Don Carlo:

When it comes to Feyerabend, we have a more fundamental disconnect than you might be aware of.

In his later years, having gone through quite a few changes of perspective, Feyerabend decided that there is no truth which is not relative, and that trying to assert that something was absolutely true was ideological fascism. Maybe smoking causes cancer, but we should encourage hundreds of alternative theories as well, including those which do not follow reason or observation. Science's answers should be weighted no more heavily than those of astrology or voodoo, because science's findings are just a modern form of myth. Feyerabend's staunch opposition to empiricism and rationalism earned him a label as an irrationalist.

This POV came after his earlier endorsements of Aristotlean empiricism, from his days as Karl Popper's sidekick, to his founding of Eliminative Materialism, the proposal that the traditional notion of states of mind is fictitious, and that traditional states of mind do not exist -- that the brain is real, the brain is what we are, and aspects of the mind which could not be physically measured were nothing more than folklore, having the same sort of relationship to actual psychology as alchemy does to chemistry, or astrology to astrophysics. He loved to shock people, and he loved to tell them that everything they thought they knew was wrong, whether that meant (earlier) that they didn't even have the thoughts they believed themselves to have, to (later) saying that there are no absolute truths, and that science is a myth.

As a moderate positivist, I believe that absolute truths exist in the physical and biological sciences. Outside of the social sciences, which are arguably not sciences at all, I can't even find a way to reach a comfortable compromise with Feyerabend's later positions.

Thanks indeed for your knowledgeable answer, it is always good to meet people who actually know who Feyerabend is. Just for the record, of course I understand the difference between science and voodoo, and the differences in the underlying belief systems, and I do regard empiricism as something special. Steve Jobs might also still be alive if he had not disbanded "empirical" medicine for too long.
I have no intention to see voodoo and science as equal, I just think that we need to keep our access to both open if we can.

In the way science and voodoo are practiced I do see similarities however. We do often blindly trust in what is presented as "science" around is, and nobody actually reads the thousands of research papers that are published every day or really questions the apriori-assumptions that underlie scientific investigations.
There also really is a lot of similarity between the way Dawkins uses the "immense beauty of the tree of life", the aesthetic perception of beauty as a means of propaganda for his perspective to the way renaissance artists depicted the virgin mary in the catholic church.

We just do what we understand to work. Everybody goes by models they have thought their way through. Models that enable us to do something but at the same time limit the view and cause blindness for all the other things that are also there, including most side effects of our actions.

I am very critical about this air of superiority that people who believe that "science is not a belief system" often display. There are vast realms of reality that this point of view discards - for example an answer to the question: "What are you actually involved with?", which can't even be asked in science.



But all of this is a different topic out of the scope of this board - I don't want to water anything down.
You guys are posting very interesting and useful news on here!

I do agree with what Dorothy said - Scientology "can be judged by the fruit it brings".
I do not buy into a description of Scientology as a "religion" however or would place its problems into the context of problems in religious institutions (such as child abuse and corruption within the catholic church, which is clearly against its own doctrine).
Seen as a religion, Scientology appears as an evil caricature at best - as "religious" as the "Oxford Personality Test" was/is "academic".

I personally actually do have nothing against seeing your subconscious as a bunch of body-thetans if you think that's useful (I must admit however I do not have a clear idea what this actually means, and given all I know about Scientology, I have no interest in finding out whatsoever). But it is quite evident hat the ideology, indoctrinations and practices of the Co$ are set up to exploit members, and I would have to see some kind of proof still that this is not inherent in the ideology itself.
(Just to make sure I am clear about drawing the lines)

I think that this picture of the left and right sides of the brain is far from being complete despite the claims of some brain surgeons. They base their claim on the facts that damages to certain parts of the brain produce different effects on person’s behavior. While the effects are somewhat different, in many cases the differences between them are statistically insignificant, which prevents the researches from drawing any conclusion. The problem with the “brain science” is that it is relatively new, and its proponents have very little knowledge of mathematical statistics. In contrast, the statistical tradition is very strong in psychology and biometrics, whose proponents begun using mathematical statistics in mid-1930

Sconetale, These scientific photographs defy your claim that artistic expression is forbidden in science:
Marvel at the Most Beautiful Scientific Images of the Year at
http://io9.com/5859898/marvel-at-the-mo ... f-the-year
I'd post at least one if I could make it fit on the page.