"Scientists currently view our whole identity as something we construct, one fraction of a second to another.You are the unfolding of an ongoing narrative." that's from this week's radiolab (a public radio show; this bit kicks in at 18 minutes). also, it is extremely typical of the approach of that show, and, i say, of our culture in general at the moment, which is like a giant game of 'science says': hahaha you believed that one but science didn't say it!' and, very very often if you thought for just one second about what science says according to super-bourgeois media outlets such as, say, npr or the excruciatingly banal new yorker - you would wake up and smell the horseshit. so i wonder how science has demonstrated that 'you are the unfolding of an ongoing narrative'.
amazingly, science has coincided with fashionable literary theory and selfesteem guides for white women (at least as they stood in 1993, when the scientists were in grad school) , yet again. so: no doubt they saw your self in an mri (it's located in the pineal gland), and when they zoomed in close, they saw the stories; oh maybe they read the little novels in there, or watched, second by second, your neurons portray characters in the movie that is you, or the little-bitty construction crew putting up the stage set and then nailing together the construction that is you, tearing it down again second by second and then putting it back together. (please don't understand me to be arguing for an essential soul or integral self; what i'm saying is, for one thing, that they're saying that science is saying things that it could not possibly test, in terms that cannot be clarified or rendered empirical. at any rate, both scientists and radio hosts are unbelievably bad at giving the meaning of, or giving a meaning to, the basic terms they're using, a deficiency which, tragically, makes the whole thing collapse like a...tower of mud. so: 'you are just a narrative you are constructing minute by minute': start by stating your conclusion coherently, son, in a way that could possibly be true, and then we'll get to how empirical evidence might bear on it. what is constructing what?)
so: this isn't unique to radiolab, though they do it all the time, and i'll grab more examples as we go on. i don't think that you should sit there going "science says that? then it is irrational to doubt it'. instead, think about the jive they're claiming science says and about how science as you understand it could possibly show any such thing. ponder the question of why science is confirming whatever's fashionable in the social groups frequented by the scientists or interpreters of science (the sciencesaysers). contemplate the function of Science as a marker of social prestige and claim to ultimate authority and as a sheer, and obviously irrational, faith. think about how you are being manipulated by the game of science says, and to what ends. think about the picture of science as a Person, speaking with a single Voice, and how well that comports with the alleged nature and purposes of science itself. cogitate about what you would have believed over the last couple of centuries if you believed what 'science says'.
show a little pride and resolve to regard yourself as someone who is capable of rudimentary independent ratiocination. stop believing whatever the authorities are telling you to believe, on the grounds alone that they are telling you to believe it. francis bacon and richard feynman would tell you the same, man. Science is to us what God was to the 'dark ages', and lord knows these are dark ages. science has proven that.
