Wednesday, June 12, 2019

What lurks at the bottom of the chasm?



When Dave Nicholl's published this particular blog post, I rejoiced.
Excerpt:

The model does not explain the real world. If it did, it would reside in the real world and one wouldn’t have to study to become a trained health professional to understand and apply it. Biomedicine then, at its worst, sits at odds with the people it is meant to serve; looking, again, rather like a spoilt (white, male), only child of very rich parents, in a room full of people whose lives are very different indeed.

But, then this piece caught my eye, and I rejoiced even more. Philosophical bias is unavoidable by science.
Excerpt: 

One school of thought viewed the new plant as a conventional hybrid and argued that, in most cases, one can deduce the safety of the new plant from knowledge of the safety of its parental GM plants. This means thinking about complexity as being various combinations of unchanging parts. The other school, however, argued that one cannot deduce the safety of the new plant from the safety of the parental GM plants. Here, complexity is thought of as an emergent matter where parts lose their properties and identity in the process of interaction.
Imagine: one idea of complexity is all about nouns (like plant parts) moving around as though they had autonomy or something, and another idea of complexity is that of emergence, that the plant parts are moved by their environment and relationships, interactively, and it's all contextual. 

Then I really rejoiced when I noticed this, today: The Burning Question





Trying to find anything specific in therapy of various kinds performed on alive awake cognizant individuals with pain reminds me of Tim Conway skits on the Carol Burnett show, ones in which he would play an old guy trying to open a door but banging it shut with his head, over and over.  


Why did I rejoice?
Because the mystery is becoming more clear. Not what can clear up the mystery.
So is the chasm.
And what is at the bottom of it. 


1.  https://criticalphysio.net/2019/06/05/critique-of-the-biomedical-model-2/
2. Philosophy of biology: Philosophical bias is the one bias that science cannot avoid.
3. 
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10161759445590183&set=gm.2231921840431689&type=3&theater

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