The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [111]
Dispelling the illusion of purpose in nature has been crucial to all of the scientific and technological advances of the biological sciences. In fact, it is what made them sciences. The same is true for neuroscience and its future. You can’t work with an illusion. If you want to make real progress, you have to give it up, no matter how deeply you are taken in by it.
Neuroscientists are like other scientists. They specialize narrowly. They are not given to speculation outside their subdisciplines. Still less do they want to attract hostile attention or lose grant funding by publically undermining cherished illusions. They are not going to take sides on scientism for love or money.
Success in neuroscience doesn’t require them to do so. Like every other science, neuroscience begins with data, not with deductions from scientism’s axiom that physics fixes all the facts. But reputations are made and progress is achieved in neuroscience, like the other biological sciences, by theories that show how physical—especially electrochemical—facts fix neural facts and create the illusions that introspection reports.
We have dealt with a lot of the unavoidable questions by now. The answers science gives are all short, unambiguous, and deeply contrary to so much that mystery mongering, everyday life, and deep philosophy suggest. You might think that we have now finished scientism’s self-appointed task. But there remains one more set of questions that often gives people sleepless nights. These are the questions about the meaning of our lives, our human past and future—the questions of history.
Chapter 11
HISTORY DEBUNKED
SOME PEOPLE ARE NOT JUST ABSORBED BY THE persistent questions about their own nature and fate. They are also concerned with everybody’s past and future. This does not make them busybodies; it makes some of them history buffs and in some cases historians. There are also a lot of other people with the same interests—understanding the human past and future—who look to economics, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, the scientific study of politics, or some combination of all of these sciences, to answer our persistent questions about humanity.
Most of the persistent questions they seek to answer are variations on the following ones. Scientism’s answer to each of them is provided:
What is the meaning of history? Does it have a point? No meaning, no purpose, no point.
Does the past have lessons for the future? Fewer and fewer, if it ever had any to begin with.
Where is civilization headed? Nowhere in particular; there is no long-term or even medium-term trajectory to its path.
Is there progress, improvement, enlightenment, in history? Not much, and what there is can only be local and temporary.
Can we or anyone control the direction of human history? Not a chance.
Perhaps you’re thinking that scientism should be more upbeat about these matters. After all, science is acquiring more and more knowledge about the past and present, along with a scientific grasp on human affairs. There has been undeniable scientific progress in the understanding of nature (including human nature).
We should be able to parlay all that science into a real understanding of our future. If it turns out that old-fashioned history can’t answer these persistent questions, perhaps newfangled social science can. The most scientistic, the most prolific, and the most influential of all science and science-fiction writers, Isaac Asimov, must have thought that eventually science would get around to doing for human history and human affairs what it had done to make the rest of nature subject to prediction and control. At any rate, he wrote a lot of science fiction (mainly the Foundation series) that assumed science would do so.
Alas, scientism realizes that Asimov’s aspirations were overly optimistic. Scientism recognizes that history is blind, and the empirical sciences