I’ll confess to being a little bit dissatisfied both by Helen’s latest screed contra statistics and by Prof. Kenneally’s argument that science improperly understood ignores the qualities of our lived experience . Both have managed to say a lot of true things but neither, in my eyes, has addressed the real problem.
Helen’s post reminds me a bit of a centuries-old post by Noah Millman on the topic of free will . Millman makes a tragic misstep common to defenders of free will by retreating into a bubble of randomness in an effort to escape determinism. This is a misstep precisely because that bubble is always shrinking — Millman is effectively daring his philosophical adversaries to come and invade that bubble; staking it all on a wager that the human race just doesn’t have that much ingenuity. Seeing the locus of free will in randomness means that every advance in cognitive neuroscience or behavioral economics means a further defeat for free will. The entire philosophical fight has been conceded, all that remains is the long, slow, dreadful march of ‘progress’.
Far better, then, to take the philosophical offensive and rigorously contest the claim that prediction implies lack of freedom. Sure, compatibilism may not get our pulses racing; but it’s the only rhetorical strategy that’s sustainable in the long term. Similarly, Helen’s tongue-in-cheek claim that "[statistics] should not be collected" is a noble impulse; but in the World of the Possible they will continue to be collected in greater and greater volume and detail. The only question going forward lies in their meta-interpretation. Will the liberal orthodoxy which claims that all the information a policymaker needs can be collected quantitatively and in aggregate remain ascendant; or will we be able successfully to defend the sanctity of the ‘whole person’? "Your statistics aren’t good enough" might work for now, but "your statistics aren’t telling you what matters and never can" wins the game.
Given the fact that this latter line is exactly what he espouses; what then do I find lacking in Prof. Kenneally’s post? The point that science regularly and shamelessly oversteps its self-defined boundaries is an excellent one that has also been made by Nietzsche, among others. The trouble is that it is not scientific rationality itself that is making ridiculous claims; but rather a nearsighted and materialistic philosophical stance that likes to cloak itself in the garb of science in the hopes of absorbing some of science’s prestige. Arguing against such a philosophy by saying "you aren’t being very scientific" will not work unless the person espousing it is honestly convinced that he is putting forward a metaphysically wertfrei argument.
I remain open to the possibility that many so-called rationalists are deluded in just this way; but those who aren’t need to be hit with a rigorous argument to the effect that reduction is not equivalent to explanation, and a perfect impersonal description of lived experience is not equivalent to experience itself.
The claim "religious experience correlates well with certain brain cells firing" is a scientific one and non-threatening. The claim "religious experience is nothing more than certain brain cells firing" is a philosophical one, and must be combatted on that ground. Neither hoping that neuroscience fails to live up to its promise nor insisting that scientists remain scientists will save us in the end. The former may very well turn out to be a losing bet, and the latter identifies the wrong foe. As long as results and statistics are out there, it is in our nature to interpret them. The only question is how.
