>Holy shit! Is this culture evolving so quickly that we already have
>"memetic fundamentalists"? What ever happened to a healthy skepticism? A
>sense of irony? A little humility?
Written in the true spirit of scientismic fundamentalism. Let me catalogue a
couple of arbitrarily selected canons of the very unhumble world of scientism:
1) The Big Bang - I have begun wondering whether there has ever been
any such thing as a big bang. Red shift and microwave background radiation
might be explainable from the point of view of photon entropy. (That is, a
photon loses energy to the surrounding space on its journey across galaxies,
and this energy loss manifests itself in a lower-energy photon with a longer
wave length, with the energy loss dissipated as microwave radiation.
E(photon) = hf) The big bang is one *possible* scenario from amongst many
and not a fact, unlike what the majority of the scientismic community is
peddling. Don't see much humility here.
2) Consciousness programmed entirely from genes. Really? Does anyone
realize, from all the contradictions and improbabilities that abound in the
studies of biology, how silly this notion is? As one arbitrarily selected
example - if all cells in an organism were 'programmed' with the same DNA,
then why do the many different types of cells in the organism behave
differently? As another arbitrary example - if consciousness was programmed,
how is it that a person with, say, Chinese parents (and therefore
'programmed' with Chinese personality) can grow up in American culture
speaking an American accent, merging fully with the American way of life
and, with the exception of skin colour, appear in every other way to be as
American as apple pie? Apart from the intuitively self-evident problems
associated with size (how could something as incredibly complex as a human
be programmed into a sperm/egg so small?), there are so many contradictions
and absurdities that the only explanation I can provide is that science has
become a fundamentalist religion, with scientists in lab-coats its priests.
We are living in a fantasy by waiting for a sufficiently intelligent
organism (scientist) to descend from the Mount (of Empiricism), to inform us
about how it all works. We have lost the enquiring, genuine humility of the
original, innovative scientists. True science is about the asking of
questions. Scientism is about the peddling of flavour-of-the-month
scenarios. There are far too many out-spoken "scientists" (and I use the
term loosely - perhaps "scientismics" is a better word) today who are
nothing more than lab technicians, turning science into a form of voodoo.
And I do not see much humility coming from them.
3) I keep on hearing about new, scientifically based studies
refuting old ones. This has become something of a sport where I look forward
to finding out what previous study will be refuted next. Butter versus
margarine, the greenhouse effect versus no greenhouse effect, new gimmicks
to refute old ones, etc, etc, etc, on and on and on without end.
No, it is scientism that is among the most fundamentalist of all the
fundamentalist religions of today. And think about how seductive is its
power - we don't even realize that we are in it! This is the truth of memes
at work - a truth about the truth of scientism.
steve tramont