SUNDAY, APRIL 8, 2018: NOTE TO FILE
This Unscientific Age
Thoughts of a Citizen-scientist
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: BLINDNESS, FROM THE WIRES, IGNORANCE, HUBERIS, PRETENCE
Abstract: Some people want to know the meaning of it all. Some know enough to have something to say worth the effort to consider. Richard Feynman is someone who listened to Nature that those who endeavor to listen to Nature should listen to.
TUCSON (A-P) — How firm is your grasp of alleged 'reality'?
'A woman gets nervous. She begins to suspect that her husband is trying to make trouble for her. She doesn't like to let him into the house. He tries to get into the house; proves that he is trying to make trouble for her. He gets a friend to try and talk to her. She knows that it's a friend, and she knows in her mind, which is going to one side, that this is further evidence of the terrible fright and the fear that she is building up in her mind. Her neighbors come over to console her for a while. It works fairly well, for a while. They go back to their houses. The friend of the husband goes to visit them. They are spoiled now, and they are going to tell her husband all the terrible things she said. Oh dear, what did she say? And he's going to be able to use them against her. She calls up the police department. She says, "I'm afraid." She's locked in her house now. She says, "I afraid. Somebody's trying to get into the house." They come, they try to talk to her, they realize that there is nobody trying to get into the house. They have to go away. She remembers that her husband was important in the city. She remembers that he had a friend in the police department. The police department is only part of the scheme. It only proves it once again. She looks through the window of the house, and she sees across the way someone stopping at a neighbor's house. What are they talking about? In the backyard she sees something coming up over a bush. They're watching with a telescope! It turns out later to be some children playing in the back with a stick. A continuous and perpetual buildup until the entire population is involved. The lawyer that she called, she remembers, was the lawyer once for a friend of her husband's. The doctor who has been trying to get her into the hospital is now obviously on the side of the husband.
The only way out is to have some balance, to think that it is impossible that the entire city is against her, that everybody is going to pay attention to this husband of mine who is such a dope, that everybody is going to do these things, that there is a complete accumulation. All the neighbors, everybody's against her. It's out of proportion. It's only out of proportion. How can you explain to somebody who hasn't got a sense of proportion?' --Richard Feynman
The above from Feynman's The Meaning of it All: Thoughts of a Citizen-scientist 1963, from a transcript of the third night of his Danz lecture, This Unscientific Age, whose questionable punctuation/editing add to the roughness. Feynman was speaking extemporaneously about, among other things, his observations at the Altedena Americanism Center prior to the lecture, which was festooned with images of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, which turned out to be an educational center for the Cold War era John Birch Society staffed by volunteer ladies who "have a good heart, and understand a little bit that it's good, the Constitution, and so on, but they are led astray by the system of the thing." Feynman doesn't quite know how 'paranoid' belief-system thinking happens, 'can't exactly get at it, and what to do to keep [it] form doing this, I don't exactly know'. But he does know cognitive pathologies are in front of his face daily as the years go by (of witch 'paranoid' ideation is merely one, the one an audience of believers is able to question and most at a Danz lecture could also question Birch Society certitudes but only because their beliefs weren't being questioned), as it is for us all, that in the believing mind 'this phenomena is a terrible one, and it has caused mankind and individuals a terrible unhappiness.'
Being 'led astray' is the norm for all who are products of industrial society and its system of schooling. As usual, Feynman's observations and concerns reference vast issues no one living in a silo can get at, yet while Feynman was amazingly multifocal, he was one of the last great silo scientists prior to the (potential) coming age of systems science. 'Silo' may seem pejorative but isn't as systems science utterly depends on the many microscopic views illuminated by specialists. Systems science interconnects the many views into a view through the conceptual macroscope based on energy principles that includes natural selection (Maximum Power Principle) and other self-organizing selection within complex systems. I never met a silo I didn't like, in either science or scholarship that referenced any aspect of the What-is, which involves the evidence and reason thing required to listen to Nature. Excluded would be the endless commentaries on commentaries, closed systems of tautological certitudes asserted on the basis of belief, always held with conviction and supported by clever ape wordsmithery, e.g. postmodernist prattle, assorted theologies, and political ideologies and narratives that include 'solutions' as fervently believed in. Imagine Feynman (or Richard Dawkins), ported back in time to thirteenth century Oxford. He would almost be able to say nothing the experts could/would understand (and Dawkins could give a lecture on the public understanding of science but wouldn't be allowed to live once the assembled had a bit of time to think about the implications of what he said, which is why he would port back soon after the lecture).
From The Meaning of it All:
I. The Uncertainty of Science
'The ideas I wish to describe are old ideas. There is practically nothing that I am going to say tonight that could not easily have been said by philosophers of the seventeenth century. Why repeat all this? Because there are new generations born every day. Because there are great ideas developed in the history of man, and these ideas do not last unless they are passed purposely and clearly from generation to generation.' The schooling system passes on information that serves the economic-political-religious-educational-social control SYSTEM. Foundationally questioning it (i.e. everything) is cognitively dissonant and selected against. 'Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.' — Isaac Asimov, everything else being schooling.
'In these days of specialization there are too few people who have such a deep understanding of two departments of our knowledge that they do not make fools of themselves in one or the other'. Silos of specialization are as dust in the vast sea of air, with each dust mote full of its own department, yet only peripherally connected to nearby dust motes. The macroscope is the conceptual toolbox of systems science that makes each department visible in relationship to other silos. Without a systems view, we are blind to the big picture. Ideological views, political/economic/religious, seem big, but illuminate words rather than data, the sum total of all data that the intelligentsia are largely oblivious to. Belief-based certitudes are crafted by wordsmiths, not scientists, of, by, and for those who would rather believe than know.
'Science means, sometimes, [1] a special method of finding things out. Sometimes it means [2] the body of knowledge arising from the things found out. It may also mean [3] the new things you can do when you have found something out' [technology]'. The media covers new knowledge [2] and technology [3]. In the public mind, science, as [1] a way of knowing (a method of finding things out), doesn't exist. Ergo this is an unscientific age. To a scientist, science is [1], [2] is the fruit, and [3] may well do more harm than good as changing complex systems has unforeseen consequences.
'Now the power to do things carries with it no instructions on how to use it, whether to use it for good or for evil'. Industrial humans value 'science' (aka technology) for the milk and cheese and profit it brings, for the short-term contingencies of reinforcement, so it is 'good' in the short-term. If it enables humans to have dominion over the earth, to be fruitful and multiply unto overshoot, to collapse the life support system of spaceship Earth, then the remnant population of humans may think it 'evil', but as 'nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so', note that Nature doesn't traffic in like or dislike. Will human extinction be bad? Humans may care, but Nature doesn't. Those humans who would rather learn to understand Mother and live properly on this planet may come to 'get right with reality', and develop patterns of living on Earth that work in the long-term. Humans will or they won't. End of story or beginning of story. We live in existential times.
'Is science of any value?' Perhaps as a way of knowing, of finding things out, which currently exists only among those who would rather know than believe. But as E.O. Wilson notes, 'people would rather believe than know'. If there are exceptions, such as humans who have six fingers on each hand, then the question is how many people would rather know than believe? This is a numeracy question best expressed as a percentage. A double digit value? Single digit? A fraction of one, a tenth, or a hundredth percent? At times, perhaps 100 percent of humans would rather know than believe, so 'rather know' should reference those who would rather know than believe by default on all questions. It is common for a scientist to want to known when it concerns their specialty as success in doing so is selected for. But scientists often have religious beliefs and political convictions that are entirely belief-based, and lack either the ability to question them or the will, or both. So it may be that the vast number of those being paid to do science, who have letters after their names, would rather believe than know about things outside their specialty. With systems thinking, however, there is no outside, and an across-the-board ability to question everything is as adaptive as it is rare in this belief-based society, this unscientific age. It may have been that in 2nd century BCE Athens a majority of the intelligentsia did not believe in belief as the openly athesitic with respect to the gods and general skeptic Carneades was honored, unlike Aristotle who had been forced in the 4th century BCE to leave due to suspicion of impiety. Americans and the global intelligentsia are as Romans, but foundational change is possible as Carneades might have pointed out if his work were as well known as Plato's, whose work helped apologists make the Christian narrative seem respectable, whose works were therefore preserved while ninety percent of Greek thought was scraped away into the unknown even though not doing so would not have violated any laws of the universe.
'First there was the earth without anything alive on it. For billions of years this ball was spinning with its sunsets and its waves and the sea and the noises, and there was no thing alive to appreciate it.... for most of the time the world had nothing alive on it'. A biologist, even from 1963, might have noted Feynman could be off an order of magnitude, so Earth was perhaps without life for some hundreds of million years, much less if you count from when Earth was cool enough for liquid water, and has had life on if for 83% of its existence, or 98% of the time once it became a water world, but Feynman reminds us to not only question everything, but to especially question everyone, including himself, as sources of information. But in the next paragraph Feynman states that 'it turns out that all life is interconnected with all other life'. E.O. Wilson couldn't have put it better. Oh, wait, maybe all life is disconnected...., or maybe just human concept forming minds are disconnected from Nature and one another because they have been conditioned to have believing minds that believe in belief.
'Trying to understand the way nature works involves the most terrible test of human reasoning ability. It involves subtle trickery, beautiful tightropes of logic on which one has to walk in order not to make a mistake in predicting what will happen'. Nature is not only more complex than we think, it is more complex than we can think. Considering questions about life, calculus, and everything, dogs are not an exceptional source of information or opinion. Humans who prattle, who listen to one another's prattle and prattle more are not sources either. Nature alone has all the answers. Humans who ask Nature for answers may know enough to have an opinion worth listening to.
'It is necessary and true that all of the things we say in science, all the conclusions, are uncertain, because they are only conclusions. They are guesses as to what is going to happen, and you cannot know what will happen, because you have not made the most complete experiments... Scientists, therefore, are used to dealing with doubt and uncertainty. All scientific knowledge is uncertain. This experience with doubt and uncertainty is important. I believe that it is of very great value, and one that extends beyond the sciences. I believe that to resolve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar. You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right'.
[Richard Feynman was fortunate that his silo was physics, an experimental science, meaning that historical sciences are even more uncertain, a cause for even greater humility. With the possible exception of the Tairona, the problem that has never been solved before is how to transition form the exuberance of growth 'for its own sake' (e.g. empire-building) to a steady state society, living within self-imposed limits, that is able to persist while slowly evolving into 'forms most beautiful and most wonderful' as the millennia pass. The transition is especially problematic for growthing empires in overshoot as a prosperous managed descent to a steady state is the best case scenario.]
[Science as a way of knowing, of finding things out, is a necessary foundation for the transition. This is a non-trivial claim or guess. In a science-based society other 'ways of knowing' would be of interest to those with an interest in human verbal behavior and cognitive pathology, but true believers would be marginalized as science-based thinking is now. Science-based, evidence-based systems thinking involves listening to Nature. Those who so listen, who would rather know than believe, have little or no time to waste in argument. Belief-based claims involve arranging words referencing concepts (other words) into forms that reinforce the believer and would-be believers—the primate(s) who prattle(s) (with belief-based claims there is no external to discourse basis for resolving differences [e.g. political/religious/opinion discourse], so those who argue merely compete to attract believers (win friends and influence hu-mans) in an endeavor to 'win arguments' that has nothing to do with 'real solutions' or 'getting right with reality').]
[Wordsmithery involves receiving reinforcing social approbation from tribal members or fellow travelers within complex society. When a scientist says, 'I believe', translate to 'I find myself considering the possibility that... such a guess suggests that... and it follows, if true, that..., but of course if the data doesn't fit, I'll guess again to iterate towards having a better grasp of the nature of things, whilst the great ocean of truth lies all undiscovered before me.' The inquiring mind is alternative to the believing mind, and doubt/inquiry is needed/adaptive to enable humans to live properly with the planet. A society based on the view through the macroscope of systems science is worth a try. It is not clear that humans are born with a believing mind. It could be an acquired affliction, a cognitive pathology subject to corrective measures, which, once corrected, would result in a society that normalized inquiry and provided belief therapy for true believers to enable a functioning complex society to prosper.]
'If we were not able or did not desire to look in any new direction, if we did not have a doubt or recognize ignorance, we would never get any new ideas. There would be nothing worth checking [vetting], because we would know what is true. So what we call scientific knowledge today is a body of statements of varying degrees of uncertainty. Some of them are unsure; some of them are nearly sure; but none is absolutely certain. Scientists are used to this. We know that it is consistent to live and not know.' True believers differ and feel free to embrace certitudes.
'This freedom to doubt is an important matter in the sciences and, I believe, in other fields. It was born of a struggle. It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure. And I do not want us to forget the importance of the struggle and, by default, to let the thing fall away. I feel a responsibility as a scientist who knows the great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought. I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings. If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations'. No doubt, no inquiry. The greater the doubt, the greater the love and understanding, aka enlightenment.
II. The Uncertainty of Values
'At some time people thought that the potential that people had was not developed because everyone was ignorant and that education was the solution to the problem, that if all people were educated, we could perhaps all be Voltaires. But it turns
out that falsehood and evil can be taught as easily as good. Education is a great power, but it can work either way. I have heard it said that the communication between nations should lead to an understanding and thus a solution to the problem of developing the potentialities of man. But the means of communication can be channeled and choked. What is communicated can be lies as well as truth, propaganda as well as real and valuable information. Communication is a strong force, also, but either for good or evil. The applied sciences, for a while, were thought to free men of material difficulties at least, and there is some good in the record, especially, for example, in medicine. On the other hand, scientists are working now in secret laboratories to develop the diseases that they were so careful to control'. Success in media, social or broadcast, selects for telling people what they want to hear. Some listen to Rush Limbaugh, some to Thom Hartmann, others see Lee Camp as a valued source of true information. Feynman describes our post-truth storytelling. What Nature says is of interest only to those who would rather know than believe.
'Very many answers have been given to the question of the meaning of it all. But they have all been of different sorts. And the proponents of one idea have looked with horror at the actions of the believers of another—horror because from a disagreeing point of view all the great potentialities of the race were being channeled into a false and confining blind alley. In fact, it is from the history of the enormous monstrosities that have been created by false belief that philosophers have come to realize the [idea of] fantastic potentialities and wondrous capacities of human beings.' Thus be it always so with believers. Unfalsifiable claims can be liked or not, false answers, 'solutions', embraced or not, but as Nature has the answers, why listen to your inner prattle or that of others? Why care what other people think?
'The dream is to find the open channel... I think that we must frankly admit that we do not know... I think that in admitting this we have probably found the open channel'. So embrace the satisfying philosophy of ignorance as a way of finding a few things out. The prattling mind does not know and does not listen to Nature. Pause the prattle and endeavor to listen.
'Looking back at the worst times, it always seems that they were times in which there were people who believed with absolute faith and absolute dogmatism in something. And they were so serious in this matter that they insisted that the rest of the world agree with them. And then they would do things that were directly inconsistent with their own beliefs in order to maintain that what they said was true'. Perhaps we should dethrone the believing mind. To find an alternative involves inquiry and doubt.
'The scientific spirit of adventure—the adventure into the unknown, an unknown that must be recognized as unknown in order to be explored, the demand that the unanswerable mysteries of the universe remain unanswered, the attitude that all is uncertain. To summarize it: humility of the intellect'. True believers are not humble, though fideists can be. We can no more understand the unanswerable mysteries than a dog understands calculus. Be silent, prattle not, before the Mysterious. Know your limitations.
'Why do we grapple with problems? We are only in the beginning. We have plenty of time to solve the problems. The only way that we will make a mistake is that in the impetuous youth of humanity we will decide we know the answer. This is it. No one else can think of anything else. And we will jam. We will confine man to the limited imagination of today's human beings... We are not so smart. We are dumb. We are ignorant. We must maintain an open channel'. See above.
III. This Unscientific Age
'I dedicate this lecture to showing what ridiculous conclusions and rare statements such a man as myself can make. I wish, therefore, to destroy any image of authority that has previously been generated... if you mean by scientific the applications of technology, there is no doubt that this is a scientific age. There is no doubt at all that today we have all kinds of scientific applications which are causing us all kinds of trouble as well as giving us all kinds of advantages. And so in that sense it certainly is a scientific age. If you mean by a scientific age an age in which science is developing rapidly and advancing fully as fast as it can, then this is definitely a scientific age.'
'In the religious period of the Middle Ages, art was related directly to religion, and people's attitudes toward life were definitely closely knit to the religious viewpoints. It was a religious age. This is not a scientific age from that point of view.' Perhaps the closest a society has come to a scientific age was the 2nd century BCE Greek's free, curious and critical experiment in complex society.
'This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around [one who knows how to iterate towards real solutions is better than one who champions politically popular feel-good "solutions"]. And the result of this of course is that the politician must give an answer. And the result of this is that political promises can never be kept... the attitude of the populace is to try to find the answer instead of trying to find a man who has a way of getting at the answer.' If a politician were asked how they were going to solve...xyz problem or issue, the honest and truthful answer would be, 'I don't know enough to have an opinion, it's a complex system and for the best guess as to what might actually work I will identify those who do and I'll listen to them who listen to Nature.' An honest, truthful, and knowledgeable politician would tell people things they didn't want to hear and would be unelectable, ergo... democracy is a feel-good delusional (in terms of real solutions) system of government that excels, for a time, to enable industrial humans to grow the economy.
'Now, another example of a test of truth, so to speak, that works in the sciences that would probably work in other fields to some extent is that if something is true, really so, if you continue observations and improve the effectiveness of the observations, the effects stand out more obviously. Not less obviously. That is, if there is something really there, and you can't see good because the glass is foggy, and you polish the glass and look clearer, then it's more obvious that it's there, not less.' Data, evidence, is our friend, while words, words, words are not.
'There are also, of course, in the world a number of phenomena that you cannot beat that are just the result of a general stupidity. And we all do stupid things, and we know some people do more than others, but there is no use in trying to check who does the most.' Some humans are stupid enough to vote for someone they think is less likely than Tweeledumb to do stupid things.
'What I am asking for in many directions is an abject honesty. I think that we should have a more abject honesty in political matters. And I think we'll be freer that way ["freedom is the recognition of necessity" aka what-is]. I would like to point out that people are not honest. Scientists are not honest at all, either. It's useless. Nobody's honest. Scientists are not honest. And people usually believe that they are. That makes it worse. By honest I don't mean that you only tell what's true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up their mind.' Those who serve the coming naturocracy must make clear the entire situation. Down with democracy, up with naturocracy.
'This is for amusement for the students here, mostly. How do you get new ideas? That you do by analogy, mostly, and in working with analogy you often make very great errors. It's a great game to try to look at the past, at an unscientific era, look at something there, and say have we got the same thing now, and where is it? So I would like to amuse myself with this game. First, we take witch doctors. The witch doctor says he knows how to cure. There are spirits inside which are trying to get out. You have to blow them out with an egg, and so on. Put a snakeskin on and take quinine from the bark of a tree. The quinine works. He doesn't know he's got the wrong theory of what happens. If I'm in the tribe and I'm sick, I go to the witch doctor. He knows more about it than anyone else. But I keep trying to tell him he doesn't know what he's doing and that someday when people investigate the thing freely and get free of all his complicated ideas they'll learn much better ways of doing it. Who are the witch doctors? Psychoanalysts and psychiatrists, of course. If you look at all of the complicated ideas that they have developed in an infinitesimal amount of time, if you compare to any other of the sciences how long it takes to get one idea after the other, if you consider all the structures and inventions and complicated things, the ids and the egos, the tensions and the forces, and the pushes and the pulls, I tell you they can't all be there. It's too much for one brain or a few brains to have cooked up in such a short time. However, I remind you that if you're in the tribe, there's nobody else to go to.' Note: get free of all complicated word-based ideas and some humans will learn much better ways of doing things, of living on this planet, in a manner that actually works as the millennia pass.
'I thought, among other people, of the Arabian scholars of science during the Middle Ages. They did a little bit of science themselves, yes, but they wrote commentaries on the great men that came before them. They wrote commentaries on commentaries. They described what each other wrote about each other. They just kept writing these commentaries. Writing commentaries is some kind of a disease of the intellect. Tradition is very important. And freedom of new ideas, new possibilities, are disregarded on the grounds that the way it was is better than anything I can do. I have no right to change this or to invent anything or to think of anything. Well, those are your English professors. They are steeped in tradition, and they write commentaries. Of course, they also teach us, some of us, English. That's where the analogy breaks down.' See C.P. Snow's Two Cultures, but note that some elements of each have 'some kind of a disease of the intellect' that stands in the way of the 'free, curious, and critical.'
'All the time you hear the question, "why can't Johnny read?" And the answer is, because of the spelling. The Phoenicians, 2000, more, 3000, 4000 years ago, somewhere around there, were able to figure out from their language a scheme of describing the sounds with symbols. It was very simple. Each sound [phoneme] had a corresponding symbol, and each symbol, a corresponding sound. So that when you could see what the symbols' sounds were, you could see what the words were supposed to sound like. It's a marvelous invention. And in the period of time things have happened, and things have gotten out of whack in the English language. Why can't we change the spelling? Who should do it if not the professors of English? If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell "friend," I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend.' It's a disease of the intellect thing.
'And in the near future the developments in biology will make problems like no one has ever seen before. The very rapid developments of biology are going to cause all kinds of very exciting problems. I haven't time to describe them, so I just refer you to Aldous Huxley's book Brave New World, which gives some indication of the type of problem that future biology will involve itself in.' Transhumanists of the world unite to cure the disease of aging! And then what?
'One other point that I would like to take a moment or two to make a little bit more in detail is this one: The problem of moral values and ethical judgments is one into which science cannot enter, as I have already indicated, and which I don't know of any particular way to word. However, I see one possibility. There may be others, but I see one possibility. You see we need some kind of a mechanism, something like the trick we have to make an observation and believe it, a scheme for choosing moral values. Now in the days of Galileo there were great arguments about what makes a body fall, all kinds of arguments about the medium and the pushes and the pulls and so on. And what Galileo did was disregard all the arguments and decide if it fell and how fast it fell, and just describe that. On that everybody could agree. And keep on studying in that direction, on what everyone can agree, and never mind the machinery and the theory underneath, as long as possible. And then gradually, with the accumulation of experience, you find other theories underneath that are more satisfactory, perhaps. There were in the early days of science terrible arguments about, for instance, light. Newton did some experiments which showed that a light beam separated and spread with a prism would never get separated again. Why did he have to argue with Hooke? He had to argue with Hooke because of the theories of the day about what light was like and so on. He wasn't arguing whether the phenomenon was right. Hooke took a prism and saw that it was true.' So disregard all the arguments and get right with Nature. 'The problem of moral values and ethical judgments is one into which science cannot enter'. Okay, obvious enough for any silo science, so read, 'The problem of moral values and ethical judgments is one into which physics cannot enter,' and who would think otherwise? But for systems science, not so obvious. Perhaps evolutionary biologists have points to make of interest. Moral and ethical judgments may have something to do with 'what works' within the nature of things, species extinction, especially of humans, commonly being see as a 'bad' thing.
'So the question is whether it is possible to do something analogous (and work by analogy) with moral problems. I believe that it is not at all impossible that there be agreements on consequences, that we agree on the net result, but maybe not on the reason we do what we ought to do. That the argument that existed in the early days of the Christians as to, for instance, whether Jesus was of a substance like the Father or of the same substance as the Father, which when translated into the Greek became the argument between the Homoiousions and the Homoousians. Laugh, but people were hurt by that. Reputations were destroyed, people were killed, arguing whether it's the same or similar. And today we should learn that lesson and not have an argument as to the reason why we agree if we agree.'
'Thank you very much. I enjoyed myself.'
The Meaning of it All: Thoughts of a Citizen-scientist 1963
Anyone who thinks we live in enlightened times should read more history and disbelieve six popular truisms (aka arguments) before breakfast. Hu-mans of the world know then thyselves.
