Science with conscience

Consciousness without science and science without consciousness are radically mutilated and mutilating.

According to Edgar Morin, for three centuries, scientific knowledge has done nothing more than prove its virtues of verification and discovery in relation to all other modes of knowledge. In "Science with Conscience ," Morin then warns of the need for a new consciousness for science and asks: "Does the scientific adventure lead us to catastrophe or to a better world?"

For Edgar Morin, science has created extremely powerful means of transformation, manipulation, and destruction, such as atomic weapons and genetic experiments, which threaten the environment. Science, with its multidimensional reality, can reproduce profoundly ambivalent effects. Scientific thought is still incapable of thinking itself, of considering its own ambivalence and its own adventure.

In this sense , " Science with conscience faces the double challenge: to point out ethical and moral problems of contemporary science, whose multiple and prodigious powers of manipulation, born of technosciences, have imposed on scientists, citizens and all of humanity the problem of political control of scientific discoveries and the epistemological need for a new paradigm that breaks the limits of determinism and simplification, and incorporates chance, probability and uncertainty as necessary parameters for understanding reality. [...]

In response to these challenges, Morin objectively offers us, in opposition to the classical paradigm of simplification, the foundations of the new complex paradigm, capable of expanding the horizons of scientific explanation, both in the physical and biological sciences as well as in the social ones." - Iná Elias de Castro