The Crack in the Cosmic Egg (14 page)

5
mirror to mirror
Singer closed his
History of Science
(1941) with the observation that
in the future the frontiers of scientific abstractions may be rendered
more fluid. The philosophical method might have a share in determining
the nature of change. The idea that mind is separated from mind, and
mind from matter, might need modification, he felt. He suggested that
the tendencies of science since the later nineteenth century may well
have been working in just this direction.
The late English physicist, Eddington, who was instrumental in helping
translate and bring into being Einstein's relative universe, was deeply
impressed by the way a short, tidy little equation, the product of a
Eureka! image arriving full blown in the mind, could open our experience
to a whole new aspect of concrete reality. He felt that man's mind must
be a "mirror of the universe."
Singer wrote that the processes of mind seemed to reflect the processes
of nature. He felt that our minds were as much the product of evolution
as were our bodies, an idea both Jung and Teilhard developed. We have
developed through the ages as "mirrors of the world in which we dwell,"
wrote Singer, and spoke of us as "attuned to nature."
Newton saw science as a voyage of discovery, coming across islands of
truth in that great ocean. Jerome Bruner questions this discovery aspect
of Newton's genius. Science and common-sense inquiry do not discover
the ways in which events are grouped in the world, claims Bruner, they
invent ways of grouping. Newton was a creative inventor, if unknowingly.
Warren Weaver calls science a very human enterprise, exhibiting the same
"lively and useful diversity" which is to be found in philosophy, art,
or music. Bronowski claimed original scientific thought to be the same
act of mind found in original artistic thinking. Sir Cyril Hinshelwood
also spoke of science as a creative art, "joining hands with all human
endeavors, learning by its mistakes."
"By their fruits you shall know them" is the criterion that underlies
scientific success. As with a piece of music the final question has been:
how well does it perform, and how well does it listen? Performers will
not consistently play, neither will an audience long support, a poor
work. Time screens out the charlatans.
Teilhard, reflecting a Bergsonian evolutionary theology, claimed that
intellectual discovery and synthesis are no longer merely speculation, but
creation. From our time on in history, some "physical consummation of
things" is bound up with the "explicit perception" we make of them. What
a thing
is
is to an unknowable extent determined by or influenced by
what we
think
it is. This may be as much a growing conscious awareness
of the basic ontology as it is an evolutionary development.
Singer sees our minds reflecting nature, and we must go a step further
and see this as a dynamic, an interrelation that will always deny clear
categorization or a one-for-one correspondence. We must push Eddington's
and Singer's reflecting mind one step further and recognize that man's
mind is a mirror of a universe that mirrors man's mind, though the
mirroring is subtle, random and unfathomable.
Michael Polanyi has championed the subjective aspects of the scientific
faith, an irritant to many in his field. Jerome Bruner is an articulate
spokesman for this "contemporary nominalism" that senses science to be
a process of inventive synthesis rather than discovery.
A "contemporary nominalism" is possible, however, only because of a
security and certainty in the scientific position. Hostility to such ideas
of the creative power of thought may be the last lingering aspect of the
very
position of mind
necessary to bring about the current confidence
itself. As Jung pointed out, only the most secure of psyches can open
to and face up to their own capacity for and tendency toward automatic
projection. Current resistance to recognizing science projected as a
synthetic creativity may be the last stand of science projected as sacred
"out there," a stand necessary to establish the entire structure.
Descartes' notion of a fixed "out there," and a separate "in here," with
God the honest mediator between the two, may have been naive realism,
but it is possible that science could only have developed through such a
faith projection -- a faith which produces, as all faiths do, according
to the nature of its postulates.
Apropos of this, in the early 1950's kidney transplants were a fascinating
possibility. A Chicago doctor finally made an apparently successful
transplant of one kidney, in a patient with a good one left. The doctor
and his staff kept extremely accurate and detailed reports, covering
every conceivable bit of data on the entire affair. After a few months
the doctor cautiously published his reports on the apparent success,
that others might benefit and follow suit with further lifesaving
attempts. Immediately the performance was known to be workable, similar
operations were tried all over the world, and the margin of success
soared beyond all previous expectations.
To his alarm, however, the doctor later found that he had erred in
his interpretations. The transplant had failed, probably from the
beginning; the other kidney had carried a double load plus the added
strains of rejection and so on. The data so cautiously published had
been erroneous. In what was admirable honesty, the doctor published
a retraction and apology, but by then, of course, his error was
incidental. Who cared? Success was at every hand, and has been growing
ever since. All that may have been needed was sureness, belief, a
concrete hope.
Science is full, in fact, of cases where perfectly workable, fruitful
productions have been organized on grounds later found fallacious. Gone,
Popper says, is the old scientific ideal of 'episteme,' the absolutely
certain, demonstrable knowledge. Every scientific statement, he claimed,
must remain tentative forever.
Warren Weaver likens the foundations of science to piles driven into soft
and swampy terrain. We simply stop driving the piles down, he said, when
we are satisfied that they are firm enough to carry the kind of structure
we want, at least for the time being. Euclid called "axiomatic" the step
on which he stood to build his system. Weaver says this bottom step is not
axiomatic but simply a postulate, assumed to be true in order to obtain
what we hope to find by following it to its conclusions. He speaks of an
"ultimate mysticism" at the bottom of this type of scientific explanation.
Such attitudes are new in the history of thought. They might well be
luxuries of mind that only a very rich discipline can afford. We are on
the way, at least, to opening to both mirrors of reality -- mind and
its source of possibilities -- and perhaps this could not have been
done earlier.
Whitehead traced the rise of science from its religious conviction
that God being rational, His Creation must also be rational and,
therefore, available to the process of reasoning. The early scientist saw
subjectivity as the illusion. Since Augustine, the neoplatonic view had
held full sway, and one got outside such quicksands by concentrating on
the "natural world." An interest in natural objects of the most mundane
sort for their own sake grew. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
displayed a mania for labeling and cataloging every commonplace item on
the globe.
This encyclopedic name-passion was another chapter in the building
of a semantic universe. These obvious and self-evident events made
up those "irreducible and stubborn facts" so loved by the earlier
scientists. Whitehead felt that several centuries of contemplation
of this basic stuff was needed. What grew from all this was a method
of
agreement
-- agreement on the kinds of phenomena that could
be "objectively" considered, and the way by which such speculation
could be verified. The method of agreement was strengthened by its
own careful restriction to those events amenable to the same "common
objectivity." This kept intact the particular fabric of belief in process
of being woven. Thus the growing frame of reference centered on a desire
for an
order of nature
that would reflect the medieval faith in the
rational order of God. The transition was slow, orderly, and smooth. The
name displacement, the change of metaphor that would allow mutations of
a more direct sort, followed a certain protocol of decorum.
Faith in the rational order of God, and thus of His Nature, was perfectly
genuine. This faith gave the prism through which those events examined
were seen. Events not fitting the prism were simply ignored. Order was
imposed upon basically random disorder through this prism of prejudice.
The prism dictated the kinds of events which were given the energy of
attention. Whitehead pointed out that the narrow efficiency of the scheme
was the very cause of its "supreme methodological success." The scheme
directed attention to the groupings and correlations that lent themselves
to that
kind
of investigation, and that in turn verified the system.
The efficiency, while narrow and selective, gave success within its
confines. The success gave ever-growing boldness for speculations. This
enlarged the selectivity itself. Whitehead observed that the early
scientists confined themselves to certain types of facts, abstracted from
the complete circumstances in which those facts occurred. This gave rise
to the materialistic assumption of "simple locations in time and space,"
an assumption which fit to perfection the facts so abstracted. The
given confines were expanded by this very activity, and the store of
"facts" grew apace. Postulating empty categories, for instance, gave the
passionate focus of attention to find the particular facts that would
fill the categories. Trial and error determined the general nature of
empty categories likely to be filled by the accepted kinds of facts.
Eventually these self-verifying successes built a system of hypotheses
that became self-sustaining. Science became a
reality-shaping
structure,
creating its own unique ecology, much as the Pentagonian mind tends to
produce the very events which make necessary an ever-expanding Pentagon
structure, and justify such things as Pentagons.
The original "stubborn and irreducible facts" of science faded into the
background as they were no longer needed. An equally stubborn fact,
that of science as an event-producing activity, rooted itself into the
growing reality structure that science itself had fostered and brought
about. Scientific growth became a process of metaphoric combinations and
mutations of existing scientific metaphor, a continual expansion of an
inherited web of ideas.
Though nothing in this web remains static, each generation's "facts"
produce the reality which that generation finds itself in, facts with
which it must deal. Feinberg feels confident that we have found the
basic substructure of matter. Yet a short two generations or so ago
an eminent scientist could write, rather with a sigh, that at
least
one sure fact could finally be counted on by science, and that was that
'ether' filled all space.
A certain egotism marks all men of science simply because nothing less
than sureness can sustain any system, much less give the confidence
to blithely contradict their elders and "discover" anew the
real
way
things work. McKellar speaks disparagingly of the "certainty systems,"
religions and cults, and lauds the reality-adjusted methods of the humble
scientists who only serve truth. The reality adjustments of science are
made to the continual metaphoric mutations occurring in the scramble
for success and fame within the brotherhood. The only humility ever
exhibited is when their systems fail or are in process of being outmoded
by their very techniques.
Edwin G. Boring writes that examination of new facts, new truths, new
theories, immerses one in the history of
controversy
. Men get their egos
tied up with their theories and their facts and "fight one another for
intellectual self-preservation." Boring speaks of science as a policy,
not a picture of truth, but a policy that has to work to be retained.
McKellar says the biggest error that underlies much thinking today
is the belief that scientific concepts refer to things which actually
exist, that science cleverly isolates existing things and measures or
uses them. The idea that scientific principles are parts of nature can
seriously impede the progress of our knowledge, McKellar wrote. In the
same sense, Bruner referred to scientific discovery not as "engineered
tinkering," as commonly conceived, but as an enterprise of thinking.
It is doubtful, however, that science could have built its constructs
and sustained its passion without the sure confidence of those earlier
scientists that they were only discovering God's preordained secrets and
laws. Policies are put into effect by people who believe in them. It is
doubtful that even today scientists will concede that they are involved
in synthetic creativity rather than discovery of a priori truth. As
doubtful, in fact, as that theologians and preachers could open to the
same possibility for their own systems.
Michael Polanyi wrote of the 'metanoia' changing a student into the true
physicist. A brilliant array of facts, proofs, laws, theories, and an
impressive body of empirical evidence, will not in themselves create a
science, Polanyi claimed. Only as all this is given meaning and purpose
through the intellectual passion of a true believer does the real science
emerge. A belief in the basic tenets determines the criteria by which an
investigator works. Science, states Polanyi, can provide no procedure for
deciding issues by systematic and dispassionate empirical investigation.
The scientific audience is won over to a new system by intellectual
sympathy. A hostile audience may deliberately refuse to entertain novel
conceptions for fear of being led to conclusions they abhor, rightly
or wrongly. Sympathetic listening allows one to discover what cannot be
understood in any other way. This kind of openness, which alone can lead
us into true agreement and "hearing," Polanyi notes, is a self-modifying
act. To elaborate on Polanyi a bit, I would explain this self-modifying
by saying each of us has an autistic openness for unlimited synthesis,
but agreement on