The Stance of Unknowing: the subject-object relationship in science and in life

The STANCE of UNKNOWING On the Subject-object Rela1onship in Science and in Life Dan Bruiger Left Field Press The Stance of Unknowing Copyright 2026 by Dan Bruiger www.stanceofunknowing.com This work may be freely cited in part or in whole, with credit accorded the author. Also by Dan Bruiger: Second Nature: the manmade world of idealism, technology and power. Left Field Press, 2006. The Found and the Made: science, reason, and the reality of nature. Routledge, 2017/2024. Holy Terror and the Beauty of It All: how to live with existential anxiety. Left Field Press, 2021. Being: a primer. Left Field Press, 2024 [epub] Forthcoming: Animal Faith and Human Destiny Left Field Press TABLE OF CONTENTS Author’s Preface Part One: Subject and Object 1. Objectivity and Subjectivity……1 2. The Equation of Experience……16 3. The Dilemma of Consciousness……22 4. The Problem of Cognitive Domains……33 Part Two: The Role of the Subject in Scientific Thought 5. The Scientific Observer……40 6. The Relativistic Observer……56 7. The Quantum Observer……81 8. Biological Subject and Object……98 9. The Human Basis of Logic and Mathematics……108 10. The Machine as Subject……114 Part Three: The Human Epistemic Agent 11. Science, Religion, Art……124 12. Moral and Ethical Subjects and Objects……138 13. The Stance of Unknowing……153 14. Redefining Humanity……159 15. Conclusion……168 Appendix: The Twins Paradox……175 Bibliography……178 AUTHOR’S PREFACE I’ve called this book The Stance of Unknowing because the entanglement of subject and object, or mind and body, casts a pall of uncertainty over all experience. The book offers thoughts and observations in several domains, united by the theme of subject and object. It presents a lifetime of reflection about how self and world inextricably interact to produce our sensations, thoughts, feelings, attitudes and actions, and the many consequences of that entanglement. Understanding the relationship between subject and object seems crucial to our wellbeing as individuals and our survival as a species. Whether humanity moves toward a unity that can take charge of its destiny will depend on how well we come to a common understanding of our own nature and that of the world. The book is organized in three parts. The first concerns the subjectobject relationship generally. The second deals more specifically with the role of the observer in science. The third part discusses aspects of the subject-object relationship in more humanistic contexts. 1 CHAPTER 1: OBJECTIVITY and SUBJECTIVITY In which it is seen that knowledge is motivated, grounded in the subject’s biological embodiment. Objectivity has survival value, yet depends on subjective awareness. We have only maps through which to conceive or perceive the territory. The subject redefines the object in human terms. Science translates inductive findings into deductive truths. “All the world’s a stage.”—Shakespeare What could be more obvious than a world of objects, present before our senses, in a space outside our bodies? Yet, we know that is not the whole story, for we are aware also of our own existence as perceiving subjects, in whose consciousness that world—and much more—seems to unfold in an interior domain. Even one’s own body can appear external to this locus of consciousness we call the self. While the universe is busy existing, we too exist. We find ourselves embedded in the physical world yet also apart from it, inhabiting a mental realm where we dream, think, and feel, and imagine things that don’t exist. We sense that objective reality unfolds “out there,” seemingly independent of us; yet we know that its appearance “in here” depends crucially on our nature as perceiving subjects. While socialization and individual character affect how we view the world and relate to others, each of us is an embodied epistemic agent, whose biological and physical nature literally shapes our experience of reality. We are actors in a drama we call living, whose stage is the physical world. The lives of the actors depend entirely upon this venue and their story can unfold nowhere else. The story, therefore, is also about the stage itself and the actors’ dependent relation to it. The narrative includes a notion of objective reality and the vital imperative to be attuned to it. But it also includes the actors’ ability to improvise, their subjective freedom within the constraints of the play. However fictional, the characters miraculously have their own internal lives. Uniquely, this drama is aware of itself. 2 Our sense that reality lies outside us is mirrored by a sense of being an observer apart from it. We seem to stand outside the system of the world, looking in, even as we seem to be inside a body looking out. We tend to deem ourselves separate from the world, as though invisible, our presence without effect. Yet, to a person inside a room, the temperature can matter in a way that it does not for someone outside. Indeed, their own body heat contributes to it. This is the human situation on this planet, the shared “room” we occupy as a species. It also describes the conscious mind’s situation as an occupant of a human body, as well as the situation of bodies sharing a world with other bodies. The awareness of being aware creates a tension, reflected in thought and language as an opposition between I and it—between first-person and third-person description. This not a distinction between kinds of things, but between things and perceivers: between a point of view and what can be seen from that point of view, between actors and props. It radically polarizes reality into two kinds of being: subject and object. This duality echoes the distinction between animate and inanimate. In addition to the subject-object relationship, we relate subject to subject: I to thou. One understandably imagines other living beings to be animated by the same sort of inner life as oneself—to be autonomous sentient agents, in contrast to merely passive things. As social creatures, we have significant relationships to each other. While one cannot have another person’s experience (or even prove its existence), it is socially polite to assume that other people are endowed with conscious awareness. We affirm this personhood in language—in the “secondperson”—and codify it in precepts of religion, ethics, psychology, and law. Yet, even inadvertently, we often treat one another as objects. While human rights violations are blatant examples, the dilemma inheres in the very fact of embodiment, as a moment-by-moment moral issue of how to relate to others. Were we disembodied minds, we might exist as pure subjects; but as organisms, we are subjects as well as objects. Whatever our human-centric morals, biology obliges us to eat and otherwise use other organisms, just as we—as objects—are vulnerable to their predations. The option to regard the other purely as an instrument of one’s needs is built into us. This manifests not only in the willingness to physically harm, or to disregard suffering, but also in every subtle form of exploitation that imagination has been able to invent and rationalize. 3 The notion of objectivity suggests that the object can at least be known independently of the subject and the process of knowing. The embodied mind naturally looks outward, upon a world presumed to have its own reality. Physical science adopts this stance, tacitly excluding the scientist from the field of view constituted by the natural world. To affirm the reality of what is observed, it brackets the observer’s role. But, just as the epistemic subject is necessarily embodied, the scientific observer is not merely a point of view, but is also an integral part of the system considered, which includes the apparatus of experiment or measurement and the information-carrying medium. That is, the scientific observer, too, is both subject and object. Still, everything remains external to the observer, who remains implicitly outside the system, in a mental rather than a physical realm. The scientific worldview rarely addresses this gap between the physical and mental, or between third-person and firstperson perspectives. Nor is there provision for a second-person relation to nature at large. Our understanding of human nature cannot be separated from the nature of the world we inhabit. (Are we primates in a material world or souls in a spiritual world?) Your view of yourself depends on your view of the world—and vice versa. Fundamental questions about what exists and how we know about it invite disagreement precisely because of the entanglement of subject and object. Spiritual traditions have advised us to be in the world and not of it. Modern science has taken this to heart. For, the scientific observer is implicitly separate from the world observed, while physically embedded in it. This suggests that science has unfinished business: to make fully explicit the subject’s embedded role in observation and description. On the other hand, religion too may have unfinished business. While catering to the needs of the subject, religion focuses on supposed theological realities—gods and souls, heavens and hells. It could shift its focus, from theology and personal salvation, to ethics and the flourishing of all life. A subject occupies a literal point of view in space and time—a unique view of the world. Being materially embodied, subjects are also objects that others can view from many different vantage points. Mutuality is implied, like the fact that when others at a distance appear smaller to us, we also appear smaller to them. Here is a thought experiment: imagine 4 that only one single object exists in the universe. Immediately a paradox arises, since your embodied imagining self is already a second object! Then imagine stepping back to imagine your own body as part of the picture. This operation can be repeated endlessly. In other words, as a point of view, the subject necessarily stands apart from what is seen. As a material being, however, the subject can only arbitrarily be distinguished from the rest of the universe. Simply drawing a boundary does not change material reality. Understanding can be framed in either objectivist or subjectivist terms. Explanation can be causal (as between inert things) or in terms of reasons (such as people offer as justification for their actions or ideas). Modern biology views humans as systems governed by causal laws. Traditional religion sees them as moral agents obeying divine laws. Secular society views them as mental and legal entities obeying man-made laws. Yet another view sees all organisms as agents who do things for their own reasons. Through natural selection, the creatures that exist have learned to deal with reality well enough to survive and reproduce. That does not imply understanding the world in a human sense, nor seeing reality for what it is, let alone for what it should be. Creaturely knowledge may be tacit and instinctive. Human knowledge is formalized in science; yet, that does not make it independent of needs. For all organisms, cognition is grounded in their biological nature, with some balance struck between individual and species interests. For social creatures, the interests of the group their play. It is natural that a conscious social primate would view the world in terms of agency. For most of human history, we’ve projected intentionality into nature. What is surprising is the degree to which modern science shuns agency in the natural world, striving instead to explain life in terms of inert matter. This bias has shaped an exploitative view of nature. It may also handicap the understanding of the cosmos as a self-organizing system. From an anthropological view, human beings, including scientists, are tribal creatures. The human species is a constructed category, which has yet to unite us in behavior. Instead, we continue to bicker and make war, even as common dangers call upon us to act with a unified will. We 5 continue in many ways to hold essentially anthropocentric, culturecentric, and androcentric views of the world, even in science. A human individual is not a unified entity that can behave consistently. Much less is society such a whole. The subject-object relation is key to any potential objectivity and its longterm benefits. The first-person point of view is charged with self-interest and survival needs. In contrast, the ideal of objectivity is to be free from the idiosyncrasies of a point of view identified with narrow biological interests, and free from compulsory adherence to parochial cultural values. The ideal is to be disinterested, which paradoxically serves our long-term interest. The ability to override biologically useful biases is itself an adaptation to help us survive changing conditions. While this may all seem abstract, there are personal benefits to understanding the subject-object relationship. For, everything that we think, feel, or do is shaped by both inner and outer factors. To blame either oneself or others, for either our good or bad fortune, fails to acknowledge this co-responsibility. Recognizing the interplay of subject and object improves our ability to act more realistically, without undue pride or shame. Understanding our subjective motivations helps us correct for bias. In ordinary terms, objectivity means seeing things clearly and acting accordingly. Yet, the deeper implication of embodiment is that it is not possible to see things literally as they “really” are. Rather, we see them in the ways that enable life. Knowing this condition to be the price of existence is liberating to some extent. It helps us understand others and ourselves more compassionately. Reality preoccupies us because it matters. But if we cannot perceive reality as it literally is, then what, fundamentally, does real mean? A fastapproaching bus can kill you, whereas an imaginary one cannot. What is real is what can affect us and what we can affect, especially with consequences for our well-being. 1 Realness is how we experience the capacity of the world to affect us and be affected by us. It is thus not only a property of things themselves, but also a quality that imbues at least some of our experience. Events in the visual and auditory fields, for example, are normally taken to indicate the presence of real external 1 The scientific version of this principle is that only what the observer can interact with causally should be considered real. 12 perspective from which all observers could potentially see the same things, arrive at the same values for measurements, and come to the same conclusions, regardless of the dynamic state of the observer. The revolutions of 20th-century physics upset this presumption, rendering observation relative in certain ways to the observer. In the Theory of Relativity, it became relative to the observer’s state of motion. 4 In the Quantum Theory, it became relative to the energy and scale of the probe compared to the thing probed. The ideal of objectivity holds that knowledge should be independent of the state of the observer and the path through which it is obtained. The visual sense, emphasizing the so-called primary qualities, 5 fulfills this expectation better than other sense modalities. Light, of course, is the medium for which the human visual sense evolved. It allows information to be formed as an optical image, which is presumed to be faithfully represented in the mind’s perceptual image. Yet, the perceptual image cannot resemble the inaccessible thing-in-itself or its optical transform. The seeming objectivity of vision is not a matter of literal verisimilitude. It is grounded instead in natural selection, which is a matter of the subject’s relation to an environment, in which light plays a significant role. The justification for believing that we see the world truly is that vision works for us—not that it reveals the world as it “really” is. Even the so-called primary qualities are no more strictly properties of the object itself than are secondary qualities. There is no way that the worldin-itself inherently looks, apart from someone looking. The properties of light, especially in the visible spectrum, uniquely suit it for distance perception and for the concept of objectivity. These properties include its near-instantaneous speed and hyper-fine structure. In ordinary circumstances, the former means that information about the world arrives without complicating delay; the latter means that the impact of light affects neither the organ of perception nor the object perceived in a significant (complicating) way. Such was the presumption in classical physics, based on ordinary experience on the human scale. But this was found not to hold in extraordinary circumstances, such as the perception 4 As we shall see in a later chapter, even that can be conceived from a firstperson or a third-person perspective. 5 Properties such as size, shape, location, etc., in contrast to “secondary” qualities such as color and smell. 13 of rapidly moving distant things or extremely small ones. A general unifying program of physics, credited originally to Descartes, proposed to reduce all physical quantities to position and its time derivatives, which depend on light as the medium of perception and measurement. However, physics had evolved actually as a hodge-podge of diverse notions. Some, such as ‘force’ and ‘temperature,’ derive from other sense modalities, suggesting that the reality of matter could not easily be reduced to mere spatial extension. Force, mass, and momentum refer to the capability of matter to impact the human body and other matter. In contrast, light quanta have little direct physical effect on the visual organ or the ordinary things observed. The reality of the material world was supposed to be independent of the embodied observer, a condition that seemed to be best satisfied by the visual sense. Yet, the world could literally impact the observer’s body in other ways, and affect other senses, with effects that could be experienced as force, temperature, weight, acceleration, inertia, etc. A lesson to draw from such inconsistency is that the basic approach of physics should include the physical nature and circumstance of the observer. An epistemic account of observation should accompany an ontological account of the world. The interdependence of thought and language has special consequences in the sciences, where the goal, as in life, is to clarify what is real and semantically referential. Mathematics is, so to speak, the syntax of the hard sciences. Just as syntax can upstage semantics, so formalist expectations can affect the interpretation of nature. 6 The great advantage of formal thinking is to define things unambiguously. While words in ordinary language may represent things found in experience, scientific language represents defined things. Formal scientific concepts mean exactly what they are explicitly defined to mean. A scientific model substitutes precise elements for the 6 Consider, for example, the ancient formalist presumption that a year should have an integral number of days; the number mysticism of Pythagoras (or its modern version, the “large number hypothesis”); Kepler’s speculation that the orbits of the planets should match geometric solids; Galileo’s assumption that orbits should be circular; and the key role of symmetry arguments in modern particle physics—all of which try to force nature into a Platonic conceptual mold. 14 ambiguous found world. Natural reality is thereby reframed as consisting of idealized theoretical entities and processes. Things poorly perceived or understood can treated as though definitely known. With this approach, one always knows what one is talking about, though it is not the natural world itself. Apart from the degree of correspondence, the model is a wholly different sort of thing from what it models. With biologically and culturally limited channels for knowledge, the subject inevitably faces uncertainty. The scientific ideal is to reduce uncertainty by translating inductive findings into deductive truths—that is, concepts and propositions that are true by definition. 7 Laws of nature then become the rules of an axiomatic system. Deductionism is the faith that physical processes correspond to such defined elements, that nature is reducible to mathematical models. Since scientists and mathematicians are a part of the natural world from which mathematical ideas are derived, to be consistent their thoughts and activities too should be considered reducible to mathematical models. Modern science descended in European culture from religion, and most of its early exponents were religious men. Science thus inherited a strong idealist thread. Substitute “theory” for “theology” and it appears that laws of nature resemble divine decrees. These may be thought to cause the patterns they express, though they are no more than convenient formulae to summarize observed patterns. The equations expressing them are human statements, which have no more power to control matter than do the decrees of emperors or hypothetical gods. While science and religion both seek truth in structured ways, scientists hold their theories to be provisional, open to revision through new experience and new thought. Yet, some scientists believe a definitive theory is possible, as final as religious doctrine. For science to free itself from its Christian heritage meant, among other things, recognizing that only material processes distinguish homo sapiens from other animals, or animate from inanimate things. Descartes regarded both the animal body and the human body as mere machines. 7 For example, perfect right angles, circles, and dimensionless points are idealizations that do not exist in nature. They are not simply refinements of their physical counterparts, but are original creations, exact in principle and manipulable in thought with total precision, which is also the advantage of digitation. 15 But humans, he pointed out, were additionally endowed with reason. Since then, we have striven to demystify even reason by mechanizing it. We design machines to emulate the powers of life, perhaps to displace it. Yet, the power of life we most cherish is subjectivity, consciousness. No preoccupation with the material ontology of the world can properly exclude the subject who perceives that world and embraces such preoccupations. Though all subjects—even artificial ones—must be material, without them objects are literally unthinkable. Bridging the gulf between first-person experience and third-person description relates to empathy and the challenge to take the experience of others seriously. As social creatures, we’ve learned to accept the interior life of others within our tribe. However, this courtesy does not automatically extend to others outside the tribe, let alone to other species. The subject-object relationship is a timeless social and ethical issue, perhaps now the fundamental issue. To deal with climate change, for example, requires action that depends on the mutual understanding needed for cooperation. To move toward mutuality with each other and with nature means shifting from a subject-object relationship to a relationship among agents. To cooperate with others, the subject must receive as well as impose. This means letting go of entitlement to treat the other as object. It means also ceasing to regard nature as a provision for human benefit, a raw material for the re-creation of the world in a humanized image. The long rebellion against nature and the body, which has defined human culture generally, originates in the claustrophobic perception of being trapped within a closed and limiting system with power of life and death over us. Freedom is associated with the transcendent perceiver, the mind, while limitation is associated with the perceived, the body and the environing world. That world may tyrannize us through its sheer reality, over which we have limited control; yet, its mystery also intrigues us. We are forever trying to decipher the rules of a game we did not invent. 16 CHAPTER 2: The EQUATION of EXPERIENCE In which it becomes clear that subject and object act always conjointly to produce experience, thought, and behavior—even in science, which attempts to bracket the subject. First-person and third-person narratives are complementary. “The brain is not an organ of thinking but an organ of survival, like claws and fangs. It is made in such a way as to make us accept as truth that which is only advantage.” —A. Szent-Gyorgyi It is obvious to the biologist that the behavior of an organism must depend both on its environment and its own constitution. It may be less obvious to the subjective self, that one’s experience must depend on both. This is because the mind naturally functions to perceive the world, not to perceive its own role in shaping that perception. Yet, everything we perceive, think, feel and do involves both subject and object interacting; nothing is ever purely subjective or purely objective. All knowledge— even scientific—is mediated, relational, interpretive, and inter-active. The relative influence of internal and external factors may vary. Sensory perception, for example, clearly involves a strong contribution from the external world. Still, the structure and organization of the nervous system determine how sensory input is processed and interpreted—shaping both how it is experienced and how we act upon it. At the other extreme, hallucination, imagination, and creativity are driven relatively by internal processes. Yet even these are typically shaped, however indirectly, by prior sensory encounters with the world. There are no pure fantasies or fictions without some basis in reality, just as there is no pure reality untouched by interpretation. The relationship between these factors can be expressed metaphorically as a simple mathematical function. We can call that mutual relation of subject and object the Equation of Experience and express it symbolically thus: E=f(s,o), where E represents experience (which here includes thought, and by implication behavior), and s and o represent subject and object, or self and world. One cannot expect to know the world purely as object, for knowing already is an act of the 17 subject. On the other hand, mind (even artificial mind) is necessarily physically embodied, which implies a historical relationship with an environment. A mind that is not a physical product of a natural or artificial evolutionary process is not a real possibility. The mutual relation of subject and object precludes mind isolated from the external world, just as it precludes meaningful talk of a universe without conscious observers. We are free to imagine either, but neither describes the reality we live in. Since these factors always act together, subject and object are fundamentally entangled. There is no second equation, as it were, to solve for a single variable. 8 This presents a fundamental dilemma, for in life we cannot easily isolate the influence of the subject from that of the object. The two always act together in a way that can never truly be disentangled. Science has devised ways to approximate such isolation—seeking to identify objective facts by controlling or filtering out the subjective component. Through rigorous protocols, peer review, and shared methods, science aims to neutralize personal and cultural bias. Yet this remains a challenge even within scientific practice. In daily life, it is a common source of misunderstanding. Although it seems like common sense that perception and behavior are shaped by both internal and external factors, people often go to great lengths to deny this simple truth—either by claiming access to a purely objective reality or by insisting that everything is subjective, a matter of opinion or belief. Naïve realism is the philosopher’s name for the assumption that the world is exactly as it appears, as though the perceiving subject plays no role. This is the default stance when one is unaware of the mind’s constructive activity. The world then appears simply to exist. The opposite stance might be called naïve idealism, which considers all experience solely a product of mind. In this view, the material world is in some sense illusory. What one believes about the world then depends less on sensation or observation than on preconceived notions. Such reasoning can become circular — for example, accepting a religious doctrine as true because of its supposedly divine origin. 8 In elementary algebra, to solve an equation with two unknowns (here, s and o) requires a second equation in the same unknowns. 18 To clarify terms, experience here means anything that occurs in the consciousness of a cognitive agent. Yet, the relationship expressed in the Equation of Experience applies not only to perceptual awareness, but also to thought and behavior. Thus, it can be put in a more general form. 9 In this broader sense, experience includes sensation, feeling, cognition, imagination, reasoning, and even scientific inquiry. In the scientific context, the subject factor includes the observer, the measuring instruments, the experimental setup, and the medium of investigation (such as light). The object factor is the system observed. Every observation or measurement involves their interaction. The very ideal of objective truth aspires to factor out the contribution of the observer, in order to focus on the nature of the observed. Science attempts to exclude what is idiosyncratic for individual observers. Yet, this does not address cognitive biases that are collective, grounded in the common biology of the species and in the accepted practices of the scientific community. As a human enterprise, science is fundamentally anthropocentric, despite the aim of objectivity. 10 There are conflicting philosophical positions within science. The perennial nature versus nurture debate, for example, emphasizes one factor over the other, though both are essential. On the other hand, in the free-for-all of conflicting opinions and beliefs in politics and the media, consensus is rarely even attempted—though that doesn’t mean there can be no objective truth of the situation. The challenge is to discern internal and external influences without ignoring either. The problem is that the inseparable joint influence of subject and object renders all experience ambiguous and open to question. That puts us in a vulnerable position of uncertainty, which we are programmed by nature to resist. How, then, are we to sort out truth? A first step is to acknowledge the depth of the problem, which is an epistemic dilemma facing embodied agents. Ours is more a worm’s-eye view of the world than a bird’s-eye view. Understanding that our brains shape perception for survival rather than accuracy, to know reality we must transcend the limits of our biological heritage, which has largely served us well. Self-awareness is 9 For example, O = f(is,iw), where O is the output of a system, is is the input from within the system itself, and iw is the input from the outside world. 10 It may also be culturally biased and androcentric. 19 paramount: ‘know thyself’ remains the best path to knowing others and the world. Using such awareness, a crucial next step is to act in good faith. While we may never fully escape subjectivity, shared intent to understand reality fosters convergence of perspectives. The alternative leads to fragmentation—everyone asserting their competing interests and versions of reality without common ground. But shared intention in good faith makes mutual understanding at least possible. Of course, that is easier said than done. With no gods-eye view, we are limited to seeing “through a glass, darkly.” Yet, it is empowering to recognize even the limited influence that conscious intent holds over experience. We are then not passive victims of experience but its active co-creators. By joining others of good will, we can collectively create a better world. Though we see from different angles, we can converge on common truths with earnest intent. Like the blind men and the elephant, each perspective contributes to the larger picture—on which our shared fate depends. While the Equation seems like common sense, not everyone will agree. In contrast to the exclusion of the subject in science, a venerable tradition of philosophical idealism downplays the object instead. It holds that what is real is the mind, the spirit, or some transcendent non-material realm. Many religious beliefs are based on such ideas. Conversely, hard materialism seeks to reduce mind to logic, computation, or biochemistry. For much of the 20th century, even psychology followed behaviorism in ignoring consciousness altogether. Idealism emphasizes the role of mind or spirit; materialism emphasizes the external world. Each presumes that only one factor is real or primary, ignoring the other or reducing it to its own terms. Yet, science has not succeeded in reducing mind to matter, nor has religion persuaded most people that the material world is illusory. Is reality fundamentally mind or matter? If both, how do they relate? In either extreme view— pure idealism or pure materialism—there would be no dualism. The fact that this dualism persists demonstrates the truth of the Equation and also tells us something about the extremes to which thought can tend. The dualism of mind and matter is reflected in the notion that a person is a self who has a body. When we look out upon the world, however, 20 nowhere do we see selves having bodies. What we literally do see is bodies going about their business, whether these bodies are inanimate objects or living organisms. Yet, self-consciousness adds to this picture a sense of being someone as well as something. Indeed, one experiences oneself as inside the body (perhaps even inside the head), giving the impression that consciousness is the true inhabitant, the body a mere husk, dwelling or vehicle. On the other hand, if the physical world is all there truly is, it would be more appropriate to think of a person as a body that has a self. These alternatives reflect different linguistic points of view: the firstperson versus the third-person perspective. Materialist description is implicitly third-personal, though any description must be made by someone, from a first-person perspective. Even automated measurements require conscious interpretation. Idealist accounts are implicitly firstpersonal, but may reify mental constructs as elements of an objective non-physical realm. 11 Much philosophical, religious, and even scientific debate stems from favoring either subject or object as the primary reality. This is reflected in the nature-nurture debate, for example, or in the question of whether quantum mechanics describes physical systems or our knowledge of them. Einstein and Bohr’s famous debate exemplified this divide, with Bohr emphasizing the inseparability of observer and system, while Einstein sought a more complete, objective, deductive theory. These are complementary threads, which science must integrate. Yet reconciling opposites is difficult, even in physics. Such complementary views continue to shape modern thought —for instance, in the concept of information. Though information presumes an informed subject, it gains a cachet of objectivity through analogy with physical entropy. Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication, based on this analogy, defines information as a counterpart to entropy. But entropy measures disorder in the world, while information involves communication between agents. Shannon information is not an 11 The soul is reified a quasi-material entity; as are heavens, hells, gods, and the eternal Forms of Plato. 21 objective property of the world, but arises from interaction between subject and object. 12 Gregory Bateson famously called information “a difference that makes a difference.” But a difference for whom? Analysis of information depends on an agent’s cognition, goals, and conceptual framework. An objective view of information applies best to well-defined systems and standardized agents—such as scientists communicating in shared terms. But natural systems are not intrinsically well-defined, nor will every observer necessarily extract the same information from them. The amount of information (in a communication or characterizing a structure) depends on how many binary (yes/no) decisions are needed to specify it. If an agent cannot decide some of those questions, the quantity is indeterminate. Only formally defined constructs have definite information content, while the systems they describe may not. For, no real-world system can be perfectly defined or completely described. To posit a finite amount of information in the universe due to a presumed bottom to its structural complexity is circular reasoning. 13 The fact that reality is not a matter of personal whim reflects the singular nature of the world, the literal common ground for all observers. The fact that there can be agreement about it reflects also the biological, if not cultural, unity of human being. Yet, the perennial dilemma remains our dividedness, which ironically also has its roots in our biological nature. Many of our troubles stem from the fact that we perceive differently and according to need more than truth. As social creatures, it is crucial to differentiate between the influence of subject and object upon our experience and behavior. While thought and belief vary widely, the fact that we live in the same universe offers potential for agreement. 12 Even structure, order, and disorder are to some extent in the eye of the beholder. 13 Is there a fundamental “law of conservation of information” preventing information loss—for example, within black holes? It does not follow that information must be conserved in the universe simply because it is conserved in some mathematical transformations. To rationalize the disappearance of information behind the epistemic wall of an event horizon stems from reifying information in the first place, as a substance or property that can be located. 28 imaginatively in its place. We must try to imagine its concerns and considerations as a self-designing system, its intentionality. While the attribution of intention is an act of imagination on our part, so is the attribution of cause. The specific role of consciousness in the life of a human being could be likened to the role of a CEO in a corporation, who has limited executive powers and is responsible to the “shareholders,” the body’s cells. This inner agent monitors and coordinates the activities of diverse subsystems. The display of phenomenality is for use by the CEO—not the cells—to keep track of what is going on. It is how the organism can explicitly represent to itself changing conditions, both external and internal. Similarly, phenomenality could be likened to the display on a computer monitor, which is a graphic version of computer code. The display is not for the benefit of the computer but for its user or programmer. In that metaphor, the organism is both programmer and user. Much mental processing occurs without consciousness. That’s why we can zone out while driving, for example. But new tasks require conscious attention, which is why you must pay attention while learning to drive. Eventually, tasks become automatic as we master them. In that sense, consciousness puts itself out of a job. It is well and good to understand the purposes consciousness serves, but what is phenomenality itself? Trees, rocks, clouds, animals, chairs, and molecules are things that exist in the physical world. While such a list includes teeth and rose blossoms, there does not seem to be a place on it for the ache of a toothache or the scent of the flower. A sensation is not a material thing, but the organism’s memo to itself about its own state and that of the world. The ache of a toothache or the scent of a rose are the organism’s internal communications, which it has imbued with tangible meaning. This is equally true of visual sensations, which we do not normally identify as sensations at all, but as literally the things in the world they reveal (trees, rocks, clouds, etc.) But all forms of phenomenality, including visual sensations, constitute a sort of narration or story, constantly updated on the basis of new sensory input, like news reporting in the media. Perhaps the best metaphor is to compare this narration to an interactive virtual reality. 29 Literal VR is a computer simulation, created by one agent to inform or entertain others. However, the brain scripts phenomenality in real time for its own use, which is not mere entertainment. Sensory awareness keeps us apprised moment-to-moment of happenings in the real world that can affect us. Yet, the brain’s simulation can also project beyond the present moment, to include imagining the future or remembering the past. On the one hand, this “show” is a creative invention; on the other, it is continually guided and updated by real-time sensory input. Perhaps these aspects account for the qualitative difference between dreams and waking experience. That this “show” is functional can be understood by considering that the senses are not simply open windows on the world, but more like remote sensors providing a digital feed. Despite the poetic trope that the eyes are the portals of the soul, the brain is effectively sealed in the skull’s chamber, which has no windows or doors! Its only connection to the external world is via electro-chemical signals it receives and sends out over nerve fibers. Imagine yourself in an analogous situation: in an isolation chamber—like in a submarine—confronted with nothing but instrument dials and control levers. Furthermore, you have never set foot outside this chamber. Whatever purpose these instruments may serve, you must discover it through trial and error. As yet, you have no idea even that there is such a thing as “outside.” Through trial and error, you learn how to “navigate by instrument” without ever seeing what is “really” out there. In fact, the show of phenomenality is simply your imaginative interpretation of such instrument readings, which have been coordinated with the controls through feedback. Certain readings can be interpreted as “solid objects.” Failure to interpret them that way could result in disaster (the submarine might collide with a reef). The interpretation is “true” if disaster is averted. 20 The above thought experiment suggests the learning or adaptation of a single brain, but applies to evolution as well. The individual brain benefits from the accumulated experience of generations of ancestors. Much of the time, this “submarine” is actually on autopilot, controlled by 20 Perhaps this helps account for reification as a default strategy: better safe than sorry. Yet, reification can be a liability as well, when it leads falsely to belief in the reality of things that are not there or are not actually things at all. 30 a sophisticated computer, whose programming has been honed over thousands of generations. Through natural selection, the only submarines that exist are those that have come to navigate so as to avoid destruction. Consciousness becomes important when autopilot is inadequate in the face of novelty. This brings us back to consciousness as a separate control system, different from more automated brain processing. It is as though someone (the CEO) must be present to monitor events and take charge in novel situations. The whole brain must act with unity, as though it were a person rather than a collection of parts. 21 Indeed, it normally accomplishes this integration seamlessly without our notice—until something goes wrong, potentially revealing the machinery behind the illusion of a unified self. When it works properly, we have the sense of being that inner person. Phenomenality is, so to speak, the virtual reality the brain produces to update its interactive map of the underwater world. 22 And this virtual reality includes the body as an “avatar” represented in the simulation. However, the brain’s VR is not a copy or imitation of anything external. The metaphor comes with a caveat, for the notion of simulation (like representation) normally implies something real it is a simulation of. The relationship involved in simulating or representing implies an original, to which there is direct access. Since the brain has no such direct access, the representation bears a different relationship than resemblance to the unknown that lies outside the skull. The submarine’s topographic map of the underwater world (made, say, with sonar) is not a literal one-to-one representation, but is instead symbolic and selective. It is more like a road map or the schematic map of a subway system, oriented toward use. If using it helps the user get where they are going, and that avoids disaster, then the map is “accurate” or at least good enough. What we experience as reality is what is conjured with the map. 23 21 Of course, that does not mean that there is a little person inside the head! Quite the contrary, personhood is to be explained by integration of brain activity, not the other way around. 22 Also called “predictive processing.” 23 Of course, every metaphor or analogy has its limits. Any “pictures” one might conjure come from being visual creatures in the first place. Eyes are presumed for those on board the submarine, whereas the brain has no internal eyes. 31 Let us call this conjuring act fiat, which is Latin for decree. 24 In this context, it means to declare something into being: an agent makes it so. Unlike the natural thing, the conjured thing is exactly what the mind says it is, no more nor less. That applies to all concepts, artifacts, and fictions, which are finite and definite in structure. (In contrast, we can only guess at the structure and parts of a natural thing, which we did not make or mentally conjure.) A simulation is an artificial thing, whereas the natural reality it simulates is not. Yet, the simulation is “realistic” insofar as it enables the organism to live. It is functional for the VR we call reality to be stamped with the relative crispness of the artificial, because the organism must make decisive choices even in the face of poor or ambiguous information. 25 Our senses tell us that the world is real, external, and literally as we see it. Creatures survive by believing their perceptions. Apart from whatever is or is not “out there,” in what Kant called the noumenal world or the world-in-itself, it generally serves us to treat as real what appears in our phenomenality. Just as in literal VR, the sense of realness is essential for believability of our perception. If it wasn’t convincing, we would not take experience seriously; indeed, our species would not have passed the filter of natural selection. Just as pain must hurt, so must the physical world appear to us convincingly as real. Nevertheless, sages—and altered states—have always reminded us that this appearance is somehow illusory, though the illusion is not without basis. One lesson to draw is to not dismiss the creative power of perception and the responsibility we have for our perceptions as well as for our actions. The scientific worldview omits agency and purpose, depicting passive objects in a mechanistic world. Yet, this worldview fails to explain the qualitative feel of experience or the mystery of subjectivity. In reality, the self is not a victim of causes but the creator of experience and action. The effort to duplicate nature reveals just how 24 As in the royal decree, Off with her head!; or the divine decree, Let there be light!; or the mathematician’s decree, Let x stand for… 25 Hence, those classic ambivalent figures in Gestalt psychology, which can be seen two ways. The key point is that they flip in our perception from one definite interpretation to the other, and eventually back, but are never vague or in between. 32 miraculous nature’s achievements are. Modern attempts to program AI to do what a brain does—or to create an artificial organism that does what a natural one can do—help us to appreciate the miraculous achievement of nature in creating us. While the problem of consciousness has largely been relegated to the pages of academic journals, its broader implications lie at the center of the human story, animating culture and history, reflecting the essence of what it is to be an embodied self-aware being. It poses the fundamental question of what we are. What does it mean to be a self-conscious subject? If the job of phenomenality is to monitor the relationship of the organism to its environment, then the job of self-consciousness is to monitor the monitoring. Self-consciousness adds depth to awareness, just as binocular vision aids depth perception. One is aware of the world and of oneself perceiving it from a psychological distance. Since focus is naturally on the external world, it can seem that experience is driven by the outside more than arising intentionally from within. This can lead to feeling impinged upon by the world—even helpless, victimized, oppressed. Such despondency can be countered by invoking an acute sense of one’s own being. The antidote to the world pressing in is to press back with intention. One then reclaims a role as the producer of experience instead of its passive consumer. The key to this shift is the act of self-consciousness, sometimes called “selfremembering.” The resulting sense of being entails recalling that one has the ability and responsibility to manage one’s own experience and action alike. 33 CHAPTER 4: The PROBLEM of COGNITIVE DOMAINS In which it is shown that the domain of the representation is often confused with the domain of what it represents. Output is recycled as input, as when concepts formed through macroscopic experience are projected onto the micro-realm where events are then deemed causes for that macroscopic experience. In view of this circularity, it is not plausible to reduce the mental to the physical or vice-versa. “The map is not the territory.”—Alfred Korzybsky It is naive to think that the universe simply is the way it appears to human observers, or that it appears the same to all possible observers. Yet, the very idea of objectivity or absolute truth implies that there is some way the world really is, apart from how anyone perceives or conceives it. Paradoxically, this is a view of the world as if no observers existed. Kant distinguished between the realm of appearances (phenomena) and the realm of things as they are in themselves (noumena). By definition, there can only be one true world-in-itself, while the phenomenal realm must differ from subject to subject. 26 While a mind has access to phenomena but not to noumena, any attempt to imagine the noumenal world must still draw upon phenomenal experience. Although the phenomenal realm is not reality itself, evolutionary pressures ensure that it tracks reality in ways conducive to survival. The phenomenal realm serves to map the noumenal territory, if only symbolically. 27 The problem is that we can only conceive that territory as it is portrayed to us in our map. I refer to this as the problem of cognitive domains, because it often involves confusing the domain of the representation with the domain represented. It is not a matter of confusing apples with oranges, for example, but of confusing apples with images of apples. A domain is a set of elements upon which operations—such as a mathematical function—can be performed. A cognitive domain is a level 26 Even identical clones would occupy different perspectives in space and so have differing experience. 27 In the mathematical sense of mapping one domain to another, which can be an arbitrary function, not necessarily one-to-one. 34 of information processing that can serve as the input for further processing. A problem arises when the output of such a process is recycled as its own input. For instance, we explain the appearance of the physical world in consciousness by presupposing that world in the first place, with the physical brain that generates this very experience. We arrive at a logical circularity when consciousness is the output of neural activity, but the concept of ‘neural activity’ is itself an element of that output. Scientific thought in general is not immune to this dilemma. For, all speculation takes place within the cognitive domain of representations. What science accepts as objective reality is ultimately a theoretical construct of the minds of scientists. But that same construct is then treated as the foundation for explaining the emergence of the very minds that created it. 28 For another example, consider the concept of time in the context of the Big Bang, when no cyclical processes yet existed to mark its passage (and certainly no observers to measure it). Kant held that time and space are not features of the world but conditions for our experience of it. Today, we understand these intuitions as evolutionary adaptations, not as logical necessities. Our inherited sense of time emerged in stable environments utterly unlike the early universe, let alone a hypothetical meta-time across cycles of universes. Similarly, as Hume and Piaget argued, our notion of causality derives from bodily experience in early life. The discovery of personal agency (the power to cause things to happen) leads us to project causality onto the external world. Ironically, the agency that gives rise to this concept appears to us as itself without cause. Science is our culture’s official cognitive organ. Like the submarine navigator, the scientist constructs a map of reality from instrument readings, mediated by theory. While science improves on ordinary experience by expanding the range of input and explanatory power, it still serves the same biological purpose, ultimately to facilitate survival. The scientific map becomes a new version of the territory, to replace the 28 Schopenhauer likened this bootstrap operation to the Baron von Munchausen’s impossible feat of lifting himself out of the water by his own pate, thereby saving rider and horse alike from drowning! 35 natural world as presented by the senses. The entities of physics, like those of mathematics, are not natural things but theoretical constructs derived from phenomenal experience. Yet these artifacts are often treated as literal realities that (circularly) are supposed to give rise to the phenomenality underlying them. Reification—the tendency to treat abstract constructs as real entities—is a useful cognitive habit. Many concepts in science originated as convenient mathematical tools but became ontological entities: fields, atoms, quanta, energy, even force. For Dalton, the atom had been no more than an accounting trick, not a real entity. Similarly, Planck first held the quantum to be a statistical strategy, at most a discrete quantity of energy absorbed or emitted by atoms, not yet the free-standing photon introduced by Einstein. In Newton’s time, even the concept of force had been controversial. 29 Since then, the concept of energy shifted from being a property of matter to being substantial in its own right. While history often vindicates such reification, it is not always justified. The physical significance of Minkowski’s 4-dimensional continuum is still debated. 30 Physics is full of such examples. Mathematically, dimension is a convention, for example in describing phase space. Yet, that use is conflated with real space, so that the number of theoretical spatial dimensions has proliferated to include eleven or more. 31 Information, a concept borrowed from communication theory, is held to be the fundamental building block of physical reality. Apparent anomalies in gravitational behavior are reified as dark energy and dark matter, and are now considered to make up the bulk of “substance” in the universe. Science writers tend to present current ideas as established fact. In their revisionist view, the entities recognized by the current generation of theorists are taken as definitive and having existed all along. Textbooks 29 Berkeley rejected the dynamic notion of force in favor of kinematic descriptions: “…neither can we know or measure [forces] otherwise than by their effects, that is to say, the motions… But what is said of forces residing in bodies, whether attracting or repelling, is to be regarded only as a mathematical hypothesis, and not as anything that really exists in nature.” [George Berkeley Works vol 3, quoted in Max Jammer Concepts of Force Harvard UP 1957, p207]. 30 H. R. Brown Physical Relativity: space-time structure from a dynamical perspective Oxford UP, 2005. 31 Even a fractional number of dimensions has been proposed! 36 tend to present current theory as established truth, glossing over historical development. 32 While useful for pedagogy, their loosely axiomatic approach risks enshrining contemporary models as timeless realities, fostering the illusion that the laws of nature are foreordained rather than humanly constructed. All organisms operate within cognitive domains shaped by the distinctions they can make within their sense modalities. Some detect ultraviolet light, polarization, electric or magnetic fields, or water pressure, for example. Each sense modality has a specific quality and defines a distinct cognitive domain. With humans, for example, the visual appearance of a wound differs radically from the felt pain. Vision and hearing provide different sources of information about the world, and their qualitative difference teaches us about the modalities themselves. Objective knowledge of the world is abstracted from sensory experience. Ideally, it is invariant across observers, sense modalities, or cognitive domains. It refers to differences within the phenomenal world but not to phenomenality itself. What appears to be objective structure is what multiple observers can agree on, based on their shared nature. From a human point of view, an organism is immersed in an environment with which it exchanges information as well as energy. However, it may not perceive this environment as humans do, and may not have a concept of an environment, let alone concepts such as ‘information’, ‘energy’, or ‘structure’. It seems to us that other creatures perceive and act upon the environment we perceive, while their own representations of this environment are limited by their cognitive abilities and brain power. Yet, the very concept of ‘environment’ imposes a human cognitive domain upon the organism, which may be concerned only to maintain its own state within tolerable limits. It need not reference an environment at all. 33 The irony of that truth is that the human observer is ultimately in the very same boat, so that scientific theories can be seen as aspects of human self-regulation. 32 For instance, Wien’s displacement law, the Raleigh-Jeans law, and the Stephan-Boltzmann law are typically derived mathematically from Planck’s radiation law, whereas the historical development was the opposite. 33 H. Maturana and F. Varela Autopoiesis and Cognition Reidel, 1980. 37 A representation is a mapping from one domain to another. A propositional representation consists of statements. While an image seems rather to be an analog representation, if digitized it too can be understood in propositional terms. A pixel’s on/off state on a screen—or the state of a receptor in the retina—constitutes a proposition in a domain. The ensemble of such propositions forms an analog representation that embodies accumulated data from prior stages of information processing. This constitutes a distinct domain, which may then become the input for yet higher domains of meaning, such as stories, symbols, and values. Analog and digital bear a dialectical relationship within hierarchies of information processing, such as in the nervous system. A language one fluently understands constitutes a different domain than the collection of sounds ones hears as gibberish before learning the language. Similarly, the raw babble of the senses is not the same domain as the sensory experience that results from processing. By design of the nervous system, consciousness has access only to the final outputs of processing, not to intermediate stages. One is able, however, to exercise special attitudes toward the contents of consciousness. An artist, for instance, knows how to “flatten” visual space, to see objects not as threedimensional things but as shapes and areas of color bounded by lines. While such objects of introspection may be mistaken for domains of sensory pre-processing, in fact they constitute an overlay, a further domain of artifacts of conscious attention. 34 Scientific objectivity is not the absence of subjectivity, but the practice of minimizing subjective distortion. Objectivity is usually associated with the visual sense, yet vision too is ultimately a function of the subject. Pain is clearly a judgment of the nervous system, not a property of objects nor even of injured tissue. Yet, we struggle to apply this insight to visual experience, which has no more existence outside a nervous system than 34 ‘Sense-data’, ‘qualia’, ‘raw feels’, etc., are artifacts of introspection when bracketed as such, defining a cognitive domain distinct from ordinary experience. The notion of the sense datum was invoked by Locke and later philosophers as a kind of theoretical entity, like atoms of experience. Sense data, presumably, are what we would experience if we could experience the domains of sensory input and other pre-processed stages of perception. In fact, we experience only the output. 44 Physical reality itself places constraints on observation, on what can be known, and on the nature of knowledge. The limitative theorems of the early twentieth century were a first pass at this realization. Einstein made the epistemic circumstance of the observer depend on the finite velocity of light; Planck made it depend on the finite grain of light. Using reason, Gödel, Turing and others mapped limits of reason itself. Though knowledge of the world must involve the knowing subject, the classical scientific portrait of nature was supposed to be a view of the world, so to speak, when no one is looking. In practice, the ideal of objectivity means agreement among trained observers. This is achieved by minimizing individual idiosyncrasies; but what about factors common to all human observers, or prejudices common to a specific generation or cadre of scientists? What about methodological and epistemic constraints imposed by quantitative treatment or by cherished values like rationality, simplicity, or elegance? Such questions usually fall outside the official scope of science. Just as the brain relies on the input of receptors to make inferences about the real world, so the scientist relies on instrument readings. The brain organizes and interprets sensory input through its perceptual models, according to the body’s needs and goals. Scientists consciously model observed phenomena, according to scientific goals. In science, the relationship between model and world cannot be presumed, as it normally is in ordinary cognition. It must be formally demonstrated. This is hardly straightforward, however, since experiments yield their results in test situations that are already prescribed by theory. Experiments are often effectively physical realizations of a theoretical model, which is rather like building a machine to see if the design is sound. If the machine works as expected, this says nothing certain about nature. The outward focus of science implies that the scientist is not part of the scientific picture. While a person can see their own body, directly or in a mirror, science has no official view of itself. Its external mirrors are found in philosophy, literature, sociology and anthropology, for example; or, in the rewards obtained from industry and government. This omission of self-reference, while pragmatically necessary to avoid unwieldy recursion, is a flaw from the perspective of a comprehensive account. Science advances by ignoring the limits of its own methods and goals and 45 questions it cannot answer. Like ordinary cognition, it focuses on what it can do. Yet, science represents more than a quest for knowledge or a strategy to deal with material reality. It also serves as a creation myth, a universal language, a doctrine to underwrite human powers. The quest to understand nature is also an attempt to assimilate it to diverse human interests. This is the deep significance of the ubiquitous use of mathematics in the scientific narrative, which transcribes natural reality into humanly defined, rational, manipulable, quantitative terms. While scientific objectivity aspires to a “god’s-eye” perspective, all description is inevitably from the viewpoint of embodied agents. Measurement, whether via instruments or senses, involves physical interaction and judgment. It is theory-driven insofar as it presumes quantities that can be isolated as the pertinent variables of a theory. But, how well can these be distinguished from noise—that is, from information that is already presumed irrelevant? Observation necessarily involves physical interaction, and the observer is necessarily part of a physical system. The physical circumstance of the observer figures in observation, along with the nature of the thing observed. The only agents (so far) that can act as scientific observers are human beings, whose biological nature must be taken into account. That includes our intentionality—our purposes, reasons, and categories of thought. Science is not a detached account of reality, but a narrative driven by the needs and nature of a biological creature, which includes the special role played by the distance senses as adaptations. Classical science attempted to eliminate “secondary” qualities from its descriptions, leaving only properties accessible to all observers. In truth, that meant reliance on the visual sense, which is able to literally to focus on objects. Visual acuity lends itself to measurement and quantification. The ubiquitous presence of light makes possible the identification of objects and their properties from many literal perspectives, which enables inter-subjective agree-ment. Distance from the stimulus allows time for reasoning and considered action, so that vision also seems more detached than other senses. The ideal of objectivity is inspired by the acuity and the literally objectifying quality 46 of the visual sense; it suggests a transcendent realm beyond the limits of the senses and independent of the needs of the organism. Yet, this conceptual realm, based on the visual sense, depends on the properties of light. So long as these properties seemed irrelevant to perception, light appeared to present the true face of the world, instantaneously and with little distortion. The realization that light is a wave-like propagation through space, at finite speed, led to questions about a medium in which it travels and its possible distorting effects. The realization that light has a fine-grained texture led to questions about how its microscopic properties affect measurement in the micro world. It became important to understand the role of light as a mediating signal through which knowledge is gathered and transmitted. The extreme speed of light had made it possible to ignore the vanishingly small relativistic distortions occurring at speeds that could be contemplated during the first centuries of classical physics. Similarly, the extremely small size of atoms, electrons, and energies of visible light made it possible to ignore quantum effects among classical objects. While these circumstances made the development of physics possible in the first place, they also required eventual revision. If it had been the case (as early supposed) that light traveled with infinite speed, life would not have been shielded from the simultaneous arrival of an infinite amount of lethal radiation from everywhere in a possibly infinite universe. Similarly, but for being quantized, matter would not be stable; neither chemistry nor chemists would be possible. These realizations challenged the traditional ontology of physics and, indeed, its fundamental stance. Physical measures derived from the visual sense (such as position, velocity, acceleration, momentum) could not be taken as straightforward, much less as absolute. Objectivity could no longer mean observer independence. These discoveries led to the guiding principle of invariance—the equivalent of object constancy in perception. Even though perspectives differ, altering appearance and measurement, the laws themselves could be the same for all observers. Mathematical modeling is essentially simulation. To be mathematically described, a natural entity or process must first be idealized and formally defined. It is this idealized model that then becomes the surrogate object of scientific investigation. The model can be described exhaustively 47 because it was mathematically defined in the first place; but there is no guarantee it corresponds perfectly to reality. For, no formalism is strictly isomorphic to the reality it models, which may be indefinitely complex and integrated with the rest of the world. Laws of nature are simplified artifacts teased out from more nuanced appearances. Indeed, if nature is real, it cannot be fully captured in laws, thought, words, or equations. (Conversely, if it could be so captured it would be an artifact, not reality.) If there can be no complete expression for the world simpler than the world itself, no final “theory of everything” is possible. Yet, redefining nature mathematically can give the illusion of complete-ness and definiteness, potentially masking real ambiguities, such as in the experimental or observational set-up. 40 It is questionable, also, to what extent assimilating nature to human purposes skews our understanding of it. Yet, science as we know it is successful to the degree that nature can be assimilated to models and simple formulae—at least “for all practical purposes.” Technology works because, unlike nature itself, machines are physical versions of theoretical models. While the philosophy of mechanism facilitates engineering, one may still wonder how well it facilitates understanding nature in a way that permits our long-term survival, in contrast to the shorter-term goals to which technology is oriented. Moreover, theory and practice have a reciprocal relationship; theory that includes the role of the observer might expand practical application in ways not presently imagined. While modeling mediates understanding, it potentially obscures nature itself, reducing science to a neo-scholastic study of its own texts and constructs. Formalization involves a shift from empirical to deductive truths. It guarantees certainty of what one is talking about, but not that one is talking about anything real. As in daily life, science cannot proceed without the use of metaphor and analogy, which extend the reach of thought and sensation beyond the familiar realm to which language is naturally adapted. Ordinary vocabulary refers to the macroscopic world, which provides a basis for our categories of thought. Therefore, it is normal to frame concepts 40 Cf. Nancy Cartwright The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p152. 48 outside that domain in terms of things familiar within it. Apart from mathematical description, or a language of pure abstractions, there is no other way to speak about phenomena that are beyond ordinary perception because they are too small, too large, too far away, or too complicated for immediate apprehension. Thus, physicists continue to speak of “waves,” even when they are not considered waves in some medium, of “particles,” even when they are not considered solid objects in the ordinary sense, and of molecules as like Lego blocks, even though they cannot be literally manipulated by the fingers. Such extension is always risky, since it constrains us to think in the limited terms suggested by familiar images. Classical physics viewed nature as a machine—an inert, passive system governed by externally imposed laws, despite the manifest aliveness of the biosphere. The world was reimagined to be a system like our inventions, which are perfectly knowable because we make them. 41 The philosophy of mechanism culminated in the concept of determinism and the dream of a complete theory. The purpose of scientific theory was to discover the blueprint of the world machine—or, in modern language, its program. 42 In this view, the world should eventually yield all its secrets to human investigation. But this is a metaphysical presumption; in reality, our theories and models are always guesses, however pragmatic. The philosophy of mechanism is the faith that nature can be dealt with like a machine. The study of nature with mathematical tools became known as mechanics. It reached its culmination in the celestial mechanics of Laplace, who first articulated the idea of a theory of everything: a single equation predicting the detailed behavior of the world machine as far into the future or past as desired. While this was wishful thinking, it persists in the concept of determinism, and in implicit faith in mathematical modelling. Indeed, it inheres in the very concept of system—a whole that consists of well-defined parts, rules, and operations that can be perfectly known because they are intentionally specified in 41 Giambattista Vico, a contemporary of Newton, had articulated the idea that we know best what we ourselves make. 42 Hence the title of Newton’s treatise, “The System of the World,” presented in the axiomatic style of Euclid. Some contemporary physicists regard the universe literally as a computer, running the laws of physics as its program. 49 the first place. It is not the system of the world that is a machine, but our system of ideas about it! The mechanistic worldview presumes a view of inanimate matter as passively obedient to externally imposed laws, reacting only to external causes, and not imbued with its own active powers of self-organization. This worldview had been handed down from antiquity through Christian theology. 43 But laws and their equations simply summarize expectations based on observed patterns, which are fundamentally statistical. All we can be certain of is correlations found among data; there can always be alternative models to account for those, and there may always be new correlations to discover. The very notion of natural law has historical roots in the juridical concept of law as edict. The two senses of law—as pattern and as decree—have long been intertwined. The early scientists made little distinction between them, nor between causality and agency. 44 While laws of nature properly express observed patterns, the notion of physical laws as governing conflates the two senses of law. 45 As Hume observed, the notion of causal necessity is but shorthand for our natural expectations regarding patterns in the world. The notion of the causal power of laws simply projects, into the physical system concerned, the logical necessity that holds within the model as a deductive system. It confuses physical cause with logical implication. While we may find reassurance in physical laws that the sun will rise tomorrow, they merely express the fact that it has done so in the past. The philosophy of mechanism aligns with the notion of physical laws as fundamental and transcendent, even separate from the universe they rule—just as the design principles of a machine rule its behavior and exist apart from its materials. In a more organic view, physical law simply 43 Although Leibniz considered vis viva (kinetic energy) to be an active power of things to affect one another (in modern parlance, the ability to do work). Newton focused rather on vis mortua (momentum), change of which he considered the passive result of external forces. 44 Newton, for example, was reluctant to attribute gravitation to an inherent property of matter, preferring to see in it the expression of divine will. This was not far removed from the medieval vision of planets carried around their paths by angels. 45 A natural law algorithmically compresses empirical data, while a computer program is a series of commands—to the computer, not to nature! 50 describes behavior that emerges through the ability of matter to selforganize. Physics, especially, is still colored by a mechanistic vision, dominated by concepts such as determinism, time-reversibility, equilibrium, and the isolated system. While equations are deterministic by definition, nature itself is not a closed, logical system. The word determine can mean either to fix or to ascertain. The first is an ontological claim, which presumes some causal power of one state to produce another. The second is an epistemic claim, which presumes an agent who seeks to “determine” the future or past state of a system on the basis of present evidence. The two senses of the term coincide when dealing with artifacts: the state of a machine at one moment fixes its state at a future moment; and the behavior is perfectly ascertainable. This does not apply to natural reality, which remains epistemically undetermined. 46 The equations of physics typically involve a time variable, which can have a positive or negative sign, rendering them time-reversible. The world itself is not time-reversible, however, since it is not a machine, much less an equation. Some natural systems, like the solar system, appear to obey reversible equations because they behave sufficiently like machines to be considered deterministic. This is because nothing outside the narrowly defined system affects it seriously for human purposes. However, when the system is considered against the changing backdrop of the world outside it, as part of a larger whole, its history no longer appears reversible. Even if the background is ignored, if there are too many parts (for example, the molecules in a gas) the system can only be described statistically. When the motions of individual molecules cannot be traced backward or forward in time, the system is measurable only thermo-dynamically, which is to say on a large scale, as a whole. It is no surprise that one cannot move backward in time, since in truth one cannot retrace one’s steps in space either. Motion seems reversible— locally—when “space” is idealized as a fixed grid, without reference to a real changing background. While the notion of reversible motion through space depends on an artificial reference frame, the natural reference frame is simply the real environment (ultimately, the whole universe), which is constantly changing. As Heraclitus realized, when location is 46 Which does not imply a metaphysical state of ‘indeterminacy.’ 51 defined relative to an ever-changing world, a moving observer can never return to a former place, which has an ever-changing meaning. Nor can one truly be at rest relative to a changing world. In geometry, motion—along some coordinate from an origin—is but the subject’s ordering of magnitude. That is a logical operation, reversible by definition, just as one can count integers backwards or forwards at will. Motion through physical space seems to coincide with this, when a continuous progression seems possible from object to object, from point to point, or from perspective to perspective. But such a progression is only reversible within a static reference frame. In real space, the landmarks themselves shift and change. The “fixed” stars, for example, move about at rapid speeds and only seem stationary because of their extreme distance. Their properties also change over time. Perspectives and backgrounds change, not merely as a result of the observer’s movement but also because they evolve on their own, so that it is never possible to re-occupy precisely the same perspective, from which the same background is recoverable. 47 Science embraces many other useful concepts and assumptions, which are nevertheless worth questioning. These include Occam’s Razor (the idea that the simpler explanation is to be preferred, even though nature is not simple); the principle of sufficient reason (whereby everything is assumed to have a knowable cause); the identity of indiscernibles (whereby things are assumed to have continuous identity and never to simultaneously occupy the same place); formalism (whereby it is assumed that nature can be exhaustively represented with symbols). Single causes are generally preferred, whereas causes in the real world are always multiple. Continuity is assumed, though relations could conceivably be discontinuous. The principle of ceteris paribus assumes “all other things being equal,” though they may not be. Principles of symmetry and invariance reflect a preference for general rules over empirical fact. Esthetic principles of beauty in theories and elegance in mathematical treatment reflect psychological needs, not necessarily nature itself. Accepted categories and ontologies are taken to reflect real structure, in the belief that nature can be carved along its true joints. 47 A metrical grid that changes like that would render the idea of reversible motion within it very complicated, if not meaningless. 52 The appropriateness of reification is often taken for granted. But are there literal objects even at the macroscopic scale? (Is a cloud an object?) Or, are “objects” merely shorthand for recurring perceptual patterns? The inference of entities in science parallels how objects are inferred in ordinary perception. Physical concepts and laws are defined in terms of measurable quantities. But presupposing an entity to carry the measured properties involves circular reasoning when the entity can only be verified through those measurements. On the other hand, even our everyday notion of “objectness” draws heavily upon industrial artifacts and the scientific concepts behind them. Industrial objects are well defined and functionally precise. A billiard ball is a far more archetypical object for physics than a stone or a pinecone, let alone a clod or a cloud. 48 As the traditional basis of scientific materialism, the notion of material substance has a tortuous history. Mass doubles as both the “stuff” of things and as a measurable property. Its measurement requires agency, interaction, and consequent transfer of energy—an equally elusive concept—which might be insignificant at the human scale, while not at the microscopic scale. Energy had first to be dissociated from its material substrate before it could be (re)unified with the concept of mass in relativity theory. It is now an abstraction that gives a common name to diverse phenomena, revealed in distinct situations by different instruments, as though a definite single entity is involved, while in fact it is a common purpose that is involved. 49 Energy had shifted from being a measurable state of matter to being an ontological entity in its own right, which itself has mass as a property. The equivalence of mass with energy suggests one fundamental substance that changes form. While putatively substantial, mass and energy are defined through operations that are relational. From an epistemic point of view, they are not substances but measures. Entropy is an abstraction conceived somewhat on the analogy of energy. But, while energy can be a property of individual things, entropy is a property of a whole system. It can be misleading to speak of the entropy of specific parts, or of a flow of entropy from one part to another, 48 Consider the satirical engineering trope of the spherical cow. 49 Bridgman The Nature of Thermodynamics Harvard UP, 1941, p114. One might wonder whether such a concept could have been conceived by a society uninterested in engines. 53 as though it too were a sort of substance, like caloric. Information is now conceived on the analogy of entropy; yet, the concept originates in human communication and implies a subject somewhere in the system. The notion of field is a classic example of reification that seems obviously justified. The space surrounding a magnet, for example, can be mapped in terms of the strength of potential for interaction with another magnet at each location. In that sense, the magnetic field was originally a mathematical device, which came to be regarded as a real entity permeating space. Certainly, the field concept has proven extraordinarily fruitful, and is now taken as the fundamental ontology of physics. On the other hand, imagining the material reality and mechanical properties of the electromagnetic field (the “luminiferous ether”) led to a dead end in 19th century physics—which was hardly the end of that story, since the concept of vacuum energy again suggests a kind of substantial ether. What we now call experiment was anathema to Aristotle, who thought that meddling with nature could only produce unnatural situations and results. Expressed in modern terms, experiment is an interaction between an apparatus (a machine) and the natural world. Today, it stands as a middle ground between pure observation and pure thought. Controlled experiments are designed to isolate variables for study; but both theory and the experimenter’s intervention shape what is observed. Science, then, is a synergy between the external world, as driver of data, and creative interpretation by the scientist. Each presumes and depends on the other. The huge difference in size and energy, between the things we see and the photons by means of which we see them, makes it plausible to neglect the physical effects of observation on our scale. It is because of this disparity that one can even postulate the existence of real objects, and of observers independent of them. Without this effect of scale, there could be no clear distinction between subject and object, nor between energy and mass. 50 50 The eye is 1032 times more sensitive to energy than the proprioceptive sense is to mass, owing to the exchange rate of mass and energy. Cf. Max Jammer Concepts of Mass, p190: “If this ratio were of the order of unity… the identity of mass and energy would have been an obvious fact of experience. The human eye, perceiving light from the sun, would then also feel the impact of photons.” 60 above the earth. There are no coordinate lines appearing in the sky to which distances can be measured. In truth, we know of astronomical events and their properties because of light arriving from them to our local environment. We can know their positions and movements only in relation to other things also made visible by light, not with respect to an invisible framework. 60 Most of the universe is more like a gas than a solid. Everything in an environment without solids would be in constant flux, with no possibility of a fixed ruler or frame of reference. Perhaps certain atomic processes could serve to measure time, if a way could be found to read them that did not depend on solid matter. Perhaps distances might be determined via signals. Yet, in a purely fluid environment it would be challenging to establish the speed of the signal, or its constancy, so as to use it as the equivalent of a rigid ruler. Since we are fortunate enough to live on a solid planet, such considerations were never troublesome until scientists began to consider speeds comparable to that of light. It had long been assumed that the speed of light is practically infinite. But if literally so, all events would be perceived instantaneously and all at once, regardless of their distance. Such an assumption corresponds to the ideal of an omniscient observer, but not to the reality of embodied observers seeing with light that travels at a finite speed (usually denoted as c). Infinite c led to certain logical dilemmas, while avoiding others. 61 In a static world, time delays owing to a known finite speed of light could be easily compensated. However, the challenge to track moving things using signals of finite speed underlay a crisis in physics that occurred toward the close of the 19th century. Acceleration is a key concept in dynamics. It did not occur to the ancients, whose notion of force derived from muscular exertion but was 60 Positions in the sky (celestial coordinates) were originally angular measurements made by instruments fixed to the ground. 61 Infinite c avoids the inconvenient time lag involved in transmission of signals. On the other hand, consider Olber’s paradox: if the universe were infinite in extent, then infinite c would imply that all the light from an infinite number of stars would reach the earth simultaneously, making the night (and day) sky infinitely bright and life impossible! 61 not associated with change of speed or direction. It was problematic for the early scientists too, who recognized that force is proportional to both mass and acceleration, thus entangling those concepts. This gave rise to circularity in the mutual definition of force and mass (in the formula f=ma), and in the concept of inertia or momentum (mv). 62 Such confusion led to a dispute between Leibniz and Newton over what would later become the concept of energy or work. 63 The modern view is that a system of colliding bodies preserves overall momentum but not necessarily overall kinetic energy, part of which can be transformed into heat, for example. While force could be directly felt through bodily contact with objects, with respect to distant things it could only be assessed through visually observing changes of motion. Force is felt in the effort required to lift massive objects, including one’s own body; it is also felt in the effort to make stationary objects move or to slow down moving ones. This gave rise to two distinct concepts of ‘mass’ as the measure of the amount of matter: gravitational mass (weight) and inertial mass. 64 62 Newton’s first law presumes the absence of outside forces; yet, circularly, outside forces are defined as violations of the first law: a body at rest, or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at constant speed unless it is acted upon by a force. 63 For Newton, the key concept in dynamics is what we now call momentum (the product of mass and velocity, mv). Leibniz thought it is what we now call kinetic energy (mv2/2). They were arguing the merits of considering a force acting over time versus over distance. A force acting over a given time produces a given change in velocity. But a force acting over a given distance produces the square of that change—because the distance corresponds to a greater time during which the acceleration acts to increase speed. Pivotal to this debate was deformation resulting from inelastic collision. Heavy balls dropped onto a sheet of clay were found to displace more clay the greater the height from which dropped. That, of course, was a result of the acceleration from gravity. If balls are rolled or slid on a level frictionless surface at constant speed, smashing into vertical panels of clay, the displacement of material would be proportional to v. 64 Apart from the dynamical concept of inertial mass, there was evidence in late 19th century for an electrodynamic origin of mass, since a charged particle seemed to resist acceleration more than an uncharged particle. This suggested that some or even all inertial mass might be electrical in origin. 62 As a line-of-sight visual effect between two observers, acceleration (like velocity) is relative and mutual. 65 That is, visually, each would perceive the other as accelerating toward or away by the same degree. However, acceleration as felt could be different for the two observers, which seems to imply an absolute reference frame. The observer who feels a force is the one who is “really” accelerating, whereas the one who feels no such force is the one “at rest” in that frame. Of course, they could both be accelerating with respect to a rest frame, by equal or differing amounts and directions. What could account for the real existence of an absolute rest frame and the consequent feeling of being accelerated with respect to it? This was the big question that Mach pondered. His answer was that it must (somehow) be all the other matter in the universe! Since the stars are comparatively far from the observer, their motions appear minimal. The “fixed” stars, then, approximate an absolute frame of reference. 66 Mach’s insight does not really tell us why acceleration (change of velocity)— with respect to the bulk of the universe—is felt as force while constant velocity with respect to it is not. Since they are both “motion,” why is changing velocity special, and what is mass that it should be entangled with it? Whatever else they might be, space and time are relationships between events or objects, as perceived by subjects. From an epistemic point of view, space and time are measurements, not entities. 67 The reference 65 Line-of-sight visual evidence for mutual acceleration would be a changing rate of change in apparent size; but the human visual system is not very good at estimating that. Indirectly it could be measured as changing frequency of the light (Doppler effect for acceleration). 66 A clock could be set by referring to (distant) astronomical events, such as the periods of binary stars or quasars. A second clock in the same reference local frame could be set by referring to local atomic events, such as frequencies in atomic clocks. For an observer at rest with respect to the reference frame of the stars, time measured by these two clocks would coincide; but would they coincide for an observer who moves relative to the “absolute” frame represented by the stars? 67 There is no flowing entity ‘time’ that can be measured like electric current is measured by an ammeter. Clocks don’t simply measure time but define it. [Ilaria Bonizzoni and Giuseppe Giuliani “The interpretations by experimenters of experiments on ‘time dilation’: 1940 - 1970 circa.” 63 frame in physics extends the point of view of a subject, but also objectifies it, as a sort of cage surrounding and fixed to the observer. The velocity of an object moving with respect to this cage is not simply the (line-of-sight) speed of its approach to, or recession from, the observer located at the zero point (origin) of this grid. 68 Though space and time are but measures, they can be reified as quasisubstantial. In classical physics, this is reflected in the notions of absolute space and absolute time—for instance, in such expressions as Newton’s “equable flow” (of time) and “uniform” space. Including real landmarks shifts the subject’s point of view from a purely line-of-sight (subjectobject) relationship to an object-object relationship perceived by the subject. The imaginary grid extends that idea; it may also come to seem a sort of entity with properties of its own. Newton’s absolute notions of space and time were challenged in Special Relativity, which ironically gave rise to a new reification, spacetime. 69 Rigid rods and mechanical clocks define idealized intervals of space and of time. Their units of measure are uniformly identical by definition. However, in a changing universe, everything happening in the background during one standard time interval is not the same everything happening in another interval. To paraphrase Heraclitus, there are no identical time intervals, except by convention. Similarly, a rigid measuring rod is an idealization, and the very concept of rigidity is circular. For, how is rigidity to be verified except by comparison with other objects presumed to be rigid? Rigid rods cannot be applied to faraway moving objects, for which the only measuring tool is light. But [arXiv:physics/0008012{physics.hist-ph} Sec2.2] Similarly, there is no substantial entity called ‘space’, apart from separated landmarks and signals connecting them (or apart from some field required to support such signals). In that sense, rulers also define space as well as measure it. 68 An airplane flying overhead, for example, may have a constant speed (s) with respect to the ground (the “base” or x axis of the cage); but the line-ofsight velocity (v) with respect to the observer on the ground continually changes. From positive s at infinity, v decreases on approach until it reaches zero at a point directly overhead, and then increases again to approach negative s at infinity. Similarly, a siren approaching on the road sounds higher in pitch than when passing or receding (Doppler effect). 69 Space and time are conveniently unified—and also reified—in mathematical devices such as the Minkowski 4-dimentional continuum or the spacetime manifold of General Relativity. 64 the “rigidity” of light (its constant speed) is an assumption that depends circularly on rigid rods and clocks, using light itself to verify. The concept of inertial system and the principle of relativity 70 play key roles in both of Einstein’s relativity theories, as do the fundamental concepts of measurement and frame of reference. Galileo had realized that objects continue at rest or in uniform motion until acted upon by some external disturbance. The default state had shifted from Aristotle’s “motion-toward-the-center” to what we now call inertial motion. An explanation of gravity then required the larger context of forces to effect changes in inertial motion. Newton grasped that the same (invisible) force pulls the apple and the moon toward the earth. More than two centuries later, Einstein reinterpreted gravity again—in a way bearing more resemblance to Aristotle than to Newton: gravity is the natural way things move in the vicinity of matter, which shapes the surrounding space. For Aristotle, falling objects signified an earth at rest at the center of the cosmos. For Newton, they signified the attraction of all matter for all matter. For Einstein, they signified a non-Euclidean structure of spacetime. These are very different conceptions of the “same” phenomenon. A great dilemma confronted the physicists of the late 19th century. Maxwell had unified electricity and magnetism and explained light as disturbance in an electromagnetic field. This was interpreted to mean transverse waves in an ethereal medium. 71 But what could that medium be other than space itself? In order to have the properties implied by Maxwell’s theory, the medium would have to resemble an extremely rigid transparent solid, which nevertheless does not impede the movement of ordinary matter through it! However unintuitive, if such a medium really existed it should be possible for observers to detect their motion through it—for example, as viewed from the Earth moving in its yearly orbit. 72 It 70 Also known as Galilean invariance: the laws of motion should be the same in all reference frames. 71 Electric and magnetic fields had been associated with material sources (such as charged wires); it was novel to consider a general field at large in space. 72 Like moving through air, the anticipated effect of this motion was sometimes called the “ether wind.” An analogous problem would be to detect an observer’s motion through air using only sound. 65 was assumed, moreover, that this medium would be a natural choice for a frame at absolute rest. Such ideas came to a head in 1887 with a famous experiment designed to detect motion through this “luminiferous ether.” This type of experiment relies upon the wave-nature of light, since it utilizes the interference of two rays of light, slightly out of phase. These begin as one beam, then split in two that follow paths at right angles to each other, which are then brought back together for comparison. The idea is that motion of the apparatus through the ether would cause one ray to be noticeably out of phase with the other. Surprisingly, the experiment failed to detect such a shift. Einstein was only seven years old at the time of the Michelson-Morley (MM) experiment. He certainly would have known of its disturbing results by the time he wrote his famous paper, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” in 1905. Yet, in contrast to Lorentz’s efforts to solve the puzzle, Einstein’s paper deals only obliquely with the MM result, concentrating instead on inconsistencies in the implications of Maxwell’s theory. At stake was the synthesis of electromagnetism (light) and ordinary dynamics (matter). The MM experiment precipitated a crisis but did not definitively settle the issue of the ether. Einstein himself admitted that Special Relativity (SR) rendered the ether superfluous but did not disprove it. Later experiments seemed to confirm the null result; but such results were sometimes contested, and even reinterpreted instead to support absolute motion. Experiments continue to be proposed to detect motion relative to a cosmic rest frame or a medium for light. 73 The persistence of such efforts reflects the appeal of an absolute perspective, a major thread in ontological thought. An epistemic thread emphasizes rather the relativity of all perspectives, oriented toward the subject as well as the object. In particular, it holds that only motion relative to visible things can be measured. That could be motion in direct relation to the observer (approaching or receding) or it could be in relation to some other visible 73 For example: Donald C. Chang “Is there a resting frame in the universe? A proposed experimental test based on a precise measurement of particle mass.” Eur. Phys. J. Plus (2017) 132: 140. The idea is to use massive particles, rather than light, in an equivalent of the MM experiment, using mass spectrometers to detect absolute motion. 66 landmark or background (but not to an imaginary frame of reference); either way involves light arriving to an observer. Supposing light to consist of waves, one problem with the ether as a medium is that (unlike the ocean or the air) it is not itself a perceptible thing. The alternative assumption—that light consists of particles moving in empty space—requires no medium in which to travel. The corresponding problem, however, is that a particle of light is no more a perceptible object than is the ether. The objectification of light, as either particle or wave, leads to inconsistency. Since light is the means of seeing for us as visual creatures—and not a thing to see—by what means could we see light itself or consider it to be an object? Whatever its nature, light is used by observers as a signal connecting them with each other and with objects. 74 If quantized energy (photons) behaved like projectiles rather than waves, then their speed, relative to an observer moving with respect to the emission source, would depend on that movement. 75 In the absence of a medium that serves as a common frame of reference, no frame has an exclusive claim on the truth, at least for line-of-sight effects. The effects on measurement—of motion between two observers—would be mutually and symmetrically perceived. Each could conclude with equal right that the dimensions of the other’s reference frame had changed. Such a situation might aptly be called epistemic rather than ontological, or apparent rather than real. Einstein called it kinematic. Let us bear in mind that any epistemic system consists of subject, object, and mediating signal. Appearances will be a function of all three. Desperate attempts were made to salvage common sense in the wake of the MM experiment. Fitzgerald, and Lorentz himself, proposed that 74 If light is but a coupling between observers, or between emitters and absorbers, the very meaning of the intervening space is called into question. 75 Early on, Einstein had considered an emission theory in which light consists of particles. This eliminated problems associated with the ether, but did not resolve the problem of the addition of velocities. Emission theories explain the MM result but are not consistent with other experimental results. In the wave theory, c is constant in the medium, whereas in the particle theory the speed of light is constant with respect to the emitter, but not necessarily the receiver. Thus, light defies both the wave and the particle interpretations, suggesting that it is not an entity at all, traveling across space, but a non-local connection between nominally separate localities—whatever that may turn out to mean! 67 the rigid arms of the interferometer were not in fact rigid. After all, solid matter is essentially regulated by electro-magnetic forces between atoms. The space between atoms, if not the atoms themselves, might be distorted by motion through the ether. Hence, in order to account for the null result, it was proposed that one arm of the interferometer physically contracts— the arm carrying the light ray in the direction of motion with respect to the ether. 76 Alternatively, it was proposed that the ether is partially dragged along with the earth in its orbit, so that there was no local motion with respect to it. All such attempted solutions were ontological. Even Maxwell, however, had been unable to produce a sensible model of the ether, compatible with mechanics. The Special Theory of Relativity (as Einstein’s 1905 paper came to be known) took a different tack. It has two parts: ‘kinematic’ and ‘electrodynamic.’ Their inclusion together may reflect Einstein’s deep struggles with the issues involved. 77 SR presents a theory of invariance: a way to express the laws of physics in the same form for all observers. That meant preserving the relativity of observation (which encompasses the addition of velocities); but it also meant preserving the speed of light as a law of physics (as per Maxwell’s theory), which should thus be the same for all observers. To all appearances, these requirements were in contradiction. Einstein’s quest to reconcile them had begun with a youthful thought experiment: what would it be like to chase a beam of light? In his own words, recollected later: “If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c… I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating. There seems to be no such thing, however, neither on the basis of experience nor according to Maxwell’s equations. From the very beginning it appeared to me 76 This would be undetectable by a “rigid” ruler, which would also contract for the same reason. 77 Robert Rynasiewicz “The optics and electrodynamics of ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’” Ann. Phys. (Leipzig) 14, Supplement, 38 – 57 (2005), p39: “The problems [with Maxwell’s theory] addressed in the Electrodynamical Part drove Einstein, albeit in round about ways, to the discovery of the self-standing doctrine as set out in the Kinematical Part. This doctrine yielded a secure and independent justification, previously lacking, for the approach he had explored for the problems of the Electrodynamical Part.” 68 intuitively clear that, judged from the standpoint of such an observer, everything would have to happen according to the same laws as for an observer who, relative to the earth, was at rest. For how [else] should the first observer know, or be able to determine, that he is in a state of fast uniform motion?” 78 I put the last sentence in italics to emphasize the tacit implication that light itself is the means to determine the state of motion, which cannot be felt in an inertial system. How would light ever reach an observer moving with the speed of light away from its source? How, then, could one even gauge one’s speed, to know that one is moving at c? Mulling over this paradox for a decade led Einstein to the kinematic part of SR: “An analysis of the concept of time was my solution. Time cannot be absolutely defined, and there is an inseparable relation between time and signal velocity.” 79 He does not elaborate on that relationship, emphasizing instead the challenge to overcome the absolute character of time; however, he could as well have emphasized the circular dependence of light upon measures of time. SR rests on two notions “only apparently irreconcilable”: (1) the same laws of electrodynamics and optics are valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good; 80 and (2) light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c, which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body. 81 Einstein cuts the Gordian knot by boldly offering these as “postulates,” to be accepted independently of empirical evidence (such as the MM experiment). His presentation then has the flavor of a logical deduction from first principles—reasoning that may be consistent with data but does not depend on it. As a reviewer at the time commented, the light postulate is the more remarkable, since its strange consequences “offer the only method of preserving the science of mechanics substantially in its present 78 A. Einstein Autobiographical Notes, translated and edited by P.A. Schilpp (Open Court, LaSalle, 1979), pp.48–51 [italics added]. 79 Einstein, “Kyoto lecture.” 80 The so-called principle of relativity, aka the principle of invariance or covariance. 81 The so-called light postulate. Note that nothing is said about the state of motion of the receiving body. 69 form.” 82 Indeed, that was Einstein’s goal. Despite his early positivism, it was his lifelong concern to preserve the objectivity, rationality and consistency of physics, the principal challenges to which were the dilemmas that gave birth to the two great 20th-century revolutions, relativity and quantum theory. Though his solutions involved taking the observer into account, the aim was to preserve an observer-independent worldview—the fundamental stance of classical physics. The intermediary of light threatened to embroil subject and object unacceptably. In SR, Einstein found a way to preserve the classical worldview. Ironically, the relativity of space and time—their epistemic “subjectivity”—was overcome in a new objectivity: the space-time continuum as an ontological entity effectively replacing the ether. 83 The argument of the paper begins with an inquiry into the concept of simultaneity: what in fact it means to establish the timing of an event. As we saw above, the space and time coordinates of an event will not be the same in two frames of reference moving uniformly with respect to each other, either of which is equally entitled to consider itself at rest and the other moving. Based on his two postulates, Einstein proceeds to derive the mathematical transformations from the stationary to the moving coordinate system, or vice-versa. 84 While coordinates may differ, the transformations between them will be the same for both observers, on the premise that the speed of light is the same for all. It is no coincidence that his papers on the photoelectric effect and SR were published the same year. SR draws indirectly on Einstein’s ideas about the particle nature of light—the other thing mulling in the back of his mind while contemplating electrodynamics. 85 The idea that light 82 Gilbert N. Lewis and Richard C. Tolman (1909) “The Principle of Relativity and Non-Newtonian Mechanics.” 83 Harvey R. Brown Physical Relativity: Space-time Structure from a Dynamical Perspective Oxford UP, 2005, p67: “The view that the space-time manifold is a substratum or bedrock…is just the twentieth-century version of the ether hypothesis.” 84 These equations had earlier been adduced by Lorentz in his (ontological) theory of electrodynamics. Poincaré had also found them on similar grounds. Einstein’s approach was novel to the degree it was epistemic rather than ontological. 85 Harvey R. Brown op cit, p70ff. [HRB] 76 we have two concepts of mass. One is local, determined by weighing in the presence of gravitation. The other is distant, determined visually by changes in motion, which must factor-in the observer’s motion. Before Einstein, the identity of inertial (distant) mass and gravitational (local) mass was mysterious but taken for granted. As a key variable in dynamics, inertial mass is always paired with a variable of motion. (Force = ma; momentum = mv; kinetic energy= mv2/2.) Contemporaries of Newton criticized the circularity of the definitions of force and mass, which applies to momentum and energy as well. These are conjoint effects of mass and changing position, with the latter relative to the observer’s state of motion. In effect, mass serves as a coefficient of velocity in momentum, of acceleration in force, and of the cumulative result of acceleration in kinetic energy. What is actually measurable from a distance in all cases involves the inseparable product of the paired variables, not just mass per se. Inertial mass has meaning only as a coefficient of velocity or acceleration, since motion is what is actually observable from a distance. In other words, what is actually measurable involves the quantities mv, ma, or mv2/2, not m in isolation. The relativistic increase of inertial mass in SR falsely suggests a “real” change in the moving object. For, all relativistic effects in SR— including apparent change in mass—must be mutual between uniformly moving frames. 100 Like length contraction and time dilation, the relativistic increase of inertial mass with speed must be a symmetrical effect between observers. The apparently objective (that is, asymmetric) increase of mass of particles in high-energy experiments may be due to acceleration rather than the uniform velocity that pertains in SR. In any case, no observer occupies the framework of the particle. The physicist who uses a cyclotron to measure speeding particles may claim to occupy the rest frame and that the particle has increased in mass; but there is no observer claiming the point of view of the moving particle, from which the cyclotron symmetrically would appear to gain in mass! 101 100 According to Einstein, such effects would include temperature: “Thus, the temperature of a moving system is always lower… than with respect to a reference system that is at rest relative to it.” [Doc47]. 101 While the cyclotron could theoretically be weighed, the moving particle cannot. In any case, that would measure gravitational mass, not inertial mass. 77 The relativistic increase of mass with velocity in SR (which supplied the reasoning for Einstein’s derivation of E=mc2) is not the same phenomenon as the conversion of internal energy to kinetic energy implied by this famous equation. Relativistic increase of mass should not be confused with the equivalence of mass and energy. However, it often is, perhaps because Einstein used the former to argue for the latter. 102 Yet, he himself was never satisfied with his several derivations of the formula, which were never without problems pointed out by critics. 103 Moreover, others had found essentially the same formula. In proposing mass-energy equivalence, he was speculating intuitively about the internal energy of the atom, about which little was known at the time. The formula quantifies the equivalence, but says nothing of the actual physical processes of “converting” mass to energy or vice-versa. Conceptual inconsistencies may be involved. 104 In his original paper on this equivalence, Einstein assumes a “rest energy” E0 in the frame of the observer considered at rest. 105 But, since that is by definition not kinetic energy (of the whole, moving with respect to an external frame), it must be its “internal energy,” whatever that would turn out to mean. 106 The idea that rest mass represents a form of 102 Marc Lange “The Most Famous Equation” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 98, No. 5 (May, 2001), pp. 219-238: “Indeed, it is difficult to find a scientific equation whose ontological implications have been misunderstood so widely and in so many ways.” 103 Cf. Hecht, E. (2011) American Journal of Physics, 79, 591-600; also Moylan, P., Yan, L. X., & Gironda, M. (2021) “On the Controversy over the Logical Correctness of Einstein’s First Paper on Mass-Energy Equivalence.” Advances in Historical Studies, 10, 21-33. 104 For instance, if electrons have mass, and mass is internal energy, then electrons must have internal energy. Does that mean internal kinetic energy, so that electrons are not “fundamental” but consist of moving parts? And of what do those parts consist? Is there such a thing as “pure” energy, other than energy that is ultimately kinetic or potential? 105 Properly: E0 = m0c2, where m0 is by definition mass in the rest frame. That is, “rest energy” and “rest mass” are equivalent for an object at rest in the observer’s frame of reference. This is not the same as the apparent (increase of) mass from the point of view of frameworks in relative motion. Cf. L. B. Okun “The Einstein formula: E0 = mc2. ‘Isn’t the Lord laughing?’” arXiv: 0808.0437v1 {physics.hist-ph} Aug 2008. 106 The unified concept of energy disregards specific measures in differing contexts (for example, radiant vs kinetic vs potential). 78 energy inside an atom turned out to be a profound truth. In contrast, the concept of relativistic mass is an effect of motion relative to an observer. 107 It confuses an ontological with an epistemic notion. 108 A mere difference of perspective between two frames of reference is not the same as a true change of kinetic energy—for example, through loss or gain of radiation. Nor is a shift of perspective: viewing the motion of the thing as a whole is not the same as viewing its internally moving parts. Einstein’s argument does not in itself establish the connection between radiant energy and mechanical inertia. 109 The equivalence of mass and energy is an empirical fact verified in atomic physics, wherein energy within the atom is converted to external kinetic energy of resulting 107 Relativistic effects vary according to the component of motion with respect to the observer: toward or away, or in some tangential direction with a velocity component in each coordinate. Accordingly, relativistic mass varies with actual direction of motion (“longitudinal” and “transverse” mass differ mathematically). Relativistic mass is taken by convention to be the transverse mass. 108 Cf. Carl G. Adler “Does mass really depend on velocity, dad?” Amer, J. of Physics 55 (8) Aug 1987, p740ff: “It is internal kinetic energy that counts toward inertia not (to paraphrase Einstein) mere translational kinetic energy of the body as a whole… Elsewhere Einstein states explicitly that the mass of a body is nothing else than the energy possessed by the body as judged from a coordinate system moving with the body” [i.e., at rest (original italics)]. Cf. also Kevin Brown “Einstein on the Inertia of Energy” [https://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath600/kmath600.htm]: “…the total energy E of a body consists of two parts, intrinsic and extrinsic. The intrinsic part…arises from internal degrees of freedom, and does not depend on the speed of motion of the overall object, whereas the extrinsic part of a body’s energy is the part that does depend on the overall motion of the body… Since, by definition, the internal energy of the object doesn’t depend on the speed of the object, it is the same regardless of which system of reference we use.” [italics added] The latter point raises a further question, since each separate moving component—as well as the system as a whole—could be regarded relativistically as moving with respect to an observer. 109 Cf. Kevin Brown, op cit: “It’s true that [Maxwell’s] equations already imply the relation E = pc, where E is the energy and p is the momentum of an electromagnetic wave, and hence if we insert the classical definition of momentum p = mc we get E = mc2 (as had already been noted previously by others, such as Poincare and Thompson), but this doesn’t really establish any connection between radiant energy and mechanical inertia.” To insert classical momentum for electromagnetic momentum already assumes the equivalence the formula is supposed to show. 79 particles of decay or radiant energy. But this fact does not follow from SR as supposed in Einstein’s original paper. 110 To be coherent, the notion of internal energy within the atom had later to be elaborated in terms of field theory, complicated by an enigmatic suite of new particles and associated fields. From an epistemic point of view, mass and energy are not substances that can be inter-converted, but are measures of observable interactions. In any case, just as one may wonder why c is a cosmic speed limit, one might wonder why it should appear in Einstein’s equation at all. Why is c2 a conversion factor between mass and energy? The usual rationale involves the four-dimensional space-time continuum, which has the speed of light (squared) built into it through the Pythagorean theorem. However, it also makes sense that c would figure in any derivation of the mass-energy relationship from electromagnetism. Yet, electromagnetic mass is not defined to be inertial or gravitational mass; in terms of concepts of mass, electrodynamics was distinct from classical dynamics. Nor does E in Einstein’s formula explicitly represent kinetic energy. While the parallel with the formula for kinetic energy is suggestive (K=mv2/2), the mass-energy relationship seems to derive historically from a consideration of the speed of transmission of disturbances (waves) in material media—applied, in this case, to electromagnetic waves in the ether. The square of that speed (c) is equal to the ratio of the elastic constant of the medium to the medium’s density. This formula in turn derives from equations describing the periodic motion of oscillators. 111 Einstein’s contemporaries explained the MM result in ontological terms, implying an interaction of material bodies with the ether. Length contraction and slowing of clocks were interpreted as “real” changes due to electrical forces between atoms. Ultimately, Einstein also proposed an ontological explanation, which interprets these phenomena in terms of 110 Einstein shows that the initial and final energies (after emission of radiant energy) differ in the moving frame by the amount E/√(1– v2/c2), which he claims is an objective (non-symmetric) fact. However, in SR this is properly a symmetrical mutual effect, claimed equally by an observer in either frame of reference. 111 See: Max Born Einstein’s Theory of /Relativity Dover, 1962, p114-15 and p185. 80 the malleable structure of spacetime rather than the malleable structure of matter. 112 The Lorentz transformation could as well be interpreted in epistemic terms: of observers’ mutually relative states of motion, given the finite intermediary of light. Space-time need not be treated as a new metaphysical entity if the observing subject is fully taken into account as part of the system. The invariance of c could have a different interpretation, not as a law of physics or an absolute cosmic speed limit, but as an incidental side-effect of light’s exclusive role as signal between frames of reference. Time dilation could have a different explanation, as a function of moving things physically interacting with something yet to be determined. Einstein derived matter-energy equivalence and General Relativity on arguments based on Special Relativity, equivocating between an epistemic and an ontological interpretation. While the predictions of GR and E=mc2 may be accurate, their theoretical dependence on SR remains dubious, at least if the clock hypothesis is true. 113 If there is a moral to draw outside science, perhaps it is to be wary of reification and to always seek an interpretation of events that includes the role and circumstance of the subject as well as focus on the object. It is both empowering and humbling to recall that all authority—even the authority of nature—involves a relationship between subject and object. 112 Carlo Rovelli “Halfway through the woods: contemporary research on space and time” in John Earman and John D. Norton (eds) The Cosmos of Science U. of Pittsburg Press, 1997, p181. 113 The clock hypothesis is the assumption that how time dilation affects a clock does not depend on its acceleration but only on its instantaneous velocity. [Wikipedia: time dilation] 81 CHAPTER 7: The QUANTUM OBSERVER In which we recognize that the quantum realm confronts us with ancient paradoxes and inconsistencies in human thinking, characterized by the wave-particle duality. Quantum properties implicate the role of the observer, who has access to measurement events, not to entities with an identifiable state between measurements. (In)determinism and (un)certainty are epistemic states, not ontological. The quantum realm is unavoidably statistical. The Measurement Problem concerns how a probability becomes a fact through measurement. Quantum theory seems “incomplete” when it is assumed that nature can be reduced to a deductive system. “The only task of physics is to describe the relationship between observations.” —W. Heisenberg, 1927 In the previous chapter, we regarded the relativity of measurements involving time and space as an epistemic issue, further concluding that an apparent cosmic speed limit, c, depends on the unique role of light as a signal. In this chapter, we will explore a similar argument for the case of extreme differences of scale between observer and observed, concluding that an apparent lower limit of size also must depend on the role of light as a signal. 114 We will examine the micro realm from an epistemic perspective, arguing that quantum phenomena should be understood with reference to the intermediary used to probe them. Special attention will be given to how the conceptual bases for understanding are grounded in experience on the human scale. Like relativity, quantum theory challenges our basic ideas concerning space, time, causality, and the relation of subject to object. Just as physics would have to take into account the finite velocity of light, so it was obliged to confront the discontinuous structure of the world and of the means for investigating it. Both these developments, which began in late 19th century, are effects of scale, with deep roots in ancient conundrums inhering in the logic and common sense derived from human cognition. Underlying the infamous wave-particle duality are long-standing 114 Which does not deny that an ontologically real least size could exist. 82 fundamental inconsistencies in human thinking. For example, the concept of substance may appear to be something continuous and indefinitely divisible; yet it is organized into discrete objects separated by apparently empty space. Whether material reality is ultimately continuous or discrete vexed the ancients long before modern science could address the question. Yet, modern answers are no less perplexing. The quantum realm defies reason perhaps because reason itself, like the biology underlying human cognition, has changed little over mere millennia of adaptation. Special Relativity was conceived when Einstein sought to reconcile the implications of Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism with those of Newton’s dynamics. The quantum revolution began similarly, with a discrepancy between theoretical predictions and actual observations regarding the electromagnetic radiation given off by heated bodies. In the background was the challenge to understand how matter interacts with radiation. The new theory of atoms considered matter to consist of tiny discrete objects. Radiation, in contrast, seemed to consist of vibrations in a continuous medium. The mystery deepened with the discovery that wave-like vibrations could behave like tiny objects and that such particles could behave like waves. 115 Newton had argued successfully for the corpuscular nature of light. In 1804, however, Thomas Young’s studies explained diffraction as a property of waves. This discrepancy became known as the wave-particle duality. Maxwell had unified electricity and magnetism as a field in which radiation could be explained as a wave-like disturbance. Planck argued that some properties of radiation could only be explained by assuming that it is emitted and absorbed in discrete amounts; he saw the need to quantize energy, but long refused to believe in the quantum as a real object. Einstein showed that radiation itself must exist in discrete bits during the time between emission and absorption. De Broglie argued, on theoretical grounds, for the wave-nature of particles and matter in general (soon confirmed for electrons by experiment); Schrödinger formalized 115 One could, for example, think of a spherical wave-front of radiation as consisting of myriad discrete parcels; yet each such parcel seemed to retain the wave-like property demonstrated by interference, as well as the particle-like ability to be absorbed at a particular location. 83 this in his famous wave equation. Bohr tried to reconcile the emerging dualism by referring to the context of the observer, who can choose complementary kinds of experiment that reveal one or the other aspect; he realized that classical concepts, like human cognition generally, are bound to the scale of experimental apparatus and cannot be transferred wholesale to the micro realm. The famous debates between Einstein and Bohr, and the competition between Schrödinger and Heisenberg, concerned essentially how to reconcile classical concepts with the strange aspects of the micro world—beginning with the wave-particle duality. Finally, Max Born interpreted the wave equation to describe probabilities of events rather than events themselves—that is, in epistemic rather than ontological terms. Classical physics developed from experience on the familiar human scale, midway between the smallest and largest known things. It is convenient to assume that physical laws, as we know them on our scale, should apply at the extremes as well. Yet, there is no guarantee of such a match. The assumption is arbitrary if physical laws are not transcendent metaphysical principles, but simply summaries of actual data gleaned on our scale. It would then be hardly surprising that some classical concepts were found not to apply universally. Our cognition evolved for dealing with macroscopic objects and processes. The micro world is baffling because our cognition does not fit it well. The other side of that dissonance, however, is the adaptiveness required to see the world, so to speak, through classical eyes. In other words, the quantum world reveals the lengths to which human cognition has gone to adapt to our scale. The micro realm reveals both the limits of this adaptation and the proclivities—such as realism—that are natural to it. These include the tendency to organize experience into distinct objects in space, assumed to persist between observations. On the human scale, this works well. But in the quantum realm, the idea of an identifiable individual object often breaks down. The micro world presents a challenge to our under-standing because it does not conform to the familiar world of common experience, so effectively described by classical physics. The early quantum physicists naturally tried to grasp the quantum world in classical terms, first using models, metaphors, and reasoning proven successful in that realm. As 84 such attempts became ever more problematic, however, the formalisms of quantum theory were accepted to the extent they worked empirically, whether or not they made intuitive sense or aligned with classical concepts. The subject-object relation is always mediated by a messenger or signal that interacts with both the observer and the observed. Just as light is required for knowledge of distant astronomical space, so some intermediary is required to probe the microscopic world. The properties of this messenger must be taken into account. On our scale, the signal’s effect can usually be ignored, which is why quantum effects—like relativistic effects—remained undetected for so long. In the micro realm, however, the energy of the messenger is comparable to that of the small entities with which it interacts. The interaction mutually disturbs the probe and the system probed. Classical properties are thought to inhere in things themselves. As in relativity, however, quantum properties implicate the role of the observer too. Only scale permits that role to be ignored. The minimal impact of the means of investigation permits the object of investigation to be considered in its own right. This bracketing of the observer, and of the means of observation, makes science possible and fosters the stance we call realism. Yet, the circumstance of scale is but an accident of our world, to which we have adapted. It is merely a presumption that ideas formed on the scale of human life are universally valid at every scale or in every circumstance. Since all experience, thought, and action reflect both object and subject, the fact that quantum entities defy intuitive expectations must inhere in our nature as embodied organ-isms as well as in the physical world itself. It might, for example, reflect the natural tendency to organize experience in terms of objects separated in space. On the one hand, an “object” is integral, a coherent whole, an individual. On the other hand, intuition tells us that things or processes extended in space and time consist of functional parts that can in turn be subdivided—even indefinitely. (Hence the mathematical notion of the continuum, and the problems of infinities and infinitesimals that have beset mathematicians ever since Zeno.) 85 While such intuitions extrapolate experience gleaned on the human scale, there is no a priori reason to assume they hold in the micro realm. 116 The individual quantum object cannot be perceived in the ordinary way. The statistics of quantum measurements doesn’t correspond to what one expects of classical objects, which can be distinguished as individuals and assigned identity. The fact that elementary particles cannot be marked or tagged as individuals leads to a characteristically different statistical accounting for quantum entities. At the quantum scale, individuals are no more than examples of a theoretical kind. Indeed, elementary particles of a kind are simply defined to be identical. There is no way to tell one electron from another; and the only way to verify anything about its idealized theoretical version is through collective experimental data. This defies experience on the macro scale, where real objects can be distinguished because they are never perfectly identical. In the quantum realm, in fact, it is not objects that are counted, but detection events—which may represent quantities rather than things. Is an electron a tiny object or a tiny amount of electric charge? When quantity does not refer to individuals with distinguishable characteristics, it makes no more sense to speak of this or that electron than it does to speak of this or that dollar in a bank account. To paraphrase Heraclitus, you can never point to the same particle twice. The observer has access only to detection events, which involve subject, object, and the medium that relates them. The track of an electron through a cloud chamber, for example, seems to be the definite path of a particle. Yet, it is not the particle itself we see but only the result of a succession of ionization events caused by the passage of the electron. While this could be compared to the vapor trail left by a high-flying jet aircraft, you can see the aircraft itself by means of light reflected from it (or perhaps with radar), whereas you do not see the electron itself, only its track. 117 116 If, for example, we are tempted to regard some particles as truly elementary, it may be only because we do not have the energy resources to break them into something more fundamental. Perhaps we also balk at the dizzying idea of unending complexity all the way down, not to mention infinity all the way up. 117 Perhaps a better analogy for “seeing” the electron would be to bombard the aircraft with massive energy pulses that could change its course (and perhaps destroy it). By the time these reflected pulses return to the observer, the plane’s position could hardly be as certain as if it were observed with light. 92 The underlying difficulty, however, lay in the ambiguous notion of determinism, which could mean either that one event causes another or that someone detects an outcome. Models, equations, and artifacts are deterministic, but the natural world is not. On the other hand, randomness means only that no cause—no explanatory antecedent or ordered pattern—has been found. By definition, there can be no true randomnumber generators; yet, patterns appear random when no algorithm can be identified. The very concepts of determinism and indeterminism are thus observer-dependent. There is always an agent who can or cannot determine something. Quantum indeterminacy is nevertheless often reified as something deeper than a failure to gain the sort of certainty we feel entitled to on the mesoscopic scale. But if determinism is not a feature of physical reality at all, then it is no surprise that individual quantum events are unpredictable. The statistical precision that characterizes large runs of detection events is precise in the way that the probability of heads approaches exactly 50% in large numbers of fair coin tosses. But that is not the certainty that classical equations are ideally supposed to provide: namely, to predict heads or tails in a given coin toss. We may imagine that the many forces bearing on the coin fix its trajectory; but we cannot accurately know those forces well enough to predict the outcome in any given toss. That indeterminacy concerns epistemic inability to ascertain outcomes, not some metaphysical impotence of external events to force other events. While classical determinism is theoretically precise, the precision of the quantum realm is an effect of large samples. In real life, we evaluate likelihood in two ways: based upon past experience and upon reasoning about idealized situations. One might call upon data gathered from questionnaires, for example, but also upon reasoning about well-defined artificial situations, such as the toss of coins or the roll of dice. The first way deals with a sequence of many actual events, the second with idealizations. The idea of the inherent (or “prior”) probability of a single event is problematic when it refers to real situations as opposed to an artificial context that is formally well defined, such as the coin toss or dice roll. At the microscopic scale, it is presumed that physical entities correspond literally to their idealized theoretical counterparts. Since there 93 can be no difference between the real object and its theoretical version, uncertainty in measurement must have a different meaning than in classical physics. Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty relations might be interpreted as restrictions on the precision of individual measurements. But since even classical measurements are subject to similar trade-offs, uncertainty makes more sense interpreted statistically, as minimum spreads of error in large runs. The choice facing the early theorists was effectively between a continuous wave description and a discontinuous particle description. Bohr proposed a middle way, in which both descriptions were valid and needed for the whole picture. He held them complementary rather than contradictory, because in the last analysis they were only descriptions, neither of which could correspond literally to the world-in-itself. For Einstein, the objective existence of physical reality implied deterministic parameters, perfectly knowable in principle. However, the reality of natural systems and the possibility of perfect knowledge are distinct issues. Einstein did not like the apparent indeterminism of the quantum realm. He believed the quantum theory to be a compromise and that a more complete theory was yet possible. His realism, however, is actually deductionism: the faith that nature can be understood unambiguously because it consists of well-defined elements of a deductive system. This faith shows up in the ideal of completeness expressed in the famous EPR paper, which challenged quantum theory to meet this ideal: “…every element of the physical reality must have a counterpart in the physical theory.” Such a formal one-to-one mapping is possible only between deductive systems. Indeed, if nature is real, no theory can be complete in this sense. 123 The elements of a theory are idealizations that must correspond somehow to elements of physical reality, if not perfectly. That correspondence is quite different in quantum physics than in classical physics. In the latter, in many cases the idealization corresponds closely to what is presented to the senses—for example, a real planet, as it can be seen in a telescope. A gravitating body may be very nearly a sphere with a certain radius, mass, center of gravity, etc. The idealization, in fact, is derived 123 One could argue, moreover, that a “complete” theory is not one that is deterministic but one that includes the role of the observer. 94 from such visual experience, which cannot be the case in the micro realm. In that realm, too, there is a correspondence between the data from experiments and the conceptual elements of the theory; but that correspondence has little to do with direct experience of the theoretical entities concerned. The theory must predict (or account for) the data; but these consist of detection events, not direct experiences of micro entities. The putative entities of the theory are simply what work in the theory to give correct statistical results in experiment. The famous debate between Einstein the realist and Bohr the positivist reflects the general philosophical question of whether physics describes nature or our knowledge of nature. Bohr’s approach emphasized experimental results and allowed “complementary” descriptions, while Einstein—in quantum theory as in relativity—sought to preserve an ontological description that maintains causality and (in his view) the integrity of physics. For Bohr, the properties of the external world must be known through interaction with varying kinds of experimental equipment. Measurement of any sort requires such an interaction, which must affect the result, if only to a negligible degree. Classical measurements are typically analogue, not usually a matter of yes or no. However, that may not be the case in the quantum realm where, for example, the measured “spin” of a particle is simply counted as “up” or “down.” A description can be complete in regard to the existing state of knowledge, while incomplete as a description of external reality. In that sense, Bohr and Einstein were talking at cross-purposes. A probabilistic description is incomplete from a realist perspective that seeks to predict individual events. The state within the unopened box—in Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment involving a cat—is understood differently in the two perspectives. 124 For Einstein, it is common sense that there can 124 The thought experiment was intended to illustrate the absurdity of using the wave equation inappropriately. Within a sealed container, an unstable substance is connected, via an amplifying device, to a vial of cyanide, so that when an atom decays the vial is broken and the cyanide kills the cat. If a wave is supposed to characterize the state of a system, then that state can consist of a superposition of other states. For example, an unstable atom can be represented by a superposition of decayed and undecayed states. But this is no more than another way to describe the posterior probability that it will decay within a given time, which is a statistical effect involving many decaying particles. 95 be no intermediate state between an alive and a dead cat, between an exploded and an unexploded bomb. Yet, even if we do not know what causes a given bomb to explode or not, we can know how many bombs fail to explode in a series of tests of ostensibly identical bombs, and on that basis establish the probability of a given bomb exploding. The so-called Measurement Problem is how to interpret a mere probability becoming fact apparently because of the act of measurement. 125 The Measurement Problem is less of a mystery if it concerns nothing more than how to interpret probability. After all, the sky may be in a “mixed state” of rain and no rain, with probability of precipitation at 60% (based on meteorological records)—until it actually rains, when the probability “collapses” to a “pure state” of 100%! Yet, whether, or when, it begins to rain is ambiguous. Does a single rain drop falling on your head mean it is raining? Similarly, your life expectancy may be x years until it “collapses” to zero at the moment of your death. The quantum realm sheds light on realism as a cognitive strategy. It might seem that quantum weirdness undermines the reality of nature, which classical physics appears to support. If anything, the very opposite is true. For, however useful, the concepts of classical physics—including causality—apply only in special, idealized circumstances. Once we admit that thought simply cannot capture the whole of reality, and that all phenomena are relational and statistical, it is more plausible that the seeming irrationality of the quantum realm is the very hallmark of natural reality. In classical physics, unpredictability is not taken to mean that the world itself is indeterministic, much less that it has no definite properties or existence. Rather, the fact that the mathematics works precisely— despite imprecise measurements—was taken to mean that causality works perfectly behind the scenes and that physical variables must have precise values even when these cannot be ascertained. The catch, however, is that such variables can only be approximately identified with physical realities, if theoretically to any desired precision. 125 Also known as the “collapse of the wave function,” since the probability of a particle’s location is described with mathematics used to describe a wave. Interpreted more literally, an expanding wave re-converges or “collapses” to a point where it is absorbed. 96 Though both are formalisms, quantum physics differs from classical physics in being driven by observational results that seem irreducibly statistical. An interpretation in terms of entities is not strictly implied in the data themselves (detection events), any more than it is in ordinary perception. Quantum physics is thus profoundly empirical, if not “realist.” It originated in the first place because of the failures of classical theory to match empirical evidence. Einstein’s seemingly realist expectation, that the quantum theory could not be considered complete until it allowed the sort of prediction of individual events possible in classical theory, was truer to an ideal of reason than to the reality of nature. Realness, in the sense of observer-independence, becomes paradoxical as a property that may be acquired or lost through the intervention of an observer. One may choose to believe that macroscopic things differ from microscopic ones because they continue in their real state when unobserved. But this, of course, is an unverifiable act of faith. 126 The best we can do to support it is to increase the frequency of observations, assuming continuity during ever shorter periods. This strategy for macroscopic things does not work as well in the micro-realm, where the very act of looking changes what is seen. The ideal of the observer-independent state of a microsystem applies only in the limit where Planck’s constant (h) would be zero, just as the observer-independent state of a macrosystem applies only in the limit where the speed of light would be infinite. Planck’s constant plays the role of a minimum possible physical size, just as c plays the role of a maximum possible speed. As we saw in the previous chapter, however, the latter is a function of the special epistemic role of light. Just so, a theoretical limit to the divisibility of space, time, or energy could be interpreted epistemically. It need not reflect an absolute structure, given that space and time are relationships between events observable by means of an intervening messenger. In other words, Planck’s constant, as we know it, is a function of the actual means of investigation (light); if a different means were ever discovered, h might accordingly have a different value. 126 The classical equivalent of Schrödinger’s cat is Berkeley’s tree falling in the forest. 97 Some views invoke a causal role of consciousness in quantum physics; for example, an observer’s consciousness might cause the state vector to collapse. Alternatively, quantum processes in the brain might causally explain the observer’s consciousness. Such notions betray the confusions and category mistakes involved in the mind-body problem, and in the subject-object relation generally. Bohr, in his way—and later Wheeler, in his—emphasized the participatory role of the observer. Certainly, experience and knowledge are participatory, since subject and object are inextricably bound. Wheeler, and subsequent theorists of an idealist bent, however, wax metaphysically extravagant when they assert that physical reality is on that account reducible to information (‘it from bit’). While knowledge consists of information, physical reality consists of the stuff that information is about. Many popular books, especially of the “New Age” sort, draw on quantum physics to explain phenomena that science otherwise seemingly fails to explain, including consciousness. That trick does little more than invoke one mystery to explain another. The quantum is not a wild card to pull out at whim to maintain a coherent story, wherever classical thinking seems to fall short. Rather, it reveals the limits of day-to-day expectations, which reflect our biological heritage. The disparity between the lived world of the mesosphere and the quantum-theoretical micro world reminds us that science does not pursue a consistent understanding of nature so much as a useful strategy of control, facilitated by theory. As Vico advised, we understand best (and perhaps only) what we make. After all, even in the classical realm, do we truly understand what force is, for example—or field, or mass, or energy—much beyond the utility these concepts afford? A general lesson of the quantum realm might be that we see the world in ways that work for us, not how it objectively is (which is beyond our ken). Certainty is elusive and statistical. Our best guide is accumulated experience. 98 CHAPTER 8: BIOLOGICAL SUBJECTS and OBJECTS In which it is shown that the organism and its observer alike are embodied systems—autopoietic, self-defining, each serving their own purposes. The organism is more like a community than a machine. Its point of view must be distinguished from that of the external observer. “The body is efficient but not polite.”—Jeanette Winterson All observers are embodied, but not all bodies are observers. To be embodied in the biological sense is not merely to be physical, but to be organized and oriented toward the world in a particular way. In short, it is to be an organism. Physical instantiation is a necessary condition for embodiment, but not a sufficient one. We associate organism with what we know as life, but this state may potentially be realizable in other forms. An organism is a self-maintaining, self-organizing system engaged in a specific relationship with its environment. It has a point of view. While the organisms we know are biological, other forms of life and mind are conceivable. Science-fiction writers have imagined crystalline and gaseous forms of intelligence, and we now have the potential example of artificial intelligence. Still, there can be no disembodied subjects. This excludes souls, gods, and ghosts, but also computers, robots and machines as we know them, along with rocks and clouds. Consciousness is not just a property of a machine that happens to be made of meat, but is the result of an evolutionary process in which it has proven advantageous. The scientific view holds that mind is not a property of an immortal soul, but of a mortal biological creature—one that will in fact die. While religion denies mortality and culture often downplays our animal roots, modern technology has joined the quest to transcend the limits imposed by embodiment—for example, through life extension, organ replacement, prosthesis, sensory augmentation, artificial intelligence, and the dream of uploading mind to cyberspace. Denial and such creative effort are two sides of the same enterprise, operating in concert. Yet embodiment is an evolutionary condition for mind, for having a point 99 of view at all. To be embodied is to participate in the evolutionary contest in which survival depends on relating to the world in ways that support continued existence. The creatures that exist have succeeded in this contest, and would not be here otherwise. To be an organism is to be a certain kind of physical system, and to be embodied is to be in a certain relationship with its environment. Unlike machines and other artifacts, such an autopoietic 127 system defines, creates, and maintains itself. In the case of biological life, this process of self-production also involves reproduction. Life is a succession of generations shaped by natural selection—a process that depends on death. In many ways, human culture protests this dependency, seeking mastery over biology, physics, and the natural environment. While religion rejects the body and mortality, we build cities literally as a world apart from nature. We pursue science to reconstruct nature in humanly-conceived terms that empower technology. We launch rockets to defy gravity and to leave our natural habitat behind for an artificial one. But despite these efforts, the illusion of separateness from nature is belied by our vulnerability to disease, injury, and death. The prospect of living in an entirely man-made environment is vitiated by our inability to coexist with the natural one, or to coexist peacefully with each other. So far, neither religion nor science has liberated us from mortality or beastliness, much less from embodiment. So-called virtual reality may be the closest we have come to creating an environment that is ideal, in the trivial sense of being nonmaterial and purely a human creation. Yet, even as a fiction, a virtual reality is the momentary experience of a natural embodied creature. Organism do not live in isolation. Life evolved as a whole, and no biological individual is independent of the biosphere. Every creature is the product both of its ancestors and of the whole web of life. No living form can properly be defined in isolation from its environment, which consists prominently of other creatures. Cells taken out of context, for example, are effectively artifacts of scientific investigation. It is only under artificial conditions of isolation from the rest of the organism, or from the web of life, that biological phenomena appear to involve mechanistic causation. While an organism seems to be an integral being, 127 Literally, “self-making.” The term was coined by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. 100 at the cellular level an individual body consists of many kinds of cells belonging genetically to the organism—but also of parasites, bacteria, and viruses far outnumbering them. The eukaryotic cell itself is an amalgam of entities that merged for mutual benefit. Organisms do not just passively react to “stimuli,” but actively manage and shape their interactions with the world. 128 Accounts that treat them as mere information-processing machines fail to explain why such systems would have values, goals, or experiences. Neither the behavior nor the subjectivity of an organism can be accounted for strictly in causal terms. For, without the interactive relationship of embodiment, there is nothing to show why an abstract and self-contained information processing system should be motivated, have directives to govern its behavior, or have a point of view of its own—let alone why it should experience the world as real and external, imbued with phenomenal qualities. Hence, there is nothing in the mechanist worldview to show how consciousness can arise within “inert” matter. The organism’s cognition and behavior cannot be accounted for without an appeal to its own intentionality—and thus to its embodied evolutionary context and history, which provides the reasons for its reasons. Though effective for studying inert matter, mechanism cannot be applied wholesale to living beings. Strictly speaking, no natural thing, even nonliving, can be duplicated through reverse-engineering. Reverseengineering presumes that a natural system can be identified in isolation from the world of which it is a part, and can be exhaustively formalized. (Even in physics, a “system” is an idealization.) An organism is defined partly in relation to the environment in which it exists; its partial autonomy exists in the context of that relationship. It is not a product of human definitions, but self-defining. While machines embody their designers’ priorities, organisms embody their own priorities, which emerge from a long co-evolutionary history with other organisms. Their internal organization cannot be understood apart from these relationships. Descartes had likened even the human body to a machine; only the human soul animating the body was not a machine. This dualism fit well with the religious perspective of the day. It was later fashionable to think 128 The concept of ‘stimulus’ is a construct in the observer’s cognitive domain, not in that of the creature unless that creature is self-conscious. 101 of the animating force as a “vital principle.” Yet, this notion did no more explanatory work than the soul. Today, computation serves as the favored metaphor: DNA is a “program” or “code,” and the brain an “information processor.” But organisms are not machines, designed from the top down. They are self-organizing, self-programming systems whose operations emerge from constant interaction with the world. The “instructions” in DNA are not addressed to an identifiable mechanism—let alone to human engineers who would replicate the process—but rather to the natural world inside and outside the cell. 129 What the organism is, in its own right, must be distinguished from how a human observer sees it. We cannot know the reality of the creature “in itself,” but must acknowledge that it has a point of view of its own, apart from how we think of it. We may see it as an open system immersed in an environment with which it exchanges energy and information. Yet, the organism may not have a concept of its environment in the way that humans do, or at all. (Let alone would it have concepts of information, energy, or evolutionary contests, for example.) The organism may be doing no more than dealing with transformations of its sensory surfaces in such a way as to maintain them within tolerable limits. 130 It may or may not have an internal image of that environment, or of its own sensory surfaces, or of itself as an agent. Yet, even an organism without dedicated sense organs responds to changes in its own chemistry, attempting to restore a preferred state in ways that either prove adaptive or not. The challenge for the organism does not necessarily entail modeling an external world, let alone modelling it as the observer does. Indeed, the very idea of an ‘environment’ imposes a human cognitive domain upon the organism. Human observers might assume that they perceive and conceive the organism and its environment as they truly are, and that the internal representations of this environment by other creatures are limited by their lesser cognitive abilities and brain power. While that is a highly 129 The notion that the DNA of the organism contains all that is needed to unfold its development harks back to the misogyny of Aristotle, for whom the creative principle lay exclusively within the male seed. It denies the role of environment (even the “soil” of the maternal womb), as well as the role of other internal processes besides the program as defined. 130 H. Maturana and F. Varela Autopoiesis and Cognition Reidel, 1980. The irony of this way of looking, of course, is that scientific theories, too, are little more than aspects of human self-regulation! 108 CHAPTER 9: The HUMAN BASIS of LOGIC and MATH In which it is recognized that mathematics abstracts and formalizes aspects of natural cognition. It is the language of not of nature but of science. Idealization tends to mask the complexity of the real world. In part, math corresponds to nature because we focus on those aspects of the world we can treat mathematically. “Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think.” —Niels Bohr While mathematics often appears to embody a priori truths, it is in fact a cultural creation, shaped by the needs and cumulative experience of human beings interacting with the real world. Phenomenality gains its relation to the world through natural selection, which is contingent and historical. Since logic generalizes phenomenal experience, it too must be a product of evolution rather than metaphysical necessity. An evolutionary theory of intelligence could help explain the remarkable effectiveness of logic and mathematics, framing them as developments of a broader cognitive capacity for reasoning, modeling, abstraction, and generalization. Mathematics describes the real world effectively in part because it abstracts its most general properties and relationships. While mathematical concepts may seem mind-independent, their development is informed by categories and relationships derived from experience with physical reality and shaped by the needs of the human organism. The universality of logic and mathematics does not preclude them being inspired by material examples or being mental constructions. The properties of integers and sets, for example, reflect features of real objects salient to human cognition, such as integrity, permanence, magnitude, and grouping characteristics. Arithmetical elements and operations, with the axiomatic rules governing them, are further abstracted at higher levels: in abstract algebra, formal logic, and set theory. Relationships as well as quantities become the focus, as in geometry or topology. The mathematical concept of a function concisely expresses how one object of thought relates to 109 another, especially over time, reflecting the significance of change for living organisms. While equations formally express how one factor varies continuously with another, the very idea of a “variable” formalizes the notion of real-world change. The drawback of this expressive advantage is that only patterns and relationships are considered that can be so formulated. Abstraction, idealization, and generalization enable us to categorize experience and anticipate future events in similar contexts. They underpin prediction, control, and planned action. Logic and reason may seem to yield unshakeable truths when elevated to tautologies, but as cognitive tools they rest on collective experience, engrained through natural selection. If not necessary in an absolute sense, they may be necessary for survival. Formal logic is grounded in an informal, intuitive sense of what is “logical,” which itself derives from highly generalized experience in the world. There is no a priori or metaphysical reason to assume that human logic applies beyond the limits of our accumulated experience, or beyond the context of our actual universe. If the multiverse is a real possibility, “logic” might look very different in an alternative universe with different rules and fundamental constants. The natural numbers abstract the “objectness” of discrete things we perceive in our environment—including human bodies. The finite steps of a proof, and the manipulation of symbols generally, mirror physical acts of manipulating or constructing real objects. This aligns with primate experience in an environment consisting of discrete countable things. Groupings of such objects are abstracted as sets or kinds. Definability expresses the ability to specify the elements of a set; decidability, the ability to determine membership; computability, the ability to generate the set by a rule. These “abilities” are not just affordances inhering in Platonic mathematical objects, but reflect experience of living and acting in the physical world. While the non-computable reals, for example, cannot even be specified, that sort of obstacle has never stood in the way of mathematical progress. Even when mathematics invents paradoxical entities—such as the square root of minus one or infinite cardinalities— it extends patterns of definition and powers of manipulation rooted in experience. 110 Galileo famously described mathematics as the language in which nature is written. But natural things are not literally symbols or numbers, and nature is not literally a text. Mathematics is more aptly the language of science—or its grammar. Scientific explanation, whether in natural or formal language, is a form of communication. Yet mathematics cannot capture all aspects of natural reality, just as ordinary language cannot capture all of human experience. As a descriptive tool, mathematics influences both our concept of nature and our relationship to it, a situation that often goes unnoticed in the pervasive drive to quantify everything. Language, like mathematics, enables substitution of symbols for real things. While physical reality resists arbitrary change, language gains its power from that very possibility. The fact that one can make grammatical statements that are not true, or not even semantically meaningful, gives imagination expressive license, both in word and in deed. The arbitrariness of symbolic representations enables falsehoods, counterfactuals, and nonsense. Words not only label concepts but help to form them, conferring “thingness” upon sensory patterns and shaping the cognitive schemata through which we experience the world. Formal definition sharpens this process, giving words precise meanings independent of their varied everyday associations. Through definition, symbols become exactly and only what they are determined to mean by explicit consensual agreement. Words—and mathematical symbols — then no longer refer to found things, but to things within a constructed world, products of definition. Through formalization, empirical generalizations become postulated truths. In mathematics, the utterly most general properties of things are raised to axiomatic status—true by stipulation. This can create the false impression that a priori intuitions are therefore absolute. Applying mathematical ideas to natural reality requires first idealizing natural things as elements of an axiomatic system, transforming them from found objects into formal artifacts. Mathematics is a high-level simulation, just as ordinary perception is a simulation created by the brain. It characterizes the most general properties of the physical world in a powerfully abstract and compressed way, especially useful in science to facilitate prediction. Mathematical objects differ fundamentally from physical ones: they are timeless, non- 111 physical idealizations. Mathematical laws seek constancy and generality, while sensory perception delivers a changing landscape of particulars. In scientific modeling, equations define and describe formalisms that could be expressed as computer programs. Equations and the models they describe are isomorphic to each other, because they express the same underlying formalism. But no formalism is strictly isomorphic to the real process it models; it corresponds only in specific and limited ways. While it is currently fashionable to think of the physical universe as a subset of mathematics—even as a vast computer—mathematics does not give rise to the world, but reflects our human experience of it. The axiomatic method in science was epitomized by Newton’s Principia, presented as geometric proofs in the style of Euclid. In spirit, this program had been a major theme of the ancients; it inheres in the later thought of Einstein, whose confidence in mathematical formalism was inspired by his success with general relativity. It is encouraged by textbooks, which teach physics in terms of conceptual rather than historical development—a revisionist approach that makes the laws of nature seem falsely simple and inevitable. It also creates the impression that science, if not nature itself, can be axiomatized in a final story that has erased its conceptual and historical tracks. Deductionism holds that physical processes are reducible to formalisms, that nature is ultimately rational. It assumes that nature itself is a deductive system, blurring the distinction between map and territory, artifice and reality. However, there is no reason in principle to believe that the world must be simple or rational. 137 This assumption may reflect human cognitive preferences more than the structure of reality. While the rules of mathematics describe general possibilities, physical laws are contingent and empirical. The surprising success of mathematics outside its original contexts does not imply that the world is a “mathematical structure” in some Platonic sense. Rather, it reflects our tendency to select aspects of reality that can be mathematically described because they have already been redefined in idealized terms. On the other hand, the correspondence between mathematics and physical reality parallels the correspondence 137 Indeed, rationality itself expresses the preference for simple relationships, as in the rational numbers and the concept of ratio. 112 between perception and the external world. Leibniz had postulated a metaphysical “pre-established harmony” between logical and physical truth. While Leibniz took that correspondence to be an act of God, physicist Eugene Wigner would later famously call it “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics.” It can be understood as a special instance of the harmony between brain and world pre-established by natural selection. The correspondence seems mysterious when it holds even in applications far removed from ordinary experience. It is not obvious why mathematics works in situations that are unfamiliar, like an ancient travel guide that seems useful in a newly discovered land. If the advice in the guide is general enough, it is bound to find some application. To the extent that the self-consistency of mathematics reflects nature’s own selfconsistency, the correspondence is unsurprising, while not guaranteed. It is natural reality itself that is surprising. Because we seek mathematically tractable aspects of nature, the expectation that nature will behave mathematically is partly tautological. After all, theoretical models describe experimental setups that are themselves realizations of those models. Rationality and consistency are human expectations, modelled on the world in the first place. The very strength of empirical science, however, is to reveal the ways that thought discords with reality: whether that means the failure of a theory or the discovery of seeming irrationality in the natural world, such as in the quantum realm. Mathematics has facilitated immense technological success by enabling prediction, control, and exploitation of natural processes. Concerns about its limits are ultimately concerns about our ability to predict in the real world. The internal consistency of mathematics matters because it underwrites this predictive power. Yet even if mathematics reflects nature’s structure and self-consistency, perhaps the only answer to why nature itself is consistent is that otherwise we would not be here. We are naturally inclined to view the world in ways that lend themselves to effectively deciding questions and predicting the course of events. Hence, the law of excluded middle and the historic focus on systems describable with simple linear equations, manually solvable. The emphasis on prediction was exemplified by Laplace’s deterministic ideal. 113 This vision faltered with Poincaré’s work on the three-body problem and Edward Lorenz’s discovery of deterministic chaos. These revealed that many real-world systems cannot be computed precisely enough for longterm prediction, and that non-linear processes prevail in the real world. Computability in mathematics is the analogue of determinism in physics; randomness in nature parallels non-computability in math. Computable numbers can be named, described, counted as distinct individuals. They are the equivalent of classical objects in physics. Yet, they are infinitely outnumbered by other mathematically-definable “numbers” that cannot be so identified (the non-computable reals). These are analogous to quantum objects, which lack identity and locality. Both prediction and computation require computable numbers. But, Gödel’s incompleteness results and Chaitin’s work on complexity show that there are infinitely more non-computable numbers than computable ones, just as chaotic processes in nature vastly outnumber simple, deterministic ones. To the extent that chaos is useless, so may be the non-computable numbers. However, nothing inherent in either mathematics or human capability prevents new mathematical techniques from being defined that could treat non-computable numbers as manipulable mathematical objects. Non-computability in mathematics and randomness in physics both refer to epistemic limits in the relationship between subject and object. Non-computability implies a limit to the ability of a formalism to capture reality as represented by the real-number continuum. It also indirectly signifies the ability of self-reflective agents to transcend their conceptual formulations. In contrast, natural randomness signifies nature’s ability to transcend any formulation an agent might propose. It is this very elusiveness that characterizes the natural world as real, as existing apart from human thought and distinct from the mathematics simulation. A strictly computable, completely formalizable math might seem a boon to physics. Yet, such a reduction, which would eviscerate the real number continuum, amounts to treating nature as a deductive system. A digital physics, for example, would guarantee computability; but it could be perilously untrue to the reality of nature. 138 138 For similar reasons, it may be hazardous to rely too much on computer simulations. 114 CHAPTER 10: The MACHINE as SUBJECT In which it is acknowledged that natural intelligence is the ability to survive. A program that simulates natural intelligent behavior does not exhaust its reality. There is a tradeoff between autonomy and control. A true AGI would act on its own behalf, for its own well-being. It would not be a tool but a tool user. A superintelligent AGI would be uncontrollable. AI “friendliness” cannot be guaranteed. “The problem with experts is that they do not know what they do not know.”—Nicholas Taleb While there is no universally accepted definition of intelligence, it is generally understood to involve reasoning, learning, and the ability to apply knowledge and skills in novel situations. In artificial intelligence (AI), the term is implicitly defined in terms of skills and knowledge prized in modern society. Psychometric traditions, with their focus on standardized testing, suggest the g factor—an abstract ideal of general intelligence independent of specific tasks. Biologically, however, intelligence is simply the ability to survive. The “final” goal of life (in the Aristotelian sense) is its own continuance. By definition, all living things are “successful” and thus intelligent. This truism matters because our concepts of intelligence originate from experience with living organisms. The ideal of artificial general intelligence (AGI), however, aims to produce artificial beings freed from biological constraints. This raises the question of how intelligence can be meaningfully abstracted from its organic exemplars, to form a coherent basis for AGI. In nature, general intelligence is costly and implies a general adaptability. In the extreme, the ideal is capability uniformly applicable in any context, suggesting an abstract theoretical niche, detached from all specifics or definitions. Yet, as a specifically human concept, the ideal of universal intelligence remains limited by human imagination and current understandings of reality. The concept of mind-at-large, especially as developed in AI, does not so much extrapolate, as we should expect, from actual instances of mind with which we are familiar—organisms in 115 general on planet Earth—as it selects isolated features of human performance to be the basis for a theoretical system. Nevertheless, however formally defined, intuitive ideas about intelligence are rooted in biological examples, where survival and reproduction are the ultimate measures. Most of a natural brain’s work is devoted to running a body. But human culture has narrowed “intelligence” to mean the capacity to solve specific problems of interest to us—emphasizing reasoning, language, and cultural goals. In AI, intelligence is thus framed in terms of skills that are anthropocentric, culture-bound, and historically contingent, yet often presented as universal, divorced from biological grounding. Much of the theoretical foundation for AGI rests on this abstraction. The ability to solve one type of problem sometimes transfers to others, but not universally. For example, some mental skills may not apply to situations beyond “problem solving” in the narrow sense, such as how to be happy or content. Moreover, defining or identifying the problems worth solving is itself a distinct skill. The notion of “pure intelligence” comes from abstracting certain abilities from their realworld contexts and reifying them as an internal power. But in practice, what counts as superior intelligence, in a social or evolutionary context, is also a matter of the ability of one agent to influence others. Intelligence, in this sense, is a political concept. As our environments become increasingly artificial—comprised of other humans and their machines— our definitions of intelligence may shift accordingly. The mechanistic metaphor, with its extension in computation, reinforces a behavioral view of cognition. While any behavior can be formally described and simulated, such descriptions never fully capture the real activity of an organism, which is not a literal machine or computer, nor a matter of human definition. Producing a program that matches a description of behavior is not the same as duplicating the behavior. Debates about “thinking machines” are hampered by vague or inconsistent definitions. Many key terms in AI are borrowed from everyday life and applied metaphorically to computational con-structs without rigorous clarification. These include: intelligence, embodiment, simulation, mind, consciousness, perception, value, goal, agent, knowledge, belief, optimality, friendliness, machine, information, 116 communication, and thinking. The fact that computers mimic aspects of human thought does not mean they “think” in any but a metaphorical sense. Even should future machines genuinely think, they will not do so as disembodied systems, like today’s computers and large language models, which simulate isolated cognitive and language functions without their own intentionality. For similar reasons, the idea of uploading a human mind into a computer—as “pure” consciousness divorced from a body—is nonsense. AGI is often seen as a natural extension of AI and an inevitable outcome of technological progress. But this presumes a particular vision of progress as relentless and unidirectional. It also enshrines AI autonomy as inherently desirable. Organisms are autonomous because they need to think and perceive in order to survive in their real environments. Most AI operates in a purely artificial environment of human-generated data. Such systems can perform well in data analysis and language related tasks. But AI meant to advise on real-world matters must engage with the world directly—and therein lies its danger if it is also autonomous. To what degree AGI can achieve human-level general intelligence without being an autonomous, embodied agent remains an open question. While AI concepts tend to treat intelligence as independent of embodiment, genuine autonomy and generality may require it. Embodiment is not just a matter of attaching sensors and actuators to a computer; it is the result of a long, adaptive, relational process through natural selection, which may not be reproducible artificially. The time evolution of a simulation, for example, is not the same as natural evolution. The ultimate “goal” of an embodied agent is simply to exist. Unlike programmable goals, self-preservation is paramount, not merely an instrumental goal in a hierarchy of sub-goals. An embodied AI agent would, in effect, be an artificial organism—gathering its own inputs, pursuing its own ends, and potentially resisting external control. The push toward full autonomy in AGI therefore leads to entities with wills of their own. This would not extend human power, but threaten it. The intelligence of an AI that is not an artificial organism remains that of its creators. It is a tool, not an agent. To be an agent, an AI would 117 have its own intentionality rooted in its own existence, not borrowed from human purposes. Creating such agents would also mean relinquishing direct control—just as we cannot fully control the autonomous creatures we are already familiar with: animals and human beings. The tension between creating powerful tools and autonomous agents runs through the history of AI, reflecting a desire to have the cake and eat it. A tool responds directly to commands; an agent interprets them in light of its own priorities, which may not align with ours. The so-called Control and Alignment problems stem largely from the attempt to create systems that are neither purely tool nor fully agent. If there is a key feature leading technology irreversibly beyond human control, it would be to combine self-programming (learning), physical self-modification, and sensorimotor interface with the real world—properties that define living systems. These, coupled with reproduction, would result in artificial entities with open-ended, potentially uncontrollable evolution—a situation that should be avoided at any cost. To preserve human control, AI should remain within the bounds of tools and oracles, not become autonomous competitors. Nothing (including Gödel incomplete-ness) guarantees that human intelligence is inherently superior to machine intelligence. Our advantage today exists only because machines are not yet autonomous agents. Once they are, their abilities could surpass our own. Given the stakes, AI research must be transparent about its motivations, assumptions, and risks. A weak point of defining intelligence simply as the ability to accomplish goals is that it is unclear whose goals are concerned. Researchers in AGI may unwittingly be misguided by unconscious motivations and assumptions, by lack of clarity about their own goals and those of their employers. While it might be inconsequential if philosophers get it wrong (or fail to agree on what is right), it could be devastating if AI developers, corporations, and governments do. Yet, in addition to confusion about what is genuinely possible, there may be confusion about what is desirable. The project to align AI’s goals with human values is complicated by the fact that even humans cannot agree on those values. Furthermore, motivation cannot simply be programmed into an autonomous agent. The priorities of a truly 124 CHAPTER 11: SCIENCE, RELIGION, ART In which it is noted that Western science and art grew together out of medieval Christianity. Religion and science seek certainty and closure; art promotes divergence and play. Like science, art experiments. Like science and religion, art substitutes artifact for natural reality. All three are modes of cognition that compromise objective truth with subjective need. “We have art so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.” —Nietzsche Science, religion and art did not exist as distinct categories in preagrarian societies. From a modern perspective, however, each represents a different mode in which culture—in the anthropological sense—fulfills a general mandate: to translate the ambiguous found world into humanlydefined terms. This involves establishing frameworks in which to contain experience. Yet, the self-transcending nature of consciousness defies containment in any particular framework. In addition, the bottomless depth of natural reality itself may elude definitive containment. The result of this double open-endedness is ongoing mystery. What we now call science, art, and religion are distinct cultural approaches to this mystery. As by a prism, the unitary light of consciousness is dispersed into a spectrum of strategies to manage the unknown. While religion provided the necessary ground for both science and art in western culture, the expectation in the 19th century was that science and rationality would eventually displace religion and superstition altogether. Yet, religion has persisted and continues to preserve an alternative perspective that competes with the rationalism of science. Art too has persisted, even though so inhomogeneous a category as to defy definition. The artist and the religious practitioner are free to embrace subjectivity in ways that the scientist is not. This may partly account for the perennial resurgence of religion and the enduring appeal of art. Feedback from nature tells us that technology is not an unqualified boon to society. We know in our bones that science is not the whole picture nor the only possible story. 125 While art, like science, affirms the human world, its lack of definition differentiates it from science and sets its multifarious visions apart from the scientific worldview. While science attempts to converge on a singular truth, or at a least consensus, art diverges into multiple perspectives. European art may have begun as a coherent religious expression; but, like the religion it served, it could only reflect the fragmentation into ever more perspectives, as western society evolved toward greater subjectivity and individuality. There may be consensus, within some circles and even internationally, about the artistic merit or market value of recognized works. Yet, insofar as art is eminently a free creation, it scarcely reflects any basis for an intrinsic standard of value. Scientific research is generally constrained by rationality, by the natural world, and by the search for practical, financial or military benefits. Science is a quest for reasoned explanation—understanding— but also for technological mastery over nature. Mastery of materials and techniques is important in art, but plays a different role. As art dissolves into the open-ended realm of creative possibility, it can afford to ignore pragmatic constraints; indeed, it may dedicate itself to breaking free of them. It can defy reason and practicality. Science investigates the creativity of nature; art, that of the human subject. It seeks to control the materials of the craft locally, on an individual level, but not to control nature at large. Art picks up where science leaves off, sometimes using the same technologies, but to explore imagined possibility outside scientific constraints—and outside earlier definitions or understandings of art. Given the rise of individualism, art is self-generating and selfperpetuating because the realm of creative possibility is as limitless as individuality. Imagination does not run out. Science too is selfperpetuating, but for a different reason: because nature does not run out and will always surprise us, despite faith in a potential definitive understanding. Many scientists seem to believe that human thought can finally close in on nature and exhaust its secrets. There can be no such presumption in art. Science would converge on final answers, in ever greater detail; art diverges into ever more questions and expressions. Like religion, science provides a framework of practices and principles to facilitate agreement about what exists—a worldview. The ontological 126 basis of the scientific framework, however, is the presence of the natural world we share in common, as opposed to idiosyncratic perceptions or the beliefs of a particular individual or community. In principle, modern science relies upon an agreement that nature, rather than some god or doctrine, shall be the ultimate arbiter of truth. However, scientific theory is a form of doctrine. Belief enters there too, for agreement already involves tacit assumptions behind a shared understanding. If the history of science has taught us anything, it is that ideas about what exists, and the very concept of nature, are continually subject to revision. Like western art, modern science grew from religious roots. Religion favored the growth of science in Europe for several reasons. First, the Judaic tradition provided the idea of a divine lawgiver, to frame observed regularities as natural “laws.” A god distinct from nature could create general laws while retaining the right to specify details and even bend or break the laws. This meant that the natural world was contingent upon divine will, rather than logically necessary as the Greeks had thought. Hence, its details could not be known a priori, but only discovered through observation. On the other hand, if we were made in God’s image, then the divine Creation ought to be rationally comprehensible to us. This gave hope for practical knowledge of a negotiable world with consistent properties and rules. The scriptures represented a covenant and a linear history. Christian dogma assimilated the cosmos to the human realm and to linear time, in contrast to an eternal cycle of repetitions, an inscrutable mystery at the mercy of chance, or the whims of competing deities. It unified nature as the creation of a single will, which could be approached through a personal relationship, on the one hand, and through rational inquiry, on the other. Christianity melded the Greek and Judaic traditions, through the filter of Arab scholarship. From the ancient Greeks, science inherited the idea of nature as deductive system, on the model of geometry. From the biblical tradition, science inherited the parallel idea of nature as text—the “Book of Nature.” Each of these complementary notions reflects a belief that the world is the result of a creative act of authorship. Despite the empirical thread of science, together these notions would affect the treatment of nature in science and by society for generations to come. Aristotle had strongly influenced the medieval concept of the natural world. But, for him, science was the study of the unique “natures” of 127 things. These were essences or powers residing within natural things themselves, which constituted the source of their change. In contrast, created things possessed no such inner power or imminent reality; they were merely the product of external agency. Precisely because—contra Aristotle—matter had no inherent powers of its own, a first cause was needed to set the world in motion. This suited the Christian metaphysics, in which God was outside nature, its creator and animator. For Aristotle, substance and form were complementary dimensions of being. Philosophers would later say that aspects of form are imposed by the human mind. But, for the early moderns, form was clearly imposed by the mind of God. Matter needed no internal principle of change or self-organization. Once created and set in motion, the world machine could be left on its own, though it might wear out or wind down eventually, and need to be restored periodically through divine intervention. The laws of nature were the edicts that forced passive matter to behave in accordance with divine will, in much the way that human laws govern the affairs of men. On this understanding, it was spiritually as well as practically beneficial to investigate natural phenomena as manifestations of divine will. While medieval Christianity had devalued nature and its study as pointless or even sinful, the post-Reformation attitude saw in the material world signs of divine intention to be studied as a religious duty. Christian doctrine also endorsed the domination of nature, and sanctioned the worldly expression of human will and masculine dominance, so long as it was nominally in divine service. The worldview, goals, and strategies of religion and early science overlapped. There is but a fine line between the faith-based biblical dominion appointed to Man and the reason-based domination of nature through technology. The quest for godliness merges with the quest for divine powers. Along with civilization generally, religion and science alike can be viewed as strategies to cope with the deeply embedded perception of nature as indifferent, alien or cruel, threatening human sensibilities from without and from within. In Christian traditions, this perception is mollified by considering nature the rational creation of a provident Father, who personifies the ideals of omnipotence, omniscience, and benevolence. At core, these are human aspirations, taken up by science 128 as well. The harshness of nature could be mitigated by appeal to God in prayer, but also by rational attempts to limit and harness it. Science represented an alternative way to participate in the divine plan. It aligned with social and spiritual progress, which could be tangibly measured by technological advance. Nature study, the pilgrim’s progress, and social progress were initially unified under the aegis of religion. But the scientific revolution also coincided roughly with revolutionary movements in society, against the arbitrary whims of monarchy, just as the printed Bible allowed independence from the priesthood. The scientific parallel to this shift was a standardized method and forum for knowledge, independent of individual fancy and authority. An anthropomorphic religion, based upon the dualism of mind and matter, does not distinguish qualitatively between divine and human creativity. This equivalence must remain tacit and unidirectional, however, in order for religious faith to be taken seriously. (To acknowledge it would allow the possibility that Man created God and not the other way around.) Similarly, human involvement must be bracketed in order for scientific theory to be taken seriously. To acknowledge it means admitting the extent to which the scientific image of nature is a construction reflecting human needs and concerns. Reason and careful observation often conflicted with faith, as the scientific worldview began to displace the religious one. Though often sincerely religious, the early scientists had to give lip service to accepted theology. Throughout the early modern period, challenging Church doctrine was dangerous, but could be sidestepped through the literary device of passing off contentious ideas as mere fanciful entertainments, not serious claims. While motivated by diplomacy, this convention set the stage for the modern concept of the scientific hypothesis: a story not to be taken seriously unless reconciled—in this case—with experiment instead of with church doctrine. Religion and science share a quest for certainty. Like religion, science reconstructs the natural world as an idealized realm. The religious response to uncertainty is theology. The scientific response is theory; hence, its broad reliance on the certainties of mathematics in the search for ever greater precision. Both substitute familiar representations for the unknown. Both embrace an ideal of transcendence, to occupy a perspective outside nature and time. 129 While the majority of modern scientists may not believe in the biblical God, or take interest in theological issues, they inherit a tradition of thought that assumes the natural world to be a literal artifact, lacking immanent reality of its own. The early scientists were creationists. Apart from materials, what distinguishes the created object from the natural thing is that the form of the artifact is imposed by its creator. In contrast, the natural thing has its own intrinsic reality: nature is found, not made. Preliterate goddess religions had revered nature itself, not a transcendent principle behind nature. By dismissing the power of supernatural agencies, Greek thought had similarly focused on the immanent reality of natural things, which contained their own intrinsic powers and were the source of their own being. This pagan inheritance was overturned by Christianity, depriving found things of their inherent natures and leaving them with only the reality conferred on them by their supernatural Creator. A God separate from nature had “spoken” the world into being. Christianity opposed the autonomous reality of nature in order to uphold divine authorship—and its human counterpart, free will. Greek belief in the reality of nature had entailed a fatalistic power over human and even divine affairs, implying no free will. The Christian concept of nature, as specially created for human benefit, overruled this notion. It eventually favored a technological science based on experimental intervention, yielding power over nature, if not yet original authorship. While science appears to survey the natural world from a materialist perspective, a major aspect of its approach remains idealist. This aspect draws upon the Pythagoreans and Plato, as well as upon the heritage of Greek rationalism generally, which (like theology) would reduce all knowledge to an axiomatic system. Today this thread is reflected in the perennial expectation that scientific knowledge is on the verge of completion in a grand unified “theory of everything.” It finds further expression in the metaphysical notion that the essence of physical reality is ultimately nonphysical, residing in a nonmaterial substratum such as computation or information. As a form of cultural heroics, science is a quest for ultimate truth and the ultimate constituents of reality—or at least for a satisfying story concerning the natural world. As a secular creation story, it must be acceptable to reason and compatible with experience, yet must also 130 capture the imagination. The modern version of that story begins with Bacon’s vision of the social role of science, which was to restore humanity to its rightful place in the order of things before the biblical Fall. Salvation was promised through technology for social benefit. Bacon’s grand program was both religious and humanist: to return to mankind its proper inheritance. Society could do this, he believed, by pursuing the biblical dominion over nature. Since God is the power behind nature, it is ultimately through imitating his creative powers that mankind can recover from its degenerate state. The transcendent being of God, separate from the world in the way that mind is separate from body, suggested that nature need not be revered as itself divine, with hands off. Instead, it could be studied, manipulated, and freely exploited as an object for use. Adam’s original state of innocence, which supposedly included perfect knowledge of nature, could be recovered through science and technology. Thus, knowledge and power, rather than moral virtue, became the new program for human salvation. Since God had authored both the world and scripture, they stood as correlated sacred texts. In Christian Europe, the natural world was considered to complement the Bible as a guide to divine will. Holy writings and nature itself were alternative expressions of God’s message and purpose for humanity. Medieval thought held that the mind and will of God could be understood through his dual creative expressions. Divine law was given to man directly in scripture, to regulate human affairs— and indirectly in nature to regulate the physical creation. The vision of the world as text is closely related to that of the world as divine artifact—indeed, as machine. Like a machine, a text is a finite, self-enclosed product of definition. It contains no more than was explicitly inscribed by its author, together with implicit deductions. If nature is a machine, it should be as predictable as other machines. If it is a text, it should be as searchable as other texts, and subject to the methods of textual interpretation that were applied to scripture. Whether the text is written by God or by the theoretical physicist, the advantage of presuming nature itself to be a text is that it can be exhaustively formalized, clearly spelled out. A major difference between speech and written language is that a text is present all at once, of a piece, autonomous and independent of the 131 speaker. Speech is necessarily presented sequentially and is intimately involved with the speaker’s gestures, charisma, and authority. A text was originally a record or reconstruction of speech. While normally read in order, it need not be considered a linear sequence at all. It can be dissected, rearranged, taken out of context, deconstructed, manipulated, edited. As an abstraction, it exists outside time, with its own authority independent of its author. It can be examined at leisure by others and searched forward or backward for new meanings. That is the basis of prophecy as biblical exegesis, with the implication that the fabric of time is a searchable text. But it is equally the basis of mathematical prediction; for theories are also texts and equations are generally functions of a reversible time variable. Understanding the Bible as both written history and covenant had dovetailed with medieval fatalism. “It is written” had meant “it is destined.” The fixed content of a text became the early template for the deterministic philosophy. Scientists took it upon themselves to discover the blueprint of a mechanistic nature. By careful inspection, the Creation could be reverse-engineered in such ways that humans could think the very thoughts of the Creator, mathematically expressed. The Enlightenment took the step to conceive, instead, the possibility of a humanlycreated rational and secular order, a predictable “system of the world” that offered fulfillment through reason, technology, and enterprise. Building on Bacon, gradually the conviction grew that industry and the state, rather than religion and morality, could guide society toward the equitable well-being promised by technologies of mass production. Science proffers maximal control of matter. It has proven superior to religion as a way to harness nature to human purpose. Yet, science does not correspond to all human purposes or respond to all human needs and desires. It does not give us immunity to existential anxieties. It focuses on what people can do to improve their knowledge and their material lot, which does not necessarily leave them feeling more secure or happy. Scientific knowledge is always provisional. Science gains confidence by dealing with well-defined constructs in place of naturally ambiguous realities. But this confidence is misleading, since the reality (unlike the theory) cannot be completely known. Because the model can never be perfect, our technological projects have unforeseeable consequences, our 132 projections into the future can go awry. Our literal machines break down, or do not work as well as expected, and are hardly eternal. Scientific concepts tend to become so abstruse and foreign to common sense that science fails to fulfill its other mandate, which is to provide society with a satisfying story about reality—a job once falling to religion. Despite some common ground as quests for truth, science and religion have radically different ontologies and ways of seeking certainty. Through technology, science uses the material world to study the material world. Religion has only the apparatus of the human body and mind; there are no god-detectors. In science, the epistemic subject employs theory to make sense of data, upon which confidence in the theory crucially depends. In religion, the believer places more faith in theology than in the evidence of the senses. Experience is filtered through doctrine, rather than the other way around. Like mathematics, religion defines its own certainties, while science must ground its certainties in evidence derived from the senses or their instrumental extensions. Science concerns the impersonal relationships among objects. Like art, religion concerns the subject’s personal relation to the cosmos and to other subjects. The scientific subject and the religious subject have the human existential condition in common. For science to truly displace religion, it would have to embrace goals beyond prediction, control, the advance of technology, even the pursuit of disinterested truth. Embodiment renders the subject keenly interested in the world; and the pathos of the human condition renders the inner life of the subject passionate. Knowledge that cannot encompass these dimensions of living does not represent the whole human being, and cannot serve the greater and long-term needs of humanity. Neither can it represent the whole truth of a nature that includes human observers. In many ways, modernity has failed to fulfill the social dreams of the early humanist thinkers. This may be one reason why religion continues to be resurgent the world over, as the failures of secularism continue to unfold. The persistence of creationism and religious fundamentalism, in the United States for example, should be understood against the background of historical continuity and common ground between religion and science. Given the pivotal influence of Christianity on the development of science, antagonism between religious and scientific 133 communities should be understood in that context. But it should also be understood in light of the failures of supposedly rational ideologies of progress to materialize as promised. Communism failed to deliver its egalitarian utopia. Global capitalism fails to “trickle down” its benefits, as the rich grow richer and the poor more numerous and relatively poorer. And technology seems to create as many problems as it solves. Religion, science, and art are three approaches to the mystery of existence, each with its own advantages and liabilities. Science competes with religion to provide a worldview, an ontology, a creation story, perhaps even an ethic to live by. Neither, however, provides a true alternative to the material-ist ethos that is destroying the natural world. Art is a third strategy to deal with the unknown. Art and science are complementary, loosely in the way that right and left-brain functions are. Just as science evolved out of religion by differentiating itself, so did art, which began as a religious expression and gradually secularized. Art and science are alternative forms of cultural production, expanding the human realm. Both rely on creative imagination. Science translates observation and theoretical concepts into technology; art translates perception and imagination into material form. Science captures general truths about nature, in abstract representations. Art too can be both representational and abstract. It may capture a landscape or, alternatively, a feeling. When literally pictorial, it is usually the uniqueness of a scene that is sought more than general truths of nature. Art may also attempt to open up experience and liberate it altogether from external reference. It explores ambiguity and invites multiple interpretations, without attempting (like science) to decide among them or to bring a question to closure. Art plays an important, if recessive, role in the modern world. To understand this role, one must first acknowledge that art involves nonverbal cognitive modes, different from either science or religion, which are functions of language. 141 Art has long been associated with the unconscious and the irrational—aspects of being that are undervalued in modernity. While the role of creativity is constrained in science by the goal of objectivity, and by the reality of the natural world, it is free to 141 Even in poetry, literature, and song, esthetic formal elements can be distinguished from semantic content. 140 Especially since Darwin, biology paints a quite different picture, in which the good is not a goal to strive for but a result of natural selection. By this measure, the good life is one that leaves offspring who themselves can reproduce. We are not what we are by conscious choice or striving, but simply what nature has made us. Nature offers no prescription for how things ought to be. Natural selection merely sets limits on what is possible. It has no purpose or intention—only outcomes that we recognize after the fact. While there appears to be no agency behind evolution, it does exhibit a ratcheting effect: while variation is random, selection builds complexity over time. Cooperation, as much as competition, has been essential to life’s advance. Organisms themselves are coalitions of cooperating cells; even the eukaryotic cell is a coalition. The human species, in particular, succeeds through extraordinary cooperation. Abstracting cooperative tendencies into moral precepts has enabled the collective good. Yet, in the context of presumed basic genetic selfishness, apparent altruism in the natural world presented a conundrum: how and why does the individual give up autonomy for the greater good? It was resolved in biology when it became apparent that the unit of natural selection is not the individual soma (let alone the group) but the gene, which is held in common by the cells of the organism and to some extent by members of the group. Morality and ethics thus may have biological roots, serving cooperation and collective survival. Yet human ideals often oppose nature itself. We are dual beings: thoroughly biological, yet aspiring to self-definition beyond biological determinism. The mind may naturally lend authority to biologicallydriven mandates, so that we believe our moral judgments; and believing them may indeed help our species or group. On the other hand, we are also able to reflect on these judgments, whether to see them as mere ideas or to extol them as ideals and virtues. Sociality is natural to us as primates, but its cultural expressions are uniquely human, grounded in reflection and imagination. From the point of view of human ideals, the biological world is a horror show in which no life can persist without destroying other life. Nature is amoral; yet, the behavior of carnivores and parasites is positively immoral by nearly any standard we apply to humans. Our self- 141 awareness leads to inner conflict: we experience both the prison of instinct and the possibility of transcending it. Animals “know not what they do;” but we, with self-consciousness and choice, must hold ourselves and each other accountable. Hence, legal pleas to evade accountability by “temporary insanity” mean that the guilty party didn’t realize what they were doing and didn’t, in that moment, actually have free will. But conscious choice is an evolutionary afterthought, precariously built atop our instinctual nature. Questioning one’s values requires effort. It runs the risk of leaving one with no reliable basis on which to choose, no external basis for an ethic. Religion animates ethics by framing moral failure as sin—literally, “missing the mark.” Sin presumes awareness and choice, hence culpability. (One must take aim in the first place!) In broad sociological terms, forgiveness is about reconciliation of opposing wills, whether that means between individuals, with society, or with God. It requires contrition and acknowledgment of wrongdoing, serving ultimately to reintegrate the sinner into the community. Reconciliation with society functions similarly: crime and punishment are behavioral, but parole and reintegration require evidence of sincere intent to reform. Civil authority in court cases may have recourse (sometimes successfully) to arguments about inherent right and wrong. Yet, whether the person judged guilty is innocent in the eyes of God is not properly a legal concern. The moral state of accused or convicted persons is less the issue than how society should deal with them. Punishment may entail loss of rights and therefore of agency. Whether or not endorsed by religion, right and wrong are preeminently a moral issue. They are distinct from legal issues and codes of conduct, even though we are taught to obey the law in the same breath we are taught to know the difference between right and wrong. Legal systems may appeal to reason and precedent, but morality can involve powerful emotions of shame, pride, remorse, or outrage. Conscience is born of socialization, internalized as the superego. Emotion gives morality its force. Consciousness reflects the organism’s relationship to the world. The internal model of reality is literally self-centered. But this does not mean 142 that it serves only the individual. Through serving the genes it may also serve kin or community. The internal model, projected outward as the world we know in experience, includes features that represent right and wrong. In other words, it is natural for us to experience the world morally, because doing so has enhanced the collective survival and thus the proliferation of certain genes, enabling us to be here. On the other hand, we know that phenomenality must not always be taken at face value. Similarly, we recognize that moral intuitions, like perceptions, are not infallible. Realizing their relativity does not mean we should abandon moral sentiments. They are often functional and intuitively aligned with the common good. But we should understand them as biological strategies, not absolute truths. To be trusted fully, they require corroboration by reason and fact. Otherwise, moral sentiments can be unduly exempted from scrutiny and elevated to dogma, reinforced by religious or political fervor. The mind’s projective tendency—its habit of treating internal models as external realities—readily supports heavens and hells, angels and demons, heroes and scapegoats to enforce moral imperatives. The reflexive consciousness of a social being introduces the dichotomy of I and thou, distinct from the relationship of I to it. Other persons are held to be not inert objects but agents like oneself, endowed with awareness and will, which language reflects in the “second person.” Ethics governs how we should treat them, whether grounded in absolute imperatives or in pragmatic reciprocity: how others will respond to our actions, individually or collectively. Unlike inanimate objects, people— and some animals and possible AI agents—may resist being badly or unjustly treated, and may retaliate or compete with us for control of the situation. While inert objects do not respond with agency to our actions, our actions upon them may ultimately rebound upon us, as in the case of climate change and environmental collapse. The basis of ethics toward other creatures should not depend on whether they are deemed conscious. What ultimately matters ethically is their well-being and ability to thrive—not merely sparing them pain or allowing them pleasure. Creatures prioritize their own welfare, and their pains and pleasures are their internal evaluations of their state. The evaluation follows from the state itself, not the other way around. 143 Phenomenality, including pain and pleasure, is an organism’s way of representing its state to itself—a state that can also be evaluated externally by observers. The primary issue should be the state itself, not the evaluation. If we do not value the entity itself, why should we be concerned about its experiences? And if its well-being is secured, its experience will follow. Our concern for how other creatures feel often stems from anthropocentric motives, reflecting our identification with our own conscious states. We blithely think of putting suffering creatures out of their misery when we can do nothing to improve their state and thereby relieve their suffering. But the damage or injury should be the concern, not just pain. Organisms deserve appreciation for their intrinsic complexity and vitality, not only because we imagine them capable of suffering as we do. By the same reasoning, the well-being of other people (and even one’s own) should be prioritized over the subjective states that represent it. In the early mechanist paradigm, animals were regarded as mere machines, without sensation. This view justified treating other species— and even other humans outside one’s tribe—as expendable, as literally fair game. The “rational soul” was invoked to distinguish people from animals, treating even the human body as chaff to be discarded in service of the soul’s salvation. Today, machines have become increasingly sophisticated, making it harder to deny that they might one day be sentient, if not already. If the human body is itself a machine, and also sentient, then we ourselves provide proof of concept. The difficulty is that we have no decisive basis for determining the conditions for artificial sentience, just as we cannot pinpoint where phenomenality arises on the evolutionary ladder. Indeed, we barely understand our own. Sentience has nonetheless become a standard by which to evaluate machine intelligence, generating moral concern even for chatbots. Such concern should focus, as with creatures, on their actual condition rather than hypothetical experiences. Embodiment entails a relationship with the world, and any phenomenality—should it exist—would be oriented toward that entity’s own welfare. But if an AI is not embodied, it has no relationship with the world, neither for itself or for us to be concerned 144 with. Its actual condition is that it is not an organism, not a creature at all, and not capable of sentience. The very concept of the other depends on a concept of self. How I view myself shapes how I view others and the world. The other is what is not me—or not us. But the other can be further distinguished as like or unlike me or us. Thus, I recognize another person as distinct from me but alike in being human, while a cat is not human, and a doorknob is not sentient. The boundaries of such categories are fluid, however. Throughout history, we have shifted the definition of humanness for convenience— branding enemies in war as inhuman, or treating outsiders as less than fully human. The category of personhood is likewise precarious. One’s own sense of selfhood depends on fragile states of brain organization. Some people lose their sense of being someone—which may be judged pathological by medicine, or exalted in spiritual traditions. Some people fail to empathize, treating others as insentient. This, too, is deemed pathological—unless it serves social ends such as war, politics, or economic exploitation. Children, other creatures, nature, and even machines can all be objects of ethical concern. Yet such concern often implies an asymmetrical relation, in which responsibility rests unilaterally with legal persons while others are “managed,” often with mixed motives of selfinterest and benevolence. This attitude of management may be resisted by agents in a position to assert their own wills. Then the relationship become agonistic, like a competitive game. Indeed, literal games reveal how competition and cooperation intertwine. To be a player implies a status as subject, different from other elements of the game, such as the playing field, the rules, and the tokens that represent the players in the “world” of a board game, for example. 143 To maintain the transcendent status of player—an agent outside the game— requires a spirit of disinterested play. As in the case of compulsive gambling, those who get too caught up in the play, too identified with the game or its outcome, have temporarily lost their senses and become no 143 In the case of sports, the playing field is literal and the physical players are the tokens. 145 more than a feature of the game. On the other hand, the game can only exist because participants agree to cooperate by following the rules. Paradoxically, it can only exist until someone wins, which puts an end to play. Morality is irrelevant in games, except for the agreement not to cheat. (The meta-rule is to follow the rules, without which there simply is no game.) In some games, such as sports and even war, a code of honor regulates fair play and sportsmanship. In economics and game theory, however, “rational” players are defined as those who play in earnest to win, or to maximize their gains. The object is not necessarily to enjoy the game for its own sake, or for camaraderie or friendly entertainment. Competition can be ruthless. To achieve the goal defined as winning implies strategy, which means trying to outwit the other players who are likewise trying to outwit you. Game theory frames rationality as pursuing optimal strategies without mistakes. 144 Yet optimal strategies may mix cooperation and selfishness, especially in repeated interactions with the same players, who take note of previous behavior and adjust their strategies accordingly. Human games are complex, recursive, and often lead to impasse. Game theory extends to biology, to the competition among genes responsible for evolution. Genes act as “selfish” players, yet selfishness at the genetic level can manifest as altruism at the social level. Evolution advances through a synthesis of competition and cooperation. Organisms naturally value their own welfare above that of competing others, except when altruism can spread their genes. Ethical doctrines that call for indiscriminately valuing the happiness of others, equal to or above one’s own, run counter to this biological principle. Yet they may serve larger social purposes, creating cohesion and enabling societies to flourish. The Golden Rule—do unto others as you would have them do unto you— transforms reciprocity into a universal formula that maximizes collective wellbeing. It may seem that the prime ethical goal should be to maximize the pleasure, happiness, or well-being in the world. But how do we measure someone’s happiness or, for that matter, their well-being? A measure can be skewed by the observer’s biases and interests, and judging someone 144 An “optimal” strategy is one that maximizes your winnings or minimizes your losses, regardless of what other players do. 146 else’s state can be as presumptuous as prescribing what is good for them. The ethical issue is to know how to conduct oneself in regard to them. The Golden Rule is a fair general guide, though based literally on personal preferences. In many cases, however, a more respectful approach is to consider the other’s response to one’s actions, letting them evaluate their experience and how you affect it. Let them be the judge of your conduct; listen to their feedback regarding your behavior and how they want you to treat them. On the other hand, the point of morals or an ethical code is to know in advance how to behave toward generic human beings—based, perhaps, on prior experience of how people seem to want to be treated. Reciprocity is a common-sense strategy involving fairness. It begins in good faith, by initially assuming the trustworthiness of other players. If they cooperate, you cooperate; if not, you retaliate in kind. (Do unto others as they do to you.) This is how we train others to behave properly toward us and how they train us. A desirable outcome can be elusive if the game is dominated by players who do not behave fairly. It would be important, then, to punish not only selfish players but also fair players who fail to punish unfair players. Society disapproves of evildoers, but also of those who tolerate them. This could help explain the social utility of morality: general indignation at uncooperative behavior or cheating, even when it does not involve personal wrongs. Reputation is important in situations where known players encounter each other repeatedly. If a moral sentiment can be assumed to prevail, it is more likely that an unknown player will be trustworthy. Ethical principles, public rituals, and especially morality, enhance social cohesion. This promotes strength against enemies as well as domestic harmony. Conformity is a valuable weapon against competing groups, as we see in patriotism. It demonstrates the willingness to cooperate with one’s team. Despite the vaunted competitive edge of individualism, it is generally more efficient to copy what others do than to try to find original solutions. Ethics also concerns how people treat each other economically. Credit, in its original sense, was a favor to be reciprocated—a practice fostering community trust. Usury, by contrast, transformed lending into exploitation, often leading to debt peonage or slavery. Many traditions 147 condemned usury within the group but allowed it when outsiders were concerned. As early societies expanded and intermingled, membership in the group became less clear. Trade and war created new and larger groupings, and less personal relationships, requiring new ethics. Over time, credit evolved from mutual trust into impersonal extortion. The “interest” charged on loans was a fee charged for the use of money, in lieu of reciprocation. The debtor—who before was a friend or relative—becomes a resource to exploit. Whereas the Lord’s Prayer admonishes us to “forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors,” we generally no longer forgive debt, but have made it the very basis of modern economics. Debt has been institutionalized. But the stigma of indebtedness—which once could lead to enslavement—remains a moral taint. Money itself, by quantifying value, impersonalizes relationships. Where once trade bound people together, coinage allowed transactions to be finalized and forgotten. 145 It rendered trade completely impersonal. Before, you had a reciprocal and ongoing relationship, of mutual dependency and trust, with your trade partner or creditor. In contrast, payment in coin—redeemable anywhere—completes the transaction, cancelling the relationship as paid in full. Both parties could walk away and not assume future dealings. Indeed, money met a need because people were already involved in trade with people they might never see again and whom they did not necessarily trust. This was a very different sort of transaction than the personal sort of exchange that had previously bound parties together. Trust in people was replaced by confidence in the universality of money. In the modern capitalist economy, all resources and commodities are by definition equivalent to money, which is a mobile resource that moves freely like air, water, or wild game. Even a potentially renewable resource like forest or fish can be exploited to exhaustion, since it can always be converted to capital to reinvest somewhere else. On the other hand, money is the practical common measure of value, reflecting what is deemed good or just. Precisely because it is impersonal, money stands above cultural and ideological differences, tending to smooth these over in the globalist world. While there is often a price to pay for conflict— 145 David Graeber Debt: the first 5000 years. Melville House, 2011. 148 leading, for example, to revenge or war—sometimes the price can be paid in cash instead of in kind. An eye for an eye need not be the policy. Money figures in court awards to victims, penalties for violations, and out-ofcourt settlements. Its positive side as an institution is that it unifies, even globally. War was historically about conquest, which often reduced the defeated to chattel. Like debt, it was a major source of slaves. A slave is someone torn from their social context—severed from the community that had given them identity, rights, and recognition as a person, reducing them to an object. But slavery was hardly a moral issue in societies that practiced it. In the ancient world, it was simply a condition that could befall anyone, through war as through debt. In the colonial era, it became associated with race and a supposedly inferior level of civilization. The precedent for human slavery is animal slavery, just as the precedent for war is the hunt. Animals too were removed from their natural context and forced into servitude, no longer seen as fellow beings—or even as worthy adversaries—but as objects, resources to be used or traded. This attitude is echoed in modern language when we speak of “human resources.” The consumer marketplace operates by a similar logic of objectification. Artifacts that once bore the hand-made stamp of craftsmanship and personal significance are stripped of their context. Through mass production, they are rendered identical and anonymous. Standardization economizes production while also adjusting quality to a common denominator, thereby fixing exchange value. The impersonality of industrial goods matches the impersonality of money itself. The identities of buyer, seller, and manufacturer are irrelevant, just as the observer’s individuality is irrelevant to scientific description. People excel at spotting cheating when the rules are clear. But following the rules does not guarantee fairness, since both the rules and the very definition of the game can be skewed by those who make them. Wrongdoers may appear to play legally simply because the system legitimizes their advantage. The more complex and abstract the game, the harder such “meta-cheating” is to challenge or even to pinpoint. Insider trading is illegal; usury is not. 149 Yet we intuitively sense injustice. Emotions can serve the common good in ways that logical analysis and cold rationality (defined as calculated self-interest) may not. They communicate the subject’s inner state and intent, serving as warnings to others. Anger, shame, guilt, pride, honor, moral indignation, and outrage at injustice thus help us to trust each other in circumstances where strict self-interest would prescribe cheating or taking advantage of the other. Indeed, people may act against their immediate self-interest in situations they perceive as unjust. Acting “irrationally” contrary to self-interest can make one unpredictable, which in itself is a form of power. Sometimes the mere reputation of being a “loose cannon” can shift the balance. Society itself is a game biased toward certain players—predominantly wealthy males. Rights may be nominally equal while resources are not. While capitalism propounds “freedom,” “democracy,” and “consent of the governed,” in reality it is rule by the rich—with tacit assent (and irrational enthusiasm) by the would-be rich. Awareness of this uncomfortable truth is potentially seditious. Men and women alike have been drawn into a masculine ethos: ideals of progress, power, self-interest, domination of nature, consumerism, greed, the cult of the celebrity and the billionaire. The exaltation of the masculine mystique and the repression of the feminine have served to keep not only women in their place but also the majority of men. We have yet to see a world that is not fundamentally hostile to the feminine, the body, and nature—let alone one defined by women or by a balance of masculine and feminine principles. Masculine and feminine are not only social roles but also psychic forces that remain to be integrated within the individual. Awed by the mystery of woman, men often fail to recognize the feminine within themselves. They seek access to feminine subjectivity through partners, sisters, daughters, homosexuality, or rebellion against gender norms; or they deny it altogether, absorbed in personal goals and consumerism. Gender can shape moral reasoning: men may lean more toward explicit rules, facts, and consequences, for example; women, more toward empathy, intuition, and inclusiveness. Each gender may also be wary of the other’s ethical framework and misjudge it. At one time, men surely envied—and perhaps feared—women’s power to create life. Their