What say you? Speak up. Especially if you believe in something super-irrational, like science.
"In
Rostov-on-Don, a provincial city in the south of Russia, two men had an
argument in a supermarket. There's no footage of it, but we can imagine
the scene. The squeaky lino floors, the tinny sound of pop music. The
strip-lighting, buzzing as it casts a dreary mundane pallor on the rows
of produce, scrubs the shadows from the faces of the disputants, and
eventually drains all color from the flecks of blood. The other shoppers
look on first in exasperation, then in horror: the argument devolves
into a fistfight until its frenzy reaches a point where one man pulls
out a gun and fires several bullets into the other's head. So it goes.
What's brought this dull event to the world's attention is the fact that
the two men were reportedly arguing about Kant.
If
anything, transcendental idealism handily lends itself to a certain
kind of will to destruction. Like most very clever people, Kant had
something of a nasty smug streak. In his What is Enlightenment?, he
describes the unenlightened condition of humanity as a 'self-imposed
nonage': if other people are stupid, lazy, and cowardly, it's only their
own fault; leaders and tyrants only channel this mass stupidity rather
than imposing it. This is why he can write that 'freedom need not cause
the least worry concerning public order or the unity of the community.'
Against those who try to stifle argument, Kant proposes the dictum
'argue as much as you like - but obey!' Enlightened argument can only
proceed towards a singular truth, and if a ruler is himself enlightened,
then any argument that challenges his rule is by definition invalid,
with no place in a liberated discourse. Kant's enlightenment admits no
contradiction. There's a very short line from his veneration of
Frederick's Prussia to a man being shot in the head in a Russian
supermarket. The shooter was applying the categorical imperative
perfectly: if everyone who dares to be so clearly and obstinately wrong about philosophy gets a bullet to the head, then proper reasoned argument can begin, to the benefit of all humanity."
Hume
had a great effect on me. Basically he was a skeptic - a real skeptic
and pointed out a problem with inductive reasoning, that means that
every human has a set of beliefs that they believe for no other reason
than that they like to believe them. That's true of people that know
they are irrational, and those that don't.
The short version of the problem is explained on Wikipedia:
So all people are 'religious'. Atheists. Scientists. Skeptics. Hammer any of them and their bigotries rise to the surface.
The
other thing that had an impact are the Feynman Lectures. Feynman had an
interesting way of organizing the physical world and the lectures are
interesting from that point, but even more relevant to the topic of the
OP is every lecture Feynman identifies 3 to 5 things that could be
answered to win a Nobel prize. His lectures identify not just what we
think we know, but things we don't know. Watch the lectures with that in
mind and you will see how truly brilliant this guy was, and how poorly
taught most science is. Most teachers teach what we think we know and
skip what we don't and students form the totally wrong impression that
we really know a lot. With Feynman, you realize our knowledge is a small
boat on a vast sea.
As
you follow the lectures and learn more and more what we don't know,
this will effect you when you face almost any issue, where people will
be convinced that they have a completely solid case, and you will see
the missing parts and know it is a flimsy creation of conjecture and
hope.
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