With some recent reading and reflecting, I'm getting clarity about issues I probably should have understood by the time I was 21. So, 50 years too late. Human cognition evolved under circumstances radically different from the ones we live in now, and people just aren't naturally equipped to function in this world.
Most of us do learn to get by in our immediate environments, although many not so well. There is a lot of unhappiness, conflict, bad judgment, damaging impulsive behavior, and just plain failure in a lot of people's lives, which I suspect was much less prevalent in the paleolithic, although obviously people tended to die much younger than we do of predation or disease.
Note, however, that our longer life span was only won in the past 120 years or so. It took 10,000 years from the neolithic revolution before people gained even a minimally correct understanding of how their own bodies work and why they fail. That knowledge, and other areas of scientific understanding, is only gained through many years of hard study, which also entail learning methods of inquiry and evaluation that just don't come naturally to people. I've had the benefit of that -- literally 22 years in school and decades of continuing study after that. I have had a hard time understanding how radically different my mental world is from most people's because of that.
The scientific mode of understanding the universe really originated in the 17th Century. The ancient Greeks made some early stabs at it but they didn't get very far and it didn't take. For me, Galileo gets the most credit. The title of his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems really has two meanings. Most literally, the "systems" are the solar system with the sun at the center, and the Ptolemaic system with the earth at the center. But they are also different ways of knowing. Galileo defends his solar system with empirical observation; his opponent defends his system through appeal to authority, and unchallengeable assumptions embedded in religion.
Many people today either reject scientific findings, or just find them incomprehensible and irrelevant, so don't even think about them. Children believe what adults tell them, because they can see immediately that adults know more than they do. So when adults tell them about Jesus or Mohamed or Moses or whatever, they believe it and once people have a belief system, they build into it every new observation and experience, and everything they newly hear. A highly developed belief system is very hard to shake. Confirmation bias means that people dismiss or don't even notice contrary evidence; motivated reasoning means they will use a veritable armanentarium of logical fallacies to defend their prior beliefs.
It doesn't help that the universe science has discovered is just plain weird and not at all comforting. Who wants to live in a universe that's 14 1/2 billion years old, in which we are absolutely nothing? And why would anyone give a shit about quarks and leptons and quantum entanglement? And now you're telling me that everything that makes my world livable, my central heating and air conditioning and automobile, is making it hotter and stormier and will eventually destroy civilization as we know it? Forget that, it's got to be bullshit. I have further thoughts about this but I'll leave it there for now.
1 comment:
And yet, there are millions of people who are interested in all of this information. Physicists, scientists, lay people from all backgrounds and professions. Perhaps in countries other than ours, they are not such a minority.
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