|
|
Return to Resources page | Food for Thought "The question of all questions for humanity, the problem which lies behind all others and is more interesting than any of them is that of the determination of man's place in Nature and his relation to the Cosmos. Whence our race came, what sorts of limits are set to our power over Nature and to Nature's power over us, to what goal we are striving, are the problems which present themselves afresh, with undiminished interest, to every human being born on earth." --T.H. Huxley "It is not enough to invent new machines, new regulations, or new institutions. We must understand differently and more perfectly the true purpose of our existence on this earth." -- Vaclav Havel "Humankind is entering an age of synthesis such as occurs only once in several generations, perhaps only once every few centuries. The years ahead will surely be exciting, productive, perhaps even deeply significant, largely because the scenario of cosmic evolution provides an opportunity to inquire systematically and synergistically into the nature of our existence - to mount a concerted effort to create a modern universe history that people of all cultures can readily understand and adopt. As we begin the new millennium, such a coherent story of our very being - a powerful and true myth - can act as an effective intellectual vehicle to invite all citizens to become participants, not just spectators, in the building of a whole new legacy." -- Eric Chaisson, ("Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature") "Science is thus one of the most important bases for meaning-making in today's world. The meaning drawn out of science by each individual who treads this path is a constructed, but not arbitrary, product of the human imagination. Despite the inherent subjectivity, meaning-making is not mere fabrication. It is a response to, a declaration of relationship with, Earth and the cosmos." -- Connie Barlow "Our beliefs about ourselves in relation to the world around us are the roots of our values, and our values determine not only our immediate actions, but also, over the course of time, the form of our society. Our beliefs are increasingly determined by science. Hence it is at least conceivable that what science has been telling us for three hundred years about man and his place in nature could be playing by now an important role in our lives." -- Henry Stapp (Mind, Matter, and Quantum Mechanics, p. 209) "If we are to examine how intelligent life may be able to guide the physical development of the universe for its own purposes, we cannot altogether avoid considering what the values and purposes of intelligent life may be. But as soon as we mention the words value and purpose, we run into one of the most firmly entrenched taboos of twentieth-century science.... The taboo against mixing knowledge with values arose during the nineteenth century out of the great battle between the evolutionary biologists led by Thomas Huxley and the churchmen led by Bishop Wilberforce. Huxley won the battle, but a hundred years later Monod and Weinberg were still fighting Bishop Wilberforce's ghost. Physicists today have no reason to be afraid of Wilberforce's ghost. If our analysis of the long-range future leads us to raise questions related to the ultimate meaning and purpose of life, then let us examine these questions boldly and without embarrassment. If our answers to these questions are naive and preliminary, so much the better for the continued vitality of our science." -- Freeman Dyson (Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 51 no 3, July 1979, p 447) "We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely." -- E.O. Wilson ("Consilience," p.269) "[The objectives of the human race] have not been reconsidered in light of the science of the past few hundred years." -- Gerald Feinberg "We should shift our emphasis from trying to discern the structure of the universe to trying to reckon our place within the structure..." -- Edwin Dobb "What you're doing and what you're thinking right now is not just you; it is a vast web of processes of which you form the consciously aware part." -- Todd Duncan (An Ordinary World, p. 12) "A scientist is supposed to have a complete and thorough knowledge, at first hand, of some subjects, and therefore, is usually expected not to write on any topic of which he is not a master...The spread, both in width and depth of the multifarious branches of knowledge...has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We...are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum-total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it...I can see no escape from this dilemma...than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories...at the risk of making fools of ourselves. " -- Erwin Schrodinger ("What is Life?") "While the choice of goals is to some extent a matter of feeling, an understanding of the alternatives requires, among other things, an appreciation of some scientific ideas about the world that is not common, even among scientists. What is required for this is not a detailed understanding of the content of each science, but rather a kind of synthesis of many different strands from many different sciences. A formulation of this type of synthesis is likely to appeal to a different kind of mind than that of the active research worker, which does not make it any less difficult or valuable. When this synthesis is achieved, it could well bring the excitement of scientific discovery to many who have remained unmoved by the detailed accomplishments of the individual sciences." -- Gerald Feinberg, ("The Prometheus Project," p 22) "Now individual consciousness, as typified in human beings, has great advantages and great disadvantages. Individuality means a narrowing, and narrowness can be useful. It is good for close-up work. We have invented the magnifying glass and the microscope to narrow our vision, because narrowness makes for precision. But narrowness also makes for a failure of purpose, for exhaustion of the will; for purpose depends upon a broad vision, a clear sight of one's objective." -- Colin Wilson "We need people who can see straight ahead and deep into the problems. Those are the experts. But we also need peripheral vision and experts are generally not very good at providing peripheral vision." -- Alvin Toffler "The search for meaning is not limited to science: it is constant and continuous - all of us engage in it during all our waking hours; the search continues even in our dreams. There are many ways of finding meaning, and there are no absolute boundaries separating them. One can find meaning in poetry as well as in science; in the contemplation of a flower as well as in the grasp of an equation. We can be filled with wonder as we stand under the majestic dome of the night sky and see the myriad lights that twinkle and shine in its seemingly infinite depths. We can also be filled with awe as we behold the meaning of the formulae that define the propagation of light in space, the formation of galaxies, the synthesis of chemical elements, and the relation of energy, mass and velocity in the physical universe. The mystical perception of oneness and the religious intuition of a Divine intelligence are as much a construction of meaning as the postulation of the universal law of gravitation." -- Ervin Laszlo "[We are] made of the same stuff of which events are made.... The mind that is parallel with the laws of Nature will be in the current of events, and strong with their strength." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson (quoted by Eric Chaisson in "Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature") "Perhaps it is not surprising how few scientists have felt the tremors of something revolutionary latent within this irreversibility paradox. Among the academic community, there is ever-increasing pressure to specialize in order to publish, to seek out the trees from the wood, which has led to the exponential growth of the scientific literature and the concomitant shift towards the sacrifice of understanding on the altar of calculation." -- Peter Coveney "Such a dismissive attitude is often prevalent when problems of a profound nature are considered: a thin layer of ice suffices for many to skate happily over, oblivious to the perils which lurk below. Thus the cat paradox has been regarded as a scrap to fall off the quantum table for the philosophers to fight over, as indeed they have." -- Coveney & Highfield "It is predictable, and yet very unfortunate, that attempts by academics of any rank to connect directly with the public that supports our science will be met with resistance (and, perhaps, with envy?) by much of the remainder of the academic community. The origin of the resistance, I think, is the fear that such academic scientists' view of themselves as awesome, special, and powerful priests will be compromised if science is conveyed without jargon. Many academics are, indeed, legends in their own minds." -- Jeffrey Marque (in a letter to the Spring/Summer 2000 issue of APS Forum on Education) "Scientists themselves are of surprisingly little help. They find it difficult to talk of what they do because they tend to assume detailed knowledge is required for generalities to be understood. They find it hard to grasp the concept of the meaning of their work, assuming this to be a debate that takes place at a lower level than the specialized discussions with their colleagues. When they do generalize, - or "popularize" as it is usually called with a noticeable degree of contempt - they tend to reveal a startling philosophical naiveté." -- Bryan Appleyard "Fail to discover, and you are little or nothing in the culture of science, no matter how much you learn and write about science. Scholars in the humanities also make discoveries, of course, but their most original and valuable scholarship is usually the interpretation and explanation of already existing knowledge. When a scientist begins to sort out knowledge in order to sift for meaning, and especially when he carries that knowledge outside the circle of discoverers, he is classified as a scholar in the humanities. Without scientific discoveries of his own, he may be a veritable archangel among intellectuals, his broad wings spread above science, and still not be in the circle. The true and final test of a scientific career is how well the following declarative sentence can be completed: He (or she) discovered that...A fundamental distinction thus exists in the natural sciences between process and product. The difference explains why so many accomplished scientists are narrow, foolish people, and why so many wise scholars in the field are considered weak scientists." -- Edward O Wilson "What is required...is not a detailed understanding of the content of each science, but rather a kind of synthesis of many different strands from many sciences.... When this synthesis is achieved, it could well bring the excitement of scientific discovery to many who have remained unmoved by the detailed accomplishments of the individual science." -- Gerald Feinberg "Through certain vagaries of history, we have managed to conflate two quite distinct questions: What makes a belief well-founded (or heuristically fertile)? And what makes a belief scientific? The first set of questions is philosophically interesting and possibly even tractable; the second question is both uninteresting and, judging by its checkered past, intractable. If we would stand up and be counted on the side of reason, we ought to drop terms like 'pseudo-science' and 'unscientific' from our vocabulary; they are just hollow phrases that do emotive work for us." -- L. Laudan ("The demise of the demarcation problem" in vol.76 of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, edited by R.S. Cohen and L. Laudan) |
