Science Confronts Philosophy, or Vice Versa

Practicing scientists often disdain philosophy.  To them, it seems like mumbo-jumbo with convoluted arguments telling them why they don’t exist or why two-ness cannot be represented on a chalkboard.  To a scientist dealing with real lab rats or chemicals off the shelf, such ramblings seem detached and worthless.  Who would know more what science is than a scientist?  Philosophizing about science seems far less productive than just doing science.  One described philosophy as “incomprehensible answers to insoluble problems.”
    Philosophy’s domain is all-encompassing.  It attempts to address, in a systematic and rigorous manner, questions about what exists (ontology), how we know things (epistemology), and how we should live our lives (moral and political philosophy).  Philosophers ask the pointed questions that give precision to our thoughts.  A fairly new branch of philosophy is the philosophy of science.  The question “what is science?” is not and cannot be a scientific question.  It is a statement of philosophy about science, describing the limits of its epistemology and the nature of its ontology.
    On the rare occasions when the scientific journals discuss philosophy of science, they usually delve into it only long enough to come back to a reassuring verdict that objectivism is still the only philosophy worth believing (i.e., that our sensations of the world correspond to what is objectively real).  Here were some examples in the form of book reviews in Science magazine.

1. Perspectives on perspectivism:  Perspectivism (a form of constructivism, i.e., that our view of reality is a construct of our sensations) claims that the human mind cannot extricate itself from an observation in a bias-free manner: what we call a quark, for instance, or what we perceive as red, is a function of how we, as humans, classify and perceive things.  Peter Lipton reviewed a recent book by Ronald Giere on this view, Scientific Perspectivism, in Science May 11.¹  Lipton reviewed the theories of Immanuel Kant and Thomas Kuhn (“Kant on wheels”), and discussed Giere’s own position.  Giere extended his discussion of color perception to all of science, concluding that “science is perspectival through and through.”
   

   Constructivists deny the “view from nowhere.”  Science can only describe the world from a human perspective.  Objectivists claim that, on the contrary, there is such a view.  You can’t think without thinking, but it does not follow that what you are thinking about–baryons, say–must somehow include the thinker.  Objectivists hold on to the idea that the world has its own structure, which science reveals.

   Lipton ended up disagreeing with Giere, but provided only fuzzy responses: he said the constructivist position “remains obscure” and “difficult to grasp.”  He said objectivists will “not be moved” by the book, because it has an “uncertain force.”  Here was his summary case for objectivism:

   Scientific descriptions surely are incomplete and affected by interest, but these are features the objectivist can take on board.  Completeness and objectivity are orthogonal.  Maybe in the end constructivism is true, or as true as a constructivist can consistently allow.  Nevertheless, the thought that the world has determinate objective structures is almost irresistible, and Giere has not ruled out the optimistic view that science is telling us something about them.

   It is not clear, however, that Giere or other constructivists would be put off by these arguments.  There is no necessary connection between an argument being pleasing and it being true.  Are not descriptions like “irresistible” and “optimistic” some of the very human perspectives Giere was talking about?

2. Who watches the watcher?  Chris Adami, usually known for his evolutionary computing work, reviewed an unusual book by Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop, in Science May 25.²  Hofstadter tried to give a completely materialist explanation of mind:
   

   Hofstadter’s explanation of human consciousness is disarmingly simple.  Even though he spends most of the book giving examples and analogies from realms as disparate as particle physics and boxes of envelopes, the main idea is simply that our feeling of a conscious “I” is but an illusion created by our neuronal circuitry: an illusion that is only apparent at the level of symbols and thoughts, in much the same way as the concepts of pressure and temperature are only apparent at the level of 10²³ molecules but not the level of single molecules.  In other words, Hofstadter denies consciousness an element of ontological reality, without denying that our thoughts and feelings, pains and longings have an “inner reality” when we have them.  But to show that consciousness is a collective phenomenon of sorts, he needs to delve deep into the theory of computation and, in particular, Austrian mathematician Kurt G�del’s proof of his incompleteness theorem, as these concepts are key to the idea the author wants to convey.  And he does this admirably in a mostly playful manner, choosing carefully constructed analogies more often than mathematical descriptions.

   Again, however, it is not at all certain a philosopher of another persuasion would be tongue-tied over these arguments.  Playful arguments have no necessary connection with truth.  As skilled and admirable as Hofstadter’s writing might be, he has a fundamental problem explaining consciousness from particulars of neurons.  To do it, he tried to extend G�del’s incompleteness realms upward into unknown territory where each higher realm provides the completion of each lower realm, then wraps in on itself: “Hofstadter suggests, our ability to construct symbols and statements that are about these symbols and statements creates the ‘strange’ reflexive loop of the book’s title out of which our sensation of ‘I’ emerges.”
       At this point, Adami (though admiring the book) comes close to bringing the case down with a pointed question:

   This ambitious program aimed at a deconstruction of our consciousness is not without peril.  For example, if we posit that our consciousness is an illusion created by our thoughts “watching ourselves think” [as the philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett had previously suggested], we might ask “Who watches the watcher?”  Or, if I am hallucinating an “I,” who is hallucinating it?  However, an infinite regress is avoided because on the level of the neuronal circuitry, the impression of having a mind is just another pattern of firings–something consciousness researcher and neuroscientist Christof Koch of the California Institute of Technology calls “the neuronal correlate” of consciousness.

   Yet is this answer not begging the question?  The issue is whether a mind can be reduced to neurons, yet Adami just stated as a matter of fact that “the impression of having a mind is just another pattern of firings” without arguing for how or why this could be so.
       Adami clearly enjoyed the book as a companion to Koch’s The Quest for Consciousness.  He accepted the premise that mind can be expressed as an artifact of neuron firing patterns.  One consequence is that humans should be able to build conscious robots some day.  A second consequence is almost purely metaphysical:

   Second, the G�delian construction suggests a tantalizing hypothesis, namely that a level of consciousness could exist far beyond human consciousness, on a level once removed from our level of symbols and ideas (which themselves are once removed from the level of neuronal firing patterns).  Indeed, G�del’s construction guarantees that, while statements on the higher level can be patently true but not provable on the lower level, an extension exists that makes the system complete on that higher level.  However, new unprovable statements emerge on the next higher level–that is, on a level that maps an improbable jumble of our thoughts and ideas to, well, something utterly incomprehensible to us, who are stuck at our pedestrian echelon.  How incomprehensible?  At least as inscrutable as the love for Bartok’s second violin concerto is to a single neuron firing away.

   Thus Adami ends on an irrational leap.  Appeals to higher levels of consciousness that are unknowable from our level, even in principle, beleaguer any attempts to encapsulate mind within a materialist world view.  (And, as a materialist himself, Adami clearly did not intend to suggest that the highest level includes God.)  Claiming such ideas are incomprehensible or inscrutable is no escape if Adami wants to play the philosophy game.  An interlocutor would call it another case of Adami begging his own question: who watches the watcher?

¹Peter Lipton, “Philosophy of Science: The World of Science,” Science, 11 May 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5826, p. 834, DOI: 10.1126/science.1141366.
²Christoph Adami, “Philosophy of Mind: Who Watches the Watcher?”, Science, 25 May 2007: Vol. 316. no. 5828, pp. 1125-1126, DOI: 10.1126/science.1141809.

These book reviews have been in the queue for three months but finally needed airing, because they are important.  Scientists cannot escape philosophy.  They are embedded within it, whether they like it or not.  To pretend philosophy has no bearing on their work is itself a philosophy.  The question is not whether a scientist practices philosophy, but how well he or she does it.  These two did not do it very well.  Both appealed to emotion and flights of fancy to defend objectivism and materialism.
    Christians are objectivists, but are the only ones who have a warrant for it.  Christian objectivism is founded in the eternal, unchangeable Creator.  That “anchor on the infinite” is what gives us confidence in objective reality.  A materialist cannot anchor his thoughts on anything universal, necessary, or certain; he is trapped in his cage of limited perceptions.  He cannot prove that his sensations and perceptions pertain to anything that is “out there” in the world (the correspondence theory of truth).  The Christian has an infinite-personal God that gives us the completeness to our human incompleteness.
    The case is stronger than this.  Philosopher of science Greg Bahnsen forcefully argued that only the Christian world view provides the “preconditions of intelligibility” for any rational response to existence, epistemology and morality (see American Vision for lecture series).  A skeptic might accuse Christians of having a world view based on faith (fideism).  Bahnsen’s comeback is that without the Christian world view, you cannot prove anything.  The world makes sense from a Christian view; it makes no sense from any other view.  Christians accept that they start with a world view and its presuppositions, just like everyone begins with presuppositions.  But if you want to argue anything rationally, you must start with Christian presuppositions, or your answers become arbitrary or inconsistent, or both – and once you permit arbitrariness or inconsistency, you cannot prove anything.  This, Bahnsen explains, is the transcendental proof of God’s existence.  It’s not a slippery proof based on reason (like Descartes), or on empiricism (like Paley), or on pragmatism (like one’s personal testimony), or on any of the other approaches that usually result in a stand-off.  It is a proof based on the preconditions of intelligibility: without the Christian world view, you cannot prove anything.  All rational discussion ends before it begins unless you accept as a precondition that the infinite-personal God of the Bible exists.  Then, and only then, observations and arguments make sense   A corollary is that the only way that secularists like Lipton and Adami can make their arguments is by pilfering the presuppositions of Christians.  In a vivid metaphor, Bahnsen says that the only way the bad boy can slap his father’s face is by sitting in his lap.
    The Christian world view is also the precondition for intelligibility in science.  Both Greg Bahnsen and J. P. Moreland (see his book Christianity and the Nature of Science) have argued this case cogently that one must accept Christian presuppositions before one can even do science.  To do science, you must defend the correspondence theory of truth, be able to account for a world of natural law, defend the validity of inductive inference and deductive proof, accept the reality of the mind, believe in the universal applicability of the laws of logic, and uphold universal standards of morality.  All these functions come included in the Christian world view package.  They are indefensible in any other world view.
    Christianity, then, is a precondition for the intelligibility of science and for reason itself.  This does not mean that non-Christians cannot do science or use reason, because clearly they do; it means that they cannot account for the validity of science from within their own world view.  Whether they are aware of it or not, they plagiarize Christian assumptions whenever they reason inductively or deductively about the world.  (This, Christians know, is because they retain the image of God impressed on their souls.)
    The argument that a materialist, as a collection of particles and forces, can do science without God has no more power than plugging an extension cord into itself.  (That, indeed, would be a strange loop.)  For the power to flow, science has to be plugged into a socket named Christian Presuppositions.  We have minds that can reason about objective reality because we have an all-knowing, rational, all-wise God who imbued some of that rationality into us.  He is the completion to our incompleteness.  He is the one who watches the watcher.