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ebear's avatar

What you're describing only applies to a subset of the scientific endeavour, specifically western corporate and government financed science, not the entire enterprise.

ergo:

https://practicalpie.com/fallacy-of-composition/

A fallacy of composition is the flawed reasoning that concludes what is true for individual parts must also be true for the entire group or system they belong to.

Furthermore, This is not a new phenomenon as Thomas Kuhn made explicit in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." First year reading.

As for not knowing what a particular thing (such as electricity) "IS" that ground was covered by Kant 200 years ago. A basic feature of all descriptions of the world is that we only know what our senses (extended to include instruments) reveal about an object, not its 'true nature' (if such a thing even exists). In practical terms this means I don't need to know what an electron "is" in order to build a device using Maxwell's equations with confidence that it will work as intended.

The basic problem with science today is that it lacks a solid foundation in Epistemology, and more specifically, General Semantics (see A. Korzybski). If these were more widely taught the fallacy of trying to describe what a thing IS would be much clearer. First realization would be that we can only describe things by analogy to other things using words as our foundation. Try and describe anything without using words, then try to define the words you must use to convey information. Notice how they're defined using other words? No escaping the trap.

What this means is that we have only our senses and extensions of our senses to describe what things DO, not what they ARE. Again, in practical terms, this means that we can build any number of sophisticated devices without the need to know more than their predictable attributes, such as like charges repel, unlike charges attract. We don't need to know what "charge" IS, only what it does. This may seem frustrating to an outside observer, but anyone properly trained in the scientific method knows this. We measure the world in terms of what things DO, not what they ARE. The error arises when we try to equate the two.

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Scipio's avatar

This is a wonderful piece and an important one, too.

My only caveat is that the emptiness that comes from destroying mystery and the spirit of enquiry, aka curiosity, is primarily a western illness.

Just my ten cents but what you're describing is the inevitable outcome of a toxic, malign narcissism & hubris that has infected the West, emanating from the United States.

I have noticed that at school, kids aren't taught how to think anymore. They're increasingly taught what to think. It's a subtle shift but a real one, with disastrous outcomes that you have described so well.

There's a terrible emptiness that is created when you rob human beings, in particular young ones, of the awe and power of mystery, of knowing that there is so much we just don't know.

I always say to my kids that almost all of the things they use in their ordinary lives today were not just considered impossible in the past, but weren't even conceived of. I encourage them to see their lives as part of a great human adventure, an odyssey to discover (in their own way) what they thought was impossible and perhaps what is unknown. A journey that they can contribute to.

However that means you have to have the humility to accept not just that what seems impossible is in fact possible, but that we have yet to discover many impossibilities.

That's to say, humans live happier lives when they understand and accept that there are realities beyond what they can see or even think about. It drives them forward.

For example and on an even more philosophical level, just because we experience a 24 hour day, in reality there is no 'beginning' or 'end'. The universe never 'started' and it will never 'end'. There is no 'time' save for that we have invented as humans.

On a deeper level, the universe itself has no end. Our galaxy is one of billions, trillions, more. Like the 'experts' in the middle ages, who believed the world was flat, many like to think that there must be an 'end' to the universe, because they can't accept that there is no end and that as humans, we haven't yet been able to understand and prove such an impossibility.

Once you start understanding the jaw dropping mystery of these revelations, you start to become humble and curious. Humans start asking questions and searching for the truth.

Every single 'impossibility' that has become real in our world has emerged from societies that value a sense of mystery, societies that have the humility to accept that as humans we not only can't know everything about reality, but in fact know very little. From that acceptance comes curiosity, a spirit of enquiry, a 'spark' if you will, that drives a society forward.

Revealing previously unknown truths and 'impossibilities' isn't easy. It takes hard work, using agreed methods developed over millenia, to discern new realities. Often only a very few of us have the mental heft to make genuine breakthroughs (eg Einstein), although even geniuses like him admitted that what they discovered required the hard work of many others before them.

Once a society loses that spark, which comes from a sense of mystery, it starts to decline. Evidence of decline can be found using various

measures, but a good indicator is when junk philosophies become rife, and lies replace truth. A form of intellectual totalitarianism emerges, where a small elite convince themselves that they in essence know everything, and then dictate to the rest what reality is.

In turn, 'the rest' become deprived of purpose and meaning. They are programmed not to question or to think, but simply to accept what they're told as truth. Over time, they develop an inner sense of hopelessness and futility, of spiritual emptiness, that many can't understand or explain. Life is reduced to 'going through the motions', to 24/7 conformism.

It's not hard to see how societies that submit to this sickness start to lose the will to resist lies, and eventually come to believe and promote them. Evil frauds and liars become their leaders and prophets. Truth tellers and those who resist , become societies enemies.

This illness has sadly infected many Western societies. Just my view but it started with French postmodernist philosophy, a fraudulent movement that proposed that there is no such thing as objective reality (there is), and all truth is subjective (it isn't). Lost on the arrogant frauds and hypocrites (Foucault, etc) who started this movement was the contradiction that they themselves were proposing an objective reality, but being the scum they were, they dismissed all opposing voices and moved on to take a stranglehold on western academia.

Sadly their junk philosophy has spawned many others and ihas become pathological in modern America, in particular among the elites who run academia and government. Like a virus, this fundamentally inhumane and toxic philosophy has in turn spread like a virus through western societies, most of them heavily influenced by the United States.

It must be rejected by all humans who value progress and humanity, and by those who want their children to rediscover the mystery that enriches our fleeting existence.

Please forgive my long reply and thank you again for such a thought provoking and important piece.

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