A nation of Gradgrinds?

As we all know, the scientific way of seeing the world has brought immeasurable benefits to all mankind ; so many benefits, in fact, that many decent people cannot bring themselves to see the world in any other way.  They just know that the only realities are those which arrive to us through our physical senses.  If a thing may be seen, touched, heard, tasted or smelt then it is real ; if not, then it is fantasy.

The principle that underlies this way of living is the very respectable m.k.s. system.  The m.k.s. stands for metres, kilogrammes and seconds, which are the standard units of length, mass and duration – the very bedrock of good science.

Once upon a time, when people were generally better educated than they are today, it was understood that this way of seeing the world was intended to provide a very specialised form of knowledge – scientific knowledge.  Such knowledge was never intended to provide a comprehensive understanding of the Universe and all the things in it.  A scientist’s specialised way of understanding the world was no different, in principle, from a carpenter’s specialised way of seeing the world ; or a plumber’s, or a farmer’s, or a train-spotter’s.

But, with generally falling standards of education, a truly extraordinary state of affairs has arisen.  It is now seriously proposed that, if a thing can be measured, weighed and timed, then it is real.  And many people of a scientific disposition now say that, if a thing cannot be measured, weighed and timed, then it is illusory ; and they add that anyone who believes otherwise is either mad or evil.

Mr Gradgrind would have thoroughly approved of all this, of course – before his daughter, Louisa, through her sufferings and by God’s grace, came to his rescue.  If he were alive today, he would be ashamed.

One of the sadnesses that arises out of today’s scientific outlook is that its more zealous believers are now quite incapable of seeing in any other way.  For them, life has lost its meaning ; in place of life, they have mere existence.  But there is hope, even yet ; for a few of them are asking, “Why is our civilisation in decline?”  In decline at the very time we should expect it to be entering a new phase of development.

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Are we getting physical, then?

The great Oracle at Delphi once told a young Athenian that Socrates was the wisest man in the world.  When the youth asked Socrates why this was, he replied, “I suppose it is because I know nothing, but I do have opinions on many things!”

We can see that Socrates was using the word knowledge in a special way here ; what he meant was that he had no certain knowledge of anything ; he did not know reality.  This kind of humility was thereafter a persistent character of most of the writings of learned people right through antiquity and up to the modern age.

Then something new happened.  First, we discovered (or invented perhaps) powerful mathematics ; then we invented what we now call the scientific method.  The mathematics enabled us to make statements about the material world that were more or less precise and in a way that had hardly been attempted previously, and the second enabled us to investigate the material world in a highly particular systematic way.

To begin with, these two aids to investigation allowed us to produce a vast amount of information about the world ; and then allowed us to use that information to manufacture new powerful technology – including the technology to make more powerful means of studying the world more closely.  By the end of the nineteenth century, we had a veritable explosion of information in physics and in its technological fruits.  It is hardly surprising, therefore, that scientists of every stripe were eager to emulate the methods of the physicists

Now there was nothing wrong with this emulation and there still isn’t anything wrong with it as long as we remember that the methods of physics are directed at the material world ; particularly at the non-living world.

But man is a forgetful creature ; also much given to speculation, and easily deceived by appearances.  Thus it was that he forgot the original purpose of physics and the scientific method, and it was this forgetting that turned initial successes into a disaster.  For he began to see living things in purely physical concepts ; and, from there began to perceive living things as machines.  Biological machines.  Perhaps this new way of seeing things was epitomised by an enthusiastic late eighteenth century stock breeder ; he asked, “What is a sheep but a machine for turning grass into meat?”  Few people then imagined that Man would be characterised as a machine that happens to turn shepherd’s pie into thoughts.

But that is where we are today.  Man is a machine which is governed entirely and exclusively by the laws of physics.  Gone is the mind, gone is the psyche, gone free-will, gone is personal responsibility ; banished is the soul and the spirit together.  We are simply machines, assemblies of particles, at the mercy of our material environment (however you might try to dress it up in the exciting tales from quantum mechanics!).

But there is hope.  Physics as it is done today has almost exhausted itself grappling with the myths of the sub-particular world ; and, having led their colleagues astray, it will be the physicists who start breaking out of the prison they have made for us all.  This repentance began about a century ago with such luminaries as Rutherford and Planck, who sounded the warnings and offered the keys of the prison.

Was it not Rutherford who said, “Whether we like it or not, we live in a spiritual world.”  And was it not Planck who said, “Consciousness is everything.  Matter is derived from consciousness.”

But did their colleagues listen?  No.  For the physical sciences are easy to do ; no great wisdom is required.  And they are profitable ; research grants are readily forthcoming, if only for the sake of the saleable technology.

On the other hand, a science of humanity takes the harder road ; the road trodden by Socrates and most of his successors ; the road of modesty.

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A creature of habit

Man is a creature of habit.  If he did not have habits, he would need to spend a lot of time consciously thinking about what he has to do.  He would have to evaluate every thought before he spoke of it and before he acted upon it.  He would have to evaluate every course of action before committing himself to it.  Life would be tedious.  But a habit, an automatic response to a thought, saves much time and mental effort ; it is productive of swift action and the satisfaction that goes with it.

It is perhaps small wonder that the most successful people tend to be more bound to their habits than the less successful.  Men and women who act with the minimum of thinking are the ‘achievers’ in this world, and they are rewarded accordingly.  Those less given to habits are the ‘philosophical’ types ; interesting people, but not noted for making their mark in the world of action – the world of trade and industry.

Scientists, too, tend to be creatures of habit.  Once a method or a theorem has been accepted, it takes hold of the scientist’s thoughts and becomes difficult to change.  Not impossible, but difficult.  A method or a theorem is difficult to change because it is productive ; it is productive of further research and is productive of new technology.  In other words, it is productive of wealth and so is a powerful motivator.

But there are some risks attached to scientific habits.  Perhaps the most obvious risk is that they lead to a canalising of research ; the easier lines of investigation are chosen at the expense of the more difficult.  And these lines lead on to other lines.  And as long as these particular lines of research are productive of quick material gains, they are pursued ; science is literally paying for itself.  But only superstition can presume that the easier investigations will lead to greater truths.

But there is a more sinister risk.  The present scientific method was first applied to astronomy and then developed to aid physics.  It was developed and refined to study the inanimate world ; the world which was properly regarded as a mechanism ; i.e., a world where motion is key, and the motion determined by forces external to the body being moved.  All this makes sense in physics.

The method was so successful that scientists then applied it to living things.  Living things were thus classified as machines, which ‘worked’ entirely by forces acting upon them.  So productive was this method of study that many inventions were made to improve the performance of the living machines.  Gradually, almost without anyone noticing, the habit of thinking of living things as machines grew in man’s mind.

The habit grew until many of those of a scientific persuasion came to believe that living things were nothing but machines.  It is now taken for granted by many scientists that man himself is just a machine.

I wonder how many of those scientists have set their habit aside for a while to consider the consequences of it?  What is the future for humanity if we are simply machines, whose every thought and every word and every action is the result of the blind forces of nature acting our bodies?

Where now is the concept of Truth?  of Justice?  How are people to be held accountable for their actions?  On what grounds may one praise a useful machine?

What credit or criticism may one give to somebody’s opinion, if that opinion is nothing more than the result of impersonal natural forces acting on his or her body?

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Ways of seeing

It’s always fun to analyse things.  We do analysis so readily because it is easy ; synthesis (imaginative thinking) is a lot harder.  Science makes such good progress because it involves mostly analysis.

But, easy though it is, the results of analysis are still a puzzle.  For example, we might do a hundred experiments in which an object is raised above the ground and then dropped.  In every experiment we observe that the object falls towards the earth.  We then reason through the event.  And our reasoning leads us to infer that something must be causing the object to fall as it does.  Then we give a name to  that something ; we call it gravity.

But note : nobody has ever seen gravity : nobody has ever heard it.  We know of it only by the effects it has on objects, including the effects it has on our own bodies.  Mystery.

And then we can try a different experiment ; not quite as simple, because we need the right conditions.  Let us shine a powerful, narrow-beamed searchlight into the night sky.  Let’s choose a clear night when there is no dust or moisture in the air.  If we stand behind the light and look along its length, we see nothing.  The light is quite invisible.  It becomes visible only when it shines directly in our eyes ; or when some of the light is reflected back into our eyes by dust or moisture.  So, the light is not a property of the beam.  So what is it that is coming out of the searchlight?

Then we might take a pair of billiard balls ; a white one and a red.  If we cue the white ball towards the red one, we see it roll across the green table ; then we see the white ball and the red move off in different directions.  We infer that the white ball caused the red one to move.  But we can look as hard as we like, and yet never see that cause.  The cause is ours, not the ball’s.  Did the white ball really cause the red one to move?  or is that just what our minds made of it?

In each of these experiments, we have inferred something ; we have reasoned about what we have seen.  And it is interesting to note that the results of our reasoning are not self-evident.  We can be sure of this because, when we investigate the findings of people who have quite different cultures to ourselves, they come up with different results ; and that is not due to their faulty thinking ; it is due to their having quite different ways of thinking.

We might wonder whether, as human consciousness evolves, what other ways of thinking there might be awaiting us.  Will we still be doing the same kind of science ten-thousand years from now?

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Getting the description right

It cannot be seriously doubted that nowadays people are more scientific than at any previous time.  Despite its obvious shortcomings, the technological successes of science have seduced millions into believing that it is the only way to describe the workings of the world properly.

One of the most unfortunate things to emerge from our love affair with science is that it has encouraged the more extreme believers into using the scientific method as the only way to describe people properly.   In the departments of the learned, gone are such words as soul, spirit, will, love, hate, and so on.  In biology, genetics, medicine, and even in philosophy, people are more and more regarded as physical machines, meat machines, in which the only processes are the ‘bottom-up’, causative ones ; the ‘top-down’, purposeful processes are not even considered worthy of study.  Even the lovely, tragic Psyche has been dismissed from psychology.

I wonder if the more enthusiastic believers have thought deeply about what follows from their infatuation with this view of science?   It seems to me that supposed causative determinants of personality and behaviour have two major sources : the first is the genes : and the second is behavioural conditioning.

In the case of genetics, it is supposed that our bodily character is determined by the arrangements of certain molecules and their interactions ; and this bodily character is the only character we have.  These genes, these arrangements of molecules, are themselves composed of simpler molecules which have their recent origins in the soil and ultimately come from stardust and the Big Bang.

However we dress this belief up, on its own it cannot account for moral behaviour without involving a lot of faith in unspeakable mysteries.  One may contemplate a molecule or an atom or an electron for ever and have no hope of discerning any sign of personality – nor any hint of moral behaviour – in them.  Nor any sense of purpose.  Atoms, etc., just do what atoms do.

In the case of behavioural conditioning we encounter something similar.  The child, the collection of genes, behaves in ways that are determined by its environment – principally by its parents and other influences.  And the parents, et al, are themselves no more than assemblies of genes.

What distinguishes a saint from a sinner?  The mere arrangement of his genetic molecules and/or the conditioning he has received.  And he has had no control over either ; and he can never have control over either.

In the best traditions of the best novels, I will leave it to you, dear reader, to work out where such extreme beliefs will lead ; to work out the consequences for a society that accepts these beliefs without some serious questioning.

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Causes and reasons

I suppose that, like most people, I grew up largely in a state of wonder.  I wondered constantly at the way the world is and how it came to be and how it might come to be.  Of course, a child does not articulate this wonder consistently, accurately and persistently ; it consists mainly in fleeting, silent questions which seem to come from nowhere and are soon gone, to be replaced by other thoughts.

But a few of these questions pop up often enough to become habits ; they are always there and, at first we are conscious of them.  But, as the habit entrenches itself, the questions become unconscious and, as such, simply form an influence on our character.  The point about unconscious thinking is that it shapes our character without our being aware that we are even doing it, and so we are largely unaware of why we are the way we are.

So it is, too, that while one person might feel attracted to being a mechanic (say) another is attracted to being a writer.  It is easy enough to infer that one has had some early encouragement towards mechanics, while the other has not.  But it also happens that some people develop interests which have been actively discouraged in early life.   And, in either case, it is nearly impossible to pinpoint exactly what early thinking was going on.

For most of us, we are reasonably satisfied with our personality or character.  After all, it has ‘worked’ for us, hasn’t it?  We have largely enjoyed our lives.  But it happens that we do become aware of certain dis-satisfactions also ; in which case, we might feel inclined to take an interest in our character-formation.  Indeed, we might feel a need to undertake a little character-reformation.  And our starting point might well be with our unconscious thinking.

I remember from long ago  wondering why it is that some people tend to see ultimate reasons for things, while others see ultimate causes.  There is certainly a fundamental difference in the kind of thinking going on here, and many people take these things very seriously ; some even devote their lives to the study of ultimate things.  I guess that a person of a theological persuasion will be interested in ultimate reasons, while an astronomer (for example) will be more interested in ultimate causes.

It seems that a certain tradition has grown up within each way of thinking about the world.  The person in search of ultimate reasons looks mostly inward, while the one in search of causes looks outward.  Thus it is, perhaps, that the theological type sees evidence of his Ultimate Reason for things wherever he looks within his own mind and in its rational functioning.  On the other hand, the astronomer sees evidence of his Ultimate Cause wherever he looks outward into in the sky ; everywhere he sees evidence of the big bang, whether it be in the orderly arrangements of the stars or in the ‘debris’ from the great primal event itself.

Saint Francis was an inwardly-looking man:

God be in my head
And in my understanding

God be in my eyes
And in my looking

God be in my mouth
And in my speaking

God be in my heart
And in my thinking

God be at my end
And at my departing.

St Francis

Taken, I am told, from a Book of Hours – a 1514 service book used in Clare College, Cambridge

After Psalm 121:8 : May the Lord keep our going out and our coming in from this time on and for evermore.

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Keeping it simple

Having been in engineering for most of my life, I have also found the attractions of science to be almost irresistible.  There is something neat about it.  The scientist begins by making an observation and proceeds to ascertain the causes of it.  After many such investigations, and when sufficient data has been accumulated, he then feels confident enough to propose a law which will account for his observations.  And, using that law, he then feels able to make some predictions of a more general nature.

Let me say at once that I see nothing wrong with this method.  It is, after all, the foundation a good deal of our technology ; and that technology can be seen to work.  The weakness of science does not lie in its method but in attitudes towards it.  The method has proved so successful that it has seduced many into believing that it is the only valid method of describing the natural world.  So successful has it been that many, perhaps the majority, of people pour scorn on any attempt to devise another.  This is especially true, I think, of the people of the West.  But there are objections to it, and there are many of them, so they will need to be severely summarised.

In the first place, science investigates the causes of natural events ; but there is no mention of purposes.  A scientist will perhaps tell us what happens, but is silent on why a thing happens.  A scientist will tell us of a natural physical law, but offers no opinion on why the law exists.  Also there is the question of what is observed.  Out of all the events occurring in an experimental condition, only certain of them are selected for observation.  Thus science deals with abstractions, with simplicities ; and by its nature is partial in the data it considers worthy of investigation.

So, all in all, science as it is done now is successful in what it attempts to do ; but its methods are limiting and, therefore, it cannot offer more than an abstract view of the world.  Therefore it cannot provide complete knowledge of nature, however hard it tries.

The physicist, AN Whitehead offered this insight : science is the application of commonsense to an idealised world.  But the world is not ideal ; it is not a laboratory ; and there is much going on in nature that science knows nothing of.

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When is enough enough?

A short while ago, there was a great debate going on about the stupendously expensive CERN experiment, which was about to take a serious turn at that time.  Much was said about many things in the public debate ; but one item that caught my attention was a remark apparently made by Prof. Stephen Hawking.  The Daily Telegraph reported him as saying that the CERN experiment is “vital if the human race is not to stultify and eventually die out.”

In its wisdom, the Daily Telegraph did not quote Hawking’s reasons for this extraordinary statement, but we can imagine what they might be.  For embedded in that statement we will surely find the sentiment that it is important that the human race survive.  But what does he mean by survive?  For a century?  for ten thousand years?  for ever?

Also we might address the question of why the race ought to survive?  The notion of ‘ought’ is appealing to some high standard of judgement – but this standard is unstated.  Why ‘ought’ we to survive?  Who says?  If we take nature as our higher authority, then what we know about extinct species suggests that she doesn’t give a tinker’s cuss about which species survive.  If we take ourselves as the higher authority, then we see that Hawking is merely indulging a kind of quirky selfish wish.

I would have thought that if we were to show a genuine concern for the future of the human race, we could start a lot closer to home than with a £5 billion boys’ toy under the magic Swiss mountain.  We could, for example, stop polluting the earth ; we could make a resolution to leave our children a finer educational legacy : we could build better buildings – ones that have some merit.  There are a thousand things we could do other than waste resources on atomic ping-pong.

And then we could turn attention to the fruits of the Great Con CERN.  Hawking fondly imagines that the outcome will be some really powerful technology.  And this technology will be all for the good.  In other words, it will be morally different from any technology that went before.  There will be no downsides to it.

One can only admire the Professor’s optimism.  Those who do not study and understand history are condemned to repeat it.  Most of the world’s new environmental problems are caused by technology ; the more powerful the techniques, then generally the graver the problem.  Why ought the fruits of CERN be any different?

It seems to me that we have quite enough technology in the world already.  I am not against technology, but rational people are able to discern when enough is enough.

On the other hand, I may be unfair to Hawking and the CERN enthusiasts.  It might be the case that they are thinking of humanity in a new way ; they might perhaps be thinking of a new kind of science and a new kind of technology.  In which case I might well agree with them.  But there was nothing in the Telegraph report to suggest these things.

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It’s too simple

Almost all science (knowledge) is concerned with abstractions.  The world is too complex for a human mind to grasp in its functioning, dynamic entirety.  So we break it down into manageable chunks ; and most of those chunks are are very small indeed – chunklets – and it is these abstracted bits of the world that we study.  It is perhaps a shame that we feel impelled to do this breaking down.

As far as we can make out, Man is the creature that has the best understanding of the world.  And to gain this understanding, we basically make  models of selected parts of the world in our memories.  It follows that our models are exactly as complex as the world we know.  Therefore Man is, collectively,  at least as complex as the entire known world or universe.

But how can we break Man himself down so as to gain a deeper understanding?  There have been any number of models of Man.  But one of the most interesting is that conceived by Sigmund Freud.

Freud is well known for his system of psychoanalysis.  But underlying that, and prior to it, is his theory of psychodynamics, or the workings of the human mind – or perhaps we should say the workings of people, for Freud did not see any essential separation of mind and body.  He was, as we might say, holistic and therefore very traditional ; one might say anciently traditional.

Man is a trinity : Id : Ego : Superego.  Strange names.  But strange for a reason.  One senses that Freud was determined to break away from the fatal Cartesian dualism concerning mind and body.  He was also determined not to become trapped in the fatal materialistic tendency in biology ( he was primarily a neurologist, so saw the traps here).  But nor did he wish to revert to traditional terminology, for spirit of his age was against it.  So he constructed his own lexicon – his own metaphors.  Many say that his ideas read much better in German, and that the English translations have not served him well.

The Id ; roughly Life, or the life principle or the vegetative principle.  The Ego ; roughly the self, especially the conscious, rational self.  The Superego ; roughly the conscience or the knowledge of what is right and what is wrong.

So Freud’s theory is concerned with the interactive dynamics of these three principles ; the principles that make us what we are – human.

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Stars don’t count

Hardly a day passes without some sign of the profound mystery of the world coming to mind.  Thinking of its origins : the universe, in its early stages of evolution, is completely invisible to us. It is known to us only by essentially geometrical expressions and, because the universe had no objects in at that ‘time’, the geometry is non-metrical. It is all numbers.

But then, isn’t almost the whole of science numbers? science requires measurements and quantities. But where do these numbers reside? If we wanted to know how many stars there are in a particular cluster, we should not expect to find each star sporting a plate with its serial number on it. The numbers exist, not on or in the stars, but in the mind of the person who counts the stars. Likewise, there is no plate bearing the figure for the mass of each star. Neither do the stars present a direct figure to express the distances one from another. If we mentally construct three lines to join three stars, there is no direct apprehension of the angles subtended by the lines – and the lines themselves exist only in the mind that constructs them.

Mathematics is a language and, like all languages, it is a peculiarly human mental construct. In the English language, does the word ‘orange’ have any necessary connection with the orange itself? Words can be seen as signs which refer to things ; but are they the things themselves? Numbers can be seen as signs that refer to things ; but are they the things themselves? A road sign pointing to Birmingham has no necessary connection with Birmingham except that we say so.

Perhaps it is human beings that decide the meanings of numbers – but the universe might be quite indifferent to our opinions and decisions. I wonder what the implications might be?

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The future of technology

The way people think about the world has changed since the scientific/technological revolution began.  And the change has not only altered our perception of the material world, but also of ourselves.

The modern perception of the material world has brought considerable benefits in the form of technology, and that is because we tend overwhelmingly to see Nature as a machine ;  the galaxies, the stars and planets, the Earth and all the things in it are seen as mechanical.  That is to say, nature ‘works’ by objects acting upon other objects.  The essence of this working is that a change in the state of anything is brought about by external means.  And our technology is modelled on this ; our invented machines mimic natural machines.

As one eighteenth century scientist observed, “What is a cow but a machine for turning grass into milk?”.  His idea was to make this machine, the cow, as efficient as possible.  Now there is no doubt that living creatures can be perceived as machines.  To settle any doubts, one has only to consider surgery and dentistry ; and medicine, too, is largely the application of external influences to the body/machine.

But has our fixation on science and technology led us to believe that people themselves are nothing but machines?  Certainly medical science makes that assertion.  It is not overstating things to say that going to the doctor’s nowadays is like going to the garage to have one’s car fixed.  The entirely physical diagnosis is made, and the treatment (the fix) is decided on solely on that basis.  And that treatment is physical.  From the beginning to the end, the patient is treated as a machine.

Very well.  But the question still remains ; is a person nothing but a machine?  The answer to that question has some notable consequences.  For example, if governments were to perceive people as mere machines, then what objection can be raised to their implementing far-reaching social engineering programmes?  Such programmes would, of course, be devized by the best experts on the human machine – politicians, doctors, lawyers, psychologists, police officers, social workers and so forth.

Does this sound far fetched?  Well, just look at what is happening around you now.

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Disinheritance

Christianity began with its founder suffering a bloody crucifixion ; continued to where its followers were persecuted even unto death ; and then progressed to develop the greatest civilisation the world has ever seen.  Christians have produced the best paintings, the best sculptures, the best music, the best literature ever ; even now there is no equal to them.  They also produced the scientists who established the best methods for examining the physical world – methods  which are used to this day.

Why do so many people now wish to get rid of such a productive system of beliefs?  I fear that one reason is  because they do not have a developed concept of progress.  They desire perfection, and think they can merely dream up a blueprint for it, forgetting that many such blueprints have been drawn before ; and then, so they think, they can merely legislate for it – forgetting that such has been tried in ages past.

They look back to their notions of what the Middle Ages were like, and feel repelled – forgetting that their medieval ancestors were repelled by what went before them ; and forgetting also that their own descendants will look back on this politically correct, amoral, sink-state age and feel an even greater repulsion, not simply because it is awful but because it is actually a regression from the heights once tentatively trodden.

So, why do they want to rid themselves of their religion and all that goes with it, including the best that goes with it?

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Just a thought

I know a nice lady, Mrs Bradshaw, who once had a real-life adventure. So my short account of her adventure begins like this : “Mrs Bradshaw pulled on her favourite green sweater, ran a comb through her hair, and stepped out of the house to go to her sister’s rather forbidding place in Reading”. This is exactly how it happened ; I was there and saw it. Indeed, I was there throughout her adventure, and recorded all of it.

But, in my desire to protect her privacy, I decide to change some details. My account now begins : “Mrs Mason pulled on her favourite black sweater, ran a comb through her hair, and stepped out of the house to go to her sister’s rather forbidding place in Bracknell“. The question now arises, Have I told lies? Will my account of Mrs Bradshaw’s adventure be accurate? Is it believable any more? Can I be regarded as a reliable reporter?

Most people would argue that no lie has been told, provided the purpose of the story is merely to relate the substance of the adventure. In this case, the names and other details do not matter. For Mrs Bradshaw, we may read Mrs Everywoman. Or even Mr Everyman. So, now I have produced a work of fiction which is also a work of truth.

But, suppose the adventure which I am relating does not have a satisfying ‘ring’ to it? Suppose it does not quite capture the spirit of Mrs Bradshaw? Suppose that, on the day of the actual adventure, she is feeling a little below par, and is not quite herself ; and, as a result, she is not acting as the mighty heroine I know her to be? Would I be justified in recalling an earlier event (which I witnessed) that showed her in her true colours – and working that event into my story? Now I have deepened the fiction ; but am I still being truthful?

What I seem to be constructing here is not lies, but an account of the nature of Mrs Bradshaw ; the focus is now on her personality as well as her adventure – but much more on her personality. And, since my memories and my reason lead me to suppose that most women could handle the adventure with the skill and heroism of Mrs Bradshaw, I am narrating not a mere lie, not a mere fiction, not a mere fantasy ; I am constructing a myth. For a myth is a narrative that is founded on disciplined observation and disciplined imagination ; it is also somewhat idealized. A myth does not necessarily tell the truth, but it reveals a truth within the mind of the reader. It opens the reader’s mind, if not to the facts, then to the possibilities.

We all love myths, so let there be more of them.

So to the anthropologist who discovers a small number of stones lying a little below the surface of the ground. By exercising a disciplined observation, he surmises that these stones somewhat resemble real bones that he has seen in a modern skeleton ; he therefore exercises a disciplined imagination to conclude that these stones were moulded to the shapes of the bones of a human-like being. Further disciplined observations and imaginings lead him to conclude that the imagined bones are one hundred thousand years old. Yet more laborious observations and imaginings lead to the proposition that the long-dead creature walked upright, had a dark skin and black hair ; also brown eyes seem appropriate to his personality. And, why not give him a name? Phillip will do.

But, surely, isn’t this mere fiction? No such person ever existed. What modern anthropologist was present to record these details one hundred thousand years ago? The anthropologist’s narrative is almost all an imaginative disciplined construction. Lies? Deceit?

No. It is much more interesting than that. What we have is a myth. And a very good one it is, too ; for it holds our imaginations captive and enlightens us, if not to the facts, then to certain principles and to certain possibilities.

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Adventures with the occult

I expect there are any number of ways of thinking about ourselves and the universe in which we live.  All of them contain surprises.  Here’s something to ponder.

There are at least two universes ; the first is the one that we know ; and the second is the one we believe in.

The one that we know exists in human consciousness. It is here that we find all the stars and starfish, moons and microbes, numbers, constants and cats. It is what we ordinarily think of as the physical universe ; the universe that is fundamentally the product of our senses but also of our reason.

The other universe, that we all believe in, exists beyond our sense data and therefore beyond true sensory, empirical knowledge ; though we may speculate about it within reason, we cannot say anything definite about it. It is this universe that (we believe) ultimately gives rise to what we think of as the physical universe.  This is the universe of atoms, electrons, protons, etc. – invisible, occult, known only by mathematical equations which have no definite interpretation.

These considerations have interesting consequences for us. For example, the numerical universal constants, since they exist only in human consciousness, simply have to be as they are in order for us to know the universe. Any other opinion is speculation. If we change the constants, for example, we are literally changing our minds about the fabric of the universe in which we exist ; with the consequence that the universe either dissolves, or becomes unimaginable.

Now, here are some sketchy ideas that can be developed.  But, if these ideas won’t do, there are others ….  😉

Jamie MacNab

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Science and omniscience

The first half of my working life was profitably and enjoyably spent in engineering ; electronic engineering.  So I am happy about what science can do for technology.  I have certain misgivings about the way that technology is used, but I’ll skip lightly over that for now.  What crossed my mind, and what I’d like to cover now, is the nature of science.

I have come across many people who believe that science will one day tell us everything that it is possible for a human being to know.  Well, maybe ; but let’s consider where such a belief might come from and then ask whether it is feasible.

Science as we know it did not spring out of the Middle Ages, like Athene from the head of Zeus, fully armed to deal with the world’s problems ; it developed over time, and this period is not exactly determinate.  But its development was spectacular.  What it boiled down to was not a inventory of new knowledge but a method of acquiring new knowledge.  And this method was extremely productive.  As a consequence, we have got used to the idea that new knowledge is easy to come by ; also that new knowledge continues to proceed from science at a prodigious rate.  If anything, it emerges now at a faster rate than ever.  Thus has arisen the belief that things can only get fuller and better ; and one day we shall know everything.  There is a touching simplicity to that idea.

It seems to me that the first doubts about this theory of everything lies in the very method itself.  The beauty and power of the scientific method lies in its rigorous exclusion of certain kinds of data.  Perhaps the most notable restriction applied to science is that which requires that only data which is measurable is admitted to its purview.  “If you can’t measure it, it isn’t science.”  This rule has far-reaching consequences.

So it is that the scientist begins his investigations of the world by abstracting from the world the kinds of data that can be measured.  In practice this seems to boil down to three things : length : mass : and duration (metres, kilograms and seconds).  This is the first level of abstraction.  The second level consists in abstracting only those data that happen to interest the scientist.  If there are data that happen not to fall within the previous experience of the scientist, then it will not be considered relevant.

Now, to my mind, once you begin to abstract data – once you decide to deal only with abstractions – you perforce limit the kinds of new knowledge you  might acquire.  And if you do that then, in all probability, you cannot hope to know everything no matter how many centuries of research you do.

Of course, it will be argued that as the centuries roll by, scientists will devise new methods that do not require abstractions.  Yes indeed.  But in that case our descendants will be dealing with a different kind of science altogether.  We will, in fact, be doing science as a development of the Old Science – the old science that the modern science accidentally killed off in about the seventeenth century.  And that old science was much fuller than the new.

It is interesting that the idea of Athene came into my mind a few minutes ago.  For not only did she spring full-armed from Zeus’s head, but she also accidentally killed her older cousin, Pallas.  That is how she came to be known as Pallas-Athene.  Perhaps she will come back to us in a new guise.  Perhaps science will become more people-friendly.

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The man who knew too much?

Sigmund Freud was a remarkable man.  Most people know that he was Jewish and born in Central Europe in the late nineteenth century.  The most productive part of his life was spent in Vienna.   He served in the German Army in WW1 and died in London just before WW2.  The socialists seem to have hated him ; both the Communists and the Nazis burned his books.  But it was the Nazis who gave him his biggest problem, because they were so close to his home.  At least twice the SS turned his house over in an attempt to drive him from Austria.  But he refused to leave.  In the end, when it was clear that his life was in a greater danger than before, his protectors (who included British and American diplomats as well as the Archbishop of Vienna) persuaded him to go to England.  His older sisters, who were too frail to travel, subsequently perished in the cleaning-out of religion in Austria.

There is not much in the life of an individual that is particularly interesting to the wider world.  What does interest us is what a person makes of his or her life ; the evolution of the soul.  And that evolution is conditioned by experiences – of other people, of places, of ideas and of the person’s own activity in the world.  Without the right kinds of  experiences, a person of the brightest potential may turn out dull and achieve little of note.

Freud was a most determined man.  Was he born that way?  or did his experiences make him so?  We can only discuss his experiences and, even then, only so far as we know them ; for experience is not only made of ordinary events but also of the private mental responses to those events – which then become events in their own right.  As a brilliant young neurological researcher at university, Freud was informed by his supervisor that he had no prospects of advancement ; no Jew had a chance.  Did he give up?  No, he qualified as a medical doctor so as to ensure an income, and then he studied psychology, which is where his main interest lay.  We recall how the Nazis tried to drive him out of Vienna and how he resisted right to the end, and how it took the strongest persuasion of his friends to get him out.  For the last eighteen or so years of his life he endured cancer of his jaw ; but he just worked harder – right up to a few days before his death from that affliction.  And almost always, his good humour and humanity shone through.  He did, however, reserve considerable irritation for those who disagreed with his psychology.

We see signs of this determination in his writing.  No detail in an argument was too small.  No causation was too far back to be left unattended ; no consequence was too slight to be overlooked.  He seems to have had intense powers of concentration as well as deep and broad knowledge of human nature as commonly understood.

Although a Jew, Freud seems not to have been at all religious.  The socialists made much of his Jewishness and circulated the idea that his psychology was nothing more then ‘Jewish psychology’ ; as if only the Jew were possessed of an Id, an Ego and a Superego ; as if the interaction of these aspects of personality had no application to Gentiles.  But Freud brushed all this nonsense aside and was always  at pains to mention that ‘his’ psychology applied to all mankind.

But he was traditional in his sources of inspiration.  Mere mention of Freud has the name Oedipus mutely attached.  He quite rightly saw that, whatever we might think of the classic myths, they were nevertheless the products of human intelligence ; and they have long endured in the minds of people ; so therefore they both reflected our one-time understanding of the world and also conditioned our evolving understanding of it.  He was also sceptical of our ability ever to comprehend reality.  Our state of knowledge is always provisional.  Always.  And, although Freud never said so (as far as I know)  this of course is a religious insight.

In view of his scepticism and in view of his trust in human intelligence, he was quite at ease when saying that yesterday’s science is today’s myth ; and today’s science will be tomorrow’s myth.  He even referred to his own theories as “My Myth”  – which implies, of course, that one day they will be overwritten. For him, all our knowledge is but a palimpsest, but a most stupendous one, in which not much is actually lost (though it might become feint) and much is recoverable by careful examination.   So, as well as a profound determination, Freud also had a humility that went even deeper.

It might be remembered, too, that Freud’s ideas probably did most to ensure the demise of the Victorian lunatic asylums.

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