One might have thought that Pakistan’s super-elite universities would be different. Lums, the country’s most expensive private university, has a school of science and engineering built with American dollars. It appeared to have a serious mission but several Lums professors now openly deride scientific reasoning.
.. The distortions were clear to me, but when the professor poured a ton of scorn on Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc squared, my eyes nearly popped out and my heart stopped beating. What else could make an atom bomb explode, or a nuclear reactor produce electricity? Jinns, surely! But he is not alone in making such claims. The head of the biology department, in an email to the entire Lums faculty, excitedly claimed that reciting or listening to certain holy verses “can control genes and metabolites” and suggested that specially equipped audio-visual rooms be made in hospitals to treat terminally ill patients.
.. Perhaps to underscore its determination to shift away from Western science, last month Lums ousted Pakistan’s most highly regarded and respected mathematical physicist from his tenured position.
.. Paranormal and conspiratorial ways of thinking dovetail well with each other.
.. Rejecting science means you are spared the required toil, effort, and exacting mental discipline needed for learning hard stuff like math and physics. Besides, you might not even have the talent for it. It’s far easier to curse science than to woo it.
.. Pakistan’s universities should have been beacons of enlightenment, open inquiry, and bold new thinking. Instead they are sheep farms. A legion of intellectually lazy and ignorant professors wants a breed of students who will submit to authority, not question or challenge. Knowing that an invented bogeyman subdues five-year-olds effectively, they hope the spectre of unworldly creatures and fear of death will suitably frighten 20-25-year-olds. The newly launched jinn invasion of campuses means that Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual decline will accelerate.
The hard problem: What is consciousness?
Blindsight is occasionally found in those whose blindness is caused by damage to the visual cortex of the brain, perhaps by a stroke or tumour, rather than by damage to the eyes or optic nerves. Those who have blindsight have no conscious awareness of being able to see. They are nevertheless able to point to, and even grasp, objects in their visual fields.
.. Blindsight is an example of how brain damage can abolish the conscious experience of a phenomenon (in this case vision) without abolishing the phenomenon itself. Conversely, apparently full consciousness can be retained in the absence of quite important parts of the brain. One example of this is the case of a Chinese woman born without a cerebellum. This is a structure at the back of the brain which co-ordinates movement. The woman in question thus finds it awkward to move around. But she is completely conscious and is able to describe her experiences. Unlike the visual cortex, then, the cerebellum has no apparent role in generating consciousness.
.. In 2014 Mohamad Koubeissi, an American neurologist, was trying to hunt down the origin of the epilepsy suffered by one of his patients. To do so he implanted electrodes into her brain—permissible in view of her condition’s seriousness. When he placed one near one of her claustra and switched the current on, she lost consciousness. When he switched the current off, she regained it. When he repeated the procedure several times, he got the same result on each occasion.
.. Seeking an evolutionary explanation for consciousness, they suggest that an animal which can model another’s behaviour can gain an advantage by anticipating it. They further suggest that, since the only model available to a mind that wishes to understand another’s is itself, a theory of mind necessarily requires self-awareness. In other words, consciousness.
.. Previous research had suggested that most animals, when they see themselves in a mirror, respond as to a stranger—often aggressively—and seem unable to learn, no matter how long the mirror is there, to do otherwise. Dr Gallup found that this was indeed true for two species of macaque monkey. But chimpanzees soon learned that the image in the mirror was a reflection of themselves, and even used it as a person might, to assist grooming.
.. For the sake of this thought experiment Dr Nagel assumed bats have conscious experience of the world. If they do, though, he suggested that it will be built largely on the basis of a sense—echolocation—which human beings do not possess. A human might, Dr Nagel posits, plausibly imagine some parts of a bat’s experience, such as hanging upside down for long periods, or even flying. But seeing the world through sonar is ineffable to humanity.
LET’S ABOLISH SOCIAL SCIENCE
The difference between the natural sciences and the humanities is the difference between motion and motive. Laws of motion can explain the trajectories of asteroids and atoms. The trajectories of human beings, like those of any animals with some degree of sentience, are explained by motives. Asteroids and atoms go where they have to go. Human beings go where they want to go.
.. If you want to stimulate the economy, you can cut taxes and hope that individuals will spend the money on consumption. But they may hoard it instead. Such uncertainty does not exist in the case of inanimate nature. If you drop a rock from a tall building, there is no chance that the rock will change its mind and go sideways, or retreat back to the top, instead of hitting the sidewalk.
All human studies are fundamentally branches of psychology. That is why the great German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey distinguished theGeisteswissenschaften — the spiritual or psychological sciences — from theNaturwissenschaften — the natural sciences.
Dilthey argued that the essential method in the human sciences or studies isVerstehen, “understanding” in the sense of insight based on imaginative identification with another person. If you want to understand why Napoleon invaded Russia, you have to put yourself in Napoleon’s place. You have to imagine that you are Napoleon and look at the world from his perspective at the moment of his decision. The skills that this exercise requires of the historian or political scientist are more akin to those of the novelist or dramatist than those of the mathematician or physicist.
Quantum Theory Experiment Said to Prove ‘Spooky’ Interactions
According to quantum mechanics, particles do not take on formal properties until they are measured or observed in some way. Until then, they can exist simultaneously in two or more places. Once measured, however, they snap into a more classical reality, existing in only one place.