With the opposition taking a very strong stand against science it is easy to feel knowledgeable and even self righteous about being a "believer" in science. I will have a hard time getting you to consider that by adopting this world view you may actually be part of the problem just like they are? In fact, from what we have learned through the most modern science is that science itself is divided into two very distinctly different camps.
I will outline a new scientific paradigm that explains this but don't expect one diary to provide you with enough information to make my case. We have published a book and are writing follow up material to spell it out. Peer review and other reviews have been very favorable so we are not off the deep end even if what we are saying may seem unfamiliar to you.
If you have an open mind read on below and I'll try to outline the situation.
Let me start by trying to establish some, what should be obvious, limits to what our minds, and therefore science of any kind, can do. The most striking fact is that our perception of the world around us is necessarily "subjective". This flies in the face of the myth of scientific objectivity, yet a truly honest attempt to minimize and control our subjectivity will admit this and deal with it consciously.
Much recent work on human cognition has made it even more clear that in order to process incoming sensory input we need a "trained" brain. Sensory signals of any kind are almost useless without some frame of reference that interprets them. This is all unconscious so we are unaware. Students of George Lakoff are familiar with the framing issue in politics which is a very important aspect of this.
Lakoff also makes us aware of the linguistic limits to the communication of these ideas. Once words and memes are established it is difficult to introduce new concepts or to communicate novel observations using them.
We speak about the way we process sensory data in terms of models. Models exist at all levels and the very ability to "anticipate" is wholly dependent on our successful use of models. The electoral process is replete with putative models and polls and other data gathering is part of the creation and refinement of those models. We do not often stop to acknowledge the fragility of these models for, in fact, they are all we have.
One interesting cartoon on facebook lately is two Native Americans sitting at a table, one reading the newspaper and saying:
Oh they have now "discovered" that the world is complex and interconnected. What will they "discover" next?
I wonder how aware the originator of that cartoon is of how well it describes what has happened in science in the past 60 years.
I mentioned models our means of anticipating future events. In 1972 Robert Rosen published his revolutionary book giving this idea its real birth and establishing the difference between the the new paradigm of "complexity theory" in a way no one else has. The book is Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical, & Methodological Foundations. In it he develops the way we use use model, consciously or unconsciously, to make sense of the sensory input we receive about our world.
He began publishing about complex systems in the 1950s and his work centered around the unacknowledged division in scientific thinking. The established way was the product of people like Descartes, Newton, Bacon and many others and was deeply entrenched in the world of machines and mechanism. Rosen saw the shortcoming of having taken only this route when he, as a mathematical biologist and student of Rashevsky, tried to deal with living organisms as machines. He quickly was able to use abstract models and the newest form of relational mathematics, category theory, to show that there was an absolute categorical partition between organisms and machines. It is easily seen using causality as the descriptor. Organisms are causally closed while machines can not be. This is subject of a number of extremely deep books so please do not try to dismiss it from this brief description. If you want to learn about it it will take some very hard work.
I'll fast forward now to our book which is built on works by Rosen, Lakoff and others to try to put together a world model based on the new paradigm. I'll be accused of trying to sell books, but anyone who knows the way the publishing game works will laugh at that idea. I am trying to get ideas across for we are in big trouble and our acknowledgement of the problem, certainly as I see it here, is not barely scratching the surface.
The book's title: Global Insanity: How Homo sapiens Lost Touch with Reality while Transforming the World is one which has b een controversial without even touching the content. I am happy with the title for it has become clearer from this controversy that there are two world models out there and that one of them is out of touch with reality. Unfortunately, reductionist, mechanistic science is in that world model. Here's a synopsis from the Amazon page:
The Global Economy that sustains the civilized world is destroying the biosphere. As a result, civilization, like the Titanic, is on a collision course with disaster. But changing course via the body politic appears to be well nigh impossible, given that much of the populace lives in denial. Why is that? And how did we get into such a fix? In this essay, biologists James Coffman and Donald Mikulecky argue that the reductionist model of the world developed by Western civilization misrepresents life, undermining our ability to regulate and adapt to the accelerating anthropogenic transformation of the world entrained by that very model. An alternative worldview is presented that better accounts for both the relational nature of living systems and the developmental phenomenology that constrains their evolution. Development of any complex system reinforces specific dependencies while eliminating alternatives, reducing the diversity that affords adaptive degrees of freedom: the more developed a system is, the less potential it has to change its way of being. Hence, in the evolution of life most species become extinct. This perspective reveals the limits that complexity places on knowledge and technology, bringing to light our hubristically dysfunctional relationship with the natural world and increasingly tenuous connection to reality. The inescapable conclusion is that, barring a cultural metamorphosis that breaks free of deeply entrenched mental frames that made us what we are, continued development of the Global Economy will lead inexorably to the collapse of civilization.
Our follow up will build on the reaction to the book because there is some heavy cognitive dissonance at work here and it clearly is painful for lots of people.
I am confident that my assertion about two worlds in he title of this diary is very accurate. Most who read this will see me as in a different world than theirs. I can only say that I agree. The issue is which world view is closer to reality and which world view is the only way, at present, to start to solve the enormous problems the misguided one has created? That choice is yours. The future of our civilization and possibly our species may be at stake. It is worth thinking about.