Here's a pretty common exchange in debates over parapsychology. Someone will point to a correlation between a brain state and a mental state, using it as evidence that consciousness originates in brain activity. An opponent will respond that correlation is not causation, and that the brain may be functioning only as a mediator of consciousness, which originates elsewhere. At this point the first person will say, "You can make that argument about any neurological evidence I present, no matter how strong the correlation may be. Essentially your position is unfalsifiable. Therefore it doesn't qualify as a scientific hypothesis."
I think this is true. But it's not the devastating refutation it may seem to be.
According to philosopher of science Karl Popper, a scientific theory must be testable and, as such, must be falsifiable in principle. There must be some way of potentially disproving it. This doesn't mean, of course, that it actually will be disproven, only that a test might disprove it.
Fair enough, but notice that this principle applies strictly to scientific theories. Not all viewpoints fall into this category. Among the viewpoints that are excluded are some positions that might be thought of as scientific theories, such as the various interpretations of quantum mechanics. These include the many-worlds hypothesis, the Copenhagen interpretation, David Bohm's "holomovement," and hundreds of others. As far as I know, none of these interpretations is testable or falsifiable. All of them are consistent with the math, and any of them might be true. They are not scientific theories, at least at this stage of their development. They are more like philosophical worldviews.
Similarly, in the example given above, the debate boils down to a difference in worldviews. In our debate, the first person is a philosophical materialist – someone who holds the ultimate basis of reality to be purely material or physical, with consciousness as an emergent property of physical things. The second person is a philosophical dualist – someone who holds that physicality and consciousness are two different kinds of things with equal ontological priority.
There's no way to definitively test either of these propositions empirically, which is why people have been arguing about them since at least the time of the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece. Both materialism and dualism are unfalsifiable hypotheses, and so they're not scientific theories. They transcend scientific theories, which are narrower in scope.
Admittedly, among Western intellectuals today, materialism is the default philosophical position, one often unthinkingly assumed to be self-evident – but that doesn't make it true. It simply means that materialism, at this period in history, is more popular than dualism. To this a materialist might say, "The popularity of materialism is no fluke. It's based on the tremendous success of materialist scientific inquiry over the past few centuries." But here we encounter a very common intellectual confusion.
The term materialism can be used in more than one sense. There's philosophical materialism, as described above, and there is also what can be called technical materialism, which is a tool or method of inquiry. Technical materialism makes no assumptions about the ultimate nature of reality. It simply posits that a physical, non-supernatural explanation should be sought first for any phenomenon. For instance, rather than assuming that thunder and lightning are produced by angry gods, a scientist following the rule of technical materialism will discover that the phenomena are caused by electrical discharges. Or again, rather than assuming that diseases are caused by malevolent spirits, a scientist following the rule of technical materialism will discover that microorganisms are responsible.
Technical materialism has been an enormously fruitful method for exploring the physical world. We moderns enjoy a fuller understanding of physical phenomena, and have been gifted with longer lifespans, greater comfort, and more affluence, than any previous generations. But our modern lifestyle is not owed to philosophical materialism, but to technical materialism, two things that are by no means the same. (In fact, it could be argued that much of the downside of modern life — the angst and anomie that characterize many developed societies — is attributable to philosophical materialism, with its rejection of spiritual values and its embrace of an uncaring, meaningless cosmos.)
Nor is it the case that scientists must be — or historically have been — philosophical materialists. Many have been dualists or, for that matter, philosophical idealists. Isaac Newton, perhaps history's greatest scientist, was a deeply spiritual man who spent a great deal of his time studying the Bible, but he used the method of technical materialism in his scientific work. Albert Einstein had room in his worldview for God, however he understood this concept*; even so, technical materialism was his method in attacking scientific problems. People sometimes opine that such figures were guilty of inconsistency and compartmentalizing, but there's no inconsistency in holding a non-materialistic worldview while using technical materialism as a method. The method is merely a rule of thumb, not a statement about ultimate reality.
To clarify this point, let's use a metaphor familiar to readers of this blog. We can look at our physical existence as akin to a fully immersive virtual-reality computer game. In that case, an explanation for the things that take place in our environment can be found in the rules of the game. The right policy is to seek to understand these rules as thoroughly as possible. It doesn't follow, however, that the rules of the game equal ultimate reality. As a matter of fact, they don't. The rules of the game are part of the game's programming, the lines of binary code which are the work of minds that exist in an entirely different reality – not the simulated reality we're experiencing when we play the game, but the actual reality that we experience when we take off the VR headset and return to the everyday world.
It might be argued that materialism is still the more parsimonious position. This would be correct only if there were no reason to doubt materialism. But there are philosophical arguments against the proposition that conscious awareness, including qualia, can emerge from mindless physicality, not to mention reams of empirical evidence for paranormal and/or spiritual phenomena that are ruled out of court by the materialist position. Naturally, there are also philosophical arguments against dualism, most commonly the argument that it's impossible for an entirely nonphysical consciousness to interact with the physical world.** And there are empirical arguments against dualism, usually consisting of debunking the claims of parapsychology.
The empirical arguments and evidence on either side cannot be used to conclusively settle the debate, because the same evidence can be interpreted in ways consistent with either worldview. Whether or not one interpretation is more plausible than another is a source of endless controversy, with materialists insisting that any "natural" explanation, no matter how far-fetched, is more plausible than a paranormal or supernatural explanation, while dualists are equally adamant in finding the "natural" explanations frequently ad hoc and hopelessly strained.
In other words, the debate is unresolved, as has been true for thousands of years. Both sides have their talking point. But the one point materialists are not (philosophically) entitled to make is that the opposing position is wrong because it's "unscientific." That's a category error.
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*Einstein: "Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive." Quoted here.
**One possible way of getting around this materialist objection is to turn (again) to our virtual-reality simulation metaphor and say that consciousness does not interact directly with the physical world but rather with the underlying "programming code," which, as information, can be processed by consciousness.
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