I’m talking about living a life, minus purposefully needing to resort to science… Im not saying give up all reasoning or use of technology, just the culture of thinking ‘Science’.
A hypothetical scenerio… a abandoned alien ship drifts into the solar system, and its impossible for us to reverse engineer it, but it has a database that allows us to make and go anywhere nearly instantly, and replicating machines to make anything. After a few generations, humanity spreads to the stars, just minus scientists, as there is no need for them…
So how would a non-scientific society look like, over one with it… frankly, I would prefer and Utopian alien ship that solves everything to crunching numbers, but that is just preference, not saying I would do without either if given the option.
I’m not sure about the utopian solve everything machine, but I do think that if science were given less credence by the general public, that we’d have a lot less of this fake science that’s intended to persuade people to a position rather than expose some truth about the physical world.
I do agree with this. Adding science, or numbers on to something lets people buy into so much easier. After all, if four out of five dentists say it’s true, It must be… All scientists agree, disease is spread through bad air.
As we have no alien space-ship that negates the need for science, I don’t think your post has anything to say.
If you want to know what a non-scientific society looks like there are plenty of benobos to look at.
Even the most primitive hunting and gathering requires observation and reflection; technology and refinement of the ideas behind it.
I am not sure that I am responding appropriately, but here are my two cents.
One Answer:
A major driver of the human intellect, though possibly not the only one, is intellectual curiosity.
I would speculate that intellectual curiosity would eventually lead to the question “why does the world behave the way it does?”.
Basically, I don’t think that humans can avoid science.
Another Answer:
Let’s assume that a human is a composite of many different attributes, and that these attributes interact with each other analogously to an axiomatic system.
By reducing the axioms or attributes, one may still be able to draw various reasonable conclusions or successfully interact within a given social structure.
However, eventually as the number of attributes/axioms is removed, fundamentally useful systems will start to fail.
If you can make anything… how will you evaluate whether you should make it?
How do you know if it’s dangerous or not? Is it poisonous? Is it acidic? Will it give people cancer? What happens when you combine it with other things?
There have to be experts with scientific knowledge who can make those decisions and who know how to use an object effectively.
Science is only for things that repeat when you do them again. But life you can not do again so it does not repeat and isn’t scientific… bet science didn’t figure that out yet.
Okay, so we are getting a concept from everyone here that is valid… at first, many would be like Lev in the beginning, then curiosity and confusion begins… ship is simply to alien for our brains to break down and understand it, but it intuitively grasp us and how we thing, and makes the things we want, need, and even will need without us knowing it yet, given how intelligent its AI is.
Phyllo would be the swansong of science… a theory of mind of the utopia ship in relation to our desires… how, how, how… but we never quite figure it out beyond some reasonable guesses to tell our children and grand children… just the damn thing works, and even the youngest and dumbest grasp this… man spreads out to the stars, and do whatever…
What would philosophy look like in such a odd symbiosis, one science dies off, given it no longer has a end? Would a Nietzschean Last Man situation develop? If so, why… if everyone have what they want, have the freedom to learn as much as they care to, are expanding and clearly thriving? Would odd hierarchies flourish? No real reason, everyone has everything they want materially… if you dont like your neighbors, millions of planets to settle.
What characteristics inherent currently within science are indispensable, to such a society, when all other aspects die off?
Whoever got the alien devices first, with the capability, would horde and hide them then extort and enslave the rest of the world. So actually nothing would change.
Before you sneer at that thought realize that every society requires a structure of priorities. You are proposing that the material needs concern be removed entirely from the priority structure. Having no material needs at all, people would have no choice at all but to resort to what we would think of as “spiritual needs” as the entire structure of their society(s) shifted. That would open a huge can of worms with unimaginable consequences.
This issue is similar to the free energy issue. If you really provided truly free energy of whatever type anyone might need for whatever purpose, society would shift so dramatically that it might take centuries before you could even recognize a structure at all. During that time, so very many false flag dramas would have been created in the effort to control society (whether for good purpose or bad) that predicting where it would end up would be seriously tough.
You have specified what was taken out of society. But you didn’t specify what society is left with, which is far more relevant to the final structure. There would be serious effort to do anything that worked merely to keep society into a controlled structure, whether there was really any need for that or not. So whatever was left would be used in the most divisive ways imaginable to cause people to depend upon the structure. In the past, that has been the hording and hiding of resources/information. And that action requires a great deal of layered deceptions based upon whatever people are willing to believe at the time, else people would not need people. And that would annihilate the entire species.
…nothing would really change other than the names.
‘Science’ and even Science are often used in the mind to cut off an experience and get at its ‘mechanisms’, to quickly find an explanation often an explaining away of something. There, now I can play this experience, that thing in that box. The system holds, no mere anarchy is loosed upon the world and I can relax.
This cuts off deepening experiences, especially anomalous ones. (thinking in terms of science is not the only way to break things up like this, but it is one very common current one)
This pattern happens interpersonally and intrapsychically.
One tries to explain the phenomenon, thing, experience quickly in terms of current (and often outdated) mainstream scientific models. Oh, well this must be because my serotonin levels are low. It keeps experience from wandering off.
The alternative is to allow the experience to develop without jumping to an explanation, without explaining away, without getting out the dissection kit of the mind. What happens if I either bracket off the experience - do not try to categorize it or explain it - or even find I do not have to call out a phenomenological time out.
This exploratory, curious approach can also be taken with other people and their stories and experiences.
We walk around as if we are editors att peer reviewed scientific journals when most of us are not and lack the skills and most of all are using tools that are useful in one set of contexts FOR EVERYTHING. It’s a bit sad.
For most people they do live in a non-scientific society. They are not scientists, miraculaous devices are created and food is delivered by people with skills they lack. So in a way this scenario is here already. And this holds even for scientists, since they are specialized, and much of the time they are off duty.
I think it’s about a 500 word post someplace that just states that people deny science sometimes. Not a lot to it really.
I do not know if news of climate catastrophes are a hoax. What I do know, is that a proper scientific inquiry has to remain within the boundaries of what one can observe and repeat or what have you, and within the boundaries of being the kinds of things that can be addressed by the kind of questions a scientist can ask with validity without leaving his discipline in the process. I think that a lot of people want to believe that things are knowable which are not. I think that science in the popular view is the atheists religion. I believe that’s a dangerous concept for the same reasons one might think that religion itself is dangerous. It shuts down discourse and accepts things in a way that real, falsifiable science cannot and so we don’t want the scientific view taken up by the masses as something that asserts things that the people who actually understand know it can’t assert.
Think of claims like, “science proves there’s no god”, or “science proves there is a god”. Those are silly, but they also closely parallel the kinds of claims that you see people attributing to “science” all the time. We knows the logic doesn’t follow from observation to conclusion in those instances and it’s best to be on the lookout for them. Especially in a world where people want to trick anyone anyway they can in order to advance their political views or economic desires.
I heard of it because you have said of it many times now even since I am here.
It means that the universe is rationally behaved because you can apply logic to it and nothing will fall outside of it, nay?
I am alternative as heck.
Hmmmmm… ok… so … yes.
What is this definitional logic?
Smart and tasteful… oh how so ever so rare a combination.