Lucidity and science III: Hypercredulity,quantum mechanics,and scientific truth

Abstract

Scientific research can reasonably be described as a search for truth, in an important and nontrivial sense. But respect for the scientific ideal is incompatible with the myth, or instinctive, quasi-religious belief, that science is about discovering final, infallible, absolute or ultimate truth. That myth, if publicly endorsed by scientists, inadvertently or otherwise, is perilous because it fuels tribal conflicts like the current ‘science wars’ and increases public confusion about science. This in turn helps the psychological, social, and economic forces, including the forces within big commerce, that work toward discrediting the scientific ideal and ethic for reasons both conscious and unconscious, restricting our options for coping with an uncertain and highly dangerous future. Future possibilities include the risk of substantial sea level rise, continuing unstoppably for a century or more after first detection. Also possible – and arguably likely if the scientific ideal is too far discredited – is the destruction of the system of free market democracy and free trade, the government by consent and prosperity of individuals on which big commerce itself depends.

Our understanding of the actual and potential human behaviour patterns that might lead to such destruction is being sharpened by evidence from linguistics, palaeoclimatology, palaeoanatomy, and genetics, and from research on perception and cognition. It is remarkable that any such self-understanding is possible for us, and even more remarkable that any human society allows such matters to be openly discussed. Both things demonstrate our species’ adaptability and the power of cultural evolution – more precisely the adaptive power of the intimate and intricate interplay, or dynamic, of what we falsely dichotomise as ‘nature and nurture’. This adaptive power is one reason why our children and their descendents might dare, against the odds, to hope for some kind of civilised future existence incorporating a new covenant between science and society.