When technology undermines science

On the day the iPad was launched, Apple sold over 300,000 of the tablet computers. Since then, over 3 million iPads have been sold. Our society is infatuated with technology, and this affects us in ways both obvious and subtle. Here I want to examine how our adoration of technology influences the way we think about science, and in turn how we see our whole world. I should note that I write this as a scientist, and someone with a long-time interest in, and fascination with technology.

Because the words science and technology are often paired, their meanings tend to be conflated. But science can be pursued with few technological spin-offs (as is the case with astrophysics, for example) and technology can be developed without the use of science (as was the case with the early technologies developed by trial and error in prehistory). Certainly scientific discoveries can often be used to develop new technologies, and existing technologies can be evaluated scientifically. But science itself is not about developing technology, it's about learning through systematic observation and (sometimes) experimental manipulation. Some would argue that this distinction is mere semantics, but I will argue that confusion between science and technology leads to some very unfortunate consequences.

Because we're so taken with technology, and because of the close connection between science and technology, it's not surprising that science is held in high esteem. But this is a double-edged sword. The downsides of technology (e.g. sedentary behaviour patterns and burgeoning rates of obesity, global warming from carbon emissions, toxic waste, etc.) are sometimes blamed on science. On the one hand, this is fitting: for better or worse, without science, modern technologies could never have been developed. On the other hand, surely it is our society's moral, economic, and political choices that determine how scientific knowledge is applied, and responsibility for those choices should fall to the decision makers. But our terminological confusion blurs such distinctions, and science and technology are routinely seen as one and the same. Praise or criticism of one is seen as identical to praise or criticism of the other. This has lead to a curious polarization of views.

The church of science

On the one hand, a triumphalism of science has become more and more common. Science is increasingly seen as providing the most trustworthy information, or perhaps the only reliable source of knowledge, not just about the physical world, but about all aspects of life.

I believe two factors underlie this tendency. First, the products of technological wizardry provide a concrete demonstration of the mastery and control that scientific knowledge can provide. The most important point here is the universality of this demonstration: no special knowledge or education is required to appreciate the power of technology. This technological factor rides on top of an epistemological claim. As Luke Muehlhauser puts it:

the massive success of science leads me to suspect that methods condoned [sic] by science are the most successful methods of knowing we have discovered yet.

And while it seems likely that a philosophical argument such as this will only appeal to a limited audience, it nevertheless provides the intellectual muscle beneath the alluring skin of technology.

Triumphalism about science has a long historical lineage, expressed in the first half of the 20th century in the school of logical positivism, and more recently in some of the writings of the so-called new atheists. In their extreme forms, such arguments tend towards scientism, the view that only scientific statements have any meaning and that, ultimately, science will provide all the answers. The trouble is, if science is seen as having all the answers, it must either expand to encompass a much broader range of concerns, or else dismiss such concerns as meaningless. Where does that leave ethics, philosophy, literature, history, art? While science can inform each of these fields, a radical redefinition of science would be required to assimilate them. And yet that is just what is being proposed.

Philosophy. Luke Muehlhauser argues: "I think philosophy will be most productive when it functions as an extension of successful science ... ". Commenting on such thinking, Massimo Pigliucci writes:

There are profound differences in method, style and type of problems between science and philosophy, and frankly I think that people who deny or minimize this simply have not taken their time to read any philosophy, or they would immediately see how bizarre it is to deny the difference.

More broadly, I am having a really hard time understanding the agenda of people here who wish at all costs to dismiss philosophy or absorb it into science. Why are you so bent on arrogating more epistemological power to science than it possesses? Why is it not good enough to say that science is by far the best approach we have devised to understand the natural world, but that there are problems that lie outside of it and other disciplines that are better equipped to address those problems?

Ethics. Sam Harris recently gave a TED talk titled “Science can answer moral questions”, in which he argues that "The separation between science and human values is an illusion". Massimo Pigliucci described the "malady that strikes Harris: scientism, the idea that science can do everything and provides us with all the answers that are worth having." Thinkmonkey, a commenter on Pigliucci's blog wrote:

Sam Harris has simply not done the hard work needed to understand the historical and ongoing arguments in ethical theory and metaethics - the context in which the argument he wishes to make *must* be situated. Perhaps these arguments have not settled very much, but they have at least established some shared terminology and made important distinctions: Without knowing the terminology and understanding the important distinctions (and the reasons for them), Harris cannot help but be confused - and to introduce still more confusion when he attempts to engage with his critics.

Philosophy may be where all the unanswered questions live, and may not get a lot of respect thereby, but at least we try to avoid these kinds of messes. Or, as Sydney Morgenbesser famously described our collective work: "You make a few distinctions. You clarify a few concepts. It’s a living."

The Humanities. The academic disciplines concerned with the human condition include history, literature, law, languages, art, and religious studies. Aspects of these and related fields may be studied using the methods of social science. But large parts of these disciplines use methods that are not scientific. Criticism of these disciplines is increasingly common. For example, the website of Edge: The Third Culture sneers:

The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.

... the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.

Mathematics. Interestingly, the claim that science provides the only reliable source of knowledge is easily refuted. Mathematics uses deduction to arrive at certain knowledge, something that science cannot achieve. One response to this is to claim that mathematics is part of science. Certainly mathematics is a key tool of science, but claiming that it is part of science goes too far. A different response is to point out that mathematical knowledge pertains to abstract entities, and thus in itself is not practical. This is indeed correct, but it highlights the key point that there are different kinds of knowledge, which cannot be seen as competing, because they belong to entirely different spheres.

Science is sometimes identified tout court with rationalism, and in a you're-either-with-us-or-against-us manoeuvre, everything else is simply deemed to be irrationalism. This is more a rhetorical trick than a line of reasoning, but once again we see the definition of science being expanded at will.

Science as fiction

At the other extreme, is an anti-science sentiment that manifests itself in support for pseudoscience, quackery, and superstition. From Deepak Chopra to crystals to the anti-vaccination movement, anti-science thinking is surprisingly prevalent. As I suggested previously, some of this is a reaction against the evident problems engendered by technology, coupled with a confusion between science and technology. But some of the anti-science thinking is a reaction to the kind of triumphalism of science that I have described.

What is to be done?

I've argued that fuzzy definitions have done real damage, fueling a grandiose vision of science and its flip side, a crude resurgence of superstition and anti-science thinking. The pairing of science and technology is here to stay, and the allure of technology will continue to promote an exaggerated conception of science. What can be done in the face of this tendency?

First, it remains important to distinguish between science and technology. The careless fusing of the two terms contributes to the unwarranted expansion of the notion of science. Second, it is important to challenge attempts to expand the purview of science to non-empirical matters such as ethics. This does no good to either science or ethics. While science can certainly inform ethics, the primary focus of ethics is normative, not predictive or explanatory. Science provides the best way to understand the physical world, but it is not a source of values or meaning. Third, pseudo-science, superstition, and quackery should be challenged by insisting on high-quality evidence. However it should be remembered that such delusions are nourished by out-sized claims about the universal dominion of science. Attempts to discredit new-age nonsense can backfire when metaphysical claims are denounced as being unscientific. Science can only address empirical claims. Non-empirical claims may certainly be challenged, but not by science.

Mind your own business

Many of the issues I have discussed are particularly vexing where the mind is concerned. Advances in neuroscience have encouraged a physicalist view that in its most extreme form argues that the mind is nothing more than the activity of neurons. This idea has an interesting connection with technology. Early computers were described as being "like a brain". As computers became more familiar, the simile was inverted, and the brain was seen as being "like a computer". More recently this process has reached its conclusion, and it is common to hear that the brain simply "is a computer".

Of course it's true that the brain computes, albeit in a way rather different from our digital computers. But somehow, along with the computation, we experience consciousness, a sense of self, the impression of free will. We experience sensation (rather than simply processing signals), we feel emotion, we delight in beauty and we abhor ugliness. Questions about these aspects of mind have occupied philosophers from the earliest times. Naturally, developments in the scientific understanding of the brain have had an important impact on philosophy of mind. But the fundamental questions remain.

Unfortunately, reductionist views about the mind are flourishing, nourished by both enthusiasm about developments in neuroscience and uncritical acceptance of the technological metaphor that "the brain is a computer". It is perhaps noteworthy that Sam Harris, who argues in his new book that Science Can Determine Human Values, has a PhD in neuroscience. In a New York Times review of Harris's book (with the telling title Science Knows Best), Kwame Anthony Appiah writes:

when he stays closest to neuroscience, he says much that is interesting and important ... Yet such science is best appreciated with a sense of what we can and cannot expect from it ...

Indeed we should approach all science this way.

Reason is not enough

I just finished reading Chris Hedges' 2008 book, I Don't Believe in Atheists. The image on the left is from a YouTube video of an interview Hedges gave on CBC's The Hour with George Stroumboulopoulos, which gives a pretty good overview his argument. One side point: while the book is a great read, its title is oddly misleading, so pay that no heed.

Hedges argues that both poles of the debate about reason and religion are occupied by fundamentalists, but at one end they are religious while at the other they are atheist. He argues persuasively, but I have some doubts ...

Thesis

Hedges, a distinguished foreign correspondent for various newspapers including the New York Times, wrote the book after debates he had in May 2007 with Sam Harris (author of The End of Faith) and Christopher Hitchens (author of God is Not Great). Hedges terms these two writers "New Atheists" along with Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. But what particularly distinguishes Harris and Hitchens is that their political views with respect to the Islamic world are curiously compatible with those of the Christian right. Harris: "Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death." (The End of Faith). Hitchens: "But the plain fact is that the believable threat of violence undergirds the Muslim demand for 'respect.'" (Slate)

Hedges' thesis is that the new atheists and religious fundamentalists make the same mistake. They have a utopian belief in the perfectibility of humanity. The difference between them is that atheists hitch their wagons to reason and science while religious fundamentalists rely on faith. But Hedges argues the key point is that they both externalize evil:

Evil, for the Christian fundamentalists and the atheists, is not something within them but an external force to be vanquished. It must be conquered and defeated. This may take violence, even massive acts of violence, but if it leads to a better world, this violence is justified. They have been anointed by reason or God to do battle with this terrible evil. But once evil is seen as being only external, once some human beings are proclaimed more moral than others, repression and murder becomes a regrettable necessity to improve the world. Those infected with the "vice" of evil have to be controlled or exterminated.

On the contrary, asserts Hedges, inside each of us lies what Joseph Conrad called the "heart of darkness":

Human beings are frequently irrational. They are governed by unconscious forces, many of them self-destructive. ... We are bound by our animal natures.

Finally, Hedges argues that "We discard the wisdom of sin at our peril.":

This understanding of innate human corruptibility and human limitations, whether explained by the theologian Augustine or the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, has been humankind's most potent check on utopian visions. It has forced human beings to accept their own myopia and irrationality, to acknowledge that no act, even one defined as moral or virtuous, is free from the taint of self-interest and corruption.

Hence, "We have nothing to fear from those who do or do not believe in God; we have much to fear from those who do not believe in sin."

Now, I'm well disposed towards a lot of what Hedges says. I find the islamophobia of Hitchens and Harris to be repugnant. The same goes for Hitchens' promotion of the Iraq war and Harris' equivocation on the legitimacy of torture. They have both helped to prop up the Orwellian "war on terror". I dislike their combative, insulting, condescending styles of debate. And they both seem to lack insight into the meaning of religious belief.

Hedges' thesis has a lot going for it, and for the most part he presents his argument in a cogent way. Above all, I agree with him that absolute certainty is extremely dangerous. But some of his arguments don't sit right with me.

Antithesis

Hedges writes that many atheists believe that

... reason and science, rather than religion, will regulate human conflicts and bring about a paradise. This vision draws its inspiration from the Enlightenment, the European intellectual movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that taught that reason and scientific method could be applied to all aspects of human life. This application would lead to progress, human enlightenment and a better world.

Indeed,

The human species, elevated above animals because it possessed the capacity to reason, could break free of its animal nature and, through reason, understand itself and the world. It could make wise and informed decisions for the betterment of humanity.

Hedges seems to agree with Enlightenment thinkers that our "animal nature" is a threat, but does not believe we can "break free" of it. We are "bound by our animal natures", "frequently irrational", and "governed by unconscious forces, many of them self-destructive". He sides with Freud who "warned that our instinctual lusts were stronger than our reasonable interests." Thus reason can be overwhelmed by our animal urges.

Is instinct really so unreasonable?

Like fear, for example? Is it unreasonable to flee from danger? Is it irrational to go out of your way to pursue a romantic possibility? Our basic needs, many of which we share with animals, are not irrational per se, but are instead the starting point of reasoning. Given that I'd like to go on a date with this man or woman, what's my best strategy? If I smell a gas leak, what should I do? Sometimes our instincts lead us to do things which might be labeled irrational, like running into a burning building to save a child. But that hardly seems contemptible.

Reason can lead to many different conclusions, depending on where you start. Deep-seated psychological factors can colour a person's reasoning. For example, strong biases can blind one to contradictory evidence. Perhaps more problematically, even when the evidence one uses has not been selected in a biased fashion, one's moral premises may be distorted. In particular, most of us are constrained (to put it mildly) by personal history and cultural assumptions.

What most worries Hedges, is our aggressive instinct and its connection with war and barbarism. We can understand aggression in the animal world. For example, when a mother Bear feels her cub is threatened, her aggressive response makes sense to us. Human aggression is another matter. Hedges, who has seen the brutality of war first hand—in Central America, Palestine, Bosnia, and elsewhere—is not optimistic. He is again swayed by Freud's argument that, as Hedges understands it,

The lusts for death and destruction are not external. They lurk in all human beings. They cannot be eradicated.

This dark view leads Hedges to some remarkable conclusions:

Pacifists, although they do not fuel the lust for violence, keep alive the myth that the human species can attain a state of moral perfection. This myth feeds the aggressiveness and cruelty of those who demand the use of violence to cleanse the world, to borrow a phrase from George W. Bush, of "the evildoers." The danger is not pacifism or militarism. It is the poisonous belief in human perfectibility, and the failure to accept our own sinfulness, our own limitations and moral corruption. This belief in our innate goodness becomes dangerous in a crisis, a moment when human beings feel threatened. It enlarges our capacity for aggression, violence and mass slaughter.

So pacifists do not "fuel the lust for violence", but they indirectly "feed the aggressiveness and cruelty" of others. Huh? And militarism isn't dangerous?

What I think this reveals is that Hedges is extremely pessimistic about attempts to address structural causes of the world's problems. I do not disagree with him that each of us is morally imperfect. And I share his distrust for utopian projects—though I would strongly argue that pacifism need not be construed as utopian. But I think he's been reading a bit too much Ecclesiastes.

Knowledge about wisdom / wisdom about knowledge

Hedges writes that "We drift toward disaster with the comforting thought that the god of science will intervene on our behalf." I agree that this naive faith in science is misplaced. Indeed I fully agree when Hedges writes:

Knowledge is not wisdom. Knowledge is the domain of scientific and intellectual inquiry. Wisdom goes beyond self-awareness. It permits us to interpret the rational and the nonrational. It is both intellectual and intuitive.

The equation of knowledge and virtue goes back at least to Socrates. And though I have long recognized it as an error, I have trouble shaking it—much to my chagrin. Perhaps it is because I think knowledge and virtue ought to be united. And perhaps it is just this sort of utopian thinking that Hedges is warning us about.