”SHADOWS OF THE MIND” Sir Roger Penrose

     From the Wikipedia: Sir Roger Penrose OM FRS (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. He has received a number of prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their contributi- on to our understanding of the universe.  He is renowned for his

work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He is also a recreational mathematician and philosopher.

    I am a great admirer of Penrose. As a scientist he pushes boundaries, I find him fascinating. However my admiration
of him as a philosopher went down a few notches after reading “Shadows of the Mind”. After all he is a ‘materialist" and materialism goes so far and no further. It’s interesting to see him trying to wiggle his way out, trying to explain the non-material in a material way.

 Scientism: America's State Religion

By Edward Feser.

Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) was the enfant terrible of late 20th-century philosophy of science. He delighted in mischief, juxtaposing vast knowledge of science and its history with antics like egging on creationists, playing devil’s advocate for astrology, and calling for the “separation of science and state.”

He has nevertheless secured a place in the canon, because he is brilliant, extremely well-read, and funny—and his views, when correctly understood, are important and challenging. No doubt it helps that he is a man of the Left, despite saying things that were often criticized for giving aid and comfort to the religious Right.

Feyerabend was once labeled “the worst enemy of science” by the prestigious journal Nature. But even a casual reader can see that what Feyerabend actually opposed was scientism, the transformation of science into an ideology and of its practitioners into a secular priesthood.

Read the full article here

[Well worth reading. I found this article very appropriate for our time.

Here are the last two paragraphs which might give you an incentive to read the whole thing.]

These developments illustrate the ways in which the practice of science can sometimes be arbitrary, dogmatic, authoritarian, politicized, blinkered, highly fallible, and destructive of other social values—just as Feyerabend warned. That does not entail that COVID-19 is not a serious problem (it is) or that the lockdown was not initially justifiable (it was). But expertise that does not acknowledge its own limitations takes from us as much as it gives, and irrationalism is never more dangerous than when clothed in rationalist drag.

Feyerabend’s last word on the subject should be our own: “The hardest task needs the lightest hand or else its completion will not lead to freedom but to a tyranny much worse than the one it replaces.”