Monomorphic

This is an attempt at restating part of this old blog post in a simpler way.

Scientists are valuable to society. They help extract new knowledge and theories about the world. To the extent that they are right, they improve our affluence, our physical health, and, possibly, our outlook on life. But scientists can also provide us with tools that support or threaten regimes, with weapons, surveillance equipment, encryption, and unexpected discoveries that bring about social change with unexpected consequences. The mass industrialisation of the western world enabled the rise of the middle class like never before, an event whose full consequences might not yet be understood.

Philosophy is traditionally defined as the study of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, aesthetics and logic. Here are some reasons why scientists may want to expand their knowledge beyond the scientific realm into the philosophical one.

Metaphysics and epistemology. Scientific method originally grew out of philosophy – what we today call science was originally called natural philosophy. Scientific method is not fixed but continues to evolve, and we must continually revise what we know and how we obtain knowledge, particularly in emerging fields. Karl Popper’s famous assertion that scientific claims need to be falsifiable is only one of many recent viewpoints that have gained momentum. Thinkers such as Bruno Latour have asserted that scientific facts are socially constructed through a complex process.

Ethics and politics. New technologies may enable new kinds of interactions between people as well as new possibilities for the individual in their lives. The way that individuals interact with new knowledge and new technologies is determined by innate tendencies and desires, as well as social processes, conventional morality in the society where one lives, and political decisions. If the scientist understands these processes, they are in a position to guide their new findings into the world in an optimal way.

I omit aesthetics from this list for now since its link to science is not straightforward, and logic since it is now an inherent part of mathematics and thus also science. Where logic goes beyond mathematical/symbolic logic, it is of course also worthwhile to study it.

The scientist who also ventures into philosophy will be able to place their scientific findings within an ethical system and within an overall purpose-directed framework. The scientific process by itself mostly does not permit any consideration of these questions, and thus scientists must either submit to an existing ethical system, whether implicitly or explicitly, or create their own. To put it in very blunt terms: the scientist or engineer without an ethical system is sometimes a tool in the hands of others who do have such a system. Awareness that the choice exists can be crucial.

In recent years, it seems people have started discussing their religious beliefs more openly, even in countries where these have traditionally been a sensitive subject. We have seen a flurry of books that are perhaps best described as pop atheism: Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion”, and so on. Atheism is now a bestseller phenomenon.

Amid all this, it might be in order to ask why people discuss the topic, and what you really wish to communicate when you flag yourself, on your social network profile or in a conversation, as an atheist or as some kind of Christian. (I’m writing from a Western perspective, so I’ll simply consider the atheist-Christian divide without including other religions – similar arguments may apply in many cases.)

I’ve only known very few Christians around my age who carry out all the rituals, go to service regularly, and so on. I believe that most young people who consider themselves to be Christians don’t go through all the associated rituals on a regular basis. So this cannot be what is communicated by the label. More likely is that people want to communicate something about what they think society should be and where it should be going. They might associate Christianity with general conservatism, with romanticism, or with a certain set of ethical values. Maybe people who specifically label themselves protestant or catholic are standing up for the values, ethics and traditions of one of the two as opposed to the other.

I’m not a person of religious faith, but I find religion and the effects that religion has had on society to be interesting topics. It really seems to me, for instance, that the protestant emphasis on individual responsibility and salvation through work has shaped protestant cultures deeply. Something else, which I cannot describe since it is foreign to me, appears to have shaped the catholic countries. It’s not a stretch to say that Christian faith and Christian ethics created much of what Europe may be justified in thinking of as its historical successes – economic prosperity, science, enlightenment and so on. Nietzsche suggests that the scientific quest for truth in fact came from a fundamentally Christian need to seek the truth at all costs. How amusing then that today, science and Christianity are said to be in conflict.

Indeed, it is strange to see the almost dogmatic fervor with which today’s nominal atheists attack Christianity. It is equalled only by the dogma coming from those nominal Christians who bite back. The “debate” we see so much of is about names and what to call oneself, when what really should be discussed is ethics – what ethics did Christianity leave us with when it imploded, and what ethical values should we select in going forward?

It may turn out that some of our nominal atheists in fact live very Christian lives in all but name, if we consider their ethics and values. In short, in everything but the superficial.

When we claim that an act was carried out as a decision made freely, we implicitly seem to say that the acting subject is fully responsible for the action at hand. In other words, if I suggest to you that you should buy blueberry ice cream and not vanilla, and you go ahead and buy the blueberry ice cream, it is still your responsibility to have done so, were it to lead to prosecution or adverse consequences. Of course, if I have some important knowledge about the blueberry flavour that I have not disclosed, such as it being poisonous, some of the blame may fall on me, out of convention. In this case we may assume that I have tried to manipulate you into doing something you would not have done, had you had full knowledge.

The act of “making a decision” or “making a choice” is an essential part of the model we have of human beings as individuals with their own will and their own choice. If one disregards situations where people try to betray others in some sense, such as the above example (using a preliminary, intuitive conception of “betray”), the act of making a decision firmly grounds all responsibility in the subject, even though various influences, sensory impressions, emotions and so on may have led to the decision.

But if we look at decision making and acting more closely, we discover that a great deal of our behaviour is not rooted in reasons that we are aware of or understand. If we are aware of the reasons, they may be something else than what we think they are. The thoughts “I am doing this because…” or “He did that because…” only apply to a vanishingly small fraction of everything that we may categorise as Actions.

In fact, causality is a tricky problem in general, and not just in the human mind. The world is a never-ending stream of sensory stimuli, and out of this stream, we isolate things that we call events, objects, individuals, delineations, contrasts, causality. We know, as physicists, that heating water ultimately causes it to boil. But this does not mean that we have identified a causal link between event A and event B, in the way that we can identify an electric current with a measurement device, and say “see, there’s 5 Volts in this wire”. The causal model is our best guess, and clearly, there cannot be a final seal and confirmation that the model is the only true one, and the complete one. It merely stands all the trials we can come up with. Details that remain unchanging in the trials, because we did not think of testing them, or because we are not even aware of them, will not be part of such a model.

Suppose now that we do things, on a daily basis, and the majority of things we do we do not know the reasons for, or if we know the reasons, they are incomplete, falsified, or not revealed to us, because of an inner battle between different aspects of our mind. Suppose also that impressions of different kinds may influence our decisions, possibly in ways that we do not understand. For instance, seeing the color blue may lead us to walk briskly, because of some association we made years ago. It seems clear then, that attributing responsibility to the subject, for all of her actions, is a practical thing to do but not a fair thing to do. It may be that we can in fact subject anyone to a series of influences that lead them to carrying out a certain action, if we know enough about their mind, and we can control the environment sufficiently well. Is this not what artists do with their audiences?