Trading Lives Without Anger

Heinrich Hoerle, 1930, Monument to the Unknown Prosthesis

 Posted by Allister Marran

The COVID-19 crisis has brought into sharp focus modern man’s ideological belief that he has mastered science and medicine, and has so defeated—or at least delayed—the intrusions of the Grim Reaper.  Our misplaced belief that medical science can cure any ailment means we want to try to save everyone—and when we cannot, there is dismay and fury.

Centuries of loud, proud pronouncements from researchers, scientists, and the medical community, of sound progress being made in the battle against age-old enemies like cancer, malaria, tuberculosis, and innumerous mortal ailments has lulled us into a false sense of security—a perception of invulnerability and ultimately immortality.

What happens, then, when death becomes an inevitable choice?  What if the choices set before us are choices which must choose death in any event?

Whilst the achievements of medical science cannot be overstated, and are undoubtedly impressive, our somewhat conceited overestimation of our ability to stave off death indefinitely has led us to a crossroads today which opens up the social, spiritual, and philosophical question of where to draw the line, who to try to save, and at what cost—if death is indeed inevitable.

At logical extremes, there are two distinct, divergent—apparently incompatible—viewpoints that could be held and debated. In the context of the coronavirus, or COVID-19:

• Firstly, that we should lockdown indefinitely, or until a treatment or vaccine is found, saving every life we can at any cost.

• Alternatively, when the cost becomes too high, to start trading the lives of the old and the sick for that of the starving young and poor.

There have of course been many pandemics, and COVID-19 is just be the latest contagion in a long line of similar illnesses that have ripped through the human population over the last hundred or so years—starting with the Spanish Flu in 1918, and continuously assaulting us before retreating and coming back again in different forms and kinds.

There is a difference this time, however.  The connected world and social media has allowed the world to track the progress of the disease and monitor its devastation, and the real-time outrage has been swift, palpable, and highly publicised.

A minister who has presided over countless funerals told me recently that there has been a perceptible change in the emotions expressed when family and friends come together to bury loved ones.  The old markers of grief and the grieving process are replaced with anger and fury today. 

But our fury has no object; it is just the way things work.  There must be a middle road—to save who you can, but allow those whose time has come to leave.  A realisation and philosophical embracing that our time on earth is finite, which in turn adds value to the little time we do have.  To say goodbye without anger or pain or fury, because after all, shouldn’t your last memory of a departed one be tinged with memories and feelings of love, not hate?

POETRY: A Greater Question (concerning the new coronavirus)

Posted by Chengde Chen * and Yingfang Zhang

Part II 

“Genetic engineering technology is designed to enable genes to cross species 
barriers.” – Martin Khor, New diseases as viruses break species barriers… 



The people in the Doomsday horror are speculating:
Is the virus destroying mankind man-made?
If so, by whom?
Some suspect China, while others, America

But a greater question is if science can do it
If it can, won’t the disaster happen sooner or later?
Hiroshima/Nagasaki was a continuation of atomic physics
Chernobyl was what nuclear technology had entailed

When scientists said they didn’t do it this time
It meant they had been able to
So, whether it was man-made this time, or by whom,
Has been a relatively–secondary question!

If it has been possible, then it is inevitable –
A fatal car-crash for the driver is a matter of time
If we still can’t see science is such a car for mankind
What does it matter if it happens this time or the next?

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* Chengde Chen is the author of the philosophical poems collection: Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. chengde.chen@hotmail.com

The world in crisis: it’s not what we think

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

The real danger is an explosion - of Big Data

We lived once with the dream of a better world: more comfortable, more secure, and more advanced.  Political commentator Dinesh D’Souza called it ‘the notion that things are getting better, and will continue to get better in the future’.  We call it progress.  Yet while our world has in many ways advanced and improved, we seem unsure today whether the payoff matches the investment.  In fact, we all feel sure that something has gone peculiarly wrong—but what?  Why has the climate turned on us?  Why is the world still unsafe?  Why do we still suffer vast injustices and inequalities?  Why do we still struggle, if not materially, then with our sense of well-being and quality of life?  Is there anything in our travails which is common to all, and lies at the root of them all?

It will be helpful to consider what it is that has brought us progress—which in itself may lead us to the problem.  There have been various proposals:  that progress is of the inexorable kind; that it is illusory and rooted in the hubristic belief that earlier civilisations were always backward; or it is seen as a result of our escape from blind authority and appeal to tradition.  Yet above all, progress is associated with the liberating power of knowledge, which now expands at an exhilarating pace on all fronts.  ‘The idea of progress,’ wrote the philosopher Charles Frankel, ‘is peculiarly a response to ... organized scientific inquiry’.

Further, science, within our own generation, has quietly entered a major new phase, which began around the start of the 21st Century.  We now have big data, which is extremely large data sets which may be analysed computationally.

Now when we graph the explosion of big data, we interestingly find that this (roughly) coincides on two axes with various global trends—among them increased greenhouse gas emissions, sea level rise, economic growth, resource use, air travel—even increased substance abuse, and increased terrorism.  There is something, too, which seems more felt than it is demonstrable.  A great many people sense that modern society burdens us—more so than it did in former times.

Why should an explosion of big data roughly coincide—even correlate—with an explosion of global travails?

On the one hand, big data has proved beyond doubt that it has many benefits.  Through the analysis of extremely large data sets, we have found new correlations to spot business trends, prevent diseases, and combat crime—among other things.  At the same time, big data presents us with a raft of problems: privacy concerns, interoperability challenges, the problem of imperfect algorithms, and the law of diminishing returns.  A major difficulty lies in the interpretation of big data.  Researchers Danah Boyd and Kate Crawford observe, ‘Working with Big Data is still subjective, and what it quantifies does not necessarily have a closer claim on objective truth.’  Not least, big data depends on social sorting and segmentation—mostly invisible—which may have various unfair effects.

Yet apart from the familiar problems, we find a bigger one.  The goal of big data, to put it very simply, is to make things fit.  Production must fit consumption; foodstuffs must fit our dietary requirements and tastes; goods and services must fit our wants and inclinations; and so on.  As the demands for a better fit increase, so the demand for greater detail increases.  Advertisements are now tailored to our smallest, most fleeting interests, popping up at every turn.  The print on our foodstuffs has multiplied, even to become unreadable.  Farming now includes the elaborate testing and evaluation of seeds, pesticides, nutrients, and so much more.  There is no end to this tendency towards a better fit.

The more big data we have, the more we can tailor any number of things to our need:  insurances, medicines, regulations, news feeds, transport, and so on.  However, there is a problem.  As we increase the detail, so we require great energy to do it.  There are increased demands on our faculties, and on our world—not merely on us as individuals, but on all that surrounds us.  To find a can of baked beans on a shop shelf is one thing.  To have a can of French navy beans delivered to my door in quick time is quite another.  This is crucial.  The goal of a better fit involves enormous activity, and stresses our society and environment.  Media academic Lloyd Spencer writes, ‘Reason itself appears insane as the world acquires systematic totality.’  Big data is a form of totalitarianism, in that it requires complete obedience to the need for a better fit.

Therefore the crisis of our world is not primarily that of production or consumption, of emissions, pollution, or even, in the final analysis, over-population.  It goes deeper than this.  It is a problem of knowledge—which now includes big data.  This in turn rests on another, fundamental problem of science: it progresses by screening things out.  Science must minimise unwanted influences on independent variables to succeed—and the biggest of these variables is the world itself.

Typically, we view the problems of big data from the inside, as it were—the familiar issues of privacy, the limits of big data, its interpretation, and so on.  Yet all these represent an enclosed view.  When we consider big data in the context of the open system which is the world, its danger becomes clear.  We have screened out its effects on the world—on a grand scale.  Through big data, we have over-stressed the system which is planet Earth.  The crisis which besets us is not what we think.  It is big data.

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The top ten firms leveraging Big Data in January 2018: Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Chevron, Acxiom, National Security Agency, General Electric, Tencent, Wikimedia (Source: Data Science Graduate Programs).

Sample graphs. Red shade superimposed on statistics from 2000.

How Life Has Value, Even Absent Overarching Purpose

Wherein lies value?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Among the most-common questions from philosophy is, ‘What is the purpose of life?’ After all, as Plato pithily said, humans are ‘beings in search of meaning’. But what might be the real reason for the question about the purpose of life? I suggest that what fundamentally lurks behind this age-old head-scratcher is an alternative query: Might not life still have value, even if there is no sublimely overarching purpose? So, instead, let’s start with ‘purpose’ and only then work our way to ‘value’.

Is an individual's existence best understood scientifically — more particularly, in biological terms? The purpose of biological life, in strictly scientific terms, might be reduced to survival and passing along genes — to propagate, for continuation of the familial line and (largely unconsciously) the species. More broadly, scientists have typically steered clear of deducing ‘higher purpose’ and are more comfortable restricting themselves to explanations of empirically, rationally grounded physical models — however inspiring those peeks into presumed reality may be — that relate to the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of existence. The list is familiar:

• the heliocentric construct of Copernicus and the mechanistic universes of René Descartes and Isaac Newton
• the Darwinian theories of evolution and natural selection
• the laws of thermodynamics and the theory of general relativity of Albert Einstein 
• the quantum mechanics of Niels Bohr, Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger. 

But grand as these theories are, they still don’t provide us with purpose.

Rather, such theories focus on better understanding the emergence and evolution of the cosmos and humankind, in all their wonder and complexity. The (not uncommonly murky) initial conditions and necessary parameters to make intelligent life possible add a challenge to relying on conclusions from the models. As to this point about believability and deductions drawn, David Hume weighed in during the 18th century, advising,

             ‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence’.

Meanwhile, modern physics doesn’t yet rule in or rule out some transcendent, otherworldly dimension of the universe — disproof is always tough, as we know, and thus the problem is perhaps unanswerable — but the physical–spiritual dualism implied by such an ethereal dimension is extraordinarily questionable. Yet one cannot deduce meaning or purpose, exceptional or ordinary, simply from mere wonder and complexity; the latter are not enough. Suggested social science insights — about such things as interactions among people, examining behaviours and means to optimise social constructs — arguably add only a pixel here and a pixel there to the larger picture of life’s quintessential meaning.

Religious belief —from the perspectives of revelation, enlightenment, and doctrine — is an obvious place to turn to next in this discussion. Theists start with a conviciton that God exists — and conclude that it was God who therefore planted the human species amidst the rest of His creation of the vast universe. In this way, God grants humankind an exalted overarching purpose. In no-nonsense fashion, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza took the point to another declarative level, writing:

‘Whatever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived’. 

This kind of presumed God-given plan or purpose seems to instill in humankind an inspirational level of exceptionalism. This exceptionalism in turn leads human beings toward such grand purposes as undiminished love toward and worship of God, fruitful procreation, and dominion over the Earth (with all the environmental repercussions of that dominion), among other things. These purposes include an implied contract of adding value to the world, within one’s abilities, as prescribed by religious tenets.

One takeaway may be a comfortable feeling that humankind, and each member of our species, has meaning — and, in a soul-based model, a roadmap for redemption, perhaps to an eternal afterlife. As to that, in the mid-20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in characteristically unsparing fashion:

‘Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal’. 

Universes constructed around a belief in God, thereby, attempt to allay the dread of mortality and the terror of dying and of death. Yet, even where God is the prime mover of everything, is it unreasonable to conceive of humankind as perhaps still lacking any lofty purpose, after all? Might, for example, humankind share the universe with other brainy species on our own planet — or even much brainier ones cosmically farther flung?

Because if humankind has no majestically overarching purpose — or put another way, even if existentially it might not materially matter to the cosmos if the human species happened to tip into extinction — we can, crucially, still have value. Ultimately value, not exceptionalism or eternity, is what matters. There’s an important difference between ‘purpose’ — an exalted reason that soars orders of magnitude above ordinary explanations of why we’re riding the rollercoaster of creation — and ‘value’, which for an individual might only need a benevolent role in continuously improving the lot of humankind, or perhaps other animals and the ecosphere. It may come through empathically good acts without the expectation of any manner of reward. Socrates hewed close to those principles, succinctly pointing out,

            ‘Not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued’.

Value, then, is anchored to our serving as playwrights scribbling, if you will, on pieces of paper how our individual, familial, community, and global destiny unfolds into the future. And what the quality of that future is, writ large. At minimum, we have value based on humanistic grounds: people striving for natural, reciprocal connections, to achieve hope and a range of benefits — the well-being of all — and disposing of conceits to instead embrace our interdependence in order not only to survive but, better, to thrive. This defines the intrinsic nature of ‘value’; and perhaps it is to this that we owe our humanity.

Are We All Scientists?

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

What is it that separates scientific discourse from our ordinary, everyday discourse? Do the two represent separate, independent languages? Or are they fundamentally the same? Are we all scientists?

I first became aware of this question – not that it was new then – when I witnessed a boatsman surfing a reef at high tide. The timing was a special skill that depended on an intimate knowledge of the regularity of the waves which bombarded the reef. Basically, said the boatsman, the waves came in threes – although it was more complex than that. Was this science? In fact, where did science begin and where did it end?

Many thinkers suppose that there are two kinds of discourse in this world: the language of science, and the language of mind. The fundamental difference, writes philosophy professor Michael Luntley, is that the language of science allows only for the physical properties of things, while the language of mind has to do with perspective.

This distinction may not in fact be necessary. Is it not a matter of perspective  as to how we arrange the physical properties of things?

The novelist and critic Samuel Butler considered (to put it too simply) that science merely has to do with the conventions on which people act, and these conventions vary. This merely needs to be noted, however. It is not of great importance to this post, other than to show that it has been considered. More important is individuation:

Our reality – if we try to imagine it before our minds make any sense of it – has been variously described as an undifferentiated stream of experience, a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions, or a swirling cloud without any determinate shape. William James famously wrote of ‘one great blooming, buzzing confusion’.

To make sense of this confusion, then, we need to break up the undifferentiated stream of experience – sounds and sights, surfaces and motions – into individual units. And while the process of doing so may seem to be quite natural and simple to us, what actually happens is extraordinarily complex.

From our earliest childhood, we begin to individuate people, playthings, animals, and a great many things besides. Before long, we begin to look at picture books in which individuated things are represented in pictures, with their names printed underneath: dog, cat, apple, orange, sun, moon – and so on.

Importantly, during this process, we strip off many of the relations which are associated with a thing, and seek instead to create something which is self-contained. In Hegelian-style philosophy, such individuated ‘things’ are said to be abstract, insofar as they are thought of in isolaton from the whole to which they belong.

Take the example of a ‘horse’. When we speak of a horse as an individuated thing, we have little interest in what it eats, or if it sleeps, or even whether it has four legs or three. It is something else that makes it a ‘horse’. To put it another way, when we individuate something, it loses some of its informational content. While in reality, it is impossible to imagine a horse without air, or food, or something to stand on – and innumerable things besides – the individuated ‘horse’ needs none of this.

Even at the same time, however, we carry all of the associations of individuated things in the back of our minds. They are present with us even as we exclude them. That is, we do not completely forget what these things are in their totality, even though we individuate them.

Consider the statement, ‘The horse fell from the top of the cliff.’ While we all know that it is likely that the horse is now dead or seriously injured, the individuated unit ‘horse’ does not obviously contain such information. To put it another way, to individuate something does not mean that we truly and completely individuate it. It may be more accurate to say that we allow some aspects of it to recede yet not to leave the picture.

In fact, this is very much what we do with scientific research. In our experiments, in order to make any progress, we screen out unwanted influences on independent variables. Physics, wrote the 20th century linguists Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen, investigates processes by progressively screening things out. That is, we ignore unwanted relations.

Whether we say, “This cake needs thirty minutes in a hot oven” (a highly abstracted statement), or “I wonder whether it will rain today,” we are doing what the scientist does. We are removing informational content, to relate abstract things, one to the other.

With this in mind, we ‘do science’ all day long. There is little difference, in the most fundamental way, between the Hegelian-style abstraction of our everyday thinking and our scientific pursuits – except that, with science, we make a more rigorous effort to put out of our minds the relations which are unwanted.

Our scientific discourse, therefore, is closely related our ordinary, everyday discourse. We are all ‘scientists’.

‘Ordinarily, hypotheses used in science are more precise
and less vague than those adopted in everyday affairs.”
—W.V. Quine and J.S. Ullian.

Revisiting Scientific Revolutions

AlanWinstanley.com  Incandescent Collection

Posted by Thomas Scarborough 

Thomas Kuhn was wrong.  He failed to understand the dynamics of scientific revolutions. Far from such revolutions occurring through an accumulation of evidence – until, so to speak, the dam bursts – they fail to occur until such time as scientific constraints have been weakened – namely, the scientific method.  I shall explain.

In recent generations, we have witnessed a rising awareness of an inter-connected world, and cosmos. One of the results of modern science in particular is the perception that 'everything is related to everything else'.  Yet paradoxically, even at the same time, we find that science requires the very opposite of openness to the totality of things, to survive and to thrive. For science to advance, there is the need for scientific control on the one hand, and a strictly normed language on the other. In the words of Wilhelm Kamlah and Paul Lorenzen, science must 'screen things out'. This applies to all four phases of the scientific method: characterisations, hypotheses, predictions, and experiments.

There is something equally true about science which we typically do not much pay nearly as much attention to. If the scientific method should exert any influence on those potential influences which it excludes, then scientific control is compromised. For instance, if in seeking to establish how much energy is required to convert a kilogram of ice into steam, I find that I am warming the laboratory at the same time, then the procedure is fundamentally flawed. Energy is being lost. We therefore require what I shall call a 'double isolation' in science. Not only does science screen things out, but it needs to screen itself out from its environment.

This 'double isolation' has led historically to two major problems:

Firstly science, having screened itself out from the world, ultimately needs to 're-enter' the world. After the final, experimental stage of the scientific method, with the artificial conditions of the laboratory removed, science begins again to have an effect on the world. Yet little thought is given to what happens at this point. Science, when it re-enters the world, typically goes beyond anything that was formally taken into account in the scientific method. The disasters which have here occurred have led various thinkers to suppose that science is responsible for the ruination of our world. Stephen Hawking puts it simply: science may score an own goal.

Secondly, the isolation of science from the world has resulted in confusion as to how science really advances. The orthodox view is that science advances by and large through an inductive process: by making broad generalisations from specific observations. Yet consider that those specific observations have already followed the procedure of 'screening things out'. That is, such science has already minimised the effects of variables. It has excluded a great many possible relations in order to trace the relations which it does. There is a limit, therefore, to what can be achieved with previous scientific observations, as far as the tracing of relations is concerned.

Not only this. Experience tells us that scientific conjectures are not adequately explained by an inductive method. Here is an example from my own experience, dating from 2004. In that year I came up with a new principle for metal detecting, called coil coupled operation (CCO).  I was already familiar with the transformer coupled oscillator. This is governed by theory which, even in its full complexity, has little or no interest in outside influences on the oscillator. Now consider that such outside influences could include coins beneath the soil, which may change the frequency of the oscillator. In order to turn this into a metal detector, my mind needed to leap outside of the theory, to discover a principle which rested precisely on those influences which the present theory excluded.

Science, therefore, would seem to require not only the inductive method, but something far larger – namely intuition. Albert Einstein wrote, 'Knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.' This has important implications for the scientific method. The inductive method should be taught only as one possible means of doing science – and probably not the best way. Rather, the emphasis should be on a more frenetic and imaginative thinking. This is borne out, among other things, by the fact that many scientists of note were inter-disciplinary or multi-disciplinary in their pursuits – among them Archimedes, Leonardo da Vinci, and Albert Einstein.

On the other hand, science should take account not only of the individual mechanisms which are isolated in controlled experiments. It should deliberately keep track of those mechanisms which are excluded from such control. These may potentially be infinite – yet it is crucial that there be an attempt to list them. No experiment is truly complete until this has been done, and no experimenter has been truly responsible without it. Inconsistently, today, some of our scientific pursuits are systematically regulated and supervised after the final, experimental stage of the scientific method – most notably in the areas of food and drugs – while vast areas remain ill-considered. The scientific method, far from being closed after four stages, should be an open-ended process.

This is intimately connected with the philosophy of scientific revolutions. In the process of 'screening things out', scientists' thinking is constrained. Yet a paradigm shift requires an eye for the wider canvas of relations. Therefore science, through the very scientific method, works to prevent paradigm shifts. However, as a science advances, the need for scientists to 'screen things out' becomes weaker. The work of scientific control has been done, and the ability to think creatively becomes stronger. Rather than paradigm shifts occurring through an accumulation of evidence, they occur where the scientific method is weakened – like a housewife, perhaps, who after kneading her bread, looks up to see the sun rise.