- Arthur C Clark

Planes, phones, guns, even central heating and talking toys could all be passed off as magic to our forebears. Modern medicine has far surpassed the wildest claims of shamans, witchdoctors and healers of times past. But despite being surrounded by ‘magic’, we do not usually marvel at it. When you’re using magic every day it becomes banal. Sometimes it’s good to look at things with fresh eyes and recapture some of that wonder, even if only temporarily.

As a good example of how technology can resemble magic, consider telepathy, which is the ability to communicate thoughts directly from one mind to another. Such a skill in the past has been claimed by stage magicians as well as those claiming some kind of psychic power. It also features prominently in fiction although it is often treated as more of a science fiction concept than a fantasy concept.
But despite this skill being supposedly far-fetched, text messages on cellphones achieve pretty much the same effect. You can be anywhere at all and communicate secretly with your chosen telepath no matter how far apart the two of you are, you can tell them anything you’re thinking, they can reply, and no sound will come out of your lips. Magic!

(more here)

Many critics assume unfairly that D.S.M.-5 is shilling for drug companies. This is not true. The mistakes are rather the result of an intellectual conflict of interest; experts always overvalue their pet area and want to expand its purview, until the point that everyday problems come to be mislabeled as mental disorders.

-Allen Frances “Diagnosing the DSM.”

Earlier versions of the DSM managed to clean up and bring systematicity to mental health diagnosis. But there is now a problem of “diganostic inflation.” More and more previously normal behaviors are pathologized and slotted into categories of some mental disorder or another. The full, colorful range of human existence, something that should be celebrated, or at minimum left alone, is now treated as deviation from some bland, implied norm. A byproduct of this is over-medicalisation.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the rampant pathologizing of typical childhood behaviours such as fidgeting and running around (ADHD), interest in odd topics (aspergers), tantrums (bipolar) and so on. The DSM brings with it the weight of authority and a kind of false certainty. When many disorders have no plausible biological mechanism or any kind of etiological explanation, they may not exist. many instances of ‘mental illness’ Might be simply part of the wide variation in normal human behavior.

So says John Gray in his review of Johnathan Haidt’s book, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion”.
This is the bind for empiricism. On the one hand, it offers humanity a rigorous and data-based way of understanding the world. On the other hand, science is always incomplete. Two hundred years ago the world did not have a functioning discipline of psychology. What were people to do, other than trust their intuitions and consult mystics?

Now, the brain is being mapped out and the evolutionary origins of human behavior are being sketched.

Is scientism an illusion? Well, that depends. From scientific breakthroughs, the scaffolding was built for new technologies, inventions that have revolutionized society and improved the standard of living for humans across the world; from elecriticty to telephones, cars to refrigerators. Not to mention modern medicine. On the other hand “science” (in scare quotes) has been used to justify bizarre and destructive social experiments.

Haidt describes morality as a biological phenomenon driven by evolution. At some level, that has to be right.

There are, he claims, six different kinds of morality (equivalent to six ‘tastes’), yet philosophers often neglect most of them to focus on two: harm and fairness. The other neglected moral intiuitions are those relating to liberty, loyalty, authority, and sanctity. Haidt notes that different mixes of these produce different political perspectives.

His TED talks are well worth a viewing here and here.

But coming back to Gray’s dismissal of “scientism”. Is he right? No. He goes too far.

It’s true, that science by its very definition can never have all the answers. It’s true that science, based as it is on a mixture of data, theory, and generalisation, will often be wrong. But it’s also true that it’s the most systematic way of looking at the world that we have.

(update: a long essay by Philip Kitcher on what he sees as the failings of ‘scientism’ here)

The greater the variety of places where food can be grown, the cheaper the food will be and the more of it.

“Business has become the most popular major, with at least twice as many students receiving degrees in the field as in any other area of specialization.”

In his review of College: What It Is and Should Be by Andrew Delbanco, Richard Wolin warns that as college funding is threatened, administrators are increasingly tempted to look toward the ‘profit motive.’ He observes that “the liberal arts have suffered under the prevailing obsession with “productive knowledge” and profitability.” In the modern environment of tight budgets, online courses and a view of education as a vocational aid, the humanities have a hard sell for their continued existence.

Wolin supports Delbanco’s call for a reinvigoration of the college ideal; a recognition that philosophy leads to self-realization; and an understanding that self-realization enables democracy. Thus the college – and in particular the arts – are a plank of democracy. Education should help address moral and ethical questions.

But as laudable as these hopes are, the reality is that landscape is shifting, and the college of the near future will not look much like the college of the past. If the liberal arts students shrink in number, but do not disappear, this might not be a bad thing. Liberal arts provide a unique perspective on society and the human condition; but maybe they are not suited to the mass market; maybe a retreat toward a smaller niche of students who appreciate them rather than being offered as a production line product to school leavers would do the humanities some good.

That was Einstein’s famous one-line dismissal of the notion that the universe is probabilistic in nature, not deterministic. He tried valiantly to prove this idea wrong, but never succeeded.

Since the advent of quantum mechanics and in particular the arrival of the Schrödinger Wave Equation, there have been debates about whether the probabilistic nature of reality at the quantum level is ‘real’ or whether it’s just a convenient trick that helps us solve the mathematics down there.

A new paper has the answer: it’s real.

(pdf of original paper here)

He is the oldest known human and because he was remarkably well-preserved, has provided insights into humans who lived in pre-historic times. For instance Otzi bore tattoos that correspond to acupuncture points, suggesting that he received a primitive kind of medicine. He wore a coat, belt, leggings, loincloth and shoes. He carried a bow and arrow and other weapons. And he was murdered with an arrow in the back. It has now also been discovered that Otzi’s red blood cells are remarkably well preserved, despite being frozen for over 5000 years.

What we need to learn, Leslie suggests, is how to ‘unthink’, so we can make the most use out of our acquired knowledge and expertise.