Nothing more than feelings
I watched a bit of Eugenie Scott’s talk at the Secular Humanism party again, via a post on it by Jerry. I watched the bit where she talked about The Feeling of bonding with her infant daughter, and the fact that “it is the meaning of the experience that is important.” Science can’t – you know the rest.
A commenter made a very good point about this idea.
Tell you what; if accomodationalists feel (heh) that they must use emotions to show that science doesn’t know everything, and there is room for the supernatural, how about accomodationalists only use descriptions of other feelings such as post-natal depression, racism, bigotry etc. and point out that their benevolent, all-loving god gave them those sensations.
Quite. Scott totally stacked the deck by selecting bonding with an infant as an example of Meaningful Feeling that science can’t add anything important to.
What is important is how I feel about that bond, which is distinct from any additional scientific understanding of the process.
Very nice, but what if you change the variables? Scott’s story is a peripeteia, a reversal of fortune. Just before the birth she was full of dread; then perinatal hormones kicked in, and she bonded. Imagine a different peripeteia. There’s the one in Christopher Browning’s book Ordinary Men, for instance. At first the men didn’t want to walk their assigned Jews into the forest and shoot them to death; then the demands of group loyalty kicked in, and they gritted their teeth and did their job, and it got easier and easier. Does it sound quite the same to say that “what is important is how I feel about that job, which is distinct from any additional scientific understanding of the process”?
No, it doesn’t, because the feeling is not one we want to valorize, and it’s one we do want to know how to interrupt or prevent, so additional scientific understanding is seen as quite germane and useful.
Not all Feelings are to be embraced rather than analyzed or understood.
I mean, we know alcohol makes us drunk, but you cant control how someone is going to feel about that inebriation. Someone might be a happy drunk, or a violent drunk, or a depressed drunk, or a dancing drunk, or an intellectual drunk…
EXPLAIN THAT, ‘SCIENCE’!!
I really love the fact that I love the fact that I love my children. The frikkin bizzaar-ness of the real world is AWESOME!
there really is no god.
P.S.
and the fact that there is no god makes it frikkin AWESOME!
Hm, I dunno. I suppose that to the extent that the Nazis in that case were faced with a crisis of conscience that drew on their reasons, desires, etc., we would be just as entitled to ask what the act of killing means to each of them, and whether or not the actions they perform will turn them into better or worse kinds of people. That seems consistent with her point — I think.
Here’s what I find hard to understand: Eugenie seems to have presupposed that all of science is the study of causes, not reasons or choices. But why? Why can’t we have a science that studies reasons — the study of meaning, and what makes for a meaningful action? If we can’t have a science of reasons, then a lot of social science is going to have to get stuffed into the woodchipper.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Nothing more than feelings http://dlvr.it/8xX4h […]
Scott needs to read The Moral Landscape.
I think many people fear that if we can grasp something objectively, if we can utterly dismantle it into some sort of reductionist understanding, that we must forever thereafter experience it at that level. It’s not quite the same as the worry about scientific understanding taking the magic of a thing away, but rather a pernicious expectation of mental authoritarianism, where subjectivity must make way for ruthless and impersonal objectivity inside our own minds; where feelings are done away with, replaced by measurements, formulae, statistics and opaque Latinate nomenclature.
Now, scientific explanations are a danger where one wishes to go a step further and use one’s feelings to support an otherwise unsupportable belief; say, feelings of transcendence used as support for dualism. Such beliefs are destroyed by conflict with the scientific truth of the matter. But that doesn’t mean that the underlying feeling can’t be enjoyed and explored (or mitigated or ignored) at a personal level, nor does it mean we can’t analyze or communicate our feelings in the vernacular. Just as a change of focus can return the 3D image of a stereogram to a field of dots, we don’t lose our feelings of transcendence or maternal bonding or whatever by explaining them, and thus there’s no need to protect them by fabricating some special aspect of them impenetrable to science.
Surely Eugenie recognizes that the maternal rush that she experienced is a physiologic response – hormonal to be sure – that is common to mothers of most species. To attribute a spiritual or transcendent aspect to this utterly normal and evolution-driven response is pushing the matter, more than just a little. The fact that the human brain can attribute ‘spiritual’ values to it says more about the cultural history of the individual than it does about the existence of anything divine or transcendent.
To paraphrase Tina Turner “What’s God got to do with it.”
The meaning of the feelings of xenophobia can have a reasonable scientific (and social-scientific) explanation, but not the meaning of feelings of a mother bonding with her newborn child?
It seems like they’re both sides of the same coin.
The “meaning” of the feelings of a mother-child bonding is of course fitness/increased survuval.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1764844/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=researchers-find-brain-re
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
And by the way, while xenophobia often is a rather divisive theme in the “culture war” (the nature-nurture debate), between the (ideally value-free) natural sciences and (more or less normatively laden) human sciences, methinks the current “mechanistic” explanation is commonly misunderstood.
Contary to “popular belief”, the identification of physical differences IS NOT a matter of skin pigmentation or other bodily features (or displayed artifacts) per se, but an shorth-hand indicator of CULTURE.
Our evolutionary “risk calculator” have “learned us” that the probablility of mutually shared VALUES
(an important prerequisite for cooperation) is greater for people having the same appearance as ourselves.
Cassanders
In Cod we trust
The “meaning” of the feelings of a mother-child bonding is of course fitness/increased survuval.
Well, I’m not sure. But isn’t this what people are talking about, sometimes, when they criticise ‘scientism’? Not that if ‘science’ isn’t a sufficient account then God must be. But that there is a very problematic ‘reductionism’ (for want of a better word) in the notion that – in the case of Cassander’s comment above – you have given an adequate explanation.
It depends what you mean by science, of course. If you include psychology (or allow that different psychological theories could be, at least in principle, scientific), then the ‘scientism’ problem isn’t there. But I think if you really think evolutionary theory is all you need to understand why mothers love their children, you can see what winds people up.
Off topic but perhaps of interest to Ophelia, an article from arch catholic Mary Kenny on the popes recent condom answer.
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/mary-kenny-common-sense-at-last-on-condoms-2429939.html
What’s she trying to prove, though? The observation that some things, in some times and places, are best not examined scientifically, for one reason or another, does not entail that, for example, supernatural claims about how the world works are immune to scientific investigation. That’s just a huge non sequitur. We don’t have to buy an argument like that at all.
It got very messy when I talked about this on my blog last week, because I think some people thought I was arguing for an accommodationist position when I was arguing for the exact opposite. What I was trying to show – but apparently making a hash of, judging by the response on Dawkins’ site in particular – was that non-accommodationists don’t have to go around denying obvious things about people’s feelings or the importance of the humanities or ordinary experiences of looking out the window, or whatever else we’re accused of doing from time to time by Eugenie, Josh Rosenau, and company. A non-accommodationist stance doesn’t entail anything remotely like that, and we shouldn’t for one moment buy into the idea that it does. They’re attacking a straw man (though some folks do make it easier for them by more or less pleading guilty).
Since the natural sciences have effectively destroyed religious claims to explain the origins of nature, it has now retreated into the humanities and social sciences, and is seeking its next waves of attacks.
One set of attacks is in the history of science, making up truths that religion is the friend of science and not its enemy. Another set of attacks is psychology, God of the gaps now hides itself in explaining consciousness and spirituality (feelings).
And so this is the rather uninspiring and predictable response of religious academics, to continue on with the desperate war, poisoning wherever knowledge is at its most vulnerable.
Science is now beginning to tackle the subjective realm with evolutionary psychology and neurology. But until religion is fully purged from academia, we will have to put up with its inadequate attacks and ignorance.
Eugenie Scott’s talk was full of muddled thinking and red herrings. Sure, scientific knowledge isn’t the only thing that people care about. But what does that have to do with the question of whether science can investigate supernatural claims?
I’m still waiting for _any_ supporter of IMN (NCSE-style methodological naturalism) to give anything approaching a carefully considered argument in support of that position.
(I should stress that I think Scott and other NCSE members generally do an excellent job of supporting evolutionary science and opposing creationism/ID. I just find it sad that they also employ mumbo jumbo of this sort, instead of sticking to their strong scientific arguments.)
I am reminded of what Feynman says somewhere – that he appreciates the beauty of a flower more because he knows something about how it works. I think, and it has been my own experience, that this is true again when it comes to understanding how it works on us. Sort of an interesting “spiral”.
I *don’t* think one need claim more, at least in all contexts, however, just that F’s view shows the compatibility of the subjective and the objective viewpoints. That said, however, there might be people who get the “full” aesthetic reaction to something *and* and get it objectively at a deep level as well – Einstein?
I tried to say this over at Jerry’s place and didn’t seem to make much headway, so I’m going to try again. Scott’s jump from science to meaning is really too big of a jump. For some reason she thinks that, once you’ve made the jump you’re in a different cognitive realm, one that is associated with religion. But this is nonsense. Both scientists and religious people have times when life seems meaningless. Just saying that the purpose of the world is to bring the world and us into existence doesn’t provide meaning. Some religious people can agree with George Herbert and believe that
But, for most people, sweeping a room is still drudgery, religious or not. In the same way, Scott may have bonded with her baby once it was born — although immediately before she was wondering what the hell she had got herself in for — but I’m willing to bet that after the child was born she still had moments of wondering what in hell she had got herself in for.
Religion doesn’t provide meaning. We provide meaning. And if we don’t provide it — if life is truly something routine and uninteresting to us, and we have contributed nothing of our own energy and enthusiasm to it — then neither religion nor science will do the trick.
But at another level, Scott is doubly wrong. Not only does religion not provide meaning in a sense in which nothing else can provide meaning, but science (critical thought) can go a long way towards analysing why some people find life meaningful and other people do not. Or it can analyse why one thing will strike us as particularly beautiful and another thing does not. Some people, of course, are just “philistines” when it comes to the appreciation of the good things in life, and prefer, say, velvet pictures of horses to Manet, but a good critic could tell us why preferring poetry to pushpin will make our lives richer and deeper, or why the shrill certainties of some sorts of religion are a poor substitute for human relationship. It may not be ‘scientific’ in the strict sense of providing theories and evidence, but it is not simply a matter of going with the flow of untutored feeling either.
Why is it that people like Scott seem to suggest that as soon as we make the leap from science to feelings, or from science to any other cultural pursuit, we have landed in the heart of religion? I think it’s just the Gouldian idea that we are dealing with magisteria here, and if we’re not in one we must be in the other, and that’s so simplistic as to be completely useless as a way of analysing human experiences, and it’s so uncritical as to raise questions about Scott’s ability to think clearly.
We are emotionally driven beings (read: instinct driven). To enjoy some of these things (food, sex, love, etc) we do have to ‘let go a bit’ and not over analyze. But that does NOT mean that these things represent some profound revelation — they are simply our primal animal brain making itself known.
Yes, Jay, we are to some degree emotionally or instinct driven beings, and to enjoy life we have sometimes simply to let go, but the Greeks discovered, long ago, that, while letting go may be good advice in many situations, analysing and thinking about what we are doing, and what we should do, are probably good things to do as well, if we want to live a truly good life. Just emoting won’t necessarily make life meaningful, though it might make for a life of a lot of pleasant feelings. There are times when simply letting go without too much analysis is the way to go. I agree. But I also think that the meaning of a life as a whole, the shaping of a life — which would include some sort of impulse control — is an important thing to consider as well, and in shaping a life, times for letting go are probably things you’d want to include.
Jay @ Eric MacDonald,
Does this not show just how pragmatic the terms meaning and purpose are? They are pragmatic values that only apply relative to their usefulness individually or collectively. And this even applies to knowledge and truth, for they are useful and therefore have meaning and purpose.
As for post-natal bonding, that is blatantly useful, at least for the survival of mammals. How is this not science?
All meaning and purpose is traceable to pragmatic grounds, and since life functions pragmatically, it is fully within the confines of both natural science and reason to explain all meaning and purpose.
If anyone has a non-pragmatic origin for meaning or purpose, then please feel free to cite one.
Egbert. I wouldn’t want to jump to pragmatism here, especially if this commits me to something like James’ “will to believe”. There is more than utility involved, I suspect, though this might take us rather further afield. There is a sense in which some things are true whether I find that truth particularly fits in with my own sense of what is useful or not. I can’t (at least in many cases) simply make things true, just by thinking of them as according with my own (probably) temporary purposes. But if what you are saying is that, given that the world is as it is, insofar, at least, as we can know it to be so, I in some sense create my life’s meaning by acting within the world in a meaning-endowing way, that is, by appropriating the various aspects of the world that come my way in a way that is consistent with my sense of who I am and what I want to achieve, then, in that sense, all meaning and purpose is pragmatic. However, I must live within the limits of the world as these are given to me, unless, by manipulating the world, I can recreate it in a way that more nearly accords with how I, as a meaning endowing being, want to see my life within the world. (That, I have to acknowledge, is a very quick, unrehearsed response to your points about pragmatism and purpose.)
Eggbert–
I think we are basically agreeing… that emotional responses are simply the way our (tuned by natural selection) instincts make themselves visible to our ‘logical’ mind (a much later add-on, evolutionarily speaking). In that sense, they are not profound, but in one sense they are because our whole concept of pleasure (which is nature’s way of getting us to do stuff) is built around interacting with our instinctive drives.
I have a protocol for “Selective Irrationality” that I like to put forth from time to time. The idea is that we are all irrational some of the time, and in fact if we weren’t it would suck a lot of the joy out of life (e.g. as in Scott’s experience of maternal bonding). So how to decide when it’s okay to be irrational? Here are my three criteria:
1) You have to clearly delineate between those things which you believe rationally and those which you believe irrationally.
2) You can’t try to spread your irrational beliefs/feelings to anyone else (with some possible exceptions for close friends and families, e.g. I might try and convince my wife we were “meant to be” together, even if I know it is an irrational position)
3) You have to be willing to step back and re-examine your irrational beliefs/feelings from time to time from a rational perspective, to make sure they are not resulting in undue harm to yourself or others. (e.g. in the case of feeling that you and your spouse were “meant to be” together, that is a healthy thing to think for most couples, but if you are in an abusive relationship maybe you want to let go of that particular irrational thought…)
In any case, Scott is just making the same old “science isn’t everything, therefore religion is something” fallacy. Does not compute. Science isn’t everything, and I’ll be the first to tell you that (and in fact I’m more vocal about this than most in the skeptic/atheist community). But religion is useless, at least in the 21st century.
And by the way, my above protocol does leave room for private quasi-religious beliefs along the lines of “she’s in a better place now,” for people who are comforted by that sort of thing. And I know many are. Personally, I find that line of thinking to be vulgar and perverse, but I recognize that it’s a comfort to many, and as long as those who choose to believe it know they are just making it up and don’t try to convince anyone else of it, I suppose that’s alright.
Note that when “she’s in a better place” becomes sabotaged by beliefs in sin, hell, etc., that violates point #3 of my protocol. So such a belief should always be examined and discarded.
I’m with Eric — the gap here cannot be leapt. The logic of most religions is either you behave a certain way or something bad will happen. How a mother’s bonding (whatever that may be, by the way) with her child can be fit into that reasoning I can’t see.
@ Eric MacDonald,
I think a rationalist could make the transcendental case of truth–for example the subject of mathematics–that it is true whether or not it is useful. However, what if truth itself were only a value based on the usefulness of reliable knowledge? Then our worldview changes from a truth-centric position to a pragmatic position. Now mathematics has no actual truth value in itself, only when mathematical concepts correspond to reality.
For example, the number i, (i being the impossible number derived from i squared = -1) is called a complex or imaginary number, because it is an impossible number, and yet functions perfectly within mathematics, and even has practical implications within quantum mechanics. How can an impossible number be true? It is true only in the sense that it provides reliable knowledge of the world. The same applies to the irrational number PI.
There is also the problem of correspondence between perception and reality. Our knowledge is based on our perceptions, which only correspond to reality, and not reality itself. But since we can reliably say that our perceptions are more or less correspondent with reality, it is useful to link the two as being more or less equivalent. Thus, empiricism is indeed rooted in a pragmatic approach to both truth and knowledge unlike rationalism or dogmaticism.
Science and naturalism is not a truth-centric position to knowledge, but a truth-value position to knowledge. Truth is a value, and not a reality. What this rather radical interpretation of naturalism can give us, is that religion is devoid of truth value. Religion certainly has value, but as a falsehood (a value opposite to truth value). It can have a practical purpose, even devoid of truth. Only naturalism can give us truth value, but not absolute truth, because absolute truth does not exist.
The point I’m trying to make, is that most of our opponents are arguing from a metaphysical position of truth, whereas our naturalist position is a practical epistemology. People who make arguments from a supposed metaphysical rationalist or sceptical position make arguments that are devoid of truth value. They are simply not true unless they correspond to the naturalist method. In fact, in making claims that contradict naturalism, they are effectively arguing from falsehoods.
Arguing that meaning can only be derived from emotions, is self-contradictory, because how do we know emotions are meaningful? We require reliable knowledge of emotions and reliable knowledge of the correspondence between emotions and the physical objects and situations that evoked them, and only then derive meaning from that knowledge. You have to begin with naturalism and natural language and natural mammalian entities with brains and minds and emotions, before making truth claims and true statements about meaning, without which meaning loses all truth value. It could be argued that religion provides emotional meaning, but that is not the same as truth. Fiction is often emotionally fulfilling, but I don’t consider Harry Potter as true or existing person to provide meaning. Meaning is not the same as truth nor metaphysical reality, but a value based on our understanding. I can understand a poem emotionally or intellectually and gain meaning from it, but the poem is not a reality nor is it a truth.
Claims of supernaturalism are claims that contradict naturalism, and are therefore falsehoods. Not because supernaturalism is unscientific, nor because supernaturalism cannot be tested, but because it contradicts what we already know, it is the opposite of reliable knowledge or truth. Supernaturalism may be meaningful to people, especially emotionally, because it is part of a story or mythology that orders their world and makes it less chaotic and random. However meaningful that may be, however emotionally satisfying that is, it’s still not true. In fact, it is a falsehood, and falsehood has value and emotional meaning for people.
For the above reasons, as most would agree here, resurrection is a falsehood and therefore Christianity is a falsehood. Not only does resurrection contradict our knowledge and truth of the world and make Christianity a falsehood, but there is no such reliable knowledge of resurrection, only unreliable knowledge and thus cannot even be useful as knowledge. But Christianity can be useful and meaningful precisely because it is false and contradicts reality. It provides meaning emotionally, to people who believe it is true. But as I’ve state above, meaning is not the same as truth, truth or falsehood is irrelevent to meaning, it is only relevent to our understanding and emotions.
There is no truth nor reliable knowledge outside naturalism, only falsehood. Our imagination can be filled with truths and falsehoods, and both truths and falsehoods can provide meaning to what may objectively appear to be a meaningless or purposeless existence. I can give my life a true meaning or a false meaning, either may be practical to my success in life, but not necessarily practical to the survival of a culture or civilisation.
@ Jay,
I hope you and perhaps even Eric are in some agreement, that our rational minds are as pragmatic as our emotional minds. That we developed our knowledge and reasoning because they were useful for our survival as a species; and that we also developed the ability to lie and create falsehoods, because they too are practical. That there is no transcendental metaphysical realm where mind or truth sit in perfection. That meaning and purpose can be gained from falsehoods as much as truths and only have pragmatic values and not truth values. That truth is itself a value based on reliability of our perceptions and is not universal or independent of reality. That religion is a falsehood that provides meaning to many, and yet contradicts and even conflicts with truth and meaning gained through science.
Really? Wouldn’t it be a discovery of immense joy if we found the source of that bonding, so that we could use it to treat post partum depression? Would that really add nothing?
I don’t agree that feelings are only important for how they feel. What about the consequences of acting on them, or not acting on them? It seems that feelings don’t tell you everything about what’s important, and I’m surprised that Scott would think otherwise. Is she trying to validate feelings as truths? That doesn’t work. No matter how important feelings are they don’t instantiate truths about anything beyond how it feels to have them. If you want to know what is true you still have to investigate causes and effects. How feelings feel is important, but that’s just the starting point. What are feelings for? What role do they play in the life of beings that experience them? These are scientific questions.
I think it depressing when individuals attempt to measure and quantify everything and can broker not a jot of mystery in their lives
Were I a confirmed atheist, I wouldn’t feel at all threatened by what Eugenie Scott said about bonding with her child.
Ophelia’s stance on this reminds one of those scientists who waste time looking for a cut ‘n dried’ ( measurable, quantifiable) gene to explain homosexuality.
Sauder – miss the point often, do you?
What Scott is saying is she bonded with her child and therefore religion is somehow another way of knowing. It isn’t, and as many others have pointed out (if you read the comment here or on Coyne’s post), a scientific outlook provides just as much awe and mystery as any religion ever could.
Sauder, I don’t think atheists are threatened by what Scott says. We think she’s wrong to exempt feelings from scrutiny, and the point has been made that she’s very selective about the exemption in a way that indicates she doesn’t really think that feelings are not a fit subject for science, but that feelings associated with protected beliefs are to be exempted for the sake of the beliefs.