I think his problem is that we can't simulate his brain on a computer well enough to know what will light up his "purpose of life" neurons.
>It's a basic fact that science is the study of reality by any effective means;
I guess you could define science that way (although it hardly seems like a "basic fact"), but I'm not sure that it would do anything useful in this context. The whole question at issue is what constitutes an "effective" means of studying various topics of interest. For example, what are the effective means of studying moral facts? You seem to think that they are limited to brain science, but why do you think this?
Incidentally, your proposed definition of science is clearly at odds with most standard conceptions. For example, it might (hypothetically) turn out that pure intuition is the most effective way of studying reality -- we might turn out to have incredibly good intuitions about how the world works. According to your definition, pure untested intuition would then be "scientific". As it happens of course, intuition isn't very effective. The point is that all kinds of crazy methods might turn out to be effective, but we wouldn't therefore want to call them scientific. The methods used in science have to be in some sense rational as well as merely effective, although no-one has ever quite pinned down the precise nature of this additional constraint.
>We've prodded the brain enough to be reasonably sure your psychology (purpose, meaning, morals, values etc) is in physical atoms & not in a soul.
Maybe you should refer to some specific results in psychology, neuroscience or phsyics that back this statement up. For example, an explanation of how facts about purpose and morality could reduce to facts about the primitives of physics. There are a few explanations on the market, but you might at least be specific about which one you are buying into. Here's an exercise. Explain how the moral fact in (1) reduces to physical facts:
(1) It is wrong to kill someone for no reason.
Well no, we just need methods leading to verifiable (ie predictive) results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science
Any methods will do, it's the body of knowledge that is important. I'm sure in your scenario we'd want to know the reason why intuition works so well (and there would be a reason), but we'd use it so long as it works.
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> Explain how the moral fact in (1) reduces to physical facts [...] You seem to think that they are limited to brain science, but why do you think this?
It's human behavior & human preferences, what else could it be? We can watch which parts of the brain light up when doing morality (eg google brain fairness). Even monkeys have a sense of fairness (google). If birds could talk they'd tell you it's a "moral fact" that birds should protect their young. Morality is clearly hardwired through evolution[1].
To see how frustrating this is, imagine you're arguing with people who are sure CPUs work because of "machine spirits." You don't have to be a chip designer to point out obvious circuitry, energy requirements, changes in function due to differing structures/damage, etc but they'll just believe whatever they want without evidence.
[1] And biology reduces to physics. Read selfish gene etc if you want to know how morality evolved, but it's clear it did happen.
That is an extremely vague statement, but is basically a statement of the logical positivist notion of the scientific method which is now universally accepted as inadequate. The philosophy of science and the scientific method is a very complicated (and unfinished) subject, and crass statements like this just won't cut it as serious claims about the nature of scientific investigation. If you're interested, the Standford encyclopedia of philosophy gives a good overview of some of these topics (or pick up a copy of "Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge," or look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem)
> I'm sure in your scenario we'd want to know the reason why intuition works so well (and there would be a reason)
Yes, if in that scenario we knew the reason intuition worked, that might make it rational to use intuition. But a method could be effective even if we didn't know why it worked, and you did not add in any additional criterion of "knowing how it works" in your original statement. Are you sure you actually meant what you said?
Regarding the moral issue, you seem to be suggesting that (1) reduces to the fact that humans have a preference for not killing people (as far as I can tell, your vague references to "parts of the brain lighting up" aren't doing any work here, they're just decoration). But of course we all recognize that moral statements are different from statements about preferences -- they are descriptions of what people /should/ do, not what they like to do -- so I don't see that there is a successful reduction here. (Unless you are willing to be a moral nihilist and believe that there are really no facts about what people should do, only facts about what they prefer to do.)
-- Erwin SchrödingerMaybe I'm just using circular logic here, but the only way we know whether a method is effective is by testing it. Nevertheless, I don't think there's a working scientist out there who wouldn't want to trust a colleague's intuition (that we've already established as reliable) to try to do things we don't quite rationally understand yet. I think the key thing to remember is that ultimately, it has to be an effective means, and the way scientists figure out what is or isn't effective is by experiment.