Science: a tool
As far as I can tell there are two ways of looking at the world or wait, maybe two ways in which the world APPEARS to us (more on this later). This is the interplay of science and arts and how both these fields give us two different truths which are both extremely important.
So what exactly are these two truths then? And why are they exactly different? And if they are different are they even true in the most fundamental sense?
All extremely valid questions,
So when you ask what exactly these two truths are, science is a tool a very effective one for sure though simply a tool nested in the metaphysical framework in which we operate. Though what science helps us with is understanding the objectivity of the world to the best of our ability. Coming onto the second way of conceptualizing truth which I have listed earlier as a truth that is derived from the arts or one could call it the metaphysical truth in itself is something that tells us how to orient ourselves in the world. So objectivity and orientation. These two things aren’t the same.
If science tells us about the objective world can’t we derive how to orient ourselves through that? Why do we need the arts or something metaphysical to tell us how we must orient ourselves? So basically can’t values be derived from facts?
Not really. As aforementioned, science is a tool a very effective one for sure but simply a tool. I keep repeating this because the manner in which we look at the world is highly discriminatory and we only hone in on things we find meaningful and no one to my understanding has been able to put a finger on why we mind some things more meaningful than others.
The new atheist types like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris try to limit everything to our biological substructure. Though I find this view extremely surface-based as it’s not simply about meeting our biological necessities like eating, procreating, and staying warm. It’s the fact we have to eat today, tomorrow, next week, and next year and be able to procreate and stay warm similarly as well as being able to do all those things in tandem and the fact that everyone in society can do so as well. This is my eyes cannot happen if there isn’t a transcendent aim that individuals in society have.
The atheist types feel that if we simply are able to dispense with our biases everyone will become rational human beings but of course, then there is Hitler and Stalin, they were rational atheists in your eyes Dawkins? Imagine just for a second if individuals in the world weren’t accountable for their actions why wouldn’t they act in a manner that is self-serving and is do the detriment of others. Individuals will be able to justify any actions and that is seriously a very scary road to go down. For I am on Nietzsche’s side.
Back to science as a tool stuff. Even with thinkers like Dawkins and Harris, when they define things to be true those things aren’t true by their definition itself.
Through this flowchart what I want to get across this that we have the objective world but with the discriminations, we make in viewing it we only see an abstraction and so to call that the objective truth is naive.
In a Darwinian worlview it is NOT true what is there in the objective world but rather THAT WHICH SELECTS.
This is something I picked up from the first time Jordan B. Peterson was Sam Harris’s Making Sense Podcast where they basically discussed what I am trying to distill.
So really Dawkins, Harris, or anyone for that matter can’t say that science is representative of the objective world because in Darwin’s own terms it isn’t. It doesn’t matter if there are 10 animals in the objective world but if 3 of those 10 survive and further their offspring then they would be deemed MORE TRUE than scientific truth. In this very definition itself Darwin places survival as more favorable than extinction why does he consider that to be the case and why does he then formulate his definition in that manner if in the objective world both survival and extinction are of the same moral value because of course, they are not and that’s precisely the point.
Another famous example that comes to mind is a famous psychological experiment from psychologists Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris:
What if there is something so evident right in front of us which we aren’t even cognizant of, I am almost certain that is the case. This takes me back to one of the points I made earlier we choose to hone in on things that we find meaningful and the things that are meaningful are what APPEAR to us. So the reason why we prefer survival or extinction is that we find it inherently more meaningful. The reason why we find it more meaningful is difficult if not impossible to know.
And again why do we have to concede everything to reason?
