arrogance – Page 3 – Harmonia Philosophica

Dogmas, science, assumptions and the need for Philosophy!

Horgan: What’s your opinion of the recent philosophy-bashing by Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss and Neil deGrasse Tyson?

Rovelli: Seriously: I think they are stupid in this. I have admiration for them in other things, but here they have gone really wrong. Look: Einstein, Heisenberg, Newton, Bohr…. and many many others of the greatest scientists of all times, much greater than the names you mention, of course, read philosophy, learned from philosophy, and could have never done the great science they did without the input they got from philosophy, as they claimed repeatedly. You see: the scientists that talk philosophy down are simply superficial: they have a philosophy (usually some ill-digested mixture of Popper and Kuhn) and think that this is the “true” philosophy, and do not realize that this has limitations.

Here is an example: theoretical physics has not done great in the last decades. Why? Well, one of the reasons, I think, is that it got trapped in a wrong philosophy: the idea that you can make progress by guessing new theory and disregarding the qualitative content of previous theories. This is the physics of the “why not?” Why not studying this theory, or the other? Why not another dimension, another field, another universe? Science has never advanced in this manner in the past. Science does not advance by guessing. It advances by new data or by a deep investigation of the content and the apparent contradictions of previous empirically successful theories. Quite remarkably, the best piece of physics done by the three people you mention is Hawking’s black-hole radiation, which is exactly this. But most of current theoretical physics is not of this sort. Why? Largely because of the philosophical superficiality of the current bunch of scientists. (1)

Couldn’t say it more eloquently

Modern science is a science with no compass. Or even worse to be exact: A science which does not accept it has a compass EVEN THOUGH it has one!

A science which has specific philosophical dogmas as foundations (e.g. materialism, atheism, nihilism) but does not even acknowledge it!

Be aware of the hidden assumptions on which you base your thought.

They are there. No matter how hard you try not to accept it.

3000-year-old trousers, Justin Bieber’s, fashion, modern arrogance…

Mayke Wagner at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin and her colleagues studied two pairs of woollen trousers from a cemetery in Xinjiang, China. Carbon dating shows they are about 3000 years old.

Before that time, local people wore skirts and cloaks – but then horse riding became popular. “During normal movements the inner parts of the legs, the crotch and the lower abdomen are not exposed to friction over an extended period of time,” says Wagner. “This only becomes an issue when straddling a horse daily.”

Wagner made a reproduction pair and realised that the wide crotch piece hangs down in folds, similar to drop-crotch pants, as worn by teen pop sensation Justin Bieber. (1)

Oh arrogant “modern” man!
Why can’t you see the truth?

What is old was once new.
What seems new, is actually too old.

Now wear your jeans and off you go!

Sand castles, dirt, God, “creation”…

For billions of years, the history of life has been written with just four letters — A, T, C and G, the labels given to the DNA subunits contained in all organisms. That alphabet has just grown longer, researchers announce, with the creation of a living cell that has two ‘foreign’ DNA building blocks in its genome.

Hailed as a breakthrough by other scientists, the work is a step towards the synthesis of cells able to churn out drugs and other useful molecules. It also raises the possibility that cells could one day be engineered without any of the four DNA bases used by all organisms on Earth.

“What we have now is a living cell that literally stores increased genetic information”, says Floyd Romesberg, a chemical biologist at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who led the 15-year effort. Their research appears online in Nature. (1)

But how can you improve something that you do not even now how it works?

It reminds me of the anecdote…

God is sitting in Heaven when a scientist says to Him, ‘Lord, we don’t need you anymore. Science has finally figured out a way to create life out of nothing. In other words, we can now do what you did in the “beginning.”‘
‘Oh, is that so? Tell me …’ replies God.
‘Well’, says the scientist, ‘we can take dirt and form it into the likeness of you and breathe life into it, thus creating man.’
‘Well, that’s interesting. Show me.’
So the scientist bends down to the earth and starts to mold the soil.
‘Oh no, no, no …’ interrupts God, ‘Get your own dirt.’

True men are humble.

And stay silent in front of the wisdom of nature…
We have tendency to play with everything like reckless children.
We have the arrogance to call our selves “creators”.
And like children, we will see our sand castles taken away by the sea…

Mississippi river and the “Change things” mania of modern civilization…

Maybe the Mississippi river delta isn’t doomed after all. Upstream dams on the rivers that run through the delta were thought to be starving it of the sediment it needs to stay above sea level – but now it seems there’s enough sand to feed the delta for centuries to come. (1)

We spend so many resources to change things.

Then we spend so many resources to understand if what we did was good.

Then we spend even more money when we pay the price for our wrong choices.

Being primitive we would just… adapt.

But we are too arrogant for that.

Microbes, arrogance, wrong perceptions.

Methane-producing microbes may be responsible for the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. Fossil remains show that sometime around 252 million years ago, about 90 percent of all species on Earth were suddenly wiped out — by far the largest of this planet’s five known mass extinctions. It turns out that Methanosarcina had acquired a particularly fast means of making methane, and the team’s detailed mapping of the organism’s history now shows that this transfer happened at about the time of the end-Permian extinction. (1)

The greatest disaster in life, caused by the – supposedly – weakest organism of all.

Our definitions need re-defining.
Our egoism does not let us see beyond our nose..

We are not all that powerful.
We are not all that clever.
We are just microbes believing we are titans.

But only the humble are truly powerful.
Look at the world from the perspective of a microbe.
Only though knowing our limits, will we become limitless.

Acknowledge you are nothing and you will be part of everything…