About 50 years ago, the English physicist and novelist C.P. Snow delivered a lecture at the University of Cambridge titled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” This was his famous lament that “the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups,” with scientists on one side and the literary scholars on the other—a Core Curriculum nightmare.
C.P. Snow blames the literary scholars for perpetuating this “gulf of mutual incomprehension” by their sustenance of shameless ignorance of fundamental ideas like the Second Law of Thermodynamics when, according to Snow, this would be the scientific equivalent of blowing off Shakespeare. But when science is the basis of pieces like biologist Francis Crick’s “The Astonishing Hypothesis,” which claims that “your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules,” it’s no wonder that science could seem unappealing, even standoffish, to anyone but the most die-hard natural scientists. Through provocative contributions like “The Astonishing Hypothesis,” which some opine vastly understates the substance of the human soul, science raises doubts in its adequacy as the single authority on truth. However, from scrutinizing works like “The Astonishing Hypothesis,” we pounced on scientific thought in general before examining any single discipline’s capacity to explain our humanity.
We did not hear, for instance, that much scientific progress comes from interdisciplinary accomplishments rather than from the achievements of disciplines in isolation. A recent article in The Economist describes how insights from the study of natural vision have helped advance the state of art in computer vision. The computer vision challenge has been to devise ways to construct scene awareness from a mere collection of pixels, and Yann LeCun, now at New York University, pioneered an approach that imitates certain aspects of our own visual cortex. I also know a linguistics student, who to Snow would probably be more like a literary scholar, who contributes to natural language processing at our Center for Computational Learning Systems. The deep and narrow approach to problem solving has lost some potency.
Therefore, the monochrome attempt by “The Astonishing Hypothesis” to explain human identity demonstrates its own anachronism as much as it hints at science’s limitations. Regardless of what science can or cannot answer at the moment, the dedication of people who live to seek better answers should at least deserve the benefit of the doubt. Science has shown us where difficulties lie, and so far it’s been science that has addressed them. Science’s current shortcomings don’t bind its potential.
Reaching out to Snow’s literary scholars and not restricting our associations with science to the world of computers, test tubes, and particle accelerators would be a step toward realizing science’s full potential. Especially at Columbia, no student should feel caught in a crossfire between Frontiers of Science haters and Literature Humanities rebels or even fire the shots to start. Harboring frustration is understandable, but having it devolve into this recent divide, postured as debate but identified by how science is pitted against nebulous alternatives, incarnates Snow’s unfortunate vision where, in the face of difficulty, one concedes to science’s constraints before inviting more participation. If Snow couldn’t guess that our new divide was sparked by a scientist, what would that say about the severity of the nightmare in the school of the Core Curriculum?
No one should wait for a breakthrough in any scientific field to better understand our humanity—such a profound achievement takes scientific effort from all human disciplines, literature not excepted. It might be in the mold of the literary scholar to continue the journey to truth from Crick’s hypothesis by posing, say, this simple but scientifically spirited rejoinder: Though many animals are similarly endowed with vast neural networks, why do no other animals on this earth write?
The author is a Columbia College junior majoring in computer science and statistics.
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