Chapter 32 - The Noble Motive of the Humanities Faculty
Chapter 32
The Noble Motive
We began in the first chapters noting the drive of humans to understand the bigger questions of the life we lead here: who we are, what is going to happen, and what should *we* do.
We noted the status philosophers have enjoyed since civilisation’s beginning, and we thought that merited while philosophy was synonymous with wisdom and knowledge.
And the *relative* fall from grace that philosophy has witnessed, in contradistinction to the rise of the status of science, would reasonably irk the academic invested in the place Humanities holds in academia. It would be arguable that the anti-science attitude many non-science academicians hold can be put down to professional envy and competitiveness.
Without doubt academics are a very human lot, subject to every vice common to humankind, and capable of any wrong other humans are subject to, but perhaps plain envy and competitiveness does not *fully* explain the resistance Humanities display to the mechanistic, deterministic models of life science has forwarded since DNA’s discovery.
For whether in song, or poem, or primer of ontology, the rhetoric cry goes forth: does science *really* think we are nothing more than DNA machines?
Non-scientists often find the idea offensive. Religious folk find it blasphemous, Most ordinary find the notion grossly counterintuitive. Yet this is where our science seems to leave us all.
Just DNA machines. Just chemical reactions, biochemical chains, complexes of synapses.
The mechanical physicalist response is an appeal to “emergent properties of complexity”.
Right now, Google AI describes the phenomenon like this:
“An emergent property of complexity is a novel, high-level characteristic or behavior that arises from the interactions of simpler components within a system, but which cannot be found in, or predicted from, any of the individual parts alone.These properties form through the synergistic interplay of system elements, creating a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, as seen in phenomena like flocks of birds, consciousness, or the organization of an ant colony”
There’s human consciousness, right there, between flocks of birds and ant colonies. The idea is that even though *individual* neurons look like non-conscious bits of biological wire, put enough together in a certain evolved way and consciousness will “emerge”. Add certain neurotransmitters and hormones, group together many many humans into societies with shared languages, and all the features of societies will emerge.
“Emergent properties of complexity” is an attractive mental model because it can explain everything without explaining the *detail* of anything, while needing nothing more than known biological components to create the emergent outcome. And it is the best general model we have to explain what we are, how *we* emerge from bunches of neurons, but I am afraid it is non-falsifiable
Rightly, non-scientists find this solution a bit of a fudge factor. Complex or not, *we* remain as bunches of neurons made by DNA.
And in a sense there is a *nobility* to the resistance of writers and poets to the dry reductionism of science. It’s hard to imagine a Kipling or a Steinbeck or a Henry Lawson being satisfied that the glorious or tragicomic characters of their works were always mere chemical reactions, however complex.
Step outside of the classrooms and coffee-houses & see how far the “you’re an emergent property of complexity” gets you in the emergency rooms, the cancer wards, the battle fields, the boxing rings, the dusty farms, the prisons, the favelas. If “emergent property of complexity” is a truth then it is an uncomfortable one, embraceable only by the otherwise extremely comfortable.
One readily-quotable and oft-quoted objection to the apparent anti-science of the philosopher and the humanities academic is that such people never live a moment of their lives *behaving* as though science is false. Take David Hume’s underdetermination passages literally, and not one of us can be certain, as we wake each morning from our night’s slumber, that there will actually be a floor under our beds to step out onto as we meet the day. Follow through to George Berkeley and Wittgenstein, and observe how elaborately they construct a really plausible reality without reality. Follow up those who claim there to be no facts - steal their wallets, and observe their insistence that it is fact you are a thief.
That said, look around at the scientists you know who espouse a purely physicalist (=materialist+energy) view of themselves. The scientists I know (mostly medical) are driven by curiosity, keen to improve the lot and prospects of humankind, and are generous people even when no one is watching. When challenged on their apparently altruism, they may well retreat to the “emergent property of complexity” defence of their own behaviour, yet surely fully inhabiting the purely physicalist view must atomise into nihilism … and frankly this is something the great majority of scientists do not exhibit.
Thus we find, on balance of probabilities, a balance of hypocrisies.
The antiscience-in-word Humanities academic fully embraces science in the every day.
The committed physicalist (say, Richard Dawkins?) scientist lives a life of purpose beyond biochemistry.
Each lives in a world, indeed a paradigm, entirely perpendicular to the other.
Which takes me to “i”
Comments
Post a Comment