Neuromania and Darwinitis

Raymond Tallis

Chapter 11 of the book The Naturalist Worldview of Moisés Pérez Marcos, which I discussed in the previous post, is dedicated entirely to the philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, who despite his atheistic religious stance opposes some of the modern exaggerations of reductionist naturalism. Tallis published a book in 2011 titled, significantly, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the misrepresentation of humanity. This book describes two very widespread philosophical pathologies, which emerge from professional journals and educated colloquiums to discussions in the pub or TV screens. (Pérez Marcos, paraphrasing Tallis). They are the following:

Naturalism or naturalisms

La cosmovisión naturalista (The Naturalist Worldview) is a monumental book, written in Spanish by Moisés Pérez Marcos, about naturalist philosophies. As with the multiverse, of which there are many different theories, usually incompatible with each other, there are (almost) as many naturalistic philosophies as there are naturalistic philosophers. In other words, they don’t agree among themselves.

The first thing to do when confronted with naturalism is to try to define it and differentiate it from related worldviews:

Will the multiverse change the scientific method?

Antony Flew

These are my last comments on Man Ho Chan’s article, which reviews and refutes recent attempts to make multiverse theories scientific. Here I’ll deal with those attempts that propose renouncing the scientific method to make the theories of the multiverse scientific. This group of proposals, the most radical, can be summarized as follows:

• Epistemological anarchy: Proposed by Feyerabend in 1988, it argues that science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to foster progress than its law-and-order alternatives. In other words: We had better give up applying the scientific method, lest we miss some pseudoscientific theory that could have been useful. 

Man Ho Chan comments this: It is doubtful that multiverse theories can make any real scientific advancement. In some versions of multiverse theories, they suggest that all that can happen happens. In other words, these versions can explain everything. If a theory can explain everything, it does not lead to any scientific advancement… Therefore, it seems that multiverse theories are passively driven by empirical findings or theoretical constructions rather than actively leading to any new scientific advancement.

Will the multiverse cause a change in the scientific paradigm?

Thomas Kuhn

I continue my comments on Man Ho Chan’s article, which reviews and refutes recent attempts to make multiverse theories scientific. In this post I’ll refer to those attempts that try to modify the current scientific paradigm to include the theories of the multiverse, so that they can be considered scientific. To do this, epistemological changes or scientific paradigm changes should be made.

According to Thomas Kuhn, there are five criteria that make it possible to evaluate the paradigmatic character of a theory:

1. Accuracy: Indicates whether the predictions of the theory agree with experimental data discovered after the theory is formulated. This criterion is similar to falsifiability in the Popper-style theory, and corresponds to what I have called in another post validation of the theory. It is clear that multiverse theories do not meet this criterion, since they do not make testable predictions.

Are the multiverse theories scientific?

Virgo galactic cumulus

In previous posts I have said that the theories of the multiverse (there are several, some of them contradictory to the others) are not scientific, because it’s not possible to prove them false, according to Karl Popper’s criterion: a theory is not scientific unless it can be proved false with an experiment.

A recent article by Man Ho Chan reviews and refutes various attempts to claim that multiverse theories are indeed scientific. Here I am going to speak about those that try to prove that the multiverse theories should be considered scientific without asking big changes to the current criteria. Carroll 2018 uses three main arguments to justify this:

Quantum paradoxes

The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics causes paradoxes, at least apparent, when one tries to apply it to the macroscopic world. These two are the best known:

• Schrödinger’s cat paradox. A live cat, a radioactive atom, a vial filled with hydrocyanic acid, and a device that breaks the vial if the radioactive atom decays are placed in an opaque box. If the vial is broken, the cat dies. If it isn’t broken, the cat lives. While the box is closed, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics tells us that the radioactive atom is in a superposition of states, decayed and intact, until someone checks it, at which point the superposition of states collapses into one of them. But then, while the box is closed, the cat must be in a superposition of states: alive and dead. Can a cat be alive and dead at the same time? Intuition denies it, but the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics asserts it. As its name indicates, this paradox was proposed in 1935 by Erwin Schrödinger, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics.

The aliens are coming!

Before the 20th century, some philosophers considered the possibility of the existence of intelligent aliens, from outside the Earth. We can cite Lucretius (De Rerum Natura, book II, 1st century BC), Nicholas of Cusa (15th century), and Giordano Bruno (16th century). The idea was happily adopted by science fiction writers, such as Lucian of Samosata (Vera Historia, 2nd century) and Cyrano de Bergerac (Comic History of the States and Empires of the Moon, 1656), of whom I spoke in another post.

During the 19th century, public attention focused on possible intelligent inhabitants of other bodies in the solar system, especially the moon and Mars. In 1835, The Sun newspaper published in New York six false reports declaring that flying men had been discovered on the moon. It is said that nine out of ten Americans believed it. In fact, The Sun had published a science fiction novel as though if it were real news, making reference to existing people, such as the astronomer Sir John Herschel. Near the end of the century, The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (1898) raised the possible existence of Martians, at the time of the scientific controversy over the canals of Mars, which was not finally solved until 1965.