I drink a lot of diet soda. Well, probably around 2-3 cans a day. So my ears perk up whenever I hear anyone propose that it is unhealthy. For some reason, there is something about diet soda that really bothers people. Given the high levels of skepticism in the general public, despite the fact that not only have millions of people have been drinking it for decades and no good evidence that it causes real harm, I'm suspicious there might be something deeper going on. Diet soda can actually be harmful to your teeth, because it contains citric acid, which corrodes enamel. But no more so than anything else containing citric acid, and can be controlled by drinking with food, so that salivary glands are stimulated, restoring the mouth's natural pH.
But no, the real skepticism isn't about tooth enamel. It is mainly about cancer. The biggest fear is the artificial sweeteners used. Some have a vague notion that the carbonation is dangerous, something about CO2 is seemingly problematic. However, considering it is a naturally occurring byproduct of human cellular respiration and therefor critical to our survival, I'm not sure they really understand what it is.
The cancer concerns have a kernel of truth to them. A derivative of coal, it didn't take long after its discovery for people to worry over its safety. A reasonable enough suspicion, however coal itself is indeed a "natural", quite literally "organic" substance. In 1906, when Roosevelt was promoting saccharin as a healthy alternative to sugar as part of his fitness promotion, vice president Sherman begged him to avoid it, calling it "a coal tar product totally devoid of food value and extremely injurious to health." Despite further studies over the following decades showing it to be harmless, suspicions held. In the 1970's, rats were found to have developed bladder cancer after being exposed to saccharin, leading to attempts by the USDA to ban it. However the findings were controversial, and eventually in 2000, it was discovered that rodent biology was actually quite different from humans in that their bladders had very different metabolic reactions to certain substances.
Comparing biological reactions across species is always tricky (as is cancer epidemiology in general). I happened to find a fascinating demonstration of this on the website of the Carcinogenic Potency Project, until recently headed by a highly respected cancer researcher. The basic point is that almost anything can be poisonous, or even carcinogenic at the right doses. No where is this more true than with rodent population. Essentially, if one were to go by cancer rates in rodent exposure, we would need to ban everything from coffee to lettuce to hamburger meat. By the way, highest on the list of rodent-cancer causing "natural" chemicals? Symphytine, naturally found in comfrey root.
There are probably many reasons why people cling to suspicions about artificial sweeteners. The idea of anything "artificial" seems worrisome to many (even though plenty of "natural" chemicals are extremely deadly, and synthetic chemicals are just as safe as naturally occurring ones. Many people have a basic mistrust of science in general, worried that they are being manipulated by industry. This is always a real concern, but one easily overcome by simply looking at where the study came from. If mainstream, respected institutions staffed by authoritative, published and peer-reviewed experts are then distrusted, well, we're off into conspiracy land and the epistemological loop is closed anyway.
My own favorite theory is that many people don't like diet sodas simply for the unconscious, puritanical intuition that is suspicious of enjoyment for enjoyment's sake, and especially if one has not earned it. Unlike regular sweets, which are high in calories which must be paid for either through exercise or self-denial, diet sodas are essentially "free" happiness. And any deserving soul can't possibly have that without making a deal with the devil - paid for in cancerous tumors no doubt...
Sometimes it's better to not comment at all. By that strange wiggly-worm process by which one so often meanders the internets, I found myself yesterday watching you tube videos of a man putting forth his explanation, in no uncertain terms, of a scientific process by which one could unlock secret spiritual powers. I was more interested than I might have been by the absurd charade because it seemed to have been part of a larger, quasi-spiritual, pseudoscientific movement.
The original rabbit link had come from a facebook friend whose affinity for magical thinking is matched only by his passion for science - his feed is a magnificent cascade of authentic scientific appreciation of the natural world interspersed with almost manic platitudes about cosmic energies and galactic spiritual convergences backed up by mathematical formulas derived from religious scripture (often laid out in obsessive charts). Apparently he did indeed do graduate work in the hard sciences at Berkeley, some controversy eventually ejecting him from a NASA project in astrobiology (I can only imagine it had something to do with his spiritualistic interpretations).
A childhood friend of mine in Santa Cruz, CA, that hotbed of new-agism, I've come to realize he is far from alone in his wild theories. Spending some time looking at his ideas, I found myself recalling just how fervent so many in that city were in their particular brand of late 20th century mysticism. A link on the page of a friend of his, a student at UC Santa Cruz, pointed me to a website devoted to something called "DNA Awakening".
After spending much longer than I probably should have watching a young bearded man named Peter (oddly, his surname was absent from the site - legal issues?) pontificating into his webcam, I gathered from the confused and rambling lecture, that our DNA was actually designed to receive electromagnetic signals from hidden dimensions of the universe, yet without proper spiritual training we would not be able to pick them up, and thus not be able to reach higher planes of consciousness. He was also peddling "courses" in that you could purchase from him for a few hundred dollars.
At some point, Peter may indeed have gotten to the part where he explained what evidence for any of this actually was - what the physical process was behind the hypothesis, how you might measure it, and whether there was any research to back it up. I mean, hidden dimensions, higher levels of consciousness, electromagnetic frequency interaction with organic molecules, the translation of that interaction into cognitive awareness, etc. - you would think that even a shred of evidence for any of it would be sort of Earth shattering and worthy of at least a few million dollars of research funding.
Of course, there was none of that. In one segment, he lamented quite passionately how painful it was to hold such radical, unorthodox views among such a skeptical public. I can imagine. His explanation was classic ad hominem: the skeptics' objections arose not from rational, logical conclusions, but rather from deep fears about the truth of what he was claiming, and the uncomfortable cognitive dissonance it creates. Ironically, this sort of rhetorical tactic works beautifully for anyone who himself is fearful of cognitive dissonance and wishes to avoid the possibility of objective analysis of his assumptions.
Which brings me to what I think is the crux of the issue. What are our standards for truth? Sure, none of us can know much of anything for certain, but we can know things, and some things are not true. For instance, my fingers are not elephants. Seems a reasonable enough claim to make. I could be a brain in a vat, but in the meantime, I need to live my life. Part of that means practical, day-to-day navigation of a world that makes sense. Another part, rooted indeed in the fundamental truth that my consciousness is limited, means a lifelong quest to understand myself and the world around me. And logic and observation are the basic principles in which this process must unfold. Believing that my fingers are, or could at any moment be elephants would not only be impractical, but it would represent a major failure to fulfill my goal of understanding the world. It would be a sort of nihilism, a sort of giving up on life itself, a death of consciousness.
But what about the larger world, the one beyond my immediate knowledge and understanding? I can know my fingers with a high degree of certainty. But with most things I must place my faith in external authority. This is a logical step. If I know that certain things exist, or could plausibly exist based on what I already am confident I know, I can then delegate - in a manner of speaking - the gathering and organization of knowledge to others whom I trust. If my wife tells me she saw a man in a clown suit standing by the freeway, as unlikely as it might be, it certainly is not out of the realm of what I know is possible, and therefor I can trust her statement with confidence. If she told me she saw a man levitating by the freeway, I would have to be much more skeptical. The logical device known as Occam's Razor tells me that I ought to trust the most likely probability: that my wife was either mistaken or has developed a mental illness, and not that multiple laws of nature had suddenly been broken.
Gravity I understand pretty well. But when it comes to more complex questions, my trust is tested somewhat further. I don't have personal access to a Doppler radar device, nor the expertise to run one, but when the weather man says a large hurricane is forming over the Atlantic, I trust him. He could, of course, be lying, and if he were the only weatherman in the world I would be much more skeptical. But he is not. His reporting is backed up by the reputation of his organization, which is in turn backed up by other organizations who would take great glee in pointing out his mistakes.
This is not a foolproof scheme, obviously. The weather is hardly controversial. For other, more complex issues it is often hard to feel confident in one's authorities. Yet a few guiding principles allow one to maintain a healthy balance between complete skepticism and complete naivete. The first, of course, is one's own knowledge. I know that 2 + 2 = 4, and I'm going to be very skeptical of a larger claim based on its denial. The second is institutional authority itself. The larger an institution is, the more connections it has to other institutions, the harder it would be for false information to be knowingly peddled for any great length of time, especially if the facts are readily available. Of course, if flawed assumptions are shared by all, then falsities can linger.
But this is quite a different thing than a falsity being conspired upon by large numbers of people within and across institutions, which is the general claim of those with radical, unsubstantiated claims. The truth, according to them, cannot be uncovered and shared because it is being actively kept from us by conspirators. While conspiracies indeed have occurred, I can think of none that have involved the secreting away of knowledge so radical that it would upend standard, accepted assumptions. For instance, conspiracies such as Whitewater or tobacco industry efforts to knowingly sell dangerous products involved quite plausible activities. Their covering-up was limited to a very small group of people within isolated organizations. Wiretaps were found. Internal memos were found. Politicians are often sneaky, and the tobacco industry faced an existential threat.
Conspiracies such as the link between vaccines and autism or a faked moon landing were not plausible at all. With the former, one study was published and faced enormous push-back in peer review against its published results by thousands of scientists and doctors spread across hundreds of reputable institutions, and subsequent studies were done and made available publicly. With the moon landing, decades of research and experimentation had been done in the open, all culminating in an almost completely public event, involving hundreds of respected institutions.
As far as I know, no conspiratorial claims about "DNA awakening" are being made (although I wouldn't be surprised). Rather, the willingness to go out on such a pseudoscientific limb seems to have more to do with a particular susceptibility to magical thinking among the new age subculture. First and foremost, a sort of deep spiritual yearning is present. This then seems to drive the individual towards a scaffolding upon which to invest their yearnings. New age culture is nothing if not a smorgasbord of quasi-religious, pseudoscientific errata.
The spiritual yearning is deeply dissatisfied with traditional, "Western" ideology and its tired baggage, and so seems to ingratiate itself to any cultural tradition, no matter how obscure or bizarre (maybe the more so the better) - as long as it is not Judeo-Christian or European in origination. From this, you get all manner of cultural flotsam and jetsom - funny smelling oils from Turkmenistan, healing ointments made by llamma herders in Peru, astrological navigations written in Sanskrit.
Yet, while "Western" authority is swapped out for that of, well, anything else really - hunter-gatherers in Botswana will likely do, what is maybe most fascinating is the sort of factual relativism that erupts, opening the door for seemingly any old kooky therapy, life lesson, mystical teaching , or spiritual world view. Much like Protestantism overthrew Catholicism's grip on Biblical interpretation, the New Age movement goes a step further and overthrows reality itself. Not satisfied with the fact that viruses cause colds, try this magnetic bracelet. Want to be happy? Drink this concoction of herbal teas and rub this root salve on your temples. Not OK with the thought that no evidence for aliens have ever existed? Go this guy's seminar and hear about how he transformed his life by communicating with an ancient race of one-eyed super-beings through meditation. Want to levitate? Want to teleport? Want to talk to your dead relatives in a past life? Why not?
At this point anything could be true, because nothing is, really. And when Peter tells you that your DNA are vibrating in harmonic convergence with cosmic energies, what is stopping you from believing him. Science has become "science". Truth has become "truth". Authority has become "authority". My fingers may not be elephants. But maybe I'm just not "seeing" the world correctly.
I left a comment on Peter's you tube video, poking fun at his naivete and misguided assumptions. But I shortly thought better of it and deleted it. What good was I doing? This was his religion we're talking about here. Well, religion in quotes, but same difference. I felt bad for mocking him. The internet, the world doesn't need any more of that. He's not really hurting anyone who isn't already on board. In order to believe in such things one must already have given up on objective truth or reality.
Its a funny thing, this vapid posture of openness to anything and everything all the time forever and ever. We all have our ways of escaping. Religion is probably the oldest, and ultimate form of it. Sense. Making sense of the world, finding meaning. One could hardly argue that it isn't a worthy endeavor. So many have struggled with so much, and have such a need for comfort. Who am I to take the pillow from their head, even if it is nothing but an illusion? Lord knows we need illusions.
What does science have to tell us about the abortion debate? In my view, not much.
I mean, first you have to define life. So even if you begin at
fertilization, then you must decide how it becomes sacred. The things
we use science to tell us about morality are largely non-existent at
this stage. In fact, science tells us they don't exist - thinking,
feeling aren't happening. And of course there's no evidence of any kind
of soul.
That doesn't mean you can't have feelings about it, or come up with
definition that make sense. But it will always be an artificial
construct you are inventing. For what it is worth, there is much
clearer evidence that killing animals for their meat is immoral.
Science shows that thinking, feeling, creatures undergo immense
suffering - immensely more than a fetus ever could at any prenatal
stage.
So the question becomes where we apply our morality. To value human
life/suffering over animal life/suffering is a human, not scientific
construct. (And of course, any attempt to invoke Darwin here as a moral
guide is preposterous. It quickly leads to what we would agree are
immoral conclusions. )
I'm reading The Information right now, and there is a fascinating chapter on Dawkins and the concept of memes
and cultural evolution. Again, there is no moral prescription, but an
explanation of a process. Not only are we a highly evolved physical
organism, we are a highly evolved cultural organism. In our lifespans,
we are exposed to such an amazingly rich developmental diet of content,
many ideas - memes - of which go back thousands of years.
Of course, the fact that they evolved - survived - has no bearing on
their morality! However, it does have a bearing on their existence as
human constructs, as they have arisen from the fertile soil of previous
generations. Generations! You could say in both senses of the word -
our biological ancestors, as well as their ideas which generated our ideas today.
So, here's a question: what does free will have to say about
the meme? I've long felt that defenders of contra-causal free will
tend to sound very similar to creationists. And in a way, they are
making the same argument. The claim that God is the originator of human
biology, or evolution, is similar to the claim that the individual is
the originator of his own memes.
So as to deny that there is a purely physical process of random mutation
of DNA that gives rise to evolved life forms, is similar to denying
that there is a random mutation of memes within the individual's neural
net. In fact, the notion that the individual is in control of his own
mind is about as absurd as the notion that God is in control of mutating
DNA. To take this further, one might ask why God would create so many
absurdly inefficient mutations. So too, would one ask why humans make
such absurdly poor "choices"? Of course, the evolutionary explanation
makes perfect sense, as seen in the fossil and DNA record, etc. So too does the
determinist explanation, as seen in developmental, sociological and
brain science.
At best, science can tells us the mechanics of how life develops, as well as the physical world in which our feelings exist. It can also tell us about how our thoughts develop. But can it tell us whether or not an embryo is "sacred"? At the very least, it would seem to tell us that it is not. Yet for many, having embraced greatly evolved historical traditions that stretch deep into the unconscious minds, science will not be enough.
Often, those who deny the science on anthropogenic global warming fashion themselves "skeptics", as if that label and the cold objectivity it implies would somehow make them seem more serious. Yet scientific skeptics they most definitely are not. From wikipedia:
A scientific (or empirical) skeptic is one who questions beliefs on the basis of scientific understanding. Most scientists, being scientific skeptics, test the reliability of certain kinds of claims by subjecting them to a systematic investigation using some form of the scientific method.
What I think people find especially galling, is the extent to which AGW deniers are denying science. And by "science", I mean the established system upon which we all depend - especially as laypeople - for objective measurement of reality, the process of peer review and consensus building.
What I find peculiar, is the willingness of people who are not experts in climate science, to assume themselves qualified to be "skeptics" of scientific consensus. While not necessarily conspiratorial (although the climate gate thing basically went there), the phenomenon is similar. The assumption is that a bedrock component of authority, the global scientific body, is untrustworthy (likely because of personal bias), and therefore can be discounted.
This is how conspiracy theories work. The first thing you do is discount the established authority, whether the media, government, academia, or science. Once that is accomplished, you basically have free reign to argue whatever you want, facts having been "relativized". You find this again and again in a variety of areas, where quackery thrives because of a dismissal of the only established authority. Therefore, unless one is personally an expert, reality for all intents and purposes does not exist. The conversation has been removed into a vacuum of ideology.
A basic underlying disagreement between the right and the left is the concept of taxes. Specifically, the right resents the idea that the wealthy should be taxed at a higher rate. So too, do they resent the idea that a portion of those taxes ought to pay for government services for the less-well off. This ultimately goes back to fundamental questions of human agency and social capital. Just as financial capital is leveraged for profit, so too is social capital. The left sees this reality and uses it as a frame for understanding how to not only measure, but create more fairness in society.
We live in a society filled with opportunities, many of which go unexploited. Why is this? The basic premise of science is that there are causes to most everything. This is the premise of social science. We look at society and see causes. We look at billionaires and poor people and we see causes.
Yet this basic premise is denied. Why? While opportunities exist to be exploited, why do we we assume that everyone can exploit them? If one does not know how to exploit them, how can he? And if another knows how to exploit them, why would he be expected to have done otherwise? Social capital is a causal factor.
But so if you correct for social capital, and luck, what do you have left? From where does human initiative come? This seems to me the final question. The billionaire and the pauper in Mc Donalds are two completely different people, who’ve had different life experiences, and – specifically – had different levels of access to social capital. If the two could be said to have possessed the same social leverage in their lives, one single price, or one single tax rate would be fair. But they clearly had not. The billionaire cannot claim to have earned his wealth apart from the leveraging of opportunities beyond his control. Likewise the pauper.
Marx had the insight that the leveraging of inequities in financial capital creates inequities in society. So too inequities in social capital, whether by birth or by family learning and culture, are leveraged by degree. Society is an organism that cannot be separated and reduced to the pseudo-scientific conception of actions that are free from temporal or spatial causality. We are society, warts and all. To deny this basic reality is not only a scientific error, but one that serves to prop up and excuse the most egregious forms of inequity, those that are inevitably exploitative and corrosive to the conception of the human right to freedom and self-realization.
Basically, twin zygotes are created, but somehow fuse back together, forming into one (like Voltron!), which then has two sets of DNA, with one or the other assuming command duty depending on cell type. So the liver might have one, blood having the other, etc.
So, if we aborted one zygote before the merge, would that be "taking a life"?
A question I've often had is, "What is a thought?" Where exactly does it exist? Obviously it exists in the physical world, via physical interactions; a mind must make a thought, not a rock. But upon what principles is it operating? Maybe an example might help:
That cat is there.
Now we have something. Light is shining off the cat and into my eyes. I take that information and create a model that tells me a range of things: shape, color, movement, dimension, location, texture, etc. I then fit it into a narrative of meaning: a small mammal with specific features, a pet. I then recognize it among my memories: I have seen this cat before. All of this and who knows how much more happen at the conscious and unconscious level - the latter making up the majority of the processing.
So all of this is thought and it is essentially a transference of electromagnetic energy from the cat into the photoreceptor cells of my retina. These cells transfer specific positional data via the interaction of each photon/wave against the electron state of specific pigment atoms within the optical cells, triggering specific enzyme cascades that transfer that "data" into my neural network, or mind. The photons' vast variabilities are then fed into my cerebral structures that process and re-process, at near-light speed, and eventually rise to the well-ordered simplicity of "thought".
Through fundamentally simple principles then, this process unfolds, involving the physical interaction of impossibly large numbers of particles. The process by which we "think" is the realization of all of this activity:
That cat is there.
While the physics of it all is relatively straightforward, the trick is wrapping one's mind around how this all relates to consciousness. If I take all of this information and a "thought" is created in my brain - how is it that I am conscious of it? Douglass Hofstadter describes the brain as a fundamentally self-reflective instrument. He points to Descartes' ultimate definition: "I think, therefore I am." The first think one ever knows about one's self is that one is actually thinking. One is able to have a thought, and then perceive it. "Look - a thought!"
That cat is there.
If one imagines capacity for reflection on a scale, Hofstadter says, at the furthest end - at one, say - you might have a simple device. He uses the example of a toilet ballcock as having basically one point of reflection: when the water rises to a certain level, a valve is closed and the flow is shut off. At the other end of the scale, you might have the all-seeing, all-knowing omnipotent god who's capacity for reflection is as limitless as the information available to him. The human mind might be somewhere in the middle, some of us more than others possessing the cognitive and emotional skills to be able to process and reflect on information. While the mammalian brain, or that of the corvid might rank relatively high, as we move down the scale, the brain gets progressively smaller until we reach animal systems that are largely autonomic, and then largely dependent on individual cell regulation.
In this way the human brain is simply an organ that is capable of taking in large amounts of data from itself and the environment and "fleshing" out meaningful metaphors that we are able to essentially live within. These become useful narratives in that we are able to construct them out of past experiences, and then predict future events with great accuracy. To the extent that we are social creatures, we are so in no small part because not only are we able to create this narrative for ourselves, but we are able to sort of geometrically place a similar narrative onto others. And our cats.
Freddie De Boer has an interesting piece up on Sam Harris and the New Atheist reliance on scientific materialism to solve real-world problems. A response to Harris' turn at TED, in which he argues that science can answer moral questions, DeBoer's thesis is basically that we should always be skeptical of our own certainty because of the limitations of consciousness.
I've always felt that the kind of skepticism that is most valuable, that is to our pragmatic benefit, is the skepticism that begins the skeptical enterprise at the human mind, the classical Greek skepticism that regarded any real certainty as dogmatism. Not because it is true, or even because it is superior, but because epistemological modesty seems to me to be an entirely under appreciated tool for the practical prosecution of our lives and our arguments.
That's true as far as it goes. But it is also untrue as far as it goes. The main problem I have with the essay is that without examples with which to work, it is difficult to agree or disagree with any of it.
The problem lies in describing exactly what types of certainty we are talking about. Some things we can be very certain of, and others we cannot. Thus how much confidence we have in any given thing is contextual. But what matters is the epistemological tools we use to determine how much certainty there exists, and how adequate they are to the task.
For instance, I know to a high degree of certainty that if I punch my neighbor in the face, he will experience pain, as I have a high degree of experiential as well as objective data that tells me this will be so.
Yet I have very little certainty that he will mind if I knock on his door at 8am instead of 9am. People wake at various hours in the morning. However if I knock on his door at 3am I can very confident I will bother him. Very few people wake that early.
I think what worries so many about post-modernism is not when it is a serious and precise philosophical discussion of why epistemology matters, but when it is a way of thinking about the world that seeks to diminish epistemology. What this often results in is a sort of selfish fealty to whatever passion one might currently be feeling.
We find this all over the political religious, and cultural spectrum. As a liberal, I've found this frequently in discussions with conservatives. Trying to get to the root of why they believe what they believe, which somewhat by definition entails an appeal to tradition, the ultimate answer is often, "Well, I don't know". For instance, when asked about the conservative emphasis on individualism and personal responsibility, and where it might come from aside from genetic and social determinism, the answer is a simple shrug of the shoulders. Yet trillions of dollars of social policy are at stake! No matter how I try and make my case, no matter how many studies I cite or arguments I present, a simple shrug of the shoulders can wash it all away.
Now, I'm not sure what I was dealing with was a conscious invocation of post-modernism. But I was certainly dealing with an argument that gets much of its strength from a social tradition that encourages the embrace of appeals to emotion rather than reason. The tradition is obviously old - vastly more so than our traditions of science and reason. The most obvious reason for this is that the epistomological tools of science and reason were not readily available. Yet to the extent that they now are, I see no reason why we should be afraid to use them.
Now, how much confidence we have in our ability to use science and reason to get at truth will always vary. Experience also tells us that we overestimate its authority at our peril. But this is at least as true as when we underestimate it. The dangers of relying on things other than science and reason are far greater.
Yet while compromise is in order, the trick is in knowing what we know, and where to place our confidence. Science has an excellent mechanism for doing this in the most objective and efficient way: consensus. Due to the degree of complexity and specialization involved in scientific progress, professional consensus is integral to the scientific process. Were any inaccuracies allowed to corrupt the process, they could not linger long for subsequent results would be unrepeatable. In this way, scientific progress itself demands a high level of objective honesty. Consensus of course, can always be wrong. But not for very long, and it is no more susceptible to error than nonscientific reasoning.
What matters in all of this is context. Scientific reasoning is not a dogmatic belief that science will always provide the answers we seek - but rather that scientific results should be taken very seriously, and should at a very minimum be held as the gold standard in knowing truth. This does not mean that results are not open to interpretation, and that scientific inquiry can't be used to draw incorrect inferences. But we should not be afraid to embrace scientific results that add to our sum of knowledge, especially when they appear to contradict our prior assumptions.
More and more, it has become the case that expert opinion must be relied upon to make judgments on important issues. Post-modernism, while a bright reminder to always remain skeptical of our sources of knowledge, must not in skepticism of things he isn't comfortable knowing allow man to substitute his own lack of knowledge for the combined wisdom of his much more able peers. This is a difficult and humbling place to find one's self in to be sure. But we can no longer conceive of ourselves as geocentric arbiters of all that is true. Instead we must seek to strengthen those institutions of society - be they government or academic - that ensure that the expertise is not only broad and robust, but accountable and self-critical. For it will be these institutions that we entrust with our continuing knowledge.
A friend of mine found this old Disney clip on what life could be like on other planets. He described it as a time when Disney "oozed magic".
It made me wonder where that magic came from? And where did it go? If you go back to the first half of the 20th century, there seemed to be a much more naive, yet emotionally-charged connection to science. We certainly had reason to become more jaded about its possibilities. But it feels like at the same time we gave something up in our sobriety.
The 60's counter-culture certainly embraced an anti-scientism, ostensibly associating it with the repressed, corporate mindset they sought to escape. This primitivism is still found today in the continued proliferation of "natural" health food stores selling such quackery as homeopathic remedies, cure-all vitamin supplements and a generally didactic embrace of the good life as defined as being against mass-production, technology and engineering. Chemistry and genetic modification are necessarily bad, even though most shoppers probably could not tell you the difference between DNA and RNA. The point is that it is abstract and scary, and most of all done by large organizations in far away places.
This is the same logic of those who oppose vaccines. Never mind the more conspiratorial theories about "government" plots, nor the ample evidence that vaccines are not only overwhelmingly safe but vital as part of a comprehensive strategy to eliminate common diseases. One goes out on a limb in these areas but a case can be made that there seems to be a subconscious fear (isn't there always) of not only needles but authority in general, and elites in particular. "Who do they think they are, with all their fancy "learnin'!" Who among those opposed to vaccination really understands what memory T cells are, and the basics of immunology. This cartoon from the Anti-Vaccine Society was drawn in 1802. It depicts the likely results from Edward Jenner's small-pox vaccine, which he derived from the pus of cows' known to be resistant to the disease. As you can clearly see, the shots produce bovine features.
None of this is to say that science and technology cannot be used for terrible ill. There is no need here to go into the obviously horrendous things that have happened either through malice or misunderstanding, which were amplified by scientific means. We must surely always be vigilant.
But who are we if not scientific animals? Descartes wrote, "I think, therefore I am." In sorting out where to begin a philosophical understanding of the mind, that was as good a foundation as any. We look out at the world - and then notice that we do. Waves of light, sound and feeling reach into our heads, we process them, then send out our own. In our brief history of scientific thought, we have already learned so much, and yet learned how much we do not know. Science is the only thing capable of letting us peer into distant galaxies, or into the inner-workings of our cellular DNA. It shows us not only what the universe is made of, but what it is capable of being made into. In a word, it is magic.
