Scientism, Physicalism, Materialism

Some people, such as philosopher Bertrand Russell, have taken the view that not only is science a powerful way to model the Universe but that science is the only way in which we can obtain knowledge. This view is sometimes called physicalism, materialism or scientism

For instance:

“Whatever knowledge is attainable must be attained by scientific methods, and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know”  

Bertrand Russell.

In fact this is self-refuting because the statement is itself not a scientific statement.

A view which is commonly held goes even further than that by saying that anything which is not discoverable by science cannot exist.

Despite its wide acceptance, there is no justification for this and there is a whole array of arguments against.

It is a highly restrictive view because it consigns anything to which the scientific method cannot be applied to the category of the “supernatural” where it is considered meaningless or not real.

However such a distinction says more about science and about an over-inflated view of humanity than about the Cosmos or what is real.

It excludes many things which are our everyday experience even though they are not normally considered as “supernatural”.

Conscious experience challenges physicalism

Ian Ravenscroft in his book [Ravenscroft 2005] expresses his belief that phenomenal consciousness is a physical event of the brain but admits that there is no way to prove that and there are reasons to believe that is not the case:

“Phenomenal consciousness does not, in my view, give us grounds for abandoning physicalism: there is little reason to doubt that episodes of phenomenal consciousness are physical events in the brain. However I find the arguments offered by Levine [Levine1993] to support the existence of an explanatory gap worrying and I follow Ned Block in thinking that, at present, nobody has come anywhere near bridging the gap [Block 1994]. We have nothing that even remotely looks like an account of how the brain gives rise to phenomenal consciousness, nor do we have many proposals about where we should begin to look for such an account”

[Ravenscroft 2005]

The following video presents one case against the assumption of physicalism based on the existence of conscious experience.

If we want to know things like how the Earth goes round the sun, we use physical laws. But what if we want to know how an ice cream tastes?

If conscious experience has no causal power, and therefore no effect on evolution, why did it, supposedly, evolve?

Although much work has been done, science has no explanation of what consciousness is or what could give rise to it. All the neuroscience, psychology and information technology that can be done gets us no nearer to providing one. The best we can do is say that consciousness is seen to be associated with brains and correlated with brain states but that is not an explanation. Neither does it tell us whether brains are necessary and sufficient for consciousness or whether other substrates are possible.

David Chalmers describes the question of consciousness as the “hard problem” since even neuroscience is “easy” in comparison. Others, such as Joseph Levine, would say that, not only is it a hard problem but that it is an impossible one for us. There is an unbridgeable chasm, an explanatory gap, between what we can know about the brain ( a physical object ) and what we can know about the nature of conscious experience (a non-physical phenomenon) affirming the inadequacy of physicalism to explain what we observe.

This is a good thing, as we shall see when we look at the implications of materialism.

The following videos go into more detail about the problem of consciousness and why it is “hard” and a challenge to the belief that the only thing that is in the Universe is material. The contributors have different views on the implications of this but they agree that it implies that there is more to the Universe than material or, at least, material as we know it.

The first video gives a short overview of the issues involved while in the second video, David Chalmers gives a more detailed and prosaic description

There are several well known arguments against physicalism although it seems to me that the inadequacy of physicalism is almost self-evident. David Papineau [Papineau 2002] is someone who strongly disagrees.

Peter J. Meyer, in his paper “Physicalism: A False View of the World” [Meyer July 2008] affirms the inadequacy of Physicalism to explain what we observe.

  • It cannot explain the existence of consciousness. Physicalists can only assert that somehow consciousness “emerges” in “sufficiently complex” physical systems. “Human thoughts and emotions emerge from exceedingly complex interconnections of physical entities within the brain.”[Dawkins 2006] (Italics in the original.) In fact they have no explanation for the “emergence” of consciousness from physical entities. This is actually an article of faith, comparable to Christians’ faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Other refutations of physicalism can be found, for instance here.

Back to “Limits of Science”
Onwards to “What can we know?”