This is a copy of a recent email list comment about the limits of science. Robert Rosen wrote a book about “The limits of the Limits of Science”. These ideas, I believe, would be compatible with his writing
First, the idea that science is centuries old and well established. This is a bit of a smoke screen because actually science is at least 4000-5000 years old. I’ve been doing research on scientific thinking in the Indus Valley culture this last year and it is fascinating and largely ignored, even actively suppressed. Their world view was very holistic in a definable mathematical sense. Dualistic thinking took over sometime between 1900BC and 600BC, about the time that Abrahamic religions got started. It was a big psychological shift from holism to dualism and it changed the entire character of civilization. There is no evidence, for example, of any major wars in the Indus Valley prior to this time nor any war artifacts found by archaeologists. Fortifications appear to have been against flooding, not invaders. That was the case for thousands of years. It absolutely stunned the archeologists because it was the single exception to nearly every other culture studied. It is also likely that civilization began there and not in mesopotamia or the nile, unless it was a contemporaneous development as these societies were in trade contact. A peaceful trading and spiritual society (the likely origin of the Vedas) that existed as a more or less continuous indigenous evolution of culture in the same region for thousands of years, and covering a much larger region than the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile combined, is an astounding discovery, but we hear little about it. All the evidence, except for along the Indus, became buried under the Thar desert starting around 1900BC.
So, there was a giant change in thinking and culture. Astronomy was well developed with descriptions of the 9 planets and their orbits, certainly the cosmology was not heleo-centric, and mathematics was also begun. India was the first to employ the numerical concept of zero, and there were important mathematical principles going as far back as we have records, some principles we have lost; particularly the mathematics of whole systems.
We can talk about Centuries old “modern science” as distinct from “post-modern science” and we can talk about all Science of Western origin (which is now global). All of these are dualistic and became formalized only in recent centuries, but have origins back to 2nd millennium BC, whereas a more holistic science existed prior to that and made many discoveries that are valid today. If you go to the philosophy book section at any university in the US, however, you may find it hard to find any evidence that science or philosophy existed before the Greeks. We are very culture-specific and in history we appropriated many many things from the ancients and attributed them to Western development.
Rosen pointed out that our dualistic thinking led us to define mechanisms and then to think of all of nature as a collection and construction of mechanisms alone. That is classic dualism, meaning you have non-mental systems being studied and human minds (somehow outside of nature) studying them: subject-object duality. It is so “well established” that many have been misled to believe that nothing else is possible. We have formalized the theory of duality to such a degree that it is considered fundamentally paradoxical for a mind to study a mind. We relegated that study to art, poetry, religion, and “sloppy thinking”. Along with that view we have discarded concepts of God as being quintessentially of the same discarded category. But it was with a great cost, because it is impossible to make such a distinction and keep human creativity, intelligence, mental faculty, personal experience, will, choice, love, or soul as part of nature – raising the question if it is even part of our nature. We thus become aliens in the current scientific view – we’re from Alpha Centauri or the Pleiades, or our minds are immanently bestowed from the divine (theological view), or our minds are illusions, i.e. “epiphenomena” that will eventually be reduced to (fully explained by) physical correlates in the brain and genes. There is a huge debate, therefore, as to whether the mind exceeds its physical substrate or not; a fact I, and probably the pre-Vedic Rishis, would consider trivially obvious. In any case, Western science does not accept that one can include the contents of mind in a scientific study, only the physical correlates, even if mind is more. The ‘more’ has to be considered as some complex emergence or uncertainty, or an understandable derivative of mechanisms. To this Rosen wrote, quite correctly:
“…To say what life is, we must …understand… what life is not. …Mechanism already excludes most of what we need to arrive at an answer…Thus, we must retreat to an earlier epistemological stage, before the assumptions that characterize mechanisms have been made.” (Rosen 1991)
So, how do we do that? I suspect, without having seen the Johnson reference, that he has pointed out how modern / post-modern science remains dualistic and does not allow the “higher” causes of mind to be considered as natural causes. In fact, most physicists tacitly believe that mind is primary (see Richard Conn Henry’s paper in Nature — Henry, R.C. (2005) The mental Universe. Nature, 436, 29–29). All of Western science retains the dualistic approach, even these enlightened physicists, in practice. Even though they know it is not fundamentally true, they believe there is no other way to write the description. So, you get someone as brilliant and respected as Feynman writing “Shut up and calculate”. Hawking and Molodinow discuss “model-dependent reality” meaning our view of nature depends entirely on our model of it.
What they have not done is take the next step, which is to explore the idea of models IN nature itself. Gregory Bateson was an advocate of that (Bateson, G. (1979) Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. Bantam, Toronto.) Bateson wrote:
“If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter … you will logically and naturally see yourself as outside and against the things around you. And as you arrogate all mind to yourself, you will see the world around you as mindless and therefore not entitled to moral or ethical consideration.”…“If I am right, the whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. … The most important task today is…to learn to think in the new way.”
So, what is “The New Way”?
Now, continuing my lack of brevity, I’ll try to address two points in the discussion: (1) limits within Western science, (2) categories for expanding Western science
Limits Within Western Science:
In 1991 I published a study of Western epistemology for a Chapman Conference on the Gaia Hypothesis. It was to challenge very narrow interpretations of what has been called “positivistic” science. The positivists believed in a very strict “hypthetico-deductive” (HD) methodology. One is to construct and test hypotheses — only. Data are used to form and test the hypotheses. HD methodology was associated with Newtonian “Modern” era of science. It could be retained in the Post-Modern era with some slight modifications – introduction of probability theory as a natural description. Probabilities became real components of nature (although hard to get anyone to admit that). Quantum waves are probability waves. It is one step toward Bateson’s recognition of mind, or information, in nature.
But HD tests hypotheses within a given set of assumptions about nature. There is a larger loop of testing that involves the assumptions, or world views. It is slightly different but I identified 6 epistemological criteria in its testing and I diagrammed the nested loops as below:
So, this gets us beyond the most narrow Western interpretations of science – a sort of scientific “nothing-but-ism”; i.e., beyond what I call the “bite and scratch” science. It allows science to explore new world views and essentially re-write all the known laws in different terms. Obviously we don’t want to have to do that very often, so the criteria are very important and “pseudo science” takes giant leaps that would not be worth anyone’s time to test. The criteria make is a reasonable investigation of other world views.
The classic example is Ptolemy’s epicircle theory of planetary motions. He might have been quoted as saying, like Feynman, “shut up and calculate”. His calculations worked. The only problem was they were increasingly difficult and grew exponentially as one asked more detailed questions. Newton rewrote all the known laws of orbital motions in terms of a central force of gravity. That simplified the calculations and gave more accurate descriptions. So, we called it “true”. “True” is a carpenter’s term that means two things match up well, in this case, the calculations and the observations. “True” means nothing more than that in this example, as we can prove by realizing that Newton’s “true” was further improved by Einstein, where again we had to re-write all the known laws of physics. Except that in that case we were able to retain a quasi-correspondence with Newtonian calculations at a particular scale and under very specific conditions of closed systems. Without those restrictions on the domain of nature being described, there is no exact correspondence (this was rather convincingly argued by Niels Bohr).
It is typical for the calculations within a given world view to not be ‘miscible’; i.e., they can’t unified. In fact, it is now a principle in physics that immiscible descriptions of nature are necessary for complete description, as in wave-particle theory. But even wave-particle theory can be re-written in terms of other views, and they will also have this fundamental complementarity between immiscible descriptions. That is complexity.
Now, on to (2) Categories for expanding Western science.
The comments in this email exchange include a mention of categories of science:
a) the three prompts of ‘science:’
What was that?
What caused it?
Will it happen again?
and
b) the three protections of the scientific method:
What is the locus of validity of the dynamic and integrity limits of your explanation/theory in ‘a)’?
What experiment will check your explanation/theory for fallibility?
Has your explanation/theory been independently checked for fallibility?
The first group of questions is an attempt to give complementarity descriptions of nature (i.e., the immiscible descriptions mentioned above). These three questions are supposed to define unique possible answers in different categories of knowledge or even nature itself. If these categories could be reduced to each other, we would write only one question, not three.
However, the three part division indicated here is arbitrary and not rooted in any genuine (scientific) metaphysics. It is a colloquial expression of current thinking in popular language – hardly something that can be analyzed logically very well. But I’ll try.
What is that? By this question most people mean to identify its material nature – substance that can be measured and quantified. We are people who have been taught to think in terms of ‘things’ (the world view), so while an modern or ancient native might answer “that is God speaking” we expect it to be answered with a material label. “That is a tree”. As if the word “tree” means something more specific than “God speaking”, which it doesn’t until we pile it up with more attributes. And that is our science, the piling up of attributes onto things.
What caused it? By this we mean, really, what explains it. Aristotle’s causes are also and probably better thought of as modes of explanation. However, Western science, particularly modern science, severely limited the allowable answers. Aristotle said it can have four categorically different answers; material (what things it represents or is made of), efficient (its dynamic laws), formal (its design), and final (its purpose). It is not wrong to say that the presence of a house is explained by, or “caused” by, a person’s desire to live there. It is also not wrong to say it is there, in the way it exists, because of its blueprint and building permit filed at the County Building Department. But that is not what we expect in Western science. These are considered social answers, or we could even have political and ethical ones. “Cause” has been reduced to efficient cause – the laws that can be written in quantitative equations— with the extremely grand assumption that everything else might then be built on such equations. That, of course, is a ludicrous assumption.
Will it happen again? By this I presume is meant prediction. In modern science this is fully reducible to the previous question, because natural law is presumed to be fully predictive. If we know how it happened, we can say exactly under what conditions it will happen again. Nature is deterministic in that world view. In post-modern science there is uncertainty, so this question has a probabilistic answer. In post-normal science, i.e., beyond duality, this question has a relational answer in which mind-like qualities might factor into the explanation; i.e., we might need to ask “do you want it to happen again?” In other words, nature is not a machine.
The three “protections” mentioned are appropriate, but they are not usually interpreted broadly enough and most often are used to reinforce colloquial limitations – the same “nothing-but-ism” mentioned above.
Locus of validity — is it the kind of behavior, or the kind of explanation? If the kind of behavior, how far out of commonly accepted domains will be allowed? Rosen was accused of “answering questions nobody wants to ask”. If I write a proposal to NSF to study “the mind of nature” it will be rejected because it is neither the kind of behavior we want to explain, nor does it involve the kind of explanations we want to find. Kuhn and Popper both recognize the tremendous influence that social norms have on science. It is not a “protection of science” but a protection of the science establishment. I once accused someone obsessed with using quantum explanations for mind as leading “the physics Sanhedrin”.
Experiment — great subtlety is required in designing good experiments, and few do it well. Most experiments assume a common reality, and so do not test for anything very surprising. They unsurprisingly confirm the general reality they are designed in and test details of that reality (the first discovery loop in the diagram above). Much more subtle methods are required to test assumptions of that reality, so the more important criteria is actually Design of Experiments. Are there more elegant experiments? When we meditate are we experimenting with the mind and can we learn anything? Original, Eastern science was of that variety and what they learned is today considered extremely profound, enough so that the early quantum physicists themselves attributed their breakthrough to its description in Vedic literature. For some reason Western scientists don’t want to hear that. I wonder why that is so? In fact it is not experiment that forms the bedrock of scientific discovery, it is Experience. Experiment is a method for testing one’s experience and appropriate experiments can be designed to test the realities implied in any kind of experience. We can even learn from madness if we go about it right.
Independent validation — certainly another of the modern gods that has been perverted and misused to limit science to our vision of the natural world as a set of things with law-like behaviors. IF nature is deterministic THEN its behaviors are regular and predictable. IF someone claims to have discovered something important about nature THEN it must be repeatable as many times as one wishes to repeat it. So it is a great test to say that the experiment must be replicated in different laboratories by different people to be accepted as true. Or is it? What if nature is NOT fundamentally deterministic, as post-modern science as now universally concluded it is not? In that case, such criteria remain, but clearly and obviously they serve to limit what science studies. It becomes science of only the most repeatable phenomena – science of the commonly shared reality. Are we really authorized to say that is the only thing science can study? In ecosystem science the entire discipline and all government environmental agencies is becoming increasingly focused on how to anticipate surprises. Complex systems produce one-off surprises. So, if we observe Lake Erie flip from one ecological pattern (say oligotrophic) to another (say eutrophic), as it did; and then flip back, as it did, should I believe the story? Do I have to replicate the experiment? How many people needed to see it for it to be true? If we replicate it with other lakes would it be a true replication of Lake Erie, or are we again looking only for what is common among them? The biological world is filled with unique organisms and species, and most of what we need to know about it involves unique phenomena. Surprise, uniqueness, identity are all part of that world. What if you have the experience of speaking to a deceased relative? Is there any way to understand more from that experience or to study its validity? In Near Death Experiences amazing things have been recorded. Are we willing to look for meaningful patterns in human experience, or only in precisely measurable external phenomena? What about the internal, subjective, experiences? It is really proper to say to all creative thinkers that they cannot, must not — and will be punished if they do — use scientific methods to study subjective phenomena because we as a society have made a religious and political agreement to call it “impossible”?
So the “well accepted” methodology excludes most of what we need to learn today.
