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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 July 2024
“What essential things are happening to us in the foundations of our existence, now that science has become our passion?” The modern sensibility is still greatly disturbed by this question of Heidegger's. We realize well enough the great value of science and the benefits obtainable from industry and medicine. Yet there remains in our hearts a certain disquiet. What indeed are science and technology doing to us at the roots?
1 This is not to say that the choice must necessarily be left to a single person for the relative weights can be determined as an average over many individual rankings. (Provided however that no inconsistencies occur, as indeed they may according to K.J. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem).
2 I am much indebted to Professor R. Aris for drawing my attention to these researches.
3 This definition of "orderliness" is as applicable in physics, and I would think also in biology, as it is in the present context. P.B. Medawar (Encounter, September 1963) has criticised the view that the physicists' and the biologists' conceptions of order are the same; in my view however the same notion of orderliness can be used consistently in many fields provided it is not confused with the concept of "organization." The two terms are used almost interchan geably by many biologists, yet there would be a gain in our understanding of living systems if they were kept separate. To be sure orderliness and organization often go together, but sometimes they do not. This can be seen by comparing a crystal with a living cell; the former is more orderly but less highly organized than the cell. Similarly a primitive society made rigid by taboo may be said, on that account, to have greater orderliness than a modern industrial society and yet to be less highly organised. I hope to show the significance of this distinction in more detail elsewhere.
4 Encounter, November 1965.
5 What is discussed here is, of course, related to the Second Law of Thermo dynamics but has been expressed in molecular terms. The full relationship of "orderliness" (or rather of its converse) to entropy requires the consideration of quantum states and not of configurational factors only.
6 Freedom, A New Analysis (Longmans, Green & Co. 1953).
7 The notion of a "freedom function," taken as a summation over all possible preferences, each weighted according to its utility, has been developed mathematically by Dennis and André Gabor. (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A, Vol. 117, 1954, pg. 31; Cahiers de l'Institut de Science Eco nomique Appliquée, No. 2, 1958, pg. 13).
8 For an expression of this view by a physicist see David Bohm, Causality and Change in Modern Physics (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957).
9 Thus Levi-Strauss (Nature, 1966, 209, 10) remarks that in South America alone between 1900 and 1950 some fifteen languages ceased to be spoken: "Native cultures are disintegrating faster than radioactive bodies."
10 The Cultural Foundations of Industrial Civilization (Cambridge, 1958).
11 Science, Industry and Social Policy (Oliver & Boyd, 1963).
12 Economic Philosophy (Watts, 1962).
13 Symmetry (Princeton University, 1952).
14 Human Judgments and Optimality pg. 405 ff. Ed. Maynard W. Shelly and Glenn L. Bryan (Wiley, 1964).
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