Category Archives: Science

Science and the Middle Way (An Objective Model)

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“We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but is somewhat beauty and poetry.” Maria Mitchell, astronomer, first female member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (quote and picture from Geozilla)

Science has a problem.  For all it’s wonderful, bewildering and sometimes terrifying discoveries (discoveries that have shaped the world that we live in, as nothing before has) science is treated with contempt and mistrust while at the same time (and often from the same source) being worshipped as the miraculous and supremely authoritative fruits of superhuman individuals – ruthless rationalists, seemingly void of normal human responses.  There are countless examples of this, from the MMR scandal and the climate change debate to the seemingly daily claims of cancer cures that adorn the front pages of our favourite tabloids (one would be forgiven for wondering how it is possible that anybody could even develop cancer any more)!  My suspicion is that the problem is borne and perpetuated throughout society, from schools and media to the scientific community itself.

I am not a scientist, most of my understanding of science comes from reading populist science books and so I offer no authority on the nuances of the scientific method.  My intention here is not to suggest possible alternatives to any part of the scientific process, suffice to say there are many dissenting voices and my guess is that any major shift will come – as it has in the past – from within the community itself.  What I will attempt here is to explore the perception of science, as it is presented and understood by what I believe is a large proportion of the population, whilst simultaneously suggesting a more objective (in the Middle Way sense of the word) model, that I hope will avoid dogma, still allow and possibly assist –  science to continue doing what it does best.

I have broken the process of science into five incremental stages, which can be put into three distinct groups of differing levels of public perception.  As can be seen in the scienceberg template stage 2diagram provided, the stages (which are numbered 1 – 5) form a triangle which rises up through the levels of perception (lettered a, b, c).

Level-a: 

This level contains the first stages of the scientific process, which are rarely publicized and are little understood by much of the public (Michael Brooks claims that this is how many scientists wish it to remain).

Stage 1 – People

Science, like art, begins with human beings, and scientists, like artists, are not only capable of wondrous creative leaps but also of jealousy, dishonesty, romance, delusion, dogma and the whole spectrum of human vices and virtues.  Yet the public perception of scientists seems to be of robot like boffin’s, working together with ruthless rationality and poise.  While science appears to maintain a dogmatic status-quo that is beyond challenge, individual scientist must be as competitive and ambitious as the rest of society.  While the established order jealously guard their hard won theories, the young upstarts must surely be desperate to instigate revolution.  These revolutions do happen, but they are rare and require exceptional creativity.  Relativity, The Big Bang Theory and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle all turned contemporary scientific thought upside down – their instigators all challenged the institution, and won.  To the scientist that proves that the speed of light is not the universal speed limit – a Nobel prize, world fame and the drinks are on you!

It is easy to stereotype scientists in the way that I have described above, or indeed as wild haired genius’s, but the reality must surely be more balanced.  Scientists come in all flavours which means that they can hold differing philosophies and have conflicting religious beliefs, enabling them to tackle problems from alternative points of view – which can only have a positive effect on the process of scientific endeavour.

Stage 2 – Enquiry/ Discovery

Much of this has been covered above, although not all scientific enquiry can result in the revision of commonly held thought.  Most of it is likely to be relatively mundane and most of it is also likely to be unsuccessful – in that results will be negative.  Nevertheless, it is at this stage that individuals and groups can really let their creativity and imagination go wild and this is where the maverick has a chance to shine.  It is worthy of note that the three theories that I cite above, most likely started life as ‘wacky’ ideas that were rejected by much the scientific community.  The majority of fringe hypotheses and unconventional theories are likely to fail, but their exploration should still be encouraged.  It is from here that the next major advancement is likely to come.

Level – b:

It is this level that I believe is the most visible, and it is these stages that many people seem to regard as ‘science’.  Again, Michael Brooks argues that many scientists want it to stay that way.

Stage 3 – Established Theories

This stage really represents the current scientific thought of any given time.  It is this thought that is often presented, in schools, the media and elsewhere, as unquestionable fact (which is actually stage 5).  In the scientific sense this is where the facts are, but this word causes problems and is misused by scientists as well as non-scientists.  The word ‘fact’ in this context should always be accompanied by a ‘with our current understanding’, which in most cases it (sometimes silently) is – even if it is only lip service, paid by a seemingly dogmatic individual.

That there can never be any fact that is 100% validated is a reality that is often exploited by those that wish to challenge current scientific thinking, and this can have serious consequences.  Climate change is a good example.  When ever a scientist makes a prediction, there is always an element of doubt, and sometimes these predictions prove to be wrong or inaccurate.  From a scientific point of view this is fine, but this inherent uncertainty enables those that have conflicting agendas to exaggerate the margin of error to devastating effect.  The same tactics are also employed in the creation/ evolution debate.

While it seems to me that stages 2 & 3 must directly inform each other (in a kind of feedback loop), it is important that they remain separate in terms of advancement to level 4.  Challenges to any scientific theory should be encouraged, but those challenges that determine or alter the application of science, without the appropriate evidence must be treated with caution.

Stage 4 – Application

This is where established theory is employed for practical purposes.  Our whole society can seem like it is the result of stage 4.  There are bridges, aeroplanes, computers, electricity, medicines, films, recorded music – the list is endless.  For many, this is science; putting a man on the moon and microchips – but this is only the result of a long, and (despite my simplification) complex process.  Many people expect science to be useful, and it often is, but that is missing the point.  Science should come from a curiosity of the universe that we live in.  Many theories never have a practical application, or at least don’t during the lifetimes of those that discover them, and that is fine.

Stage 4, although often the accumulation of the stages that precede, is no more important and a scientific journey should not always be expected to arrive at this destination – even though it can obviously be worth it when it does.  Additionally, It should be noted that not every application of scientific discovery is always desirable!

Level – c:

Although this level can never be reached, claims are sometimes made, or misunderstood to have been made that would fit here, and for some this is where science already resides.  This level can often be confused with, or thought to be a part of, level – b.

Stage 5 – Absolute/ Unquestionable Claims

Stage 5 represents the logical conclusion of any scientific exercise, which is to fully understand the universe, even though this aim is unachievable.  While it is regarded as an unattainable ideal, of which the journey towards is worthy in itself, it can be useful as a point of focus.  Nonetheless, it can be problematic, especially where it is claimed that a final and unquestionable truth exists.  I would suggest that in many cases, where it appears there is a claim that would be at home in stage 5, there has actually been a misunderstanding that has resulted from the language used to describe claims in stage 3.  The speed of light is a good example of this.

One can often hear scientists saying that it is impossible for anything in the universe to exceed the speed of light, and this sounds very much like an absolute claim.  At school it is taught as such and the media treat it as such, they are mistakenly presenting it as a stage 5 claim.  However, when a scientist makes this claim there is, in most cases, the additional ‘given our current understanding’ and ‘if you are suggesting otherwise then show me the evidence’, the problem is that these are usually presumed, and therefore unspoken statements.

As human beings, there are undoubtedly individual scientists that believe that some of the claims of science have reached stage 5, but as long as science in general does not then I do not see this as much of an issue.  Some scientists also believe in God while others don’t – which similarly does not cause me concern.

From the perspective of the Middle Way I think that it is important to view science as a whole, which along with the arts and philosophy forms part of an even greater whole.  I think that when one places too much focus on any individual stage then misunderstanding will arise and science will suffer.  The only stage that I am unsure of is number 5, for me it is fine as a motivating but unobtainable goal, but I suspect that others might differ in this.

Level – c (stage 5) aside, the current trend of focusing mainly on level – b should be disregarded, and I would like to see levels a and b combined, which a Middle Way perspective should achieve with little effort.  Of course for the early stages to be better understood they need to be much more visible, and this will ultimately come down to the efforts of the education system, the media and the scientists themselves.

This is clearly a simplified model.  In reality there is much overlap between the stages and the order is not set in stone – as I mentioned above there is an obvious feedback loop in effect between levels 2 and 3.  I have also negated to mention the ethics of science, which is already an ongoing debate.  Some seem to believe that ethics only exist in the application of science, but I would suggest that the reality is much more complex.  Ethical considerations, in varying forms (owing to stage 1), seem likely to exist and to play an active role at every stage of the process – perhaps this is something that the Middle Way Society can explore in greater detail at a later time.

There are bound to be errors here, both in my understanding of science and my application of the Middle Way to it , and I accept that I may have missed my target.  As yet I have not discussed or shown these ideas to anybody but I hope that, if they are not as complete as they seem to me at the time of writing, they might still form part of a wider discussion about how the Middle Way Society might approach science and scientific issues in the future.

Networks and the Middle Way

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Recently I’ve been reading about network theory, an inter-disciplinary study related to complexity theory and systems theory. I’m very much struck both by how much it supports the approaches in Middle Way Philosophy, and by how it could help the presentation of it. Network theory studies the properties of any network: for example, the network of connections on the internet, the social connections between friends and relatives (online or offline), the connections between animals, plants, and non-organic elements in an ecosystem, or the neural connections in the brain. The illustration is of network connections on the internet, but it could conceivably be a diagram of any of a  number of other types of complex network.

Internet diagram Opte project edited
What makes a network complex (and thus not entirely predictable) is the potential for any element in it to connect to any other element. If you are connected to a computer (or smartphone) reading this now, you are part of a network that could potentially connect to many millions of other machines. If the network is your brain, then it is even more complex than the internet: there are an estimated 100 to 500 trillion neural connections in an adult human brain.

We’re more in the habit of thinking of social or ecological networks than of ourselves as networks, but if we can do so it could open up our thinking in many useful ways. We need to think of ourselves as a network of neural connections that is so mind-bogglingly complex that it can create consciousness, ego, experience, and all those other features we think of as ours. That model can make it easier to explain both how desire, meaning and belief relate to each other (all of them consist in neural connections or disconnections), and how our desires, meanings and beliefs can be more or less integrated – depending on how well interconnected the different parts of the network are. Of course, this is a simplification of the actual processes in the brain, but a model that might be helpful.

Network theory talks in terms of strong ties and weak ties between nodes on the network. In the picture, strong ties are the thicker lines, thinner the weaker ties. Strong ties, either in an individual brain or in a society, would correlate to strongly shared beliefs which are based on well-worn cognitive models. Weak ties, on the other hand, provide further potential beyond those well-worn channels, and might be associated with creative thinking and new metaphors. Two or more clusters of strong ties that are only weakly related to each other suggest unintegrated and possibly polarised beliefs. It is very difficult to say how far such patterns could actually be traced in a brain, where there would also be many other processes occurring, but I presume that this is what we would be able to see if we could isolate the pattern of neural connections that were most relevant to the beliefs concerned.

I think that the Middle Way might well be conceived as involving a balance between strong and weak ties in relation to our meanings and beliefs. We can have strong beliefs in the sense of lots of strong ties integrated into a single pattern, without neglecting weak ties. However, those with strong beliefs often unfortunately maintain them by trying to impose an exclusivity on the network that it cannot have. Imagine a part of a network with a strong central node and very strong links to other nearby nodes – but hardly any links beyond that. At a social level that would be the pattern of an exclusive cult, or an isolated authoritarian institution, and it would also be the pattern that members of such groups would try to impose on their brains. This kind of exclusive pseudo-network of strong ties would represent metaphysical belief. Of course, those who try to impose such a pattern on their brains do not completely succeed, because they continue to be embodied beings requiring all sorts of other neural links, but the dominance of left hemisphere function can still make such imposed patterns dominant in conscious experience, and do quite enough damage.

Alternatively one could potentially have lots of weak ties, and be very open to a variety of experiences and ways of thinking, but lack the core of strong ties that are necessary to be effective in practice. We can’t avoid having beliefs if we want to do anything, and when we act, the clearer and more comprehensive those beliefs are, the better. Lots of strong ties mean power, whether that the political power of a person in a social network or a belief in a neural one, because the more nodes that can be united by similar motives, the stronger the capacity to act.

Network theory also talks about equilibrium in a network. This is when the different elements in the network have no incentive to radically change the network. This state of equilibrium (also known as homeostasis) will occur when the network addresses the conditions it needs to address. This is perhaps easiest to see in an ecosystem, where different creatures can settle into a ‘balance’ despite the fact that they are probably eating each other. My suggestion would be that our best chance of addressing the complex and changing conditions around us in a sustainable way, and thus developing this equilibrium, is to maintain a balance of strong and weak links. That way we can both act effectively in the current situation and think flexibly when new conditions arise.

Picture: Internet connections by the Opte Project (Wikimedia Commons)

The Third Phase

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The universe – and our brains – are complex. Western civilisation has passed through differing phases in its treatment of that complexity, but it seems from all the signs that we are on the verge of a new one. In my view that change is potentially Copernican – a major upheaval in our world-view equivalent to realising that the universe does not revolve around us.

In the medieval era, complexity was ignored because of the over-simplifications of the ‘enchanted world’ and its unresolved archetypes. We mistook projections of our psychological functions for ‘real’ supernatural beings. A supernatural world provided a causal explanation for the world around us that prevented us from needing to engage with its complexity. The medieval era was gradually succeeded by the era of mechanistic science, in which linear causal mechanisms took the place of supernatural ones. Although we began to get to grips with the processes in ourselves and the universe, this was at the price of over-estimating our understanding of them, because we were using a naturalistic framework according to which, in principle, all events could be fully explained.Clouds

We are now gradually moving beyond this into a third phase of intellectual development. In this third phase, we not only develop models to represent the universe, but we also recognise and adapt to the limitations of these models. We take into account not only what we know, but what we don’t know. The signs of this third phase have been appearing in many different areas of intellectual endeavour.

  • In mathematics and allied areas of science, there has been complexity theory and systems theory, which try to take into account the complexity of systems and the unpredictable ways in which complex systems operate, whether those systems involve the human brain, society, or global climate.
  • In psychology, cognitive bias theory has increasingly mapped the kinds of errors that lead us to think we know things that we do not. We now recognise increasingly why we are so inclined to over-estimate our own knowledge.
  • In cognitive science, linguistics and philosophy, embodied mind theory has revealed how much meaning, the building blocks of belief, is formed not by representations of the world, but by a bodily process that prevents us assembling direct representations of the universe.
  • Nassim Nicholas Taleb has charted how much our estimates of ‘probability’ simply do not take into account the limitations of the experience on which these estimates are based, so that we remain unprepared for ‘black swans’.
  • Iain McGilchrist, drawing again on the cognitive science of the brain, has charted the extent to which the representations of the left hemisphere of the brain can be built up in isolation from the right, giving us a deluded sense of having the whole picture.

These different types of recent work converge in telling us that we need to recognise the complexity and unpredictability of the complex systems we depend on – whether these are physical, chemical, biological, psychological, or social. Once we recognise how little we can actually predict the world, we have a reason to curb the arrogance of scientific naturalism and see it as an over-interpretation of the changing and fallible information we can gain by applying scientific method. The third phase of intellectual development is one that, at last, takes seriously the scepticism offered by Greek Pyrrhonians and Buddhists thousands of years ago. It does not abandon scientific theory or underrate its value, but offers more precise insights into its limitations.

The third phase has a dialectical relationship with the previous two. The thesis (the supernatural) conflicts with the antithesis (the natural). It is only by recognising the ways in which both of these address conditions that the other does not address that we can develop the synthesis, the Middle Way. The Middle Way, like the supernatural, recognises the limitations of our representations of the world, but like the natural, it also recognises the value of theory supported by experience in positively supporting those theories.

I think another aspect of the third phase must also engage with ethics in a way that none of the sources mentioned above do as yet. The first (supernatural) phase subordinated facts to values, so that we lived in a wholly moral world, whilst the second (natural) phase subordinated values to facts, so that ethics became relativised. The third phase needs to involve a recognition that facts and values are in practice interdependent, and that our ignorance of values is no worse than our ignorance of facts.

I do not want to try to predict the future. This nascent development of the third phase could still fizzle out and come to nothing. But the indications do offer some grounds for confidence that a third way of thinking is taking root. There will always be those who seem incapable of thinking beyond the terms of the first and second phases, or try to appropriate the third phase into one of the earlier ones. But their arguments may become increasingly irrelevant when the advantages of the third phase become better known and articulated.

The judgements we make under the influence of third phase thinking are different from those of the second phase because they can start to avoid the same arrogant disregard of uncertainty. They may at least help us cease making the same mistakes about the environment, about social intervention, about economic conditions or about our personal happiness. Fundamentally judgement in the third phase becomes a matter of balancing belief against ignorance, rather than merely an application of what is supposedly known.  No doubt the third phase may in turn be superseded, but it will nevertheless be an advance on what went before.