Of delusional believers and naive positivist scientism

Great Debates
1

While the two topics for this OP appear in unrelated threads I thought they were pretty much the opposites of one another – pending further definition from mswas on the latter.

Since we were asked by the OP in the first thread not to stray off-topic and the second one was closed, I felt there was enough merit to start a new thread in order to discuss both takes.

1-Are believer delusional? Contrary to what alterego asserts here, I don’t believe that is a wide spread notion amongst non-believers*. From my perspective, personal beliefs normally do not enter into my evaluation of a person’s rationality. In fact for the most part when meeting new people my default position is that they are believers to some degree. Normally there’s no need to delve into the nature and depth of individual convictions for just like I don’t go around proclaiming my own beliefs, most believers I meet act in similar fashion.

Having said that, it is also true that when this topic is brought forth I do take mental notes of individual perceptions. Meaning that while I find nothing unreasonable about believers per se, the degree to which they hold their beliefs does, at times, make me conclude that some are indeed delusional. As to how exactly I make that – admittedly subjective – cut, well, as anyone else I am influenced by my own experiences and knowledge. Thus when someone starts talking about actually “seeing” and “speaking” to ethereal beings, be they gods, ghosts or what have you, I admit that the “delusional” label starts to appear fitting since those are extraordinary claims that go beyond the world as we know it. Even then, I think one must take into account just how much influence said beliefs have in the normal day to day life of said people. If they live their lives counting on unforeseen influences from beyond, then yes, I do think there’s a need to rearrange their furniture – in matter of speaking. However, in most cases, I still adopt a “live and let live” attitude for in the end, most people I know have little to no direct influence on me. OTOH, it is something I have addressed with family, relationships and friends and for what little it is worth with most of them I’ve been able to reach a common understanding. There have also been a few instances where that understanding simply didn’t happen. In such cases I found it best to simply part ways.

Okay, that about sums-up the first part of the OP from my perspective; obviously other views are welcomed. I am leaving the second part open in order for mswas to clarify what he meant. Having said that, if it is not as understood I would still like to hear from theists who think that some/many/most/all non-believers rely in science as a quasi official Bible. It’s an argument I’ve heard a lot, both here and in real life and I’d like to see exactly how it applies to my own way of thinking – as well as how others perceive it and use it.

*for the purposes of this discussion I’d like to use the term “non-believers” to encompass, well, all of those who simply don’t believe in a deity. No nitpicking of the term please, that’s already been done to death.

As for starting this thread in The Pit, well, I don’t think the topic is pit-worthy as is. However since I expect some posters to take umbrage if at some point their proposed beliefs are labeled “delusional” and/or the opposing set, get angry due to what they feel is mislabeling of their own non-beliefs, then perhaps it is best to do it here.

Here’s hoping that the profanity won’t overwhelm the content.

2

I think this is an interesting OP. I also think it would be a lot better if it were in GD, where less incendiary language might help it be an actual discussion. Might I suggest you have it moved while it’s still possible? Also, I like the way you define “non-believers”. I think it would be helpful to similarly define “believers” to simply be theists. It might help the discussion, encouraging it to be on point and not being about a particular religion.

I’ll hope to participate later, especially if it’s moved, but I don’t have adequate time now.

3

Fair enough, magellan. As I said, it is not profanity I am interested in but the topic itself. And sure no problem with your definition of believers as theists. Again, that’s not what I’d like to discuss here but rather the views from each side.

GFactor, please move this thread to GD.

4

Done.

5

Thank you, sir. That was so fast I am still spinning. :wink:

6

Thanks for starting this. I’m looking forward to reading what others have to say.

I would also like to second the note to consider asking it to be moved to GD.

And I still think that adopting “naive positivist scienctism” sounds like fun.

7

I think mswas simply has some paranormal beliefs but is introspective enough that on some level he understands the merit that skepticism and science has against them. So he can’t simply ignore that issue, he has to justify it to himself somehow. Combine this with his general more-intellectual-than-thou attitude, and you get someone who scoffs those who embrace a purely scientific naturalist or skeptical view as having a narrow minded or insufficiently broad world view.

For example, he believes in Qi, which is a form of vitalism. There was this post in the Sylvia Browne thread which is ambiguous but I can’t think of any interpretation except that he’s mocking skeptics by implying we’re unfairly maligning an obvious fraud. There are other examples that I can’t recall or find offhand.

8

Well! If I knew you’d me so responsive to my suggestions I would have made many other ones in many previous other pit threads. :wink:

Good move. I’ll be back later.

9

I suspect that what **mswas **means by “naive positivist scientism” is a general board attitude that statements about reality generated through methodical materialism are TRUE.

The unexamined predicate in this epistemological stance is what we mean by “true”. Any statement about reality is a string of abstract signifiers, so when we say something is “true” we’re implying that there’s a correlation between the signifiers and the features of reality they refer to. However, the signifiers are not reality. Language is a human construct, and so any correlation between statement and reality is necessarily fragmentary and incomplete. A “true” statement is not unequivocally true, but rather conditionally true within a certain realm of discourse.

If I say “schizophrenics are insane”, that statement is certainly true within normal contemporary discourse. But it’s useful to recognize that “insane” is itself a cultural construct. It’s a way of grouping together a wide range of different human behaviors into a useful abstraction. However, there’s nothing magical about that particular abstraction. Other cultures have had other ways of organizing categories of human behavior, and as we learn more about brain function we may discover that our current abstractions are replaced with other, more useful ones. One hundred years from now the statement “schizophrenics are insane” may sound as silly as a discussion of the bodily humors does today. (The bodily humors themselves being an earlier attempt to construct a set of abstractions to accurately describe a collection of confusing empirical observations.)

The “naive positivist” approach is to ignore the constructed nature of the abstractions we use and to instead assume that they represent some sort of Platonic essence that science is in the process of gradually uncovering. It implies that our current discourse is somehow absolute and privileged, rather than being a set of somewhat arbitrary cobbled-together conceptual frames.

On the other hand, I may be totally misreading mswas’s comments … .

10

Well if that’s the case – pending mswas confirmation – I think we should leave the whole “naive positive scientism” aside and simply debate the merits of the science-as-a-Bible claim. I really don’t want to add paranormal into the believers/non-believers mix.

Maia’s Well,

Yeah, I liked the term as I understood it at first. Perhaps we can get mswas to let us use it that way?

You know, as in “you’re delusional!” and “you should talk, naive positivist scientist!” :slight_smile:

magellan, come on! Even you know that broken clock is right twice a day. So don’t push it :smiley:

For the nitpickers: “in matter of speaking” should of course be: in a manner of speaking.

11

I have met people at both extremes; however, as I am a believer, I’ll try to comment more on your comment about science as a quasi-Bible for non-believers. One important thing to keep in mind is that, as someone with religious beliefs, it’s pretty much a given that I believe that there is more out there than we can experience and measure, at least at this point. To some extent, I think many non-believers will make some admission to this; not that it’s necessarily super-natural or that it implies a spiritual world, but simply that there are some human experiences, many of them somewhat common, that don’t have adequate scientific explanations for everyone.

The part that gets frustrating for me is, precisely as you say, someone who treats science a quasi-Bible. By it’s very nature, science is always evolving. Science isn’t perfect, it doesn’t have an answer for everything, and sometimes it’s wrong about things; however, I still run into people who treat current scientific understanding as unasailable fact and leave no room for other possibilities. For example, we are having a discussion, and something that treads that line comes up and, rather than consider possibilities, the other person resolves to a state similar to “science hasn’t proven it exists, therefore it cannot exist”.

Even worse, there are a number of human experiences that simply lose some of what makes them beautiful experiences when filtered through that perspective, like love or purpose and relating back to biochemical reactions, evolutionary instincts for reproduction, and all that. It’s like giving someone a plate of food, them finding it delicious, and then, when finding out it’s tongue or some other “gross” kind of food rejecting it. Science may some day far off in the future eventually solve all of the problems, even about complex things like human nature, but we’re not there at this point and treating it as such is just…silly.

I take this same approach to my religious beliefs too, and I think people who take the opposite extreme are just as silly. Religion is just as much an evolving process as Science is, just in a very different way. By that, I mean, even looking at the same scriptures today as theologians were hundreds of years ago, they are often gaining new insights into their meaning and how it relates to us. Sometimes, it even means a complete reversal on some beliefs that have been held for centuries. Anyone who holds that their religious fews are necessarily the correct ones and that everyone else’s are incorrect are just as foolish.

12

Science-as-a-religion claims stem from the insecurity of the person making the claim, generally. On some level, they’re uncomfortable about some aspect of their beliefs and the idea that there’s a superior system of belief, more able to reach the truth, bothers them. So they try to dismiss it by saying “he’s no different from me, he just has a different set of sacred cows and beliefs”

Science is humanity’s best attempt at understanding the nature of the world. Inherent in the process is an attempt to weed out the sort of intellectual biases and ignorance that lead people to paranormal beliefs. The purpose of science is take humanity out of the intellectual dark ages. But most people arrive at their views because they are easy, not because they are worthy or valid. What response would a system that tried to destroy that illusive comfort get besides hostility?

13

Interesting posts, guys. Already I am seeing a conflict between believers definition of knowledge and reality, and the way I use those terms myself.

Will try to compose a more comprehensive post on just those two issues to see if we can find some common ground. As is, I can’t agree that because we obviously don’t know everything – and even that which we know is constantly evolving – that leaves the door open to anything.

In a nutshell I think that is the discussion.

14

If they are, it’s a mass delusion. By this, I mean, for most any belief, there are enough people telling you theat you’re right, that also believe the same thing, that I don’t really think the term “delusional” applies anymore.

When your dog tells you to kill all the whores, generally, you’re not going to find a whole group of people to back you up. That makes you delusional.

Espouse a belief in reincarnation, say, and you got a couple billion backers. It’s hard to make the case that you’re “delusional” then.

15

I don’t really understand what you’re saying here, or maybe I just don’t agree. Trying to understand the mechanism behind say, love does not mean it’s less interesting, attractive or effective, or possibly inspiring. I don’t know about beautiful, but then, I think beauty as applied to that kind of subject is pretty much a short hand for a whole bunch of emotions. As a less emotionally loaded example, I don’t think understanding the rule of thirds is detrimental to the enjoyment of images.

ETA: I think tongue tastes just fine :slight_smile:

16

Why should I clarify anything? SenorBeef and RedFury are both trying to read the tea leaves of my obscure in-jokes that I like to make to myself and that’s kind of amusing, but I’ll bite anyway.

I actually don’t even really know what naive positivist scientism actually means in totality. I was cribbing it from this post by Maeglin. As Maeglin and I are friends IRL and he introduced me to this message board I kind of assumed he was referring to my tendency to get annoyed at people using skepticism as a signifier of group identity rather than being a rational tool.

SenorBeef couldn’t have gotten his analysis of me more wrong. I don’t have any problem with science, and in fact I can hang out with real scientists and have a grand old time. A friend of the family is one of the premier geneticists in the world and he and I stayed up drinking beer together last time I stayed at his home. It’s not him, it’s not Maeglin, it’s not Sentient Meat and it’s not Voyager who I have a problem with. It’s the dilettantes who want to associate with their betters, those who actually ARE skeptics and think that by calling themselves skeptics it magically makes them so. For the most part I don’t have a problem with SenorBeef’s take on things, I agree with him a lot more often than I disagree with him.

But really, I should just say, The Hamster King nailed it.

I believe in Qi because I have worked with arts such as Shiatsu that base their premise off of Qi and it actually works. I know a couple different styles of massage and the ones based off of western medicine (I am uninterested in your semantic nitpicks of keywords so I will continue to call it western medicine for these purposes) and the ones based off of eastern medicine feel very very different. The effects of Tui Na can be explained somewhat by western scientific principles because a lot of Tui Na effects come from working deeply into the tissue on trigger points or by almost violently separating the fascia from the muscle. Shiatsu on the other hand is much more subtle, and doesn’t really need to apply pressure at all, but it still can have dramatic impact. So basically when people dismiss Qi they are expecting me to dismiss something that I have been on both the giving and receiving end of and know that there is SOMETHING there. I don’t try to explain it scientifically, I am perfectly comfortable with the fact that I cannot explain it scientifically, and that’s that.

What’s even more interesting about Shiatsu is that Qi skeptics often are not benefitted by it. So it tells me that there is some layer of belief in which it works. It doesn’t matter to me whether or not it’s psychosomatic, because I don’t put the same stock in the term ‘psychosomatic’ as a dismissal. Just because something is psychosomatic doesn’t mean it’s not real. There is a level where there is the power of mind over matter. The very existance of mind is the proof that mind over matter does exist. For instance I just picked up a pair of metal scissors on my desk and put them back down. I made a choice in my mind to manipulate iron molecules and transport them through space. My mind impacted the external physical world.

For the most part I don’t actually take these sorts of queries seriously at all because I do not believe that the people asking me the questions are actually interested in the answers. For the most part I think people like RedFury want to PALATR and are not interested in any way in my actual thought process. That is abundantly evident by the fact that he fixated on an off the cuff joke I made and started this thread in the Pit. If it had remained in the Pit I wouldn’t have responded seriously at all. I also have little respect for positivism. There is a metaphysical layer to reality, it’s just an objective fact and that’s all there is to it. Thoughts cannot be fully understood by examining the chemical reactions in the grey matter of the cortex. If you gave me an EEG you could tell that I was thinking by the activity in my cortex. You might even be able to isolate which emotions I was feeling about it based on limbic activity, but you wouldn’t be able to know what the particular thought was unless I told you. A thought is by definition metaphysical even if its medium of conveyance is physical.

I just think that people around these parts don’t give enough credit to the level to which thought shapes reality. And that’s what I refer to as, ‘Naive Positivist Scientism’, if that’s not what Maeglin meant then I hope he’ll correct me. Maybe at some point I’ll go raid his liquor cabinet and steal his book. :wink:

As this applies to the Dope, I use the term, I think a lot of people around here have too high an opinion of their own ability to be rational. When I use the term scientism perjoratively I am referring to those who believe that science is something that belongs to them and not to others. IE, SenorBeef engaged in the fallacy with his analysis of my thought process. He thinks that I have some problem with science itself, I don’t, not at all, none whatsoever. What my problem is with people who use science as a totem for groupthink, as a way to cement belonging. They ridicule others, like myself in order to cement a bond with other individuals who share a similar outlook. This is the same sort of in-group/out-group behavior that characterizes any system of belief. Science is not a religion but Scientism IS a pseudo-religion.

In short scientism is a form of idolatry. It’s like the Groucho Marx joke, “I don’t know what is but I’m against it!”, well this is the inverse of that. “I don’t know what it is, but I’m for it! It’s Scientific!”, it’s like Science Fiction science. A love of science that treats it more like people treat mythology than as an analysis of cold hard facts. If I use the term scientism I am usually poking fun at people who think they are a lot smarter than they actually are. It’s incredibly conceited and all too common around here for people to conflate a problem I might have with a few individuals with science as though they = science. Maybe I’ll just call it trying to hide one’s idiocy behind the theory of relativity from now on. :wink:

Anyway, I’ll see how this progresses as I have very little faith that people actually wanted a serious discussion, they just wanted an excuse to talk trash about mswas and make fun of him for shit they don’t even understand and have made no serious effort to try to understand.

17

This is true in some cases but I disagree with it on a fundamental level because it’s just a stereotype. As I said above the problem is that people think that ‘they = science’, maybe the believers problem is actually with YOU (general you as in whoever is being accused of scientism) and your relationship to Science, and not with Science at all.

But a lot of people make no attempt to sort out their intellectual biases, and being fascinated by science as a bauble you barely comprehend doesn’t make you any less cognitively blocked. Lots of people think science is neato-keen but are actually terrible at looking at things critically.

18

I very much would like to see a serious discussion of this. Glad you have posted what you have already.

I have a question here. My understanding of skepticism is a philosophy in which there is thought to be no certaincy. Or are you using it in the more common sense, such as a skeptic being someone who doesn’t believe in anything “supernatural”?

19

It depends on how much I am attacked by those who just wish to be mean as opposed to actually discuss the issue. We’ll see how that goes. I usually don’t discuss this issue because I am not interested in getting beaten up when I talk about personal things. It’s not one of those throwaway topics where I’ll wade into the fray not giving a shit.

I am using it the way you are using it. The second definition of skepticism is not actually skepticism it’s a form of ‘naive positivist scientism’. :wink:

I actually do not believe in the supernatural. :wink: If it exists, it’s natural.

I’m pretty much an extreme skeptic in that I don’t put that much stock in belief beyond its utilitarian usage. For the most part I think human beings have very little clue about what the true nature of reality is and that all of our models even the best ones are woefully inadequate. That far from being at a level of high advancement in science we are actually at the toddler stage where we are just learning to walk and talk.

20

Forgive me, but it appears that you do have a problem with science if it does not validate your beliefs (which you prefer to base on your experience, a.k.a personal testimonials).

I have no interest in trashing poor mswas :(.

I do think it’s silly for people who have issues with the scientific method (when it conflicts with their preferred form of woo) to pretend that skeptics are engaging in a form of religion or groupthink or what have you. Insistence on a rational evaluation of phenomena employing the tools of science does not constitute a religious belief system, much as it may give you satisfaction to needle opponents in this way. If they are employing sloppy thinking to put down your beliefs, have at 'em. But you can’t logically embrace science only when it suits you, and exempt qi, shiatsu or other woo du jour.