The techniques of the scientific method are universally valid; they’re not contingent on a specific culture. If civilization was wiped today and we had to start from scratch, we would discover the same methods to ascertain natural laws and apply them to our purposes.
When we find an alien culture, I expect they will follow the same rules to find out what works and what is real (if they’re advanced enough to use science).
The techniques of the scientific method are universally valid; they’re not contingent on a specific culture. If civilization was wiped today and we had to start from scratch, we would discover the same methods to ascertain natural laws and apply them to our purposes.
Different scientific communities have different methods. The scientific method as practiced by physicists isn’t the same method we use in computer systems research and it isn’t the same method they use in medical research. And this isn’t because these different fields have different deviations from the One True Method—it’s because different subjects require different methods to prevent error.
In computer systems and physics, data is typically collected by machines. We therefore aren’t worried about observer bias or placebo effects, and we don’t usually worry about blinding things from experimenters.
With computer systems, everything is reasonably deterministic and so statistical error isn’t a major concern. Also, any effect that’s big enough to be interesting is likely to be far larger than statistical noise—it’s not an interesting paper unless you got a factor of two improvement or something like that.
In physics, it’s routine to circulate preprints before a peer-reviewed paper. This doesn’t happen much in computer science.
In physics and CS, a purely theoretical argument without data can be taken seriously, and often people will trust theory more than experiment. My impression is that people don’t have nearly the same sort of confidence in theory in biological or social science.
I think talking about The scientific method is mostly an oversimplification. I don’t hear professional scientists using that category when talking amongst themselves about their work. I hear much more about the particular publication and review norms of individual fields.
The awkwardness is that once you generalize enough to cover everything we normally refer to as “science”, it’s hard to include a very wide range of things we don’t normally think of as science.
We don’t think of legal reasoning as science, but it involves using information and experimentation (with a community of experts!) to update our model of the world.
The fashion industry uses experiment and empirical reasoning to figure out what people want to buy. But I don’t think it’s useful to talk about fashion designers as scientists.
I think the term “scientific method” as normally used in English does not pick out any actual cluster of behaviors or practices. It’s a term without a coherent referent.
I think the term “scientific method” as normally used in English does not pick out any actual cluster of behaviors or practices.
The term “scientific method” as ordinarily used is associated with the traditional rituals of “Science”, which are themselves unsatisfactory, or at best an improvable-upon approximation to what really works in finding out about the world. The more useful cluster is the one hereabouts called Bayesian epistemology. It can and should be practiced everywhere, and if a fashion designer employs it, it is just as useful to call it that as when a scientist in the laboratory does.
Science is tailored to counteract human cognitive biases. Aliens might or might not have the same biases. AIs wouldn’t need science.
For example, science says you make the hypothesis, then you run the test. You’re supposed to make a prediction, not explain why something happened in retrospect. This is to prevent hindsight bias and rationalization from changing what we think is a consequence of our hypotheses. But the One True Way does not throw out evidence because humans are too weak to use it.
Science is tailored to counteract human cognitive biases.
That isn’t really clear to me. Science wasn’t intelligently designed; it evolved. While it has different ideals and functions from other human institutions (such as religions and governments), it has a lot in common with them as a result of being a human institution. It has a many features that contribute to the well-being of its participants and the stability of their organizations, but that don’t necessarily contribute much to its ostensible goal of finding truth.
For instance, it has been commonly observed that wrong ideas in science only die when their adherents do. Senior scientists have influence proportional to their past success, not their current accuracy. This serves the interests of individual humans in the system very well, by providing a comfortable old age for successful scientists. But it certainly does not counteract human cognitive biases; it works with them!
Yes, science has the effect of finding quite a lot of truth. And philosophers and historians of science can point to good reasons to expect science to be much better at this than other claimed methods such as mysticism or traditionalism. But science as an institution is tailored at least as much to self-sustenance through human biases, as to counteracting them.
I think a Buddhist who seeks enlightenment might practice systematized curiosity. He doubts a lot of things that I take for granted. He only believes things that are in some sense confirmed by his perception.
I’m not familiar with that particular brand of Buddhism, but does it have concepts like karma and reincarnation? If so how do you deal with them and at the same time wanting to promote reductionism?
Theravada Buddhism is mainly practiced in Sri Lanka and Mainland Southeast Asia.
We do not consider Buddha to be a mystical superbeing come to Earth from celestial realms. We see Buddha as a regular guy who thought very hard about the problem of emotional suffering and came up with an innovative self-hack.
Karma and reincarnation are an inevitable part of Indian culture, and Buddhism was also touched by them. Karma is understood as the effect of your intentions, rippling across causal chains, and through some of those causal chains, influencing your future circumstances. It is not a cosmic system of morality, but a way of reminding you to be mindful of how what you do affects others and, potentially, your future selves.
Reincarnation is something I have more serious problems with. For one, I do not believe it. It is not a mandatory belief, though (nothing is, actually).
Karma and reincarnation are an inevitable part of Indian culture, and Buddhism was also touched by them. Karma is understood as the effect of your intentions, rippling across causal chains, and through some of those causal chains, influencing your future circumstances.
I have to preface by not saying that I’m not a Buddhist myself but that I do my meditation in a non-Buddhist framework. That means I do have my fair share of experiences but I do have to translate between frameworks.
Of course karma is all about causal changes but a lot of the causal changes that Buddhists see don’t really lend itself to materialist reductionism.
More importantly if you say karma is the effect of your intentions rippling through causal changes, that doesn’t answer the question of why the whole “goal” of Buddhism is to move beyond karma and become enlightened. It doesn’t even tell you what that “goal” is supposed to mean.
To me your answer looks like you are just reciting the teachers password. If I would go to an advanced Buddhist teacher I doubt that he would tell me that karma is about influencing your future circumstances because Buddhism is about being in the now, being in the moment.
Reincarnation is something I have more serious problems with. For one, I do not believe it. It is not a mandatory belief, though (nothing is, actually).
Of course Buddhism has no mandatory beliefs but if you drop reincarnation and keep karma you are left with asking where all that karma that determines your life comes from if not a previous life. In some sense it’s a valid Buddhist position to not seek for a source but if you a a reductionist, then part of that means actually breaking things down and not just stopping at saying that the karma comes from somewhere.
Of course Buddhism has no mandatory beliefs but if you drop reincarnation and keep karma you are left with asking where all that karma that determines your life comes from if not a previous life.
From the actions of other people? One part of Buddhism is to de-emphasize the concept of ‘self’, so the difference between “good/bad actions will cause good/bad things to happen to future reincarnations of me” and “good/bad actions will cause good/bad things to happen to other people in the future” might be smaller than it would seem at first sight.
One part of Buddhism is to de-emphasize the concept of ‘self’
Buddhism does not de-emphasize “self” to focus on other people.
Buddhism de-empahsizes “self” in the meaning of the continuity of identity—the classic Buddhist view looks at the mind/soul as beads on a string (of time) -- the beads are similar but they are not just one bead.
Yeah. It reminds me of questions like what if, 5 seconds from now, I will be Britney Spears?. I’m a little unclear on exactly what parts of “you” continue into the next incarnation (metaphors like “a lamp lighting another lamp” are not very precise)---I think you don’t get memories, but you do get mental habits and inclinations?
I could imagine a Less Wronger taking the position that “supposing for the sake of argument that everything in Buddhist metaphysics is correct, the similarities between two reincarnations are not great enough to preserve your personal identity in the philosophical/moral/my-utility-function sense. So you have no reason to care more about your future incarnation than about any other person”.
Furthermore, I could also imagine a Buddhist making that argument. Two recurring themes seem to be that it’s bad to focus on what you want, and that in fact you should abandon the idea that there is a “you” that wants things. If you follow that advice it seems you should not care about what will happen to “your” reincarnation in particular.
The techniques of the scientific method are universally valid; they’re not contingent on a specific culture. If civilization was wiped today and we had to start from scratch, we would discover the same methods to ascertain natural laws and apply them to our purposes.
When we find an alien culture, I expect they will follow the same rules to find out what works and what is real (if they’re advanced enough to use science).
Different scientific communities have different methods. The scientific method as practiced by physicists isn’t the same method we use in computer systems research and it isn’t the same method they use in medical research. And this isn’t because these different fields have different deviations from the One True Method—it’s because different subjects require different methods to prevent error.
In computer systems and physics, data is typically collected by machines. We therefore aren’t worried about observer bias or placebo effects, and we don’t usually worry about blinding things from experimenters.
With computer systems, everything is reasonably deterministic and so statistical error isn’t a major concern. Also, any effect that’s big enough to be interesting is likely to be far larger than statistical noise—it’s not an interesting paper unless you got a factor of two improvement or something like that.
In physics, it’s routine to circulate preprints before a peer-reviewed paper. This doesn’t happen much in computer science.
In physics and CS, a purely theoretical argument without data can be taken seriously, and often people will trust theory more than experiment. My impression is that people don’t have nearly the same sort of confidence in theory in biological or social science.
I think talking about The scientific method is mostly an oversimplification. I don’t hear professional scientists using that category when talking amongst themselves about their work. I hear much more about the particular publication and review norms of individual fields.
By scientific method I would mean something on a far more general level than details about circulation of preprints.
Architecture varies, but the structural mechanics that describes how buildings stay up is the same always and everywhere.
The awkwardness is that once you generalize enough to cover everything we normally refer to as “science”, it’s hard to include a very wide range of things we don’t normally think of as science.
We don’t think of legal reasoning as science, but it involves using information and experimentation (with a community of experts!) to update our model of the world.
The fashion industry uses experiment and empirical reasoning to figure out what people want to buy. But I don’t think it’s useful to talk about fashion designers as scientists.
I think the term “scientific method” as normally used in English does not pick out any actual cluster of behaviors or practices. It’s a term without a coherent referent.
The term “scientific method” as ordinarily used is associated with the traditional rituals of “Science”, which are themselves unsatisfactory, or at best an improvable-upon approximation to what really works in finding out about the world. The more useful cluster is the one hereabouts called Bayesian epistemology. It can and should be practiced everywhere, and if a fashion designer employs it, it is just as useful to call it that as when a scientist in the laboratory does.
Science is tailored to counteract human cognitive biases. Aliens might or might not have the same biases. AIs wouldn’t need science.
For example, science says you make the hypothesis, then you run the test. You’re supposed to make a prediction, not explain why something happened in retrospect. This is to prevent hindsight bias and rationalization from changing what we think is a consequence of our hypotheses. But the One True Way does not throw out evidence because humans are too weak to use it.
That isn’t really clear to me. Science wasn’t intelligently designed; it evolved. While it has different ideals and functions from other human institutions (such as religions and governments), it has a lot in common with them as a result of being a human institution. It has a many features that contribute to the well-being of its participants and the stability of their organizations, but that don’t necessarily contribute much to its ostensible goal of finding truth.
For instance, it has been commonly observed that wrong ideas in science only die when their adherents do. Senior scientists have influence proportional to their past success, not their current accuracy. This serves the interests of individual humans in the system very well, by providing a comfortable old age for successful scientists. But it certainly does not counteract human cognitive biases; it works with them!
Yes, science has the effect of finding quite a lot of truth. And philosophers and historians of science can point to good reasons to expect science to be much better at this than other claimed methods such as mysticism or traditionalism. But science as an institution is tailored at least as much to self-sustenance through human biases, as to counteracting them.
What do you mean with those techniques if you would have to taboo “scientific method”?
Sistematized curiosity, carefully doubt-filtered and confirmation-dependent.
Could you explain that a bit more in detail?
I think a Buddhist who seeks enlightenment might practice systematized curiosity. He doubts a lot of things that I take for granted. He only believes things that are in some sense confirmed by his perception.
Wow. That’s an unexpected view into myself. I happen to be a Theravada Buddhist.
Of course, I wouldn’t expect Buddhist meditation techniques to be necessarily useful for alien species.
I’m not familiar with that particular brand of Buddhism, but does it have concepts like karma and reincarnation? If so how do you deal with them and at the same time wanting to promote reductionism?
Theravada Buddhism is mainly practiced in Sri Lanka and Mainland Southeast Asia.
We do not consider Buddha to be a mystical superbeing come to Earth from celestial realms. We see Buddha as a regular guy who thought very hard about the problem of emotional suffering and came up with an innovative self-hack.
Karma and reincarnation are an inevitable part of Indian culture, and Buddhism was also touched by them. Karma is understood as the effect of your intentions, rippling across causal chains, and through some of those causal chains, influencing your future circumstances. It is not a cosmic system of morality, but a way of reminding you to be mindful of how what you do affects others and, potentially, your future selves.
Reincarnation is something I have more serious problems with. For one, I do not believe it. It is not a mandatory belief, though (nothing is, actually).
I have to preface by not saying that I’m not a Buddhist myself but that I do my meditation in a non-Buddhist framework. That means I do have my fair share of experiences but I do have to translate between frameworks.
Of course karma is all about causal changes but a lot of the causal changes that Buddhists see don’t really lend itself to materialist reductionism.
More importantly if you say karma is the effect of your intentions rippling through causal changes, that doesn’t answer the question of why the whole “goal” of Buddhism is to move beyond karma and become enlightened. It doesn’t even tell you what that “goal” is supposed to mean.
To me your answer looks like you are just reciting the teachers password. If I would go to an advanced Buddhist teacher I doubt that he would tell me that karma is about influencing your future circumstances because Buddhism is about being in the now, being in the moment.
Of course Buddhism has no mandatory beliefs but if you drop reincarnation and keep karma you are left with asking where all that karma that determines your life comes from if not a previous life. In some sense it’s a valid Buddhist position to not seek for a source but if you a a reductionist, then part of that means actually breaking things down and not just stopping at saying that the karma comes from somewhere.
From the actions of other people? One part of Buddhism is to de-emphasize the concept of ‘self’, so the difference between “good/bad actions will cause good/bad things to happen to future reincarnations of me” and “good/bad actions will cause good/bad things to happen to other people in the future” might be smaller than it would seem at first sight.
Buddhism does not de-emphasize “self” to focus on other people.
Buddhism de-empahsizes “self” in the meaning of the continuity of identity—the classic Buddhist view looks at the mind/soul as beads on a string (of time) -- the beads are similar but they are not just one bead.
Yeah. It reminds me of questions like what if, 5 seconds from now, I will be Britney Spears?. I’m a little unclear on exactly what parts of “you” continue into the next incarnation (metaphors like “a lamp lighting another lamp” are not very precise)---I think you don’t get memories, but you do get mental habits and inclinations?
I could imagine a Less Wronger taking the position that “supposing for the sake of argument that everything in Buddhist metaphysics is correct, the similarities between two reincarnations are not great enough to preserve your personal identity in the philosophical/moral/my-utility-function sense. So you have no reason to care more about your future incarnation than about any other person”.
Furthermore, I could also imagine a Buddhist making that argument. Two recurring themes seem to be that it’s bad to focus on what you want, and that in fact you should abandon the idea that there is a “you” that wants things. If you follow that advice it seems you should not care about what will happen to “your” reincarnation in particular.