Recently, I've been reading the fascinating book, Paradoxical Life : Meaning, Matter, and the Power of Human Choice by Andreas Wagner. It's definitely a must-read. But the chapter on human choice about perspectives in science reminded me the discussion we had in a humanities class I took in my freshmen year, so I thought it is worth writing about.
Since the day humans have concluded that they are the only living beings with consciousness, we have associated the idea of being human with the idea of being unique, and being at the center of the universe. I guess it's due to the narcissism of being human, we have never considered the possibility that there may be a form of life which deserves to be more unique, and not yet discovered because of the limitations of our observational capabilities. At this point, it's worth to mention the three great breakthroughs in history, which disappointed the human race on their uniqueness very deeply. Each and every of these breakthroughs were accomplished by human choice, a choice about scientific perspective, as Wagner argues in his book. What Wagner says is that the sufficient evidence for a scientific theory may be present and ready for interpretation for centuries; but it takes courage, courage to choose, to interpret them in a novel way. Humans bred animals and plants, observed the diversities and similarities between species for centuries before Darwin. Physicists measured the speed of light and tried to explain why it stays constants for any frame of reference before Einstein. But those giants took the courage to choose a completely different perspective to look at the present data, considering the possibilities of being wrong, discouraged, or abandoned and humiliated by the scientific societies.
Since the day humans have concluded that they are the only living beings with consciousness, we have associated the idea of being human with the idea of being unique, and being at the center of the universe. I guess it's due to the narcissism of being human, we have never considered the possibility that there may be a form of life which deserves to be more unique, and not yet discovered because of the limitations of our observational capabilities. At this point, it's worth to mention the three great breakthroughs in history, which disappointed the human race on their uniqueness very deeply. Each and every of these breakthroughs were accomplished by human choice, a choice about scientific perspective, as Wagner argues in his book. What Wagner says is that the sufficient evidence for a scientific theory may be present and ready for interpretation for centuries; but it takes courage, courage to choose, to interpret them in a novel way. Humans bred animals and plants, observed the diversities and similarities between species for centuries before Darwin. Physicists measured the speed of light and tried to explain why it stays constants for any frame of reference before Einstein. But those giants took the courage to choose a completely different perspective to look at the present data, considering the possibilities of being wrong, discouraged, or abandoned and humiliated by the scientific societies.
I guess best way to mention these three great wounds of human history, carved by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, is to give the floor to Sigmund Freud himself first. It is also worth to mention the impressive paragraph from the book Life's Ratchet : How molecular machines extract order from chaos, by Peter M. Hoffmann.
“Humanity has in the course of time had to endure from the hands of science two great outrages upon its naive self-love. The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, although Alexandrian doctrines taught something very similar. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries. But man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind. We psycho-analysts were neither the first nor the only ones to propose to mankind that they should look inward; but it appears to be our lot to advocate it most insistently and to support it by empirical evidence which touches every man closely.”
- Sigmund Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis
“In our belief that we are the center of the universe, we have assumed much, just to be proven wrong time and again: No, the solar system does not revolve around Earth. No, the universe does not end beyond Pluto, or even beyond our Milky Way galaxy, but it is much bigger than we ever thought, full of stars in some places, but for the most part filled with staggering emptiness. No, there is no special life force—our bodies are part of nature, run by molecules. And no, we are not a separate creation from all the other animals, but are their close cousins—all, including ourselves, historical accidents of evolution. In short, we are lucky to be here.”
- Peter M. Hoffman, Life's Ratchet : How molecular machines extract order from chaos
