The Scientific mind and modern world crisis. (In search of an overall academic philosophy- part 2)

In my previous article, I talked of the absence of an overall, cohesive philosophy for Malaysian academia. This time the focus will be on a particular philosophy permeating academic realm,  pushing out alternative paradigms aggressively. Instead of bringing about cohesion, it divides academia and degrades it into fragmented chaos.

Philosophy is not a subject favoured by contemporary scholars. Any discussion bearing any abstract concept  would quickly be labelled "rhetoric" and not worth serious attention. What matters are real 'empirical' hard data. Swift judgement based on scientific data would be the hallmark of modern and sharp intellectualism. For academia, this is unfortunate. It creates the current crisis or paralysis currently infecting it.

Ironically, for all the low admiration of philosophy currently in academia, it embrace one particular philosophy religiously. Admit it or not, this particular attitude highlighted above originates from A particular philosophy that generally favours a specific scientific worldview that has served humanity well, to a certain degree.

 At the outset it can be described as a mechanistic, reductionist, and Cartesian outlook of the world. It was developed by Rene Descartes, a French philosopher in early 17th century, following the tradition of scientific revolution. Among others, it entails the breaking up of human and real world experience into small, manageable chunks. Humanity is viewed as a mechanical clock, which can be taken apart and tinkered with, hence the word mechanistic. To be fair, it is a useful concept that has greatly helped propelled humanity into the modern era as we know today.

 It is also called a reductionist approach  because in order to ascertain the cause and effect relationship of a phenomenon, it reduces as much as possible the factors at play. For example, to study the effect of different temperatures on human comfort, we need to exclude other factors that might also affect comfort, the subjects must wear the same clothing over the change of temperature, the wind speed must be kept constant, humidity too. Even cultural variation must be eliminated, the subjects must be from the same culture to exclude the effect of cultural bias. In short, the dynamics are reduced.

 For hundreds of years this philosophy has been the basis of scientific inquiry. Its power is evident in the giant leaps made by those civilisations embracing it. It can be argued that the western civilisations conquered the modern world through advances in science and technology which are the results of the method of inquiry framed by Cartesian way of thinking.

 Nevertheless, in this article, I would argue that blind adherence to it has caused the current crisis in Malaysian academia. A modern physicist, Fritjoff Capra has argued that the dominance of the reductionists mode over all others has resulted in notable modern world crisis, such as famine, war, hunger and poverty. (Capra, F. The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture , 1982). This is due to the reductionist approach that formulate the solution to a problem by excluding factors that actually contribute to a phenomenon.  Take the example of the thermal comfort study above. The reductionist approach eventually concludes six factors that contributes to human perception of their thermal environment, excluding other variables that also has effect, but considered too complex to be included.

It is considered a scientific triumph that the thermal comfort model, could universalise human reaction with the thermal environment down to these six variables. It was declared, that if we were to know exactly the values of six parameters of a group of human in a space, we could determine the comfort perception of 80% of the occupant. (The six factors are temperature, humidity, radiant temperature, air speed, metabolic rate and clothing level). This algorithmic model, named the thermal comfort model, developed by O.P. Fanger in 1970s, was developed with several subjects placed in constant thermal environment. The robustness of the model was proven in few similar studies. Eventually it is used as a standard design method for mechanical engineers to provide comfort in air conditioned spaces all over the world.

 All seem fine when in air conditioned rooms designed according to the standard, most people do not express dissatisfaction with the thermal condition. But Alas, come the energy crisis, when excessive consumption of energy resulted in socio-political and environmental crisis never seen before. We started to be very calculative with the use of energy. With 40% of energy use in a building is attributed to space cooling and heating, people start to question the validity of the universal thermal comfort model. It is observed that in countries where hot climate is the norm, people begin to wear European clothing to be comfortable. Jacket, necktie, socks, become a norm in countries where previously they were happy with shorts and cotton shirt. This signals that they live in cold climate. Upon scrutiny we would find that the newer generations in warmer climate are accustomed to thermal condition provided in air conditioned houses, offices, malls and even cars. Remember the experiment done by Fanger? It was done with European white subjects placed in climate controlled room. It seems the model has resulted in people adopting and adapting to those conditions. At the moment there is a lot of counter argument against the reductionist model developed by Fanger. It is not the objective of this article to go into details. But suffice to say here, the reductionists model has caused irreversible problems that currently haunting our civilisation. Capra went on to describe how this paradigm results in chronic modern age crisis; war, famine, environmental degradation, society breakdown, etc.

 Why so? Remember the reductionists model exclude a lot of variables to understand a phenomenon, and then proceed with inductive reasoning to boldly assume universal solutions, whereas the factors they eliminated, such as adaptive capacity of human, cultural response, from the model, in actuality are constant forces at play, being ignored due to the availability of fuel to provide a steady-state thermal condition, as favoured by those European subjects in the original studies. A lot of energy being consumed due to the blind adoption of this model. And energy crisis is not only a matter of paying your utility a bit more every month, it is now understood to cause climate change, erratic weather patterns, causing environmental damage, famine and even war.

Coming back to academia, what sort of damage could this have wrecked upon us? I would say, a lot. In my next article, I would attempt to describe the crisis that currently haunting Malaysian academia due to its infatuation with this philosophy.

Part 3 - Crisis In Academia

Zaky Jaafar
18/8/2019