Old Business

And in elucidation of some of yesterday’s comments, lest, dear reader, you should think I was just shooting from the hip, here are some of my reasons for disparaging the strange bedfellows of Philosophy, Psychology, Medicine, Religion, and Astrology:

1) When science in the 19th century progressed beyond the ability of any one person to understand all of its details as well as the history of human questing for answers called Philosophy, it left the philosophers so far behind that today they delve deeply into amazingly narrow fields like the Philosophy of Sports (!) It seems it is no longer possible to deeply understand both cosmology and the human spirit.

2) Psychology has been aching to be a science since its birth from its parents, Philosophy and Medicine. B. F. Skinner tried hard to make us all into machines and modern psychologists try hard to control their variables and run their statistics, but they are firmly up against the mind-body problem and seem to me to be caught up in just another Glass Bead Game, although for the most part, I feel they are more in touch than your typical philosopher.

3) Aah, medicine. . .we are all so afraid to die or even suffer temporary diminishment of our pleasures by illness that we invest huge amounts of money and angst into our doctors. Many of them are scientists trying hard to understand us humans in a biological way. They are certainly more open to new theories than the psychos or the philosophes, but tell me, just HOW long is it going to take for them to accept acupuncture as a reputable idea? Medicine rejects things that work if they do not fit its theories, so I feel justified in calling it, to some extent, just another closed box.

4) Religion—always easy to bash. I am talking about organized religion, the systems of coerced belief that were institutionalized by the movers and shakers after Buddha and Christ and Mohammed had conveniently left the scene. Those three were not prisoners of the ideas of others, but their so-called followers are.

5) Finally, astrology—help! Don’t hurt me! I know and respect a lot of people (mostly women) who use this old system of beliefs to navigate through their lives. There are probably truths in the science of astrology (yes, science—it was an state-of-the-art science at one time about 600 years ago) but because the system was formulated well before the concept of experimental or even empirical science came about, it does not attempt to test its propositions. I can easily imagine that there might be a lot of predictive value in astrology, after all a lot of interesting personality differences have been found to be caused by birth order and timing of birth. It is not a whole lot more counterintuitive than a lot of modern psychological theories. So why won’t the astrologers run the experiments? They would have nothing to loose, it wouldn’t shake their believers even if the theories were found lacking.

Nuff said.