science and maths

@rcs,

Science can explain why we see a rainbow, but it can't explain why rainbows are pretty.

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@rcs,

Quote:

but it can't explain why rainbows are pretty.

I think that it can. It is possible that when you first see the rainbow that a chemical response happens in the brain, perhaps a release of endorphins or serotonin. (just examples) That release causes a pleasant response within your brain and so the euphoria response connects the experience of the rainbow with a pleasant reward and so you label the rainbow with a positive trait. The labeling of the rainbow is probably grabbed by other such things you have experienced previously using the same method.

The other way to explain this is to use it's reversal. Let's say you are on a nature hike in the woods and all of a sudden a bear comes charging out from behind some bushes. What sort of reaction do you have now? I bet you are going to go into a fight or flight response with the release of adrenalin.

These two responses are exactly the same, the only difference is their chemical response and your physical reactions. By all means this is a crude explanation but I am sure it is not outside the scope of science.

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@Krumple,

Krumple;86819 wrote:

I think that it can. It is possible that when you first see the rainbow that a chemical response happens in the brain, perhaps a release of endorphins or serotonin. (just examples) That release causes a pleasant response within your brain and so the euphoria response connects the experience of the rainbow with a pleasant reward and so you label the rainbow with a positive trait. The labeling of the rainbow is probably grabbed by other such things you have experienced previously using the same method.

Yeah yeah, I get it. But that only tells us what the unifying neurophysiologic process is by which judgements of "pretty" are made.

It still doesn't say anything about the personal experience of it. The machinery behind the experience of "pretty" is not the same as the experience itself.

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@Aedes,

In my opinion, science and maths are everything!

There is nothing that can't be explained by physics (Of course I do not refer to our current status of research).

Aedes;86913 wrote:

The machinery behind the experience of "pretty" is not the same as the experience itself.

I'd rather say that it is both the same.
The experience itself isn't more than the saved procedure of the machinery.

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@rcs,

The neurological process might explain how the seeing of the rainbow causes certain "feelings" of pleasure at its beauty, but not why some people get that "feeling" and think the rainbow is pretty, and others do not. So we are left with the question why is X pretty, which is not the same question as how we feel its prettiness, and it does not seem that either science or mathematics alone can give an satisfactory account, nor can either account for the concept of "prettiness."

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@rcs,

I think science and math are going to have a hard time with subjective experience (i.e. values and aesthetics). Science and math will give us some insight but inherently science and math give a limited, partial, and somewhat unsatisfactory explanation for such experience.

I'll take the arts, music, literature, poetry for interpretations of subjective experience.
I really have trouble with materialism, mechanism and determinism and yet I still love the sciences.

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@jgweed,

jgweed;86972 wrote:

So we are left with the question why is X pretty, which is not the same question as how we feel its prettiness

I'd answer this question claiming that all our judgements are based on what we have experienced so far, including our morality, education and the like (However, this thought quite much arises form the psychoananalysis; I don't know to what extend you think of it as right).
All those experiences are saved in our brain and lead to our evaluation of new incoming perception.

This is, at least, my materialistic opinion on it.

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@rcs,

Quote:

Yeah yeah, I get it. But that only tells us what the unifying neurophysiologic process is by which judgements of "pretty" are made.

It still doesn't say anything about the personal experience of it. The machinery behind the experience of "pretty" is not the same as the experience itself.

I understand what you are saying. I just think that all experiences carry with it three types of judgment. You either like something, dislike it, or are indifferent to it. Since everything carries with it one of these three aspects, then by all means you are labeling everything. So for you when you see the rainbow you title it pretty, where as someone else might see it different. Therefore the label is not universal and if it is not universal then how is it that you come to title it as pretty while someone else doesn't?

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@Krumple,

Krumple;86994 wrote:

I just think that all experiences carry with it three types of judgment. You either like something, dislike it, or are indifferent to it.

I love my son, I love my wife, I love my brother, I love my parents, I love my grandparents, I love sushi, I love the Red Sox, I love practicing medicine, I love Mozart, I love Dostoyevsky, I love the winter, I love mountains, I love swimming...

Krumple;86994 wrote:

So for you when you see the rainbow you title it pretty, where as someone else might see it different. Therefore the label is not universal and if it is not universal then how is it that you come to title it as pretty while someone else doesn't?

The label isn't the point.

The point is that the experience of seeing a rainbow at a certain level is indivisible. If you break it down to water droplets and neurotransmitters, it's no longer the plain old apprehension of a rainbow.

Think of this in terms of resolution. The wonder of seeing that picture of the earth from the moon's surface is not divisible into every molecule the earth is made of.

1 Reply

@rcs,

Quote:

I love my son, I love my wife, I love my brother, I love my parents, I love my grandparents, I love sushi, I love the Red Sox, I love practicing medicine, I love Mozart, I love Dostoyevsky, I love the winter, I love mountains, I love swimming...

What does this have to do with anything? There could be people that hate some or all of those people in which you love. So what? It is almost as if you are trying to say that since you love them everyone does. Other than that I don't see how saying that means anything dealing with the discussion.

Quote:

The label isn't the point.

The label IS the point. Or else you wouldn't call it pretty. Pretty is an adjective to describe an object. In other words a label.

Quote:

The point is that the experience of seeing a rainbow at a certain level is indivisible. If you break it down to water droplets and neurotransmitters, it's no longer the plain old apprehension of a rainbow.

I in no way "broke it down". If you really want to get that technical I could ask you the same thing. What if you zoomed way in on a picture of a rainbow where you only saw one tiny piece of it. Would it still be pretty? You probably wouldn't even know what you were looking at unless you were told. The label is the distinguishing aspect, you just want to attach some sort of metaphysical or "something" else to the experience to proclaim it can't be explained scientifically. That's fine if you want to believe that, but I think it can.

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@rcs,

You don't get it at all.

I was demonstrating that the word 'love' is a completely different judgement for each instance I used it. It's completely absurd to conflate all judgements as you have.

You also haven't read many of my posts here if you think I want it to be something metaphysical, because I doubt there is anyone on this forum who thinks more negatively about metaphysics than I.

But at the same time, despite the fact that I have a doctoral education in science, I am more willing than you to admit that science simple doesn't have the tools or the language to capture human experiences except in a rote, technical sort of way.

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@rcs,

Quote:

doesn't have the tools or the language to capture human experiences except in a rote, technical sort of way.

Well you reveal something here, alright so metaphysical was not the proper word to use for your explanation but you do insist that it can't be explained without being technical. But if it is not technical then what would it be? Has anything science has ever explained never been technical?

I was never disputing the word love, it is obvious that it carries a value or weight to it for each instance that it is used. Just like the word "like" has a weight or emphasis in which it is used. But generally speaking there are only three ways in which you can respond. How does this not withstand?

There is love, there is hate and there is indifference. Is there any emotion between love and hate or don't care? That I missed?

1 Reply

@Krumple,

Krumple;87164 wrote:

But if it is not technical then what would it be? Has anything science has ever explained never been technical?

Science is technical, but our experience of life as we live it has elements other than the technical. We are impressionistic, emotive, etc, and the technical explanation doesn't communicate what an impression is truly like.

Krumple;87164 wrote:

I was never disputing the word love, it is obvious that it carries a value or weight to it for each instance that it is used.

It also carries a different meaning for each instance. I do not love sushi in the same way I love my son, in fact the words mean completely different things. There is a massive qualitative range for which a word like "love" can be appropriately applied.

Krumple;87164 wrote:

There is love, there is hate and there is indifference. Is there any emotion between love and hate or don't care? That I missed?

The words "love" or "hate" are not like the terms 1 or -1. They're not discrete, they're not integers. Not only is it not a linear spectrum between love and hate, but the words themselves can have myriad submeanings. I don't hate mosquitos the same way I hate genocide or hate the Yankees, it's just a whole different concept subsumed in that word.

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@rcs,

Krumple wrote:

There is love, there is hate and there is indifference. Is there any emotion between love and hate or don't care? That I missed?

I reread this multiple times in order to decipher your intentions and to evaluate whether you typed this in a jocular fashion. You didn't, did you?

Are you to say that you love, hate, or don't care about everything you've ever experienced? You've never considered anything between these extremes? I find this almost unreal. Didn't you just acknowledge that "like" holds value, and isn't "like" considered to be lower on the affinity scale than "love"? Surely then you must acknowledge that there are feelings in between "love" and "hate". And this is not even considering the semantics of the aforementioned words, like Aedes was hinting at.

Quote:

But generally speaking there are only three ways in which you can respond. How does this not withstand?

When I read this, I laughed. Not at you, please don't take offense. But I thought for a second: What if humans really only had three ways they could ever respond to a person, place, or thing. That's it. Just three. Haha, we'd all walk around like damn robots. You must be joking my friend, right?

I think Aedes said it best here:

Aedes wrote:

There is a massive qualitative range for which a word like "love" can be appropriately applied.

There's no definitive spectrum between "love" and "hate". One must consider what they even mean when they say words such as, "like", "love", or "hate".

Keep in mind, regarding the rainbow, it's not the physical rainbow (molecules and such, noted) that we think is pretty, is it? Of course not. It's the image we have stored in memory which we find aesthetically pleasing. Yes, some of this may have been influenced by society (for instance, children's books), but some of this may just be due to some 'natural' affinity towards these sights (I don't think anyone really knows for sure). Regardless, even if many consider the rainbow aesthetically pleasing, you must realize your "pretty" isn't necessarily my "pretty". It's very possible that I attach a different meaning to the word, however slightly the difference. Simply put, I may not feel the same way you do about the rainbow, and yet we both may call it pretty.

Does this seem farfetched to you? If not, it should be increasingly more apparent that it's a bit harder to create a dichotomy between "love" and "hate" and then call it a day.

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@rcs,

totally 100% agree, zeth

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@rcs,

Quote:

I reread this multiple times in order to decipher your intentions and to evaluate whether you typed this in a jocular fashion. You didn't, did you?

Nope, just categorizing all responses into three aspects. Positive, negative and neutral. Love and like are both positive responses even though their weight varies. I think someone can just as easily replace "I love sushi" with "I like sushi" and no one would ever mistake it to be a negative connotation. That is unless the comment was meant to be sarcastic.

Love might not be in direct opposition with hatred, but they do follow one another. If you do not love something, you don't necessarily hate it because it is in opposition with love. But can you love and equally hate something at exactly the same time? I doubt it even though I bet many will argue that they do. It is a paradox of emotion. The mistake is that it is never love and hate, instead its usually love but hate something else. Such as you might love the person but hate their actions. But you can not equally love and hate a person.

Also if love and like carried different degrees and were drastically different. Why is it in speech we NEVER hear, "I like and love sushi."? Because both denote a positive response and the reason we don't hear it is because we present a positive only once never twice. The same goes for people who hate to hear double negatives in sentences.

1 Reply

@Krumple,

Krumple;87278 wrote:

Nope, just categorizing all responses into three aspects. Positive, negative and neutral.

Love and like are both positive responses even though their weight varies.[/quote]Their meaning varies as well. I can be positive about a food I really like using a different connotation of the same word I apply to a positive feeling about my son. It's not just different strength, it's a completely different meaning. It's not a continuous variable. You don't love your mother the same way you love your wife, not even remotely, but the love is so comparably strong that you could never bear to be forced to choose between them.

Krumple;87278 wrote:

But can you love and equally hate something at exactly the same time?

Absolutely. Think about sibling rivalry. Think about battered wife syndrome.

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@rcs,

Quote:

Absolutely. Think about sibling rivalry. Think about battered wife syndrome.

Sibling rivalry is not love and hate at the same time. It is flip flopping between them, and the same goes for beating your wife. You really think a person is having loving feelings when they are punching their wife? Seriously? It is an exchange between the two emotions.

Actually you know on a second thought, a man who beats his wife doesn't love his wife at all. He might claim he does but no, sorry that is just nothing other than conjecture. It is similar to sibling rivalry, and like I mentioned before, you might love your sibling but the part that you are hating is not them but instead something they did or are doing which is completely different than hating them. You are mixing the two and calling them the same, but clearly they are not.

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@rcs,

I don't think Paul meant that, I think he meant that even though the person is getting beaten they still love the beater.

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