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mmg's picture

Outside the boxes

Submitted by mmg on Sun, 02/01/2009 - 10:45pm.
I too (like others before) like this idea of loopy science as I do the idea of boxes within boxes as a representation for the nervous system. Both offer a way out/around the set ‘rules’ that science is perceived to be. I am concerned where culture and traditional outlooks come into play in these set of boxes. It seems as if certain truths or summary of observations cannot be neatly wrapped up, so to speak, and put into these boxes. To my mind, a lot of faith comes under this category. If not just religion, also faith or belief in authority – the way we take something coming from someone more experienced or such as true, without having our own summary of observations. I am a Hindu and most Hindus consider cows holy and don’t eat beef. I have never really tried beef to come to my own conclusion regarding its consumption. It’s a cultural thing, my family never had beef, I never wanted to eat it. While I am not saying that’s what the norm is, it is true that with matters concerning faith and such, it is hard to create one’s own summary of observations. Now, with science, a certain amount of distrust in the truth or existing literature is required to be able to make any progress, as we’ve been discussing in class so far. Yet, if we were to abandon the idea of truth, since it becomes hard to define, then science gets a lot more leeway to play around with many different ideas. Since a lot of scientific truths have been considered absolute truths, this will bring in an idea of abstraction to the field. And I love that, not only because it gives us more room to explore around, but also because the brain itself is so complicated and fascinating that it will be hard to pin down absolute truths for it.

In keeping with that, I also feel that we might soon abandon the input/output box model as we discarded the ones before it and move onto a modification or a new one - one that has some sort of explanation for contextual factors for indviduals (culture,faith..), and also to keep the loopiness going. :)

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