A DIALOGUE ON THE HUMAN CONDITION ILLUSTRATING INCOMMENSURABILITY

 

BORIS BONDAREV: For 20 years of my diplomatic career I have seen different turns of our foreign policy, but never have I been so ashamed of my country as on February 24 of this year. The aggressive war unleashed by Putin against Ukraine, and in fact against the entire Western world, is not only a crime against the Ukrainian people, but also, perhaps, the most serious crime against the people of Russia, with a bold letter Z crossing out all hopes and prospects for prosperous free society in our country. …

“I studied to be a diplomat and have been a diplomat for 20 years. The Ministry has become my home and family. But I simply cannot any longer share in this bloody, witless and absolutely needless ignominy.”

—Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev #ukrainerussiawar #society

This post led to the following conversation between Mike Takac, an engineer, and myself on LINKEDIN:

 

MT: The best we can do in our modern day, as the world became a local neighborhood at the individual level thanks to technology, is to become a diplomat in helping to advance the evolution in global civility via the internet (a doorway to the world). 

Wars will continue, the task is to make them less bloody.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356475384_THE_SCIENCE_OF_RIGHTS

 

SR: If we rely on science and technology fixes, we're doomed. We may be doomed anyway, but science & tech fixes are not the answer. We are obliged to focus on social structural, cultural, and organizational causal forces.

Is there an evidentiary basis for your conception of "technology guided by philosophy?" This sounds like a tech-fix idea: The term technological fix, coined by technologist/administrator Alvin Weinberg in 1965, vaunted engineering innovation as a generic tool for circumventing problems commonly conceived as social, political, or cultural. A longtime Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, government consultant, and essayist, Weinberg also popularized the term big science to describe national goals and the competitive funding environment after the Second World War. Big science reoriented towards technological fixes, he argued, could provide a new "Apollo project" to address social problems of the future. Bejan's “physics is the science that covers everything” is an example of the "science fix" ideology. Society and Culture are sui generis and escape being FULLY comprehended by physics, biology, chemistry, or neuroscience.

MT:  Not only “Society and Culture are sui generis and escape being FULLY comprehended by” the scientific method; but also, “physics, biology, chemistry, or neuroscience” too cannot be “FULLY comprehended”. Hence, the evolution of knowledge. 

The flow to “FULLY comprehend” is the life of science to persist in time (to live) [Life], it must evolve freely [Liberty] such that it provides greater access [the pursuit of] to the pedagogic currents of nature via discovery [Happiness].

For the most part, discovery results in a partial comprehension of nature labeled as physical laws in nature often expressed in the language of mathematics, a branch of philosophy. The ethical application of those physical laws (“technology guided by philosophy”) enable humanity to fly above the clouds, switch on a Zoom session converting the world into a local neighborhood. A new variable in the human social and cultural equation, over the last number of decades, in the evolution towards global civility.     

The evolution of society and culture are dependent on ethics; otherwise, extinction is part of evolution. The key is to understand the science of evolution and the ethical application thereof.

 

 

SR: We can keep this up all day and we won't come to a consensus about our human situation. This is so even though we are committed, highly trained, intelligent students of life, the universe, and everything. The reasons are:

1. Humans are one biological species at a superficial level; at a deeper level, we have evolved into different species-specific niches;

2. Culture is a speciating mechanism; so we are trying to communicate across doubly species-specific barriers-biological and cultural.

3. So while it looks like we are using the same language and concepts and communicating with different levels of success, this is an illusion. We are operating out of incommensurable worldviews.

Offered as an experiment in abnormal discourse; presumptive, corrigible, and without absolute conviction.