Logical Me

Copernicus was born this day in 1473. Cheers!

I like to think that I am logical, though passionate, and that I understand the world pretty much the way it is, as revealed by evolution. I think that I understand the world in a way that nobody did or could in previous centuries or millennia. For example, in both Hebrew and Greek, the words or breath, wind, and spirit are the same (ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek). This appears to not be mere metaphor; to ancient people, they were the same things. Ah, but I know about gas molecules. It is also obvious to me that the Earth goes around the Sun and that stars are distant suns. So there.

You can see where I am going with this, since I seldom boast. Clearly, I am setting you and myself up to make a point. Which is this: if I had been born in an earlier century, it would have been absolutely obvious to me that the sun goes around the Earth, that the stars were little holes in the dome of the sky, and that spirits flew through the air, disturbing the leaves, slipping into my nostrils, and creating feelings in my heart (not my brain). And I would feel the same intellectual excitement by believing such error as I do by believing the scientific truth. Evidence? When I think of something exciting, my heart beats faster; obviously the heart is the source of emotion and thought. If you embalm me (assuming I was Staanses the First, a Pharaoh, or at least Stani the scribe) you could suck out my brain and throw it away but you better keep my heart in a little clay pot.

Therefore, we must remain intellectually humble. Our brains have no way of telling the difference between truth and error. We are genetically similar to the people who believed that the sun was a ball of flaming shit pushed across the sky by a scarab beetle, or something like that. We have the same genes (most of the same alleles too), the same brain lobes, the same brain circuits, the same brain chemicals, as they did. We are just lucky to live in an age of science.

Scientists like me can be as stupid and biased as anyone else. The difference is that we scientists have imposed a yoke upon ourselves, forcing ourselves to confront our biases and to critically test our hypotheses. It is a discipline that leads to truth, and without that discipline we would be no more likely to find the truth than anyone else. It is a yoke, but it pulls the cart of human knowledge through the mud of confusion.