The Rise of Science

Question 1

What does the word Renaissance mean?

Answer 1

Rebirth

Question 2

When was the Renaissance? What is it known for?

Answer 2

The historical period of the [so called] Renaissance is c. 14th – 17th Century, beginning with a flowering of talent in Florence
The period is marked by advance in art, mathematics, philosophy, and natural science

Question 3

What is Copernicus most famous for?

Answer 3

Discounting the view of a geocentric (earth-centred) solar system

Question 4

What did Copernicus observe about Ptolemy’s cosmology?

Answer 4

Copernicus spent time studying both Aristotle’s theory of multiple spheres circles, and Ptolemy’s epicycle ‘improvement’
He observed incompatibilities with Ptolemy’s theory in the movement of both the moon and stars

Question 5

What was his magnum opus and when was it published?

Answer 5

“On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres”
Published around or just after his death
Some say he was handed a copy on his deathbed.

Question 6

Who was Johannes Kepler?

Answer 6

Johannes Kepler was a German mathematician born a few years after Copernicus’s death

Question 7

What did Kepler try to revive?

Answer 7

Kepler tried to revive the idea of an ordered universe: he developed a neo-Platonic view of the universe that depended on nesting Platonic solids (the five symmetrical solids that can be constructed from simple shapes) inside spheres

Question 8

How did Kepler inadvertently confirm Copernicus’ theory of a non-geocentric universe?

Answer 8

He analyzed some data collected by Tycho Brahe, and realized that the planets did not revolve around the sun in circles, but as ellipses (a shape that nobody had ever claimed as a sign of God’s Perfect Hand)
He codified his findings mathematically into 3 simple laws.

Question 9

Why were Kepler’s laws a key moment in Scientific history?

Answer 9

Freed from Pythagoras at last:
Kepler’s Laws are a key moment in scientific history, because they mathematically captured several true facts about the world without being limited a priori to a particular ‘ideal’ form
-The genie was out of the bottle: Instead of allowing a priori notions to pick the model and then finding the best model of the data that fit those notions…we were ready to let the data speak for itself: Science!

Question 10

How did Galileo pay the price for supporting Copernican ideas?

Answer 10

Galileo Galilei paid the price for these ideas, being found guilty of heresy for defending Kepler’s geocentric view (though he was a bit of a trouble maker in other ways as well)
He had to “abjure, curse, and detest” the view and then spent the last years of his life under house arrest and with a publication ban

Question 11

Who was the first philosopher of science?

Answer 11

Francis Bacon

Question 12

What was Bacon’s opinion on formal methods?

Answer 12

Bacon was suspicious of formal methods (including the descriptions of Kepler et al)
He wanted to put data first, and description/explanation/theory second [this is now inverted by many scientists, not always for the best]
He advocated for science grounded in the collection of definitely true facts (like Tycho Brahe’s astronomical observations) and for the careful use of precise language
Inductive analysis of rightfully-arranged facts would lead to insight

Question 13

What did Bacon advocate for?

Answer 13

He advocated for the use of experiment as the best way to figure out what was relevant and what was irrelevant in the phenomenon of interest: “Nature when vexed takes off her mask and reveals her struggles.” (Novum Organum)
He also advocated for public funding of science

Question 14

What were Bacon’s four idols?

Answer 14

He classified the maladaptive beliefs that could lead reason astray: the four idols.

1) Idols of the tribe
2) Idols of the cave
3) Idols of the marketplace
4) Idols of theatre

Question 15

The idols of the tribe

Answer 15

Deceptive beliefs inherent in all human beings, due to our tendency to exaggerate, distort, and project patterns

Question 16

The idols of the cave

Answer 16

Arise in the mind of individuals, modified by education, character, habit, environment, and accident
(Projective errors: ‘To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.’)

Question 17

The idols of the marketplace

Answer 17

The idols of the marketplace: Errors due to false ascription of meaning to words
(Words can obscure the thoughts they try to express)

Question 18

The idols of the theatre

Answer 18

Errors due to false learning and sophistry

Things believed to be true because someone in authority has decreed they are true
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Question 19

What did Bacon think of hypothesis testing?

Answer 19

To him this was another formal method that would shoe-horn people into looking for certain kinds of explanations

Question 20

Hypotheses are useful, because when properly used, they:

Answer 20

Force scientists to state our ideas clearly and defensibly in advance of the outcome (Force scientists to place bets about the best way to think of the world)
Allow for falsification (as opposed to a Baconian “Anything goes” approach to science)

Question 21

What extreme measures did Descarte take to cut through the incompatible and/or uncertain beliefs in the world?

Answer 21

In 1619, with breathtaking vanity, Descartes decided that the only way to cut through the mass of incompatible and/or uncertain beliefs in the world was to start from scratch
He would begin by doubting everything, and accept only what he could see as clear, distinct, and impossible to doubt

Question 22

What was Descarte’s famous foundation for his quest for truth?

Answer 22

As he thought about what he could start with that was impossible to doubt, Descartes had his most famous insight
“…while I wish to think everything false – it was necessarily true that I who thought was something�
(I think, therefore I am) (The Cogito Argument)

Question 23

What was Descarte’s rationale behind his famous insight?

Answer 23

The act of doubting was undeniable and doubting required thinking
A person might doubt the truth or validity or rationality of the contents of his own consciousness [stay tuned to see how Descartes got around that] but it would impossible to deny the very existence of those contents
The thought is undeniably manifest
It makes no sense more to say “I think there are thoughts but there might not be” than to write down “This might be written words, but it might not be.”
And, if there are thoughts, there must be a thinker: therefore, if you think, a thinker must exist

Question 24

What assumption seems logical to draw from Descarte’s famous insight that he never did claim?

Answer 24

Descartes never claimed to have actually proved that HE existed.
He recognized [I paraphrase] that he might be living in The Matrix- that is, that the appearance of where and who he was might be only appearance
The first step was simply to prove that a thinking thing (res cogitans) exists

“But I do not yet have a sufficient understanding of what this ‘I’ is, that now necessarily exists” (Meditations)

[It needs also to be said that fairly similar arguments were made by Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Augustine.]

Question 25

What was method did Descartes advocate for finding general solutions to problems?

Answer 25

1. “…never to accept anything for true which I did not clearly know to be such […] so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all […] doubt.
2. …to divide each of the difficulties under examination into as many parts as possible
3. …to conduct my thoughts […] by commencing with objects the simplest and easiest to know, [and] ascend […] step by step, to the knowledge of the more complex;
4. […] to make enumerations so complete, and reviews so general, that I might be assured that nothing was omitted.”
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Question 26

What did Descartes also conclude after proving the existence of a thinking thing using reason?

Answer 26

Descartes concludes that he cannot doubt reason.

Question 27

What did Descarte compare proving God’s existence to?

Answer 27

He compared it to proving a mathematical proof.

Question 28

Having proved the existence of a thinking thing using reason, he concludes…

Answer 28

He concludes that he cannot doubt reason.

Question 29

What does Substance Dualism assert?

Answer 29

Substance dualism asserts that mind and matter are fundamentally distinct kinds of substances.

Question 30

How did Descartes defend substance dualism?

Answer 30

Since he could doubt his body but not his mind, and could clearly conceive of them as separate, Descartes concluded that body and mind must be separate

It was motivated in part by the observation that, while the body is fallible, there are certain thoughts that are absolute- hence those thoughts must not be part of the body but of something less fallible

Question 31

Where did Descartes famously believe that the mind and body interact, and what did he incorrectly believe about that place?

Answer 31

The Pineal Gland!

He incorrectly believed that:
The pineal gland was suspended in the middle of the ventricles,
It received animals spirits from “arteries” feeding into it,
The ventricles were filled with air

Question 32

What is wrong with Descarte’s Atheists are stupid argument?

Answer 32

It uses circular logic.

God guarantees the existence of Reason, and Reason guarantees the existence of God.

Question 33

What is Hylomorphism?

Answer 33

A type of Dualism. Asserts that Form and matter intermingle as one thing (Aristotle, [some forms of] Christianity)

Question 34

What is Interactionism?

Answer 34

A type of Dualism.

Interactionism: The mental and the physical are separate but interact (Plato, Descartes, [some forms of] Christianity)

Question 35

What is psychophysical parallelism?

Answer 35

A type of Dualism.
Psychophysical Parallelism: The mental and physical are independent but are pre-synchronized by God (Leibniz, in response to Descartes) (like a clock)

Question 36

What is occasionalism?

Answer 36

A type of Dualism.
Occasionalism: All causation is due only to God; Mind and body are synchronized in real time by God’s intervention, but have no causal interaction (Malebranche, in response to Descartes)

Question 37

What is epiphenomenalism?

Answer 37

A type of Dualism.
Epiphenomenalism (AKA Automaton Theory) : Mental events are caused by physical events, but they have no causal influence on the physical (Thomas Huxley)

Question 38

What is property dualism?

Answer 38

Property dualism (AKA Anomalous Monism): Mind and body are one single substance, but have different properties in the world (e.g. some substances [neurons] allow certain mental properties to emerge) (Donald Davidson)

Question 39

What is predicate dualism?

Answer 39

Predicate dualism (AKA Nonreductive physicalism): There is just one single substance, but the properties of the mental are not descriptively reducible to physical properties (Gilbert Ryle, Jerry Fodor)
For example, the concept of ‘traffic jam’ is not reducible to physics, even though all elements of a traffic jam do obey the laws of physics

Question 40

How are Property dualism and Predicate dualism similar and different?

Answer 40

Both believe mind and body are one single substance.

Property dualism says that there are two essentially different kinds of properties in the world; Predicate dualism says the non-reducibility is in our way of describing those properties.

Question 41

Explain why Walter Freeman worked on ‘brain reading’ using a rabbit olfactory bulb?

Answer 41

Studying the rabbit olfactory bulb is a good way to study brain coding because:
Its input is relatively ‘clean’ (un-preprocessed, single-source, jacked directly into the brain)
It is small
It is highly specialized
It is possible to tightly control its input under laboratory conditions

Question 42

What was Freeman’s stated goal in understanding olfactory simulus?

Answer 42

Freeman’s stated goal has always been to understand the neural representation of interpreted perception- of the meaning of the stimulus

Question 43

The Information Processing Hypothesis

Answer 43

One possible way the olfactory lobe might work (roughly Freeman’s original hypothesis, the information processing hypothesis) is that it might be a ‘decoder’ that takes in a smell, processes it, passes processed data into the brain, and returns to its starting state to await the next smell
This is roughly how other senses (your retina [and V1], cochlea, tongue, and touch/pain sensors) [normally] work: they actively change in response to a specific percept, but maintain a (more or less) stable state while awaiting input
(physiology chemically changes as it receives stimulus and then goes back to normal. think of your retina)

Question 44

What should we expect if rabbit olfaction works according to the information processing hypothesis?

Answer 44

If this is how rabbit olfaction works, we should expect to identify spatial patterns localized to limited parts of the bulb that correspond to nerve cell assemblies
We should also expect the bulb to return to its original activation state after processing, in the absence of any input

Question 45

What was Walter Freeman suprised to find about the gamma patterns?

Answer 45

On the basis of the information processing hypothesis I confidently expected to find differences in the spatial patterns of amplitude with different odorants. Instead I found that the gamma patterns were like handwritten signatures and facial expressions: no two bursts were identical, but each was easily recognizable as unique for each animal.
Each individual rabbit had it’s OWN response, different from all the other rabbits, to an odorant.

Question 46

When did spatial patterns for the rabbit change significantly?

Answer 46

only when the animals were given an unconditioned stimulus paired with an odorant: e.g. only if the odor had meaning for the rabbit

Question 47

What did Walter Freeman find about the number of neurons participating in each response?

Answer 47

No spatial pattern could be localized to limited parts of the bulb that might correspond to a putative nerve cell assembly: “Every neuron in the bulb participated in every response to a learned odorant.” (Freeman, 1990, emphasis added)

Question 48

What was Freeman’s final conclusion?

Answer 48

This multideterminacy within the self comprising the active brain supports the conclusion that each perceptual construct reflects the entire corpus of past experience. An appropriate term for the outcome is that the percept constitutes not a representation of a stimulus. It is the meaning of the stimulus for the self.”

Question 49

What does Freeman’s experiment mean for Predicate Dualism?

Answer 49

This means there can be no ‘science’ of neural encoding that takes content into account
We can only have a content-free general account of the general principles by which content is encoded
“the properties of the mental are not descriptively reducible to physical properties”

Question 50

How does Predicate Dualism and Freeman’s work save psychology as a discipline?

Answer 50

Note that this is not a nihilistic conclusion: it saves psychology as a discipline, by explaining why psychology cannot be reduced to pure neuroscience: we have to have a level of explanation that looks at the meaning of content

Question 51

How did Descartes think our nervous system worked?

Answer 51

Descartes proposed the external stimuli impinged on the peripheral ends of nerve fibrils, which he conceived of as little tubes
This causes those tubes to move, re-arranging the interfibrillar space and thereby allowing animal spirits to flow into the nerves.

“The animal spirits, resemble a very subtle fluid, or a very pure and vivid flame, and are continually generated in the heart, and ascend to the brain as to a sort of reservoir. Hence they pass into the nerves and are distributed to the muscles, causing contraction, or relaxation, according to their quantity.”

Question 52

What did Descarte’s mechanical man theory do for the relationship between god and science?

Answer 52

he tied science, the pursuit of justified knowledge, to the existence of God
This inverted the relationship that had held for centuries, in which God and science were seen to be at odds with one another

Question 53

What two non-psychological contributions is Newton best known for?

Answer 53

he discovered the laws of motion and discovered/invented calculus (as did Leibniz, independently)

Question 54

How did calculus put another nail in the coffin for the Pythagoreans?

Answer 54

Calculus requires the use of imaginary ‘infinitesimals’, which are (if you squint a little) more or less exactly like zero, except that you are allowed to divide by them and they add up to something other than 0 (so perhaps they are not much like zero at all?)
These ‘imaginary’ properties were considered outrageous by many mathematicians at the time, most famously Bishop Berkeley (about whom, more soon)

Question 55

What did Newton think about color and light rays?

Answer 55

He did not believe that light rays themselves had color
He distinguished between the stimulus (certain wavelengths of energy [as we now know]) and its subjective experience (colour)

Question 56

How do Bees and Newton’s discoveries of the subjective nature of color show we are really living in plato’s cave?

Answer 56

Bees see ultraviolet light and light polarization so they get information that we do not from the visual world 
The difference between stimulus and subjective experience is vital in psychology
We really are living in The Matrix/Plato’s Cave, in a way
We do not have direct access to the world as it is, but only mediated access, to one way it can appear to be
Bees see something completely different from what we do! ZOMG. Which means… that we just receive an interpretation of the world, not the actual thing…

Question 57

Why did it become possible, for the first time, to start studying the world as it really is, rather than just pondering how it might (or should) be?

Answer 57

Formal descriptions that are based in data rather than in philosophy begin to multiply
The first attempts at defining the rules of science is made
The mainstream of intellectual thought turns from the speculative to the empirical, infecting even philosophy (as we shall see next class)