Wednesday 27 November 2013

Values, Purpose, Meaning & Quality of Life

     It's very useful to examine & understand the strengths & limitations of different ways of knowing. Science has an important well-defined role, but we should NOT exclude other ways of knowing - see: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2012/01/28-underdeveloped-way-of-knowing.html
     Unexamined, false assumptions about ways of knowing can sadly confine, indeed paralyze - see: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2013/05/critical-thinker-discerning-taste-and.html The following is from the legendary philosopher Huston Smith's (HS) interview by Jeffrey Mishlove PhD (JM) - on YouTube:

     "We've turned a method of getting at truth, namely the scientific method, into a metaphysics - taking to be real only what turns up by that probe, through that probe, and assuming that that probe is the privileged & reliable way of getting at truth. Well it's immensely powerful, but we don't see that it's power derives precisely in trade-off for its limitation

     JM: In other words, you seem to be saying that the
     modern Western mindset is a kind of imperialism 
     dominated by materialistic metaphysics.

     Well I think that's a fair statement because just think of what it leaves out. 
     Again, all credit to what (science) has done in the regions where it is effective and in fact a near perfect way of getting at truth in the material world
     But values for example - science rides on values, but it cannot itself deal with values. It can deal with descriptive values, like market research - it can tell us what people do value, but it can't tell us what they aught to value.
     A second thing is purpose. Is there any purpose in existence? In life? In reality? Jacques Monod, the Nobel prize winner says: "The systematic denial of purpose is the cornerstone of the scientific method" - and we can see why it has to be. Because if you go back to explain things 'because a god intended it so' - namely a purpose - why of course it short-circuits the scientific investigation for secondary causes which produces it. So we rule out purpose.
     And then meaning. The scientific endeavor is meaningful all the way through, but a certain kind of meaning it can't get at, namely the meaning of the whole - what is the meaning of life?

     JM: Sort of a Gestalt

     Right. Existential meanings they're sometimes called. The meanings by which we live - science can't deal with these. The scientist Steven Weisberg puts it: "The more comprehensible reality becomes, the more meaningless it becomes" - because it comes down to equations & numbers, and those are not themselves existential meaning.

     JM: So the fact is that our dominant worldview is a
     scientific one - without value, without purpose, without
     meaning, without a sense of quality.

     Yes - quality I haven't mentioned. ... the scientific enterprise & worldview too itself rides on many of these things we've already mentioned like values - values of truth, but the point is those values are not themselves turned up and revealed by science - they're assumed for science. And science itself cannot come to grips with - let's just name them again - values, purposes, meanings & qualities - it deals with quantities rather than quality. But look what we've left out if we leave out those four things!

     JM: The nourishment of life itself I would think ... and I
     would imagine that without that kind of nourishment
     being sustained by our mainstream cultural institutions,
     by our mainstream cultural mindset then what we
     experience is alienation, discontent, social problems ...

     I think this is a direct result of moving our beliefs into the confinement of a scientific view of reality. ... There's nothing wrong with science itself, in fact that's an understatement - it has given us incredible goods. The problem is not science but scientism - namely to assume that what science turns up, & can turn up, is the sum of all there is."



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