The Marvel that is Science Very serious (molto gravi)
I was soon going to be writing about what science can and cannot do for us, anyhow, and with Dr. Perez’s most recent comment fresh in mind, this seemed like a good time and place to cover it. {I am sorry that it goes on for so long, but I just kept finding what I thought were important and relevant things to say, so please bear with me to the end.}
First, let’s cover the marvel, for us humans, that the scientific method is. It is certainly one of our collective high points. Our brains did not evolve to provide us with words that exactly correspond with what we see and experience around us, or inside of us, and that we can then communicate clearly to other people. If it were only that simple.
Instead, we are faced with an exceedingly complex and variable external environment, with many significances in common for us as groups and as individuals, but also many different ones. And to complicate matters, we also experience very much the same level of complexity in our internal environments, which are even more variable than most of the external environment (although similar, in some ways, to the weather), and which, although our own internal environment has many general, or generic, similarities with those of other people, are very individualized and idiosyncratic, very much our own.
Truth and “Delivered Messages”
The main problems for us as beings having to be in tune with our environments are, and always have been, how to “know” what is going on in the two environments, how to relate the two to each other, how to articulate and communicate that knowledge (or those knowledges) to other people, and how, as groups, to establish concordances among and between the different individual knowledges and perspectives.
Fortunately, after centuries of development, we do have well-defined procedures for ascertaining or discovering certain kinds of facts that can be communicated clearly to other people, with these procedures known collectively as the scientific method. For an organism made up of the kinds of substances and materials that we are composed of to develop and refine such a set of procedures, and to continue to hold to them in the face of strong emotional objections from many quarters, is a phenomenon that it is hard to find the best and most encompassing adjectives for, so I will just settle here for amazing.
However, and unfortunately, this methodology can’t really be applied to another type of what is also often referred to as “knowledge,” and which has a primarily personal basis, consisting principally of a feeling that some expression or statement, or state or status, is “true”.
In Russian, this differentiation might be captured by the difference between pravda, which means “truth”, and izvestiya, which translated literally means “delivered messages”, but which is today usually translated as “news”. There is a saying in Russia, “Pravda nyet izvestiya, izvestiya nyet pravda” – “truth is not news, news is not truth”. It strikes me that many of us probably have a sense of what “truth” that saying contains.
Science and Religion
What the scientific method has done for us, to restate what I said just a few moments ago, is the arduously difficult task of turning at least some of the sense impressions from our environment into words that are clear as to what they mean or point to, and relating them to each other to produce the certainties that we know as facts.
Several of the main cultural traditions of the world today, however, have a particular problem with the “delivered messages” of religion (and other sectors of society, as well) and the truths that they claim to possess and embody.
What religion (and propaganda, and to some extent, advertising, including political advertising) have given us are “delivered messages” that we may either already have, or develop, strong internal “resonances” with, primarily on an emotional level, but also with some abstract meanings relating to our self-concepts (which are not without their emotional aspects).
However, the only certainties that we can have about these messages are personal certainties, if only the certainty that we had better say that we believe such-and-such, if we want to stay in the good graces of certain people important in our lives. Consequently, these kinds of “truth” cannot really be communicated from one person to another without a great deal of distortion or loss of information in the process, and we have to settle for the surface appearance of sharing, including declarations of belief and the performance of prescribed rituals. In many contexts, mostly local, these suffice, but, in many others, they lead to violence.
A very significant difference, then, between science and religion is that while we humans often, and quite readily, do real physical and murderous battle over “delivered messages”, we seldom go to war over facts (instead, we just use—or quote—them, or ignore them). Were it not for the involvement of scientists in the “arts” of warfare, I might even have been able to say that part of what science gives us is peace.
What science cannot do
However, there is something very basic, something very important, that science cannot do for us. If you take all of the facts that Dr. Perez gave us about humans, and add to that list all of the other facts of that nature that science has come up with – if you take all of that information and add it together – if you do all of that, you still would not have captured a whole, functioning human being.
Science looks at things from the outside, looking in, and is concerned with observable regularities that are verified by repetition, and prediction, and, ultimately, control to the point of being able to manipulate or modify at will (that’s when you really know what you are talking about), and so it has to work with can be perceived by our own senses or by instruments. Plus which, it typically must break the subject at hand into smaller and smaller parts in order to get a clear enough picture of what variables are involved and to control them.
Consequently, it necessarily leaves out a good deal about us that it can’t say much about. Like poetry, just to name one.
The View from Inside
In particular, science, looking from the outside in, cannot tell us what it is like to be alive, to be human. That has to come from inside us. It cannot put together all of its singular facts and breathe into them the life of dynamic immediacy, the integration and resolution of the large number of often conflicting and usually only partially sketched out motivations, intentions, perceptions and understandings that go into doing the things that humans who are alive do. By the time that science analyzes some aspect of the dynamic process we call life and comes up with a result, the “game” has moved a considerable distance “downfield”, or has morphed into something a little different.
Moreover, since science is paradigmatically value-free, it does not have access to one of the salient features of being human, that of having values. (Not that having values is necessarily always a good thing, or that it cannot be problematic in itself, but it does shape us and what we do in ways that science has denied itself access to, often, and this is particularly important for the future, in ways that might be better for almost all of us.)
Perhaps in part for this reason, science also has a hard time with bad intentions; having to be value free (or, from another point of view, individual scientists not being comfortable enough to make such distinctions, for personal reasons), it pretty much treats evil as a natural occurrence and does not concern itself with reducing its presence among humans.
For these reasons, science cannot find, much less describe, that which holds these complex, multi-faceted, dynamic and conscious individual beings “together” and moves them forward in a more-or-less integrated fashion, the self. Consequently, it cannot do much to help these selves “grow” and become more positively human.
For that, we need the insights of the likes of teachers and biographers and therapists, novelists, ministers, and coaches, and anthropologists, insights informed by an appreciation and interest in the whole, functioning, individual human being engaged in life, more than a little hands-on experience, and an appreciation for the truth (more like pravda, not izvestiya). (We probably should also add grandparents to the above list; and possibly also parents, but part of human nature seems to be that we aren’t really ready to be parents until our children start having theirs. That's part of what experience does for us.)
We need not just knowledge, but also, more particularly, an understanding from personal experience of what it means to be human, along with insights into how to develop our positive capacities and to become more fully human. Science, if left to its sparse predictive paradigm, might end up reducing us, instead, to essentially the same status that religions leave us with, except that instead of asking us to just accept “God’s will”, as religion does, it will ask us to accept that we have no real wills of our own, that we are merely the accretion of all of the cause-and-effect facts that it has been able to find out about us, leaving no room for a self to educate itself and perhaps have better intentions. Not all scientists share this view, but those who do not share it appear to be in the minority.
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
What I have written here is neither new nor particularly radical (unless we mean by that “getting to the root of the matter”); Alexander Pope wrote the following words 280 years ago, in 1731, in his Moral Essays:
Our depths, who fathoms, or our shallows finds,
Quick whirls, and shifting eddies of our minds?
On human actions reason though you can,
It may be reason, but it is not the man:
His principle of action once explore,
That instant ’tis his principle no more.
Like following life through creatures you dissect,
You lose it in the moment you detect.
In short, yes, absolutely, we need science, and we could certainly do with fewer “delivered messages”, which I hope that science, along with the good sense and wisdom of those of us with educated wills and selves, will continue to reveal to be very limited in their scope in their positive effects, and very broad in scope in their negative effects, and therefore very problematic for a human future. However, we do not need science to try to tell us what human nature is, or what it should be. That’s for us as whole, functioning human beings to fathom (with the help of science, to be sure), and to live with.
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