The Muslims Had it Right, part 2.

I think perhaps my comments from yesterday need a bit more explanation:

The Muslim philosophy is one of unity and wholism — it has none of the mind/body or spirit/matter dualism that plagues Western thought. As such, the Islamic sciences didn’t discard theories that involve immeasurable quanta as impossible or irrelevant, and more importantly, they didn’t seperate every tiny branch of science into its own little self-contained genre.

To put it in simple terms, Islamic X-ologists would have read Islamic Y-tician’s journals, and drawn the conclusions that only someone who paid attention to the whole could come to — something that Western scientists and doctors are famously incapable of doing. Today, remarkable discoveries come from journalists and researchers who do no science of their own, but rather correlate the results of experiments performed in narrow niches with other results from other niches, which would never have been put side-by-side except for the happenstance of the journalist’s research.

Similarly, modern Western medicine treats every physiological abnormality like a disease that needs treating. We’d all like to be normal, but some abnormalities are just part of living a human life. On the other hand, Western allopathy also shrugs off most personality traits that we can’t make a pill for as “your fault”, and makes no effort to cure things like addictive behavior or suicidal tendencies, which they leave in the hands of psychologists and such.

Treating pregnancy like a disease is a Western medical practice, and it’s stupid. Treating boredom like a disease would be something I would expect a Muslim scientist to do — and it’s something we desperately need.

I hope that helps people understand my previous comments.