Saturday, March 14, 2009

The science wars

I think it’s safe to say that last session brought a fundamental philosophical division in our group to light. It’s funny that I have found myself warring for the scientists with Greg and Paul, when in any other company I’d be fighting the good fight for mysticism and imagination. In my astrologer days I even published articles on this, decrying the sterile reductionism of our empirical epistemology and arguing for the ontological validity of qualities: astrology is a perfect example of a discipline outside of the scientific paradigm, one that is founded on a notion of qualities inhabiting the world. In fact, wasn’t my topic on exactly this? So, why am I not simply in furious agreement with Martin? The ghost of my physicist ancestor perhaps? I too reject the apparent project of science to reduce all phenomena to their measurable, quantifiable correlates. Where did this assumption arise that measurable=real? I don’t think that Newton for one believed this. He was an alchemist and a devout Christian. It’s something that has crept up on us as science has grown in prestige and influence. This is the reification of scientific models, and the beginning of the cult of scientism, a type of religion.

But for measurement, in that quantitative domain, science is the go. Measurement is science’s thing. It’s what it is for. Measurement, prediction, quantification. I disagree with Martin that science is indistinguishable from religion because I believe that science is about quantification, while religion is about meaning. Science wouldn’t work if its equations and formulae weren’t accurate, i.e., effectively predictive of real world phenomena. I believe those equations, while they may be superseded by equations that are more general and encompassing,  are damn good approximations, and I don’t think there are an infinite range of other equations that would serve just as well. The danger, the impoverishment only occurs when we take those quantitative abstractions for reality, when we allow the models to destroy our imagination for what is possible. I always hold to the Hamlet’s sentiment that “there are more things in heaven and earth…”

I’d be disappointed by two possible outcomes for our group: either that all interesting scientific angles were suppressed, or that we became restricted to the empirically knowable. Not that I think that the latter seems likely! I think most of us agree that narrow scientism has harmed us philosophically and spiritually. We wouldn’t be participating in this group if we were convinced positivists.  But neither can I shake my personal fascination for the mysterious reality suggested by modern quantum science. If science is no more arbitrary that religious dogma, how come it has uncovered such an extraordinary and fantastical matrix underpinning the blockish mechanics of ‘inanimate’ matter? Shouldn’t it merely revolve within its own sterile assumptions? (And yes, OK, it does that too, but that does not negate the real revolutions that violated all expectations.) Science should be another ingredient thrown into the imaginative soup of our explorations, and not be decried merely because it is aligned with the Powers That Be and is the weapon of choice of the bigots of reductionism. It was Einstein who said, “Imagination is greater than knowledge.”

Sunday, March 1, 2009

I recommend this movie as the starting point for a discussion if you haven't seen it already: http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/