In Search of a Theory
FEST log
Entry #006
April 30, 2024
Experimental introductions to experience and appearance
In the last three entries I have introduced two different experiments as initial examples of what experimentation might look like in a science of mind. In entry #003 I introduced the first one, a way of using experience to study experience. I called it "Experiment 1): the nature of matter as experience". The main idea was to turn the tables with respect to how we function in daily life.
Whatever it is that we experience, we normally focus on *what* it is that we experience. The invitation of the first experiment is to shift our focus to *how* we use our experience. We usually see a stone *as* a material object, but we have the freedom to see the experience of "seeing a stone" as an experience, rather than the presence of a stone. I compared it to shifting our attention from a painting to the paint, with our mind providing the mental paint for the mental painting of the physical object that we are aware of.
In entry #004 I presented a very brief vignette of Husserl's pioneering work of focusing attention to the mind side of reality, rather than the matter side, using what he called the epoché, a mental lab tool for studying the mind. The second half of his life was dedicated to exploring how that tool could be used, by using experience to study experience.
In entry #005 I introduced "Experiment 2): the nature of experience as appearance", picking up a thread that I had started already in entry #003. I gave a brief description in order to convey a feeling for such an experiment, with a warning that it was only an initial hint for "dipping a toe into the waters of appearance." I also provided an even shorter vignette of Nishida's way of pointing beyond experience to a more elementary presence of appearance constituting experience.
Back to the ratchet of science
We are now ready to explore the notions of experience and appearance using theory and experiment. In that way we can find out how useful those two notions may be in setting up a framework for a science of mind, our main topic as summarized in the ManiFESTo presented in entry #000.
In entry #001, I introduced what I called the "ratchet of science": the use of exploratory experiments or field observations in order to construct an initial theory, followed by more experimentation to test this theory. The next step is then to adjust the theory in order to obtain a better fit with the results of the newer experiments, and so on.
Having done some exploratory experimentation starting in entry #003 through #005, it is now time to formulate an initial type of theory. With that theory in hand, we can then return to the initial two experiments, to give more precise instructions of what to look for, and how to analyze the results of our experiments.
In order to develop a theory to describe experience and appearance, where to start?
Using science of matter as inspiration
Compared to science of matter, setting up a science of mind may seem far more difficult, if not impossible. When comparing the two, it is clear that science of matter is the low hanging fruit: you can hold a stone in your hand, weigh it and measure it, but dealing with thoughts and feelings presents more of a challenge.
At the same time, one could also argue that in fact a science of mind has become the remaining low hanging fruit, now that science of matter presents us with a tremendously successful example of how to set up the first type of science. Insofar as every moment of our life we are confronted with matter aspects and mind aspects of our world, science of matter just begs to be followed up by a science of mind.
So let us use the science of matter as inspiration. In physics any new discovery of a more fundamental theory should be compatible with the previous discovery. Could there be a parallel between our progression from matter to experience to appearance? If so, each next insight should leave the previous one largely intact, while at the same time offering deeper insight into aspects of that previous insight.
A natural example in the case of physics would be to start with Aristotle's view of matter and motion, next to compare that to Newton's classical mechanics and universal gravity, and then to move on to Einstein's relativity theories, both special and general relativity.
Just as it took us three entries to introduce even the basic ideas behind the moves made a century ago by Husserl and Nishida, it will take some time to unpack the parallel suggested above.
From Aristotle to Newton
According to Aristotle's theory, in the realm below the Moon, including all phenomena we witness on Earth, the natural motion for objects is to fall toward the center of the Earth. We can throw a ball, and for a while it may move upwards and sideways, but before long it runs out of steam, so to speak, and winds up falling straight down. And indeed, his theory was in agreement with what we see happening, because of the friction between moving objects and the air, decreasing the speed of any initial motion, leaving gravity to determine the downwards motion.
In contrast to everyday objects, Aristotle assumed that completely different laws of motion hold for objects moving beyond the orbit of the Moon. There he posited that natural motion is not linearly directed to the center of the Earth. Instead, heavenly bodies move around the Earth in circles, seen as the most perfect geometrical figures. This again was roughly in accord with observations.
As a result, in Aristotle's system the cosmos was split into two very different parts. In the lower sublunar realm everything eventually runs out of steam: any movement that is not sustained comes to a natural state of rest by ending up on the surface of the Earth, and any form of life eventually decays. In contrast, movement in the supralunar, heavenly realm perpetuates itself in an eternal fashion.
It took two thousand years before a more accurate theory was introduced by Newton, a theory that at first sight was in flagrant contradiction with every normal observation of motion in our vicinity. Newton's laws tell us that an object, once in motion and left undisturbed, will continue to move in a straight line in the original direction. He had to assume that air friction only exists close to the Earth, and planets and their moons move in a large vacuum that fills the whole solar system.
Having made that assumption, he could suddenly explain in a quantitative way all the observed movements of any celestial object, including comets. By assuming that the force of gravity between two objects drops off with the inverse square of their distance, suddenly everything could be calculated and then checked that it all confirmed his theory to high accuracy.
Extending validity and accuracy
It is important to realize that Newton's theory in many important ways did not disprove Aristotle's theory. On the contrary, under normal circumstances in daily life objects do lose their original form of movement, and fall down toward the center of the Earth. To test Newton's laws on Earth, one would have to develop a theory of air friction, adding significant complexity to the simplicity of Newton's laws.
However, when applied to orbits in the solar system, Newton's laws of motion and of universal gravity naturally show how the Moon and planets obey the same laws as an apple falling from a tree. The enormous extrapolation from an apple falling a few meters, to the Moon traveling more than a million miles in its monthly orbit, yet following the same law of gravity, was the first "grand unification" in the history of physics. It showed once and for all the unity of the two realms posited by Aristotle as being totally different. It would be the first in a long string of unifications of two or more seemingly different theories into an overarching inclusive new theory.
Yet we should not forget that Aristotle's theories were not plain wrong. They did form a reasonable approximation to many aspects of motion, both on a very small and a very large scale.
This pattern would be repeated over and over again, whenever physicists discovered new theories. The older theories were not just discarded. Rather they retained their approximate validity in the realms in which they were originally tested.
Science in the news
What else could we expect? Once a theory is tested, in particular situations and to a specified accuracy, and tested independently in different experiments in different places by different scientists, how could a future group of scientists objectively (in practice always intersubjectively) repeat that kind of test and get different values?
Newspaper headlines of the type "theory X has been proven wrong" can be quite misleading. A more accurate statement would be an admittedly rather clumsy description of the type "theory X, previous tested and confirmed to an accuracy of Y under conditions Z, needs to be modified, now that new tests under higher accuracy Y' and/or different conditions Z' have shown that the theory's predictions fall outside the error bars of the observed results, not only once but repeatedly in different experiments performed by different teams."
Given the alternative, we can have some sympathy for the choice of the shorter headline, which is also likely to provide greater revenue for the newspaper by adding a flavor of a sport's match with winners and losers. In practice, in science there are only winners, when better tests are applied to theories. Theories are abstract constructs, while scientists are human beings, collaborating in a global community of peers aimed at improving the storehouse of knowledge that is humanity's most important asset.
The attentive reader may have noticed that the last sentence neglects peer pressure, in the same way that Newton neglected air pressure, for non-perfect peers.
After Newton
It took 2,000 years for Aristotle's theory to be replaced by Newton's theory. As a measure of the increasing speed of innovation, made possible by the advance of science, it took only 250 years for Newton's theory to be replaced by Einstein's theories of relativity.
Ten generations is still a long time, though, and a lot of cultural damage was done by the insistence of many scientists that "we now know that the underlying reality of our world is that of a mechanism". Worse, they typically did not speak for themselves, but rather made statements like "Science tells us that . . . "
Yes, science is an amazing achievement, one of the most amazing of all that humans have ever produced, and one that does not depend on specific materials, places or cultures, once it is shared globally. But no, science does not talk. As often happens, once a bright spotlight illuminates some part of a culture, the rest seems to retreat into relative darkness. Success invites hubris, and scientists are human, not immune to such temptations.
Around 1800, artists and poets like William Blake in England and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in what later would become Germany, bemoaned the limitations of a mechanistic worldview. They realized that it was transferred well beyond the boundaries of physics, as a model for just about any aspect of modern life.
I count myself lucky to have been born in the twentieth century, rather than one or two centuries earlier. Soon after 1900, relativity and quantum mechanics showed the glaring limitations of mechanistic approximations to descriptions of matter. In principle, that should have eased communication between natural scientists and artists, as well as scholars in the humanities and social science. In practice, though, deeply ingrained habits of thought die slowly, as we still witness.
From Newton to Einstein, act 1: special relativity
In 1905 Einstein published his special theory of relativity, which gave a totally new description of motion. Triggered by loose ends in the interpretation of Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism, something we will soon discuss in more detail, Einstein concluded that Newton's absolute space and time were only approximations. One dramatic consequence is that there is no absolute time frame, as illustrated by the twin paradox.
When two twins decide to let one of them travel far and fast, and the traveling twin then stops and returns at the same speed, they will no longer be the same age. When the speed of the traveler is close to the speed of light, the one staying at home may be older by many years, while the traveler may have barely aged, and so is much younger upon return than the one staying put. There is actually nothing paradoxical about it, from the point of view of relativity theory, which in itself is as consistent as Newtonian mechanics is. The name "twin paradox" indicates the unexpected outcome for someone used only to the consistency of Newton's theory.
Another consequence has had a much more dramatic impact than retarded aging. Einstein's famous formula E = m c^2 opened the door for a realization that a very small amount of matter could harbor the potential to unleash an undreamt amount of energy.
From Newton to Einstein, act 2: general relativity
In 1915 Einstein followed up with his general theory of relativity. He showed how we can interpret the phenomenon of gravity as the consequence of curvature of spacetime, the four-dimensional structure of space and time taken together into what mathematicians call a manifold.
In Einstein's formulation gravity is not a force field that operates in space and time, like electricity that acts only on electrically charged particles. What seems to act as a gravitational force field is a consequence of the way that curvature of spacetime makes it impossible for any object to move in a straight line. Instead, any object will try to move on as straight a line as it can find within the restrictions of the curvature around it.
As a result an apparent gravitational force seems to be created, a force that causes an acceleration for any object at any given place and time that is independent of its mass, as demonstrated first by Galileo. In Einstein's view the apparent force is nothing but a response to the curvature of space and time in the neighborhood of the object, independent of the nature of the object.
From Aristotle to Newton to Einstein to Einstein
As we saw above, phenomena confirmed under certain conditions in one theory should be predicted by more accurate theories to the same accuracy as found before. This should also hold true for the transition from Newtonian mechanics to Einstein's theories of relativity.
Specifically, general relativity should reproduce results of special relativity in the limit of a weak gravitational field. And in turn special relativity should reproduce results predicted in Newton's classical mechanics and universal gravity in the limit of velocities small compared to the speed of light. And indeed, they both do.
In fact, it can be rigorously proved mathematically that the above two limiting cases, in a cascade from general to special relativity, and then to Newton's theory correspond exactly. This is highly non-trivial, since the underlying structures of those three theories are described by quite different mathematical formalisms. Given these exact correspondences in limiting cases, there is no need to perform additional experimental tests, as long as a more advanced theory corresponds in detail to any earlier theory, within the limits of accuracy specified.
Similarly, for any future theory the first requirement, before any attempt at experimental testing, is that the mathematical limit of the new theory under less extreme conditions corresponds to that of the earlier theory.
While this holds mathematically for any scientific theory, a comparison with Aristotle's theory is more difficult to make. Aristotle's theory is prescientific in that some of the predictions made turn out to be incorrect, as Galileo showed by dropping objects from a leaning tower. This means that there is no mathematical theory of Aristotelian mechanics to which Newtonian theory should correspond to in any limit that can be defined. This is why I stated above a more qualified correspondence, namely a requirement that Newton's theory "in many important ways" did not disprove Aristotle's theory, but certainly not in all ways.
Parallels with a science of mind
We can now come back to the question we asked near the beginning of this entry. In the process of constructing a candidate for a new science of mind, we needed to provide at least a few simple experiments together with a simple theory to make some sense of those experiments. Entries #001 and #002 provided a summary of the science of matter. Entries #003, #004 and #005 described two candidates for basic experiments in a science of mind. In this entry we have started to prepare the ground for a first candidate for a basic theory that we could use in tandem with those experiments.
In the next entry we will return to this very abbreviated history of physics, from Aristotle to Newton to Einstein. There we will have a more detailed look at the ontologies of matter, as reflected in the structure of the theories we have reviewed here. Could they at least provide some hint or hints as to the kind of Ansatz that might turn out to be useful? Here Ansatz is a term that I introduced in entry #004, to indicate a starting point for constructing a new idea in physics when exploring new areas. Let's try to find out.
– Piet Hut