On
the other hand, we have an evident tendency to deny the existence of what we
don’t understand. This is happening to our civilization with two concepts with
which we’ve got stuck, that we insist on explaining (away), but don’t have an
obvious solution: the flow of time and human self-consciousness.
In both cases, many thinkers of the last two centuries have said that both
concepts are illusions; that they don’t really exist. Let’s look at it in more
detail:
- In the case of time, as I said in another post,
two opposing doctrines emerged at the beginning of the 20th century: time
A (flowing time, where the past no longer exists, the future does not yet
exist, and the fleeting present has the only real existence) and time B
(or block time, where the flow of time is an illusion and all instants of
time exist simultaneously).
- In the case of self-consciousness,
materialist reductionism (a non-scientific philosophical theory) insists
on asserting that consciousness is an irrelevant epiphenomenon and human
freedom a simple illusion, as I explained in another
post.
In
both cases, common sense is clearly in favor of one of the two positions:
the flow of time (time A) is real, and human self-consciousness is an extremely
important phenomenon, rather than an irrelevant epiphenomenon. In both cases,
my personal position is in accordance with common sense and against the
opposite positions.
 |
| Albert Einstein |
Well,
no. It’s true that Einstein made important advances in science, such as the
two theories of relativity, and the explanation of the photoelectric effect,
one of the first practical applications of Max Planck’s quantum theory. But he
also made some serious mistakes, such as publicly adopting the theory,
widespread in the 1930s, according to which we just use
10% of the brain, while the remaining 90% remains inactive. The
falsity of this theory has been amply demonstrated by modern neuroscience.
We
could say, in Einstein’s excuse, that this failure took place on a subject different
from his own. This is true. But Einstein also made a major mistake by not
accepting Bohr, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg's Quantum Mechanics,
despite all the arguments in its favor. It’s true that Einstein’s attacks on
this theory were useful for its confirmation, but when he died, more than a
quarter of a century after the formulation of the theory, he still didn’t accept
it. And here the excuse that the topic was not his own is not applicable, for it
was an extension of the same theory (Planck's) that he used to explain the
photoelectric effect, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics. .
On
the other hand, when Einstein wrote in favor of the theory B of time, he
was also getting out of his own field and into philosophy. It is true
that time plays an important role in his two theories of relativity, but that
does not authorize him to speak as though what he was saying were
unquestionable, but without giving arguments, in favor of one of the two
philosophical theories of time.
One
of the foundations of the scientific method is this: facts
must take precedence over theories. Although your theory may be wonderful,
if the facts go against it, the theory must be rejected, not the facts. Therefore
we can say that, when a phenomenon is declared to be an illusion, i.e. when the
facts are denied, the scientific method is being transgressed. In fact, it’s a
confession of ignorance, equivalent to saying: As we can’t
explain it, it doesn’t exist.
No comments:
Post a Comment