The Many Varieties of Scientific Materialism

[s~Z]

>>>But if these imaging studies are replicated, the results will mean that
the real enemies of paranoid people are their own brains.<<<

Most of us may not believe in the story of a Devil to whom one can sell
one's soul, but those who must know something about the soul (considering
that as clergymen, historians, and artists they draw a good income from it)
all testify that the soul has been destroyed by mathematics and that
mathematics is the source of an evil intelligence that while making man the
lord of the earth has also made him the slave of his machines. The inner
drought, the dreadful blend of acuity in matters of detail and indifference
toward the whole, man's monstrous abandonment in a desert of details, his
restlessness, malice, unsurpassed callousness, moneygrubbing, coldness, and
violence, all so characteristic of our times, are by these accounts solely
the consequence of damage done to the soul by keen logical thinking! Even
back when Ulrich first turned to mathematics there were already those who
predicted the collapse of European civilization because no human faith, no
love, no simplicity, no goodness, dwelt any longer in man. These people had
all, typically, been poor mathematicians as young people and at school. This
later put them in a position to prove that mathematics, the mother of
natural science and grandmother of technology, was also the primordial
mother of the spirit that eventually gave rise to poison gas and warplanes.

The only people who actually lived in ignorance of these dangers were the
mathematicians themselves and their disciples the scientists, whose souls
were as unaffected by all this as if they were racing cyclists pedaling away
for dear life, blind to everything in the world except the black wheel of
the rider in front of them. But one thing, on the other hand, could safely
be said about Ulrich: he loved mathematics because of the kind of people who
could not endure it. He was in love with science not so much on scientific
as on human grounds. He saw that in all the problems that come within its
orbit, science thinks differently from the laity. If we translate
"scientific outlook" into "view of life," "hypothesis" into "attempt," and
"truth" into "action," then there would be no notable scientist or
mathematician whose life's work, in courage and revolutionary impact, did
not far outmatch the greatest deeds of history. The man has not yet been
born who could say to his followers: "You may steal, kill, fornicate - our
teaching is so strong that it will transform the cesspool of your sins into
clear, sparkling mountain streams." But in science it happens every few
years that something till then held to be in error suddenly revolutionizes
the field, or that some dim and disdained idea becomes the ruler of a new
realm of thought. Such events are not merely upheavals but lead us upward
like a Jacob's ladder. The life of science is as strong and carefree and
glorious as a fairy tale. And Ulrich felt: People simply don't realize it,
they have no idea how much thinking can be done already; if they could be
taught to think a new way, they would change their lives.

(The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, Part 1/Ch. 11)