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Tuesday 2 December 2008

And Another Thing

What we really want to know is not on the menu

The spectacular increase in scientific knowledge during the last hundred years tempts me to ask: cui bono? We now live on average twice as long as in the early 19th century. But what does our ability to repair our bodies and fend off fatal diseases do except prepare us for a long twilight of Alzheimer’s and debility, a burden on our families and a reproach on ourselves. I recall a woman in her mid-nineties, who had led a life of duty, saying over and over again: ‘I have lived too long.’ I spend much of my time studying history, especially letters, diaries and biographies, and I see no evidence that all the technical knowledge we now possess has increased the sum of human happiness by one smile or a single heartbeat of delight.

On the other hand, the things we really want to know about remain, for the most part, as mysterious as ever. Take dreaming, for instance. Joseph, son of Jacob, the outstanding dreamer and interpreter of dreams in deep antiquity, knew as much about dreams — or as little — as we do. He lived in the early part of the 2nd millennium bc. Over 3,000 years later Freud published his Interpretations of Dreams (1899). It is a fine piece of imaginative writing but it is hard to say it actually adds to our knowledge. If he and Joseph could have had a conversation about dreams, across the abyss of time which separated them, it would have been an exchange of ideas or a conflict of assertions — possibly a dialogue de sourds — but not a productive debate about empirical knowledge. Since Freud’s day there have been studies of dreaming states using elaborate and scientific equipment. But nothing momentous has emerged. We do not know for sure why we dream or what benefit dreaming gives us, if any. What particularly interests me is whether dreams ever bring us information we do not already possess, or which lies buried in our unconscious or non-functioning memory banks.

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