The real discussion: Values (Humans)

by dhw, Saturday, January 02, 2016, 18:21 (3249 days ago) @ xeno6696

Dhw (to Romansh): I sometimes get the feeling that by reductionism you actually mean materialism, and what you mean by insights is the belief that all things can be traced back to material causes and effects. If this were so, there would be very little to discuss. We would simply conclude that science will eventually prove that life, consciousness, psychic phenomena, emotional, aesthetic and mystic experiences will one day all be traced back to material causes. That in itself is a matter of faith, and so has no more current validity than the belief that there are a dozen or so dimensions, other universes, and/or other forms of being beyond those that we know (or think we know).
MATT: Reductionism is usually used as an epithet by Intelligent Design proponents to be synonymous with materialism. Yet for the few things of faith we would be required to take by assuming materialism, we drop many, many, many more. To me, materialism represents epistemological conservatism at its best.-I agree, but with the reservation I expressed earlier, concerning those matters which so far science has been unable to explain. I do not accept the “assumption” that all things can be explained by materialism. That is a hypothesis.-MATT: Epistemology's goal is to provide the foundation to force us to justify how we know what we know. To me it is a directed study. Otherwise we could just assume Agrippan Skepticism and deny knowledge is possible. "Actual knowledge" is knowledge independently verifiable and free from cultural bias. (It must be true no matter the culture involved.) Materialism does require some speculation, but I will ask you the question, does it make us speculate more or less compared to other alternatives?
-The nearest we can get to “actual knowledge”, we agreed, is a “general consensus on what is true among those who are aware of the matter in question.” This of course must be independent of culture. I agree that generally materialistic science involves less speculation than, say, philosophy, but there are some subjects as listed earlier that even materialists can only speculate about, possibly because with our current means of access to “knowledge”, we are too limited to get to the bottom of the mysteries. That does not mean materialists should give up the search to justify their faith, but currently their speculations are far from achieving a general consensus and therefore have no more objective validity than those of the “immaterialists”.