RE: My new YouTube video about atheism
September 26, 2020 at 11:34 am
(This post was last modified: September 26, 2020 at 11:49 am by John 6IX Breezy.)
Ironically, it was the physicists Ernst Mach that first proposed that psychology was the primary science and all other sciences mere branches of psychology. Given that all of reality is mere perception, the study of perception becomes the foundational field of study for all other sciences:
"The frequent excursions which I have made into this province have all sprung from the profound conviction that the foundations of science as a whole, and of physics in particular, await their next greatest elucidations from the side of biology, and especially, from the analysis of the sensations" (1984, p. vii).
A major influence in 19th Century experimental psychology came from astronomy. The astronomer Kinnebrook was fired from Greenwich Observatory because of errors in his observations. He was recording the transit time of stars, as they passed through a fiber that would temporary block them from view. This was done by listening to the ticking of a clock, and counting the ticks until the star reappeared. The issue came when it was noticed that the average time recorded by Kinnebrook differed by .75 seconds from the leading astronomer.
The astronomer Friedrich Bessel noticed that it wasn't just Kinnebrook, but every astronomer consistently varied in their recording times. Bessel attempted to remove this variability by assigning a unique equation to each individual that would normalize their unique error. Thus the study of individual differences and statistics for human behavior was born (McConnell, 2009). The initial error of astronomers was the assumption that sensation and perception occurred simultaneously. It had not yet been considered that the distance between nerves affects the time information takes to travel to the brain, and that people differ in this regard.
The term "hard" sciences is oxymoronic. There's a reason why science began with physics and chemistry, and has now progressed to harder fields such as psychology and other social sciences. Individuals who look down on psychology, typically do so because they are uncomfortable with the variability and complexity that the world naturally has, and prefer the stable and predictable environments of a physics lab.
As long as scientists are the ones doing science, every field of science is subservient to the research of psychology and other social sciences.
References:
Ernst, Mach. (1984). The analysis of sensations and the relation of the physical to the psychical. La Salle: Open Court.
McConnell, Daniel. (2009). Philosophical and theoretical foundations of psychology (2nd ed.). Iowa: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company.
"The frequent excursions which I have made into this province have all sprung from the profound conviction that the foundations of science as a whole, and of physics in particular, await their next greatest elucidations from the side of biology, and especially, from the analysis of the sensations" (1984, p. vii).
A major influence in 19th Century experimental psychology came from astronomy. The astronomer Kinnebrook was fired from Greenwich Observatory because of errors in his observations. He was recording the transit time of stars, as they passed through a fiber that would temporary block them from view. This was done by listening to the ticking of a clock, and counting the ticks until the star reappeared. The issue came when it was noticed that the average time recorded by Kinnebrook differed by .75 seconds from the leading astronomer.
The astronomer Friedrich Bessel noticed that it wasn't just Kinnebrook, but every astronomer consistently varied in their recording times. Bessel attempted to remove this variability by assigning a unique equation to each individual that would normalize their unique error. Thus the study of individual differences and statistics for human behavior was born (McConnell, 2009). The initial error of astronomers was the assumption that sensation and perception occurred simultaneously. It had not yet been considered that the distance between nerves affects the time information takes to travel to the brain, and that people differ in this regard.
The term "hard" sciences is oxymoronic. There's a reason why science began with physics and chemistry, and has now progressed to harder fields such as psychology and other social sciences. Individuals who look down on psychology, typically do so because they are uncomfortable with the variability and complexity that the world naturally has, and prefer the stable and predictable environments of a physics lab.
As long as scientists are the ones doing science, every field of science is subservient to the research of psychology and other social sciences.
References:
Ernst, Mach. (1984). The analysis of sensations and the relation of the physical to the psychical. La Salle: Open Court.
McConnell, Daniel. (2009). Philosophical and theoretical foundations of psychology (2nd ed.). Iowa: Kendall Hunt Publishing Company.
