Book Review: The Methodology of Scientifc Research Programmes

Philosophical Papers, Volume 1: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes by Imre Lakatos

Research by Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida

Reading this book gave me the impression of re-reading Karl Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery, or a sequel to it. Lakatos is a student of Popper and the latter's influence on him can be surmised on this book. The title can be misleading as this book is about the philosophy of science, and it synthesizes highlights of history on the development of the physical sciences, how theories are built, replaced or modified, and the surrounding nuances on the scientific establishment. Whereas it discussed the significant differences on the Kuhn-Popper discourse, Lakatos provides an alternative model by proposing the nature/presence of Scientific Research Programs - which are actually metaphysical in nature and that which guides practitioners on how they carry out their tasks on their respective fields, hence, the fate of theories. For me, his proposal of Research Programs are part sociopsychological, cultural and part epistemological that enables science practitioners develop theories that build and guide them on their respective specializations. This book is a part of a two-volume series, the second however deals with philosophy of mathematics.

Quick Book Review: Consciousness

Consciousness by J. Allan Hobson

Lifting the flaps in George Bartisch’s Ophthalmodouleia. This 1583 book on ophthalmology includes flaps that allow readers to “dissect” the layers of the head and brain.

This remains as my most favorite book so far on consciousness and I'm biased because I own a copy of it. It's both a textbook, and a reflection on the the psychology and neuroscience of consciousness, packed with biological information and tidbits of the author's musings and experiences. Another aspect of the book that I adore much are the art reproductions (specifically surrealism), poetry and quotations at the beginning of every chapter. It's hilarious how J. Allan Hobson pokes fun at at psychoanalysis, saying why do so many people fell for this 'brainless approach.'

Though it's limited in scope considering the advancement in the understanding of consciousness in both its material and philosophical aspects, over-all, this book is a wonderful read. It's also where I gained new information on some scientists working on the topic by incorporating it on other fields such as physics, namely Roger Penrose, et alia.

On Spiritual Masochism

I would just like to express some thoughts on the matter of developing inner faith, or on making a personal resolve to be a devout believer in God. It is quite a common phenomenon that can be seen or felt, and it seems that having a glimpse of it through another person, one can sense an awe of other-worldliness, selflessness, humility, etc. but taking a closer look and you will see that there are those who profess religiosity but when they voice their beliefs, there is lack of humility or consideration of others' point of view, without allowing for any leeway or flexibility.

One can see this on certain preachers and writers and I'm not going to mention names. They impose self-denial, suppression of thought and expression, bigotry, and unconditional following on their points of view. I even read someone who said that in an ideal Islamic State, there is no room for the arts such as poetry or literature which would comprise as products of 'innovation.' This person even when to the extent of simplistically attacking canons of philosophy as if they are a bunch of morons. He imposes an extreme rigid form of religion by encouraging self-suffering, lack of compassion and love towards others, and then he goes on to say to his followers that God will redeem their suffering. Isn't this a form of double suicide? You go on a hunger strike and refuse to take any food while it's being offered to you and then you tell others that God will redeem you and reward you for your suffering, and that the world is a place of temptation equating it to the concept of woman? That this world is evil and thus it should be condemned as such? And then you see that person airing his own opinions with absolute certainty while condemning other teachers as heretics? No doubt I am slowly realizing that his works though they are widely read are in fact poorly researched, lacking in depth, and just plain simplistic and his imposition on the understanding of religion (Islam) is literal. If one will observe, he does not respect the right of others to express alternatives while staying true to the traditions, and to assert ones identity as an individual. 

One does not need to induce suffering to oneself in order to be a better person, or be near to God. If you are hungry, eat. If you are sick, seek medication. If you feel ugly, beautify yourself. If you are ignorant, seek wisdom. If you are physically weak, develop your health: exercise, breathe fresh air and eat healthy. If your clothes are old and tattered, buy new ones that are comfortable or suit your taste. Desires or the self are not demons. They are facilitators that correspond our needs as human beings. To the extent that they are destructive, reason and general ethics provided by religion are enough for the person to help her decide as to their level of destructiveness. There is no need to conflate desires with the devil unless you are dealing with perversion which is easy to detect. One does not need to compromise ones individuality to be a part of a community or a cause. One does not need to love suffering in order to be near to God. One does not need to shut ones mind and voice and let it depend entirely on a person's dictatorial point of view, whether he is a scholar or not. And I am not going to quote any verse or narration just to prove that what I am saying is 'true'. The reader has a mind of her own to find them or realize them herself.

Meaningful Questions

Beauty of Life

But love towards a thing eternal and infinite feeds the mind with joy alone, unmixed with any sadness.

- Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of Intellect

Book Review: Man's Search for Himself

Man's Search for Himself by Rollo May

In this book, I noticed parallelisms between Rollo May's insights with those of Erich Fromm, especially on the aspect of freedom and irrational authority. But the difference is, May's style is rather free-flowing and spontaneous as contrasted with Fromm's somewhat repetitive with rigorously referenced writing.

Condemning ourselves is the quickest way to get a substitute sense of worth. People who have almost, but not quite, lost their feeling of worth generally have very strong needs to condemn themselves, for that is the most ready way of drowning the bitter ache of feelings of worthlessness and humiliation. It is as though the person were saying to himself, “I must be important that I am so worth condemning,” or “Look how noble I am: I have such high ideals and I am so ashamed of myself that I fall short.” A psychoanalyst once pointedly remarked that when someone in psychoanalysis berates himself at great length for picayune sins, he feels like asking, “Who do you think you are?” The self-condemning person is very often trying to show how important he is that God is so concerned with punishing him.

May discusses the phenomenon of man's inability to deal with his own condition of being alone, the anxiety that causes one to feel when being confronted with the reality of having to deal with ones own existence within ones own context. The resulting fear, anxiety, and even panic of confronting this reality of being alone, or with people who do not want to face it when they call the state as 'loneliness.'

Loneliness is such an omnipotent and painful threat to many persons that they have little conception of the positive values of solitude, and even at times are very frightened at the prospect of being alone. Many people suffer from “the fear of finding oneself alone,” remarks André Gide, “and so they don’t find themselves at all.

...

And did not Spinoza's refusing to flee from excommunication by his church and community mean the same inner battle of integrity, the same struggle for the power not to be afraid of aloneness, without which the noble Ethics, certainly one of the great works of all time, could not have been written?

...

Man, furthermore, must make his choices as an individual, for individuality is one side of one’s consciousness of one’s self. We can see this point clearly when we realize that consciousness of one’s self is always a unique act—I can never know exactly how you see yourself and you never can know exactly how I relate to myself. This is the inner sanctum where each man must stand alone. This fact makes for much of the tragedy and inescapable isolation in human life, but it also indicates again that we must find the strength in ourselves to stand in our own inner sanctum as individuals.

He draws his insights from occasional tidbits with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Kafka, whom he considers to have been influential on his thought with regards to the condition of man. He also integrated key psychodynamic concepts which are essential in the practice of therapy, case analyses, and so on.

I am quite adamant, however on his overemphasis on matriarchal authority, which he blames as being a great factor for the neurosis of his young male patients. This is perhaps due to what he had analyzed based on his practice, but to pay so much blame on matriarchy at the expense of neglecting other factors, I see it to be biased for his part. The only portion on this book that might convince me of impartiality is his statement of considering social factors that would vary as per condition of each patient. Overall, the book is easy to understand and his insights are straightforward with brutal honesty. I can't say that it is rigorously written in academic style, but it is helpful especially for practicing psychologists geared towards the existential-humanistic orientation.

Book Review: The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology

The Revolution of Hope: Toward a Humanized Technology by Erich Fromm

This book is born out of the conviction that we are at the crossroads: one road leads to a completely mechanized society; the other to a renaissance of humanism and hope. This book is meant to clarify the issues for those who have not clearly recognized our dilemma, and it is an appeal to action. It is based on the conviction that we can find the necessary new solutions with the help of reason and passionate love for life, and not through irrationality and hate. It is addressed to a broad spectrum of readers with different political and religious concepts but sharing this concern for life and respect for reason and reality.

This book, like all my previous work, attempts to distinguish between individual and social reality and the ideologies that misuse and “coopt” valuable ideas for the purpose of supporting the status quo.

– Erich Fromm, in the Foreword

It came as a surprise to me to have found this little book not from the psychology section, but from the philosophy section at the library, with a title which is less discussed compared to his more popular works namely the Sane Society or Escape from Freedom. And it has something unique in it in addition to the resonating themes found from the two aforementioned titles – Hope.

This book begins by looking into the phenomenon of hope, what it is and what it is not. For it is through this notion of hope that Fromm will then connect the crucial issues that affect modern man– the phenomenon of technological advancement and its effects on man. Through the lens of hope, a productive anticipation is based not only towards the future but also by focusing on the present. 

What is it to hope?

Is it, as many think, to have desires and wishes? If this were so, those who desire more and better cars, houses, and gadgets would be people of hope. But they are not; they are people lusty for more consumption and not people of hope.

Is it to hope if hope’s object is not a thing but a fuller life, a state of greater aliveness, a liberation from eternal boredom; or to use a theological term, for salvation, or a political term, for revolution? Indeed this kind of expectation could be hope; but it is non-hope if it has the quality of passiveness, and “waiting for”—until the hope becomes, in fact, a cover for resignation, a mere ideology.

pp.6

This kind of passive hope is closely related to a generalized form of hope, which might be described as hoping for time. Time and the future become the central category of this kind of hope. Nothing is expected to happen in the now but only in the next moment, the next day, the next year, and in another world if it is too absurd to believe that hope can be realized in this world. Behind this belief is the idolatry of “Future,” “History,” and “Posterity,”… I do nothing; I remain passive, because I am nothing and impotent; but the future, the projection of time, will bring about what I cannot achieve.

pp.8

And even if he tackles the phenomenon of hope, Fromm takes a realistic critique of what it actually means to hope, his critique of society and its destructive effects on the individual cannot actually have been truer until today. Scanning through his words makes one realize or re-affirm observations of how alienated people and society had become from the values of what it means to be human instead of being a cog in the machine.

This society produces many useless things, and to the same degree many useless people. Man, as a cog in the machine, becomes a thing, and ceases to be human. He spends his time doing things in which he is not interested, with people in whom he is not interested, producing things in which he is not interested; and when he is not producing, he is consuming.

pp.38

Among the technological society’s pathogenic effects upon man, two or more must be mentioned: the disappearance of privacy and of personal human contact.

pp.45

Man is caught up in the endless entrenchment of cultural mores and technological instruments to the extent that his awareness of what matters to him the most as a human being are either blocked off, forgotten, or no longer given importance which eventually lead to alienation, loss of hope, and dehumanization. But,

…some people, while unconsciously they have turned into things, carry unconsciously a sense of their identity precisely because the social process has not succeeded in transforming them completely into things.

pp.84

Whereas man is supposed to be the benefactor of these instruments that he made and that the inherited values from religions are meant to the actualization of his humanity, the loss of hope and alienation had turned him into a slave of these very things that he constructed to the extent that he does not know and has lost grasp of what matters to him or cannot move beyond what society expects of him, all the while being utterly powerless to change the situation for the better. Two results can occur when hope is shattered: either the loss of dependence to others or destructiveness,

It is not primarily the economic frustration which leads to hate and violence; it is the hopelessness of the situation, the ever repeated broken promises, which are just as conducive to violence and destructiveness.

pp. 21-22

With regards to computer technology, here is an insight which is also found on his other work, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness where he expanded the concept of Necrophilia even further to the attraction of man to non-living things such as robotics/AI:

One symptom of the attraction of the merely mechanical is the growing popularity, among some scientists and the public of the idea that it will be possible to construct computers which are no different from man in thinking, feeling, or any other aspect of functioning… One cannot help being suspicious that often the attraction of the computer-man idea is the expression of a flight from life and humane experience into the mechanical and purely cerebral.

pp.43

The computer can serve the enhancement of life in many respects. But the idea that it replaces man and life is the manifestation of the pathology of today.

pp.44

This work is divided into the discussion of hope and its various manifestations: faith, fortitude, resurrection, messianic hope and the shattering of hope; the dehumanized society (AD 2000) and the present technological society (during the time the book was published, on 1968); what it means to be human; suggested steps to the humanization of technological society; and a proposed movement.

As a whole, this book is a means of personal re-affirmation especially to those who are becoming increasingly wary of the present times: the increased use of gadgets with the compulsion to use them, the loss of genuine human connectedness in daily life, the mixed effects of technology on daily life alongside its benefits and its threats to human existence i.e. nuclear weapons, the reduction of human beings to instruments of production or objects of consumption/gratification, the loss of humanity by constant bombardment, destruction and humiliation of human life and dignity by it being reduced to headlines, pictures, videos and forms of entertainment, and the list goes on.

They constantly need the stimulus from the outside, be it other people’s chatter, or the sight of movies, or travel and other forms of thrilling consumption excitements, even if it is only a new man or woman as sexual partner. They need to be prompted, to be “turned on,” tempted, seduced. They always run and never stand. They always “fall for” and never get up. And they imagine themselves to be immensely active while they are driven by the obsession to do something in order to escape the anxiety that is aroused when they are confronted with themselves.

pp.12

Erich Fromm’s work is not a feel-good psychology or philosophy book, it is words describing life in the raw, a refreshing and truthful critique of society and its superficiality and hypocrisies, and how it disrespects the individual human being and eventually the whole of humanity. Regardless of what belief, religion, or ideology one has, one can definitely agree that when it comes to human life and dignity, one has to make the conviction that it should not be used as a means to an end.

The critique took almost the entire book, but Fromm suggested a concrete solution, which is far more suited on the American context. Perhaps, this is the weakest point in the book because of its culture-specific dimension.

Another weak point is the lack of directive approach on how to achieve a passionate love for life when it is clear that modern man is faced with a lot of obstacles that are beyond his control. How to achieve the kind of productive hope or love that this book envisions cultivating in man’s heart which would transcend beyond the obvious societal ills discussed is, what I think, the challenge to the reader himself.

Las Meninas

This metropolitan world, then, is a world where flesh and blood is less real than paper and ink and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship. Living thus, year in and year out, at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no less remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets - living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological. They become victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior. 

- Lewis Mumford

Confidence