A lot of science consists of describing things, studying them in qualitative and not quantitative terms.

For example, zoology and botany are about qualitative descriptions of animals and plants. They may use numbers occasionally, like for measuring bones, growth rates or population dynamics, but the goal is a description.

Likewise, physiology and neuroscience consist mainly of the description of the body and the brain, and how they function.  

"Science discounts subjective experience"

This stems from the unfortunate ideas of behaviorists, a bunch of psychologists led by John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner, who, last century, decided that introspection should not be used for psychological research.

However, we are now way past behaviorism, and subjective experiences have been thoroughly integrated into neuroscience experiments.

We need look no further than pain neurophysiology, my own field of expertise. Obviously, pain is a subjective experience. For a while, pain scientists debated whether we should talk about nociception instead of pain, but you can have nociception without pain (under general anesthesia) and pain without nociception (in cases of central pain in which the pain originates inside the brain). The debate is now moot because brain imaging using fMRI and PET can look directly into the brain of people experiencing pain (Zubieta et al., 2001).

Not only we can see what happens in the brain when we have a subjective experience, we can induce subjective experiences by stimulating the cortex with electrodes or using transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Once optogenetics (Yizhar et al., 2011) is applied to stimulate the human brain, we will be able to stimulate single neurons in a precise and fast way. This will allow us to create a brain-computer interface that would merge our conscious experience with the information processing of computers. Just as now we wonder whether AI is conscious, in a decade or so we may have trouble separating our inner experience from external computing.

"Science cannot tell us what is love"

Because, you know, love is such a beautiful, magical thing!

In reality, love is just another subjective experience that can be studied by the same methods that we use to study pain.

During the last months I embarked on a search of the scientific literature to write a couple of chapters about the neuroscience of love for the book I am writing, Dopamine: the Molecule of Desire. Dopamine, together with the social neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin, plays a key role in making us fall in love (Walum and Young, 2018). I found several studies that used fMRI to study what parts of the brain get activated in people in love (Bartels and Zeki, 2000; Bartels and Zeki, 2004; Aron et al., 2005), and also after a romantic breakup (Najib et al., 2004; Fisher et al., 2010; Kross et al., 2011; Song et al., 2015). Other studies used a radiotracer and PET to find out what brain areas release dopamine when we experience love (Striepens et al., 2014; Takahashi et al., 2015).

"Science believes that the world is deterministic"

To be honest, this is still being hotly debated by scientists.

Still, it is clear that there is no strict determinism at the quantum level, only probabilistic determinism. If you look at a radioactive atom, it is impossible to predict when it is going to disintegrate, but if you consider a lot of these atoms, you know how many will disintegrate in a certain length of time.

At a much larger scale, if you make a patch-clamp recording of a single ion channel protein, you cannot predict when the channel will open, but you can measure precisely how many openings will occur per unit of time. That’s because an ion channel is a single molecule and its opening follows the laws of quantum mechanics.

In evolution, Stephen Jay Gould said that, if you could go back in time, the path that evolution would take would not lead to the same species that we see today. Or, to put it another way, it is impossible to predict what species evolution will produce in the future.

In his book The End of Certainty, Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigogine argued that non-determinism is built into the structure of reality, giving raise to entropy and the arrow of time.

Therefore, philosophers should stop assuming that the world is deterministic when discussing issues like free will. There is only probabilistic determinism.

"Science can explain what things do but not what they are"

This is because philosophers claim exclusive ownership of the discipline of ontology: knowing what things really are.

Never mind that no philosopher has ever explained how things really are.

In practice, there is no real difference between what something does and what something is. Probably because things are not fixed entities but are constant becoming. Now, isn’t that a great philosophical idea?

For example, science explains what a synapse is. Science discovered synapses, named them, and produced a great deal of information about what they do. This is explaining what synapses are. If it’s not, then you make explaining what things are a mystical, impossible task.

You can say the same thing about glial cells, lymphocytes, protons, black holes, galaxies, uranium and all the other things discovered and named by science. We know what they are because we know what they do.

"Science will never explain consciousness"

When it comes to science, it is wise to never say never.

Science is not done yet. It is an ongoing enterprise. There are many things that science has not explained yet, but that doesn’t mean that it will never explain them. A hundred years ago, explaining what is life seemed like an impossible task. Today science understands the nature of life quite well.

I predict that two things will happen in the near future:

1. Science will explain consciousness.

2. Philosophers will still insist that science had not explained consciousness.

Mysterians insist that it is impossible to explain consciousness, opening the door to all kinds of mystical beliefs about consciousness. This is because David Chalmers and other philosophers have stated the Hard Problem of consciousness in such a way that it is impossible to solve. What they are demanding is not that we explain consciousness, but that we create it.

Of course, that means that philosophers will not explain consciousness, either. They won’t even try. They are just happy to show that nobody can. They have become obstructionists. Philosophy used to be about knowing things; now it’s just about being content not to know them.

"When scientists criticize philosophy, they are doing philosophy"

You bet we are! And you better watch out because scientists may take over your field and make you irrelevant!

Smart philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland and Paul Churchland, chose to build their careers by incorporating scientific discoveries instead of arguing against science. I think that is the way to go.

Even if philosophers chose not to follow that path, the least they could do is to study science before they start writing opinions about it.

It’s hard, I know! Even scientists don’t have the ability to encompass the staggering amount of knowledge built by science. Still, if an academic is going to make a specific claim, it’s his responsibility to properly research it.

I think scientists should stop tolerating willful ignorance and intellectual dishonesty about science. Too much is at stake in knowing what is true about the world.

Do philosophers really say these things?

I have read these ideas here and there, but I don’t have the time to go chase who said what. So you may pull out a “no true Scotsman” and say that no reputable philosopher would say such things.

I don’t really care. What I wanted to do is to rebut these ideas and, if it’s true that good philosophers don’t say them, then all the better for philosophy. I wish it was true.

References

• Aron A, Fisher H, Mashek DJ, Strong G, Li H, Brown LL (2005) Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love. J Neurophysiol 94:327–337.

• Bartels A, Zeki S (2000) The neural basis of romantic love. NeuroReport 11:3829–3834.

• Bartels A, Zeki S (2004) The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love. NeuroImage 21:1155–1166.

• Fisher HE, Brown LL, Aron A, Strong G, Mashek D (2010) Reward, addiction, and emotion regulation systems associated with rejection in love. J Neurophysiol 104:51–60.

• Kross E, Berman MG, Mischel W, Smith EE, Wager TD (2011) Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 108:6270–6275.

• Najib A, Lorberbaum JP, Kose S, Bohning DE, George MS (2004) Regional brain activity in women grieving a romantic relationship breakup. The American journal of psychiatry 161:2245–2256.

• Song H, Zou Z, Kou J, Liu Y, Yang L, Zilverstand A, d'Oleire Uquillas F, Zhang X (2015) Love-related changes in the brain: a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Frontiers in human neuroscience 9:71.

• Striepens N, Matusch A, Kendrick KM, Mihov Y, Elmenhorst D, Becker B, Lang M, Coenen HH, Maier W, Hurlemann R, Bauer A (2014) Oxytocin enhances attractiveness of unfamiliar female faces independent of the dopamine reward system. Psychoneuroendocrinology 39:74–87.

• Takahashi K, Mizuno K, Sasaki AT, Wada Y, Tanaka M, Ishii A, Tajima K, Tsuyuguchi N, Watanabe K, Zeki S, Watanabe Y (2015) Imaging the passionate stage of romantic love by dopamine dynamics. Frontiers in human neuroscience 9:191.

• Walum H, Young LJ (2018) The neural mechanisms and circuitry of the pair bond. Nature reviews Neuroscience 19:643–654.

• Yizhar O, Fenno LE, Davidson TJ, Mogri M, Deisseroth K (2011) Optogenetics in neural systems. Neuron 71:9–34.

• Zubieta JK, Smith YR, Bueller JA, Xu Y, Kilbourn MR, Jewett DM, Meyer CR, Koeppe RA, Stohler CS (2001) Regional mu opioid receptor regulation of sensory and affective dimensions of pain. Science 293:311–315.