The term ‘progression’ involves a certain amount of risk. That is mostly because what we call ‘progression’ is actually the cumulative result of trial and error which, by some chance, we either like or think will be of use to us. It might not be very reassuring to think of everything we have as based on chance, but that’s the way it goes. Had our ancestors not played with the fire, we would’ve never mastered it and learned how to cook food, as well as all the later tricks we learned to do with fire (including explosives). If we happened to have accidentally burned down a forest or two while we’re experimenting—well—that’s the price for progression, isn’t it? Scientific progression as a favor to chance, the only problem is—how far can we rely on chance? Isn’t it a bit (pardon the bad pun) chancy?
For instance, in the recent article “Can Brain Scans See Depression” by Benedict Carey from New York Times, we address the issue that, despite of everything we know, we really know preciously little, especially about ourselves. More specifically, about our minds…how we think, act, react, and why. As the author said, “For one thing, brains are as variable as personalities.” Despite of the availability of different scans that should’ve been able to provide what we think, repeat: we THINK, will be crucial knowledge to “turn on the lights in what had been a locked black box,” the actual results have yielded almost no insight into the finer (and currently still blank) portions of psychology. So? Chance didn’t quite play out—experimental hypothesis failure 101, time to try again with something else. Meanwhile, we discovered that the scans DO measure brain activity and physiology quite well and if we base our experiments on purely physical and biological data, we MIGHT be able to deduce “a potential key to understanding depression, attention deficit disorder, anxiety.”
However, as we can see, this is also a case of trial and error. If we were deducted points for every mistake we’ve made, then it’s quite possible what we’re looking at will not be called ‘progression’, but ‘retrogression.’ Luckily though, Mother Nature, God, or who/whatever controls the ways of this world had deemed it good enough for us to continue to pile up our store of useful knowledge, called success, regardless of times of useless wandering, called failures, therefore enabling us to say that we’re making great scientific progressions. The only question that is left then is this: What is really the definition of ‘progression?’
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