Showing posts with label scientism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label scientism. Show all posts

Friday, October 30, 2020

Scientism








In all the known universe of uncountable stars and planets so far only one jewell like planet stands out from the rest in it's amazing beauty and complexity of life forms.

But on this planet earth, of its many thousands or millions of species one single species is making such a mess of it that all life is being put in danger of extinction.

WHY?

The short answer is ignorance and greed. However there is a larger story worth considering.

In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus published his Model of the Solar System that positioned the Sun remains motionless at the center of the Universe, with Earth and the other planets orbiting around it.

On February 13, 1633, Italian philosopher, astronomer and mathematician Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome to face charges of heresy for advocating Copernican theory. Orthodox inquisitors demand punishment for blasphemy of questioning the origins of the cosmos and pondering our place within it. At the time of his death in 1643, Galileo had been under house arrest for 8 years as a result of having held to his opinions.

René Descartes (1596-1650) was mostly remembered as the "father of modern philosophy". He lived in a time preceding the Age of Enlightenment that flourished in Europe. While the philosophical distinction between mind and body in western thought can be traced to the Greeks, Descartes reinforced this concept and gave it a name, dualism and committed to the mechanistic conception of physical world.

Mechanism is the belief that living things are like complicated machines composed of parts lacking any intrinsic relationship to each other. This mechanistic conception of life evolved into Scientism, the belief that only science can provide knowledge worth having and that only scientific claims are meaningful. Scientism holds that science is the only way to know truth while all other claims to knowledge are simply irrelevant.

Scientism can be seen as a kind of faith that science has no boundaries, and that in due time all human problems and all aspects of human endeavor will be dealt and solved by science alone. Scientism is an attempt to shut down political debates. It shifts the discussion from questions of value, which are accessible to all, to questions of facts which are in the domain of the experts, thus shifting the terrain of the debate.

Scientism is the adherence to a materialist version of reality that confines investigation to those sorts of things that are permitted by materialism. The belief, however, that scientism is science, and that its authority should be similarly accepted, has been disastrous. Scientism is the handmaiden of the administrative state, which is the ruling authority of bureaucratic totalitarianism.

Is science our only guide to what exists? Scientism is increasingly influential in popular scientific literature and intellectual life in general, but philosophers have hitherto largely ignored it.

The problem with scientism, or one of its many problems, is that it tends to be prejudiced and therefore not very scientific. True science is open minded, scientism is not. The idea that what cannot be weighed or measured does not exist is puerile, arrogant, and blind to most of the chief qualities that make human life profound. Friedrich Nietzsche predicted that the decline of religion would result in a turning to rigid idiological systems as a replacement

One way to find out what you want is to learn what you don't want. It seems we have come to understand very well what it is we do not want. Dystopia is a world or society in which people lead wretched, dehumanized, fearful lives.

A computer search for "system is broken" will yield a slew of large categories that need to be changed: ecology, healthcare, education, government, food, racism, justice, police and military, taxes, etc. Many if not most of our systems are broken. They are literally falling apart as we watch.

What happened? How did so much go so wrong? How could we be so indifferent to the destruction of our own environment, to each other, and to ourselves? We have come to see each other as inanimate objects to be possessed, manipulated. and often tossed aside or destroyed. Such indifference reveals that emotion is not the problem, it is the lack of emotion.

We have become possessed by seemingly unshakable ideas of the way things should be and who we think we are. Science is the pursuit of knowledge covering general truths or the operations of fundamental laws by using unbiased observations and systematic experimentation. Contrasted to this is scientism, which is the belief that only science can provide knowledge worth having.

By seeking to explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry, scientism reduces human beings to something a lot less than what we are. As long as we depend only on physical measurements to understand reality, we are stuck with the limits of matter. Scientism holds that about 95% of all reality is "dark energy" and dark matter but no one knows what it is.

Science has utterly failed to solve the "hard problem" of the question of "how experience arises out of non-sentient matter." Despite centuries of analyses, definitions, explanations and debates by philosophers and scientists, consciousness remains puzzling and controversial, being "at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives".

In fact, there seems to be growing evidence that consciousness actually exists independently and outside of the brain as an inherent property of the universe itself like dark matter and dark energy or gravity. Panpsychism is the view that all things have a mind or a mind-like quality.

Spirituality means different things to different people. For some, it's primarily about a belief in God and active participation in organized religion. For others, it's about non-religious experiences that help them get in touch with their spiritual selves through quiet reflection, time in nature, private prayer, yoga, or meditation.

For more than a thousand years the church sought to prevent people from making conjectures about spirituality. Many people identify as spiritual but not religious: With a few exceptions, the percentage of adults who identify as religious in many industrialized countries is declining, while remaining generally high in less developed nations. Even as religious affiliation decreases, though, a sense of spiritual identification could remain steady or even increase.

 The human psyche has been split into a good and a worthless portion. This divorcing ourselves from the numinous and liminal world has brought us to the brink of self-destructive annihilation. Limiting ourselves only to proven facts ignores the facts that are yet to be proven. Some would say that subjectivity is the better part of our human nature.

Science has also delivered wealth and power into the hands of the greedy. Moral and social issues have taken a back seat to profits. Capitalism is individualistic, competitive, consumerist, and fantastically materially productive but simultaneously spiritually desolate. Capitalism promotes "short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs."

Our greed and indifference have brought us to the limits of sustainability.  If we can just WAKE UP and stop supporting foolish incompetence and act with compassion and common sense we might still avert a mass extinction event.









Thursday, July 4, 2013

Alienation and Indifference



When we as individuals go through life, we pass periods or phases when we change our identity -- from baby to child, adolescent, adult, parent, maturity, old age, end of life. Each change may be accompanied by some sort of identity crisis. As a species we also encounter periods of challenge and change when we must consider just who we are and will be.

Feudalism, religious repression, scientism, materialism, and an education system designed for capitalism have all conditioned us for subjugation and compliance and 
a lack of emotional intelligence.

As it happens we live in interesting times when we are faced with decisions which may drastically affect the future of our species. This generation may remembered for a very long time for what we do or don't do about critical choices which must be made, concerning issues such as the environment, genetic manipulation, and weapons of mass destruction.


It seems that we are facing a kind of  collective end of adolescence which implies dealing with our issues of power, greed, lust, and progeny. How an adult handles these issues becomes the measure of who they are. It is obviously time to have a look at some of our shadow issues. A few of the characteristics of adulthood  include accepting the consequence of ones actions, coping with delayed gratification, and taking care of family.

Most people seem to get their beliefs from the media, and that's messed up. The media as we know it, grew up inside an odd paradigm where the attitude toward the natural order of reality was skewed toward empiricism and reason as the twin pillars of a philosophy of life appropriate for an Age of Science. The dogma, attitude and methods of this science was thought to be universally applicable to all phenomena, and was based on Reductionism, which is a philosophical position which holds that anything and everything is just the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. While Reductionism was useful in developing of the objective laws of physics and chemistry, it is becomes problematic when applied to more subjective realms. Where reductionists most often disagree among themselves is how much this "reduction paradigm" can be expected to apply to the understanding of living things.


"I'm not contained between my hat and my boots"  - Walt Whitman, (''Song Of Myself'' )

Scientism is a rather recent word, associated with many other “isms” with long and turbulent histories: materialism, naturalism, reductionism, empiricism, and positivism, and behaviorism. Scientism is a term used, usually pejoratively, to refer to belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach, and the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints.

The roots of scientism extend as far back as early 17th century Europe, an era that came to be known as the Scientific Revolution. Up to that point, most scholars had been largely concerned with a combination of Judeo-Christian scripture and ancient Greek philosophy. But a torrent of new learning during the late Renaissance began to challenge the authority of the ancients, and long-established intellectual foundations began to crack. The Englishman Francis Bacon, the Frenchman Rene Descartes, and the Italian Galileo Galilei spearheaded an international movement proclaiming a new foundation for learning, one that involved careful scrutiny of nature instead of analysis of ancient texts.

Descartes and Bacon used particularly strong rhetoric to carve out space for their new methods. They claimed that by learning how the physical world worked, we could become “masters and possessors of nature.”                     - Thomas Burnett

Before the 17 th century, people generally believed that Earth was at the center of the universe. Galileo, however, was not afraid to challenge existing beliefs when he published his work in support of the Sun-centered, or heliocentric, Copernican theory. For a very long time before that dominant moral paradigm had been based on what Joseph Campbell referred to as " Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy." This old paradigm that had become stagnant and corrupt and the Renaissance brought a general sense of relief. In a way the new view of the universe was larger and more grand, but it meant that mankind was no longer at the center of the universe.

The Scientific Revolution continued the trend or paradigm change and it brought changes in humanity's diminishing view of itself, nature, and God. Newton and his contemporaries viewed the universe as a machine. For a time, this model saw the universe as orderly, coherent, and natural. God was viewed as the creator of this machine, who brought into being the world in its lawfulness, regularity, and beauty. This image viewed God as the master builder who created a perfect machine and then let it run. This view of God was called Deism, and was accepted by many who supported the " new philosophy.

At age 26 Charles Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands for only 3 weeks. But what he saw there allowed him to connect the dots with ideas others had been developing about geological evolution so he could see how biology follows a similar pattern. Since Darwin's publication of his "Origin of Species" there has been a increasingly widespread acceptance, particularly in the 'westernized' parts of the world, of the idea that Mankind 'evolved' from earlier forms of life. In a big way this further diminished Man's Place in Nature, while it unified all of nature. At about the same time,  Karl Marx appropriated science as a justification for his theories, and how science replaced religion in Marxist communism. Marx changed history drastically because his writing inspired various revolutions.

Religious reductionism generally consists of explaining religion by boiling it down to certain nonreligious causes. Sigmund Freud's idea that religion is nothing more than an illusion, or even a mental illness. As an atheist, Sigmund Freud reduces God to a dream of man. As a materialist, he reduces man to his body, the human body to animal desire. He laid the foundations of reductionism in psychology, which refers to a theory that seems to over-simplify human behavior or cognitive processes, the belief that human behavior can be explained by breaking it down into smaller component parts. Freud adopted an interactionist approach, in that he considered that behavior was the results of dynamic interaction between id, ego and superego, and that "No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism."

Behaviorism was a school of psychology that takes the objective evidence of behavior (as measured responses to stimuli) as the only concern of its research and the only basis of its theory without reference to conscious experience or introspection ism. Behaviorism emphasized the outward behavioral aspects of thought and dismissed the inward aspects of existence. Behaviorism also became a pervasive worldview that operates on a principle of "stimulus-response" conditioning, primarily concerned with observable and measurable aspects of human behavior. This belief that all behavior can be explained without the need to consider internal mental states or consciousness led to a kind of survival of the fittest, dog-eat-dog pessimism.

In Literature this set of beliefs became known as Naturalism, which the idea or belief that only natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces operate in the world. This deterministic view of human life and actions represents a rejection of idealism. Humans are portrayed as victims in a hostile universe of alien forces they cannot understand or control. This raw, slice-of-life attitude has become pervasive in melodrama media plots where might makes right and sensationalism rules.

"Survival of the fittest" is a 19th-century concept of human society, inspired by the principle of natural selection, postulating that those who are eliminated in the struggle for existence are the unfit. In this scenario, life is usually portrayed as a competition where there is one winner and the others are all losers. Once upon a time a fable or legend was about a heroic figure who braved the unknown for the good of all, or at least for his own community. Now cult media icons are more apt to be antiheroes whose character and goals are apt to be associated with things like drug abuse, exploitation, criminal activity, and self destructive behaviors. To have an immense popularity  means not becoming too mainstream if you don't want to loose your their fan base and fabulous earnings.

An exploitation film is typically both low budget and of low moral or artistic merit, and therefore apparently attempting to gain financial success by "exploiting" a current trend or a niche genre or a base desire for lurid subject matter. These films then need something to exploit, such as a big star, special effects, sex, violence, or romance. An "exploitation film", however, due to its low budget, relies more heavily than usual on "exploitation".  Some films even might be advertised by the producers themselves as "exploitation films" in order to pique the interest of those who seek out films of this type.

The media in general exploits the public by pandering sensationalism, sex, violence and relentless commercialism. There is always something exciting, enjoyable and tempting to grab our attention. There is a false presumption of instant gratification and quick attainability of happiness or of contentedness. Loyalty, patience and persistence are mostly absent. But even worse is the desensitization resulting in the diminished emotional responsiveness to a negative or aversive stimulus after repeated exposure to it. We seem to be ever more emotionally insensitive or callous; as normal emotional response (as of fear, anxiety, or guilt) to stimuli that formerly induced it is extinguished. In this brave new world everything is energy and intention.

Getting past adolescence requires dealing with self-doubt and self-centeredness and being responsible for our actions. Humans or no longer in a paradigm where the earth is the center of the universe. And the old-fashioned frontiers are mostly behind us where most issues were dealt with with a gun and a bottle of whiskey. Territorialism, colonialism, and imperialism have failed and in the past paradigm our place in the universe has been diminished and confusing. People in the old world had a sense of their identity and entitlements, limited though they were. Now it seems that anything goes and chaos reigns.

According to Cellular Biologist Sondra Barrett, the structure and behavior of Leukemia cells is chaotic. There is no order at all compared to a normal blood cell. And since all life must have a place to exist, then perhaps in some way we must be taking in or creating chaotic conditions internally which promotes cancer. A cancerous cell gets stuck so that the normal growth pattern doesn't move into its final phase, but keeps on growing. The normal cell programs the final phase which is cell death. Living cells maintain regular vibrations, while dying a cell's frequency of vibrations increases until the cell disintegrates.According to Gwilda Wiyaka, physical manifestations cannot exist at very high frequencies.

She extrapolates that  illness happens when we internalize the chaotic conditions around us in the external world. So at some level, confusion and chaos can make us ill. She believes that one of the most important lessons is LETTING GO. She observed that people who go into remission find a way of letting go of some of their larger patterns of in their lives, especially patterns of being rigid. When something important is holding us in patterns related to being rigid, it interferes with the normal programming of cells.

Letting go means letting go of struggle and moving into peacefulness; letting go of guilt or fear. Bruce Lipton writes that the only way to move from fear into love is through the heart. So what is there for you that can be heartfelt; where/what is your bliss? What attachments can you let go of.

According to the string theory, cells are made up of particles made of intelligent strings that are vibrating. Entraining your vibrations (resonance) into peacefulness is a positive approach. Scheduling down time nature walks, beautiful music, literature, poetry or art is one way.  Careful preparation and enjoyment of healthy food is another. Meditation, Chi Gong, Yoga, or spiritual practice based on gratitude are other proven ways.

The bottom line is just listening and experiencing without criticizing, judging or becoming defensive. Emotion is the catalyst that draws something to you. Reactions of either love and hate magnetizes externals and draws them into your internal personal sphere experience.

It is important here to make the distinction between detachment and indifference. A response of "I don't care," says you will take whatever you get. Such indifference just promotes alienation and the dangers of anonymity. But an attitude that everything will somehow be OK, says I care, and am open to creativity.  Einstein said that the greatest decision in life is whether we live in a friendly or a hostile world.

Simplicity is without pretension, though it takes on a spiritual dimension, an overview that moves beyond the fear of loss or deprivation. True simplicity purifies, clarifies, unifies and frees us. Simplicity allows us to let go of yearning for the future, preoccupation with the past, and strategies to protect the present. There is nowhere left to go but where we are. To connect deeply with the present moment is to be able to appreciate the ultimate beauty of reality. Great simplicity is only obtained by a few who are able to eliminate the superfluous trivia of the complex world, and the intricacies of our own body, to find essence.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.  - Leonardo DaVinci


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