Ştiinţa

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Joscha Bach is my intellectual crush for this most strange year. Fitting, since he is a most strange character. A distant descendant of That Bach family, raised by an eccentric arhitect/artist in a forest in the bad part of pre-1990 Germany (the communist half). His main domain of activity is Artificial Intelligence but after listening to a couple of hours of his talks/interviews i can safely say that he is one of those very rare types of persons, especially in the hyper-specialized world of today: a polymath. Or, in terms that he would probably like better: a beautiful nerd.

"A nerd is someone who thinks the purpose of communication is submitting one's ideas to peer review and normal people understand that the primary purpose of communication is to negotiate alignment and this purposes tend to conflict."

Joscha Bach

Happiness is a cookie your brain bakes for itself

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One of the most twisted and sick ways in which people choose to interpret the current crisis is that "we are the real virus and COVID is the cure the Planet has made to defend itself from us".

While the factual claim this stance implies (a self-regulatory Gaia-like Earth) is highly dubious what i find even more baffling is this self-deprecating conceptualization of humans as "viruses", "cancer", etc.

What underlines this ungenerous attitude towards our own species? I think that it is a misinterpreted and corrupted version of the Copernican Principle compounded by the ecological disaster we have inflicted on the biosphere.

This may seem a little far fetched since a lot of people endorsing this type of world-view probably never even heard of the Copernican Principle. No matter: ideas, (even from seemingly esoteric fields such as quantum mechanics or philosophy of science in this case) have a funny, and perhaps generally unhealthy, way of seeping into popular culture.

So what is the Copernican Principle? Quoting Jim Baggot's "Farewell to Reality": "The Copernican Principle. The universe is not organized for our benefit and we are not uniquely privileged observers. Science strives to remove ‘us’ from the centre of the picture, making our existence a natural consequence of reality rather than the reason for it. Empirical reality is therefore something that we have learned to observe with detachment, without passion."

Simply put the idea is that the Universe doesn't revolve around us. This is one of the starting assumption on which the scientific project rests upon since it's very early modern stages when that strange polish priest (Mister Copernic himself) wrote that strange little "book that no one read" ("On the revolution of the celestial spheres") and kicked us self-aggradizing apes out from the centre of Universe.

Subsequent developments in all kind of scientific fields have reinforced that assumption (organic chemistry showed that we are just regular "stuff", evolutionary biology showed that our ancestors are "microbes and muck", psychoanalytic theories suggests that we don't really know what goes on in our own head etc, etc). As Carl Sagan puts it: "Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with lesson in humility waiting at every stop." The problem is that many persons take this humble attitude, now seemingly endorsed but science and therefore made somehow respectable, too far and in wrong directions. Hidden masochists more than happy to glide on the slippery slope of self-flaggelation. Now not only are we, humans, really not that special after all: we are in fact the worse thing that ever happened to this planet ! (An attitude which paradoxically makes us special, albeit in a very bad way, and violates the principle from which it stems)

What Sagan said was only half of the story. Contained in the "voyage into the uknown" image is another, more bright and heroic, face of humanity: we undertook this voyage in the first place and we didn't shied away from it in the face of all the "lessons in humilty" we have been served. The very fact that this voyage was possible: that we desire to and that we are capable of, understanding and explaining the world should suffice in putting us back on a more elevated place in this strange world.

There are other arguments against the "humans as viruses" analogy but i am running out of words and patience.