Before looking into what happens within Science itself, let discuss some of its uncanny consequences. It is easy to be a devotee of the scientific method; it is not so easy to also be a consciously responsible scientist. The history is well known: dynamite, invented by Alfred Nobel, became a building block of weapons used for killing people. The discovery of radioactivity led to the buildup of nuclear arsenals. The bombs stockpiled today are sufficient for destroying all life on our planet. Artificial Intelligence
and Bioengineering can, potentially, lead to a similar catastrophe.
Bertrand Russell On the Destructiveness of Science
In “Religion and Science”, Bertrand Russell summarizes it this way:
The scientific temper of mind is cautious, tentative, and piecemeal; it does not imagine that it knows the whole truth, or that even its best knowledge is wholly true. It knows that every doctrine needs emendation sooner or later, and that the necessary emendation requires freedom of investigation and freedom of discussion. But out of theoretical science a scientific technique has developed, and the scientific technique has none of the tentativeness of the theory. Physics has been revolutionized during the present century by relativity and the quantum theory, but all the inventions based upon the old physics are still found satisfactory. The application of electricity to industry and daily life—including such matters as power stations, broadcasting, and electric light—is based upon the work of Clerk Maxwell, published over sixty years ago ; and none of these inventions has failed to work because, as we now know, Clerk Maxwell's views were in many ways inadequate. Thus the practical experts who employ scientific technique, and still more the governments and large firms which employ the practical experts, acquire a quite different temper from that of the men of science: a temper full of a sense of limitless power, of arrogant certainty, and of pleasure in manipulation even of human material. This is the very reverse of the scientific temper, but it cannot be denied that science has helped to promote it.
The direct effects of scientific technique, also, have been by no means wholly beneficial. (…) they have increased the destructiveness of weapons of war, and the proportion of the population that can be spared from peaceful industry for fighting and the manufacture of munitions.(…) These evils of our time are all due in part to scientific technique, and therefore ultimately to science. (bold, mine.)
Although what Russell is saying is to the point, yet it does not tell us the whole story. It should be added that the scientific revolution carried within itself certain undesirable effects that, instead of diminishing, are growing larger and more dangerous in our time. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century’s scientists were often well educated members of the upper class who had a great deal of leisure and plenty of money to support their research. This was the Golden Age of Science. Later, in the nineteenth century, economic and political consequences of certain discoveries started to put Science on a wrong path. The pursuit of science became a career rather than a hobby. An army of scientific workers was sought to serve the agendas of what was to become known as the Military-Industrial Complex.
Coming next: Curiosity, intellectual freedom and Science
P.S.1 22-01-2023 Reading McGilchrist "The Matter with Things":
"In our ordinary way of thinking, things must be established before there can be relationships, and so this about-turn should seem paradoxical; but as I shall explain, paradox very often represents a conflict between the different ‘takes’ afforded by the two hemispheres. However, we must also be prepared to find that, as Niels Bohr recognised, whereas trivial truths manifestly exclude their opposites, the most profound truths do not."
" This is itself a version of the realisation that what applies at the local level does not necessarily apply in the same way at the global level. The failure to observe this principle underlies some of the current misconceptions of both science and philosophy.
I believe that nowadays we live no longer in the presence of the world, but rather in a re-presentation of it. The significance of that is that the left hemisphere’s task is to ‘re-present’ what first ‘presences’ to the right hemisphere. This re-presentation has all the qualities of a virtual image: an infinitely thin, immobile, fragment of a vast, seamless, living, ever-flowing whole. From a standpoint within the representation, everything is reversed. Instead of seeing what is truly present as primary, and the representation as a necessarily diminished derivative of it, we see reality as merely a special case of our representation – one in which something is added in to ‘animate’ it. In this it is like a ciné film that consists of countless static slices requiring a projector to bring it back into what at least looks to us like a living flow. On the contrary, however, reality is not an animated version of our re-presentation of it, but our re-presentation a devitalised version of reality. It is the re-presentation that is a special, wholly atypical and imaginary, case of what is truly present, as the filmstrip is of life – the re-presentation is simply what one might call the ‘limit case’ of what is real. Stepping out of this world-picture and into the world, stepping out of suspended animation and back into life, will involve inverting many of our perhaps cherished assumptions."
"Straight lines, in as much as they can be said to exist at all, do so as the limit case of curves, which constitute all the lines in nature even space and the paths travelled in it are curved). Linearity is the limit case of nonlinearity, and can be approximated only by taking ever narrower views of an infinitely complex picture. The discontinuous, in as much as it can be said to exist at all, is the limit case of the continuous, which is the norm. Total independence is an imaginary construct, the limit case of interdependence, which is universal."
"Let me give a few further examples, which I grant may seem at first sight surprising, even nonsensical. We could start with our own thought processes and their expression in language. The explicit is not more fully real than the implicit. It is merely the limit case of the implicit, with much of its vital meaning sheared off: narrowed down and ‘finalised’. The literal is not more real than the metaphorical: it is merely the limit case of the metaphorical, in which the wealth of meaning is collapsed into a 1:1 correspondence for a useful, temporary, purpose. More importantly, it’s the wider cosmos whose deep structure we are inclined to misunderstand. It may seem obvious that randomness is the primary condition and that order is an unusual phenomenon that emerges from (how?), and is supervenient on, that primary chaos. However, order is not a special case of randomness, but randomness merely the limit case of order, which is the universal norm. Indeed, true randomness is a theoretical construct that does not exist." (bold, mine)
And so I think. And I know what needs to be done. We are consciously aware only about a thin boundary of the Infinite Domain.
