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from the smeared-electrons-and-live/dead-cats dept.
Review of a couple of recent publications, in The Boston Review
People are gullible. Humans can be duped by liars and conned by frauds; manipulated by rhetoric and beguiled by self-regard; browbeaten, cajoled, seduced, intimidated, flattered, wheedled, inveigled, and ensnared. In this respect, humans are unique in the animal kingdom.
Aristotle emphasizes another characteristic. Humans alone, he tells us, have logos: reason. Man, according to the Stoics, is zoön logikon, the reasoning animal. But on reflection, the first set of characteristics arises from the second. It is only because we reason and think and use language that we can be hoodwinked.
We'll get to the quantum mechanics in a bit.
The two books under consideration here bring the paradox home, each in its own way. Adam Becker's What Is Real? chronicles the tragic side of a crowning achievement of reason, quantum physics. The documentarian Errol Morris gives us The Ashtray, a semi-autobiographical tale of the supremely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) by Thomas S. Kuhn. Both are spellbinding intellectual adventures into the limits, fragility, and infirmity of human reason. Becker covers the sweep of history, from the 1925 birth of the "new" quantum physics up through the present day.
So, verifiable, experimental, experienced proof?
Not only can people be led astray, most people are. If the devout Christian is right, then committed Hindus and Jews and Buddhists and atheists are wrong. When so many groups disagree, the majority must be mistaken. And if the majority is misguided on just this one topic, then almost everyone must be mistaken on some issues of great importance. This is a hard lesson to learn, because it is paradoxical to accept one's own folly. You cannot at the same time believe something and recognize that you are a mug to believe it. If you sincerely judge that it is raining outside, you cannot at the same time be convinced that you are mistaken in your belief. A sucker may be born every minute, but somehow that sucker is never oneself.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by requerdanos on Friday June 08 2018, @10:47PM (1 child)
It's the other way around--It is because we reason and think that we can hoodwink others.
We can hoodwink reasoning people, sure.
But we can also, for example, mix fipronil with peanut butter and hoodwink ants who take the yummy peanut butter home and feed it to the whole anthill, which then dies.
Because we are reasoning people, we can hoodwink game animals by spraying inanimate objects with "fragrance of female game animal who is interested in you" so that they come out into the open where we can shoot them.
I don't think Aristotle would argue that game animals are reasoning beings, much less ants.
Anyone who argues that only reasoning beings can be hoodwinked isn't paying much attention.
And if they argue that, and then use that egregious error to demonstrate their special knowledge of science, for example, or of religion, you should run. And hold on to your wallet.
Someone who was mostly very wrong once said:
Word.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday June 08 2018, @11:11PM
> Humans alone, he tells us, have logos: reason. Man, according to the Stoics, is zoön logikon, the reasoning animal.
I'm pretty sure that that seagull I saw at lunch today, hanging out next to the kids having fries would disagree. Cars passing by two feet away? Classified as harmless as long as it's close enough to the tables...
And that's not even talking about tool-making crows and apes, pets, trained animals, dolphins, and the smartest mathematician on the planet, who's happy to be a camel so it can spit on and kick humans.