|
|
|
|
|
RE:
THE NEW HUMANISTS
From:
Jaron Lanier
Date: 4.15.02 Bravo, John! You
are playing a vital role in moving the sciences beyond a defensive
posture in response to turf attacks from the "postmodernists"
and other leeches on the academies. You celebrate science
and technology as our most pragmatic expressions of optimism.
Maybe there's a community of scientists who have become the
"new humanists", but that isn't good enough. While "postmodern" academics and "2nd culture" celebrity figures are perhaps the most insufferable enemies of science, they are certainly not the most dangerous. Even as we are beginning to peer at biology's most essential foundations for the first time, we find ourselves in a situation in which vast portions of the educated population have turned against the project of science in favor of pop alternatives that are usually billed as being more "spiritual". These range from the merely silly (such as astrology) to the archaic, mean, and often violent religious orthodoxies which seem to be gaining power within many of the world's religious traditions at the same time. What is it that drives vast numbers of people into superstition, and the inevitable exploitation that follows from it? What is it, for instance, that has made medicine informed by science (often derided as being merely "Western", or "Allopathic") so unattractive to so many smart people, when it is utterly clear that it has been an overwhelming success? Perhaps the science culture elite has not sufficiently appreciated the task it must take on if it is to be its own advocate. Postmodern critics of science are mostly merely ridiculous, while the mainstream enemies of science are something much worse: They are winning. What does that word "spirituality" mean? Let me propose a definition: One's spirituality is the range of one's emotional relationships to those questions which cannot be answered. Scientists and technologists naturally gravitate away from such questions. "What happens when you die?", for instance. Of what we cannot speak we remain silent. We have made peace with the big questions every child asks by finding the limits to our abilities to answer them. Many of us have grown comfortable with a few familiar and eternal splotches of ignorance, even though they are centrally placed in our fields of view, because there have been compensations for our disappointments. We're delighted that the universe can be understood so well in so many ways, and specifically that we've been able to make personal contributions to that understanding. We're often enchanted with the beauty we see in nature; beauty that's harder for non-specialized people to appreciate. Some among us have even found faith of one sort or another, but usually only faith which is precisely coincident with those splotches of ignorance. But what we forget is that many people, probably most, haven't had life experiences which lubricate such intellectual bargains. Most people are not comfortable with accepting a little unfortunately-placed ignorance, or perhaps uncertainty leading to only rigorously bounded zones of faith, in exchange for robust specialized knowledge in other areas. There is every reason in the world to ridicule stupid elitist cultural figures who use trendy pessimisms as a cover for narcissism. Yes, please, let's have fun with them. But that approach won't do much for the hugely larger number of people who suffer from sincere anxiety about the unanswerable big questions. I'd like to focus on one particular cultural pathway which I believe is driving much of the public away from the sciences, because some members of the edge.com community are central to it. It goes like this: A scientist or technologist is sought out by the media because she is articulate about life beyond the lab. She appears on TV talking about items with human interest using the intellectual framework of her research. Suppose she likes to think in the terms of artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, or some of the other intellectual frameworks which refute the "specialness" of people in order to clarify investigations. An idea arising from such a framework which might serve a purpose in the lab often turns out to fall flat out in the open environment. For instance, if she's an artificial intelligence researcher, she might in passing wonder if a lonely, childless couples could raise a robotic child for comfort in the future. This was an idea in a popular science fiction movie recently, but was also espoused as a reasonable and realistic eventuality by an MIT scientist on National Public Radio. Within the informed scientific and technological community, it's possible to have a nuanced debate about such a remark. It's possible to ask if the scale of complexity in a real child can really be approximated by a digital device anytime in the relevantly near future. One might point out that even if the hardware gets vast and fast enough, we don't seem to be able to write stable giant programs, so some unforeseen advances would at a minimum be required on the software front. But that's not what happens out in the wide world of non-scientists. "Soft", or "spiritual" people, for instance, are often disturbed and become more likely to cancel doctors' appointments in favor of aromatherapy sessions. If scientists think robots and children are the same, then a pox on them! When the artificial intelligence researcher equated, even in a very narrow sense, information systems and human beings, she inadvertently answered some of the big questions of childhood in a particular way. I fear the message ends up being heard as something like, "Not only is there no soul, no afterlife, no nothing magical about you at all, but I'm an elite scientist who can see into your circuitry and make another thing like you, thus making you in a fundamental way subordinate to me." The arts and humanities (and lets not forget the religions!) have been perpetually faced with the challenge of making simple things complicated. So we have preposterously garbled academic books about philosophy and art. This is a little like that old trope about Cargo Cults. When I was trained as a composer, I was made to study ridiculously arcane academic music that only a small number of people could understand. This simulated the situation in physics, in the hopes that similar prestige, budgets, and even parking spaces on campus might be forthcoming for the most celebrated and cryptic elite. In this case the cargo cult approach worked! Science faces the opposite problem. Most scientists would be delighted if the inherent elitism of a hard discipline would suddenly drop away, so that there could be an army of new collaborators. Sadly, this future is not to be. Instead, we have to learn new ways to improve the interactions between the scientific community and the world at large. This is where I think the "Third Culture" still needs to mature. Science must learn to be better at communicating its limits non-apologetically as strengths. And scientists might have to learn to communicate in public about how we, too, are sometimes troubled at night by the unanswerable questions.
JARON LANIER, a computer scientist and
musician, is a pioneer of virtual reality, and currently the
lead scientist for the National Tele-Immersion Initiative.
[more....]
|
|
John Brockman,
Editor and Publisher |
|
|Top|
|