Species of Civilizations

Friday

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These galaxies would certainly gain the mythological attention of any sentient beings living in full view of such spectacular displays.

When a future science of civilizations begins to take shape, it will need to distinguish broad categories or families of civilizations, or, if you will, species of civilizations. In so far as civilizations are out outgrowth of biological species, they are an extension of biology, and it is appropriate to use the terminology of species to characterize civilizations.

Just a few days ago in A Copernican Conception of Civilization I distinguished between eocivilization (i.e., terrestrial civilizations), exocivilization (extraterrestrial civilizations), and astrocivilization (an integrated conception of eo- and exocivilization taken together). This is a first step in identifying species of civilizations.

Given that astrocivilization follows directly from (one could say, supervenes upon) astrobiology, it is particular apt to extend the definition of astrobiology to astrocivilization, and so in A Copernican Conception of Civilization I paraphrased the NASA definition of astrobiology, mutatis mutandis, for civilization. Thus astrociviliation comprises…

…the study of the civilized universe. This field provides a scientific foundation for a multidisciplinary study of (1) the origin and distribution of civilization in the universe, (2) an understanding of the role of the structure of spacetime in civilizations, and (3) the study of the Earth’s civilizations in their terrestrial and cosmological context.

Some time ago in A First Image from the Herschel Telescope I made the suggestion that particular physical features of a galaxy might result in any and all civilizations arising within that galaxy to share a certain feature or features based upon the features of the containing galaxy. This is a point worth developing at greater length.

Of the images of the M51 galaxy I wrote:

If there are civilizations in that galaxy, they must have marvelous constellations defined by these presumably enormous stars, and that one star at the top of the image seems to be brighter than any other in that galaxy. It would have a special place in the mythologies of the peoples of that galaxy. And the peoples of that galaxy, even if they do not know of each other, would nevertheless have something in common in virtue of their relation to this enormous star. We could, in this context, speak of a “family” of civilizations in this galaxy all influenced by the most prominent stellar feature of the galaxy of which they are a part.

We can generalize about and extrapolate from this idea of a family of civilizations defined by the prominent stellar features of the galaxy in which they are found. If a galaxy has a sufficiently prominent physical feature that can witnessed by sentient beings, these features will have a place in the life of these sentient beings, and thus by extension a place in the civilizations of these sentient beings.

There is a sense in which it seems a little backward to start from the mythological commonalities of civilizations based upon their view of the cosmos, but it is only appropriate, because this is where cosmology began for human beings. If we remain true to the study of astrocivilization as including, “the search for evidence of the origins and early evolution of civilization on Earth,” the origins and early evolution of civilization on earth was at least in part derived from early observational cosmology. We began with myths of the stars, and it is to be expected that many if not most civilizations will begin with myths of the stars. Moreover, these myths will be at least in part a function of the locally observable cosmos.

The more expected progress of thought would be to start with how the physical features of a particular galaxy or group of galaxies would affect the physical chemistry of life within this galaxy or these galaxies, and how life so constituted would go on to constitute civilization. These are important perspectives that a future science of civilizations would also include.

Simply producing a taxonomy of civilizations based on mythological, physical, biological, sociological, and other factors would only be the first step of a scientific study of astrocivilization. As I have noted in Axioms and Postulates in Strategy, Carnap distinguished between classificatory, comparative, and quantitative scientific concepts. Carnap suggested that science begins with classificatory conceptions, i.e., with a taxonomy, but must in the interests of rigor and precision move on to the more sophisticated comparative and quantitative concepts of science. More recently, in From Scholasticism to Science, I suggested that these conceptual stages in the development of science may also demarcate historical stages in the development of human thought.

It will only be in the far future, when we have evidence of many different civilizations, that we will be able to formulate comparative concepts of civilization based on the actual study of astrocivilization, and it is only after we have graduated to comparative concepts in the science of astrocivilization that we will be able to formulate quantitative measures of civilization informed by the experience of many distinct civilizations.

At present, we know only the development of civilizations on the earth. This has not prevented several thinkers from drawing general conclusions about the nature of civilization, but it is not enough of a sample to say anything definitive about, “the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of civilization in the universe.” The civilizations of the earth represent a single species, or, at most, a single genera of civilization. We will need to study the independent origins and development of civilization in order to have a valid basis of comparison. We need to be able to see civilization as a part of cosmological evolution; until that time, we are limited to a quasi-Linnaean taxonomy of civilization, based on observable features in common; after we have a perspective of civilization as part of cosmological evolution, it will be possible to formulate a more Darwinian conception.

In the meantime, while we can understand theoretically the broad outlines of a study of astrocivilization, the actual content of such a science lies beyond our present zone of proximal development. And taking human knowledge in its largest possible context, we can see that our epistemic zone of proximal development supervenes on the maturity and extent of the civilization of which we are a part. This does not hold for more restricted forms of knowledge, but for forms of knowledge of which the study of astrocivilization is an example (i.e., human knowledge at its greatest extent) it becomes true. Not only individuals, but also whole societies and entire civilizations have zones of proximal development. A particular species of civilization facilitates a particular species of knowledge — but it also constrains other species of knowledge. This observation, too, would belong to an adequate conception of astrocivilization.

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The Taxonomy of the Sciences

Thursday

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There is passage in Foucault, in the preface to the English language of The Order of Things, after the more famous passage about the “Chinese dictionary” in Borges, in which he discusses a pathological failure of taxonomy. The theme of Foucault’s book, restated compellingly in this preface, is taxonomy — taxonomy in its most general (and therefore its most philosophical) signification. Taxonomy is a problem.

It appears that certain aphasiacs, when shown various differently coloured skeins of wool on a table top, are consistently unable to arrange them into any coherent pattern; as though that simple rectangle were unable to serve in their case as a homogeneous and neutral space in which things could be placed so as to display at the same time the continuous order of their identities or differences as well as the semantic field of their denomination. Within this simple space in which things are normally arranged and given names, the aphasiac will create a multiplicity of tiny, fragmented regions in which nameless resemblances agglutinate things into unconnected islets; in one corner, they will place the lightest-coloured skeins, in another the red ones, somewhere else those that are softest in texture, in yet another place the longest, or those that have a tinge of purple or those that have been wound up into a ball. But no sooner have they been adumbrated than all these groupings dissolve again, for the field of identity that sustains them, however limited it may be, is still too wide not to be unstable; and so the sick mind continues to infinity, creating groups then dispersing them again, heaping up diverse similarities, destroying those that seem clearest, splitting up things that are identical, superimposing different criteria, frenziedly beginning all over again, becoming more and more disturbed, and teetering finally on the brink of anxiety.

THE ORDER OF THINGS: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, MICHEL FOUCAULT, A translation of Les Mots et les choses, VINTAGE BOOKS, A Division of Random House, Inc., New York, Preface

Taxonomy is the intersection of words and things — and just this was the original title of Foucault’s book, i.e., words and things — and Foucault brilliantly illustrates both the possibilities and problems inherent in taxonomy. Foucault had an enduring concern for taxonomy, and, as is well known, named his chair at the Collège de France the “History of Systems of Thought” — as though he were seeking a master taxonomy of human knowledge.

Foucault found madness and mental illness in the inability of a test subject to systematically arrange skeins of wool, since each attempted scheme of classification breaks down when it overlaps within another system of classification pursued simultaneously. One suspects that if the task placed before Foucault’s aphasiac were limited in certain ways — perhaps in the number of colors of wool, or the number of categories that could be employed — the task might become practical once a sufficient number of constraints come into play. But the infinite universe investigated by contemporary science is the very antithesis of constraint. There is always more to investigate, and as the sciences themselves grow and fission, begetting new sciences, the task of bringing order to the sciences themselves (rather than to the empirical phenomena that the sciences seek to order) becomes progressively more difficult.

The taxonomy of the sciences is more problematic that usually recognized. Consider these possible categories of science, not all of which are current today:

● natural sciences It is still somewhat common to speak of the “natural sciences,” with our intuitive understanding of what is “natural” as sufficient to classify a given study as an investigation into “nature.” What, then, is not a natural science? At one time there was a strong distinction made between the natural sciences and the formal sciences (q.v.)

● formal sciences The phrase “formal sciences” is rarely used today, though it is still a useful idea, comprising at least mathematics and logic and (for those who know what it is) formal mereology. Today the formal sciences might also include computer science and information science, though I haven’t myself ever heard anyone refer to these sciences as formal sciences. Since the mathematization of the natural sciences beginning with the scientific revolution, the natural sciences have come more and more to approximate formal sciences, to the point that mathematical physics has, at times, only a tenuous relationship to experiments in physics, while it has a much more robust relationship with mathematics.

● moral sciences Philosopher J. R. Lucas has written of the moral sciences, “The University of Cambridge used to have a Faculty of Moral Sciences. It was originally set up in contrast to the Faculty of Natural Sciences, and was concerned with the mores of men rather than the phenomena of nature. But the humane disciplines were hived off to become separate subjects, and when the faculty was finally renamed the Faculty of Philosophy, philosophy was indeed the only subject studied.”

● earth sciences The earth sciences may be understood to be a subdivision of the natural sciences, and may be strongly distinguished from the space sciences, but the distinction between the earth sciences and the space sciences, as well as these two sciences themselves, is quite recent, dating to the advent of the Space Age in the middle of the twentieth century. While the idea behind the earth sciences is ancient, their explicit recognition as a special division within the sciences is recent. I suspect that the fact of seeing the earth from space, made possible by the technology of the space age, contributed greatly to understanding the earth as a unified object of investigation.

● space sciences The space sciences can be defined in contradistinction to the earth sciences, as though science had a need to recapitulate the distinction between the sublunary and the superlunary of Ptolemaic cosmology; however, I don’t think that this was the actual genesis of the idea of a category of space sciences. The emergence of the “Space Age” and its associated specialty technologies, and the sciences that produced these technologies, is the likely source, but the question becomes whether a haphazardly introduced concept roughly corresponding to a practical division of scientific labor constitutes a useful theoretical category.

● social sciences The social sciences would obviously include sociology and cultural anthropology, but would it include biological anthropology? History? Political science? Economics? The social sciences often come under assault for their methodology, which seems to be much less intrinsically quantitative than that of the natural sciences, but are not social communities as “natural” as biologically defined communities?

● human sciences In German there is a term — Geisteswissenschaften — that could be translated as the “spiritual sciences,” and which roughly corresponds to the traditional humanities, but it is not entirely clear whether the human sciences coincide perfectly either with Geisteswissenschaften or the humanities. Foucault’s The Order of Things, quoted above, is subtitled, “An Archaeology of the Human Sciences,” and the human sciences that Foucault examines in particular include philology and economics, inter alia.

● life sciences I assume that “life sciences” was formulated as a collective term for biological sciences, which would include studies like biogeography, which might also be called an instance of the earth sciences, or the natural sciences. But the life sciences would also include all of medicine, which gives us a taxonomy of the medical sciences, though it does not give us a clear demarcation between the life sciences and the natural sciences. Does medicine include all of psychiatry, or ought psychiatric inquiries to be thought of as belonging to the social sciences?

● historical sciences I have written about the historical sciences in several posts, since S. J. Gould often made the point that that historical sciences have a distinctive methodology. In Historical Sciences I argued that there is a sense in which all sciences can be considered historical sciences. Indeed, one of the distinctive aspects of the scientific revolution has been to force human beings to stop assuming the eternity and permanence of the world and to see the world and everything in it as having a natural history. If everything has a natural history, then all investigations are historical investigations and all sciences are historical sciences — but if this is true, then Gould’s claim that the historical sciences have a unique methodology collapses.

There are also, of course, informal distinctions such as that between the “hard” sciences and the “soft” sciences, which is sometimes taken to be the distinction between mathematicized sciences and non-mathematicized sciences, and so may correspond to the rough distinction between the natural sciences and the social sciences, except the that the social sciences are now dominated by statistical methods and can no longer be thought of a non-mathematicized. This leads to problems of classification such as whether economics, for example, is a natural science or a social science.

For each of the science categories above we could attempt either an extensional or an intensional definition, i.e., we could give a list of particular sciences that fall under the category in question, or we could attempt to define the meaning of the term, and the meaning would then govern what sciences are so identified. An extensional definition of the earth sciences might involve a list including geomorphology, biogeography, geology, oceanography, hydrology, climatology, and so forth. An intentional definition of the earth sciences might be something like, “those sciences that have as their object of study the planet earth, its subsystems, and its inhabitants.”

Today we employ the sciences to bring order to our world, but how do we bring order to the sciences? Ordering our scientific knowledge is problematic. It is complicated. It involves unanticipated difficulties that appear when we try to make any taxonomy for the sciences systematic. Each of the scientific categories above (as well as others that I did not include — my list makes no pretension of completeness) implies a principled distinction between the kind of sciences identified by the category and all other sciences, even if the principle by which the distinction is to be made is not entirely clear.

The implicit distinction between the earth sciences and the space sciences has a certain intuitive plausibility, and it is useful to a certain extent, though recently I have tried to point out in Eo-, Exo-, Astro- the importance of astrobiology as unifying terrestrial biology and exobiology in a truly Copernican framework. While the attempted task of a taxonomy of the sciences is important, the nature of the task itself suggests a certain compartmentalization, and too much thinking in terms of compartmentalization can distract us from seeing the larger synthesis. Concepts based on categorization that separates the sciences will be intrinsically different from extended conceptions that emerge from unification. An exclusive concern for the earth sciences, then, might have the subtle affect of reinforcing geocentric, Ptolemaic assumptions, though if we pause for a moment it will be obvious that the earth is a planet, and that the planetary sciences ought to include the earth, and the the planetary sciences might be construed as belonging to the space sciences.

The anxiety experience by Foucault’s aphasiac is likely to be experienced by anyone attempting a systematic taxonomy of the sciences, as here, any mind, whether sick or healthy, might continue to extrapolate distinctions to infinity and still not arrive at a satisfactory method for taking the measure of the sciences in way that contributes both to the clarity of the individual sciences and an understanding of how the various special sciences relate to each other.

On the one hand, perfect rigor of thought would seem to imply that all possible distinctions must be observed and respected, except that not all distinction can be made at the same time because some cut across each other, are mutually exclusive, order the world differently, and subdivide other categories and hierarchies in incompatible schemes. To use a Leibnizean term, not all distinctions are compossible.

To invoke Leibniz in this context is to suggest a Leibnizean approach to the resolution of the difficulty: a Leibnizean conception of conceptual rigor would appeal to the greatest number of distinctions that are compossible and yield a coherent body of knowledge.

A thorough-going taxonomic study of human bodies of knowledge would reveal a great many possible taxonomies, some with overlapping distinctions, but it is likely that there is an optimal arrangement of distinctions that would allow the greatest possible number of distinctions to be employed simultaneously while retaining the unity of knowledge. This would be a system of compossible taxonomy, which might have to reject a few distinctions but which makes use of the greater number of distinctions that are mutually possible within the framework of methodological naturalism as this defines the scientific enterprise.

There are not merely academic considerations. The place of science within industrial-technological civilization means that our conception of science is integral with our conception of civilization; thus to make a systematic taxonomy of the sciences is to make a systematic taxonomy of a civilization that is based upon science. Such conception categories extrapolated from science to civilization will have consequences for human self-understanding and human interaction, which latter does not always take the form of “cultural exchanges” (in the saccharine terminology if international relations). Industrial-technological civilization is in coevolution with industrial-technological warfare, so that a taxonomy of science is also a taxonomy of scientific warfare. Our conception of science will ultimately influence how we kill each other, and how we seek peace in order to stop killing each other.

One of the most distinctive forms of propaganda and social engineering of our time is the creation from whole cloth of artificial and fraudulent sciences. Since science is the condition of legitimacy in industrial-technological civilization, social movements seeking legitimacy seek scientific justification for their moral positions, but the more that science is seen as a means to an end, where the end is stipulated in advance, then science as a process must be compromised because any science that does not tend to the desired socio-political end will be subject to socio-political disapproval or dismissal. While there is a limit to this, the limits are more tolerant than we might suppose: large, complex societies with large and diverse economies can sustain non-survival behavior for a significant period of time — perhaps enough time to conceal the failure of the model employed until it is too late to save the society that has become a victim of its own illusion.

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The Hierarchy of Perspective Taking

Tuesday

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Jean Piaget

One of the important ideas from Piaget’s influential conception of cognitive development is that of perspective taking. The ability to coordinate the perspectives of multiple observers of one and the same state of affairs is a cognitive skill that develops with time and practice, and the mastery of perspective taking coincides with cognitive maturity.

From a philosophical standpoint, the problem of perspective taking is closely related to the problem of appearance and reality, since one and the same state of affairs not only appears from different perspectives for different observers, it also appears from different perspectives for one and the same observer at different times. In other words, appearance changes — and presumably reality does not. It is interesting to note that developmental psychologists following Paiget’s lead have in fact conducted tests with children in order to understand at what stage of development that they can consistently distinguish between appearance and reality.

Just as perspective taking is a cognitive accomplishment — requiring time, training, and natural development — and not something that happens suddenly and all at once, the cognitive maturity of which perspective taking is an accomplishment does not occur all at once. Both maturity and perspective taking continue to develop as the individual develops — and I take this development continues beyond childhood proper.

While I find Piaget’s work quite congenial, the developmental psychology of Erik Erikson strikes me a greatly oversimplified, with its predictable crises at each stage of life, and the implicit assumption built in that if you aren’t undergoing some particular crisis that strikes most people at a given period of life, then there is something wrong with you. That being said, what I find of great value in Erikson’s work is his insistence that development continues throughout the human lifespan, and does not come to a halt after a particular accomplishment of cognitive maturity is achieved.

Piagetian cognitive development in terms of perspective taking can easily be extended throughout the human lifespan (and beyond) by the observation that there are always new perspectives to take. As civilization develops and grows, becoming ever more comprehensive as it does so, the human beings who constitute this civilization are forced to formulate always more comprehensive conceptions in order to take the measure of the world being progressively revealed to us. Each new idea that takes the measure of the world at a greater order of magnitude presents the possibility of a new perspective on the world, and therefore the possibility of a new achievement in terms of perspective taking.

The perspectives we attain constitute a hierarchy that begins with the first accomplishment of the self-aware mind, which is egocentric thought. Many developmental psychologists have described the egocentric thought patterns of young children, though the word “egocentric” is now widely avoided because of its moralizing connotations. I, however, will retain the term “egocentric,” because it helps to place this stage within a hierarchy of perspective taking.

The egocentric point of departure for human cognition does not necessarily disappear even when it is theoretically surpassed, because we know egocentric thinking so well from the nearly universal phenomenon of human selfishness, which is where the moralizing connotation of “egocentric” no doubt has its origin. An individual may become capable of coordinating multiple perspectives and still value the world exclusively from the perspective of self-interest.

In any case, the purely egocentric thought of early childhood confines the egocentric thinker to a tightly constrained circle defined by one’s personal perspective. While this is a personal perspective, it is also an impersonal perspective in so far as all individuals share this perspective. It is what Francis Bacon called the “idols of the cave,” since every human being, “has a cave or den of his own, which refracts and discolours the light of nature.” This has been well described in a passage from F. H. Bradley made famous by T. S. Eliot, because the latter quoted it in a footnote to The Waste Land:

My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it… In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346, quoted by T. S. Eliot in footnote 48 to The Waste Land, “What the Thunder Said”

I quote this passage here because, like my retention of the term “egocentric,” it can help us to see perspectives in perspective, and it helps us to do so because we can think of expanding and progressively more comprehensive perspectives as concentric circles. The egocentric perspective is located precisely at the center, and the circle described by F. H. Bradley is the circle within which the egocentric perspective prevails.

The next most comprehensive perspective taking beyond the transcendence of the egocentric perspective is the transcendence of the ethnocentric perspective. The ethnocentric perspective corresponds to what Bacon called the “idols of the marketplace,” such that this perspective is, “formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other.” The ethnocentric perspective can also be identified with the sociosphere, which I recently discussed in Eo-, Exo-, Astro- as an essentially geocentric conception which, in a Copernican context, should be overcome.

Beyond ethnocentrism and its corresponding sociosphere there is ideocentrism, which Bacon called the “idols of the theater,” and which we can identify with the noösphere. The ideocentric perspective, which Bacon well described in terms of philosophical systems, such that, “all the received systems are but so many stage-plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion.” Trans-ethnic communities of ideology and belief, like world’s major religions and political ideologies, represent the ideocentric perspective.

The transcendence of the ideocentric perspective by way of more comprehensive perspective taking brings us to the anthropocentric perspective, which can be identified with the anthroposphere (still a geocentric and pre-Copernican conception, as with the other -spheres mentioned above). The anthropocentric perspective corresponds to Bacon’s “idols of the tribe,” which Bacon described thus:

“The Idols of the Tribe have their foundation in human nature itself, and in the tribe or race of men. For it is a false assertion that the sense of man is the measure of things. On the contrary, all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolours the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.”

Bacon was limited by the cosmology of his time so that he could not readily identify further idols beyond the anthropocentric idols of the (human) tribe, just as we are limited by the cosmology of our time. Yet we do today have a more comprehensive perspective than Bacon, we can can identify a few more stages of more comprehensive perspective taking. Beyond the anthropocentric perspective there is the geocentric perspective, the heliocentric perspective, and even what we could call the galacticentric perspective — as when early twentieth century cosmologists argued over whether the Milky Way as the only galaxy and constituted an “island universe.” Now we know that there are other galaxies, and we can be said to have transcended the galacticentric perspective.

As I wrote above, as human knowledge has expanded and become more comprehensive, ever more comprehensive perspective taking has come about in order to grasp the concepts employed in expanding human knowledge. There is every reason to believe that this process will be iterated indefinitely into the future, which means that perspective taking also will be indefinitely iterated into the future. (I attempted to make a similar and related point in Gödel’s Lesson for Geopolitics.) Therefore, further levels of cognitive maturity wait for us in the distant future as accomplishments that we cannot yet attain at this time.

This last observation allows me to cite one more relevant developmental psychologist, namely Lev Vygotsky, whose cognitive mediation theory of human development makes use of the concept of a Zone of proximal development (ZPD). Human development, according to Vygotsky, takes place within a proximal zone, and not at any discrete point or stage. Within the ZPD, certain accomplishments of cognitive maturity are possible. In the lower ZPD there is the actual zone of development, while in the upper ZPD there lies the potential zone of development, which can be attained through cognitive mediation by the proper prompting of an already accomplished mentor. Beyond the upper ZPD, even if there are tasks yet to be accomplished, they cannot be accomplished within this particular ZPD.

With the development of human knowledge, we’re on our own. There is no cognitive mediator to help us over the hard parts and assist us in the more comprehensive perspective taking that will mark a new stage of cognitive maturity and possible also a new zone of proximal development in which new accomplishments will be possible. But this has always been true in the past, and yet we have managed to make these breakthroughs to more comprehensive perspectives of cognitive maturity.

I hope that the reader sees that this is both hopeful and sad. Hopeful because this way of looking at human knowledge suggests indefinite progress. Sad because we will not be around to see the the accomplishments of cognitive maturity that lie beyond our present zone of proximal development.

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Science Behind the Scenes

Thursday

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Science has become central to industrial-technological civilization. I would define at least one of the properties that distinguishes industrial-technological civilization from agriculturalism or nomadism as the conscious application of science to technology, and the conscious application in turn of technology to industrial production. Prior to industrial-technological civilization there were science and technology and industry, but the three were not systematically interrelated and consciously pursued with an eye toward steadily increasing productivity.

The role of science within industrial-technological civilization has given science and scientists a special role in society. This role is not the glamorous role of film and music and athletic celebrities, and it is not the high-flying role of celebrity bankers and fund managers and executives, but it is nevertheless a powerful role. As Shelley once said that poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world, we can say that scientists are the unacknowledged legislators of industrial technological civilization. Foucault came close to saying this when he said that doctors are the strategists of life and death.

I have previously discussed the ideological role of science in the contemporary world in The Political Uses of Science. Perhaps the predominant ideological function of science today is the role of “big science” — enormous research projects backed by government, industry, and universities that employ the talents of hundreds if not thousands of scientists. When Kuhnian normal science has this kind of backing, it is difficult for marginal scientific enterprises to compete. Big science moves markets and moves societies not because it is explicitly ideological in character, but because it is effective in meeting practical needs (though these needs are socially defined by the society in which science functions as a part).

Despite the fact that progress in scientific research is driven by the falsification and revision of theories through the expedient of experimentation, the scientific community has been surprisingly successful in closing ranks behind the most successful scientific theories of our time and presenting a united front that does not really give an accurate impression of the profound differences that separate scientists. Often a scientist spends an entire career trying to get a hearing or his or her idea, and this effort is not always successful. There are very real and bitter differences between the advocates of distinct scientific theories. The scientist sacrifices a life to research in a way not unlike the soldier who sacrifices his life on the battlefield: each uses up a life for a cause.

I have some specific examples in mind when I say that scientists have been successful as closing ranks behind what Kuhn would have called “normal science.” I have written about big bang cosmology and quantum theory in this connection. In Conformal Cyclic Cosmology I noted at least one theory seeking empirical evidence for the world prior to the big bang, while in The limits of my language are the limits of my world I discussed some recent experiments that seem to give us more knowledge of the quantum world that traditional interpretations of quantum theory would seem to suggest is possible.

No one of a truly curious disposition could ever be satisfied with the big bang theory, except in so far as it is but one step — and an admittedly very large step — toward a larger natural history of the universe. Given that the entire observable universe may be the result of a single big bang, any account of the world beyond or before the universe defined by the big bang presents possibly insuperable difficulties for observational cosmology. But the mind does not stop with observational cosmology; the mind does not stop even when presented with obstacles that initially seem insuperable. Slowly and surely the mind seeks the gradual way up what Dawkins called Mount Improbable.

Despite the united front that supports fundamental scientific theories (the sorts of science that Quine would have placed near the center of the web of belief), we know from the examples of Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology and the recent experiments attempting to simultaneously measure the position and velocity of quantum particles that scientists are continuing to think beyond the customary interpretations of theories.

The often-repeated claims that space and time were created simultaneously in the big bang and that it is pointless to ask what came before the big bang (as earlier generations were assured that it was illegitimate to ask “Who made God?”), and the claims of the impossibility of simultaneous measurements of a quantum particle’s position and velocity have not stopped the curious from probing beyond these barriers to knowledge. One must, or course, be careful, for there is a danger of being seen as a crackpot, so such inquiries are kept quiet quiet until some kind of empirical evidence can be produced. But before the evidence can be sought, there needs to be an idea of what to look for, and an idea of what to look for comes from a theory. That theory, in turn, must exceed the established interpretations of science if it is too look for anything new.

We know what happens when scientists not only say that something is impossible or unknowable, but also accept that certain things are impossible or unknowable and actually cease to engage in inquiry, and make no attempt to think beyond the limits of accepted theories: we get a dark age. A recent book has spoken of the European middle ages as The Closing of the Western Mind. (In the Islamic world a very similar phenomenon was called “Taqlid” or, “the closing of the gates of Ijtihad“.) When scientists not only say that noting more can be known, but they actually act as though nothing more can be known, and cease to question normal science, this is when intellectual progress stops, and this has happened several times in human history (although I know that this is a controversial position to argue; cf. my The Phenomenon of Civilization Revisited).

It is precisely the fact that science continues to be consciously and systematically pursued in the modern era despite many claims that everything knowable was known that sets industrial-technological civilization apart from all previous iterations of civilization.

Science goes on behind the scenes.

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Eo-, Exo-, Astro-

Monday

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This post has been superseded by Eo-, Eso-, Exo-, Astro-, which both corrects and extends what I wrote below.

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The Philosophical Significance of Astrobiology as a

Cosmological Extrapolation of Terrestrial Biology

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In yesterdays’ Commensurable Perspectives I finished with this observation:

Ecology is the master world-narrative that unifies the sub-narratives employed by individual species in virtue of their perceptual and cognitive architecture. Ultimately, astrobiology would constitute the universal narrative that would unify the ecological narratives of distinct worlds.

The naturalistic narrative has the power to unify even across species and across worlds. This power may not be particularly evident at present, but in the long term future of our species (if our species does in fact have a long term future) this power will prove to be crucial.

If indeed astrobiology is the universal narrative of life, that gives astrobiology a privileged position among the sciences. That is a tall order. But what is astrobiology? At one time I had heard both the terms “exobiology” and “astrobiology” and I was not quite clear about the exact difference between the two, or how each was defined. Thereby hangs a tale. The distinction between the two is in fact a very interesting story, and it is a story to which an entire book has been devoted, The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology, by Steven J. Dick and James E. Strick.

I urge the reader to get this book and peruse it for yourself for the detailed version of the emergence of astrobiology as a scientific discipline. I will give only the bare bones of that story here, which will be only enough to grasp the crucial concepts involved. And our interest is in the concepts, not the personalities.

Joshua Lederberg before he had formulated the distinction between eobiology and exobiology.

Exobiology is the older term, introduced by Joshua Lederberg (first used in a public lecture in 1960), and contrasted by him to eobiology. Exobiology has some currency in the public mind, but I didn’t know about eobiology until I read about the history of the discipline. However, the contrast between the two terms is conceptually important. Exobiology is concerned with biology off the surface of the earth, while eobiology is biology on the surface of the earth. (cf. p. 29) In other words, all biological science prior to human spaceflight was eobiology, even if we didn’t know that it was eobiology. Another way to formulate this distinction is to say that eobiology is the biology of the terrestrial biosphere, while exobiology is the biology of everything else.

In the book The Living Universe: NASA and the Development of Astrobiology the authors give a lot of background on the internal politics and budgeting of NASA and how this affected the emergence of astrobiology. It is an interesting story, but I will not go into it here, as our interest at present is exclusively with the conceptual infrastructure of the discipline. Suffice it to say that in 1996 the first attempts were made to define astrobiology (cf. p. 202), and within a couple of years there was a virtual Astrobiology Institute.

The NASA astrobiology website characterizes astrobiology as follows:

“Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe. This multidisciplinary field encompasses the search for habitable environments in our Solar System and habitable planets outside our Solar System, the search for evidence of prebiotic chemistry and life on Mars and other bodies in our Solar System, laboratory and field research into the origins and early evolution of life on Earth, and studies of the potential for life to adapt to challenges on Earth and in space.”

The NASA strategic plan of 1996 gives this definition of astrobiology:

“The study of the living universe. This field provides a scientific foundation for a multidisciplinary study of (1) the origin and distribution of life in the universe, (2) an understanding of the role of gravity in living systems, and (3) the study of the Earth’s atmospheres and ecosystems.”

The important lesson to take away from this is that astrobiology is the more comprehensive concept, and that in fact we can consider astrobiology the union of eobiology and exobiology. This sounds simple enough (and it is), but it is important to understand the conceptual leap that has been taken here.

From the perspective of astrobiology, earth sciences are only fragments of far larger and more comprehensive sciences. Just as all biology was once eobiology, the same observation can be made in regard to the other earth sciences, and the same tripartite conceptual distinction can be brought to the other earth sciences. We can formulate eogeology and exogeology unified in astrogeology; we can formulate eohydrology and exohydrology unified in astrohydrology; we can formulate eovulcanology and exovulcanology unified in astrovulcanology; we can formulate eoclimatology and exoclimatology unified in astroclimatology. All of these are cosmological extrapolations of earth sciences. One suspects that, in the future, the prefixes will be dropped and we will return to climatology simpliciter, e.g., but while the conceptual revolution is underway it is important to retain the prefixes as a reminder that science is no longer defined by the boundaries of the earth.

I assert that this is a conceptual leap of the first importance because what we have with astrobiology is the formulation of the first truly Copernican science; astrobiology includes eobiology but it is not exhausted by eobiology; it is supplemented by exobiology. The earth, for obvious reasons, remains important to us, but it no longer dictates the center of our science. All mature sciences will eventually need to take this Copernican turn and dethrone the earth from the center of its concern.

We can take a further step beyond this conceptual formulation of Copernican sciences by observing that traditional earth sciences began as local enterprises, and it has only been in recent decades that truly global sciences have emerged. These global sciences have culminated in objects of scientific study that take the world entire as their object. Thus biology has converged upon study of the biosphere; hydrology has converged on study of the hydrosphere; glaciology has culminated in the study of the cryosphere. Copernican sciences based on the model of astrobiology can go one better than this, transcending earth-defined “-spheres” in favor of more comprehensive concepts.

When I spoke last year on “The Moral Imperative of Human Spaceflight” at the NASA/DARPA 100 Year Starship Study symposium it was my intention to spend some time on the emergence of Copernican sciences, but I didn’t have enough time to elaborate. I cut most of that material out and still was rushed. The point that I wanted to make there was that the concepts of the biosphere, the lithosphere, the geosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, atmosphere, anthrosphere, sociosphere, noösphere, and technosphere are essentially Ptolemaic concepts. (If the proceedings of the symposium are published, and if my paper is included, this contains my first sketch of Copernican sciences as transcending these earth-defined “-spheres.”) The Copernican Revolution entails the formulation of Copernican concepts to supersede Ptolemaic concepts, and this work is as yet unfinished. In some spheres of human thought, it has scarcely begun.

One way to transcend our Ptolemaic concepts and to replace them with Copernican concepts, and thus to extend the ongoing shift to a truly Copernican perspective, is to substitute for the earth-defined “-spheres” a conception of the object of the sciences not dependent upon the earth, and this can be done by defining, respectfully, biospace (in place of the biosphere), lithospace, geospace, hydrospace, cryospace, atmospace, anthrospace, sociospace, noöspace, and technospace. In so far as we can facilitate the emergence of Copernican sciences, we can contribute to the ongoing Copernican Revolution, which will someday culminate in a Copernican civilization (if we do not first destroy ourselves).

We can pass beyond the earth sciences and the natural sciences and similarly extend our conceptions of a the social and political sciences. Although concepts from the social sciences are not usually expressed in geocentric terms — except for the above-mentioned anthrosphere, sociosphere, noösphere, and technosphere (which are not employed very often) — our social and political thought is usually even more tied to planetary prejudices than the concepts of the natural sciences. Thus we can extend our conception of politics by distinguishing between eopolitics and exopolitics, both of which are subsumed under astropolitics. Similarly, we can formulate eoeconomics and exoeconomics, subsumed by astroeconomics, eostrategy and exostrategy, subsumed by astrostrategy, and so forth.

As a final note, it is ironic that the breakthrough to a Copernican science should occur first with biology, because biology was among the latest of the sciences to actually attain a scientific status. Prior to Darwin, biological theories were essentially theological theories with but a few exceptions. Darwin put biology on a firm biological footing and created the discipline in its modern scientific form. Thus biology was among the last of the sciences to attain a modern scientific form, though it was the first to attain to a Copernican form.

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This post has been superseded by Eo-, Eso-, Exo-, Astro-.
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Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization

Saturday

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Jane Goodall

One of the greatest contributions to science in the twentieth century was Jane Goodall’s study of chimpanzees in the wild at Gombe, Tanzania. Although Goodall’s work represents a major advance in ethology, it did not come without criticism. Here is how Adrian G. Weiss described some of this criticism:

Jane received her Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 1965. She is one of only eight other people to earn a Ph.D. without a bachelor’s (Montgomery 1991). Her adviser, Robert Hinde, said her methods were not professional, and that she was doing her research wrong. Jane’s major mistake was naming her “subjects”. The animals should be given numbers. Jane also used descriptive, narrative writing in her observations and calculations. She anthropomorphized her animals. Her colleagues and classmates thought she was “doing all wrong”. Robert Hinde did approve her thesis, even though she returned with all of his corrections with the original names and anthropomorphizing.

Most innovative science breaks the established rules of the time. If the innovative science is eventually accepted, it eventually also becomes the basis of a new orthodoxy. Given time, that orthodoxy will be displaced as well, as more innovative work demonstrates new ways of acquiring knowledge. As the old orthodoxy passes out of fashion it often falls either into neglect or may become the target of criticism as vicious as that directed at new and innovative research.

“A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked.” Michel Foucault

I have to imagine that it was this latter phenomenon of formerly accepted scientific discourses falling out of favor and becoming the target of ridicule that inspired one of Foucault’s most famous quotes (which I have cited previously on numerous occasions): “A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked.” Here is the same quote with more context:

Each of my works is a part of my own biography. For one or another reason I had the occasion to feel and live those things. To take a simple example, I used to work in a psychiatric hospital in the 1950s. After having studied philosophy, I wanted to see what madness was: I had been mad enough to study reason; I was reasonable enough to study madness. I was free to move from the patients to the attendants, for I had no precise role. It was the time of the blooming of neurosurgery, the beginning of psychopharmacology, the reign of the traditional institution. At first I accepted things as necessary, but then after three months (I am slow-minded!), I asked, “What is the necessity of these things?” After three years I left the job and went to Sweden in great personal discomfort and started to write a history of these practices. Madness and Civilization was intended to be a first volume. I like to write first volumes, and I hate to write second ones. It was perceived as a psychiatricide, but it was a description from history. You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from the lazar house, he becomes infuriated.

Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault — October 25th, 1982, Martin, L. H. et al (1988) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, London: Tavistock. pp.9-15

It remains true that many representatives of even the most sophisticated contemporary sciences react as though attacked when reminded of their discipline’s history. This is true not least because much of science has an unsavory history — at least, by contemporary standards, a lot of scientific history is unsavory, and this gives us reason to believe that many of our efforts today will, in the fullness of time, be consigned to the unsavory inquiries of the past which carry with them norms, evaluations, and assumptions that are no longer considered to be acceptable in polite society. This is, of course, deeply ironic (I could say hypocritical if I wanted to be tendentious) since the standard of acceptability in polite society is one of the most stultifying norms imaginable.

I'm not sure that acceptability in polite society is the best standard for rigorous science.

It has long been debated within academia whether history is a science, or an art, or perhaps even a sui generis literary genre with a peculiar respect for evidence. There is no consensus on this question, and I suspect it will continue to be debated so long as the Western intellectual tradition persists. History, at least, is a recognized discipline. I know of no recognized discipline of the study of civilizations, which in part is why I recently wrote The Future Science of Civilizations.

There is, at present, no science of civilization, though there are many scientists who have written about civilization. I don’t know if there are any university departments on “Civilization Studies,” but if there aren’t, there should be. We can at least say that there is an established literary genre, partly scientific, that is concerned with the problems of civilization (including figures as diverse as Toynbee and Jared Diamond). Even among philosophers, who have a great love of writing, “The philosophy of x,” there are very few works on “the philosophy of civilization” — some, yes, but not many — and, I suspect, few if any departments devoted to the philosophy of civilization. This is a regrettable ellipsis.

When, in the future, we do have a science of civilization, and perhaps also a philosophy of civilization (or, at very least, a philosophy of the science of civilization), this science will have to come to terms with its past as every science has had to (or eventually will have to). The prehistory of the science of civilization is already fairly well established, and there are several known classics of the genre. Many of these classics of the study of civilization are as thoroughly unsavory by contemporary standards as one could possibly hope. The history of pronouncements on civilization is filled with short-sighted, baldly prejudiced, privileged, ethnocentric, and thoroughly anthropocentric formulations. For all that, they still may have something of value to offer.

A technological typology of human societies that is no longer in favor is the tripartite distinction between savagery, barbarism, and civilization. This belongs to the prehistory of the prehistory of civilization, since it establishes the natural history of civilization and its antecedents.

Edward Burnett Tylor proposed that human cultures developed through three basic stages consisting of savagery, barbarism, and civilization. The leading proponent of this savagery-barbarism-civilization scale came to be Lewis Henry Morgan, who gave a detailed exposition of it in his 1877 book Ancient Society (the entire book is conveniently available online for your reading pleasure). A quick sketch of the typology can be found at ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES: Cross-Cultural Analysis.

One of the interesting features of Morgan’s elaboration of Tylor’s idea is his concern to define his stages in terms of technology. From the “lower status of savagery” with its initial use of fire, through a middle stage at which the bow and arrow is introduced, to the “upper status of savagery” which includes pottery, each stage of human development is marked by a definite technological achievement. Similarly with barbarism, which moves through the domestication of animals, irrigation, metal working, and a phonetic alphabet. This breakdown is, in its own way, more detailed than many contemporary decompositions of human social development, as well as being admirably tied to material culture and therefore amenable to confirmation and disconfirmation through archaeological research.

Today, of course, we are much too sophisticated to use terms like “savagery” or “barbarism.” These terms are now held in ill repute, as they are thought to suggest strongly negative evaluations. A friend of mine who studied anthropology told me that the word “primitive” is now referred to as “the P-word” within the discipline, so unacceptable has it become. To call a people (even an historical people now extinct) “savage” is similarly considered beyond the pale. We don’t call people “savage” or “primitive” any more. But the dangers of these terminological obsessions are that we get hung up on the terms and no longer consider theories on their theoretical merits. Jane Goodall’s theoretical work was eventually accepted despite her use of proper names in ethology, and now it is not at all uncommon for researchers to name their subjects that belong to other species.

Some theoreticians, moreover, have come to recognize that there are certain things that can be learned through sympathizing with one’s subject that simply cannot be learned in any other way (score one posthumously for Bergson’s conception of “intellectual sympathy”). Of course, science need not limit itself to a single paradigm of valid research. We can have a “big tent” of science with ample room for many methodologies, and hopefully also with plenty of room for disagreements.

It would be an interesting exercise to take a “dated” work like Lewis Henry Morgan’s book Ancient Society, leave the theoretical content intact, and change only the names. In fact, we could formalize Morgan’s gradations, using numbers instead of names just as Jane Goodall was urged to do. I suspect that Morgan’s work would be treated rather better in this case in comparison to the contemporary reception of its original terminology. We ought to ask ourselves why this is the case. Perhaps it is too much to hope for a “big tent” of science so capacious that it could hold Lewis Henry Morgan’s terminology alongside that of contemporary anthropology, but we have arrived at a big tent of science large enough to hold Jane Goodall’s proper names alongside tagged and numbered specimens.

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The Future Science of Civilizations

Wednesday

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Some day in the far future, if humanity (or some successor species) survives and if we establish ourselves as a spacefaring civilization, we will eventually have the opportunity to research whatever other civilizations exist in the universe and which we are able to find. With a study of multiple civilizations as a point of reference for the idea of civilization, we will not only possess a much richer conception of civilization, we may be able for formulate a genuine science of civilizations — a formal and theoretical science of civilization based on classificatory, comparative, and quantitative concepts that can be applied to known civilizations and employed in the prediction of not-yet-known civilizations.

Rudolf Carnap's account of scientific concepts from his Philosophical Foundations of Physics.

Let us begin, however, with something smaller and much more modest than entire civilizations, but something upon which civilizations are crucially dependent. Let us, then, begin with ideas.

I recently posted the following to Twitter:

The natural history of non-temporal transcendencies is the history of their epistemic order in human knowledge.

This remark could use some elucidation, since I have alluded to some ideas that are perhaps not widely known.

When I mentioned “non-temporal transcendencies” I was thinking of Husserl’s use of this idea in his 1905 lectures on time consciousness. here is a passage from the very end of his lectures, from the last two paragraphs of the last section:

“…we must say: the ‘presentation’ (appearance) of the state of affairs is presentation, not in the genuine sense, but in a derived sense. The state of affairs, properly speaking, is not something temporal either; it exists for a specific time but it not itself something in time as a thing or even is. Time-consciousness and presentation do not pertain to the state of affairs as a state of affairs but to the affair that belongs to it.”

“The same is true of all other founded acts and their correlates. A value has no place in time. A temporal object may be beautiful, pleasant, useful, and so on, and these may be for a definite period of time. But the beauty, pleasantness, etc., have no place in nature and in time. They are not things that appear in presentations or re-presentations.”

Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), translated by John Barnett Brough, Kluwer, 1991, sec. 45

I think that in this final passage of his lectures on time consciousness that Husserl has gone beyond a strictly phenomenological account and has almost imperceptibly passed over into metaphysics with his assertion that, “beauty, pleasantness, etc., have no place in nature and in time.” In other words, Husserl makes the claim that non-temporal transcendencies have no natural history. But in phenomenology nature has been suspended, so it is not within the competency of phenomenology to say that anything has no place in nature. Husserl is here struggling with the problem of apparently non-temporal objects in the light of the universality of constituting time consciousness, and he can’t quite yet see his way clear to a purely phenomenological treatment of non-temporal transcendencies.

Fortunately, although Husserl himself didn’t seem to make the leap, all the elements necessary to that leap are there in his thought, and it doesn’t take much phenomenological reflection to realize that non-temporal transcendencies have a peculiar way of appearing to consciousness, and that being a non-temporal transcendency is nothing more (for the phenomenologist as phenomenologist) than this peculiar way of appearing — a presentation in the derived sense, as Husserl calls it.

Edmund Husserl

When I wrote about the “epistemic order in human knowledge” in the same Twitter aphorism I was thinking about Hans Reichenbach’s distinction between the context of discovery and context of justification. Here is how Reichenbach drew the distinction:

When we call logic analysis of thought the expression should be interpreted so as to leave no doubt that it is not actual thought which we pretend to analyze. It is rather a substitute for thinking processes, their rational reconstruction, which constitutes the basis of logical analysis. Once a result of thinking is obtained, we can reorder our thoughts in a cogent way, constructing a chain of thoughts between point of departure and point of arrival; it is this rational reconstruction of thinking that is controlled by logic, and whose analysis reveals those rules which we call logical laws. The two realms of analysis to be distinguished may be called context of discovery, and context of justification. The context of discovery is left to psychological analysis, whereas logic is concerned with the context of justification, i.e., with the analysis of ordered series of thought operations so constructed that they make the results of thought justifiable. We speak of a justification when we possess a proof which shows that we have good grounds to rely upon those results.

Hans Reichenbach, Elements of Symbolic Logic, 1947, The Macmillan Company

I have elsewhere discussed rational reconstruction so I won’t go into any detail on that here, though the idea of rational reconstruction is fundamental to Reichenbach’s project and in fact inspires the distinction. Reichenbach’s distinctions implies that there are at least two orders into which human knowledge can be organized: in the order of discovery or in the order of justification (presumably in a mature theoretical context).

Hans Reichenbach

What Reichbach does not say, but which we can extrapolate from his distinction, is that there are both ontogenetic and phylogenetic orders of discovery. The individual’s order of discovery may well differ from the order of discovery chronicled as “firsts” in the history of science. There may also be individual and social orders of justification — ideally there would not be, since this would imply multiple theoretical contexts, and even a personal theoretical context, but we must at least acknowledge the possibility.

With these references in mind consider again my Twitter aphorism again:

The natural history of non-temporal transcendencies is the history of their epistemic order in human knowledge.

While what Husserl called nontemporal transcendencies have no “history” of their own, no development or evolution, they do however have a human history in the order in which they have been grasped by human minds, and then in the forms in which they have been sedimented in human cultures. Moreover, their presentation in a derived sense exhibits characteristic forms of order, and among these forms of order are the order of discovery and the order of justification.

Given what I recently wrote about the problem of other minds in The Eye of the Other, an obvious generalization of the above would be to formulate the same free of anthropic bias (to the extent that this is possible), thus:

The natural history of non-temporal transcendencies is the history of their genetic order in the epistemic frameworks of sentient beings.

Any sentient being capable of cognizing a non-temporal transcendency (i.e., thinking abstractly about an idea) constitutes an instance in the natural history of ideas, whether that instance of cognition is human cognition, another terrestrial species, or some non-terrestrial species. In this way, we understand that ideas may be mirrored in the consciousness of many different peoples. Under the aspect of the plurality of conscious minds, the natural history of ideas takes on a new and far more complex aspect.

If we could plot the natural history of ideas (i.e., the derivative appearance of non-temporal transcendencies in cognition of sentient beings of any species whatever) on a graph, I think that this would go a long way toward formulating a science of civilization, since civilization is founded on ideas, albeit ideas that are always found in their implemented form. Mapping the emergence of ideas in a wide variety of diverse civilizations may even suggest empirical generalizations, and from empirical generalizations laws could be formulated and predictions made.

The more research we are able to do in the natural history of ideas (possibly one day extended by the technology of a spacefaring civilization), the more likely we are to find unusual or unexpected instantiations of an idea. There are likely to be some very interesting exceptions to the rule. At the same time, a large body of research could eventually establish some norms for particular classes of civilizations and how these relate to each other. The Kardashev scale is perhaps the first step in this direction.

We might even formulate quantitative concepts of civilization into a graphic representation analogous to the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which in its simplicity reveals the “main sequence” of stars by considering only the variables of luminosity and surface temperature. We may discover that there is a “main sequence” of civilizations, and perhaps this civilizational “main sequence” corresponds to the macro-historical sequence of humanity thus far — nomadism, followed by settled agriculturalism, followed by settled industrialism. I suspect that we will always find that settled agriculturalism is the civilizational prerequisite for the emergence of industrial-technological civilization.

Michio Kaku, in his book Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100, suggests a quantitative measure of civilization based on the Kardashev scale and Carl Sagan’s information processing typology. While Kaku’s thought remains on a primarily classificatory or typological level, we could easily plot a civilization’s energy use (or energy flows, if you prefer) on one axis of a graph and its information processing ability on the other axis of a graph and come up with a quantitative presentation of civilization typologies. We would plot known earth civilizations on such a graph, but we wouldn’t really get all that far considering only earth civilizations. Ideally we would want to plot as diverse a set of civilizations as we plot diverse stars from all over the universe on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.

It could also be observed that, in the same circumstances as stated above, in the far future of a human spacefaring civilization, that human beings (or their successor species) will also gather an enormous amount of information about the universe, and possibly also the multiverse (should the world reveal itself to be more than that which can be seen with contemporary technology). No doubt many strange and wonderful things will be discovered. But we have sciences that are capable of comprehending such things. Extended conceptions of astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology will be able to include within their growing bodies of knowledge every outlandish natural phenomenon that we might chance to encounter in the wider universe, but there is nothing, either in a present form or in an inchoate extended form, that can do this for civilization. There is no science of civilization at present, or, at least, nothing worthy of the name.

We could formulate a science of civilization exclusively on the basis of civilizations on the earth — it could be argued that this is what Toynbee attempted to do — although this would be anthropically biased and not as valuable as a future science of civilization that could draw upon the data of many different civilizations on many different planets. While we are on the verge today of just being able to glimpse other planets around other stars, it will be some time yet before we are able to glimpse other civilizations, if there are any.

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Some Formulations of Methodological Naturalism

Sunday

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In several earlier posts I have made a trial of distinct definitions of naturalism. These posts include:

● A Formulation of Naturalism
● Two Thoughts on Naturalism
● Naturalism: Yet Another Formulation, and
● Naturalism and Object Oriented Ontology

I regard all of these formulations of tentative, but there may be something to learn from these tentative formulations if we employ them as a kind of experiment for understanding methodological naturalism. That is to say, each of these attempts to formulate naturalism implies a formulation of methodological naturalism. Furthermore, in so far as methodological naturalism is definitive of contemporary science, each formulation of methodological naturalism implies a distinct conception of science.

In A Formulation of Naturalism I suggested that, “Naturalism is on a par with materialism, and philosophically is to be treated as far as possible like materialism.”

In Two Thoughts on Naturalism I suggested that “Naturalism is on a par with mechanism, and philosophically is to be treated as far as possible like mechanism.” I also suggested that, “Naturalism entails that all ideas will first be manifest in embodied form… there are no abstract ideas that are given to us as abstract ideas; all ideas are ultimately derived from experience.”

In Naturalism: Yet Another Formulation I noted that these earlier efforts at formulations of naturalism are implicitly parsimonious, tending toward conceptual minimalism, and further suggested that, “we can characterize naturalism in terms of a quantitative parsimony, following quantitative formulations as far as they will go, and only appealing to qualitative formulations when quantitative formulations break down.” There is a sense, then, in which we can speak of deflationary naturalism. In so far as these formulations of naturalism embody the principle of parsimony, we need not separately formulate the principle of parsimony as a regulative norm of science.

In Naturalism and Object Oriented Ontology I suggested that an approach to naturalism might be made by way of object oriented ontology, which I there compared to Colin McGinn’s transcendental naturalism thesis, i.e., that the world is “flatly natural” though we are unable to see this for what it is because of our perceptual and cognitive limitations.

While when I first formulated naturalism such that, “Naturalism is on a par with materialism, and philosophically is to be treated as far as possible like materialism,” I intended naturalism as consisting of a more comprehensive scope than materialism, though when applied to the scientific method I see that it can be taken as a doctrine of limiting one’s scope to the problem at hand. This approach to science is as familiar as Newton’s aphorism, Hypotheses non fingo. Science often proceeds by providing a very limited explanation for a very limited range of phenomena. This leaves many explanatory gaps, but the iteration of the scientific method means that subsequent scientists return to the gaps time and again, and when they do so they do so from the perspective of the success of the earlier explanation of surrounding phenomena. Once a species of explanation becomes generally received as valid, the perception of the later extension of this species of explanation (perhaps already considered radical in its initial formulation) becomes more acceptable, and more explanatory power can be derived from the explanation.

Similar considerations to those above hold for the same formulation in terms of mechanism rather than materialism, or in terms of quantification rather than materialism. Initial formulations of mechanism (or quantification) can be crude and seem only to apply to macroscopic features, and is possibly seen as impossibly awkward to explain the fine-grained features of the world. As the mechanistic explanation becomes more refined and flexible, the idea of its application to more delicate matters appears less problematic.

An object-oriented ontological account of naturalism would be the most difficult to formulate and would take us the farthest from methodological concerns and the deepest into ontological concerns, so I will not pursue this at present (as I write this I can feel that my mind is not up to the task at the moment), but I will only mention it here as a viable possibility.

In any case, our formulations of methodological naturalism based on these formulations of naturalism would run something like this:

● Methodological materialism pursued as far as possible, leaving any non-material account aside

● Methodological mechanism pursued as far as possible, leaving any non-mechanistic account aside

● Methodological quantification pursued as far as possible, leaving any qualitative account aside

● Methodological flat naturalism, or transcendental naturalism, pursued as fas a possible, leaving any non-flat or non-transcendental account aside

I think that all of these approaches do, in fact, closely describe the methodology of the scientific method, especially as I mentioned above considered from the perspective of the growth of knowledge through the iteration of the scientific method.

The growth of knowledge through the iteration of the scientific method is a formulation of the historicity of scientific knowledge in terms of the future of that knowledge. The formulation of the historicity of scientific knowledge in terms of the past is nothing other than that embodied in the Foucault quote that, “A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked.” (from “Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault”)

All present scientific knowledge will eventually become past scientific knowledge, and it will become past knowledge through the continued pursuit of the scientific method, which is to say, methodological naturalism in some form or another.

The distant future of scientific knowledge, if only we had access to it, would seem as unlikely and as improbable as the distant past of scientific knowledge, but the past, present, and future of scientific knowledge are all connected in a continuum of iterated method.

It is ultimately the task of philosophy of see scientific knowledge whole, and to this end we must see the whole temporal continuum as the expression of science, and not any one, single point on the continuum as definitive of science. The unity of science, then, is the unity of the scientific method that is the connective tissue between these diverse epochs of science, part, present, and future.

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Beyond the Big Bang

Saturday

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The cover story on this month’s issue of Scientific American is Does the Multiverse Really Exist?, and the BBC has also had a story on the same, ‘Multiverse’ theory suggested by microwave background. Here is the opening paragraph of the Scientific American story:

“In the past decade an extraordinary claim has captivated cosmologists: that the expanding universe we see around us is not the only one; that billions of other universes are out there, too. There is not one universe—there is a multiverse. In Scientific American articles and books such as Brian Greene’s latest, The Hidden Reality, leading scientists have spoken of a super-Copernican revolution. In this view, not only is our planet one among many, but even our entire universe is insignificant on the cosmic scale of things. It is just one of countless universes, each doing its own thing”

It is typical for contemporary scientific thought to present this as a new idea, notwithstanding several thousand years of philosophical tradition investigating the infinity of worlds, as it is equally typical to cite a recent book on the topic rather than to acknowledge the theoretical underpinnings of the idea that go back to the earliest works of the Western tradition. I mentioned similar considerations not long ago in a post about Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.

The BBC story ‘Multiverse’ theory suggested by microwave background by Jason Palmer references the paper First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation by Feeney, Johnson, Mortlock, and Peiris. Here’s the abstract of the paper:

The eternal inflation scenario predicts that our observable universe resides inside a single bubble embedded in a vast inflating multiverse. We present the first observational tests of eternal inflation, performing a search for cosmological signatures of collisions with other bubble universes in cosmic microwave background data from the WMAP satellite. We conclude that the WMAP 7-year data do not warrant augmenting ACDM with bubble collisions, constraining the average number of detectable bubble collisions on the full sky N_s < 1:6 at 68% CL. Data from the Planck satellite can be used to more definitively test the bubble collision hypothesis.

First Observational Tests of Eternal Inflation by Feeney, Johnson, Mortlock, and Peiris

This is from the second paragraph of the paper:

Eternal inflation is ubiquitous in theories with extra dimensions (string theory being the primary example) and positive vacuum energy. However, testing this scenario is extremely difficult since eternal inflation is a pre-inflationary epoch: any signals from outside of our bubble would naively appear to be stretched to unobservable super-horizon scales. While this is in general true, one prospect for probing this epoch lies in the observation of the collisions between vacuum bubbles. These collisions produce inhomogeneities in the inner-bubble cosmology, raising the possibility that their effects are imprinted in the cosmic microwave background

I find these recent developments in cosmology both welcome and troubling. It is welcome because the time in long overdue to give serious consideration to theories that do not limit the universe to that generated from the Big Bang (as cosmologists once limited the universe only to the Milky Way galaxy, and before that to our solar system), and it is troubling because the way in which these developments are presented confirms much that I have written recently about Fashionable Anti-Philosophy in science.

From the origins of the Big Bang model up until very recently, it was commonplace among scientists to assert that space and time began with the big bang, and that it was meaningless to speak of the big bang singularity as existing in space or time (this was called the “container theory” of space and time), since space and time (actually, spacetime) was generated by the big bang. To insist upon any other account marked you out as a philosopher and a fool who simply couldn’t understand the scientific concepts involved and the mathematics behind them.

Truly enough, from the point of view of observational cosmology it is meaningless to develop theories of things that can’t be observed, like the interior of singularities, what lies outside the light cone, or what happened before the big bang. But cosmology is not limited to observational cosmology, and physicists routinely theorize about things that can’t be observed, on the hope that they might someday be observed. The “standard model” of particle physics has been looking for the Higgs boson for years, and is hopeful that it will be found soon. But this is why we formulate hypotheses: so we have a research program that can focus on finding mechanisms that might explain the things that we can see.

The great scientific and mathematical revolution that supposedly made all this both possible and rational was the idea of the finite and unbounded universe that was bent around on itself, like the surface of the earth, so that even though there is no edge to the cosmos, that does not mean that it is infinite. There is no edge because there is no boundary, and there is no boundary because the universe is finite and unbounded. The elliptical geometry of Riemann, adapted by Einstein as the setting for General Relativity, gave a precise mathematical expression to this idea. But the advocates of the finite and unbounded universe carefully avoided explaining the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic curvature, and with a little bit of ambiguity they were able to pretend that the universe was expanding into nothingness without giving an account of this nothingness.

A typical expression of this attitude, in the form of an aside, comes from J. J. Callahan, in discussing his motivation for writing his frequently cited paper, “The Curvature of Space in a Finite Universe” (Scientific American, Volume 235, Number 2, August, 1976). Callahan said the paper grew:

“…out of an attempt to explain Einstein’s concept of a finite but unbounded space to my nonscientific colleagues at Smith. They found it tough going, and some simply dismissed a finite universe as impossible, because Kant had done so when he studied the question 300 years ago.”

Apart from a misrepresentation of Kant, Callahan’s “non-scientific colleagues” are caricatured as mere simpletons who can’t hack mathematical and scientific ideas (it was “tough going” for them), and not people who had genuine intuitions of the how the universe is put together but were unable to express them with the same blinding simplicity of the big bang model producing a finite and unbounded universe.

I am not the only one to have noticed this systematic ambiguity in recent cosmology. I found this amusingly acerbic quote in The Ontology and Cosmology of Non-Euclidean Geometry:

“The closest we seem to have come to a more open consideration of these matters is when both Stephen Hawking and Karl Popper [Karl Popper, Unended Quest, Open Court, 1990; p.16] point out that Einstein, whether or not he successfully answered Kant’s Antinomy of Space, did not answer the Antinomy of Time: despite decades of everyone glorifying in the philosophical revelation of a finite but unbounded universe, they simply didn’t notice that the solution proposed for space didn’t work with time. It is to Hawking’s great philosophical credit that he faces this question squarely.”

The author here has been more charitable to Hawking than I would be, as Hawking has been prominent among those who have ridiculed what he sees as the simple-mindedness of philosophers in insisting upon answers to their questions about a universe with this geometrical structure. Morevoer, I would maintain that the “philosophical revelation of a finite but unbounded universe” doesn’t even offer a solution to the problem of space, much less time, much less spacetime.

So I am happy to see cosmologists extending their scope and trying to get outside the confines of the big bang model, but I continue to be distressed that they continue to ridicule the philosophical underpinnings of their own ideas, and that they will go through a lot of needless duplication of labor in coming up with ideas that have been worked through time and again. But, if you’re aiming at research dollars to build the latest, greatest superconducting supercollider, or the biggest and most sensitive radio telescope, it isn’t going to pull much weight with the grant writing committees or the grant granting institutions themselves to tell them you’ll be spending the next few years in a library reading old books in order to refine your concepts to the point that they might suggest a research program.

Physicists and cosmologists seem to belong to the Field of Dreams school of thought, pursuing a “if we build it, they will come” strategy in research, with “they” being discoveries, suitably celebrated in the headlines of newspapers.

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Seeing the World for What It Is

Thursday

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Roosting birds at Pass-a-Grille Beach, Florida; the natural world is a fitting point of departure not only for understanding nature through science, but also of understanding science through the philosophy of science.

Yesterday’s meditation upon The Fungibility of the Biome led me to think in very general terms about scientific knowledge. It is one of the remarkable things about contemporary natural science — following rigorously, as it does, the methodological naturalism toward which it has struggled over the past several hundred years since the advent of the Scientific Revolution — that the more complex and sophisticated it becomes, the more closely science is in touch with the details of ordinary experience. This is almost precisely the opposite of what one finds with most intellectual traditions. As an intellectual tradition develops it often becomes involuted and self-involved, veering off in oddball directions and taking unpredictable tangents that take us away from the world and our immediate experience of it, not closer to it. The history of human reason is mostly a history of wild goose chases.

Detail of a pelican from the above photograph.

In fact, Western science began exactly in this way, and in so doing gave us the most obvious example of an involuted, self-referential intellectual tradition that was more interested in building on a particular cluster of ideas than of learning about the world. This we now know as scholasticism, when the clerics and monks of medieval Europe read and re-read, studied and commented upon, the works of Aristotle. For a thousand years, Aristotle was synonymous with natural science.

The scholastics constructed a science upon the basis of Aristotle, rather than upon the world with Aristotle as a point of departure.

Aristotle is not to be held responsible for the non-science that was done in his name and, to add insult to injury, was called science. If Aristotle had been treated as a point of departure rather than as dogma to be defended and upheld as doctrine, medieval history would have been very different. But at that time Western history was not yet prepared for the wrenching change that science, when properly pursued, forces upon us, both in terms of our understanding of the world and the technology it makes possible (and the industry made possible in turn by technology).

Science forces wrenching change upon us because it plays havoc with some of the more absurd notions that we have inherited from our earlier, pre-scientific history. Pre-scientific beliefs suffer catastrophic failure when confronted with their scientific alternatives, however gently the science is presented in the attempt to spare the feelings of those still wedded to the beliefs of the past.

Once we get past our inherited absurdities, as I implied above, we can see the world for what it is, and science puts us always more closely in touch with what the world it is. Allow me to mention two examples of things that I have recently learned:

Example 1) We know now that not only does the earth circle the sun, and the sun spins with the Milky Way, but we know that this circling and spinning is irregular and imperfect. The earth wobbles in its orbit, and in fact the sun bobs up and down in the plane of the Milky Way as the galaxy spins. This wobbling and bobbing has consequences for life on earth because it changes the climate, sometimes predictably and sometimes unpredictably. But regularity is at least partly a function of the length of time we consider. The impact of extraterrestrial objects on the earth seems like a paradigmatic instance of catastrophism, and the asteroid impact that likely contributed to the demise of the dinosaurs is thought of as a catastrophic punctuation in the history of life, but we now also know that the earth is subject to periods of greater bombardment by extraterrestrial bodies when it is passing through the galactic plane. Viewed from a perspective of cosmological time, asteroid impacts and regular and statistically predictable. And it happens that about 65 million years ago we were passing through the galactic plane and we caught a collision as a result. All of this makes eminently good sense. Matter is present at greater density in the galactic plane, so we are far more likely to experience collisions at this time. All of this accords with ordinary experience.

Example 2) We have had several decades to get used to the idea that the continents and oceans of the earth are not static and unchanging, but dynamic and dramatically different over time. A great many things that remain consistent during the course of one human lifetime have been mistakenly thought to be eternal and unchanging. Now we know that the earth changes and in fact the whole cosmos changes. Even Einstein had to correct himself on this account. His first formulation of general relativity included the cosmological constant in order to maintain the cosmos according to its presently visible structure. Now cosmological evolution is recognized and we detail the lives of stars as carefully as we detail the natural history of a species. Now that we know something of the natural history of our planet, and we know that it changes, we find that it changes according to our ordinary experience. In the midst of an ice age, when much of the world’s water is frozen as ice and is burdening the continental plates as ice, it turns out that the weight of the ice forces the continents lower as they float in the magma beneath them. During the interglacial periods, when much or most of the ice melts, unburdened of the weight the continents bob up again and rise relative to the oceanic plates that have not been been weighted down with ice. And, in fact, this is how things behave in our ordinary experience. It is perhaps also possible (though I don’t know if this is the case) that the weight of ice, melted and now run into the oceans, becomes additional water weight pressing down on the oceanic plates, which could sink a little as a result.

Last night I was reading A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science by John Losee (an excellent book, by the way, that I heartily recommend) and happened across this quote from Larry Laudan (p. 213):

…the degree of adequacy of any theory of scientific appraisal is proportional to how many of the [preferred intuitions] it can do justice to. The more of our deep intuitions a model of rationality can reconstruct, the more confident we will be that it is a sound explication of what we mean by ‘rationality’.

Contemporary Anglo-American analytical philosophers seem to love to employ the locution “deep intuitions” and similar formulations in the way that a few years ago (or a few decades ago) phenomenologists never tired of writing about the “richness of experience.” Certainly experience is rich, and certainly there are deep intuitions, but to have to call attention to either by way of awkward locutions like these points to a weakness in formulating exactly what it is that is rich about experience, and exactly what it is that is deep about a deep intuition.

And this, of course, is the whole problem in a nutshell: what exactly is a deep intuition? What intuitions ought to be considered to be preferred intuitions? I suggest that our preferred intuitions ought to be those most common and ordinary intuitions that we derive from our common and ordinary experience, things like the fact that floating bodies, when weighted down, float a little lower in the water, or whatever medium in which they happen to float. It is in this spirit that we recall the words that Robert Green Ingersoll attributed to Ferdinand Magellan:

“The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church”

The quote bears exposition. Almost certainly Magellan never said it, or even anything like it. Nevertheless, we ought to be skeptical for reasons other than those cited by the most familiar skeptics, who like to point out that the church never argued for the flatness of the earth. We ought to be skeptical because Magellan was a deeply pious man, who lost his life before the completion of his circumnavigation by his crew because Magellan was so intent upon the conversion to Catholicism of the many peoples he encountered. Eventually he encountered peoples who did not want to be converted, and they eventually took up arms and killed him in an entirely unnecessary engagement. But what remains interesting in the quote, and its implied reference to Galileo’s early observations of the moon, is not so much about flatness as about perfection. Aristotle in particular, and ancient Greek philosophy in general, held that the heavens were a realm of perfection in which all bodies were perfectly spherical and moved in perfectly circular motions through the sky. We now know this to be false, and Galileo was among the first to graphically demonstrate this with his sketches of superlunary mountains.

What does the word “superlunary” refer to? It is a term that derives from pre-Copernican (or, if you will, Ptolemaic) astronomy. When it was believed that the earth was the center of the universe, the closest extraterrestrial body was believed to be the moon (this happened to be correct, even if much in Ptolemaic astronomy was not correct). Everything below the moon, i.e., everything sublunary, was believed to be tainted and imperfect, contaminated with the dirt of lowly things and the stain of Original Sin, while everything above the moon, i.e., everything superlunary, including all other known extraterrestrial bodies, were believed to be free of this taint and therefore to be perfect, therefore unblemished. Thus it was deeply radical to observe an “imperfection” on the supposedly perfect spheres beyond the earth, as it was equally radical to discover “new” extraterrestrial bodies that had never been seen before, like the moons of Jupiter.

Both of these heresies point to our previous tendency to attribute an eternal and unchanging status to things beyond the earth. It was believed impossible to discover “new” extraterrestrial bodies because the heavens, after all, were complete, perfect, and unchanging. For the same reason, one should not be able to view anything as irregular as mountains or shadows on extraterrestrial bodies. Once we get beyond the absurd postulate of extraterrestrial perfection, we can see the world with our own eyes, and for what it is. And when we begin to do so, we do not negate the properties of perfection once attributed to the superlunary world as much as we find them to be simply irrelevant. The heavens, like the earth, are neither perfect nor imperfect. They simply are, and they are what they are. To attribute evaluative or normative content or significance to them, such as believing in their perfection, is only to send us off on one of those oddball directions or unpredictable tangents that I mentioned in the first paragraph.

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