This is something of a follow up to the last post -- at the not-Buddhist blog Balloon Juice (I love blog names), Tim F., a biologist, writes about not knowing from a scientific point of view.
He describes submitting a paper for peer review and having it rejected. His and several other labs had reported the same findings. But two reviewers declared the findings must be wrong, because "It violates what we already know are universal rules about how (this bit of) life works!"
He goes on to say, "Ask a leading expert in any field and you will hear the same thing: we only barely understand how much we do not know." Yet very "rational" people insist that new findings must conform to what we know we know, or else they must be wrong.
I enjoyed this quote:
"Every aspect of life is still ruled by invisible, inchoate forces. The ones we understand have underlying causes that we do not even know we do not understand yet. In fact, to put a finer point on it, just about every leading expert made his or her name by proving that the fixed rules that previously governed the rational world were either wrong or incomplete."
Tim F. also discusses vitalism, which is a very old belief in a non-physical something that that animates a living being, This something is not necessarily a soul or spirit, but neither is it something that can be accounted for by physical properties alone. Here is Tim F's perspective:
"In that sense we need vitalism precisely because it is illogical; it is an intellectual memento mori that gently prods us to keep a grain of humility in the midst of triumph."
Do read the whole post; it's not very long. After spending time with "rational" people who quickly dismiss things they don't understand as "superstition" and "hocus pocus," it's nice to see someone acknowledge that we all need to acknowledge that we don't know what we don't know.
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