Curtis White - The science delusion: asking the big questions in a culture of easy answers

NON-FICTION
Monstrous Possibility:
An Invitation to Literary Politics

The Middle Mind:
Why Americans Dont Think for Themselves

The Spirit of Disobedience:
Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless
Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work

The Barbaric Heart:
Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature

FICTION
Heretical Songs
Metaphysics in the Midwest
The Idea of Home
Anarcho-Hindu
Memories of My Father Watching TV
Requiem
Americas Magic Mountain

THE SCIENCE DELUSION

Copyright 2013 by Curtis White

First Melville House printing: May 2013

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eISBN: 978-1-61219-201-7

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v3.1

For Lewis Lapham

It is very advisable to examine and dissect the men of science for once, since they for their part are quite accustomed to laying bold hands on everything in the world, even the most venerable things, and taking them to pieces.

Nietzsche

One of the most astonishing spectacles of popular intellectual culture in the first decades of the 21st century has been the confused alarms of struggle and fight rising from the clash between the Christian evangelical and the scientist. At the very moment that the neo-cons made the child-minded mythologies of the Christian right the defining ideology of the Republican Party scientific liberalism produced a series of triumphal books proclaiming the victory of science and reason over religion. The commercial success of these worksled by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great), Alex Rosenberg (The Atheists Guide to Reality), Sam Harris (The Moral Landscape), and, of course, Bill Mahers lethal dose of pop sapientia, the movie Religulousis a phenomenon, as the book world likes to say. In any case, it is clear that the story these writers have to tell is one that a very powerful part of our culture wants told and emphatically so.

More recently, a separate series of extraordinarily successful books, lectures, and articles have appeared concerning the advancement of scientific knowledge about the human brain: how it works and how it possesses those mystifying capacities that until now we have called consciousness and creativity. I will be focusing on three science writersthe science journalist Jonah Lehrer and the neuroscientists Antonio Damasio and Sebastian Seung. These writers are, I think, typical representatives of the field, but their work is just a sliver of the total output: between the neuroscientists and their allies among the advocates of Artificial Intelligence, the literature explaining the brains wiring is vast and technically intimidating.

Unlike those scientists and critics at war with religion, it is much less clear that these writers have an antagonist, or are part of our culture wars, but it is obvious that neuroscientists are trying to explain phenomena that until the last few decades were thought to be in the domain of philosophy, the arts, and the humanities. The surprising thing is how much interest and enthusiasm neuroscientists and their advocates have generated in the media and among readers. For example, until his unfortunate fall from grace for lapses in journalistic ethics, Lehrers Imagine: How Creativity Works was a best seller; and Sebastian Seungs TED lecture on the connectome has had over half a million views. There have been a few critiques of this work from academic philosophers like Thomas Nagel (Mind and Cosmos) and Alfred R. Mele (Effective Intentions), but there has been nothing remotely like a popular response to neurosciences encroachment on the humanities.

Shouldnt there be voices as prominent as Lehrers asking very different questions? Are we really just the percolating of leptons and bosons, as philosopher of science Alex Rosenberg believes? Are we just matter obeying the laws of physics? In our emotional lives, have we been for all this time nothing better than the humiliated lover of E. T. A. Hoffmanns The Sand Man who falls in love with Olympia, a seductive piece of clockwork? For all these centuries, have our soul mates (as Notre Dame linebacker Manti Teo called his electronically simulated girlfriend) been mere congeries of meat, wire, and chemical? Are our ideas best understood as gene-like memes for which the most important consideration is not truth but adaptive fitness? Is the best way to understand our social behavior by tagging it to genes: the selfish gene, the violence gene, the altruism gene, the compassion gene, the romance gene, etc.? Most importantly, whether the neuroscientists are correct about all this or not, what are the social and political consequences of believing that they are correct, or nearly so?

So Id like to ask, In whose interest do these science popularizers and provocateurs write? And to what end? They would like us to think that their only interest is the establishment of knowledge. What I will suggest is that their claims are based upon assumptions many of which are dubious if not outright deluded, and that the kind of political culture their delusions support is lamentable. I say lamentable because it is too late to say dangerous. Its already here and well established.

One thing that can be safely said is that these ideas are not entirely new, never mind the fact that part of the hype is that they are the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. The truth is that the fundamental assumptions of modern scientific culture are part of the ideological baggage of the Enlightenment. In his famous lectures on The Roots of Romanticism (1964), Isaiah Berlin expressed that ideology in this way:

[The view is] that there is a nature of things such that, if you know this nature, and know yourself in relation to this nature, and understand the relationships between everything that composes the universe, then your goals as well as the facts about yourself must become clear to you. About all these things disagreement may occur, but that there is such knowledgethat is the foundation of the entire Western tradition. The view is that of a jigsaw puzzle of which we must fit in the fragments, of a secret treasure which we must seek.

The essence of this view is that there is a body of facts to which we must submit. Science is submission, science is being guided by the nature of things, scrupulous regard for what there is, non-deviation from the facts, understanding, knowledge, adaptation. (11819)

None of this would have been a surprise to Dostoevskys spiteful Underground Man, exactly a century earlier, in the famous short story Notes from Underground (1864):

[T]hen, you say, science itself will teach man that he never has really had any caprice or will of his own, and that he himself is something of the nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, and that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything he does is not done by his willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and man will no longer have to answer for his actions and life will become exceedingly easy for him. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000 and entered in an index; or, better, still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the world. (68)