Week 7- Duy Phung- Consciousness and the “Two Cultures”

We’ve never seen such an interesting debate like this week’s topic. The question revolves around consciousness and judgment. Wednesday carried on the Monday’s discussion on “first impression” judgment. Lots of people raised their hands, expressed their opinions, and sometimes even questioned the professors’ perspectives. While I was enjoying the atmosphere of this “hot” debate, I was disappointed with Dr. Scerri on many points.
According to Wikipedia, consciousness is “a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment.” Since consciousness is based on one’s feeling and perspective, it’s unique. While both Prof. Vesna and Dr. Scerri agreed that good judgment in making decisions was essential to our survival and success, they argued whether the first impression was reliable. Prof. Vesna believed that we should trust our instinct and intuition, but Dr. Scerri claimed we only make conclusion after examining and analyzing that matter. In other words, we should never rely on our instinct but hard facts.
Both arguments are neither right nor wrong. Since consciousness is subjective, one can’t really argue that their reason is valid and work for other people. In the other words, there’s no universal standard for consciousness. It’s understandable when Prof. Vesna said that most of the times she would go with her instinct to decide something. There’s no real procedure to create a piece of art. When you deal with art, you have to rely on your imagination and instinct completely. When a new idea flashes in an artist’s head, that idea is not a spontaneous process, it reflects the result of years of experience, hard work, and observation. Many of us agree that in a multiple-choice test, it’s best if we keep up with our first-time choice. We tend to rely on our first impression when we meet someone, then decide if that person is reliable and should we work with him/her. Whether you believe it or not; most of the time this method work rather well. In any given society at any given time in human history, trust is essential for our success while paper work is just a back up in cooperation. Trusting our instinct helps we pick out friends, who are suitable for us, choose the most important thing to do when there are many tasks that seem equally important, or follow an unclear path which might affect profoundly to our future. Most Nobel laureates, who are scientists, base on their intuitive judgment to decide whether the ideas are worth pursuing in their 30s and work hard on them later.
Scientists are taught not to rely on instinct but facts from experiments. When a theory or hypothesis is proposed, it’s vulnerable to testing. Scientists follow strict method and procedure to conduct the experiment that is posted by the primary researchers. If the experiment is repeated with the same result, it’s valid. But that is not the point. Over time out of thousand experiments that are carried out, if one shows different results than obtained from the experiment, the hypothesis/theory is discredited right away. That is why Darwin’s theory of evolution or Einstein’s general theory of relativity (GRT) although have been many years, they’re still theories, not facts. So far, these theories have been withstanding countless tests.
For example, in 2004, Gravity Probe B, a satellite-based mission, launched in 2004 to test related models in application of Einstein's GRT. Initial results from data have confirmed the effect of Einstein's GRT to a precision of 0.5%. Therefore, both Prof. Vesna and Dr. Scerri were not wrong. They simply presented what kind of “consciousness” worked best for them based on their fields of expertise and experiences.
Dr. Scerri was the first guest lecture who happens to be a scientist. He had been praised for his interesting lectures, vast knowledge, and guitar skill by his students. However, I was disappointed with him, not in his lectures but his point of view. While this class has been trying to incorporate and bridging ideas between art and science, he seemed to stick with the idea “to leave things where they are”. To him, science is about observation, experiment, and facts, etc… Science is measurable and unambiguous while art is abstract, immeasurable, and ambiguous. They’re independent and so can’t work well with each other, such as on the notion of progress, or reliability of first impression. He reluctantly agreed that progress is not unique but reserved his perspective on scientific progress. No doubt he believed science is the future, and we should have followed the standard of science. It’s true that science has advanced exponentially and achieved tremendous successes, but one should remember science not only about experiment and facts but also open-mindedness, a key for successful scientists.
http://einstein.stanford.edu/