Are you an illusion? - Author's Introduction

Are you an illusion? - Author's Introduction Preface Only some of the discussions drawn from my article "Why the Idea of Purpose Won't Go Away", which appeared in the Journal of Philosophy (October 2011, 545-63), have been printed from this little book before. The rest of the book simply stems from my growing ire over the tendency of some now highly competent scientists to claim clearly and in the name of science that they believe their selves – and indeed their readers – do not exist. I think I understand why people agree with this sensational story. They simply see it as a necessary pillar of their faith in science: a defense of the physical world; a crucial pillar of certainty that we desperately need in today’s pervasive chaos. But I don’t think that this suicide bomb can give us our scientific certainty. The claim of non-existence is not reasonable in itself, and so are the arguments used to support it. I received a lot of help to produce these ideas from colleagues and friends who shared my complaint about this quick way out of our predicaments. Especially the helpful suggestions that came from Ian McGilchrist, Stephen Rose, Andrew Brown, Ian Ground, and Willie Charlton. Anyone who has seen what it has become over the past 50 years will gradually see this whole idea atrophy, vanishing all too frequently behind various machines, unraveling it to fit the conditions of many disciplines, and (more strictly) being deliberately ignored by professional philosophers who have been trying to study it in an objective, technical, and as close to scientific fashion as possible. It is possible that this ill-fated campaign – this divergence from first-hand experience – that received the name “modern” a hundred years ago, may be receding in our culture somewhat. If so, I can only hope to be able to help it, at least to a small degree. Introduction Are we losing ourselves? This book is about the big gap that exists between common sense[1] and scientific doctrine today, and centrally about the idea that science has shown that our inner selves are illusions. More clearly, (it seems) that we do not exist. For example, we know that common sense was wrong when we used to assume that the Earth was flat, or that the stars were all points in a continuous ceiling, and we agree with those who corrected these ideas.[2] We believe that new realities have carried their own power, and that science, in these cases, must actually surpass common sense. For example, when science tells us that tables we think are solid are generally empty spaces, we don’t have to give up our previous visions and stop putting cups on them. Common sense can easily reconcile two different ways of thinking about tables. He developed a companion system by which he could see how he generally connected them. In this way, either yesterday’s science merges with common sense,[3] or, if it proves to be wrong, he forgets. Gravity is now part of common sense and no one talks about recycling.[4] In fact, common sense can develop, and indeed it is constantly developing. It is not a rigid, unchanging formula in perpetual conflict with science, as Lewis Wolpert suggested in his book The Unnatural Nature of Science. Wolpert wrote: “I have always argued that if something fits with common sense, it cannot be science… The way the universe works is not the way common sense works; the two are not identical” (1992: 11). It includes our own selves and our immediate sensory perceptions. It also includes visions of life built up through ages of human experience. Today, that history tends to build a common-sense background, which is not a fixed formula when compared to a particular science, but something like a huge stretch of green mental space filled with different kinds of plant life that sustains growth to fit around it. Science, of course, is not (as Wolpert points out) an independent static organism. It is one of the productive plants that has taken root in that green space and has spread to change vast parts of the human landscape. Science must start with data that humans naturally perceive, and develop these data in ways that fit the human mind. Thus, if people claim that science has discovered something that contradicts man’s immediate sensory perceptions and those basic human patterns[5] – as is happening now about the self – these people must be wrong. Hence, the point from which we started is that common sense must sometimes give way to scientific facts, which need a bit of complexity. New proposals must be accepted, but only if they can be understood in ways that correspond to what is fundamental to the general humanist view. Claims cannot, of course, become scientific simply because certain scientists list them. Scientists, after all, can be just as wrong as everyone else. Those who formulate these facts must use assumptions: any patterns of expectation, and choose their data, and organize them, and form them, and classify them through them, as they may be confused at first. Problem of Presumptions Their exploration and crystallization is the work of philosophy that often makes them somewhat more explicit. But even when they are excavated, they will often remain mysterious and are certainly not necessarily reliable. They are not eternal truths. They are formulated in part by the ever-changing surrounding culture. This name may refer to something boring and permanent, an organization that stays with us for a century or so. But, as residents of Greece and Turkey know, plate tectonics are much more active, so are cultural climates. These attitudes are expressed in shifting myths, which are not lies, but imagined visions, or images that illustrate how we see the world around us in the form of graphs. (I have explained my understanding of this useful sentence before in The Myths We Live By 2003, so I don’t have to do it here.) The myth I want to draw particular attention to now is one that believes that science – natural science – has a strange central role in our lives. This myth depicts our world as a huge mass of material objects that are observed from a huge distance by an anonymous observer through huge systems of telescopes. It is no coincidence that this observer himself is unknown, and indeed invisible, because he is nothing at all. He is simply, like telescopes, one of the necessary tools to observe and record the infinite field of facts. What are the other things? He didn’t say. Similarly, when Weinberg found it hard to convince his fellow Americans to pay for a superconducting supercollider that could outstrip the great European Hadron Collider, he appealed to them to build such buildings as “the cathedrals of our time.” He did not explain which cult these cathedrals or any idol[7] were found to worship. The problem here is not only that few people understand this kind of physics at all. If the story we should be looking for about the unreality of our perception is true, even those few cannot want it because they cannot want anything at all. In the words of Francis Crick, “You, with your joys and your comforts, your memories and your aspirations, your sense of personal identity and your free will, are really nothing more than the behaviors of an enormous collection of neurons and their accompanying molecules.” The sacred or the worship in which it is performed, but the deep reverence for it still stands. What is scientism? This picture is the cosmological view that is sometimes called scientific, and it is a very strong belief, as we will see, which has many metaphysical and religious roots. It is not really about the excessive veneration of science. The error of scientism lies not in overly praising an image of it, but in cutting this image from the rest of thought, in treating it often as having carved the rest aside. This prevents them from seeing the opposite facts that have been observed very recently, though they may be bright. A prime example of this in the present is the refusal of people – broadly, especially in the United States – to acknowledge the seriousness of climate change. The ideology that makes it so difficult for us to understand that anything is wrong here – the doctrine that tells us that mankind cannot be harmed – is a set of old and deep assumptions that are still seen as scientific,[10] but that lie in our thinking so deeply that we do not easily discern them. These assumptions generate bad science, and we will try to explain them in this book. Let’s start by studying why trying to glorify science can’t be done alone. That’s because human thought functions as a single unit. It’s a vast and complex ocean, or environment, that includes, but is not limited to, common sense. These sciences vary from physics to anthropology and have all been driven by problems from spaces outside them, such as philosophy and history. Biology, for example, has to deal with philosophical problems about the concept of life and also with enormous historical problems about evolution for which historical, rather than physical, methods are used. Moreover, the history of science itself, as we shall see, is extremely useful, allowing us to understand the important things about it that would otherwise have been mysterious. It is a very important field of study with its distinctive subjects, and it does not need to be flattered by the assumption that it is universal. All sciences have different kinds of functions that must be performed together. But this leads us – as has just been mentioned – to a more interesting question: why is this particular branch so important? Why does it deserve to be a cathedral? For them, the real world is clearly made up of only things; it does not include any subjectivity. The observer’s main idea may be just – as we have pointed out in the case of quantum phenomena – a reductionist way of referring to telescopes and recording. In fact, this is the thinking that leads to the wild conclusion that we ourselves do not exist. Until very recently, new claims about the primacy of a particular branch were made in a familiar context. It had to be about similar claims about other human activities like love, religion, politics, sports, exploration, and the arts, for example. Today, however, science tends to be glorified in isolation, as if any attempt to link it to other valuable human activities were unscientific. Thus, the familiar imagined map of values, along with the human feelings that have been generated – human fears and wishes that make up our language about what matters – simply vanish. I will discuss in this book its history, the arguments it uses to support it, and the extent of the real problems it produces. Of course, I will look at the arguments that make people think like that. This may be difficult to understand because (as we will see) it is being put forward nowadays by real scientists: by people with special doctorates who work in laboratories, some of whom are actually quite distinctive. This shows that, unfortunately, recently, scientific education has become too narrow; it does not draw people’s attention half enough to understand the meaning of what they are saying, about the difference between our multiple ways of thinking. Even Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein, serious scientists always had the philosophical background, and they studied the conceptual entanglements involved in their theories (Thomas H. Huxley and Huxley knew this in their own time, and John S. Haldane used them both). This has led philosophers such as Daniel Dennett, among other bad results, to take the anti-self doctrines we will discuss in this book seriously, assuming that they are scientific. I did not follow their arguments here because, although they added a lot of sharpness, they did not, in my view, change the central issue, which concerns the basic presuppositions in which we live. This book is circular rather than linear. It is all about its subject. Because the phenomenon of self-killing or soul destruction poses so many different kinds of problems, I have tried to probe them from many different angles. Thus, in addition to examining our current attitudes toward individuals – including ourselves – and especially toward the ways in which these individuals seem to divide, I paid close attention to the sources of these attitudes: to the deep, enduring habits from which they have sprung. Readers who can’t stand history are welcome to skip chapters three and twelve. However, doing so may deprive them of much pleasure, and of some thoughts about the present. [1] Common sense, common sense (in a philosophical rather than a religious sense), spontaneous attitude, or the attitude of the average human being are different nomenclature of ideas that all human beings share and cannot deny. (Aisha) [2] There is a clear confusion in philosophy of what the concept of common sense means, and the researcher Reza Zidane in his book The Human Consensus: Determinants and Criteria of Protest (Braheen Center 2017) in dismantling this confusion and setting the standard that removes confusion from the concept, says: "Society is the justification for the meaning and the determinant of certainty, and the agreement of human societies is the utmost health if it is not a condition for the existence of the human community. A condition in the game is absolute and does not originally express a social and psychological need." p.56-57 It also says: "They must be flattened by the following two conditions: 1- To be a condition of the game of the human community. 2- To express a social and psychological need. John Searle did not say that the automatic concept was created in general, and did not differentiate between the automatic concept arising from the same human nature and the automatic concept arising from a certain social majority, as in the latter. In a more detailed discussion of a precise philosophical treatment of the issue, please review it. (Aisha) [3] Although the author acknowledges that science can correct some of the concepts common to humans (the previous comment), her reference to the need to undermine this correction due to the nature of common sense is remarkable. (Aisha) [4] The orbiting system is part of the geometrical system introduced by the Ptolemaic model to explain the motion of the planets. See History of Ancient and Classical Astronomy, Jean-Pierre Verdi, i. The Arab Organization for Translation, pp. 60 et seq. (translation) You can’t start with a mental activity (a scientific experiment) and then say that you have no mind! You can’t start with an awareness of the existence of the outside world, and then say that the result of the experiment is that the outside world is an illusion (according to one extreme interpretation of the Copenhagen School of Quantum Physics)! Accepting such results – which are supposed to be scientific – will still be like accepting the demolition of a house. [6] The philosopher of language and mind Peter M. S. Hacker explains this idea more clearly: "Neuroscientists are primarily interested in the pursuit of empirical questions, which are essentially testable by experiments, and can be refuted or confirmed. The pursuit of those experiments presupposes a conceptual framework, a conception of what the terms mind, will, perception, memory, imagination and so on mean." https://youtu.be/Bv5ql-KKITI Aisha. [7] For illustration, Stephen Weinberg is an atheist physicist. (Aisha) [8] Climate change or global warming is the increase in the average surface temperature of the world with the increase in the amount of carbon dioxide and some other gases in the atmosphere. This example of scientific is not successful at all. But it is meant that people touch climate change themselves, and yet do not want to acknowledge the danger of it because there is no scientific evidence for it. But the reality is very different, those who support the idea of the seriousness of climate change and the need to face global warming. [9] This is also one of the famous claims in this file, and although there is no denying that fuel industry companies have a role in denying climate change, there is an over-accusation on the other side of every doubter of climate change that he is supported by these companies. “There is no dispute that carbon dioxide levels have increased in the last 100 years, and that there has been a rise in temperatures in recent decades. Does that mean that this was a cause? Maybe not. Despite the steady and continuous increase in carbon levels, there has not been a statistically significant increase in temperatures in the past nearly 20 years.1 Nor do we know exactly what part the solar cycles play in all of this, let alone cloud cover, ocean currents, etc. Climate is managed by a system of unimaginable complexity, which is beyond our ability to fully understand at the moment. I have also noticed that most computer-generated climate models that predict rising temperatures have proven to be inefficient. And I'm not even convinced that we're facing this terrible climate crisis that says we're "killing the planet," I think that makes me a little bit of a camp of skeptics. But my goals here have nothing to do with it.” Yes, regardless of who is right on both sides of the debate, but what is important is that global warming has turned to hysteria, and in chapter 3 of his book, Smith explains how deeply this hysteria has deepened. The book is from the 2018 edition of the Center for Evidence. (1) Gerald Traufetter, “Stagnating Temperatures: Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out,” Spiegel Online, November 19, 2009, http://www.spiegel.de-/international/world/stagnatingtemperatures-climatologists-baffled-by-global-warming-timeout-a-662092-2.html. [10] This is also contrary to reality, as what is currently seen as scientific is the exact opposite, says Wesley Smith: "In 2011, we warned that we had only ten years to save the planet! The Met Office warned that "The world had only ten years to control the rate of greenhouse gas emissions, before the effects became irreversible" (1) But the same warning we had heard before in 2005: "Global warming is going to the point of no return! The drought is widespread, the crop is low, and the likely result is lack of water, according to an international report... (3) We have only 4 years!!! In 2006 Al Gore approved the remaining 10 years hypothesis. He also warned a report from 2007 that we only have until 2015. These people have to understand and clarify their stories those! What’s the feeder of the story? In the hysteria of global warming, there is always a looming crisis that requires us to give up our freedom.” The evidence is that global warming is a consequence of science, and the assumption that the human race will be completely and permanently destroyed in a few years is also a consequence of science. (1) Louise Gray, “Copenhagen climate change conference: world ‘has 10 years to reverse trends,’” The Telegraph, December 9, 2009, https://www.telegraph.co.uk-/news/earth/copenhagen-climatechange-confe/6770111/Copenhagen-climate-changecon-ference-world-has-10-years-to-reverse-trends.html. (2) “Global warming a time bomb ticking away,” Daily Times, January 25, 2005, http://web.archive.org/web/20050408181042/http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_25-1-2005_pg7_49. (3) Robin Mckie, “President ‘has four years to save Earth’,” The Guardian, January 17, 2009, http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jimhansen-obama. [11] You mean physics and biology. (translator) Clips attached to the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv5ql-KKITI - Mary Midgley. — Source: Brahin Center website - Published on 2020-01-25 (archived at the Internet Archive) https://braheen.com/publications/intros/هل-أنت-وهم؟-مقدمة-المؤلفة