Understanding the Present: An Alternative History of Science by Bryan Appleyard

Understanding the Present: An Alternative History of Science Reviews

• 
  Andrew Langridge

  This book sparked much controversy when it was first released in the UK in the early 90s, and the debate seems just as urgent some twenty years later. Is science following a path of independent natural development, or is it culturally and historically conditioned? Appleyard states his preference for the latter thesis, and goes on to argue that science has marginalised our value systems and caused us to become alienated from ourselves. His chapter about the impact of science on religion is particularly powerful. While agreeing that science often over steps the mark, I do not go along with his final recommendation that it must be humbled in order for us to become whole. I think his analysis is flawed by insisting that science derives its power from its utility, while omitting to acknowledge that it addresses our existential need to explain the world in which we live. Appleyard follows Wittgenstein in arguing that we are embedded in our culture through language and that the Cartesian separation of subject and object alienates us from this culture. This is well-said, but he must also address the nature of our relationship with the external world.
• 
  Andrew Boden

  Imagine you have a brainiac friend named "Science." Science can do amazing things: build airplanes, MRIs and dialysis machines; Science can calculate the distance to the centre of the galaxy, the weight of an electron and the carrying capacity of the earth. But Science's effectiveness makes him more than a bit arrogant. He opines that the universe is devoid of meaning. You and I are specks in a cold, unforgiving cosmos. Our myths and religions are the product of delusion. Our deepest questions -- who am I? what is the purpose of life? is there life beyond death? is there a God? -- are pointless, given Science's largely mechanistic view of the universe and our place in it. Writes Appleyard: "The scientific understanding as a basis for human life is radically inadequate, yet it continues to triumph. As a result, human life itself will become inadequate. That is what there is to worry about."
  
  Appleyard very compactly shows us how science's "spirit-killing hegemony" arose and how we can begin to reclaim ourselves.
• 
  Neil Rempel

  Read it twice, will need to read it again in the future.
• 
  Duncan Smith

  Well argued and insightful. Caused a lot of controversy when it first came out.
• 
  St Fu

  The argument that technology is the enemy of personal meaning has been made before. It's most forceful proponent's campaign to do something about it involved sending bombs in the mail to various scientists. Here I refer to Ted Kaczynski, himself a mathematician, and an author whose argument on the subject he coerced several newspapers to publish.
  
  Wait, you ask, are you equating Bryan Appleyard with the unabomber? Not really. I gave this book 4 stars which indicates I think it is important and should be more widely read. Bryan says in the book's acknowledgments (yes, I read the acknowledgements!) that its topic obsessed him over the years and the writing reflects this passion. His solution, presented in the last chapter isn't to mail bombs but merely to somehow humble science whose underlying metaphysics has infected, to our detriment,the way we all think. This book comprises his attempt to do so.
  
  I was originally drawn to read this book because I agree that science has an underlying metaphysical problem that needs to be addressed. Rutgers psychology professor George Atwood describes the problem he had trying to get his department to recognize that the subject he taught is about who we feel we are only to be told he should transfer to the philosophy department because that isn't science. (You can find this somewhere on youtube if you try really hard.)
  
  The argument of the book is that science, in a quest for a dubious objectivity, has estranged us from ourselves and undermined our values by pointing out that they are unscientific and untestable and thus have no truth value.
  
  Most of the book, however is a history of science from Galileo's challenge to the church up to today. He includes this for two reasons. The first is so that you know that he knows his science. Most attacks on science come from people who know little about it and are proud of that. On the right, there are climate change deniers and fundamentalists and on the left, cultural critics who see it as part of the establishment.
  
  The second is as a form of psychotherapy. You discuss a patient's history to show him how he came by his current disorder and to help him gain some distance from his previously unexamined beliefs by showing that they weren't always believed and were originally adopted to ward off perceived emotional assaults.
  
  I do think he applies Godel incorrectly. The idea that there are things that are true but unprovable within the system doesn't mean that you necessarily know these truths. I.e. he says "This appears to suggest that we have something a machine can never have—an ability to grasp truth intuitively in the absence of formal evidence."
  
  Nor does he understand how psychotherapy works when he says: "A doctor might come up with some hormonal explanation of your condition; a psychoanalyst might suggest an incident in childhood. But the point is both would be offering only causes, they would not be explaining or describing the feeling itself." Well, CBT sort of works that way but a psychoanalyst needs to empathize with the feeling. That we can understand the feelings of another is something he should be presenting as a truth outside of the scientific paradigm because, though scientists can talk of mirror neurons, they can't observe the conscious of another--what he calls the "feelings of greenness" from the color green.
  
  Similarly his argument that "we cannot think our way to purpose and meaning" is important but it would imply we can't think our way out of them either. He's saying that our values aren't primarily consciously derived; that science swindled us out of them (or is in the process of doing so.) So, did religion swindle us into them in the first place? Where did they come from? Did we just luck out on have a culture that supplied the right values until our luck gave out and science eroded them?
  
  Science also helped eliminate a lot of false values, like racism and sexism, and religion had gotten corrupted and needed a corrective. Relativism may have weakened our culture but there were parts of it that should have been weakened. Western civilization did lots of bad along with the good and if the pendulum appears to have swung too far against it in some quarters, it still is running the show, in part because of the help of science. The problem of values turns out to be a lot more complicated than he indicates.
  
  I have a lot more to say about this and topics like strong AI (Imagining machines can become conscious because they can be made to act like they're conscious is like the primitive belief that a camera can capture the soul of those it photographs because the pictures look like the person) and that's why I read books like this. I'm currently also reading
  Why Liberalism Failed which shares some of this book's direction, in particular the non-neutral nature of the scientific world view. I think Mr. Appleyard would like it.
  
  If you spend all your time in the language controlled parts of consciousness, you get a distorted view of what it's all about, as you'd find out by meditating, taking psychedelics, or having a stroke (see Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk).
  
  So, to sum up, many flaws but he's on to something. You should read it.
• 
  Rob Squires

  An exceptionally thoughtful and readable history of Western science and intellectual development. I would have given it 5 stars until I got to the final chapter where the author started spouting off opinions that seemed irrational and based on wishful thinking. In the end, our eye-brows should remained raised by the fact that Bertrand Russell is the villain of this book, as the author admits, because he didn't believe in Santa Claus. Sigh.