Skeptical Inquirer has some very deep thoughts in this months issue regarding culture and the way the brain works. Is science making us more ignorant?

“But even if everyone were scientifically informed, that would not keep us from being ignorant in the following sense. We still might be lost, in that we might not have a reasonable grasp of basic issues like these: What are we? Why are we here? How are we related to nature? Why is this world here rather than some other world or “nothing at all?” What can we know? What can we hope for?”

“Throughout most of human history, people have gotten a handle on such questions by way of common sense, religion, philosophy, literature and art, educational and civil institutions, and assumptions embedded in natural language itself—in short, by way of their culture. Of course, a single culture might contain many, sometimes conflicting, answers. Nevertheless, there is such a thing as a cultural understanding of our basic outlook on the world and our place in it.”

So why has this changed? It may surprise you to learn that as you are reading this, the deepest mysteries of how the brain works are being unraveled. We may soon have knowledge that will explain consciousness itself:

“Now, neuroscience is probing the brain and behavior and discovering some startling facts. By observing electrical activity around your hippocampus on a computer screen, others can predict more accurately than you can whether you will successfully recall the name of a person you just met. Meanwhile, the neural activity associated with a choice appears to precede your conscious experience of that choice. This is just the beginning. Do these facts contradict the received cultural understanding of the self? Do they reinforce it? Or are they not facts about the self at all but about something else?”

This sense of “self” is being lost because the advance of scientific knowledge is making cultural explanations of it irrelevant. And these same advances are inadequate in answering the questions asked above. I’m sure I’d get an excellent argument on this from my more religious friends, but what are we going to do when we’re finally able to empirically determine what constitutes “reality” itself? What will happen to our sense of self?

One possible outcome will be a melding of the cultural and the scientific. Our friends at Skeptical Inquirer believe it will be some kind of scientific discipline that incorporates the humanities (art, literature, criticism) into an interdisciplinary relationship with a variety of scientific fields:

“A new interdisciplinary academic field is needed. The Center for Inquiry, a nonprofit research organization concerned with the scientific outlook, is collaborating with the University at Buffalo on a program in Science and the Public, which will initially include research and an interdisciplinary MasterÂ’s degree. [5] The program is being designed to attract scholars in the sciences and humanities, as well as educators, policy makers, and journalists who seek a new language and framework in which to discuss the intersections of science and culture.”

For most of the 20th century, there was a longing on the part of humanists to merge science and philosophy. Orwell, H.G. Wells, and C.P. Snow, among others, saw science as a vehicle to explain things that were fundamental to the human condition.

Unfortunately, so did the Third Reich. By using “science” to justify the holocaust (the idea of racial purity was based on the crackpot ideas of some discredited 19th century scholars) Hitler’s Germany demonstrated how the underpinnings of such a merger could be extraordinarily damaging.

The difference here is that the basis for the melding of science and the humanities would rest on sound scientific principles. If these efforts are successful, perhaps sometime in the near future, there will be an answer to the question: Who are we?

UPDATE: ON THE RUN FROM THE COMSYMPS

The Commissar has issued another edict from Party Headquarters and his commie goons are in the process of one of their regular “sweeps” of right wing blogs. As you all know, the commie bastard just got finished with his most heinous show trial yet as he wrote the name of his patrone across the sky in blood. He is audacity itself.

I’m getting very tired now…I haven’t eaten for three days and barely slept for twice that long. My neighbors shun me, my friends ignore me, my compatriots…killed or arrested. These are dark days for the resistance indeed. Even my own family has abandoned me by joining the conspiracy against me.

What am I to do? Should I turn myself in? Should I turn and fight? What chance do I have against the power of the State wielded with such ruthless efficiency and heartless abandon? My tears fall to the ground partially obscuring my bloody footprints as a look to the sky and cry out in frustration and rage…

YOU CAN TAKE AWAY MY LIFE…BUT YOU CAN NEVER TAKE MY FREEEEEEDOOOOOM! ARMAUGH GO BRAUGH!

The dogs are getting very close now…I can hear them baying in anticipation of the kill. I put the gun to my head. Before I pull the trigger on my 9mm Makarov, I think of my home, my family, my dog, my cat, the first time I had sex, that day in the park when Nikolai professed his love for me, that time at the bar when Misha insulted me and I had to belt him, the first time I heard the Beatles…

(OH FOR GOD’S SAKE PULL THE TRIGGER ALREADY YOU MORON!)