Censoring Science, The External and the Internal

The On Being program broadcast today was pretty provocative and could have been the occasion for some real fireworks but those didn't develop.  Instead there was a very good but, ultimately, stalemated discussion over the alleged benefits of believing that a mechanistic view of life is accurate.  The particpants with Krista Tippett were Arthur Zajonc,  emeritus professor of physics at Amherst College and president of the Mind and Life Institute and Michael McCullough professor of psychology at the University of Miami, where he directs the Evolution and Human Behavior Laboratory*.   Of the two it was kind of remarkable to me that the physicist was the one who was the more skeptical of the mechanistic universe than the psychologist.   While I would suspect that would be because modern physics has found the mechanistic model to be unsound, the life sciences, invested so heavily in the 19th century model of natural selection, and thoroughly enmeshed  in a political struggle, their ideological side thoroughly invested in that view, can allow no one to imagine anything else.  I found the following statement Zajonc made to be far more convincing than McCullough's breezy assertions which I am entirely confident are based on fundamental contradictions, held only through refusing to address the issues rigorously.

Yeah. In Mind and Life, for example, is a very large tent. I'd say the majority of the folks within that scientific and contemplative community are either materialistically oriented or agnostic on the whole question. And there may be a relative handful who have a more active spiritual set of commitments. But that's fine because we're not there to adjudicate that particular set of ontological commitments, that high-level stuff. We're there to do some experiments, do what seems to benefit, come to insights that we have confidence will ultimately benefit folks, reduce suffering, and promote human flourishing. That's the line. And I think that's just the way it should be.

By the same token, I think, personally, that the good science, if you will, that's done also has this sort of agnostic character. And where I get worried is where the mechanism commitments and the materialist commitment is slipped in as if this were the only thing any good scientist could possibly believe....

... Whereas I think that's just not the case. In fact, I would make the case that simply on the matter of science, from the standpoint of good physics, materialism is very implausible, or you have to reinterpret it in a way which makes it bizarre. So this is not the place to hold out those arguments and so forth. But you don't need them. I think science doesn't rely on them. I mean, I don't see — if this is an illusion, then the brain is an illusion. So, it just feels to me like we're constantly in this infinite regress.

I think it's both extremely interesting and telling that it is the physicist who understands the inescapable problems for our thoughts, our minds, the products of those, including the very science both he and the psychologist value, if the mind is the mere product of physical causation and a machine.   While McCullough makes some rather ambiguous statements which, I would say, are obviously and fundamentally at odds with his ideological commitments,  his years in his profession, allegedly the science of the mind, doesn't seem to have prepared him to consider those problems.   I will go more into that another day.

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As someone who has, a number of times, typed out and posted large passages of the book Zajonc mentioned in the course of the discussion and as someone who has enormous respect for its author, Joseph Weizenbaum, I found this passage fascinating.

And I think one last thing in this regard — this kind of conversation is very precious also, the fact that Michael and I can disagree on certain fundamentals in a safe context. You know, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a book, Computer Power and Human Reason. Got him in huge trouble at MIT where he was a prominent scientist. I remember him talking with great bitterness and difficulty about how he was treated by his colleagues for even questioning the possibility of the infinite power of the computer and the possibilities of artificial intelligence and so forth 'cause he was on the inside of all that. First natural language program, he wrote.

It was really rough on him. He had to leave the United States, went to Hamburg where he had a home and so forth in order to let things calm down in difficult time. Or another friend of mine at the Institute for Advanced Studies, same sort of thing. And when I speak about these things, and I raise these questions, it's been difficult. Our community of scientists is very — it's got a certain set of ideological commitments.

MS. TIPPETT: Bringing the word “contemplative and physicist” is also not that easy in the world of physics.

DR. ZAJONC: Oh man. No. All this kind of soft language of mine, it's all hazardous — or raising the question of materialism. Oh man, this is a dogma. I think of it as an assertion. It's proof by assertion as opposed to by reason. And I want to — nowadays, I'm old enough, I want to call it into question. I never felt that it was adequate with the last 40 years of being in science. But for most of those 40 years I felt like, step out of line at your risk, at your peril. I've done it occasionally and more consistently recently, late in life.

But we shouldn't have illusions about science, even today, welcoming the full discourse. There are certain general commitments. And one has to be — sort of pluck up one's courage at least to step into the fray. And then, more often than not, I think there's a positive response. You can get hit a few times. But basically, that's fine. So, I think we should practice this kind of work more and more, allow for that difference, explore it with real respect and civility and have it be the — what Hannah Arendt might like as our public place of discourse where really the most important ideas can be debated openly. And it doesn't — we don't have to come to a single conclusion at the end.

I had, of course, known that Weizenbaum, one of the major figures in computer science during the time,  spent the last part of his life in Germany, the country he had fled with his parents in the 1930s, but I'd not known he was hounded out of the United States, MIT in MASSACHUSETTS, for crying out loud, due to him being a scientific heretic.   And, considering the careful nature of what he said in the book, his rigorous citations and flawless logic, him getting that level of flack for that book is pretty amazing.   And we're not talking the Massachusetts of the 1920s WASP plutocracy, we're talking about the hotbed of academic freedom, free speech absolutism at the high water mark of its actually being a liberal state in the academic environs that were the very pinnacle of that sadly lost world.   Perhaps there is something in the incident to be understood, something it could tell us about just the enforced boundaries of acceptable speech about science are drawn.

In those years, Weizenbaum was once on Boston TV being interviewed on the introduction of computers into elementary schools.  He was a skeptic as to their revolutionizing education, he said that it wouldn't take the place of children learning to read and write and do arithmetic or the need to have good teachers in classes of manageable size.   I don't think I'd read his book before then but it's a statement that earned him my respect in a way that a lot of the geeks never would.

*  Without knowing anything about that lab's record, the idea that you can know anything about human behavior on an evolutionary scale of time is absurd.  I will be addressing some of what McCullough said later this week.