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>>Roger Anderton holds that Einstein was mistranslated, and most intellectuals are reluctant to be challenged on long-held beliefs. (I have found that to be the case.)
Dear Friends of Wisdom,
Quite a variety of responses to my “Crisis” email.
Roger Anderton holds that Einstein was mistranslated, and most intellectuals are reluctant to be challenged on long-held beliefs. (I have found that to be the case.)
Christer Nylander thinks our problems might be solved by means of AI. I’m not too sure about that. At present AI may be doing more harm than good: algorithms designed to learn from their interactions with people learn to reproduce all the prejudices of people – not, I know, what Christer had in mind. The point I sought to get across is that there is something deeply flawed in our institutions of learning; replacing human intelligence with artificial intelligence does not address that problem.
Ronnie Hawkins suggests some websites where policies can be found designed to help save the natural world. Energy production, manufacturing, agriculture, and transport seem to me to be main sources of CO2, and other greenhouse gases. Year by year increase in tax on use of fossil fuels, clearly announced by governments, plus government aid to the development of sustainable energy production, manufacturing, agriculture and transport, would help quite a lot, it seems to me. Universities implementing wisdom-inquiry would, as a matter of priority, do everything they can to get across to the public, in as simple terms as possible, what policies need to be adopted to avoid the worst horrors of climate change. Universities implementing knowledge-inquiry – as at present – cannot do this adequately (because it would be construed to involve becoming political and abandoning the objective search for knowledge). By and large, universities do not spell out the policies we need to be putting into practice.
Steve Ballard argues that the world’s universities need to be “prevailed upon to work together to peacefully repudiate misconceptions about the common origin and purpose of the compassionate instincts and intelligence that are common to all sentient species”. In my view we need to recognize that universities were developed with the idea that a basic task would be to help humanity resolve its conflicts and problems of living rationally, and thus make social progress towards a better, wiser, more enlightened world. Our problem is that the 18th century Enlightenment that initiated this idea made dreadful blunders which we have failed to correct, and which are still built into the institutional/intellectual structure of academia. What cries out to be done – in my view – is for the academic world (above all) to recognize these blunders, see what needs to be done to correct them, and then make the changes to universities that are needed – so that we may develop when we so urgently require: universities rationally devoted to helping humanity make social progress towards a good, enlightened, wise world.
Christer Nylander’s second email does not convince me that AI can be used to promote wisdom. What we need, in any case, above all, is social wisdom, political, economic, industrial, agricultural, media, international, global wisdom – wisdom built into our institutions, social endeavours, habits and culture. I do not see how AI could substantially help, and relying on it might well have seriously adverse consequences – just as the internet has had. (Social wisdom is not just the sum of individual wisdom.)
Richard Trowbridge argues that we have not learned about the universe. According to Richard, the current scientific, physicalistic view of the universe leads straight to the current devalued view of human beings, and other living things, in all sorts of contexts. But, as a matter of logic, it does not. As I have argued since my first publications, in 1966 and 1968, physics is only about a highly specialized aspect of all that there is: the causally efficacious aspect, as it may be called. Physics does not, and cannot, say anything about the experiential dimension of reality, what we see and hear, what we experience. And of course, tied up with that, physics says nothing about that which is imbued with value.* Even if some people think – as Richard evidently does – that the value-denuded vision of physics implies that nothing is of value, nevertheless they are wrong. There is no such implication. It is vital to appreciate this point, for if we do not, we may be led to think that in order to salvage the value of human life – and sentient life more generally – we have to deny the correctness the view of the universe to be associated with modern physics. There are, however, good arguments for holding that modern physics is broadly along correct lines: see my arguments for aim-oriented empiricism. ** So, in defending the thesis “the value-neutral view of modern physics implies that nothing is of value”, we horribly weaken the case for holding that life is of value by demanding that this can only be the case if physics is fundamentally wrong (when it is not). Actually, the argument I have developed and propounded over the decades takes its starting point from aim-oriented empiricism – a conception of physics which suggests that physics is broadly correct.
It is not modern physics, and the vision of the universe associated with physics, which undermines appreciation of the value of life, but rather what I have called “knowledge-inquiry”: the view that the proper aim of academic inquiry is knowledge. This is a product of the great Enlightenment blunder: the idea that social inquiry should be developed alongside natural science, as social science. No! What we require is wisdom-inquiry, which requires social inquiry to be engaged in helping humanity solve problems of living (including global problems) so that people may realize what is of value to them in life. Put knowledge-inquiry into practice, and academia will tend to undervalue the value of human and other life (as I argued in my From Knowledge to Wisdom , ch. 3, (1984); put wisdom-inquiry into practice, and the fundamental task is to help people realize what is of value, potentially and actually, in the circumstances of life. Wisdom-inquiry is all about the discovery, experience, appreciation and realization of what is of value in existence: knowledge-inquiry, devoted to the pursuit of factual knowledge, becomes blind to value – diminishes value to something merely subjective; the factual question about what people hold to be of value.
Enough. Probably too much. I will do what I can to respond to further comments as they arise.
Best wishes,
Nick
* (1966) Physics and Common Sense. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science , 16 (64) 295 – 311
(1968) Understanding Sensations. Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 46 (2) 127 – 145
(2001) The Human World in the Physical Universe: Consciousness, Free Will and Evolution. [Book]. (First ed.). Rowman and Littlefield: Lanham, USA; Oxford, UK
(2010) Cutting God in Half - and Putting the Pieces Together Again: A New Approach to Philosophy. [Book]. Pentire Press: London, UK.
** (1998) The Comprehensibility of the Universe: A New Conception of Science. [Book]. (First ed.). Clarendon Press: Oxford.
(2005) Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Aim-Oriented Empiricism. Philosophia , 32 (1-4) 181 - 239.
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(2017) Understanding scientific progress: aim-oriented empiricism. [Book]. Paragon House |
(2017) In praise of natural philosophy: a revolution for thought and life. [Book]. (1st ed.). McGill-Queen's University Press: Montreal, Canada.
(2017) Karl Popper, Science and Enlightenment, UCL Press – can be downloaded free.
Both issues are discussed in my forthcoming book The Metaphysics of Science and Aim-Oriented Empiricism: A Revolution for Science and Philosophy (Springer, April, 2019).
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Dear Friends of Wisdom,
We face an unprecedented crisis – as I am sure almost all members of Friends of Wisdom recognize. That this is the case becomes apparent when one considers the very serious global problems that confront us: population growth, destruction of natural habitats, loss of wild life and mass extinction of species, the lethal character of modern war, pollution of earth, sea and air, the menace of nuclear weapons, and perhaps most serious of all, the impending disasters of climate change. These global problems interact with one another in various ways so that they become all the more serious. Climate change may render vast tracts of land in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere uninhabitable; ocean levels may rise to drown heavily populated coastal regions and cities, prompting massive migration, in turn likely to provoke right wing governments and war. As the population goes up, food production goes down. And wild life will continue to suffer catastrophically.
Why do we face this crisis now? As I see it, it can be put quite simply like this. Humanity faces two great problems of learning: (1) learning about the universe, and about ourselves and other living things as a part of the universe; and (2) learning how to become civilized, enlightened or wise. We have solved the first problem; we did that in the 17th century when we created modern science. But we have not yet solved the second great problem of learning. It is that combination of solving (1) and failing to solve (2) that is so dangerous, and has led to our current crisis. For, as a result of solving the first problem of learning, and developing modern science and technology, some of us enormously increase our power to act. This can have immensely beneficial consequences – as it has. It has led to much that is good about the modern world. But, in the absence of the solution to the second great problem of learning, vastly increased power to act, bequeathed to us by science, may do as much damage as good, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
And that is just what has happened. Modern science and technology have led to modern industry and agriculture, modern hygiene and medicine, modern armaments, which have led to much that is good but also to population growth, destruction of natural habitats and mass extinction of species, lethal war, nuclear weapons, pollution, and climate change.
We urgently need sufficient wisdom to be able to anticipate the emergence of serious global problems due to new actions made possible by science and technology, and take action so as to stop such problems emerging before they become serious. Failing that, we need sufficient wisdom to have the political muscle able to act so as to resolve global problems humanely, effectively, and intelligently.
But how is humanity to acquire the global wisdom that is required? Political events of the last two years or so seem to indicate that we are getting more stupid, not wiser. Most people, I think, would regard the idea that the world might learn how to become a bit wiser or more civilized somewhat absurd. And so they tend to despair at anything serious being done about our global problems.
For decades, now, I have argued that there is a solution this problem of how we can solve the second great problem of learning – the problem of learning how to become more civilized, wiser.
We can learn from our solution to the first great problem how to solve the second one. We can learn from scientific progress how to make social progress towards a good, civilized, wise world.
This is not a new idea. It was the basic idea of the 18th century Enlightenment, especially the French Enlightenment. But the idea was developed in a seriously defective form. We still suffer from it today – and that is the source of our current incapacity to resolve our grave global problems.
In order to implement the profound Enlightenment idea properly, three steps need to be got right. (i) the progress-achieving methods of science need to be correctly identified and characterized. (ii) These then need to be generalized, so that progress-achieving methods become fruitfully applicable to all worthwhile problematic endeavours in life. (iii) These generalized progress-achieving methods then need to be got into the fabric of the social world, so that we may make social progress towards civilization, enlightenment and wisdom in a way that is somewhat comparable to the astonishing intellectual progress of natural science.
The Enlightenment got all three steps wrong. Most disastrously, the philosophes got the third step wrong. They thought the task was to develop the social sciences alongside the natural sciences. This got developed throughout the 19the century by people like J.S. Mill, Karl Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber, and built into academia in the early 20th century with the creation of disciplines and departments of social science. The outcome is what we still have today: academic inquiry devoted in the first instance, to the pursuit of knowledge.
Our institutions of learning may be good at acquiring specialized knowledge; they are not good at helping humanity acquire wisdom.
The big blunder was to concentrate on improving knowledge of the human world, rather than on helping the human world to resolve its conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively rational ways – in ways which enable people to achieve what is of value in life, and make progress towards a good, civilized, wise world.
So here is the paradox. Our universities today are the outcome of putting the great Enlightenment idea into practice: namely, learning from the solution to the first great problem of learning how to go about solving the second one. Our universities are intended, as it were, to help humanity learn how to acquire wisdom. But because we still have not acknowledged, and put right, the blunders of the 18th century Enlightenment, what we possess today is deeply flawed, in a wholesale, structural way.
What we urgently need to do is correct the blunders of the Enlightenment. My latest effort at spelling out what these blunders are, and what we need to do to correct them, can be found here: The Scandal of the Irrationality of Academia (2019). It was first spelled out long ago in detail in my From Knowledge to Wisdom (1984; 2007).
We have to learn how to resolve the grave global problems that confront us. That in turn requires that our institutions of learning, our schools and universities, are rationally designed and devoted to the job. At present they are not. That is because we have failed to correct the 18th century blunders of the Enlightenment. There is a clear prescription as to what we need to do. It has been around for at least 40 years. But few academics seem aware of what needs to be done.
Somehow, we Friends of Wisdom need to get the message across, to our academic colleagues (if we have them) to politicians, to members of the public – to whoever will listen. That is how I see the matter, in any case.
What can we do? What are we doing? Is my diagnosis, and my prescription, correct? If not, where does it go wrong? I would be interested to hear what others think.
All good wishes,
Nick Maxwell
Website:
www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom
Publications online: http://philpapers.org/profile/17092
http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/view/people/ANMAX22.date.html
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