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I'm not so sure I agree. I don't see anything particularly special about why people believe Alex Jones or polarize to creationism, racism, nationalism, etc. The
by jplayer01 7y ago
I'm not so sure I agree. I don't see anything particularly special about why people believe Alex Jones or polarize to creationism, racism, nationalism, etc. These are all well within the ability of science in all it's forms (biology, history, psychology, sociology) to explain. Their needs are well-quantified and analyzed in any number of papers that have been published. There's nothing new there, except the internet reinforcing existing behaviors in a novel way that wasn't possible before. But the underlying pathologies? They've always been there.
- zbyte64 7y agoWeren't philosophers a decade a go lamenting of how reductionist science has become? Like I remember going to college and the professors held a forum where they insisted that science isn't the end-all be-all for human existence. Weird how I disagreed with their analogies but I find myself agreeing with their point that human experience is not meant to be reduced to what is already known.
- jplayer01 7y agoAnd they (as much as one can generalize across an entire discipline) still do (rightfully so) lament about science and how it pretends to be the answer to everything. But that doesn't mean we're supposed to throw out everything we do know about humans through science, such as how they establish their beliefs or how they manage to persist or how these beliefs get tied up in identity, and what we continuously find out by applying scientific methods (such as how presenting facts can lead to reinforcing contradictory pre-existing beliefs).