Editorial: 25th Issue December 1st 2019

Blog: http://michaelrdjames.org/

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The first lecture is about essay number 7 in Harari’s work “Sapiens”. Essay
Number 7 is entitled “The Mariage of Science and Empire” and is intended to
highlight the interesting relation that exists between Science and Politics in
History and in Contemporary Society. The essay opens as follows:

The section entitled "the Marriage of Science and Empire" raises immediate normative issues
for the philosopher searching for an analysis of the anomalies of the modernism and post-
modernism eras of our History. This work certainly falls into one of these two categories.
Having said this it must be added that this is one of the most interesting chapters of the book
and it provides a great deal of empirical explanation relating to the material and efficient
causes of the phenomena of these periods.

The author begins by pointing out that British exploratory expeditions beginning with Captain
Cook's in 1768, were in the habit of transporting scientists of various kinds to conduct both
inductive scientific investigations in new and strange environments and to verify more
deductively structured theories which predict the existence of events, objects etc that have not
yet been observed. Harari does not in this discussion make the traditional philosophical
distinction between Science in the context of Discovery and Science in the context of
Explanation. Indeed his talk in the last chapter of "new knowledge" appears to highlight the
observational activity of the scientist at the expense of the theoretical activities of thought and
reason.

The kinds of explanations required by Science in its context of

Explanation/Justification is very different to the kind of explanation we demand
in the Social Sciences and Politics. This issue is particularly relevant in relation
to the discussion over whether the Colonization of India occurred with evil
intent, ambiguous intent or with the best interests of the Indians in mind. The
interesting question to answer here is of course whether the motivations of
scholars and administrators were self interested or not.

The second lecture analyses essay number 9 in Harari’s work “Sapiens, a brief
history of humankind” . The essay is entitled “The meaning of life:

Harari argues that The Industrial Revolution was an era in which large-scale experimentation
and social engineering led to a radically different form of life to that we experienced during
the Agricultural revolution. Precise timetables and schedules were substituted for a form of
life determined by the natural movement of heavenly bodies, growth cycles and the weather
conditions. As a consequence, there were few timepieces or scientific concern for the precise
measurement of things in this ancient world.
The Industrialised society's experiments in social engineering dominated by scientific
methodology and scientific materialistic assumptions decoupled from both religious ethical
theories and the ethical theories of philosophy that led to the concept of human rights
eventually resulted in the bizarre totalitarian "experiments of Hitler and Stalin. Harari refers
in this context to an experiment relating to human mentality but it is not clear, however, what
he means. Is the suggestion being made that the Industrial Revolution changed our mentality?
If so, Science, which was a precursor and one of the theoretical conditions of the industrial
revolution must have been a contributor to this change. Does Harari mean that we shifted to a
state of discontentment because of the new disenchanted world we were forced to live in?

Harari argues that evolution has resulted in the alienation of the individual at the
hands of states and market forces and thereby ignores the rational forces
operating in Globalization processes since the time of the Enlightenment. These
rational forces are in the name of freedom and work over the time period of
hundreds of thousands of years on the time scale that the evolution of the brain
operates. Harari’s argument is in the spirit of post-modernism and he argues
that those who believe that life has meaning are deluded:
In the ensuing discussion, however, it is suggested that any meaning that people ascribe to
their lives is delusional!

Psychoanalysis is the "science"(in the Kantian sense) of the states and processes of our mind
and provides us with our best account of delusional states and processes. In this account, it is
very clear that the delusional states of mind which schizophrenics, for example, experience,
are primitive dysfunctional affairs in which there is an inadequate relation to reality.
Suggesting that all ideas of a flourishing life or the meaning of life are delusional is a popular
use of the term that undermines its more objective meaning. Of course one of the
"mechanisms" of the schizophrenic's delusional state of mind is the "imagination" that other
people, for example, are listening to their thoughts. Given that for this author human rights,
money, the nation-state etc are figments of the imagination the whole account risks falling
into a kind of psychological reductionism that serious psychologists such as Freud manage to
avoid.

Ascribing the term "delusional" to the meaning ordinary agents attach to their lives and the
faculty of imagination as the source of important ideas and realities such as human rights and
nation-states aims of course at inverting the image of reality in our visual systems: a state of
affairs that no doubt will have the effect of creating a "strange" impression of our world.
Worse still, we know from the result of experiments on image-inversion that the subjects
concerned learn to live with the strange feeling that the world is upside down and in so doing
the inversion inverts itself and everything "feels" normal. Such is the logic of feeling and the
logic of imagination.

The third essay is entitled “Intelligent Design” and opens controversially:

A genetically engineered fluorescent green rabbit and a mouse with an ear on its back are
cited as examples of the presence of intelligent design as a principle of life forms. Evolution,
it is argued, as a biological limit and explanation comes to an end in the twenty-first century.
This so-called principle of intelligent design is of course "scientific" intelligent design which
raises the obvious question as to whether this is in accordance with the philosophical concept
of intelligence.

William James argues in his work "The Principles of Psychology" that the concept of
intelligence is a descriptor of the "way" an intelligent life form does something or solves
problems. His citation illustrates the principle of the freedom humans possesses in choosing
how to act. A magnet attracts iron filings but if you insert a cardboard strip in between the
magnet and the strip the filings will never reach its goal. On the other hand, if Romeo is
attracted by Juliet but her family places a fence between his goal and himself, he will find a
way to eliminate the obstacle of the fence and find a way to his goal, Juliet. Intelligence, then,
does not refer to any particular goal but rather to the way in which we achieve that goal that
will include thinking critically about how to solve the problem. The iron filings when it
reaches the magnet without any intervening obstacle is not intelligent.
In the light of these reflections, one can wonder whether the use of the word "intelligent" in
this principle of intelligent design is an appropriate term to use in relation to the insertion of
genes into organisms that do not naturally possess these genes. If rabbits needed to be found
in the dark or mice were hard of hearing then, of course, these feats of "engineering" would
be motivated and may deserve the term "intelligent". Indeed it seems difficult to even say
whether there was any point to the "goal" that was achieved considering that no natural
processes were involved. On the contrary, these experiments appeared to require the
disruption of natural processes. Of course, these "experiments" are revealing of the practical
reasoning capacities(or lack thereof) of the scientist. The whole process positively reeks of the
lack of intelligence of earlier "experiments" such as the splitting the atom which managed to
produce a weapon that could destroy humankind in a world war(One must admire the
consistency of Science: if the universe began with a Big Bang human life might as well end
with a little bang). There is, as has been pointed out on a number of occasions, nothing in the
scientist's assumptions or methodology that will enable him to evaluate whether just because
something can be done, it ought to be done or ought not to be done. Harari has, on a number
of occasions, used the term "imagination" in relation to nations, human rights etc which are
intelligent "creations" of moral and political agents respecting the processes of cultural
evolution from families to villages to city-states to nations. For Aristotle, this process(up to
the level of the city-state) was both organic and intelligent. It wasi exactly because science
lacked the "tools" and concepts to describe the process of cultural evolution that Freud was
forced to resort to mythology and its "Intelligent " theory of what is important to mankind.

Science is also experimenting with out ideas of immortality and may be trying to
create a race of Gods. The essay closes with the following words:
If the attempt to create man in the laboratory resulted in Frankenstein one can but wonder
what will happen when man attempts to create a race of God's in the laboratory. Perhaps they
too will be fluorescent with an ear on their backs. Harari has given us a glimpse of the world
in which History has become a virus and the word "intelligent" no longer has an intelligent
meaning.