Are luddites entirely wrong to question whether the advancement of technological know how is always a good thing? Is it even pertinent to ask that question, if humanity, absent higher guidance, can do nothing to put the "progress" of technology under sustainable control? Privacy will soon be gone. Freedom to tinker will soon be monitored. Access to anything smacking of WMD will be rigidly supervised. Technologies will avail categorizing of orientations of brain functions. Minds will not be read, but brains will. Political and commercial attitudes will be tested. TSA lines will appear far beyond airports. Freedom of expression and enterprise will be constrained to corporate like franchises and fiefdoms. The next world war will usually not be violent except when it cannot reliably be kept virtual. The high ground will abide in control over the internet cloud. North Korea launches. Physical violence will generally give way to science of persuasion. Freedom of thought will collapse, unless borders for islands of liberty can be sustained.
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Once national boundaries collapse, predators will establish territories and fire walls on the cloud. Generic fire walls will be accessible only to different layers and levels of elites. For hire hackers will take on new flavors. Different races, tribes, cults, and gangs will play defense and offense, preserving and exploiting firewalls and capacities to weaken or even eliminate entire levels of cloud use. Users will be required to sign on with two way cameras, verifying identity based on thumbprints and retina pictures and verifying need to know based on current situational context. People left without means of cloud communication will be one step removed from social collapse into barbarism. People of foresight and means will have shelters provisioned with essentials: water, rations, seeds, arms, ammo, gold, maps, books. Absent an assimilating prophet or poet, there's no way out. Until then, we have Yates: twenty centuries of stony sleep / Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle ....
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People are more than the labels for their job functions. The contractor does not always "exactly" follow the instructions of the architect. Sometimes, he/she does act as a minor architect. Yes, the blueprint may age or become blurry. More than that, however, the architect's specifications will often leave room for the contractor to choose among materials, sometimes based on cost, sometimes based on wanting to merit future work, sometimes based on durability or even aesthetics. So the specs will often not be 100 percent airtight, and there will abide numerous alternative ways to satisfy the blueprint. Still, I agree that one can assume the metaphorical contractor, like the physical environment, dumbly follows the arrow or direction of an originating source. And one can assume the architect of the originating source has, like Elvis, left the building. Indeed, for scientific purposes, I can see how one should assume there's no continuing input by the Architect. What I don't see is how, for inspirational purposes, that sort of assumption can be proved --- either way.
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That's where I think the crap comes from: In assuming that empirical efforts can prove notions that are simply not testable, either way. Example: Mormons notwithstanding, I don't see how we can test for what caused the Big Bubble in order to put ourselves in position to assert mastery over any sub-bubble or sub-universe of our own creation. I suspect the most that can reasonably be said is that epigenetics will not prove, disprove, render likely, or render unlikely, an inspirational role that is metaphysical. Regardless, as technological skills accumulate, it will be interesting to follow how the inspiring and stimulating of attitudes of optimism may facilitate the targeting of sickness and the evolving, unfolding path of civilization.
Mr. Lipton can be applied to bait scientists. However, I think his merit is less as foil to scientists generally than as foil to those who think science can do more than it's equipped to do (that is, to try to prove that genetics is closed to metaphysics or will). Nor can Science very well answer or inspire how an ideal society should organize itself. (Though Sam Harris seems to think mirror neurons may shed scientific light, based on a notion of testable "well being.") Nor can Metaphsyics answer or inspire how an ideal society should organize itself.
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However, metaphysical notions CAN be turned to inspire or to abuse. Example: My fundamental priority or construct for politics is based on asking what is needed to facilitate broad human freedom of expression and enterprise. In relation to that construct, I can reason my way to particular political preferences. However, when my foundation begins with a different construct, I would rationalize (or "justify") different preferences. For example, I could begin with a construct that there is no such an existent as freedom, will, belief, or even consciousness. Instead, I could consider that people should be treated as of no more value than inanimate, predetermined things. When I ask, What causes or should cause people's fundamental political orientations? I would need to say, I don't know, but I don't think it can be reduced purely to science.
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In any event, I think people have "little choice but to choose" formulations for moral belief constructs, not proofs, about how they wish to devote their lives. The person who claims to follow no stated beliefs will still zag about in respect of unstated beliefs (even if only out of predilection "to prove" that moral constructs are crap). Interestingly, such a debate about belief constructs would not be published as a "proof for oughts" in any reputable scientific journal, though it may very well be aired in a court of law. After all, Western law generally idealizes the notion of arms length, free thinking contractors or citizens. Ah, the idealized "reasonable person!" (Not to mention the notion of the dismal science of economics with regard to the "arms length consumer.") Maybe that's why law, economics, politics, and pscyhology so often seem the upshot of a debate between the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. Not to worry. No doubt, Sam Harris will soon scientifically prove what is best for us, so that we will no longer need to trouble ourselves about (gag) beliefs.
That there abides an ultimate, superior ("first") cause is directly apparent to the intuited experience of every self conscious perspective of will. Whether such cause remains completely retired from what it sets and bubbles in flux and motion --- to conserve and center about a quantitatively measured average of zero --- is not subject to empirical proof. This is because an inferior cause cannot in mortal logic prove the active or continuing agency of a superior cause. Rather, whether the superior cause takes a coextensive and qualitative interest in how events continue to unfold within such quantifiable degrees of freedom as defy the proof of an inferior cause is a subject for faith, belief, and intuition --- not a subject for empirical proof. Coextensive with any given context, one either believes such an ultimate agency avails intuitable guidance, or one does not. Regardless, one will make choices, and one will rationalize one's choices as believed to be "reasonable" to the identity, personality, and/or social orientation that one then and there or generally adopts. Such rationalizations will not --- except for concerns of trivialities or tautological proofs by definition or by a priori assumption --- be empirically or logically provable as "true in themselves." One who retains integrity either seeks to live a morally principled life, or simply rationalizes whatever happens to please one's prevailing glandular impulses. For that, the brain itself is a gland, while, at least to philosophers, the mind is supposed to be not.
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