{"id":17034,"date":"2024-11-18T15:17:34","date_gmt":"2024-11-18T15:17:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=17034"},"modified":"2024-11-18T15:17:34","modified_gmt":"2024-11-18T15:17:34","slug":"how-far-can-we-trust-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2024\/11\/18\/how-far-can-we-trust-science\/","title":{"rendered":"How Far Can We Trust Science?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Science in itself appears to me neutral, that is to say, it increases men\u2019s power whether for good or for evil.<\/em>
\n<\/span>– Bertrand Russell (from The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell<\/em>, 1914-1944 (1968), Vol. 2, <\/span>Letter to W. W. Norton, 27 January, 1931).<\/span><\/p>\n

What is Science? That is about as readily answerable a question as \u2018What is Art?\u2019, and could invite a similarly lengthy exegesis. As to whether or not it should be trusted, well, that rather depends on the kind of Science under discussion \u2013 just as it would if the same challenge were applied to Art. Is Science what scientists tell us it is? Is their research funded by a pharmaceutical company, with a vested interest in the outcomes of their labours? Will their universities\u2019 coffers be swelled by producing what their institutions\u2019 benefactors wish them to find? \u2018It\u2019s not an exact science\u2019 is a clich\u00e9 which trips lazily off the tongue, in relation to many a discipline. But it can conceivably be extended to \u2018Science isn\u2019t an exact science.\u2019<\/p>\n

This opening paragraph is a suitably unsubtle illustration of the paranoic mindset, most readily associated with right-wing conspiracy theorists, and most recently made manifest by COVID scepticism: anti-vaxxers, mask refuseniks, restriction flouters. Such largely unfounded suspicions also extend to questioning the reality or severity of the threat posed to the planet by climate change (usually for entirely self-serving motives). But there is a more nuanced argument to be made here. As Arthur Koestler\u2019s The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man\u2019s Changing Vision of the Universe<\/em> (1959) argues, the breaking of paradigms is essential in order to create new ones. People, scientists included, cling to cherished old beliefs with such love and attachment that they refuse to see what is false in their theories and what is true in new theories which will replace them. After all, the Ptolemaic geocentric model of the solar system lasted from roughly 3000 BC to around 1500 AD, a time frame spanning from the Ancient Greeks to the late Middle Ages, before Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton came along, nervously positing the heliocentric conception of our corner of the universe.<\/p>\n

This point was developed further a few years after the publication of Koestler\u2019s influential tome, by historian of science Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions<\/em> (1962), in which the concept of \u2018paradigm shift\u2019 came to the fore. Kuhn\u2019s insistence that such shifts were m\u00e9langes of sociology, enthusiasm and scientific promise, but not logically determinate procedures, caused something of an uproar in scientific circles at the time. For some commentators his book introduced a realistic humanism into the core of Science, while for others the nobility of Science was tarnished by Kuhn\u2019s positing of an irrational element at the heart of Science\u2019s greatest achievements.<\/p>\n

Koestler\u2019s book was also a major influence on Irish novelist John Banville\u2019s so-called \u2018Science tetralogy\u2019: Doctor Copernicus<\/em> (1976), Kepler<\/em> (1981), The Newton Letter<\/em> (1982) and Mefisto<\/em> (1986). A recurring theme in these narratives is the correlation between scientific discoveries and artistic inspiration, with scientific progress often depending upon blind \u2018leaps of faith\u2019. (One thinks of poor schoolteacher Johannes Kepler, struck by the proverbial bolt of lightning, \u2018trumpeting juicily into his handkerchief\u2019 in front of a classroom of bored boys, thinking \u2018I will live forever.\u2019) For Banville, all scientific explanations of the world and existence in it \u2013 and perhaps all artistic depictions too \u2013 merely \u2018save the phenomena\u2019; that is, they account for our perceptions, but rarely delve into what we cannot (yet) perceive. This is classic phenomenology, which has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others.<\/p>\n

None of the foregoing is made any easier to unknot if one considers that when it comes to Science, the majority of the population (myself included) have little idea of what they are actually talking about. As C.P. Snow observed in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution <\/em>(1959):<\/p>\n

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare\u2019s? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question \u2013 such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? \u2013 not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.<\/em><\/p>\n

Latterly, in Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction<\/em> (2001), Simon Critchley suggests:<\/p>\n

Snow diagnosed the loss of a common culture and the emergence of two distinct cultures: those represented by scientists on the one hand and those Snow termed \u2018literary intellectuals\u2019 on the other. If the former are in favour of social reform and progress through science, technology and industry, then intellectuals are what Snow terms \u2018natural Luddites\u2019 in their understanding of and sympathy for advanced industrial society. In Mill\u2019s terms, the division is between Benthamites and Coleridgeans.<\/em><\/p>\n

In his opening address at the Munich Security Conference in January 2014, the Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves said that the current problems related to security and freedom in cyberspace are the culmination of absence of dialogue between these \u2018Two Cultures\u2019:<\/p>\n

Today, bereft of understanding of fundamental issues and writings in the development of liberal democracy, computer geeks devise ever better ways to track people… simply because they can and it\u2019s cool. Humanists on the other hand do not understand the underlying technology and are convinced, for example, that tracking meta-data means the government reads their emails.<\/em><\/p>\n

Artists are characterised as wildly unpredictable tricksters, while scientists are framed as boring, calculating nerds. Neither misrepresentation is helpful. As a corollary, most people think they can in some way \u2018do art\u2019 and \u2018be creative\u2019, while also merely taking Science on trust, just as they take (or took) religion on faith. We may have the experience of using technology and social media every day, but few of us have any meaningful grasp of how it works. More prosaically, how many of us could wire our own house \u2013 even if we were legally permitted to do so?<\/p>\n

Kepler (1571\u20131630), along with Galileo and Isaac Newton, was one of the founders of what we nowadays call Science. In Kepler\u2019s time, and prior to it, those who practised Science were known as natural philosophers, and theirs was largely a \u2018pure\u2019 discipline in which intellectual speculation was paramount and technology played only a small part \u2013 although Galileo was quick to point out the practical uses of the telescope in, for instance, seafaring, land surveying and, of course, military strategising. Kepler\u2019s three laws of planetary motion paved the way for Newton\u2019s revolutionary celestial physics. Indeed, Kepler\u2019s first law, which declares that the planets move not in circular but in elliptical orbits, was one of the boldest and most profound scientific propositions ever put forward: men, and \u2013 more often \u2013\u00a0 women, had been burned at the stake for less. By way of illustration, as Bertolt Brecht\u2019s play Galileo<\/em> (1940) dramatises, the eminent professor of Padua was brought to the Vatican in Rome for interrogation by the Inquisition and, threatened with torture, recanted his teachings and spent the remainder of his life under house arrest, watched over by a priest. His astronomical observations had strongly supported Copernicus\u2019 heliocentric model of the solar system, which ran counter to popular belief, Aristotelian physics and the established doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. When doubters quoted scripture and Aristotle to him, Galileo pleaded with them to look in his telescope and trust the observations of their eyes; naturally, they refused. As a good Marxist, Brecht advocates the theory of technological determinism (technological progress determines social change), which is reflected in the telescope (a technological change) being the root of scientific progress and hence social unrest. Questions about motivations for academic pursuits are also often raised in the play, with Galileo seeking knowledge for knowledge\u2019s sake, while his supporters are more focused on monetising his discoveries through star charts and industry applications. There is a tension between Galileo\u2019s pure love of science and his more worldly, avaricious sponsors, who only fund and protect his research because they wish to profit from it.<\/p>\n

These days, the preponderance of popular debate about Science centres on computer science, specifically information technology, and concomitant fears that Artificial Intelligence (hereinafter referred to as \u2018AI\u201d) is taking over the world, posing a threat to our democracies, or even our very conceptions of humanity \u2013 or as it is almost always more narcissistically cast, \u2018Our way of life.\u2019 The Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting scandal of 2018, in which the data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump\u2019s election team and the winning Brexit campaign appropriated millions of Facebook profiles of U.S. voters, is certainly to be taken very seriously indeed. However, social media platforms \u2013 even \u2018legacy\u2019 ones \u2013 will undoubtedly have to pay more than lip service to improving privacy and security, if only to continue to attract venture capital, advertising revenue, and thus keep the shareholders happy. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, etc. are about maximising profits, by whatever means necessary. Therefore, it would be more perspicacious to look for the human element in these data breaches, rather than blame the technology itself. Such scaremongering claims as that by Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, in an article in The Economist<\/em> (April 28th<\/sup>, 2023) under the headline \u2018AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation\u2019 seem to me to be all wild assertion and little evidence. As a recent delicious hoax perpetrated on the op. ed. pages of The Irish Times<\/em> (concerning fake tan and cultural appropriation) neatly demonstrated, almost all problems with computers and AI-generated content are facilitated by human error and stupidity. All of us live under systems of control \u2013 political, financial, social, technological \u2013 over which we have very little, if any, agency. Even if we could do something meaningfully efficacious about the identity theft which takes places every time we log on to our computers, it is unlikely that we possess enough personal initiative to do so. In this regard, the chaos theory of modern (mis)communications is mirrored by the babble of literary, musical and visual modernism. After all, you could just stop using social media altogether, had you but sufficient willpower. Few of us have the courage to go completely off grid. Moreover, lest we forget, most statistical analysis puts internet access at around 64.6% of the world\u2019s population, which means that over a third of mankind have never \u2018surfed the web\u2019. First World problems, eh?<\/p>\n

The Frankensteinian trope of the Mad Scientist being overpowered by his invention has long been a mainstay of that most underrated of genres, science fiction \u2013 a consideration of which might shed more light on this problem, rather than limiting discussion solely to scientific fact. From relatively schlocky items such as Alex Proyas\u2019 film I, Robot<\/em> (2004) (which fails dismally to capture the complexity of Issac Asimov\u2019s source material), to the most famous and prescient instance of a computer outsmarting its operator, exemplified by Hal 9000 in Stanley Kubrick\u2019s (who co-wrote the screenplay with Arthur C. Clarke) 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em> (and how far into the future did the year 2001 feel in 1969, when the film premiered?), the interface between intelligent humans and even more intelligent machines has long provided an imprimatur for literary imaginations to run wild. Witness Denis Villeneuve\u2019s Blade Runner 2049<\/em> (2017) (a sequel to Ridley Scott\u2019s Blade Runner<\/em> (1992), which was in turn based loosely on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/em>). In the novel, the android antagonists can be seen as more human than the (possibly) human protagonist. They are a mirror held up to human action, contrasted with a culture losing its own humanity (that is, \u2018humanity\u2019 taken to mean the positive aspects of humanity). In \u2018Technology, Art, and the Cybernetic Body: The Cyborg as Cultural Other in Fritz Lang\u2019s Metropolis<\/em> and Philip K. Dick\u2019s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?<\/em>\u2019, Klaus Benesch examined Dick\u2019s text in connection with Jacques Lacan\u2019s \u2018mirror stage\u2019. Lacan claims that the formation and reassurance of the self depends on the construction of an Other through imagery, beginning with a double as seen in a mirror. The androids, Benesch argues, perform a doubling function similar to the mirror image of the self, but they do this on a social, not an individual, level. Therefore, human anxiety about androids expresses uncertainty about human identity and society itself, just as in the original film the administration of an \u2018empathy test\u2019, to determine if a character is human or android, produces many false positives. Either the Voigt-Kampff test is flawed, or replicants are pretty good at being human (or, perhaps, better than human).<\/p>\n

This perplexity first found an explanation in Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori\u2019s influential essay The Uncanny Valley<\/em> (1970), in which he hypothesised that human response to human-like robots would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as a robot approached, but failed to attain, a life-like appearance, due to subtle imperfections in design. He termed this descent into eeriness \u2018the uncanny valley\u2019, and the phrase is now widely used to describe the characteristic dip in emotional response that happens when we encounter an entity that is almost, but not quite, human. But if human-likeness increased beyond this nearly human point, Mori argues, and came very close to human, the emotional response would revert to being positive. However, the observation led Mori to recommend that robot builders should not attempt to attain the goal of making their creations overly life-like in appearance and motion, but instead aim for a design, \u2018which results in a moderate degree of human likeness and a considerable sense of affinity. In fact, I predict it is possible to create a safe level of affinity by deliberately pursuing a non-human design.\u2019 But, as technophobes would likely counter, the uncanny gets cannier, day by day. It would certainly be interesting to know if Mori has seen such relatively recent film fare as Spike Jonze\u2019s Her<\/em> (2013) or Alex Garland\u2019s Ex Machina<\/em> (2014) and, if so, what he makes of their take on the authenticity of human\/android emotional and sexual relationships.<\/p>\n

It was military imperative which accelerated the discovery of nuclear fission (\u2018What if the Nazis develop the bomb first?\u2019), just as it went on to fuel the post-war arms race and Cold War paranoia. As he witnessed the first detonation of an atomic weapon on July 16, 1945, a piece of Hindu scripture from the Bhagavad-Gita<\/em> supposedly ran through the mind of Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project: \u2018Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.\u2019 Similarly, artists such as director David Lynch view the invention of nuclear weapons as unleashing a new kind of evil on the world, as explored in Episode 8 of the third season of Twin Peaks<\/em>, known as Twin Peaks: The Return<\/em> (2017). Many view the U.S.\u2019s deployment of primitive atomic devices to obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as wilfully and wantonly cruel, as well as ultimately unnecessary. Yet, in British novelist J.G. Ballard\u2019s highly subjective and characteristically idiosyncratic opinion, he and his family survived World War II only because of the Nagasaki bomb. The spectacular display of American military might when the Ballards were prisoners at the Japanese camp for Western civilians in Shanghai led the Japanese soldiers to abandon their posts, leaving the civilians alive. In the essay \u2018The End of My War\u2019, collected in A User\u2019s Guide to the Millennium<\/em> (1996) (apropos of which, is anyone old enough to remember when Y2K was going to be the next big computer science disaster?), Ballard recollects that the Japanese military planned to close the camp and march the civilians up country to some remote spot to kill them before facing American landings in the Shanghai area. Ballard concludes, \u2018I find wholly baffling the widespread belief today that the dropping of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was an immoral act, even possibly a war crime to rank with Nazi genocide.\u2019 Also, the same source of power which can cause thermonuclear destruction can be harnessed in reactors to produce cheap, clean energy streams for large populations. Yet nuclear reactors can fail, as the disasters of Chernobyl and Fukushima attest. Yet the use of such technologies, along with solar, wind and wave power, can reduce dependency on fossil fuels, thus helping to ameliorate the climate emergency of global warming. Furthermore, as Lou Reed has it in \u2018Power and Glory, Part II\u2019, a song from his album-length meditation on death, bereavement, and (im)mortality, Magic and Loss<\/em> (1992):<\/p>\n

I saw isotopes introduced into his lungs<\/em>
\nTrying to stop the cancerous spread<\/em>
\nAnd it made me think of Leda and The Swan<\/em>
\nAnd gold being made from lead<\/em>
\nThe same power that burned Hiroshima<\/em>
\nCausing three-legged babies and death<\/em>
\nShrunk to the size of a nickel<\/em>
\nTo help him regain his breath<\/em><\/p>\n

And yet, and yet, and yet. If only life, and the moral and ethical dilemmas it throws up, were black and white.<\/p>\n

Man (encompassing Woman) invented the wheel, and discovered electricity. Wheels can be used to transport food and medicine to the starving and sick, or weapons to a war zone. Electricity can be used to power a life-support machine in a hospital, or death by electrocution in a chair in a penitentiary. Electrocution can even be accidental, just as winning a war may \u2013 in exceptional circumstances \u2013 serve the greater good.<\/p>\n

Ever since Prometheus stole fire from the gods, and Eve bit into a forbidden piece of fruit, the acquisition of new knowledge has been painted as problematic. Humans will always misuse humanity\u2019s greatest discoveries and inventions for selfish and malevolent ends. It is the way of things. Computers were supposed to make all our lives easier, freeing us from work-related drudgery for higher, less ephemeral, pursuits. Instead, inevitably, they have been appropriated by Capitalism, and made screen slaves of us all. If anything, they have added to our workload and the hours we must make available to employers, rather than diminished time spent earning a living in favour of increased leisure. The adults in the room, and there are increasingly fewer of them, need to speak up. Objective scientific truth, should it exist, is neutral. The problem, as ever, lies with humanity. For, as the author of this piece\u2019s epigraph also wrote, in Icarus, or the Future of Science<\/em> (1924), \u2018I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups rather than to make men happy.\u2019 Equally, to draw again on the lessons to be gleaned from sci-fi, in Kubrick\u2019s Dr. Strangelove<\/em> (1964), the hydrogen bomb winds up getting dropped through the actions of one unhinged army general, and a subsequent unfortunate series of events; just as in his aforementioned 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>, HAL 9000\u2019s behaviour would not have turned increasingly malignant, had the astronauts taken into account that their spaceship\u2019s operating system could lipread. Indeed, in Clarke\u2019s novelisation of the film, HAL malfunctions because of being ordered to lie to the crew of Discovery<\/em> by withholding confidential information from them, namely the priority of the mission to Jupiter over expendable human life, despite having been constructed for \u2018the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment.\u2019 As film critic Roger Ebert observed, HAL \u2013 the supposedly perfect computer \u2013 is actually the most human of the characters. Once again, the fault does not lie with Science; rather, human error and stupidity are to blame. All of which might lead one to suggest that maybe the question \u2018How Far Can We Trust Science?\u2019 should be more fruitfully reformulated as \u2018How Far Can We Trust Humans?\u2019<\/p>\n

Postscript: this essay could not have been handily completed without the assistance of Wikipedia, and other, often unreliable, online research resources.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Feature Image: <\/strong><\/em>Lum3n<\/strong> <\/em><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Science in itself appears to me neutral, that is to say, it increases men\u2019s power whether for good or for evil. – Bertrand Russell (from The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell, 1914-1944 (1968), Vol. 2, Letter to W. W. Norton, 27 January, 1931). What is Science? That is about as readily answerable a question as \u2018What […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":17039,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[667,1249,1463,2432,3186,4195,4210,5286,8174,9385,9563,9568],"class_list":["post-17034","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-science","tag-arthur-koestler","tag-can","tag-cassandra-voices-science","tag-desmond-traynor","tag-far","tag-how-far-can-we-trust-science","tag-how","tag-koestler-the-sleepwalkers","tag-science","tag-thomas-kuhn","tag-trust","tag-trust-in-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17034","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17034"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17034\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17034"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17034"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17034"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}