How Scientists Trick Themselves And Us Into Believing A Tiny Focus Shows The Entire Reality

Before the passage that follows,  Joseph Weizenbaum recalls the joke in which a policeman encounters a drunk on his hands and knees under a lamp post.  He asks him what he's doing.
"Looking for my keys."
"There aren't any keys here.  Where did you drop them."
"Over there."  He points in the dark.
"Why are you looking over here then?"
" Because the light is so much better."
That's how I was told the joke, anyway.

He concentrates on computer scientists who mistake their limited focus for an entire system but in all of science, up to even  cosmologists, they clearly mistake it for the entire universe.  More about that later.  For now, I couldn't possibly say it better than Weizenbaum did

Science can proceed only by simplifying reality.  The first step in its process of simplification is abstraction.  And abstraction means leaving out of account all those empirical data which do not fit the particular conceptual framework in which science at the moment happens to be working, which, in other words, are not illuminated by the light of the particular lamp under which science happens to be looking for keys.  Aldous Huxley remarked on this matter with considerable clarity:

" Pragmatically [scientists] are justified in acting in this odd and extremely arbitrary way;  for by concentrating exclusively on the measurable aspects of such elements of experience as can be explained in terms of a causal system they have been able to achieve a great and ever increasing control over the energies of nature.  But power is not the same thing as insight and, as a representation of reality, the scientific picture of the world is inadequate for the simple reason that science does not even profess to deal with experience as a whole, but only with certain aspects of it in certain contexts.  All this is quite clearly understood by the more philosophically minded men of science.  But unfortunately some scientists, many technicians, and most consumers of gadgets have lacked the time and inclination to examine the philosophical foundations and background of the sciences.  Consequently they tend to accept the world picture implicit in the theories of science as a complete and exhaustive account of reality;  they tend to regard those aspects of experience which scientists leave out of account, because they are incompetent to deal with them,  as being somehow less real than the aspects which science has arbitrarily chosen to abstract from out of the infinitely rich totality of given facts."

One of the most explicit statements of the way in which science deliberately and consciously plans to distort reality, and then goes on to accept that distortion as a "complete and exhaustive" account, is that of the computer scientist Herbert A. Simon, concerning his own fundamental theoretical orientation:

"  An ant, viewed as a behaving system, is quite simple.  The apparent complexity of it s behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which it finds itself ... the truth or falsity of [this] hypothesis should be independent of whether ants, viewed more microscopically  are simple or complex systems.  At the level of cells or molecules, ants are demonstrably complex; but these microscopic details of the inner environment may be largely irrelevant to the ant's behavior in relation to the outer environment.  That is why an automaton,  though completely different at the microscopic level, might nevertheless simulate the ant's gross behavior...
" I should like to explore this hypothesis,  but with the word 'man' substituted for 'ant'. 
" A man, viewed as a behaving system is quite simple.  The apparent complexity of his behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which he finds himself...  I myself believe that the hypothesis holds even for the whole man." 

With a single stroke of the pen, by simply substituting "man" for "ant," the presumed irrelevancy of the microscopic details of the ant's inner environment to its behavior has been elevated to the irrelevancy of the whole man's inner environment to his behavior!  Writing 23 years before Simon, but as if Simon's words were ringing in his ears, Huxley states;

"Because of the prestige of science as a source of power, and because of the general neglect of philosophy,  the popular Weltanschauung of our times contains a large element of what may be called 'nothing-but' thinking.  Human beings, it is more or less tacitly assumed, are nothing but bodies, animals, even machines ... values are nothing but illusions that have somehow got themselves mixed up in our experience of the world;  mental happenings are nothing but epiphenomena... spirituality is nothing but ... and so on."

Except, of course, that here we are not dealing with the "popular" Weltanschauung, but with that of one of the most prestigious of American scientists.  Nor is Simon's assumption of what is irrelevant to the whole man's behavior " more or less tacit"; to the contrary, he has, to his credit, made it quite explicit. 

Simon also provides us with an exceptionally clear and explicit description of how, and how thoroughly, the scientist prevents himself from crossing the boundary between the circle of light cast by his own presuppositions and the darkness beyond.  In discussing how he went about testing the theses that underlie his hypothesis, i.e. that man is quite simple, etc., he writes;

"I have surveyed some of the evidence from a range of human performances, particularly those that have been studied in the psychological laboratory.

The behavior of human subjects in solving cryptarithmetic problems, in attaining concepts, in memorizing, in holding information in short-term memory, in processing visual stimuli, and in performing tasks that use natural languages provides strong support for these theses... generalizations about human thinking... are emerging from the experimental evidence.  They are simple things, just as our hypothesis led us to expect.  Moreover, though the picture will continue to be enlarged and clarified,  we should not expect it to become essentially more complex.  Only human pride argues that the apparent intricacies of our path stem from quite different sources than the intricacy of the ant's path."

The hypothesis to be tested here is, in part, that the inner environment of the whole man is irrelevant to his behavior.  One might suppose that, in order to test it, evidence that might be able to falsify it would be sought.  One might, for example, study man's behavior in the face of grief or of a profound religious experience.  But these examples do not easily lend themselves to the methods for the study of human subjects developed in psychological laboratories.  Nor are they likely to lead to the simple things an experimenter's hypotheses lead him to expect.  They lie in the darkness in which the theorist, in fact, has lost his keys' but the light is so much better under the lamppost he himself has erected.

There is thus no chance whatever that Simon's hypothesis will be falsified by his or his colleagues' minds.  The circle of light that determines and delimits his range of vision simply does not illuminate any areas in which questions of, say, values or subjectivity can possibly arise.  Questions of that kind, being, as they must be, entirely outside his universe of discourse, can therefore not lead him out of his conceptual framework, which  like all other magical explanatory systems, has a ready reserve of possible hypotheses available to explain any conceivable event.

Almost the entire enterprise that is modern science and technology is afflicted with the drunkard's search syndrome and with the myopic vision which is its direct result.  But, as Huxley has pointed out, this myopia cannot sustain itself without being nourished by experiences of success.  Science and technology are sustained by their translations into power and control.  To the extent that computers and computation may be counted as part of science and technology, they feed at the same table.  The extreme phenomenon of the compulsive programmer teaches us that computers have the power to sustain megalomaniac fantasies.  But that power of the computer is merely an extreme version of a power that is inherent in all self-validating systems of thought.  Perhaps we are beginning to understand that the abstract systems - the games computer people can generate in their infinite freedom from the constraints that delimit the dreams of workers in the real world - may fail catastrophically when their rules are applied in earnest.  We must also learn that the same danger is inherent in other magical systems that are equally detached from authentic human experience, and particular in those sciences that insist they can capture the whole man in the abstract skeletal frameworks. 

"There will be no chance that Simon's hypothesis will be falsified by his or his colleagues' minds."   "Falsification" as the touchstone guaranteeing the presence of the quest of modern alchemy, "science," has been introduced into the popular imagination since Weizenbaum wrote what he did.   You can encounter sci-rangers who demonstrate their profound ignorance of what the word means flashing it like iron pyrite all over the web.  As this passage shows, the concept is little understood by even very sophisticated people, scientists included, perhaps especially.   They certainly will be unaware that even among scientists and the philosophers of science, "Falsifiability" isn't granted the status of a fixed and uncontroversial truth.

Much of the misconception of science, as encountered among the sciency, is encompassed in this passage.  You can read it and remember it was written during the dawn of Sociobiology, as expounded by E.O. Wilson, the world's foremost experts in ants and the reduction of people into "lumbering robots" by the "evolutionary" psychology that quickly succeeded it and overtook it.   In that form, as popularized in "The Selfish Gene" and other radically reductionist popularization, it has taken root among the would-be intelligentsia, both those in their own minds and those with advanced degrees.  It governs how they see other peoples' lives and, astonishingly enough, their own experience.

The TV commercial says, "If love is a chemical reaction,...." only in the minds of many, perhaps most, college educated folks these days, there is no if about it.   I would say if only they understood the practice of the radical abstraction and the profoundly limited focus of the psychological reductionist practice that is the origin of that superstition, they might not fall for it.  The chain of assumptions that leads to that belief contains many links that are ideological, I would guess even more of them than the "Intelligent Design" effort might.   Only, ideological links that are based in materialism are invisible to any but rather rigorous reviewers of science because the consideration of material entities is the subject matter of science.

In the 20th century and on to today, there has been an odd form of elevation of scientists, usually at the twilight of their productive career in science, to the status of popular sage or, more often, oracle.   These people declaim their prophesy on TV and YouTube to an eager lay public and to each other,  scientists are as prone to falling for PR as anyone.  Since the 1970s, these have been prophets of materialistic scientism,  just about any of the big name scientists whose names are recognized would fall into that category.   The editing of popular culture, done mostly by non-scientists who are quite ga-ga with the glamorous cache that science has or by wannabees who gave up long ago, disappears scientists who don't teach that dogma.   As real, working scientists forget that they are sampling a very limited amount of human experience to issue their doctrines and declaring their universal efficacy, the rest of us are prone to doing the same thing, adding ignorant credulity to the mix.