The Expressible and Inexpressible and the Boundries Between

What do we expect from Science? What do we expect from the other ways we seek to understand our individual and collective experience: art, poetry and the domains of endeavor people think of as "spiritual"?

Once in a commentary on the poet Mary Oliver I found the following definition

"Poetry is what takes us to the boundaries between the expressible and the inexpressible"

Its been years since I read that but it has always stayed with me. It articulates a sense that there are aspects of human being, aspects of our experience, that can be deeply felt but not codified into a statement whose truth-value can be parsed and then evaluated discursively. This can seem like a weird thing for someone who has spent a life-time in science to say. As I kid I was attracted to science specifically because it promised an absolute knowledge of an absolute (I was a platonist early on it seems). But as got older this seemed more like an idealism (no pun indented) that a true description of the situation.

I am, of course, still in love with science and but now I think it offers us a more local kind of certainty embedded in a global question that it beautifully exposes. The world is out there and it pushes back. Of that there is no doubt. But in the totality of human experience how many ways are there to know to its shape and form?

How do we embrace the irreducibility of of our own experience conditioned by our personal narratives, with the sense that there are constants guiding that experience. Science reveals a world of exquisite order and subtle patterns that can be articulated with precision. How we respond to that order is about reason and our other myriad faculties.

I would argue that in our response such "revelation" we are taken to the boundaries of what can be expressed in language (mathematics included) and what eludes expression. The question is this: how to acknowledge such a boundary while staying close to world which shows itself to us. In the comments to the last post the metaphore of a gyroscope was offered. That can be quite useful. There is a great quote from the Buddhist tradition which could also be said of science: "The purpose of any practice is to not fool yourself".

That is the work.

The Value of Value and the Climate Change Debate

After marveling at the wonderful back and forth over the last post I am going to change subjects here to climate change, politics, values and the way forward.

Last Friday Gavin Schmidt visited the UR to give a talk on the current state of climate models. Schmidt is a researcher at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS). GISS has a long and influential history in the climate debate as its director James Hansen has been at forefront of the efforts to warn the public of the dangers of greenhouse emissions (some would say too much at that forefront). My first science Job out of undergrad land was at GISS in 1985 so I have fond memories of the place - and it was better my previous job as a bouncer (!) at the Rocky Horror Picture Show (oy).

Schmidt is quite influential in his own right as one of the contributors to Real Climate which many consider to be the best blog for explaining the science of climate change to rest of us and taking on the day to day issues in the field.

In my book I spent a whole chapter reviewing climate science and trying to show how it unintentionally recovers the traditional and quite ubiquitous myth of the flood. One of my themes in the book was that science serves a similar function in modern culture that the great myth systems served in earlier cultures. In most of the great narratives of science (the origin of the Universe, the origin of Life, etc) you can see mythological themes poking their heads up. Its inevitable because we must always parse the data we gather into stories. At the highest levels we pull our explanatory stories from this great storehouse of narratives that is human mythology.

Flood myths are so common in comparative mythology you can even find them in cultures that did not live close to water. The myths almost always involve humans suffering some kind of retribution for sins against whatever animate powers are in control. This story of careless greed and retribution now appears in the way narratives of modern climate science gets told. It too is a story of technological humanity ignoring, in its greed, the limits the Earth imposes on all species.

I don't think we can help but tell the story this way because, in a real sense, it is a story we have been telling for a long time. But there will be value in this narrative too as we come to understand that what we value, what we hold sacred, is what motivates broad changes in cultural behavior.

Culture's evolve because of some deep underlying change in their values. The change is never solely in response to some technical argument. And it is exactly at this point the technical specifics of scientific research get braided into the deeper mythological, spiritual and moral context in which that science exists.

When we talked I asked Schmidt about the way climate science fits into these mythologies of meaning. He raised a very important point which must be considered. The problem with linking science with any value system is that it can make the evaluation of that science suspect. The more climate science is seen as part of a narrative of humanity embracing its rightful place in a deep ecological view of planetary evolution, the more difficult it becomes to evaluate what is correct and what is false in that science on its own merits. The science has to be allowed to speak for itself and the methods and modes of inquiry which, at it best, science embodies must be allowed to move in whatever direction they will follow.

As a researcher I am really sympathetic to what Schmidt was saying. At the same time meaning will be drawn from the science. Meaning is always drawn from our largest scientific narratives. That is where the link with mythologies occurs even if we don't intent it to. I am sure that we can not manifest the will to act collectively without understanding that link and fostering it in the service of new mythologies that speak directly to our moment in evolution.

The question then is how to keep the "ethic of inquiry" I have written about before while still acting in the service of those new mythologies.

Beyond the Poles: Not a Christian Nation

Here is a link to a very nice article about the idea that the US is not a christian nation. While I have tried to argue that we must move beyond the traditional Creationism vs Evolution debate in thinking about Science and Religion, part of transcendence will require speaking forcefully to those who indulge intolerance and fan its fire.

The challenge those of faith will face (and many have already risen to) is to find a meaningful pluralism that acknowledges other paths as well as the beauty and power of science.

The Phenomenal Promise

I have argued in my book that focusing on experience is a more fruitful way to think about the domains of science and human spiritual endeavor. You can find the line of that argument here but one might ask what is the big deal about experience? Why focus on it? The answer, I think, comes by flipping the question on its head and asking instead what have we been missing by not focusing on experience?

I take this question to cut broadly - the reason experience is a fertile starting point to think about science and religion is the same reason its a good place to focus our thinking about how we understand ourselves, the world and our attempts to make sense of them both. The unfortunate fact is that in much of modern scientific and philosophical thinking, experience has been forgotten as a question at all. Which brings me to Francisco Varela and phenomenology

Varela was a Chilean biologist of Harvard training who had a distinguished career thinking on a broad range of topics from insect vision to the nature of consciousness. Many people are familiar with his work which has been quite influential (he was one of the founders of the Mind and Life institute) so its a bit embarrassing for me to only encounter him now. Lately I have been reading an article by Varela in "Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Problem". This is a collection of pieces in response to David Chalmers' concept of the Hard Problem in the study of consciousness.

The Hard Problem that Chalmers pointed to was none other than experience - that elusive but inclusive totality that makes consciousness so different than other external phenomena science wishes to address. The text is great because it has so many perspectives in it but for now I want to simply touch on Varela's main focus in his article Neurophenomenology: A Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem.

In confronting the hard problem Varela reaches back about 100 years in the history of philosophy to the the school of Phenomenology. This was a European movement advanced by writers like Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The emphasis in Phenomenology is to take take experience and its investigation seriously rather than just dismiss it as unimportant or not really a worthy subject. As Husserl claimed "back to the things themselves" or as Merleu-Ponty wrote

"To return to the things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks and in relation to which every scientific stigmatization is an abstract and derivative sign language, as the discipline of geography would be in relation to a river, a forest a prairie we knew beforehand."

Taking the phenomenological perspective Varela claims that experience is irreducible. He then goes on to outline how a phenomenology when combined with cognitive science and neuro-science could provide constraints on each other to develop a true scientific study of consciousness.

Varela's perspective is an important one for thinking about consciousness and science in general. Experience is irreducible. It is always were we start and where we must return. The inability to recognize this has led to the objectification of objectification in science. We imagine the detailed nature of an objective world because it is so fruitful for our scientific world-view (and it is) but then we forget that no one ever experiences it. Objectification is a useful tool but it is not a thing in itself. It is a powerful story that helps us make sense of things.

Clearly there is a world out there. No one doubts that unless they have gone loco. The world is there and it kicks back. But what access we get to it, and what role we play in shaping what we see is very much an open question. We always begin from "behind our eyes" so to speak. What makes Varela's perspective in this paper (and his book the Embodied Mind) so valuable is it takes that recognition and then attempts to do something concrete with it in the service of investigation.

Varela takes our experience seriously and that is an attitude we could fruitfully apply many places.

Onward from Discover-y

Here is a link to my last post for Discover. It is a kind of summation of the themes I was working on there.

So now to the future.

My hats off to all the bloggers out there who can post 3 or 4 times a week. I think I may be a crusty old-timer in this new medium so I will be posting here a couple of times a week on themes from the book as well as a broader set of topics which run ashore of the human search for the True and the Real. These will include:

Science and Religion - the Good, the Bad and the Future
Science and the Human Prospect - how to best deploy science in the service of a just and sustainable culture.
Topics in Cosmology (woopie!)
Cool new stuff in astrobiology, planet and star formation
Stuff on the Foundations of Science (physics in particular but hey biology can be pretty weird too)
Topics in the Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics - the endless debate about what QM really tells us.
The study of Consciousness (I got pulled deep into this via my bloggingheads debate and am now lost in how cool the topic is)

So thare you go. Hopefully the mucking around will be useful. So many wonderful topics, so many other day-to-day urgencies that get in the way (sigh).

Tomorrow's topic: Francisco Varela and Phenomenal Promise

Sinking in the deep waters of Science and Consciousness

A post at Reality Base on Science and Consciousness.

This is a fascinating area with overlaps of neuroscience, cognitive science, biology, physics and philosophy. The topic naturally touches on issues of spiritual endeavor and religion as well. Like Cosmology only inward looking.

Even sticking just to science the issue of reductionism raises it head here too.

Oh Quantum How Strange Thou Art

A post on the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics over at reality base.

If quantum mechanics had not come along then we would all be less justified in thinking the world was a very strange place.