Well said Russ. Science as a self-organizing system which is relatively
robust and self-healing.
Russ Abbott wrote:
Richard Feynman said that "Science is what we have learned about how
not to fool ourselves about the way the world is." To the extent that
it achieves that goal, science works even without individual
self-awareness. That's really quite an accomplishment, to have created
a way of being in the world that succeeds reasonably well without
having to depend on individual subjective honesty.
For the most part, if we aren't honest with ourselves and with each
other, we all suffer negative consequences. Now that I've written
that, it seems to me that "honesty with oneself" is not a bad
definition of "self-awareness." Another way of putting it is that
self-awareness is what keeps us from fooling ourselves about our
subjective experience. Contrast this with Feynman's definition.
Science works reasonably well even without individual self-awareness
in that it relies on community self-verification. In some ways science
is the self-awareness of a community of people about what can be known
about the world. Obviously science is not about everything -- in
particular inter-personal values. But within its domain I think it
does a pretty good job of keeping everyone involved reasonably honest
-- and especially keeping the community as a whole reasonably honest.
There are failures and detours. But they are usually corrected.
I hadn't intended my original post to be about science. It was about
the importance of self-awareness when dealing with political and
governance issues. But now that we are talking about science it's an
interesting comparison. Perhaps that's why science has been so
successful. It's a methodology that isn't ultimately dependent on
individual human honesty. Can we say that about anything else?
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