Raheel Farooq

It doesn’t matter for physics if humans are living beings or machines. It doesn’t mean anything to arithmetic if your calculations are about earth or heavens. Science doesn’t care. It doesn’t even care if you’re scientific or unscientific in your beliefs.

That’s how all inanimate things operate in nature. From cross to hemlock, nothing feels ashamed when it kills a human. But that’s not the case with life. Life has a strong tendency to rebel and revolt against lifelessness wherever it occurs in nature and society.

Science is totally justified in what it does and how it does it. But we need to be rational enough to discourage humans trying to be scientific like physics and arithmetic. Humans are not inanimate. They know there is something else in nature and in themselves that defies death and dead mechanisms and they must have enough moral courage to acknowledge it.

Things are good only as long as they exist in their natural limits. Using a pen to drill into a wall will probably do something you can justify scientifically but not a hole at all. The pen doesn’t care, of course, but we do. We have other things to consider that may be more important for us than just science of the process. One may argue that we can also consider the other things scientifically and, hence, prove how prone and addicted we are to the abuse of natural limits of things.

Science, as a a rule, excludes everything from its considerations that is not shareable or communicable. This is what we know as objectification of knowledge. It has no room for experiences that are personal to you as a living being. What you know, experience and see but cannot communicate to others in shared terms is not scientific knowledge. However rich it may be, you have to be able to externalize it beyond your individuality for it to be science. Science, hence, is essentially democratization of the knowledge that could otherwise be and remain individual.

Information is the democratized version of knowledge, pixelated into bits that may never show the full and real picture but are readily digestible to the logic. It is shared and shareable but contributes nothing to you unless you internalize it again. The internalization may be purely on irrational grounds and often is but science doesn’t care as it is personal to you and beyond the scope of science once you take it in. Scientific knowledge, as opposed to information on one hand and knowledge on the other, is information internalized and compiled as a society. Therefore, its fruits are typically sweeter for society than individuals.

Turning knowledge into scientific knowledge requires it to be dehumanized. Objectification and democratization are essentially processes of removing the human element, i.e., discarding the personal, the individual, the incommunicable as subjective. This gives way to an ideal of humans without humanity which, in turn, explains why science paradoxically attempts at things like turning robots into humans and humans into robots at the same time. If that sounds ridiculous, it is not science but the scientific community who should be laughed at. It is them who are trying to equate knowledge with science and hence abusing both science and humanity.