provably prolix
I wrote another too-long response to a BA blog post. I’ve been complaining about this for years, too:
Which leaves me to say the thing I have said so many times, but which so many people don’t seem to want to understand: there is no such thing as the supernatural. If something exists, then it is real, and it is natural.
But I shoot for the middle path:
Whole-heartedly agreed that the word ’supernatural’ is meaningless. I cry a little inside whenever I see the word used by supposedly intelligent publications or people as if it has a referent.
But with respect to the whole discussion, I wanted to suggest a fundamental (ontological? epistemological?) difference between experience and representation of experience, and the consequences for science.
Let’s say we have the technology to hook someone to a machine that precisely constructs descriptions of her emotions in real time. We have a great deal of faith (ehem) that our model of the brain can convert electrical/chemical activity into these perfect descriptions. I’m not sure what such a description would be. Maybe it’s uncannily well-written, evocative prose. Or maybe a vector in some multi-dimensional emotional space that we know (somehow) is complete across the gamut of possible human emotion.
The person has experience, the machine constructs representations of that experience.
Now, if you could only pick one of those two things to have on a desert island, which would you pick? The exhaustive representation? Or the experience? Which is the more “valid” aspect of existence?
Neither; both. The two—a 1st person experience and a 3rd person representation of experience—are fundamentally separate yet equally valid aspects of existence. Science, no matter how perfect its models of the world are, will never be able to do more than generate representations. Experience can never be more than a private affair. Never the twain shall meet. (Except indirectly through the artifacts of reason and language and art and music and poetry and …)
So what’s the problem? you ask. Well, this places a real limitation on what science, as a method of investigation, is able to do, and raises questions about what “truth” and “validity” mean. Giving it short shrift, does a scientific account of an event always beat out a personal experience account of the same event in the battle for validity? If so, is that assertion “provable”?
The answer is of course, no, it’s not provable. Any claim science makes on validity depends on being able to represent the object of investigation.
So? What’s the problem? Two difficulties spring to mind:
1 - The practical impossibility of a complete model of the universe. Granted, this has little bearing on the everyday, whether your microwave works or not, but if we suppose that the project of science can be “completed,” then there is the problem of the amount of information and computation required to model the entire universe, if we suppose that, for any event, tendrils of causative dependency creep out into the entire universe (or at least to the information horizon of the speed of light), which, for completeness‘ sake, we must suppose.
But okay, forget the universe, how about modeling an afternoon thunderstorm? How about modeling a cup of tea? Completely? Without simplification? I don’t know, perhaps it will be possible some day. Maybe quantum computing will even be able to model the apparently probabilistic nature of the very small.
But, more relevant to the example above, how about modeling human emotion? Can we be sure that the multi-dimensional emotional space we made for our machine truly exhausts the gamut of human emotion? Can we prove it?*
Which brings us to …
2 - Representations must exist in some language, and science’s claims of validity in particular rely upon mathematics. I am no expert by any means, but one interpretation of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems is that “truth is a stronger notion than proof”. “Proof” exists only in the idealized, internal world of perfect spheres and such. “Truth” is something else. The philosophical implications for science are that “truth” is (provably!) slippery and the notion that science “explains” things, full stop, a bit naïve.
In fact, as should be well-known (but apparently isn’t), nothing is ever “proven” in empirical science. (I cry at the abuse of that word, too.) What we have in empirical science is a general consensus among experts, and faith, yes faith, that mathematical language maps well enough onto experience to trust the scientific models built from it. The models, the language, and the notion of proof are forever hermetically sealed away from the actual, 1st person experience of the world.
And that’s the part we care about, right? Our experience? Science is cool because it gives us microwave ovens.
So experience and 3rd-person representations of experience are (ontologically? epistemologically?) separate, but valid, aspects of existence. To compare the validity claims of science to the validity claims of personal experience is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Ken Wilber would call each “true but partial.” It’s best, perhaps, to take each on its own terms.
Reuben Hersh calls mathematics a social activity, and if that’s true for math it’s got be even moreso true for science. Science is a collective representation of the world based on a very mature and useful method of inquiry. It is not, however, the holy grail or the end-all and be-all. I’ll take its results as wonderful things, and will often, but not always, defer to them in the face of a conflicting account of “truth” from my own 1st person experience of the world. Did I see a ghost? Probably not.
But, that’s a matter of judgement, not of mathematical necessity.
September 28th, 2007 at 10:09 pm
“Representation of experience†is possible only through a technology that is as complex as it is ancient. There are many categories of representation ranging from literature to heliographic artifacts. But central to all inquiries into the phenomenon we are calling “representation of experience†are the fundamental principles of Theatre.
Because first person experience, when contemplated, rises inexorably to parallel the greatest of all mysteries, the staggering possibility that the universe actually exits, first person experience necessarily includes within itself all possible worlds and cannot be outside of it, as if it were imbedded within itself.
While theatre concerns itself with stories, stories of human beings exploring what it is to be, it is exactly doing what the sciences do, what math does, what philosophy does. It creates models as a way of generating artificial perspective, seeking ever to circumvent the tautology of being, the snake swallowing its tail, to somehow escape subjectivity and “knowâ€.
Since phenomenological discussions of meaning have become passé, and the Einsteinian revolution has not provided knowledge but has rather deepened the conviction that the world is what we make of it, no more, no less, we now have quantum theory which also disappoints by increasing uncertainty rather than lessening it.
Lately, we have string theory, which shows that physical reality possesses a beginning, middle and end, is linear, and does not evaporate. Still, is it comic or tragic, this reality strung across the silence of non-being? Is there a Deus ex Machina in any of the science to save us from the prison of always being ourselves?
October 3rd, 2007 at 8:29 am
agreed that it seems unfair that we must always be ourselves. what a weird constraint on consciousness. the circumstances of your birth are set in stone.
but then i’ve seen seedlings growing ridiculously—doomed for sure—out of tiny cracks in rocks and also seen full-grown trees living precariously but beautifully on a sheer mountain face, which probably started as seedlings in some negligible crack. maybe the tiny, ignored gap between mathematics and reality, the negligible uncertainty of an un-collapsed wave function, the esoteric paradoxes of emptiness, form, and self … maybe these are tiny cracks in the face of experience. perhaps we can reach into them with our choices and exertion and grow towards the sun.