How The Two-Stage Rocket of Science has Jettisoned its Philosophical
First Stage and become Literalist/Fundamentalist Science
In insisting that China and India must subscribe to CO2 emissions
targets, the ‘G8’, the richest and most powerful alliance of countries
in the world, acknowledges that while their power over other people
and over material things is great, it is in the category of ‘making
things happen’; i.e. causing outcomes, or bringing about desired
results, which is a limited special case of dynamics within the
dynamical space of nature.
The architecture of ‘making things happen’ does not comprehend
(address, take into account) the dynamical continuum of nature in
which we are included as we ‘make things happen’ and whose sustained
possibility-giving we depend upon for the continuing renewal of
resources and other ‘possibility’ that enables us to do what we do..
Burning fuels whose unintended side-effect is the emission of nitric
and sulphuric toxins and CO2 plays a role in much of our ‘making
things happen’; e.g. without the burning of fossil fuels, the
productive operations of our factories, distribution systems and the
submission-imposing operations of our military would be brought to a
near standstill.
Clearly, our success at ‘making things happen’ is accompanied by
unintended side-effects that condition and transform the resources and
possibilities that characterize the natural living space we are
included in, within which we undertake to make things happen in the
way we want them to. The wonderful leafy-green and flowery comlex of
ecosystems that undergo cyclic renewal and feed us in the process
(renew our body substance) will not withstand, for example, too much
nuclear war. If the possibility giving qualities of our living space
are damaged to the extent that human life is no longer supportable and
if this lasts for a couple of hundred years (beyond the lifespan of a
human living openly in nature) then the continuation of the human
population will depend upon fancy footwork that we typically read
about in science fiction rather than in science. The point here is
not so 'strong' as to argue that man is able to condition the dynamics
of the living space he is included in to the point that he can no
longer do the things he needs to to ensure his continuance, the point
is the far more modest point that man’s dynamics condition the
possibility-giving dynamics of the space he is included in, at the
same time as the possibility-giving dynamics of space are
(inductively) conditioning his dynamics. (Mach's principle of the
relationship between matter and space).
The plain fact of the matter is, that ‘what man does’ in terms of
‘making things happen’ is far from the ‘full story’, but it has been
the ‘full story’ as far as ‘science’ has been concerned. That is,
‘science’ has been the science of ‘making things happen’ which ‘takes
for granted’ the possibility-giving quality of the natural living
space we are included in. Meanwhile, ‘what we do’ in our own self-
centre-driven purpose oriented way inherently involves unintended side-
effects since we draw on the resources of our living space to do what
we do, and we discharge effluents into our living space that are
byproducts of ‘what we do’.
Standard science, the science of ‘what things do’ (local object
dynamics) implicitly makes the approximation that the suprasystem that
we are included in, that we draw from and discharge into, is so big
and so resilient and so 'just the way it is', that it is not necessary
for us to address ‘its’ dynamics at the same time as (as inseparable
from) our dynamics.
But we, the general public and even we who are scientists of a modern
day science, are students of 'science' rather than students of the
philosophy of science (the first stage of the two stage rocket of
science, the 'philosophical stage', we have jettisoned).
Kant, for example, philosophized that ‘natural
science’ (Naturwissenschaft) had two aspects to it, one concerning the
conditions for the possibility of experience which would then provide
the base from which the general laws of nature are to be deduced.
Kant argued that irreducible atoms could not be at the bottom of the
dynamical organisation of nature, such dynamics 'bottoming out'
instead in the interaction of attractive – repulsive forces in
immaterial space. Kant’s idea is compatible with modern quantum
theory where basic matter is no longer seen as irreducible particles
but as inner-outer resonance with an immaterial ‘spatial-energy’ base
wherein ‘quantum entanglement’ prevails (i.e. space is ultimately
characterized by thinglessness and immaterial relational
connectedness).
Science, as we know it today is the science of local objects and how
they act and interact; i.e. it is science that bypasses inquiry into
“the conditions for the possibility of experience/experiment”,
substituting ‘initial conditions’ in terms of the locations and
motions of objects as if in an absolute rigid and empty euclidian
space frame. This is the starting point from whence Newton deduced
the general laws of motion in nature, and fine laws of motion they
are, ... for dealing with the actions and interactions of local,
independently existing objects in an absolute fixed and empty
Euclidian space (as with the machinery we construct). But the natural
space of our living experience is nothing like Euclidian space and its
dynamical organisation is nothing like 'machinery'; i.e. the FULLBLOWN
dynamics of nature are nothing like Newtonian dynamics, and Newton
openly recognized and acknowledged this fact (that nature’s
characteristic tendency is to form/sustain interdepending (mutually
influencing) dynamical balance-seeking harmonies), stating in his
author’s preface to Principia, that the fullblown dynamical
organisation in nature is beyond the scope of his generalised laws of
motion.
Our modern tendency is to start from the generalised laws of science
which are in terms of ‘what things do’ (the actions and interactions
of notional local, independently-existing objects) as if in an
absolute fixed and empty mathematical space, in which case we ignore
the true possibility giving nature of the space we live in, and we
ignore our inclusional dynamical relationship within it. That is,
what we have come to think of as 'science' drops out the first stage
in the origins of scientific generalisation, the philosophical
understanding of stage-setting from whence the generalised laws of
science come from, and we have come to understand science instead, in
terms of its generalisations without revisiting the simplifications we
have imposed upon the nature of the ‘possibility-giving conditions’ of
the space we are included in.
As Hegel observes, the object of science is to reflect the logical
structure/organisation in nature, using the logical structures of
human language to do so [these two logical structures are not the
same]. The job of philosophy is to grasp this whole process and raise
it to the level of consciousness. The fact is that we have become
scientific literalists or scientific fundamentalists that take the
writings of science [post our simplifying of the possibility-giving
conditions enabling our experience] ‘literally’ as the God’s truth,
and thus having no need to be, at the same time, a philosopher that
that first must, as Kant says, understand ‘the conditions for the
possibility of experience’; i.e. ‘experience’ is not something that
‘just happens’ as if in a void, for it to transpire it must be
possibilitized by the dynamics of the possibility-giving space it
transpires in.
Are we thankful for the amazing possibility-giving quality of the
space we were born into? Or, do we take this for granted and just get
on with ‘making stuff happen’, ... constructing our desired future in
material terms, as an individual, a family, a religious group, or a
political membership club-aka-‘nation’? If we are not ‘thankful’ for
it, then will we care that our behaviour, which is conditioned by the
possibility-giving quality of this space that we share inclusion in,
is at the same time being conditioned by our behaviour? If we are not
thankful and if we therefore do not care about the fact that our
behaviours condition the possibility-giving quality of space at the
same time as the possibility-giving of space conditions our behaviour,
then we are likely to experience a deterioration of the possibility-
giving quality of space, since the continual renewing and innovating
of the possibility-giving quality of space associates with the
tendency inherent in nature’s dynamic towards dynamical balancing and
mutual cultivating and sustaining of harmonies amongst the dynamical
forms in the unfolding continuum of nature.
Summary: Science is a method for generalising the dynamical
organisation of nature using the logical structures of language (and
the logical structures elicited in our consciousness by the language
structures). The natural space we are included in, ‘the space of our
experience’, is a possibility-giving space that enables our
experience. Meanwhile, the mathematical spaces (e.g. our default
Euclidian space) are nothing like the possibility-giving, continually
innovating, cyclically renewing space of our experience, but we impose
mathematical space to describe the ‘initial conditions’ that make it
easier to generalise the dynamical organisation of nature by way of
scientific laws. Let’s make no mistake here, we first reduce the
complex, mutually influencing harmonies that give the space of our
experience its ‘possibility-giving’ quality, to a ‘most easy though
not most true’ mathematical space, in order to come up with the
generalisations of our experience that are otherwise known as
‘science’.
"Space is another framework we impose upon the world" . . . " . . .
here the mind may affirm because it lays down its own laws; but let us
clearly understand that while these laws are imposed on our science,
which otherwise could not exist, they are not imposed on
Nature." . . . "Euclidian geometry is . . . the simplest, . . . just
as the polynomial of the first degree is simpler than a polynomial of
the second degree." . . . "the space revealed to us by our senses is
absolutely different from the space of geometry."--- Henri Poincaré
“Space is not Euclidian' ...'Space is a participant in physical
phenomena'”--- Albert Einstein
.The space of our experience is a rich possibility-giving space, a
continually innovating, cyclically renewing, mutual harmony and
dynamical balance seeking space. It is not to be confused with the
absolute rigid and empty Euclidian MATHEMATICAL SPACE that we use to
establish ‘initial conditions’ (the location and motion of the inert
irreducible particles that purportedly populate this space [i.e. our
substitution for dynamcial forms in the fluid-dynamical continuum of
nature]) amenable to the generalisations of dynamical organisation
that are ‘science’.
To ‘forget’ about this philosophical under-girding of science (by
reducing the possibility-giving space of our experience to a
mathematical space more suitable for scientific generalisation), and
to conceive the dynamical space of nature in these stark rational
object-based action and interaction terms is to turn ‘science’ into
‘fundamentalist science’ and to turn ourselves into ‘literalists’ who
take the written generalisations of science, bereft of philosophical
originating context, as ‘the God’s truth’.
Richard Dawkins is an influential exemplar of the followers of such
‘fundamentalist science’, a science that sees nature as a
unidirectional construction of structures and dynamics based on
notional local objects (atoms, genes, organisms) in empty and absolute
euclidian space. Such understanding of the dynamical organisation of
nature, constrained as it is to a world of local objects animated
locally by external or internal forces, jettisons the philosophical
origins of science wherein we had to substitute ‘most easy though not
most true’ possibilty-giving conditions for the enabling of dynamical
experience (i.e. substitions of convenience and ease of enabling
generalisation such as the axiomatic existence of local objects and
the hidden convention of absolute euclidian space).
It is from this artificial base of substitute mathematical conditions
for the enabling of experience that we get the ‘constructive’ view of
the dynamical organisation of nature, and there are two choices, both
of which arise out of our initial approximations of space;
construction by intent (of God) or construction by ‘natural
selection’. Since Richard Dawkins objects to the unsupported invoking
of a constructionist God that infuses His purposeful intent by way of
‘intelligent design’, Dawkins goes with the second of the artificial
constructionist options, ‘natural selection’, wherein the fitness of
randomly emerging dynamical forms of organisation 'naturally' get
preferred treatment at the expense of other dynamical forms (sic).
“Natural selection, the unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially
non-random process that Darwin discovered, has no purpose in mind. If
it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the
blind watchmaker.'
"Patiently and lucidly, Dr. Dawkins - in this book which has been
acclaimed as perhaps the most influential work on evolution written in
this century - identifies those aspects of the theory which people
find hard to believe and removes the barrier to credibility one by
one.”
By jettisoning the philosophical origins of science and starting from
our reductive approximations to the possibility-giving conditions for
our experience, we jettison the truths of our experience of living in
a rich possibility-giving space wherein every dynamical form, such as
ourselves, is guided by attunement to its larger aspect, in the manner
that the eye of the hurricane is guided by its natural attunement to
its larger aspect, the dynamical continuum of space in which it is an
included flow-form.
The two constructionist options whose debating sides have attracted
media attention are both based in reducing the conditions for our
experience to stark empty space populated by inert local particulate
structures, the one taking on dynamical order by the intentional hand
of a watchmaker-God and the other taking on dynamical order by random
chance supported by 'natural selection' of the fittest dynamical forms
of organisation (nature as 'the blind watchmaker'). This two-sided
who or what is responsible for the 'constructions' in nature, is a
sideshow featuring a wrestling match between two opposing
fundamentalist/literalist factions. It is a sideshow that distracts
us from revisiting the philosophical origins of our scientific and
religious ‘frameworks’ that we have imposed to facilitate the
generalising of the dynamical organisation of nature (and/or of
society) in terms of the CONSTRAINED (relative to nature) logic and
structure of our language.
Not only 'science' but also 'religion' has 'two rocket stages' wherein
the jettisoning of the first philosophical stage that deals with
understanding the 'conditions for the possibility of experience' leads
to constructivist fundamentalism. Fighting over the choice of an
intentional constructivism (i.e. 'creationism') or an unintentional
constructivism ('natural selection') is a distraction that is
prolonging our dysfunction.
