[The Hype Cycle: Uppers and Downers in Our Bipolar Culture by Arnold Schelsky (Open Universe, 2025); 320pp.]
In this remarkable book, Arnold Schelsky argues that financial oligarchies, allied with political elites, exaggerate certain trends in order to increase their power and wealth. This is the “hype” referred to in the book’s title, and it may refer either to fear that something bad or hope that something good will happen. The government and mass media promote these fears and hopes to manipulate the public.
Schelsky discusses a large number of these hypes, under the headings, “Science Hype” and “Culture Hype.” Global warming is an example of the first of these: it is claimed that, unless we take drastic action, dire consequences are impending for humanity. An example of culture hype is the “woke” claim that racial and sexual minorities require extensive remedial action to overcome the ill effects of oppression by white males. I have to say that many of the hypes are quite controversial, e.g., the claim that not only were lockdowns, masks, and vaccinations harmful, as has been well established, but that there was no covid pandemic at all.
Schelsky further maintains that those who challenge the hypes are suppressed, even though—in many cases—they are highly qualified authorities with opinions that merit consideration. Schelsky himself is an example of such suppression. He is an applied mathematician with a great deal of technical expertise in many different areas of science, and he is a philosopher as well, but he has had to write his book under a pen name lest he endanger his own career.
In what follows, I’ll discuss a pattern of argument that Schelsky uses in a number of the book’s chapters, as it is one that is of philosophical interest and importance. He distinguishes between simple systems, in which only a few variables need to be determined in order to construct a model and complex systems, in which a large number of variables are required. Complex systems such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the earth’s climate are what Schelsky calls “non-ergodic,” which means that there is no recurring pattern that permits predictions. Because the fear and hope hypes involve complex and non-ergodic systems, we cannot construct synoptic models of them, i.e., “a model that can be used to engineer a machine replica of a given natural system or to replicate its behavior.”
I must confess that I faced a problem in evaluating Schelsky’s arguments, though the problem is entirely my own fault. In almost all the chapters, Schelsky offers very detailed technical considerations in support of his claims that the models have been “hyped,” but I do not know enough about the various sciences to have an opinion whether he is correct. In one area, though, that involves a philosophical issue, I do think that he is right, and moreover, it is an issue where he is in accord with Ludwig von Mises. Schelsky writes:
The human mind is a non-separable component of the mind-body continuum. It cannot be understood in isolation…. The human brain is the organ in which the processes that cause our mental experiences occur. It is the most complex biological system we know of. Processes occur in systems. Understanding a process means being able to describe how the elements of the system which cause the process interact…. But we don’t understand at all how the mind-body continuum generates our experiences: consciousness, emotions, intentions, or cognitive capabilities. We can merely experience them, observe them through introspection into our own private experience, and then compare our conclusions with the observations of other people.
The crucial issue that enables me to avoid evaluating the technical issues is that physical science does not include any terms that designate inner qualities of experience and thus cannot explain them. Scientists can, for example, identify correlations between expressions of feelings such as pain with areas of the brain, but it does not account for, in Thomas Nagel’s famous phrase, “what it is like” to have these experiences or indeed why there is any inner experience at all. I should add, though, that few if any important philosophical arguments command universal assent, and there are responses in the literature to the claim I’ve just made. But this article is not the place for further discussion of them.
As I have already mentioned, Schelsky’s argument is quite similar to an argument advanced by Mises. He too contended that if the brain determines human consciousness, which he thought it very well might do, we lack sufficient knowledge to make use of this determinism to understand human actions. As he puts it in Theory and History:
Mortal man does not know how the universe and all that it contains may appear to a superhuman intelligence. Perhaps such an exalted mind is in a position to elaborate a coherent and comprehensive monistic interpretation of all phenomena. Man—up to now, at least—has always gone lamentably amiss in his attempts to bridge the gulf that he sees yawning between mind and matter, between the rider and the horse, between the mason and the stone. It would be preposterous to view this failure as a sufficient demonstration of the soundness of a dualistic philosophy. All that we can infer from it is that science—at least for the time being—must adopt a dualistic approach, less as a philosophical explanation than as a methodological device. Methodological dualism refrains from any proposition concerning essences and metaphysical constructs. It merely takes into account the fact that we do not know how external events—physical, chemical, and physiological—affect human thoughts, ideas, and judgments of value. This ignorance splits the realm of knowledge into two separate fields, the realm of external events, commonly called nature, and the realm of human thought and action.
If you think that confining my review to the foregoing philosophical argument was an attempt to avoid the controversies that discussing the really “hot-button” issues in this book would have generated, you are of course perfectly correct. I always avoid controversy.
