NETFUTURE
Technology and Human Responsibility
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Issue #162 April 5, 2005
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A Publication of The Nature Institute
Editor: Stephen L. Talbott (stevet@netfuture.org)
On the Web: http://netfuture.org
You may redistribute this newsletter for noncommercial purposes.
Can we take responsibility for technology, or must we sleepwalk
in submission to its inevitabilities? NetFuture is a voice for
responsibility. It depends on the generosity of those who support
its goals. To make a contribution, click here.
CONTENTS
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Editor's Note
Recognizing Reality (Stephen L. Talbott)
Toward a New, Qualitative Science (Part 1)
DEPARTMENTS
About this newsletter
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EDITOR'S NOTE
Regarding the following essay: if any of you have been impatient with my
earlier critique of mechanistic science, or with the dialogue on mechanism
that Kevin Kelly and I pursued, then I hope you will read, with critical
faculties on high alert, the series that begins here. I will be
attempting to articulate the vision of reality that has, all along, been
implicit in the critique, and from which the critique arose.
I will continue to gather, re-organize, and revise all these essays, along
with various supporting papers, on the Nature Institute website. You'll
find the entire collection at
http://natureinstitute.org/txt/st/mqual.
For those of you who live within striking distance of Hudson, New York:
I'll be giving a lecture at The Nature Institute the evening of Thursday,
April 14, at 7:30 It's entitled, "Grasping for Certainty, Fleeing from
Meaning: The Dilemma of Science and Some Thoughts on Its Resolution". Go
to http://natureinstitute.org/calendar for details.
SLT
Goto table of contents
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RECOGNIZING REALITY
Toward a New, Qualitative Science (Part 1)
Stephen L. Talbott
(stevet@netfuture.org)
What is a quality? I cannot tell you -- at least not in any direct way.
This makes it difficult for me when a reader, Maurice Englander, responds
to "The Reduction Complex" (NF #158) by complaining that "Talbott never
defines what he means by 'quality'". Former Wired editor, Kevin Kelly,
voices a similar concern when he asks me for a definition of "the exact
method of holism -- how it runs as a science and not as poetry".
I respect these requests. This essay is the beginning of a response.
But I am afraid my response may not be quite what my correspondents were
looking for. The crucial issue, we will find, is whether their insistence
upon a definition and an exact method is an insistence upon conformity to
the very science we need to reform. After all, we typically try to define
a thing by holding it fast, freezing it, nailing it down. We want to say
what it is, so that we can point at and delineate it in no uncertain
terms. We want to grasp it securely and without ambiguity.
There is, in other words, an aggressive philosophical stance concealed in
the seemingly innocent demand for a definition. But what if reality, like
water, slips through our clutching fingers? How much good will it do us
to pin something down if the reality we are trying to lay hold of is a
power of movement and becoming -- a living, animating power by which each
thing is continually becoming something different? What if the entire
business of qualities is to express the moving, pulsing, darting, gliding,
ascending and descending, throbbing, living, self-transforming character
of the world's phenomena? Can we exactly define that which is continually
transforming itself?
If, from the start, we insist that the poet could not possibly be
exercising badly needed cognitive faculties neglected by today's dominant
science -- well, then, we are not asking what sort of new science might
arise. Rather, we are insisting that, whatever it is, it must embody the
limitations of the science we already have.
In this introductory essay I wish only to bring a greater vividness to the
problem of qualities. Along the way, a crucial first point should begin
to emerge: although my correspondents would hang the question of
qualities like an albatross around the neck of the would-be qualitative
scientist, the truth is that it weighs first of all -- and decisively --
upon the reductionist scientist. In fact, as I have suggested before, it
is a game-ending problem for reductionism. All science, right down to its
most tough-minded, quantitative formulations, remains permeated by
qualities wherever its equations and algorithms touch revealingly upon
actual physical phenomena -- that is, whenever the science gives us
understanding of the world. But the reductionist, while relying upon
these qualities for the sense of his explanations, refuses to speak about
them in any meaningful way.
The willingness of a new science to identify itself with the difficult
problem of qualities is not a sign of weakness but rather of a return to
health. Even if the initial attempts at understanding prove terribly
inadequate, they will be greatly preferable to willful disregard of the
qualitative dimensions of conventional science.
Some day we will be dumbfounded at the long-sustained pathology whereby
the scientist looked out upon a world consisting of nothing but
qualities and then claimed to explain it while refusing to say anything
substantial about the nature of those qualities.
Pathologies of Language
-----------------------
Aphasia is a disorder often resulting from lesions to the so-called
"language centers" of the left brain. According to the usual definition,
people with aphasia lose their ability to understand words as such.
Oddly, however, friends and relatives of those afflicted sometimes hardly
recognize that anything is amiss. How can this be? How can a person fail
to understand words and yet get along reasonably well in many situations
involving verbal communication?
Well, the aphasic patient does have a problem. But it may not declare
itself clinically, according to neurologist Oliver Sacks, until the
physician speaks to the patient in an impersonal, mechanical, and
unnatural way, removing "all the extraverbal cues -- tone of voice,
intonation, suggestive emphasis or inflection, as well as all visual cues
(one's expressions, one's gestures, one's entire, largely unconscious,
personal repertoire and posture)...." In order to confirm a diagnosis,
Sacks finds he might even need to employ a voice synthesizer or otherwise
manage to produce "grossly artificial, mechanical speech -- somewhat like
that of computers in Star Trek".
The reason for these special measures, of course, is that the meaning of
our speech is conveyed through much more than the abstract, definable,
strictly logical and propositional force of the words. Aphasic patients,
while unable to receive speech in its more fixed grammatical, logical, and
lexical signification, are nevertheless sensitive to a much deeper, more
gestural realm of expression. Only when the patient is cut off from this
fuller, richer sphere of communication does his deficit most clearly
present itself.
Sacks goes on to note that, because aphasics may "preternaturally enhance"
their sensitivity to the subtle, expressive aspects of speech, he
sometimes has the feeling that
one cannot lie to an aphasic. He cannot grasp your words, and so
cannot be deceived by them; but what he grasps he grasps with
infallible precision, namely the expression that goes with the
words, that total, spontaneous, involuntary expressiveness which can
never be simulated or faked, as words alone can .... They have an
infallible ear for every vocal nuance, the tone, the rhythm, the
cadences, the music, the subtlest modulations, inflections,
intonations, which can give -- or remove -- verisimilitude to or from a
man's voice. (Sacks 1985, pp. 76-79)
Those with injuries to the opposite (right) side of the brain may suffer
difficulties complementary to aphasia. While identifying words correctly
in some narrow sense and following grammatical constructions exactly, they
lose awareness of everything expressive about a voice. Because they
perceive speech to be flat and emotionless, they become wooden and
literal-minded in their understanding. Deeply meaningful, or passionate
speech becomes confusing and contradictory to them.
Speaking of one such patient, Sacks describes how she paid "extreme
attention to exactness of words and word use", and demanded the same of
others. Slang and loose or richly allusive speech were difficult, so that
she "more and more required of her interlocutors that they speak prose --
'proper words in proper places'". One suspects she would have done very
well as a programmer working with computer languages.
Missing the Forest for the Trees
--------------------------------
There are pathologies of vision -- also due to right-brain lesions -- that
closely parallel those of the literal-minded woman. Sacks tells how, when
he first met "the man who mistook his wife for a hat", the patient did not
look at him in the normal way, but rather "made sudden strange fixations
-- on my nose, on my right ear, down to my chin, up to my right eye -- as
if noting (even studying) these individual features, but not seeing my
whole face, its changing expressions, 'me' as a whole".
You could hardly have a clearer image of the tendency of science to become
a purely analytic discipline and a fragmented collection of facts. The
patient (Dr P.) "had no sense whatever of a landscape or a scene". As for
people: "in the absence of obvious 'markers', he was utterly lost". He
approached faces -- "even of those near and dear -- as if they were
abstract puzzles or tests. He did not relate to them, he did not behold.
No face was familiar to him, seen as a 'thou', being just identified as a
set of features, an 'it'". This is why, when intending to put on his hat,
he reached out to grab the head of his wife.
In sum, Dr P. functioned like a machine, indifferent to visual images as
such and construing the world "by means of key features and schematic
relationships .... without the reality being grasped at all". It reminds me
of the opening pages of a book called The Marriage of Sense and Thought,
where the authors speak of a warm smile between friends and then imagine
how its reality would be reduced through a mechanistic investigation: "a
smile is a widening of the oral aperture, caused by contractions of the
cheek musculature", and so on (Edelglass, Maier, et al. 1997, p. 1).
It is not that such descriptions lack usefulness. The question has to do
with how much reality the scientist is content to ignore as if it were not
there. We certainly need our powers of isolation and abstraction, but, as
Sacks remarks of Dr P., "it was precisely this, his absurd abstractness of
attitude -- absurd because unleavened with anything else -- which rendered
him incapable of perceiving identity..." (Sacks 1985, pp. 7-21).
Such cases provide us with a good opportunity to ask, "What is the
'something else' that enables us to take in the world in a manner that
coheres, holds together, gives it meaningful form?" Such coherence, after
all, is the first prerequisite for any science.
Actually, the something else is not really something else. It is the only
thing we have. The literal, fragmented, logically precise truth we
cherish is never anything but a stripped-down and therefore easily
falsified abstraction from a much fuller and more expressive reality.
Complementary Deficiencies
--------------------------
The clinical observations reported by Sacks form one part of a large body
of research relating to the two hemispheres of the brain. Although the
right brain/left brain distinction is often rendered popularly in coarse,
simplistic terms, it is by now well-established that there are differing
tendencies at work in the two parts of the brain, albeit in an extremely
subtle interplay. A leading authority in the matter, Colwyn Trevarthen,
summarizes certain findings this way:
It appeared that the right hemisphere was able to notice the shape of
things more completely than the left. Taken with evidence that
systematic calculation and forming logical propositions with words were
better performed by the left hemisphere, these results favoured the
idea that the right hemisphere is better at taking in the structure of
things synthetically, without analysis, assimilating all components at
once in an ensemble, figure, or Gestalt. (Trevarthen 1987; see also
Gazzaniga and Hutsler 1999)
Where the left hemisphere does well with abstractions and with
"disembedded or context-free propositions lacking in interpersonal force",
the right hemisphere copes best with language that "is fitted into the
world of objects, interpersonal acts, and events, all of which sustain the
meaning of what is said". Similarly, as Gazzaniga and Hutsler report,
"the right hemisphere is typically much better at representing the whole
object while the left hemisphere shows a slight advantage for recognizing
the parts of an object".
The distinction between hemispheres becomes especially sharp when we
recognize faces, a task for which the right hemisphere exhibits "an
extraordinary superiority". The superiority manifests itself most
dramatically when there are no isolated, bold, distinguishing marks on a
face, such as a scar or mustache. This is because, with the right brain,
we take in the impression of the whole and do not focus on separate
features analyzed out of the whole. By contrast, the person forced to
rely on the left brain alone achieves recognition only through "a
laborious check-list of distinctive semantic elements to be memorized and
searched for" (Trevarthen 1987).
Two Ways of Looking
-------------------
Every naturalist is familiar with laborious checklists of distinguishing
elements. Such checklists are formalized into the various "keys" used for
identifying and classifying plants and animals. An identification key
typically presents you with a series of yes-or-no questions. For example,
in trying to identify a particular tree, you might be led through the
following dialogue, where each succeeding question follows a "yes" answer
to the previous one:
Is this a broad-leaved plant with simple rather than compound leaves?
Are the leaves opposite one another on the branches?
Is this an erect tree or shrub?
Are the leaves toothed?
Are the leaves also lobed?
Are the twigs neither red nor hairy?
Are the buds red and blunt with several scales?
Is the trunk bark rough and not flaking?
Then this is a red maple.
The key, in other words, presents you with a neatly logical framework
consisting of a set of crisp, yes-or-no forks in your path of inquiry.
Such guides are essential for every field naturalist.
Nevertheless, experienced naturalists do not often use a guide of this
sort. The recognition they normally rely on in the field is, as zoologist
C. F. A. Pantin has pointed out, strikingly different from the tedious,
step-by-step logical exercise demanded by the key. "Our recognition of
species in the field is commonly instantaneous. We do not consciously
traverse a series of dichotomous alternatives, excluding one possibility
after another before we arrive at the answer. Indeed it is difficult to
believe that we do anything of this sort even unconsciously".
Pantin also notes that the errors committed in what he calls "aesthetic
recognition" (and which I will here call "qualitative recognition") differ
from the wrong turns we take when traversing a logical key. The latter
mistakes are "as disastrous as an arithmetical error in calculation". It
is not hard to see why. Taking the wrong fork of a path whose divergences
are designed to be clear and unambiguous quite naturally lands you in
territory that is clearly and unambiguously the wrong territory. Every
fork you take after the first wrong turn only confirms your lostness.
An error in qualitative recognition, on the other hand ("For a moment I
thought you were your brother") is less clear-cut. In general, Pantin
suggests, there is truth in such errors. We were not altogether wrong.
The mistaken impression was more or less like the thing we were after.
"You really do look a little like your brother. In taking you for him, I
was truly recognizing in you certain aspects of him". We do not have
neat, yes-or-no judgments so long as we are reckoning with the qualities
of things.
This relates to another feature of qualitative recognition, which is that
it is not analytical. "It seems to depend on the whole available
impression", and this totality makes possible various associative
connections. Pantin illustrates this with wonderful examples:
Even a statement such as "The spines of the sea-urchin I am looking for
have something of Chippendale about them -- whilst that one looks
Hepplewhite" may be significant. And if, when we are collecting
Rhynchodemus bilineatus together, I say, "Bring me any worms
that sneer at you," the probability of your collecting the right
species becomes high.
In this case, not only is the probability of correct identification high,
but the collection rate will be much faster than when the students are
directed to look for the various separate anatomical features that might
be analyzed out of the "sneer". Moreover, because the whole impression is
an impression of the whole, it does not arbitrarily discard the greater
part of what we can recognize in the organism. By contrast, once we have
run through our list of yes-or-no features, "a very great deal of the
impression which the organism makes upon us still remains 'unused'. This
residue is undoubtedly important in our recognition of species even though
it cannot be analyzed in just this [yes-or-no] way" (Pantin 1954).
We have, then, a contrast between propositional knowledge -- the kind of
knowledge that comes through analysis and results in sharply articulated,
logically well-structured statements of atomic fact -- and recognitional
or qualitative knowledge. To use an example given by Ron Brady: you find
yourself engaging in one sort of activity when trying to recognize an old
friend in a crowd, and quite a different activity when struggling to
identify a stranger in the same crowd by proceeding through a list of
discrete features (Brady 2002).
You already have an overall impression of your friend -- one perhaps
sufficiently rich in its expressive potential to enable nearly
instantaneous recognition of him even in postures or activities you have
never witnessed before. As you scan the crowd, there are countless
possible gestures of form or movement that might tip you off to the
presence of the person you are looking for. Each one of them bears, not
some literal and specific, easily definable feature, but rather the
expressive signature of the friend. That is, they are all shone through
by the same qualities, the same unifying whole -- a fact demonstrated by
your ability to recognize numerous outward, novel manifestations as
expressing the character of one individual.
In the analytical approach, by contrast, you are reduced to identifying,
one by one, a set of low-level features described in unexpressive and
rather more literal terms. Given a set of successful recognitions, you
say, "This must be the person" -- but you still do not recognize
him in the way you would a friend. Time and familiarity are required
before you can experience the inner, expressive unity that raises the
particulars into a coherent and multi-dimensioned whole.
The Dilemma of Definition
-------------------------
It appears there are two ways we know the world -- or, rather, two
different, nearly opposite, cognitive movements we make on our way to
understanding. This observation is in no way dependent upon functional
divisions within the brain. I mentioned the brain research only because
it helpfully draws our attention to distinct aspects of our cognitive
activity. But we should be able to notice these aspects directly. And,
as Pantin's discussion shows, we can in fact do so, without reference to
physiology. Even if the brain hemispheres happened to be absolutely
identical in their functioning, it would not affect the points I will be
making.
The idea behind the identification key is straightforward and valuable:
break the task down into discrete steps so that each one can routinely and
reliably be executed. Break the object we are observing down into its
parts. We arrive at a series of simple, yes-or-no choices by reducing
them to the terms of more-or-less unproblematic givens. The aim is for
automatic and sure-fire judgments: This flower has five petals, these
leaves are compound ... therefore, "this is that".
The cognitive movement at issue here is one whereby we abstract and
calculate, analyze and divide, isolate and decontextualize, define
and classify. We strive to achieve an ever sharper focus in order
to eliminate all ambiguity and attain the highest possible precision.
Above all, we want nailed-down certainty. Through such pinpoint focus we
tend to lose the character of what we are looking at. This is because
the object of our attention becomes disconnected from everything else,
whereas character (and the unity it signifies) can be found only in the
qualitative connection of things. That is, the unifying character lies
between the analyzed elements or parts. It is not some material
thing.
What, then, of the counterbalancing movement, whereby we do not isolate
and decontextualize, but rather discover relatedness through the
qualitative and expressive character of things? Let me ask the question
this way: Can we isolate and define this relatedness with unambiguous,
nailed-down precision?
The question itself declares our dilemma. We may, with Pantin, glimpse
cognitive processes running in the opposite direction from our
well-characterized powers of analysis. But in an analytically biased
society, what can we acceptably say about these processes? When reputable
scientific discourse is equated with precise, analytical definition, how
do we speak about whatever is opposed to precise, analytical definition?
Are we not being asked to define the movement of thought running counter
to definition? How can we analyze an activity whose whole purpose is
to recognize unities and wholes by overcoming analytic separation?
There Is No Escaping Qualities
------------------------------
Clearly, we've got a problem here. But however difficult our task in
chasing down long-ignored aspects of cognition, it would hardly be seemly
for the practitioners of today's sophisticated and abstruse science to
complain of burdensome difficulty. Nor can they honestly retreat from the
problem by muttering epithets like "obscurantism" and "mysticism". The
processes of recognition Pantin describes may seem mysterious to our
current understanding, but they are not other-worldly. They are as close
to us as ourselves, observable in every routine act of perception.
Likewise, the bizarre syndromes afflicting patients with right-hemisphere
lesions -- patients unable to perceive the expressive, unifying qualities
of things -- are not inaccessible and mystical. We have many clinical
descriptions.
What we need is to find the right terms of understanding for abilities we
casually demonstrate every day, and it should not surprise us if these
terms are as unexpected in relation to familiar habits of thought as were
the syndromes resulting from loss of these abilities.
Regarding these syndromes, Sacks tells us that neurologists long ignored
lesions to the right side of the brain because their effects seemed much
more difficult to get a grip on compared to the disruption of those left-
brain functions we rely upon so heavily. He adds that, while the left
hemisphere may in some respects be considered the later, more
sophisticated, and more specialized one,
it is the right brain which controls the crucial powers of recognising
reality which every living creature must have in order to survive. The
left hemisphere, like a computer tacked onto the basic creatural brain,
is designed for programs and schematics; and classical neurology was
more concerned with schematics than with reality, so that when, at
last, some of the right-hemisphere syndromes emerged, they were
considered bizarre. (Sacks 1985, p. 2)
And so, too, many scientists will consider any reckoning with qualities
bizarre -- which you can take to mean, "Please! -- I'm not comfortable
with that. It doesn't belong to conventional scientific practice". And
so it doesn't. When will we begin to recognize the obvious, which is that
this is a problem?
Just as neurologists have needed to face those aspects of reality that
don't readily submit to their neat logical schemata, so also within
physics and every other discipline. If the charge of obscurantism is
called for, its fitting target is a science that, fearing what seemed
bizarre and threatening to its preferred one-sidedness, simply covered its
eyes. How can you pursue an observation-based science while turning a
blind eye to the routine and essential role of qualitative recognition in
all observation?
After all, it is not as though we can speak of a method of pure analysis,
independent of our recognition of expressive qualities. You cannot
proceed through a list of discrete features in an analytical key without
first being able to recognize each individual feature as expressing its
own unifying qualities. A leaf on a tree has its own significant unity,
as does a nose on a face. If you relied solely on analysis, you could
recognize a nose only with the aid of another analytical key -- and each
part of a nose with yet another key -- so that you would be stuck in an
endless, iterative task. In the end, we have no choice but to recognize
something on the strength of its unified qualitative and expressive
presentation of itself.
The aim of the analytic approach is to make the necessary recognitions so
simple and unproblematic that they are absolutely reliable, or nearly so.
Then we hardly need to notice that we are recognizing anything or to ask
what we are recognizing. Our attention can shift mindlessly to the
"yes" or "no" we pronounce at each logical fork of our key. The process
begins to seem automatic, and it is easy to ignore the fact that our
science is wholly dependent upon acts of qualitative recognition.
We must, of course always strive toward reliability, and analytic methods
are important to this striving. But any one-sided resort to these methods
is highly problematic, for two reasons: first, it encourages reliance
upon habit -- upon recognitions so routine that we no longer struggle to
question or deepen them in the true scientific spirit; and second, because
it beguiles us into the false belief that real knowledge is of a simple,
yes-or-no sort, and that we do not have to deal with the qualities of
things.
The recognizable expressiveness of things is not something added to their
"real" content. It is the fullness of the content itself. Without it,
all content disappears. Abstract schemata in general and measurements
in particular do not give us reality. Painfully obvious as this is, it
remains widely ignored. But our measurements have to be measurements
of something, and we have no scientific understanding until we can speak
intelligibly about what this something is. Nor can we do this in any
terms except qualitative ones. Simply filling in our quantitative
notions with unexamined, almost unnoticed qualitative mental pictures
does not make our work worthy of science.
Living with Corn
----------------
As I have indicated, no scientist can turn entirely away from the world
and its qualities. But occasionally one finds a prominent researcher who
actually acknowledges and consciously works with the qualitative reality
of her subject. One such scientist was the celebrated geneticist, Barbara
McClintock, well-known -- and considered rather eccentric -- for
cultivating what has been called a "feeling for the organism". A life-
long student of corn and its genetic organization, she would observe every
plant she studied, starting when it was a tiny seedling. "I don't feel I
really know the story if I don't watch the plant all the way along, so I
know every plant in the field. I know them intimately, and I find it a
great pleasure to know them" (Keller 1983, p. 198).
McClintock's biographer, Evelyn Fox Keller, tells of the geneticist's
meeting with a group of graduate and postdoctoral biology students at
Harvard University. The students were responsive to her exhortation that
they "take the time and look", but they were also troubled. Where does
one get the time to look and to think? "They argued that the new
technology of molecular biology is self-propelling. It doesn't leave
time. There's always the next experiment, the next sequencing to do. The
pace of current research seems to preclude such a contemplative stance".
McClintock went on to tell the students how fortunate she had been for
having worked with a slow technology, a slow organism. Other researchers
disliked corn because you could only grow two crops a year. But she found
that even two crops a year were too many. If she was really to observe
her plants adequately, one crop was all she could handle.
McClintock had little patience for her many colleagues who were "so intent
on making everything numerical", and who therefore missed much of what
could be seen. Because of her commitment to the whole, qualitative
organism,
her own method was to "see one kernel [of corn] that was different, and
make that understandable." She felt that her colleagues, in their
enthusiasm for "counting," too often overlooked that single, aberrant
kernel (Keller 1983, pp. 198-207).
Through such oversight, those colleagues sacrificed the potential richness
of science. "Things", McClintock remarked, "are much more marvelous than
the scientific method allows us to conceive". In the end, her own work
contributed a good deal toward the enlargement of this method. Her "slow"
attention to the qualitative nuances of individual corn plants led
eventually to discoveries for which, tardily, she was awarded the Nobel
Prize.
Analytical Collapse
-------------------
We can contrast McClintock's work with the body of research that became
known as classical Mendelian genetics. When, in his famous experiments
laying the foundation for modern genetics, Gregor Mendel counted violet-
flowered and white-flowered peas, he did not puzzle over this or that
particular flower with its own peculiar shape and shade of violet. Or, if
he did, the fact is not reflected in his final tabulation of results.
When Barbara McClintock strove to "see one kernel [of corn] that was
different, and make that understandable", she was led to the principle of
genetic transposition (Keller 1983). This in turn helped to loosen the
logical structure of genetics, which had become rigid and brittle. If
Mendel had been similarly entranced by the nuances of his violet and white
flowers -- if he had not been content to "digitize" them in his mind,
reducing all the qualitative variations so as to achieve a two-valued,
schema -- if he had not fixated upon neat, arithmetic ratios -- we would
likely have a far richer and more balanced discipline of genetics today
(Holdrege 1996).
As McClintock knew so well, a quality of any part always reveals something
about the character of the whole to which it belongs. The analytical key
collapses this revelatory potential down to a single yes-or-no value, or a
group of such values. Such a narrowing of focus and restriction of
insight serves many practical purposes. But if this analytical collapse
of the world remains the sole or primary cognitive movement of the
scientist, then the world begins to disappear and science verges upon a
kind of formal emptiness disguised as formidable technique.
This is rather like what happened to Dr P. While his ability to visualize
faces and integral scenes was drastically impaired, Sacks reports that
"the visualization of schemata was preserved, perhaps enhanced.
Thus when I engaged him in a game of mental chess, he had no difficulty
visualizing the chessboard or the moves -- indeed, no difficulty in
beating me soundly" (Sacks 1985, p. 15). The loss of a meaningful and
coherent world apparently may coincide with considerable skill at merely
syntactic and technical operations.
Noting that the mental processes constituting our being and life "are not
just abstract and mechanical" but involve feeling and aesthetic judgment,
Sacks goes on to say,
Our cognitive sciences are themselves suffering from an agnosia
essentially similar to Dr P.'s. Dr P. may therefore serve as a warning
and parable -- of what happens to a science which eschews the
judgmental, the particular, the personal, and becomes entirely abstract
and computational (Sacks 1985, p. 19).
The Problem Before Us
---------------------
I have not been trying to identify some strange or paranormal or
unapproachable reality called a "quality". We in fact have nothing but
qualities. The question should be turned around and thrown at the
scientist who does his best to ignore qualities: "Give us a scientific
characterization of the physical world that is not qualitative. And
remember that mathematical statements by themselves, as pure mathematics,
are not statements about the physical world". If you want obscurantism,
just listen to the strange answers you will receive to this request.
What I have been suggesting is that, in our attempts to apprehend the
world, we have two polar opposite movements of consciousness. With one
gesture we try to take hold of the world's truth, narrowing it down to a
sharp focus for ease of comprehension. With the other we yield ourselves
up to the truth by allowing its expressive fullness to resonate within us
and thereby to shape the entire range of our cognitive faculties -- to
shape us -- in its likeness.
Both are essential. When the former tries to dominate, as it does in
reductionist science, it becomes a grasping in order to possess and
control. It becomes a demand for certainty and a refusal of ambiguity.
When the two movements are in balance -- the taking hold and the offering
of ourselves -- we have exchange, conversation, participation in reality.
To the extent we lose our balance and become fixated upon grasping and
pinning down, our language (and therefore our understanding) contracts
toward the formalisms of grammar, logic, and mathematics. With these we
become ever more precise and less ambiguous, but at the cost of losing the
world's content. We sacrifice reality for the sake of certainty. With
pure logic (recall the p's and q's in textbooks of formal logic) our terms
have been so emptied of content that we can speak with great precision,
but cannot say anything in particular about the world. If we worship this
precision, it is not because we have gained some dependable reality more
solid and sure than qualities, but rather because we have abandoned
reality. We have abandoned the qualities that are the only reality we
have (Talbott 1995).
There are two kinds of clarity and exactness corresponding to the two
cognitive movements. We can analyze, and reduce a phenomenon as far as
possible to single parts, isolated from all their relations. We thereby
gain exactness through simplification and loss of character.
Alternatively, we can aim for greater clarity by illuminating and
embracing a thing from ever new angles, bringing all its relatedness and
diverse qualities fully into the light. One method approaches certainty
through reduction, so that we become ever more certain about less and
less. The other approaches certainty through ever greater completeness,
through the recovery of context, and through richness of insight. The
former tends toward automatism; the latter requires extraordinarily hard
work and the continual expansion of our inner capacities, including (as we
will eventually see) moral ones.
---------------------
So what are qualities? For now, I offer the same reply Owen Barfield gave
to the question, "what is meaning?" (Meaning and qualities are intimately
related. We speak more of meaning when we are referring to the human
being, and more of qualities when we are referring to the world. But just
as qualities are both in us and in the world, so also is meaning.)
Barfield wrote that while meaning "is not expressible in definitions and
the like (the prosaic), [it] is indirectly expressible in metaphor and
simile (the poetic)":
That is to say, it is suggestible; for meaning itself can never be
conveyed from one person to another; words are not bottles; every
individual must intuit meaning for himself, and the function of the
poetic is to mediate such intuition by suitable suggestion. (Barfield
1973, p. 133)
The suitable suggestion can come from many sides. "All" you need to do,
for example, is to enter as deeply as you can into Pantin's distinction
between a logical key and aesthetic recognition (what is it you are
recognizing when you recognize a friend in a crowd?), and you will have
begun to understand what qualities are. "All" you need to do is to
appreciate what is missing in certain right-brain-damaged individuals and
you will have learned to appreciate qualities. Or, more generally, all
you need to do is develop your artistic sensitivities.
We in fact live within a sea of qualities; there is no problem finding
them or learning to work with them. It simply requires an interest in
doing so and a willingness to proceed in a rigorous manner.
All, or nearly all, of us have no difficulty reading the smiles of our
spouses, children, and friends as much more than "widenings of the oral
aperture, caused by contractions of the cheek musculature". Some among us
develop great skill at understanding the entire range of human expression,
learning to commune deeply and sympathetically with the self doing the
expressing. This sort of understanding -- as every one of us (scientist
or otherwise) assumes in daily life -- is real and objective, even if it
is very unlike our schematic knowledge of machines. It leads to
possibilities of conversation and exchange that are as deep as our
understanding.
If you deny this knowledge; or if you would split the world's truth down
the middle, refusing to accredit half of it as scientific truth; or if you
equate science with technology and our powers of mechanical manipulation
-- then you will have no reason to read further essays in this series.
But if you are at least open to the possibility that the face of the
larger world -- a face every bit as qualitative and expressive in its own
way as the human face -- might be read meaningfully and with objective
understanding, then I invite you to proceed along with me in this
forthcoming exploration.
Bibliography
------------
Barfield, Owen (1973). Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning.
Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Brady, R. H. (2002). "Perception: Connections Between Art and Science".
Available at http://natureinstitute.org/txt/rb/art/perception.htm.
Edelglass, Stephen, Georg Maier, Hans Gebert, and John Davy (1997).
The Marriage of Sense and Thought: Imaginative Participation in
Science. Hudson NY: Lindisfarne Books.
Keller, Evelyn Fox (1983). A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and
Work of Barbara McClintock. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Gazzaniga, Michael S. and Jeffrey J. Hutsler (1999). "Hemispheric
Specialization", in The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences,
edited by Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil. Cambridge MA: MIT Press,
pp. 369-72.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1995). Scientific Studies (vol. 12 of
Goethe: The Collected Works), edited and translated by Douglas
Miller. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Holdrege, Craig (1996). Genetics and the Manipulation of Life: The
Forgotten Factor of Context. Hudson NY: Lindisfarne.
Sacks, Oliver (1985). The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat -- and
Other Clinical Tales. New York: Summit Books.
Talbott, Stephen L. (1995). "Can We Transcend Computation", chapter 23 in
The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our
Midst. Sebastopol CA: O'Reilly and Associates. Available at
http://netfuture.org/fdnc.
Trevarthen, Colwyn (1987). "Split-Brain and the Mind", in The Oxford
Companion to the Mind, edited by Richard L. Gregory with the
assistance of O. L. Zangwill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.
740-47.
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Steve Talbott :: NetFuture #162 :: April 5, 2005
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