Eastern philosophy says the self is an illusion

BidenPresident said:
Please explain that demonstrated value.
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I think our society and all the technology we currently rely on has more than adequately proven the value of science. And the technology for brain scanning is just starting to show amazing results. The technology of fMRI alone is an amazing benefit to medical science and it is now showing its value in understanding our thoughts and our sense of self and even the possibility that free will may not be as extensive as we think.
 
BidenPresident said:
Oldest trick in the book. Science has no answer today but will some time. Okay, then make that argument when it does.

Decisions about whether to get married or not are not random questions. Most people consider it profoundly more important than describing bosons.
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One reason I wanted to read Plato's Republic is that science can't tell us anything substantive about justice, truth, or virtue.
 
Cypress said:
One reason I wanted to read Plato's Republic is that science can't tell us anything substantive about justice, truth, or virtue.
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Justice and virtue, yes. Truth, on the other hand, covers a lot of territory including both facts and beliefs. While science may not be able to find the truth about some beliefs, it can certainly find the truth in facts.

Were there canals on Mars? Science found the truth.

Is there intelligent life other than Earth? Still looking, but the truth is none has been found so far.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truth
truth
noun
ˈtrüth
pluraltruths ˈtrüt͟hz ˈtrüths
Synonyms of truth
1
a
(1)
: the body of real things, events, and facts : ACTUALITY
(2)
: the state of being the case : FACT
(3)
often capitalized : a transcendent fundamental or spiritual reality
b
: a judgment, proposition, or idea that is true or accepted as true
truths of thermodynamics
c
: the body of true statements and propositions
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Cypress said:
One reason I wanted to read Plato's Republic is that science can't tell us anything substantive about justice, truth, or virtue.
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Disagree. Science can definitely tell us why we would value justice, truth and virtue. We are SOCIAL animals (biology) and that confers upon us a survival advantage. As such our species puts value on those things. These are not universal by any stretch of the imagination since we can easily look around us and see animals that are not social animals and which do things that we might consider "immoral" (like killing the offspring of others of our species, etc.)

Science helps us understand why we would value those things and science can help establish things like "truth" more effectively than just about any other method we have available.
 
BidenPresident said:
Science cannot even define "truth."
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Science does not go in for absolute proof but rather preponderance of evidence. As such it gets closer to truth than any other method we have thus far developed.

Alternatives to science to seek "truth" have often failed (see religion for example).

Given the limitations of reality truth can only ever be estimated. Science is the only technique by which we can not only estimate truth but also give an accounting for those aspects like error.
 
Cardinal Carminative said:
Science does not go in for absolute proof but rather preponderance of evidence. As such it gets closer to truth than any other method we have thus far developed.

Alternatives to science to seek "truth" have often failed (see religion for example).

Given the limitations of reality truth can only ever be estimated. Science is the only technique by which we can not only estimate truth but also give an accounting for those aspects like error.
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Science can only be accurate in descriptions.
 
Doc Dutch said:
Justice and virtue, yes. Truth, on the other hand, covers a lot of territory including both facts and beliefs. While science may not be able to find the truth about some beliefs, it can certainly find the truth in facts.

Were there canals on Mars? Science found the truth.

Is there intelligent life other than Earth? Still looking, but the truth is none has been found so far.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/truth
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Observable facts can be verified by sense perception.
There's always the philosophical question if our sense perception are actually representing what's really out there in the world apart from the images our brains construct. Is an apple really "red"?

For all the achievements of Issac Newton, at the end of the day he didn't really acquire any true knowledge that was universal and beyond question. Newton thought time and space were static, uniform, unchanging.

That was completely wrong and not true.

What scientific realism holds is that science encroaches on and approaches the truth,, but since science by definition is always provisional, it never gives us truth at the end of the day.

On the other tangent, science certainly cannot give us the kinds of moral and social truths that are pursued in the canon of Plato, Confucius, Sidartha Gautama, et al.
 
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Cardinal Carminative said:
I don't necessarily think that Cypress is needing an ineffible self separate from the physical brain, it sounds like he's OK with that concept. The self as an emergent property of the neuron network seems to be something that many of us on here are OK with as a concept.

The "desire for water" can easily be explained as a physical need arising from the body's need to take in water. The stimulus is processed by the subconscious and the person gets water. I am still fascinated that this might be a case wherein the subconscious drives the entire bus and only AFTER we get the water does the brain create a post-hoc explanation that it was our goal to get water. Making it seem that we, indeed, have free will when it can be explained without free will at all.

I'm not of the opinion that free will is, ipso facto, non-existent. I honestly don't think we can ever know that or not. I tend to function with "effective free will", in other words it feels to me that I am taking actions myself and not simply being "driven" by subconscious stimulus-response. But I don't know that for sure and science seems to be showing that it may not be as thorough as we might like to think.
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And that is why it's so difficult to get people to see that free will is an illusion. We feel like we have it. We feel like we are the author of our thoughts and there is a self that is wanting, intending and experiencing. We feel like there is a self in the driver's seat. We feel like we are reasoning and making choices.

In reality, having free will - having a self that was in the drivers seat, authoring thoughts, creating desires, intentions - would mean that we could "make" ourselves want something we don't currently want, or not know something we do know. I'm not free to want to start collecting rocks if I truly have no desire to collect rocks...or bird watch.... or play tennis. I'm not free to not know that 2 x 3 is 6 if I do know that 2 x 3 is 6.

But, if I talked to a rock collector that made me see a whole different side to rock collecting, that I'd never seen before, and that conversation completely transformed my desire to collect rocks, I'm also not free to not want to collect rocks if my mind was changed.

And, to whatever degree my thoughts have impacted the opinion of other posters regarding the self and free wil, they are not free to not be impacted if they have been.
 
Cypress said:
Observable facts can be verified by sense perception.
There's always the philosophical question if our sense perception are actually representing what's really out there in the world apart from the images our brains construct. Is an apple really "red"?

For all the achievements of Issac Newton, at the end of the day he didn't really acquire any true knowledge that was universal and beyond question. Newton thought time and space were static, uniform, unchanging.

That was completely wrong and not true.

What scientific realism holds is that science encroaches on and approaches the truth,, but since science by definition is always provisional, it never gives us truth at the end of the day.

On the other tangent, science certainly cannot give us the kinds of moral and social truths that are pursued in canon of Plato, Confucius, Sidartha Gautama, et al.
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Which is the importance of the scientific method; it is used to verify perceptions are accurate and replicable.

Yes, Newton made erroneous assumptions but he also made correct ones such as the Laws of Motion. Einstein's theories are still being proven to be correct such as gravity lensing of light around a planet or star.

Those things are, indeed, universal fact. If we ever meet up with an alien civilization, I have little doubt that our first lines of communication will be mathematical or involving Universal laws because they are factual, replicable.

Human morals, OTOH, are not necessarily universal since they are peculiar to us.
 
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