Tycho:
I can certainly agree with all this. But on top of that, for me, there is an innate curiosity. A sort of feeling that just wondering what's true simply for the sake of knowing.
hakootoko:
Again, it isn't about truth. Truth lies in facts; theories are all approximations.
Yes and no. Theories are approximations, yes. But they're approximations to the truths, so to say it's "not about the truth" is an overstatement, in my view. A desire to "know what's true" pushes us to find better and better approximations. We may never be able to reach "the truth," but we can get closer and closer as our understanding increases. And the desire to know the truth is what can motivate us to increase our understanding.
An analogy might be this: You're in a room with a window that looks into another room. You want to know what's in the other room, so you look through the window. But the window is very dirty, so you can barely see through it. So you scrub the window to get a better view. It's still pretty dirty, but now you can see a bit better. So you go get some better cleaning kit, and scrub harder. Again, a better view, but it's still obscured. And so on, and so on. You're motivated by wanting to know what's in that other room. You're forced to look through the window, so you'll never be able to get as good a view as you'd like but you can keep doing work to get a
better view. The fact that your view is never perfect doesn't mean that all you want is an approximation. It really is about what's in that other room (ie, the truth), even if all you'll ever get is a view of it through an imperfect window (ie, a theory).
Tycho:
But anyway, what I'm trying to get at, is how much awe/wonder/curiosity do you feel when thinking about pure science stuff like this, and how much are do think things like "hmm...that would give us the technology to do X..."?
hakootoko:
Again, when doing pure science, you don't know what the practical effects will be. You can think about those afterwards.
You figure them out afterwards, sure. But the question is that what's motivating you? The possibility of technological benefits that you currently can't predict? Or is it just wanting to know?
hakootoko:
Curiosity is certainly a good motivator. When you see a pattern, you want to know if something (or nothing) is causing it. And being human is all about searching for and/or inventing patterns.
There is also a thrill in figuring something out, and (unfortunately) for some a sense of power when controlling the institutions and/or process of science.
Yet science is a dispassionate human endeavor. Looking at it with too much awe or wonder can get in the way. It's not about what you want to demonstrate, but what you can demonstrate.
Hmm, I'm not sure about this last bit. You need to "do" science dispassionately, in a sense, but that doesn't mean its a dispassionate endeavor. We do it because we want to know, and its possible to feel passionate about wanting to know. I agree with you that it's what we can demonstrate, not what we want to demonstrate, but I think we may be talking about different issues here. Wanting to know THAT X is true, and seeking to prove that it is isn't good science, and is the wrong way to go about things. But wanting to IF X is true, and passionately pursuing that question (regardless of the answer) IS good science. We should strive to be neutral with respect to the answer, but that doesn't mean we have to feel dispassionate about the question.
hakootoko:
To get back to your original point of the distinction between believers and non-believers, is a lack of belief at least partially responsible for viewing an inherently dispassionate intellectual pursuit passionately? My passions are directed elsewhere, not towards science.
Possibly. My gut feeling is that the causation is the other way, but right now we're still gathering data, so I don't know that we can say one way or the other. I suppose if we have a finite store of 'passion', and believers 'use this up' on religious beliefs, then only non-believers would have enough 'left over' to care about science. But that sort of doesn't feel right to me as an explanation. I've known believers who are passionate about other things (family, sports, fitness, art, hobbies, etc.). It would seem somewhat odd to me that "wondering what's true about the world we live in" would be the automatic last-in-line for passion-expenditure to me.
On the other hand, if it's really true that there are some people who ask "is that likely to be true?" and other people who as "what's the cost or benefit of believing that?", it would seem to explain both religious views, and differences in how one looks at pure science. This makes it seem a bit more parsimonious of an explanation to me.