Problems of modern Science
What are the problems of modern science? If modern science is so great then how come we are threatening our very existence with technological devices today? Is there a way we can change our modern beliefs in science in order to change the world today? All these questions and more can be discussed........in this discussion.
Comments (66)
It is very evident, that the knowledge of how to make a device precedes the knowledge of how to safely use it. This is mostly because a device must be in use for a period of time before we get an understanding of how it will actually be used. Science itself is very similar, it advances our knowledge at a great speed, and we are very quick to employ the knowledge, without understanding the effects which using that knowledge will have. The destruction of the ozone layer is a good example of this. This makes the ethics of using scientific knowledge very difficult.
But when we do know, the issue is human nature, not science.
If there's an issue with science it is the difficulty of advancing human knowledge now. Many experiments are greatly increasing in expense. And the results they reveal are understood by only people with a postgrad education in a close field.
So the general public often prefer to engage in fantasy; pseudoscience, conspiracy theories and misleading pop articles (e.g. eggs cure cancer or whatever)
We pursue ends besides knowledge. Sometimes the end we pursue involves using knowledge for the purpose of making money or obtaining power. That often leads to disaster.
Sad, but true.
Technology is older than science. We were using tools long before we were basing them on science or driving science to yield them, including tools specifically to kill. Knowledge can't always be held responsible for what humans do with it.
That said, too much science is funded by technology companies and institutions, including military. It would at least help to not make science so dependent on those willing to pay the most, especially when defense is extremely well-funded.
So in order to progress humans and their own inherent nature, along with the nature around them it is more important to find every creatures purpose that serves undoubtedly to benefit man. For everything we construct there will always exist a natural analog. An example is that we have created the calculator when most scholars hundreds of years ago were capable of mental calculations at an arguably greater speed than people today. As we perfect living, natural creations it will nonetheless perfect the creator.
I agree with Stephen Hawking: the greatest threat to mankind is not climate change or nuclear warfare, but rather A.I.
God created man in His own image, and Nietzsche declared God dead; now man is creating digital gods in his image...
Science doesn't put anything aside. Science, not some of the people who are doing it, does not have anything to say about reality as such because that is not defined scientifically to be surveyed or to be measurable. If purpose and intentionality could be studied then they would be. Purpose, intentionality, and reality are philosophical constructs in some philosophical languages.
Quoting Thinking
Is molecular biology not beneficial in having created vaccines for COVID? What about our much beloved smartphones?
Of course it does. The first step in studying any subject scientifically is deciding what to exclude.
Quoting magritte
Purpose and intentionality are exhibited by the simplest of creatures. Historically, these were relegated to the domain of 'secondary qualities' by Galileo, hence the widespread view of a Universe 'devoid of purpose'.
The Manhattan Project, for example, was huge, and hugely expensive; probably one of the finest examples of a large group of scientists working together toward one goal. Look at the gift it gave us! However, its great success was probably hugely inspirational for the space program which followed, culminating in the Apollo Project, which might have employed even more scientists than the Manhattan Project.
I don't think we get these huge projects of scientists working together toward a common goal anymore, the money is in the hands of private companies, and they compete. Even something like the covid-19 research and vaccine is carried out by numerous different companies in competition.
The Apollo project was funded by NASA which was specifically intended to be a non-military, civilian government agency.
The source and cause of COVID is controversial. I will say to not buy the major narrative media is giving the majority, and to not act out of the fear of it . Virus' for the most part are not a problem in nature and are very beneficial to organisms. Whenever a virus effects a population of deer for example, there is underlying causes that would for example affect the immune system of the subject or an overpopulation. Nature as a whole is very intelligent and has many ploys to restore itself to homeostasis or balance.
I hate to say it but it seems that we are more of a virus to this planet than COVID is a virus for us.
Quoting Thinking Of course. tools, machines, and products deteriorate.
But then you go on to say
So it would appear that you are more concerned with a 'religious' or 'spiritual' or some such matters more than scientific problems. You don't have much confidence in science at all. So, one wonders, what is your interest in "the problems of science"? It would appear that you have more confidence in "seemingly universal intelligence". Believe what you want, but it would be better if you were more up-front from the get-go about what your position is.
Humans are as much a consequence of evolution as viruses, bacteria, clams, grasshoppers, sparrows, scorpions, kangaroos, and poison ivy. We are part of nature as far as I can tell. Maybe you believe that evolution has a destination, an end, the OMEGA POINT of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin?
I
I would agree that all of nature is more or less balanced for conditions to be dynamically stable under the circumstances within some limits. The deer population is balanced with the abundance of its food supply. Oak trees go through cycles of massive production of acorn and lean years. Many animals depend on that variance to maintain a sustainable population. People used to be part of that food chain but globalization and technology unbalanced our existence as a species. However, it doesn't take much for more powerful factors like climate change or a supervolcano to wipe out all that balanced stability.
Quoting Thinking
Seems that way.
I am giving you a point of view to debate for and against. Also, a lot of what you would call "spiritual" and "religious" is heavily backed up by the science in the more modern day, so try not to be too skeptical as old world-views are changing.
To perceive the real world is to perceive possibilities, tensions, expectations. The concept of materialism itself cannot be enunciated without self-contradiction, it cannot even be thought of as a hypothesis. You think there is a material world, and, as we have a brain, we invent things other than the material world, but all that we invent is exactly the presence of the material world.
If reduced to its “material” properties, the world could not even be material. Because what you call material is just an abstract selection of certain properties out of the countless ones that you perceive and that you hypothetically call materials, but that are not perceived separately. They are never perceived separately. All the knowledge that we can acquire from Epistemology and Theory of Knowledge must be obtained through the analysis of real perception, through the analysis of real knowledge, and not through artificial hypotheses.
Real knowledge is that which is obtained in real experience, in actual experience and not in hypothetical experience. What is a scientific experiment? It is a hypothetical experience set up within the realm of real experience and which is only valid within the realm of real experience. When a subject, based on a scientific experience, denies the consistency of the real experience, pretending that the scientific experience has more cognitive validity than the real experience, he is incurring a monstrous self-contradiction. If he actually carried out this experiment, he did it not only within the laboratory, but within reality. Where was his laboratory? If he really did the experiment, he did it within reality. It is only valid when inserted into this field of real experience.
Without this field it has no validity. Never a particular science or the results of all of them can override the common and current perception that we have of reality. We can apprehend, through the analytical examination of the common reception, but we cannot overcome it. Where are we going to overcome it? In the hypothetical world or in the real world?
What Husserl called Lebenswelt — the world of life — in fact, I think this concept is too timid, because Lebenswelt is the only world that exists, and I assure you: the world of scientific experience, considered in itself, does not exist. It only exists as a part of Lebenswelt, which you have decided to look at separately, you are distinguishing mentally, but you are not actually separating. This means that without an Ontology and an Epistemology based on the examination of real experience, no science is worth anything, they only acquire value if properly inserted into this general scheme of reality.
Or maybe they're speaking about the 3% difference between human DNA and chimpanzee DNA, them being geneticists and all.
That statement does go to show how important philosophy is so that we treat our experience of reality in the correct ways. Right now the current extremism line of thinking that bred our modern science from our modern philosophy does not seem the right way we should be treating our experience. Our global pollution crises for example. Therefore tracing the problem to its root, there needs to be a fundamental change of sciences worldview today. Similarly with many other subjects as well, such as philosophy and politics.
The basic problem is that people are putting far too much things in what they regard as "science" and "scientific view". It's either used a sledgehammer or portrayed something with hidden evil intensions. Science is apolitical.
It's just a method.
Since the advent of modern empirical and experimental Science, new Knowledge (What? & How?) is fairly easy to come by. But the Wisdom (Why? & Why Not?) to properly apply that knowledge usually comes from hard experience (negative feedback). The job of Philosophy is to apply untested Knowledge, and unproven Theories, in the form of thought experiments.
Unfortunately, such metaphysical testing doesn't have nearly the impact on human behavior as physical negative feedback. "Once burned, twice shy". The moral lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has put ethical constraints on Nuclear energy that retard both technological progress, and forestall Armageddon. The Nuclear Disarmament Movement is philosophical, not scientific; moral, not technical. :smile:
Einstein on the bomb : Though Einstein worked to warn the world about the perils of nuclear proliferation for the rest of his life, he struggled to make sense of his responsibility.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/06/nuclear-weapons-atom-bomb-einstein-genius-science/
School of Hard Knocks : where you get the grade first, and the lesson later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_of_Hard_Knocks
The biggest problem science faces is that it is not known by most people.
The second biggest problem is that people who don't know how scientific advances explain things, make their own explanations.
The third biggest porblem of science is philosophy forums on the Internet.
The fourth bigget problem of science is its amorph state; the frontiers of science are a swamp, in which theories sink and emerge, but nobody knows what's below the muddy surface of the quagmire.
The fifth biggest problem of science are humans.
In essence, because we do not listen to what the scientists say.
How important we must be!
That comment highlights in itself one of the great problems of science, or rather with the perception of science. The idea that if we listen to what the scientists say then the world will be fine, we won't threaten our existence, we will have a good life and so on.
One only needs to look at the history of science to find dangerous statements or recommendations that were presented as true by scientists. That is, statements that are now widely seen as dangerous. And there are statements made by scientists today that are dangerous, but because many people blindly believe that scientists tell the truth and that we should listen to them, well they don't see them as dangerous.
There is a growing distrust of what scientists say, but they have mostly themselves to blame for that. If they stopped presenting their conclusions as much more certain than they truly are, we wouldn't have many people blindly believing false statements made by scientists, and there wouldn't be a growing distrust of what they say.
And then there is the whole what demarcates science from 'pseudoscience', and there is no good answer to that, there are many observation-based logically consistent theories of the world that are labeled as pseudoscientific or non-scientific for no good reason, just to discredit them because they go against the mainstream power structure.
That is a great problem, due to our lack of ability to change and always striving for truth. When you have been studying science for 40 years and all of the sudden your preconceived notions of what you thought reality and science for that matter is a joke, then I could imagine why it would be hard to accept newer views of reality.
That's not what was said. The OP blames science for "threatening our very existence with technological devices today", when the culprit is scientific illiteracy combined with naked greed.
Blaming science parallels blaming the victim for her own rape.
Does it? As I read it it simply says that science does not prevent us from destroying ourselves.
Quoting Banno
Lack of education? But why, in this wonderful scientific age, are we all so badly educated and greedy? We can produce clean water, but we cannot produce clean minds - is there a science and technology of humanity to match the water and sewage system?
Technological problems are trivial these days, but psycho-social problems are intractable. and psycho-social problems prevent us from dealing with technological problems.
One has to conclude, surely, that 'science' does not have all the answers. How do we stop being greedy?
Science has become more and more compartmentalized and specialized to a degree that the language of science is not easily accessible or comprehensible to the otherwise generally well educated. Even scientists need to consult other specialists when they stray out of their own area of expertise. The tower of Babel is upon us.
The choice of what to do remains with... well, I was going to say "us", but...
That's not a problem. I can get a plumber to do the pipes, and an electrician to to the wiring and so on. this is called cooperation and coordination. Humans are good at that. Super technical super complicated stuff gets done that way, that no one can understand - like my laptop. Thank you germanium miners.
Quoting Banno
Indeed. So science cannot do politics, cannot do social studies, cannot do psychology. Science cannot care. And woe betide humanity if we neglect to care because science cannot measure and control it.
I never heard of germanium before. But I thought you said geranium miners. Flower power.
How true. Up until the late 1800s, magazines like Nature and its predecessors had articles about discoveries in mathematics that were by and large intelligible to normal, well-educated readers. These days new ideas in the subject are usually too specialized for even mathematicians not working in those specific areas to understand.
We can develop an anti-consumerist, anti-materialist philosophy, and try to teach it to our kids.
Sure we can, so why don't we? You come up with external solutions to an internal problem, which is why it doesn't happen. When the problem is the world, science will tells the practice that will work best. But when the problem is the human, the problem is the scientist, then science cannot help, but on the contrary, does exactly what you have done - project sensible solutions onto the world as if humans can implement it. This solution is as old and as ineffective as "don't do what I do, do what I say." Human problems can only be answered with your life.
This is a lesson which the pandemic, and the calls for physical isolation, may teach us, if we look. Each person must do one's own part, make the resolution and adhere to it, with will power. But the human being is in many ways lazy with respect to will power, always seeking excuses, rationalizing ways to escape the resolve. So when we see that so and so are not keeping up their end of the stick, we see this as a good reason to drop our end, instead of forging ahead as leaders instead of followers. Therefore the structure falls like a house of cards, the domino effect of herd mentality.
So the answer to "why don't we?", is that we do not have the will power. And human beings will never implement any such solutions until they learn how to practice and exercise will power, which makes them into leaders instead of followers.
Who said I don't do that in my own life?
Essentially, tech-driven science has developed to the point it can't be decoupled from philosophy in general, where tech-science occludes unmixed reason (science isn't reasonable with its all or nothing physicalism). Philosophy answers to nothing but reason, a priori, whereas modern "thought" has shifted all the way over to empirical data as the only source of truth, a posteriori. Intelligent people don't share the same limitations as computers/algorithms; e.g., a elementary philosopher does exactly what a computer simulation can't do: form thoughts, ideas, concepts, meaning, understanding, judgments, etc..(he doesn't merely collocate data or find patterns in heaps of data, meta analysis, he synthesizes a catena of new, as yet nonexistent, concepts). Then it appears the solution isn't only more philosophy, but philosophy removed from STEM. The difference between synthesis and analysis is the difference between a timeless philosopher and a modern scientist, respectively.
No one. I said it was ineffective. If I said it was as ineffective as a glass hammer would you insist that you use a metal hammer?
I don't think that explains the problem at all. We have the will power to create armies and bombs to seek out new fossil fuels to exploit, and all kinds of stuff and yet we are terrified more by the prospect that someone will get something for nothing than by the destruction of the world. Here is Trump willing the death of a few more while he still can in the dying days of his presidency. No lack of will...
I propose first of all to point out that it is a problem of humanity, and a problem that science and reason cannot deal with.
And then I will wait until all the proposals run into the sand. If I had a proposal for solving the problem of humanity, it would be from the imaginary position of non-humanity. This is why scientific psychologies fail; the humans that reform humanity are all too human; the peasants are just as greedy as the nobility given the chance.
So that is the first and last step, not to separate oneself from the problem so far as to make a proposal.
Kind of you to tell me what I mean, but actually no, it doesn't.
But suppose for a moment that doom is unavoidable. What do you propose? Will you wait then, or will you do something? This is rather important, because a large part of the problem of humanity is just this need for a win, a positive result, for progress. And of course we are all doomed to die sometime or other. So I don't propose, and I don't wait. I plant trees and bake bread; I do not travel, I live low and small, and I offer what insights I have. I try to help my neighbours practically and psychologically. Or else I do other stuff, you know. What I do matters even if it makes no difference.
I'm not proposing anything, I'm doing autobiography, in response to you claiming "Waiting, at this point, means accepting doom as necessary or unavoidable." when I said "I propose first of all to point out that it is a problem of humanity, and a problem that science and reason cannot deal with.
And then I will wait until all the proposals run into the sand."
I am not proposing that you or anyone should do what I have been doing for fifty years, merely mentioning something it. It is as if the arguments I have bothered to make have passed you by completely, and we are reduced to some virtue competition. Carry on proposing if it floats your boat.
I think that "will power" refers specifically to the capacity to prevent oneself from acting in a situation where the person is inclined to act. So it is distinct from "willing", which is when the person carries out the act which one is inclined to do. Will power is the means by which we prevent ourselves from doing what we know is a bad act, but we are nevertheless inclined to do it for some sort of pleasure, or out of habit. It is the means by which we break bad habits.
I have never been able to make any sense of the notion, myself. Whence cometh this mysterious power? Given there is a shortage, how can the supply be augmented?
Well, to be honest, I was just answering your question, "why don't we?". My reply was pretty much just a matter of identifying the problem, we can recognize ourselves to be engaged in wrongful activities, but still not have the will power to rectify this. Now, finding the solution is another matter altogether. Maybe the first step is to quit looking at will power as a "mysterious power", and recognize it as a fundamental capacity which can be exercised and strengthened.
I think what I was saying, is that we all get set in our ways, it's a matter of habit. Our habits are what provide us with our comfort. But each one of us can look at a number of different habits and determine that these are not really aspects of the best way of living; in other words, bad habits. A word that comes to mind is "luxury". I think Plato used something like "relish".
But to break a bad habit requires that one makes an effort, and this is to step outside of one's comfort zone, so it is a sort of self-inflicted pain. If we encourage each other, the pain is lessened, but if I see that others are engaged in the very activity which I am taking pains to curtail, I might use this as an excuse not to put myself through that suffering, despite knowing that I ought to.
Yes. And it seems that no one can afford to stop building that tower even higher.
"…only what gives effective knowledge are the sciences, philosophy gives only a sense of orientation and values…"
Meditate on this phrase.
He thinks that effective knowledge is that which was given by scientific experiment and, beside knowledge, there is an ornament, which is a sense of orientation and values. It happens that, to know if this scientific experiment is true and if it is valid — this is a question of orientation and values. Where does scientific knowledge exist except within the field of guidance and values? It never existed in itself, it is just an invention of the mind. Now, if the sense of guidance that allows you to judge a scientific experiment is not knowledge in itself, the result of the scientific experiment can never be knowledge.
Science appeals to the authority of the naturalistic premise and the unity of logical discourse, but none of these things, in isolation, has authority. An explanation cannot be natural because it is necessarily part of a metaphysical conception of the whole.
The unity of a logical discourse is only possible to apprehend if we already have the capacity to perceive unity and wholeness in general. It is the unity of the real that allows human action and the existence of a logical discourse, but that same discourse can deny in its content that same unity of the real — and here is the source of all mistakes in philosophy, which is denial of the unity of the real in order to put in its place a fictional world of discourse where a separate knowing self reigns. Thus, individuals believe more in the content of reasoning than in the conditions that allowed its creation. The only validation that is requested is that of the cropped scientific experience that the scientific community accepts and not the real and personal experience, thus entering into a collective delusion.
The belief that modern science is in pursuit of universal truths seems to result in the sentiment that its progression is, if not benevolent, inevitable. Just as premodern Truths mobilized prevailing armies and colonizers, modern Truths mobilize the production of prevailing technologies. Given the current trajectory of science and technology, I think there is a possibility that our faith in a haphazardly financed science will be eclipsed by trust in a well-constituted economic order that credits a plurality of social entrepreneurs, each with scientific agendas constrained by a nonviolent contest for economic power.