Feynman, Morals and the scope of Science.

Alix and I have been reading Richard Feynman books together, and are often amazed at how much our thoughts about the world line up.

However, for the first time while reading 'The Meaning of it All' I found a major disagreement with what he said. That Science has nothing to say about moral questions.

Here is Feynman's logic. Moral questions can be simplified into,

"Should I do this?"

When analyzing this question its broken into two questions. Firstly,


"What will happen if i do this?"

and then,

"Do I want that to happen?"

Feynman says that the answer to the first question is very much a scientific one, the very purpose of science is to be able to make predictions about the world around us. However that second one, he argues, has nothing at all to do with science, but is completely a moral question.

At an earlier point in this book, Feynman talks about how Science updates itself by increasing the levels of precision an experiment is measured by. He gives an example of a spinning top. Science at the time showed that a spinning top weighs the same as one at rest... However later, when instruments improved, we were able to show that at very high speeds the weight of a top would change a very very small amount. So is the first observation wrong? Well, it depends on the point of the observation... The point of knowing the weight of spinning objects is to make predictions, so you can know what will happen if you spin things. Its very useful for making technology, and at the time, knowing that spinning things weighed the same as still things is all you needed. But later, when your finally spinning things awfully fast, and you need them to be an extremely accurately weighted, you have to use the more true rules. And there is a whole good bit about the uncertainty of Science in there.

What I would suggest is, that the same is the case with Feynman's statement about Morals. In 1963 saying that Science has nothing to say about "Do I want this to happen?" was completely valid. However here in 2010 that is not exactly the case anymore. Sense Feynman's time we have begun to deeply probe into how the human mind functions. Much effort is being made on accurately modeling the entire neural structure of the brain. And while we currently can not hook you up to a machine and tell you if you want something or not, we do have a glimpse at why such a thing is likely to happen.

I realize that the human brain is massively complicated, but it is a much more closed and finite system then the weather patterns of the earth... and even in that we are capable of scientific investigation. We are (with much varying degrees of accuracy) able to make predictions about how much snow we will get on Friday.  And I think as we continue to understand and are able to accurately model the brain, and to probe its functioning, that we will come closer to examining moral questions with science.

The answers to these questions might not be the kind you were hoping for... When Religion is asked questions like where do we come from, and why is there spring, the answers come back fairly straight forward. 'God made us' or 'Persephone returns from the underworld each year' ... when Science answers, things are usually a bit more complicated. Answers include things like the entire workings of evolutionary biology and how the whole solar system, gravity and the laws of motion function... So answers might not come back about morals the way we might want to hear them. When Religion talks about morals, they are immutable laws put in place by the deity... very epic and inspiring. For some people saying its all just values weighed out in our squishy bio computers, based on a life time of experience and a couple million years of evolution...leaves them feeling like maybe they asked the wrong question. However for me, and I think for a lot of people who are interested in the real world, rainbows are more beautiful when you understand how they work, they are a beautifully complicated and intricately detailed interaction of water and photons, just thinking about the quantum interactions involved in splitting white light into its many apparent colors fills me with wonder and amazement... Just the same, knowing how my morals function doesn't detract from their importance. Realizing that our underlying value system is supported by millions of years of evolution, that its built off the very lives of countless species, is an awe inspiring and fulfilling concept.

I think if Feynman were alive today, and could see the advances we have made in biology and computer science, that he would agree with me.