for - key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - adjacency - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - climate denialism - mistrust in science - polycrisis - Deep Humanity

• the worry for Goethe and whitehead is that
  • we forget sometimes with the typical scientific method that = we can only ever apply concepts derived from our empirical experience
• and so if we're trying to understand experience as if it were really
  • an illusion produced by
    • collisions of particles or
    • brain chemistry or
    • something that we can never in principle experience
• what we're doing is
  • applying concepts derived from our experience
  • to an imagined realm that
    • we think is beyond experience
• but it's not
• This is Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

key insight - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness - This helps explain the rising rejection of science from the masses. I didn't realize there was already a name for the phenomena responsible for the emergence of collective denialist behavior

adjacency - between - fallacy of misplaced concreteness - increasing collective rejection of science in the polycrisis - adjacency statement - Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness exactly names and describes - the growing trend of a populus rejection of climate science (climate denialism), COVID vaccine denialism, exponential growth of conspiracy theory and misinformation - because of the inability for non-elites and elites alike to concretize abstractions the same way that elite scientists and policy-makers do - Research papers have shown that the knowledge deficit model which was relied upon for decades was not accurate representation of climate denialism - Yet, I would hold that Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concretism plays a role here - This mistrust in science is rooted in this fallacy as well as progress traps - Deep Humanity is quite steeped in Whitehead's process relational ontology and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness requires mass education for a sustainable transition - This abstract concreteness is everywhere: - Shift from Ptolemy's geocentric worldview to the Copernican heliocentric worldview - Now we are told that the sun is not fixed, but is itself rotating around the Milky Way with billions of other galaxies - scientific techniques like radiocarbon dating for dating objects in deep time - climate science - atomic physics - quantum physics - distrust of vaccines, which we cannot see - Timothy Morton's hyperobjects is related to this fallacy of misplaced concreteness. - "Seeing is believing" but we cannot directly experience the ultra large or ultra small. So we have scientific language that draws parallels to that, but it is not a direct experience. - - Those not steeped in years or decades of science have the very real option of feeling that the concepts are fallacies and don't hold as much weight as that which they can experience directly, even though those concepts have obviously produced artefacts that they use, like cellphones, the internet and airplanes.

• Quote
  • increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is
  • (Hoffman 2015:5).

//Quote - If the facts don’t fit the frames in your brain, the frames in your brain stay and the facts are ignored or challenged or belittled - (Lakoff 2014: xiv).

// quote - increased knowledge tends to strengthen our position on climate change, regardless of what that position is” - (Hoffman 2015:5). - The wealth of information available on the internet and through social media does not make us better informed, but simply makes us more certain that we are right - (Hoffman 2015:45)

// Interconnecting many thinkers and ideas throughout modern history related to knowledge deficit - knowledge deficit model is closely related to homo economicus, which is based on human beings a rational, self-interested agents - all these inter-relationships are new knowledge to me - this individualized ontology has its roots at least in Descartes and has been extensively critiqued - Edmond Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty critiqued it - Their critique influenced Gregory Bateson, as reflected in his book "Steps in an Ecological Mind" - It also influenced Emmanuel Levinas' understanding of ethical subjectivity and Bruno Latour's actor network theory - Latour's work influenced anthropologies of Indigenous people - This knowledge is well known with field of environmental humanities, but little known in the world of politics and economics

// abstract - summary - Rationalist approaches to environmental problems such as climate change - apply an information deficit model, - assuming that if people understand what needs to be done they will act rationally. - However, applying a knowledge deficit hypothesis often fails to recognize unconscious motivations revealed by: - social psychology, - cognitive science, - behavioral economics.

• Applying ecosystems science, data collection, economic incentives, and public education are necessary for solving problems such as climate change, but they are not sufficient.
• Climate change discourse makes us aware of our mortality
• This prompts consumerism as a social psychological defensive strategy,
• which is counterproductive to pro-environmental behavior.
• Studies in terror management theory, applied to the study of ritual and ecological conscience formation,
• suggest that ritual expressions of giving thanks can have significant social psychological effects in relation to overconsumption driving climate change.
• Primary data gathering informing this work included participant observation and interviews with contemporary Heathens in Canada from 2018–2019.

And therein lies the great mystery. How is it that with this specific way of knowing, we can still ignore the overwhelming science? It's not just a small minority either, but the majority of the elites. As research from Yale and other leading research institutions on climate communications have discovered, it is not so much a knowledge deficit problem, as it is a sociological / pyschological ingroup/outgroup conformity bias problem.

This would suggest that the scientific community must rapidly pivot and place more resources on studying this important area to find the leverage points for penetrating conformity bias.