The most anti-science belief you can hold is that science is religion

“Fringe”, “bizarre” and “unthinkable” when, for example, we rightly criticize a hare-brained professor’s thesis suggesting that the North American Sasquatch is a major driver of climate change or that Elvis is a perfectly acceptable expression that a science writer might use. Presley and Tupac Shakur are responsible for the kidnapping of Shelley Miscavige. Science journalism has work to do. That includes verbally bashing pseudoscience from academic fraudsters in order to protect the dignity of both readers and science. The store features diss tracks about science and is happy to lend its pen to such causes.

But when science writers dismiss a hotly debated philosophical theory in this way, one well-known theory about the possibility of subjective consciousness even in inanimate objects: panpsychism. Like doctrines, they would seem more like Victorian drawing rooms than erudite defenders of empirical truth. It is full of phrenologists who scoff at William James’s psychological concepts and declare that “there is no amazing evidence to support this theory.”

At least that’s what they seemed like last week, when Popular Mechanics science writer Stav Dimitropoulos offered a freshly nuanced report on the renewed public interest surrounding the philosophical theory of panpsychism. . Although grossly oversimplified, this theory suggests that consciousness is not just an emergent, scientifically inexplicable property of the human brain, as many currently think, but also the self-organization of nearly all matter. It is assumed that it is a characteristic of the system. The principle of panpsychism dates back to the earliest classical philosophical concepts of humanity, but it has evolved in parallel with science (and, as we know, theories in the humanities as well).

Its core concept has been proposed by Nobel Prize winner Robert Penrose, physicists such as author Eddington and David Bohm, and even William James himself. As a theory, panpsychism posits that objectively existing concepts (such as consciousness), which we have no way of actually quantifying, can only be produced by the sparks of neurons in the hamburger meat that become electrically charged between them. Time challenges us to consider whether featherless bipeds are thinking a little too primitively. our ears.

Panpsychism seems to be looking up at us from our species’ inquisitive past and asking: Do you believe that your primitive little frontal lobe corresponds to the skull of Zeus, from which springs the sum of all wisdom, fully armored like Athena? ”

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Questions of panpsychism arise when vague terms like “artificial superintelligence” are overused to describe black-box processes in computer networks that can be paid to be your girlfriend. I think it’s worth more than that embarrassingly tone-deaf laugh. Equally well-timed amidst the recent flurry of research on quantum mechanics, Dimitropoulos’s rather eloquent writing examines the current limits of theories in material physics and explores the humanities’ understanding of self-awareness and the role of the mind. We invite readers to find out what the brainiacs have to say. In a wider universe.

But judging by the frantic tone of the science writers who were quick to capitalize on her click traffic, you would have thought the article was a crayon-scrawled defense of Flat Earthers. Perhaps chopped into mutton, seemingly perplexed that philosophical theory might offer a unique interdisciplinary approach to questions that physics neither asked nor intended to solve on its own. A group of science writers has eagerly charged into the latest skirmish in a decades-long battle between philosophers. And physicists.

Over-the-top headlines and reckless body copy gleefully congratulate defenders of the scientist faith for missing the entire point of panpsychism throughout widely circulated and uninformed articles. But I don’t want to promote it any further.

It’s disappointing to see, but not surprising. A lack of curiosity about the possibility of consciousness has led to an anti-scientific attitude, even among those tasked with leading dispassionate investigations into an awe-inspiring world of which humanity is only a fleeting member. It is a characteristic of And to do this job properly, at all, to even go long enough to learn something about this existence beyond our own trembling ontological fragility, we must We must combat anti-scientific attitudes in the field, and even in our own field.

We should start with our own beliefs. To that end, the most anti-scientific beliefs you can hold are that the Earth is flat, that consciousness may be beyond human thought, that there is more to existence than we can quantify at the moment. It’s not that it might be a thing, it’s that science is science. religion. And if we treat science not as a framework for discovering the world’s possibilities, but like a religion, a framework that limits our interpretation of the world’s possibilities, we stop writing science journalism, and we stop writing science journalism. I will start writing a statement of defense.

When your congregation assiduously overestimates the epistemological function of empiricism in the study of logical positivism, you trap the conversation of science and consciousness in a fatally boring Viennese wagon tour. And in this way, it insults the dignity of both readers and science.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Salon’s Lab Notes, the science and health team’s weekly newsletter.