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.









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