The Machine Vs Us

Science is never unbiased, clear. It comes with baggage. We need to call it out more ...

The idea of the machine as an organizing principle and “paradigm” has been on my mind of late. Mostly, as I think through the possibilities, the outcomes possible with AI, artificial intelligence. I’ve written a lot about it the last few months.

In this video excerpt, a man I’ve long admired, Rupert Sheldrake, outlines what he sees as the fundamental problem with scientists and their findings. They are all funneled through a lens of looking at the world, a paradigm which is materialistic, mechanistic. He’s to science what Martin Luther was to Catholicism. This beautiful talk, banned by mainstream science, lays out his arguments.

I came upon this talk in a marvelous series of interviews by Dutch broadcaster VPRO. 6 fantastic scientists interviewed with erudition, intelligence. Great men, them all. I was going through my YouTube playlists and hit upon my long stored away one about documentaries - find many great ones, free to watch on my playlist. I go there when needing a deep think and not wanting to read. Sometimes, I benefit from my packratting of thought - books, videos and more … I also highly recommend this article - The Empty Brain. It will change how you think about our brain, memory, processing and all the other metaphorical garbage we carry about it.

Anyway, back to Sheldrake’s words.

The Oxford Dictionary says a paradigm is : a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated

the Freudian paradigm of psychoanalysis

broadly : a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind

I can go with that but it is much more. It is also cultural and how WE ALL see and view the world. Our rose colored glasses so to speak. I remember a university course I took called, “The Philosophy Of Science”. Don’t remember much specifically except the insistence of our heavily accented Czech professor that science wasn’t neutral. It came with its own prejudices. Indeed.

Sheldrake illustrates well the fact that our science as well as our religion, isn’t as professed, “clean”, heavenly, neutral truth. This fight between the all-knowing, pure logicians and those of living flesh, goes back further than Sheldrake suggests, back to the struggle between rationalism and empiricism in its purest forms. The fight between a clean, objective approach through data, numbers, ticks and boxes AND experience, nurture, gut, our lividness/livediness, in this world.

But he lays out well, naked, the arguments of science that have gained favor, especially the last few hundreds of years. It goes as follows.

The world is made of "stuff" that goes together in different ways and acts in different ways. Newtonian physics, for example. Artificial Intelligence is just the continuation of this paradigm ruling science - that man is ultimately a machine. There is no god, nobody driving the bus. That man, if we just can figure out how he/she works, tinker enough, we can make the perfect machine. And conversely, computers and robots can become machines like us too. Even conscious beings. Basically, we believe life is a “machine” made of moveable parts. We just need to figure out how things work, what does what. What makes what move. Then, bingo, no god, an answer, truth beheld.

I protest and have never felt this at all. We are not machines, my experience tells me so. Nor much of the organic world. In fact, nature might be an invention as proposed by Humbolt, an effort to raise man into dominance and at the top of the “intelligence” pyramid. It’s the genesis of Frankenstein. It’s frightening, how we’ve divorced ourself from nature, as just machine, when experience tells us so directly, we are not apart from nature. We are but one branch on a huge tree that nature grows, life blows …

Like Sheldrake, I reject the mechanistic view of our world and the science that follows such. One day in the future, it will be seen like those dim-wits before Copernicus, thinking the earth circled the sun. It is a bad pair of glasses for science to wear.

I see this paradigm, this “scientism” in so many fields and disciplines. Think of the recent mRNA vaccines. Basically, they are just a money wrench thrown into our genetic code. The view that if we can just tweak this gene, snip that one, we’ll fix things, this machine we are. How wrong we are finding this! But yet, we have a huge field of medical science acting like it is the way to go. They need to look in the mirror, see the Frankenstein in all of this.

And look at ChatGPT. People actually think it is human, talks to us, replies. Yet, it is just a word processor. All be it, a powerful one but still one, nonetheless. And as stupid as one. Machines, as Sheldrake outlines, don’t “think”.

In education, there is a thread of “science” that runs through everything. Evidence based is the code word. Cognitive this and brain based that. Never mind we know so little even about how people learn. Yet, we prattle on with data showing X or Y and thoughts of cognitive overload dancing in our head. Hubris it all. Tinkering like Dr. Frankenstein, thinking we know how the machine works when we really don’t know much at all.

I think of Aldous Huxley who for years was mocked in his belief in the paranormal. Yet, there is evidence that it works, it exists. Science, itself needs to re-examine its orthodoxy and the thesis it has tacked on its own door. There needs to be a wider acceptance of alternative “paradigms”, ways of seeing and measuring the world.

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

―Nikola Tesla

Science needs more voices like Sheldrake’s. Watch his other talks in that documentary. Such erudition. Candor. Humility. May I even say, common sense. An uncommon, brilliant mind. Not any buffoonery of big data, number crunching and the church of science standard deviation. He challenges the dominant orthodoxy of "scientism" and the belief that we are but machines filled with stuff, moveable parts with a manual we just need to decipher so we can fix ourselves and unlock our potential.

I’ll end with a quote from Stephen J. Gould. One of those scientists in the doc. linked above. He hits the nail on the head. Read if you have the time, apologies for the length. But this topic is important. We all have a stake in it. Science needs to stop its yellow brick road march - Dorothy, there is no Oz. That manual for the human machine, does not exist. Let’s pull back that curtain.

The reason I remain so interested in the history of science is that it's easier to flay open the biases of the past because we've overcome them. I think we're largely unaware of how our own deep beliefs - which just seem either logical or necessary or proven to us - are as immersed in bias. I think it's very hard for us to understand that.

Look, it's only when I was a graduate student that continental drift and plate tectonics, which seems so obvious in retrospect, was accepted as a major revolution in the earth sciences. Now, my older colleagues, who never accepted it to the day they died, they weren't stupid or evil, but they were certainly wrong.

On the other hand, you know, we do get better. The genetics of racial variation as we understand it today do quite conclusively show, I think, how fatuous the notion of deep, significant, ineradicable, wide-ranging differences are. We've measured genetic variation. Morton obviously couldn't do it. He didn't know about genes to begin with. And it's one of the great liberating advances in science.

Science can be liberating as well as restrictive. We have now understood genetic variation in human beings - I'm not saying our knowledge is fixed for all time; it never is -- but I think we have seen just how shallow and superficial the average differences are among human races, even though in certain features, like skin color and hair form, the visual differences are fairly striking. They're based on almost nothing in terms of overall genetic variation, and that's because we now understand that human racial variation is much, much younger than we ever thought it was, that probably all non-African racial diversity is less than 100,000 years old.

That sounds like a lot of time, but to an evolutionary biologist that's an eye blink; that's not enough time to accumulate anything in the way of evolutionary difference. So science liberates as well as falls into the biases of its time.

‘’My message is not that biological determinists were bad scientists or even that they were always wrong. Rather, I criticize the myth that science itself is an objective enterprise, done properly only when scientists can shuck the constraints of their culture and view the world as it really is. I believe that science must be understood as a social phenomenon, a gutsy, human enterprise, not the work of robots programmed to collect pure information. ’’ - Stephen Jay Gould. The Mismeasure Of Man.