The Science-Humanities Split

Perhaps you've heard: STEM -- Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics -- and the humanities -- art, literature, history, music, etc -- have split apart from one another.

Perhaps you've just read the previous sentence, and asked: Whaddya talkin' about, Steve? Was there some time when science and art actually got along?

Oh yes. The time was up until the eighteenth century, and can perhaps be seen most dramatically in Western civilization -- I really don't have much of a clue about non-Western civilizations, but I'm trying to catch up -- in the example of philosophy, and of individual philosophers. Up until a few centuries ago, the leading philosophers were also the leading mathematicians and scientists, and people generally took for granted that this was so. Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz were the leading philosophers and the leading mathematicians of their time. Newton was a leading scientist and mathematician, but he left scarcely a mark in what today is generally considered to be philosophy. The split seems to be beginning already in Newton's time. Kant, Schopenahuer, Marx, Nietzsche and the other most prominent 19th-century philosophers are not, to my knowledge, enthusiastically read today by most scientists. Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were prominent 20th-century mathematicians and philosophers, but they were very unusual in being both at the same time. In the 21st century, Stephen Hawking and Neil deGrasse and Lawrence Krauss Tyson have said that philosophy is worthless, without causing much of an uproar among their fellow scientists, which shows you how little you can know about philosophy today and still be a brilliant scientist.

My brother, an engineer, goes probably even farther than Hawking and deGrasse Tyson and Krauss in his ignorant dismissal of philosophy -- and that's all this is: ignorance. If Hawking or deGrasse Tyson or Krauss or my brother knew very much at all about philosophy, they wouldn't say such things.

This unfortunate split, this destructive antagonism between two vital types of human endeavor is not, of course, all the fault of the scientists. Those who have objected to the dismissal philosophy by prominent scientists have included other prominent scientists. And it's certainly not as if all philosopher, artists, musicians, poets etc, have a decent appreciation of STEM. There is plenty of fault on both sides of the split.

I've tried to bring the sciences and the humanities back together, but I could've done much more. I stopped studying math in school just as soon as I was allowed to stop studying it, after completing 10th-grade geometry. I usually had the best math grades in my class -- the only exception I can remember was in 9th-grade algebra. The teacher posted a constantly-updated list of the members of the class by our current grade. I don't remember whether A was 90% and up, or 94% and up, or what exactly. I do remember that it was possible to score above 100% with extra-credit work, and that the 2 of us at the top of the list were over 100%, and that I wasn't on top. That felt very strange, not being the best math student in sight.

That 9th-grade algebra teacher, and some other math teachers I had, talked to me very excitedly about how far I would be able to go in math. They didn't realize that I didn't enjoy math at all. It was my undiagnosed autism which allowed me to make those grades without trying and without being interested.

The 9th grade was 45 years ago. Since then I've made a few feeble attempts to make more progress in math, which, it seems to me, would amount to developing an interest in and enjoyment of math. I was talking to a math teacher the other day, and he said, You have to enjoy math to go far in it.

My brother was valedictorian in high school and got 2 degrees from MIT. He enjoys math. During one of those periods when I was trying to develop an enjoyment, my brother gave me his copy of the 5th edition of Calculus and Analytic Geometry by Thomas and Finney, one of his former MIT textbooks. He's a good brother, even though he is an appalling philistine when it comes to the arts.

Pages 355 through 362 of this book are missing. Did my brother remove these pages before giving me the book? Are there things on pages 355 to 362 which, my brother decided, must remain hidden from librul artistic types such as me?

I still haven't made that big breakthrough, to where I enjoy math. Although, in the past year or so, chess, mildly interesting to me already for decades, has become much more interesting, and a large part of chess, or maybe all of it, is math. (Well, no, not all of it. There's also psychology in sizing up one's opponent.)

And when people like Melvin Schwarz -- co-recipient of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics -- are writing about things like vectors, I actually understand part of it. So, hey, lookit that, I actually have learned some calculus! Schwarz also writes things like: "Electromagnetic theory is beautiful!" And I believe him even thought I still don't understand it.


And I still want to understand. So that I can enjoy math at last, and for many other reasons.

Who knows: maybe, if I understand things like advanced physics, I'll become much better at helping people like Neil deGrasse Tyson appreciate things like existentialism.

Stephen Hawking Thinks The Robots Are Going To Kill Us All

And that is certainly alarming. But what exactly should we be alarmed about: artificial intelligence, or Hawking's state of mind?

I've already written about how Hawking has illustrated Bollinger's Axiom on another topic: a few years ago he declared that philosophy was dead. Now he's illustrating it again with his Terminator-Matrix-type fantasies.

Let's look at some other cases. Remember Linus Pauling? He's one of only 4 people ever two have won 2 Nobel Prizes, and the only 1 of those 4 who didn't share either prize with anyone else. He was, like Hawking, undeniably extraordinarily brilliant, and yet, his greatest effect in the short term, still in effect now 21 years after his death, may well be due to some nonsense which he energetically plugged: he urged people with no serious health problems to take massive amounts of vitamins. In real life, using real science, doing so, as Sheldon explained to Penny on "The Big Bang Theory," only produces "very expensive urine." Pauling, with no scientific justification and no corroboration from any serious physicians or biologists, said that taking dozens or hundreds of times the recommended daily dosage of Vitamin C prevented colds, and that massive doses of C and other vitamins also had other health benefits such as the prevention of cancer.

Rudyard Kipling was sort of smart in some ways, I suppose -- they gave him a Nobel -- but he insisted that

"East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,"

while the meeting was well underway all around him.

Hawking, Pauling, Kipling -- 4 Nobel Prizes between them, many good ideas, some bad ones.

Hey, all of their surnames end with -ing. Maybe we just need to be wary of eccentric statements made by Nobel laureates whose last names end in -ing.

Eh? Huh? See what I did there? I'm very bright, and I just suggested a perfectly cuckoo idea. Of course I don't think that surnames ending in -ing are any cause for alarm, I only pretended to think so in order to illustrate what it would be like if I were to commit a blunder which illustrated Bollinger's Axiom.

And I'm sure I do make such blunders fairly frequently without realizing it, what with my being human and all, not to mention being autistic and dealing with a 99% neurologically-typical general population. Hopefully my particularly bad ideas aren't very influential right now, because I'm a nobody, and people will tend to judge my ideas more or less objectively, appreciating the good ones and rejecting the ridiculous ones. But if I win a Nobel or two, if Hawking, Pauling and Kipling are any indication, people might suddenly lose all of their critical faculties when it comes to my every utterance, despite my own warnings not to do so with me or anyone else, and simply assume that everything I say is pure gold. That would be a disaster in my case, it's a disaster in Hawking's case, it's always a disaster when critical judgment is suspended in response to any authority or for any other reason.

Anyway, all I came here to say is: fears of AI are ridiculous, even if Hawking suffers from them. AI doesn't even exist yet -- computers trouncing humans at chess isn't AI, it's just a combination of math and electronics. Cute little gadgets that vacuum the floor and self-driving cars don't qualify either -- and there's no rational reason to believe that, if and when AI ever is created, it'll go all Terminator-Matrix on us. One thing which IS dangerous is neo-Luddite mentality, and it's extremely ironic that this mentality is currently being fed by someone who is able to communicate with us and go about his daily life thanks to some pretty sophisticated technology.

Sir Stephen, some of the people who are heeding your call to be afraid, to be very afraid of the robots are themselves very intelligent, again illustrating Bollinger's Axiom. Some of the simpler folks heeding your call to panic think YOU're a robot.

Bollinger's Axiom

Just recently I learned that back in 2011 Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy is dead.

Speaking at Google’s Zeitgeist Conference in Hertfordshire, Hawking said, "Almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics."

And that doofus Lawrence Krauss shot his mouth off around the same time, saying that philosophy had made no progress in 2000 years, and then wrote an entire article in Scientific American in which he sort of apologized. Sort of. Krauss' case is somewhat more annoying because he claims to have a solid knowledge of philosophy.

Then again, to put that into perspective: Sam Harris claims to be a philosopher.

For as long as I can remember thinking about it I had always assumed that everybody was stupid about something. Then in 2007 I learned that I am autistic. Then just recently I started to wonder whether the dumb-in-some-areas, smart-in-others paradigm was not universal, but applied especially to me because I'm autistic.

Then I hear about what Hawking said in 2011, and I reflect on him and Krauss and Dawkins, all brilliant in their own fields and occasionally quite shaky indeed when they wander outside of them -- and the New Atheists in general, most of whom, unlike Harris, are actually competent in some field or other -- and it seems to confirm that I was on to something all along:

Don't assume, because someone is brilliant in one field, that they have useful insights about -- anything else at all.

I like that. How about if we call that Bollinger's Axiom, so that people can start mis-quoting it and mis-applying it right away and claiming that I think all sorts of things which I don't?