The Guardian newspaper hosts an exchange of ideas between philosopher Julian Baggini and physicist Lawrence Krauss about science's so-called mission creep into other fields including, but not limited to, philosophy.
While he seems quite happy with science, Baggini picks up on whether science is capable of fully answering moral questions, giving a compelling example of the claims concerning the (and he quotation marks them as well) evolutionary benefits and biological basis of rape which is generally considered to be barbarous. Baggini points out that there is something non-scientific and measureable about the moral condemnations of certain activities and also the occurance of (maybe more positive) others.
Krauss, on the other hand, argues that facts of a scientific nature should and do form the basis of moral decisions, and argues that in order for science not to apply in a situation involving something extraordinary as self-sacrifice, "there would have to be something beyond the purely 'physical' that governs our consciousness. I guess I see nothing that suggests this is the case." He concludes by saying that there may be areas where science falls down, but that these particular areas will not be known until science has tried to explain everything.
I don't get along particularly well with philosophy. A lot of the time it seems to hinge rather tenuously on the definition of a word, an initial assumption or to completely lose track of its point completely and, like a Simpsons episode, end up in a place totally unrecogniseable from where it started out.
On the other hand, I'm not a scientist and I took enough political science courses to come to the conclusion that attempting to explain human-scale activities using social scientific theory is almost always absurd. It's much worse when someone comes to the conclusion that a particular theory should guide the future and we should all start living by an idea cooked up in a booth in a Manchester bar. (I don't have anything in for that particular theory above others and get that we have to have ideas in order to make attempts to improve but you get the idea in a casual sense).
Social scientific theories, however, are always quite falsifiable (and old but relatively reliable way of discounting a scientific idea as completely accurate) and usually falsified. Ask a physicist if he or she thinks that political science deserves the name 'science' as we understand it today, and the answer is almost certainly 'no'. Not to say that political science and the humanities aren't valuable, however.
I think this is why most sensible discussions of this kind end up talking about brain chemistry and "the illusion of" free will. Using brain chemistry, we can or very well may be able to explain an individual human, say some scientists. Ultimately, this could mean that we could explain humanity and morality (whether such a thing is practical or not).
This is when I run into trouble and it's not because I think that there is something about humans that is not measureable by science in some respect. Complexity of modelling such an unimaginably enormous system usefully aside, I'm concerned that looking at people as individuals doesn't always translate into looking at people in a society in a reasonable way. This doesn't mean it's not possible, but it does mean that even small unpredictable and unreasonable events in the chemistry and physics of a person could actually have enormous and counter-scientific ramifications in the world.
I think that boils down to me finding myself partway between Krauss and Beggini's agreement to almost agree, but with no actual evidence for my argument. I think my lack of evidence for my argument says it all.
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On a note I will probably come back to later, in terms of actually investigation of philosophy vs. science I still think that philosophy (and political 'science', social 'science' etc.) is useful even if science can ultimately explain 'everything' (whatever that means) just as biology is still useful even though physics could be used to explain it.
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