Reality is something other than a language game called 'Science'

 

Science is an internally consistent system that does a good job of explaining ‘appearances’; i.e. ‘what things do’.  What it does not do a good job of, is in giving us an understanding of how the world we live is transforming, and how our ‘what things do’ oriented science relates to the transforming of our living space.

At the end of the nineteenth century there was a wave of scientific applications that we loosed on ourselves.  We knew a lot about how to ‘construct them’ but we didn’t know how their use would transform our landscape and our lives.  That’s because science deals in ‘what things do’ as if these things are ‘things-in-themselves’.

If we understood science and the applications of science in terms of ‘tools’ that have developed, it would be reasonable to say that prior to developing these tools we lived within a continuously unfolding living space dynamic.   When we do our scientific modeling, we do not start with a model of our living space and how are science-informed actions are transforming it.  We start with a concept of a ‘thing-in-itself’ [material system in itself] and ‘what it does’, such as a gasoline engine or an airplane or an electrical generator.   How it will transform the dynamic space we have emerged into, is not ‘covered’ by science.   We don’t know how to describe the dynamic space we are included in.  We only know how to explain apparently ‘local’ systems within it.

If the ‘local system’ is only one of the parts in a relational web of interdependent parts constituting a larger system, then we will be imputing behaviour to the ‘local system’ seen as a thing-in-itself, that derives instead from the larger system in which it is merely a ‘part’.

That is, in fact, the argument of Mach, Nietzsche, Poincaré and Schrödinger [MNPS].  If they are right, then we can expect that the behaviour we [and science] impute to ‘the organism’ as a ‘thing-in-itself’ is not simply coming from the individual, but is somehow coming from the relational web in which ‘the organism’ is included.

This unaccounted for difference in the sourcing of the organism’s behaviour is what Nietzsche suggests is screwing up European thinking and European civilization’s social dynamic which has become the dominant global social dynamic.

MNPS contend that ‘what we do’ does not describe ‘change’.  That is, the space we live in has been continuously evolving and the emergence of organisms is included within that evolving and organisms continue to be contributing participants in the continuing evolving, but science prefers to focus on organisms as if they were ‘things-in-themselves’ and explain their behaviour in inside-outward asserting terms.

The notion that organisms are ‘things-in-themselves’ rather than being included within a larger system [e.g. relational web] is just an assumption that someone made.  It has never been justified.  It is an assumption that goes hand-in-hand with splitting the evolution of the world into two parts, the inorganic realm, and the organic realm’.   The assumption is that the difference between minerals, crystals, rocks, planets etc. and ‘organisms’ is the difference between ‘alive’ and ‘dead’. That is, when an organism dies, it ‘loses its life’ and decomposes into non-living matter.

Of course, not everyone believed this.  Lamarck didn’t believe it; he thought that the world evolved as one and that ‘organisms’ were a more complex form of organization; i.e. the universe has all of the basic influences necessary for organizing into crystals and/or organisms and there is no need to impute the evolution of a new influence called ‘life’ to explain the emergence of ‘organisms’ but that is what the dominating faction of science chose to think and Darwin had a great deal of influence on this one.  In a letter (1871) to botanist Joseph Hooker, Darwin wrote:

“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are present, which could ever have been present. But if (and Oh! what a big if!) we could conceive in some warm little pond, with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, light, heat, electricity, etc., present, that a protein compound was chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”

Science is still struggling to ‘define life’ and ‘science’ has never departed from the simple notion that in order to explain the difference between ‘organisms’ and ‘crystals’, we have to assume the existence of a special local process, that is only found locally and rarely and in the latter part of the history of the planet earth.  For example, a February 6, 2012 article in ‘Science’ entitled ‘Opinion: What is Life?’ — ‘Designing the simplest possible living organism artificially may lend clues as to what life is’, by Edward N. Trifanov, continues to accept without question the notion that ‘life’ is a mysterious process that marks an absolute boundary between ‘things that are not alive’ and ‘things that are alive’.  In other words, ‘life’ is an invented concept that science uses to define that absolute boundary.  Thus, the absolute boundary stands or falls with the belief in ‘life’.

Lamarck, on the other hand, in his ‘Recherches sur l’Organisation des Corps Vivans’ (Investigations into the organization of the living body) sees the ‘living body’ as a complex form of organization deriving from ‘fields’ (thermal, electromagnetic, gravity) and their interaction with fluids (water, air etc.) in the manner that tornadoes, which are highly organized forms do not form in regions where there is insufficient contrast between warm and cold air and insufficient humidity for the formation of thunderstorms.  In this case, there is no need to postulate an absolute boundary between the more common flow-forms and this special form, defined by a basically different process being responsible for the special form.  That is, the sourcing influences that author the tornado are the same sourcing influences that pervade the universe, however, different confluences of spatial relations can give rise to exotic forms of organization compared to those which are most common.

Since ‘life’ is a concept that in turn enables a ‘thing-in-itself’ view of the organism, there is a whole lot hanging on an unvalidated assumption here.  Right off the bat, one might be suspicious in that aboriginal cultures never split apart nature and organisms; i.e. nature was the living earth and humans were included in the living earth.   One might be suspicious since many things predicted by the aboriginals [e.g. “if we spit on the earth, we spit on ourselves”] have come true since our science has been focused one-sidedly on ‘what things do’ rather than acknowledging Mach’s principle where there is a conjugate habitat-inhabitant relation’ as in the aboriginal belief system.

What would you say is the reason that we hold on so hard to the ‘thing-in-itself’ view of the organism and/or the atom?  The notion that fields transcend matter is an accepted notion in modern physics; i.e. matter is a condensation of the electromagnetic field, matter is curvature in the gravitational field etc.   The sailboater in us is more humble than the powerboater in us, in acknowledging that form, power and steerage derive from the dynamics of space that we are situationally included in.  Only if the ocean space is calm [as when we impose absolute space-framing] do we transform, like the werewolf, from sailboater to powerboater.  Powerboaters have to steal their life-giving blood/fuel by stealth in the dark to keep up the appearance that their power and steerage derives from themselves.

Science’s notion that the material body is a thing-in-itself is a notion we still use [Mach’s complaint against ‘the Church of Science’] because of the simplicity it brings to scientific language.

“Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a non-Euclidean space which would be a guide less convenient than, but just as legitimate as, our ordinary space ; the enunciation would thus become much more complicated, but it would remain possible.  Thus absolute space, absolute time, geometry itself, are not conditions which impose themselves on mechanics [the physical phenomena of our experience] ; all these things are no more antecedent to mechanics than the French language is logically antecedent to the verities one expresses in French.” – Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis

Newton ran into problems with this assumption of the material body as ‘thing-in-itself’ in developing his Principia, and his ‘Euclidian fix’ always stuck in my mind.  That is, he was able to develop his laws of motions in a manner that worked out for two bodies but when he tried to extend it to three or more bodies, he ran into the ‘three-body-problem’.  The three body problem is that in the case that three or more bodies move under one another’s simultaneous mutual influence, it is impossible to solve for the behaviour of each individual participant.  Since the intuition of gravity was that everything was simultaneously mutually influencing everything [the gravity field was ‘everywhere at the same time’], there were no mathematics that gave tractable solutions that ‘kept hole’ the notion of a material body as a ‘thing-in-itself’.

As Poincaré said, science is a language game, the simplicity of which is assured by hidden ‘conventions’ in its architecture such as the convention of euclidian space which grants ‘thing-in-itself’ status to the material forms within it.   In order to be able to address the three-body problem, one would have to ‘let go’ of the ‘thing-in-itself’ status of material bodies, which would make the mathematics far more complex/difficult.  That is, one would have to acknowledge the ‘feminine’ aspect of dynamics [outside-inward spatial accommodating] and not just the ‘masculine’ aspect of inside-outward asserting behaviour.   And as Evelyn Fox Keller notes in ‘Reflections on Gender and Science’, in regard to the circularity between mathematical tools and observer preferences;

“To the extent that such models [models that posited central governing elements] also lend themselves more readily to the kinds of mathematics that have been developed, we need further to ask, What accounts for the kinds of mathematics that have been developed? Mathematical tractability is a crucial issue, and it is well known that, in all mathematical sciences, models that are tractable tend to prevail. But might it not be that prior commitments (ideological, if you will) influence not only the models that are felt to be satisfying but also the very analytical tools that are developed?’

So, both in the so-called inorganic realm and in the organic realm, the formulations in terms of ‘things-in-themselves’ came under challenge; i.e. in the organic realm, Lamarck’s and MNPS’ proposed to restore/include the outside-inward accommodating influence of space with the inside-outward asserting influence of matter, putting them into a conjugate inhabitant-habitat relation based dynamic unity.

Now, the ‘trick’ that Newton used to avoid the more complex mathematics associated with restoring the female aspect, was the invention of a vector ‘force field’.   This is not a ‘measured field’ but a calculated field where one assumes the two-body version of gravitational influence and computes the gravitational force at any “point-location” in a notional absolute ‘fixed’ space arising from the mass distribution in that space [what effect that each body/mass would have on any point].    This split apart the ‘field’ from the ‘material masses’.

The mass would then ‘experience’ the force as calculated and move in response to its ‘experiencing of the externally applied force.  The mass would be seen as moving relative to an absolute three-dimensional grid of fixed point locations [Euclidian x,y,z space]; a grid that could be divided up into points as small as we like.   The smallness of the grid of absolute fixed space and absolute increments of time would seem to be able to approximate, as closely as we would like, the originally intuited notion of gravitational motion wherein all masses moved under the SIMULTANEOUS MUTUAL INFLUENCE of all masses as in a single interdependent web of spatial-relations.  Measurement-wise, using this ‘vector force field’, we could home in on a particular point and calculate the force due to the overall mass distribution, at that point, which would tell us the direction and motion of a mass at that point.   Being able to calculate the movement of that mass would then allow us to re-calculate the mass distribution and recalculate the force at its new location, and to continue to make these calculations recursively to calculate the ‘trajectory’ of a particular mass, … relative, of course, … to a notional absolute space and absolute time reference frame and assuming ‘ceteris paribus’, all other things staying the same.

In this manner, where we started out with ‘motion’ that we intuited to be ‘relative’ in a spatial-relation sense, we are able to reduce and simplify that motion to ‘the movement of particular things’ [relative to a notional absolute space and absolute time].  To view motion in terms of ‘what things do’ is a far simpler formulation of motion than had we suspended imposing the notions of absolute space and absolute time and allowed motion to be purely spatial relational (as in non-euclidian geometry of space).  Meanwhile, in understanding motion in terms of a transforming web of spatial relations, we would require a far more complex ‘language’ [i.e. a non-euclidian geometry-of-space language] to talk about it; a language in which motion would no longer depend on time; i.e. motion would be in terms of the transformation of spatial relations.

This ‘path not taken’ by science is the path preferred by Ernst Mach as in Mach’s principle of space-matter relativity, and by Nietzsche;

“And do you know what “the world” is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, a household without expenses or losses, but likewise without increase or income …” –Nietzsche, ‘The Will to Power’, 1067

Now, you can see here, that there is this juncture in how we RE-PRESENT motion, either (a) in the absolute terms of ‘what things do’ as if within an absolute space and absolute time reference frame, or (b) in the relative terms of a transforming web of spatial-relations.

Furthermore, we shall need different language to talk about dynamics depending on whether we opt for the (a) or (b) RE-PRESENTATION of motion.   That is, we would need a language like the Amerindian languages if we opt for (b) since it keeps everything moving [in flux] and avoids hard dependency on ‘things-in-themselves’.  The Western doer-deed languages of noun, verb and predicate are meanwhile ideal for (a), in re-presentations of motion in terms of ‘what things do’.

If we make our choice and go down the path of (a), of re-presenting dynamic physical phenomena in terms of ‘what things do’, we are at the same time choosing a language with an architecture suited to re-presentations of the (a) type.   The fact that this language makes the dynamics of physical phenomena APPEAR much more explicit and specifiable than the dynamics of our intuition of movement sourced within a gravitational field [which is everywhere at the same time] wherein everything moves under everything’s simultaneous mutual influence.  That is, we are prone to taking the language based re-presentation of dynamics LITERALLY even though different languages capture only a reduced version of our experiencing of physical phenomena.  Poincaré’s reminder on this was that the physical phenomena of our experience are not dependent on the language we use to re-present them; e.g. a language such as our Western language which makes use of the notions of ‘things-in-themselves’ that inhabit a notional ‘absolute space’ and ‘absolute time’ reference frame.

“Finally, our Euclidean geometry is itself only a sort of convention of language; mechanical facts might be enunciated with reference to a non-Euclidean space which would be a guide less convenient than, but just as legitimate as, our ordinary space ; the enunciation would thus become much more complicated, but it would remain possible.  Thus absolute space, absolute time, geometry itself, are not conditions which impose themselves on mechanics [the physical phenomena of our experience] ; all these things are no more antecedent to mechanics than the French language is logically antecedent to the verities one expresses in French.” – Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis

What we are forced to conclude here is that our standard language for re-presenting physical phenomena dynamics [mechanics] is not dealing with ‘reality’ but with an ‘idealization’ of reality based on using mathematics to match the ‘appearances’ of the dynamics, starting from idealized ‘things in themselves’ that move, NOT relative to one another, but relative to an idealized absolute space and absolute time reference frame.  This was Mach’s explicitly stated point [2]; that the laws of science deal with ‘appearances’ rather than with ‘reality’.  The production of wood products is commonly conceived of in terms of ‘what things do’; i.e. ‘what we, as skilled producers of wood products do’, what this formulation misses is that the forest is at the same time transformed; i.e. the larger view is in terms of transformation of the spatial relations we are included in.

Only recently have economists accepted that keeping track of ‘production’, the ‘what things do’ side of things, misses the fact that ‘production’ is more comprehensively seen in terms of the transformation of our habitat.  Economists have made a crude adjustment via the term/concept ‘externalities’ which alludes to unplanned ‘results’ of a production operation which is not in the accounting but which someone will ultimately bear the costs of [e.g. ‘pollution’, ‘over-grazing’ etc.].

A compounding complication of this choice of a simple language for re-presenting dynamics in terms of ‘what things do’ as if in an absolute space and absolute time reference frame, is our manner of social organizing that follows from this choice.  That is, organizing into sovereign state collectives that declare their ‘independent’ or ‘thing-in-itself’ status and the freedom to undertake ‘doer-deed’ actions in pursuit of the fulfilment of their own self-interest [their own ‘pursuit of happiness’] never happened in the stateless aboriginal communities and confederacies [Iroquois five nation confederacy] for a reason.  Their conceptualizing of the world dynamic, as captured in their language, did not conceive of dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ within a notional absolute space and absolute time reference frame. Their language, unlike our Western phonetic alphabet and noun-verb-predicate language,  incorporated the ‘complementarity’ or ‘conjugate habitat-inhabitant relational’ archetype for dynamics of relativity and quantum physics.  Dan Moonhawk Alford gives a good account of this ‘connection’ (see footnote [1]) and also an account of how such ideas are so BIG that many academics attack them out for the sole reason that they threaten to bring down the entire Western worldview;

“What are these academics so afraid of that they can’t face and contemplate and answer student’s questions about Whorf’s actual text? Why the smoke and mirrors? I suspect that they fear, and rightly so, that the entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part, in fact, is at stake; or at least the superior attitude that often accompanies it. It may be a fear that what we’re culturally heir to is ‘just another worldview and its langscapes’ rather than exemplifying, as we tend to want to believe, eternal and universal human logic, which we’re simply ‘better at’ than people who speak other languages outside of the Indo-European language family. As John Lucy says, relativity “challenges assumptions which lie at the heart of much modern social and behavior research — namely its claim to be discovering general laws and to be truly scientific.”

The fact that language influences our approach to organization not only supports organizing into sovereign state collectives that declare their ‘independence’ or ‘thing-in-itself’ status and the freedom to undertake ‘doer-deed’ actions in pursuit of the fulfilment of their own self-interest [their own ‘pursuit of happiness’], the ‘corporation’ is a homologous organization wherein ‘pursuit of profit’ is the equivalent to ‘pursuit of happiness’.

In this view, these ‘communities’, the sovereigntist community and the corporatist community, are organized so as to behave as doer-deed machines [based on the view of dynamics in terms of ‘what things-in-themselves do’ as if in an absolute space and absolute time reference frame].  In the case where dynamics are more realistically understood as the transformation of spatial relations, this is a recipe for disaster by way of ‘incoherence’.

David Bohm describes what happens when the thoughts that our language [which is re-presenting appearances rather than reality] delivers to us inform our behaviour in such a manner that we experience results that are nothing like the doer-deed results of our thought and language based mental models.

“People didn’t set up nations in order to suffer the way they’ve suffered — to suffer endless wars and hate and starvation and disease and annihilation and slavery and whatnot.  When they set up the nations it was not their intention to do that.  But that’s what has happened.  And it would inevitably happen.  The point is that people rarely look at the nation and ask , ‘what’s it all about?’  Rather, they say ‘at all costs we’ve got to go on with this nation, but we don’t want these consequences’.  And they struggle against the consequences while they keep on producing the situation.” – David Bohm, ‘Thought as a System’

 

Conclusion:

‘Science’ is a way of pursuing knowledge systematically that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions regarding the dynamic universe we live in.

Science needs a language to deliver its ‘understandings’ in, and the contention is that the requirement that the language be able to precisely and explicitly deliver the understandings has been over-riding the requirement that our experience be fully and faithfully captured in the re-presentations of science.

As a result, science, in order to preserve a ‘tongue’ or ‘langue’ that is explicit and precise in its re-presentations, has chosed to describe dynamics in terms of ‘what things do’ as if this activity transpires in an absolute fixed, empty and infinite space and absolute time reference frame [x,y,z,t reference frame].   This precision and these powers of predication come at some sacrifice of reality; e.g. the predictions are portrayed in terms of the results of ‘what things do’ which does not comprehend the more comprehensive experienced reality of dynamics that are in terms of how the habitat in which these doer-deed inhabitant activities are transpiring in, is transforming.  As Marshall McLuhan observed, science can tell us all about the machinery of its applications in terms of what everything does and what the doer-deed result will be; e.g. science can tell us all about how to manufacture Cadillacs or Cornflakes, but it does not begin to inform us as to how our relations with one another and our habitat are transforming in our implementing of scientific applications.

There is a problem here in that the scientific way of understanding that has been the very foundation of Western civilization is a rising source of incoherence.  So long as we stick with the scientific method in our attempts at resolving the dissonances of this incoherence, we shall only exacerbate the problem.  Miring us further in this incoherence is the  powerful matrix of living ‘icons’ of Western civilization whose high and richly rewarded and privileged status would be radically altered by a collapse of belief in the scientific tenets of Western civilization.  Yet we are at a point of ‘revision’ of our understanding wherein, as Dan Moonhawk Alford observes:

“…  the entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part, in fact, is at stake.”

Western civilization is running on the flywheel effect of ‘pride’ as Alford suggests, and on the flywheel effect of the matrix of power constituted by the differentially respected, rewarded, privileged and empowered icons of this civilization.

* * *

 

 

 

[1] Excerpt from; The legacy of Benjamin Whorf  [by Dan Moonhawk Alford, MIT linguist]

http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm

What if you had intimations of an idea SO BIG that it took a highly improbable international combination of people interested in consciousness and cognition issues — quantum physicists, field linguists, Native American philosophers and others — to figure out whether it had any validity? And what if the consensus of that group was that it was important for cross-cultural understanding? As we saw in Chapter Five, the perhaps most lasting achievement of disciplinary synthesis that Benjamin Whorf created, which he called the “principle of linguistic relativity” on taking it back from Einstein, has in the 1990s been de facto validated by just such a historic meeting and dialogue.

This principle, seen now as a century-long dialogue between physics and linguistics, occurs at the place where they agree, using complementarity or respect thinking, quantum logic instead of English logic — and it’s at exactly THAT principled intersection, which had never happened before, where Native American philosophers could finally join in dialogue and find Westerners for the first time in 500 years who would actually listen to their words, their insights, their langscapes [languagescapes] and worldviews; as a result, all participants then began to explore together, after appropriate rituals, the logic and worldview of the nounless quantum (spirit) realm, and went away with very special new relationships.

Yet it is this very linguistic relativity principle, this pivotal stage on which such history has happened, arbitrarily renamed a hypothesis(2) by many social scientists, presumably “so as to be better tested,” that has sparked the amazingly acrimonious debate, name-calling, and strawman argumentation that’s gone on, until recently, during the five decades since the publication of Whorf’s collected articles by M.I.T. Press.

Worse yet, the debate itself, their own Hypothesis Hoax, is all that most social scientists and their textbooks ever focus on, not the principle that underlies it. Students are urged to learn the intricacies of the debate from all the current and historical players — although a close reading of Whorf himself — in the original, in English — is not necessarily specifically encouraged. And that’s the education that most students get in the social sciences about this topic, unless they actually dig deeper on their own — which they may be discouraged from doing because, they’re told, they’ll just be ‘wasting their time’ on a dead issue. At least, I was.

What are these academics so afraid of that they can’t face and contemplate and answer student’s questions about Whorf’s actual text? Why the smoke and mirrors? I suspect that they fear, and rightly so, that the entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part, in fact, is at stake; or at least the superior attitude that often accompanies it. It may be a fear that what we’re culturally heir to is ‘just another worldview and its langscapes’ rather than exemplifying, as we tend to want to believe, eternal and universal human logic, which we’re simply ‘better at’ than people who speak other languages outside of the Indo-European language family. As John Lucy says, relativity “challenges assumptions which lie at the heart of much modern social and behavior research — namely its claim to be discovering general laws and to be truly scientific.”(3)

David Abram eloquently shows in The Spell of the Sensuous that we long ago disqualified ourselves from claiming anything ‘universal’ as a culture when we adopted phonetic alphabets, which shifted the locus of ‘interaction with the world’ from Nature to the printed page — thereby also transforming air into something empty instead of the inescapable medium of all speech interactions and all life. All the more reason then that we must now listen to the indigenous voices of those who have resisted our cultural attitudes, and who come as speakers from languages with different cognitive structures than our own, which has become so divorced and alienated from Nature.

Whorf was the only linguist of his time who understood the advances in modern physics well enough to understand that physicists had stolen the fire from the philosophy of language camp; he staked his claim and tried to take it back. He knew enough about Hopi to know that, in its proclivity of turning our propositions about things into propositions about events, its structure is more congenial to describing quantum eventings than are the structures of Western languages; in his writings he suggested Hopi as a human language candidate, a real life example, that would demonstrate the quantum logic of nounless realities perplexing physicists. Although Hopi itself has not been considered as yet in the Science Dialogues (because we have had as yet no native Hopi speakers as participants), the addition of Athapaskan, Siouan and Algonquian languages to the ‘quantum language list’ at the Science Dialogues and elsewhere are independent evidence that Whorf was substantially on the right track.

 

[2] Excerpt from Chapter IV.  [The Formal Development of Mechanics], Section IV. [The Economy of Science], from Mach’s ‘The Science of Mechanics: A Critical and Historical Account of its Development’

http://ia700204.us.archive.org/9/items/scienceofmechani005860mbp/scienceofmechani005860mbp.pdf