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• Taking it for granted
  2004-08-07 12:10:59  Kilamanjaro [Reply | View]
  
  
  Great article on science and consensus!
  
  It got me to reflecting that, generally speaking, we don't "see" air or radio, and fish can't "see" water or x-rays, yet, in both cases these realities surround AND pervade us. Which is simply to use these observations as a motivation in noticing that 'Out there/In here', 'Objective/Subjective', and other visible and invisible dichotomies that most of present day modern classical science is built upon, and much of how we, on a moment-to-moment basis, have come to and continue to practice our daily being and perceiving, are such as a result of how we enact ourselves, consciously and unconsciously.
  
  [I make the distinction between "classical" and "other" enquiries because enquiries like Complexity (a la the Santa Fe Institute) and Quantum Mechanics on the one hand, and Meditation and the exploration of 'Inner States' on the other, are mapping [mapping as a process and as a product] realms where Science's foundational dichotomisations cannot be practised and yet made consistent nor fundamentally resonant (correspondence with) with our widening experiences, descriptions or enactments of the world (universe)).
  
  The nature of this enactment is all around and within us, in our dynamic personal, social and professional cultures. Thomas Kuhn spoke eloquently of "disciplinary matrices" in science, using the concept of an 'eidos', in his writings, an eidos being a system of methods. An eidos, in Kuhn's words, is a disciplinary matrix which defines and describes what a given society takes as its metaphysical assumptions, sensible formulations, meaningful challenges and sanctioned methods in its principal endeavours.
  
  Where it exists a disciplinary matrix is the cognitive part of any organisational structure. It is made up of the criteria of credibility, the logic used in thinking and acting, and the basic ideas by which members of an organisation organise, interpret and share experience. It defines what the organisation takes as its models [the beliefs and assumptions], symbolic generalisations [the sensible formulations], values [as expressed in the meaningful challenges], and exemplars [the sanctioned methods] in its principal endeavours.
  
  Historically Kuhn was talking about science, and in some of his discussions, how alike its practise is to the practise of religion. A little reflection on our parts allows us to also observe that his view is not inconsistent in talking about any population of systems which share similar cognitive facilities, experiential content and common injunctions - whether that population is a pride of lions, a TCP/IP-based storage network, a drug cartel, or a group of wall street arbitrageurs.
  
  It's often said that culture democratizes perception (hence the consensus), sometimes lulling us into thinking that this mainly means that it provides a process and means for individuals to become part of a collective (who enact and practice the culture). Yet more violently and necessarily, culture enforces perception (THE consensus), providing many "curative" forces to ensure that "you 'see' what we 'see' and 'do' what we 'do'" with such feedback as: or else, no tenure, you're insane, you're disconnected, if you do that again or see that again I'll spank you, etc. From the moment of conception and even before, our variegated human "culture" is being injected, projected, enacted and practiced for us, with us and by us until we "get it right" (or are rejected or killed). Fortunately, as in any population, there are the necessary-for-the-population's-existence dynamics of chance, mutation, evolution, resistance, 'cranks', 'idiots', 'genius' and more, and sometimes being one and the same within a single individual (smile).
  
  Current 'science' it seems to me is that set of disciplinary matrices (being the sum total of "How we do things around here with respect to discovering, determining and blessing knowledge {and those who do these things}") that are presently built on and takes as "real" a fundamental and, historically, Aristotelian dichotomy of "in here ain't out there" and vice-versa. Indeed, modern science, except perhaps in Quantum Physics, since about 1932 [Von Neumann, Dirac, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Feynmann et al], doesn't presently generally allow for "suppose it isn't either, neither, all or both".
  
  "Is it a wave or is it a particle?" was first a paradox before it became "it's a field" (the first of several efforts in regarding waves and particles as symptomatic of some'thing' or some'think' else'where'). The place your blog pointed me towards is this: Just as 'is it a wave or is it a particle' is no longer regarded as a fundamental dichotomy that is "true" about the world (except perhaps as a correspondence with our methods and chosen contexts of investigation), might that not suggest that 'The map is not the territory', or, differently expressed, 'Is it the map or is it the territory' might also be distinctions (and hence processes and products) that are also symptomatic of a particular set of choices of some'thing', some'think' or some ways of acting we practise, and therefore as some suggest of the nature (not effects) of those results as "illusory", not in the sense of hallucination, but in the deeper sense of not being fundamental and in the sense that the realm a phenomena is real in and our participative ability to enact ourselves in that realm determine our "reality", and not the other way around. Or as Q'ai Gon,a Jedi master in the Star Wars movie 'Revenge of the Clones' remarks: "Your focus determines your reality". And for some five hundred years 'Science' has been looking with near enough a single focus.
  
  Much of the ground for our Science beliefs and practices, cultural, disciplinary and otherwise, is bound over by our use of and the forms and ways we use and practice langauge. David Finkelstein, former Director of the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and now at M.I.T. Mathematics, says of the various languages of science that, like English, science is also a language. It is constructed of symbols. And the best you can get with symbols is a maximal but incomplete description. A mathematical analysis of subatomic phenomena, for example, is no better qualitatively than any other symbolic analysis, because symbols do not follow the same rules as experience. They follow rules of their own.
  
  In short, the problem is not in the language, the problem is the language. Our problem, according to Finkelstein, is that we cannot understand subatomic phenomena, or any other kind of experience, through the use of symbols alone. As Heisenberg observed: The concepts initially formed by abstraction from particular situations or experiential complexes acquire a life of their own. Or as I like to observe, science [in its various quests to get to the bottom, top of, or arms around everything] has a cultural challenge: it's biased, for various partially understood reasons, towards familiar cultural methods and symbols, and those biases regard experience only on an evidentiary and verification/validation basis. Hence the methods for "in here" lack the cumulative five hundred (500) years of practice "science" has just put into the methods for "out there", and, again, at least in the West since the time of Heraclitus of Ephesus (some 2500 years ago), science has progressively (that's how it's described) put aside and 'forgotten' ('see' what we 'see') methods for "in here" developed in some instances over millenia. There are an increasing number of anomalies being discovered, buried, ignored or otherwise managed that emphasize science can't "have it's cake and eat it too" AND remain faithfully dichotomous. On present course the 21st century frames a space wherein these methods meet and blend, and in doing so reveal themselves as only symptoms of a far deeper craft and calling.
  
  Some say we make the world, I rather think that as you and others have written here, in the flow of this sense, that we enact and practice it; and perhaps, in a reaching out that reaches in, we might learn to forgo the acts of personal, social and, herein, with respect to science and consensus, professional cultures that forget our deep and seemingly universe-spanning selves.
  
  Arthur C. Clarke opined almost sixty years ago, that in the Year 2000 the Nobel Prize for Physics would be awarded for the "Study of Consciousness" He's off by a few years, however, he's right on target in that I presently think that if modern classical science (dichotomous) is to heal itself, inadvertently, mathematicians, physicists and philosophers will be in the vanguard. As Jung's friend, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli put it almost three quarters of a century ago: "From an inner centre the psyche seems to move outward, in the sense of an extraversion, into the physical world...If these men are correct, then physics is the study of the structure of consciousness."
  
  "What is here is there too."
  - The Rig Veda
  
  

• Play and Reality Politics
  2002-10-02 15:45:09  anonymous2 [Reply | View]
  
  
  Tim,
  
  Did you intend the underlying self-referential play on consensus reality within your text? (The 'authoritative' wikipedia definition, the reference to Charles Tart with the caveat of "may have been coined," and Joi's highlighting of papers [or texts] that could prove or change facts if they were not ignored?)
  
  Anyway, since I haven't read Latour's book, and only have reference to your and Joi's descriptions of it contents, I'll throw this out as a question: isn't this just a rehashing and (maybe) an extrapolation of many previous works (i.e., Plato's metaphor of the cave, Kabbalistic Pansemioticism, writings of de Sassure's, Husserl, Derrida, et al.)?
  
  And since we're throwing out related readings, I thought I'd recommend Umberto Eco's _The Name of the Rose_. Probably more fun that reading his _Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language_ or _The Search for the Perfect Lanaguage_, but still qualifying by showing the dichotomy of interpretation of events and/or reality as described through language with "mystical overtones" vs. apparent a priori/a posteriori analyses and descriptions.
  
  Of course, there are political motivations that lend to the division of and tension between these two viewpoints.
  
  Which brings me to another question: if consensus reality is "a very anthropocentric view," why is there no discussion on the political or power-seeking motivations behind the structures? If we look at the example of the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy, Prof. Gingerich's idea that the "entire social and intellectual milieu . . . was ready to accept such a change," and Stevens' view that "the construction of reality is an artistic act, not just a scientific one," aren't we also talking about the political dynamics within and surrounding the (artistic) creation of 'facts' and 'truth'? To me, that would be a quite an issue for contemplation and discussion.
  
  
  Regards,
  Kevin Harris Stoll

• Nothing is as perfect as you believe it to be
  2002-09-04 00:01:39  filtered [Reply | View]
  
  
  Nothing is as perfect as you believe it to be because we all speak the same language differently.

• Science and Consensus
  2002-09-02 17:48:09  seanor [Reply | View]
  
  
  Tim,
  
  I think the analogy of the black box as a scientific hypothesis or theory that has conceptually hardened into fact in the collective mind is worthy of a lot of additional thinking. The most obvious example of this sort of hardening is to be found in teachings on evolutionary theory whereby natural selection, which certainly can be shown to be responsible for variations between species, is accepted universally as being productive of species themselves. This is merely a hypothesis that has by no means been proven. There is little or no scientific evidence showing that species evolve into other species--it is merely assumed that this happens over very large periods of time. The fossil record indicates the exact opposite--that new species spring into being almost nilly willy. The reaction of the scientific community to evidence indicating that something other than evolution (or creationism for that matter) might be at work can only be described as hysterical. Creationist camps have equally irrational reactions to evidence that points in directions that might indicate some modification of their position is necessary.
  
  The Second Law of Thermodynamics, i.e., the Law of Entropy is violated by the appearance of life. What should be happening according to the second law is that species should be devolving into lower forms not higher. Negentropy or negative entropy is seldom examined by either evolutionary science or biology--except by way of indicating that something "else" might be at work in the universe besides blind forces mysteriously coalescing in marvelous symphonies of order. What I find extraordinarily disturbing is the desire on the part of many members of the scientific community to have the watchmaker of the universe be blind. For what purpose? In a purposeless universe anything goes, so in general one might make the claim that the desire to have a blind watchmaker is in some small part proportional to the desire to be spiritually blind--to be free from moral and spiritual restraints. In short the desire to see blindness in the ordering of the universe is based on the blindness that the appetites have from time immemorial sought to induce in humanity. As Katherine Hepburn said so memorably to Humphrey Bogart (Mr. Allnut) in the Movie, The African Queen, "Nature Mr. Allnut is what we are meant to rise above." Put more bluntly, do your appetites have any desire for spiritual or moral clarity? If one's appetites could come up with the perfect theory it would be of a universe in which everything was permitted, and nothing causally connected, for indeed that is what your appetites and will desire when left as they are in today's society--all too frequently I might add--to their own devices. Thus when Jean Paul Sartre, in his book Nausea, describes how disgusting the universe appears to him, he is aptly describing an intellect so heavy with appetitive filth that the doorways of perception might be described as being clogged with appetitive diarrehea. Do we not describe those who are morally blind as asses? There is much truth to expressions such as these. One of my favorite is the description that many apply with unthinking wisdom to the morally disabled male as "being a dick" or more generally to "having one's head up one's ass". These are expressions that emphasize the meaning of being absorbed and ruled by the appetites.
  
  Korzybski's brilliant observation, in the latter half of the 20th century, that the map is not the territory morphed into the bizarre idea that there is no territory at all, which to most rational individuals is simply absurd. What the great classical philosophers showed us was that there was a universe out there that seemed to operate according to a strict set of rules. What modern science has shown us is that the rules are far more flexible than we thought but rules nonetheless apply--they are just more relative to frames of reference than was previously thought. The notion of the old Catholic scholastics will surely and in time come to the forefront of modern thinking in the 21st century and that is the notion that being is participatory. We participate in the consciousness of the universe--we don't make it. If there is any task that could be more important than figuring out what the rules governing that participation are, I can't think of it.
  
  Edmund Husserl started science on the road back to some accommodation with the flow of reality with the development of phenomenology and the bracketing (epoche) of judgment, as a discipline that allows the individual self to experience the flow of reality outside black box parameters, i.e. as it actually is, not as it is wished to be. Thus when an individual has,for example, a moral or immoral experience that individual doesn't deny the lived content of his or her experience--they accept it for good or ill, and it is that acceptance of reality that is the basis of the individual who is awake as opposed to asleep. Being capable of doing advanced science, for example, is no guarantee of spiritual or moral wakefulness. Indeed, without moral or spiritual clarity, it can produce that most ghastly of all creatures--the individual without backbone or passion--the lackey. Lackeys with degrees remain lackeys.
  
  I deal with a number of these issues peripherally in my book, How to Manage Your Destructive Impulses with Cyber-Kinetics (How to Manage Your DICK www.dickmanagement.com) Unregulated appetites have an extraordinarily corrosive effect on thinking when not checked at the door of our rational faculties. There is a great deal of commingling between the will and the appetites that often gets mistaken for rational thought. I had to restrain myself recently, for example, from laughing out loud at a Catholic priest who tried to tell me during a general discussion on sexual matters that the desire for teenage girls was a deviation from normality. How clueless! On the contrary, for the appetites, such things are completely normal. What is abnormal is what one does with this desire, i.e., not checking it. The same applies to having a bad temper, homosexual desires, greed or gluttony--what the appetites want is what the appetites want--what we do with them is what makes us moral or immoral. Beyond the appetites, however, is what I call The Fifth Access. Thinking in more than the four dimensions of length, width, height and time involves a real participation or engagement with the self and reality that allows us to taste truth and falsity and rather than being afraid of truth, bonds us to it. Discerning what is true from what is false is the business of both science and philosophy. The fear of truth has no business in either discipline.
  
  Sean O'Reilly
  

• More on Reality and Language
  2002-09-02 14:49:22  Joi [Reply | View]
  
  
  Hi Tim! What a great entry! When I read the book, I because a bit depressed at first, but it dropped a new paradigm on my head that was helpful in thinking about the process of fact creation. I gleaned a few interesting points from the book, but there are some other one's so I would suggest reading the book.
  
  Your entry sparked a connection to the Reality and Language part of my memory which was in a different place until you made the connection. Thanks! I would like to point to a few interesting references.
  
  In The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man by Marshall McLuhan he talks about how societies with written languages tend to have streets that are gridlike where societies without written language tend to have more circular streets. Not only does language affect what we can think, things like alphabets change the structure of our thinking.
  
  Also, think about a dictionary that defines ALL of the words. There is not a single word in the dictionary that is not defined in the dictionary. It is completely self-referential.
  
  I think each word is a little black box of its own. We all think we know what we are talking about when we say "God" or "Open Source" but are we talking about the same thing? We don't think deeply about "God" and really invision HIM every time we utter the word. (Although maybe that's blasphemous.) Maybe we are all living in parallel universes with slightly different meaning for everything, but similar enough to think we are living in the same universe.
  
  It seems to me that the root of much argument and conflict comes from language causing people to think that are talking when in fact they are in an apples and oranges situation.
  
  Edward Hall's book Beyond Culture is a great book on how different cultures can be.
  
  It sounds like this is something you've thought about quite a bit with more structure than I have... This is where I start to lose it... ;-)