aa5 » September 17th, 2018, 6:50 pm wrote:Something they so far have done a poor job on with science as a religion is talking about what (real) science can do in terms of heavenly advances. For example, some poor kid today is born with a growth hormone deficiency. And he would in earlier times grow up to be a dwarf/have disabilities, etc. But today with growth hormone injections he may be able to grow up to normal height and function.
A reason the older generations especially viewed science as godlike, is that science delivered to them godlike advances. The national electric systems, waterfalls right into their own home, flicking a switch and turning night into day, turning a dial and the heat goes on. The age old dream of the horseless chariot, brought from imagination into reality.
We are now in a period where the technological advances are cool, like cell phones and video games, computers doing things.. but they aren't so overwhelming in a physical sense. (in the way say the airplane was).
People view science and the technology of applied science as negative usually. Like I mention what a team of robotic AI servants could do for you.. and you know people are thinking of killer robots. Even pharmaceuticals, I mention coming products and people say, oh great the pharma companies can rip us off more.
„ Technical advances” were (and are) always (unfortunately or not) felt “cool” -- as well as all social changes foisted upon people by, or rather through, science, -- even wars. The noise was made as always by the media, as we call it today. I think it is a mistake to maintain the memory of our youth or our fathers’ youth in this respect. There was no “dream of horseless chariot”; but there were “dreamers” -- just as we have them now. Perhaps Jules Verne can be named as the first. (Dreams are real, but only in themself without any intention to become “true”.)
That how many lives medical (and other) sciences really save and how many they take we have no reliable account and will never have. But we can think about it… both in general sense and on given occasions.
[Modern science (to theorize a bit) seems to be an entirely “leftist” thing btw. It permits only social values. I wonder e.g. whether the official division now counts psychology into the “social sciences”. All things seem to tend to be incorporated in them.]
And again: whether the results (feelings, emotions) the “dreamers” achieve in people are positive or negative is just the same (AI is a “dream”.) (I don’t think “people are awakening”, in no sense of the word.)
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Kham didn’t mention in her list of Einstein’s (co-authored) papers his correspondence with Freud, published on the eve of Nazi’s rise to power (i.e. of the beginning of modern “anti-Semitism”), on Jewish things. – Maybe there exist other works of his as well contributing to the social fields.