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Title: Science As Radicalism Author: William Gillis Date: 2015/08/18 Language: en Topics: science, anarchism, anarcho-transhumanism, technology, critique, post-left, civilization Source: Retrieved on 31st January 2016 from http://humaniterations.net/2015/08/18/science-as-radicalism/.
It’s no secret that a good portion of the left today considers science
profoundly uncool. A slight affinity with it persists among a majority,
but few asides of scorn by the continental philosophers influential in
the contemporary leftist canon see spirited response and science’s most
prominent champions remain dated historical figures like Peter Kropotkin
and Élisée Reclus. Indeed there’s a lingering whiff of technocratic
stodginess and death that the word “science” has never quite shaken.
Those leftists most associated with it have a tendency to either be
authoritarians looking to legitimize near-fascist narratives, or
doe-eyed activists enchanted by saccharine visions of self-managed
bureaucracies and The Meeting That Never Ends. To a great many who
identify as radicals “science” appears in our lives primarily as a place
our various enemies habitually retreat to conjure the authority their
shoddy arguments couldn’t.
Taken in this light as a sort of nebulous divinity — spoken of with
explicit capitalization and the occasional flourishing exclamation mark
— “Science!” often strikes like a character in the tales we encounter
throughout our life, gradually accumulating a jumble of associations and
personality traits. Tales that are almost uniform across our society.
Everyone knows the high school story of Science! in rough terms: The
belief that the entirety of our reality can be divided up into little
atoms and facts. Gleaned from numbers, brutally harvested, and then
locked into little jars. Except — the story goes — it’s never quite
capable of successfully reducing us to these accounting sheets; all it
succeeds at is calling for xenocidal policies, unleashing catastrophes,
and, in its insane pursuit of infinite knowledge (ie domination) over
nature, consuming everything and everyone in its wake. Science! is
surely just another way of expressing the logic of empire and
capitalism. Science! is a religious institution that brokers no
alternatives. Science! is nuclear weapons, GMO killer seeds, animal
testing, bulldozers, nazi medical experiments, Jurassic Park, and
Christopher Columbus. It may have some more anodyne faces, but the
affair as a whole is inseparable from destructive hubris and cold
inhumanity.
Once you’ve seen this pattern or narrative it’s all too easy to fit
everything into it.
Chances are you don’t directly experience science in your everyday life.
But you do encounter its glossy logo incessantly. In the news stories
trolls cite against you to “prove” something about gender roles. In the
stickers on giant technological devices. If it’s not sneering Dawkins
fans telling you Science! says they’re right then it’s the horror tales
repeated incessantly by a fearful popular culture. We’ve watched
thousands of movies moralizing about “playing god” by seeking
understanding, to the point where we just assume such cinematic mistakes
are a realistic thing that totally happens. Someone says “the Large
Hadron Collider could create a blackhole” and we partially believe them
because like we’ve seen this movie before and further we immediately
leap to our Hollywood notion of a “blackhole” where it eats the earth
(rather than immediately evaporating into hawking radiation). There’s
literally a terrorist organization trying to murder graduate students
over a fear (“grey goo”) they admit they don’t understand at all. But
again, we’ve seen this movie.
Okay, sure, scientists may occasionally manage to poke their heads
through the media wall and point out that pollution is happening or that
actual neuroscience doesn’t back patriarchal narratives, but that’s
clearly just them cleaning up after their colleagues, their own
mistakes, their own colonizer logic. So many terrible people cite
science as a justification there must be something to it. And who could
deny that ozone depletion and deforestation wouldn’t have happened in
the first place if we weren’t making pencils and measuring devices for
those scientists to scribble down their findings. (Don’t talk to us
about scale or ridiculous differences in orders of magnitude! Numbers
remind us of how much math class sucked and any reference to scale
proves it’s “just a matter of degree.” And anyway all of industrial
society surely depends entirely on all the rest of it! It’s a package
deal!) Even if Science! has good parts, it surely also has a Dark Side
and dare not be let free to its own desires. At best it’s a tool capable
of some good (if tightly enslaved) and much evil (if embraced for its
own sake). But if it is just a tool it’s totally the master’s tool. And
at worst? At worst Science! is an insane power fantasy of our rulers
that has motivated and facilitated the enslavement of the entire world.
Science! is — in short — accepted on face value. It is taken more or
less as what we see called Science! almost everywhere. An unlucky few of
us are granted closer experience, stumbling into soul-sucking
engineering jobs for companies or academic sweatshops, specializing in
what boils down to optimizing a single widget. Science! is on the
nametag. Science! is on the diploma. Science! is on our report. Science!
is how our paymasters excuse the damage our widget causes in military or
economic application. Science! must surely be this.
You can tell I think this is all patent nonsense. A similar
intentionally misattributed and surface-deep tale could be told about
“Anarchy” from the newscaster desks to the Hot Topic stickers.
Yet the pull of such narratives are all consuming. And like any good
tale, they typically have a wide enough array of moving parts to make
any attempt at thorough critique prohibitively involved. Even if you
were to examine every association, assumed causation, repeated lie, and
misattribution it’s unlikely someone enraptured by this narrative would
be able to hold it all in their attention at the same time. They’d
always feel confident you hadn’t addressed enough. And in the face of
such complexity, they might as well default on whatever bundle of
associations they already have. In any case this narrative is dressed up
as a ‘critique’ of something presently in power — what? do you oppose
critiques? are you defending those in power?? surely the status quo
needs no more defenders!
As with conspiracy theories, if you hold a believer’s nose to the tricks
or holes in their tale they’ll sincerely retort that surely every other
possible story depends on equivalent slights of hand. Time and time
again I hear from hip radicals the same derision with science dressed up
as enlightenment: “All models are wrong, it’s just that some can be
useful self-deceptions.” If everything’s equally just a myth, equally
ungrounded, or politically suspect, you might as well settle on whatever
seems like it would be the most useful story given your psychology and
context.
Among other peculiarities I have the dubious distinction of having been
raised by a true believer in “Christian Science.” If you’re unfamiliar
with the religion think less Scientology than a cranky first-wave
feminist sort of Mormonism. Which is mostly just to say a distinctly
19th century American invention with a tenuous Christian genealogy,
conservative aesthetics, and some weird twists into philosophical
idealism.
Christian Scientists are most notable for their unique response to the
problem of suffering in the presence of an omnipotent god: they respond
by disbelieving in suffering. Indeed they disbelieve in the entire
material world and sometimes even logic or math. It’s one of the cutest
tricks in the history of religion and philosophy and I feel bears some
horrified appreciation. There’s an organized religion in our world with
hundreds of thousands of followers founded on an explicit version of
immaterialism that would do even George Berkeley proud. If you break
your back or are imprisoned by a rapist you can cope by denying that any
of that actually exists. The entire material universe in fact is a
vicious lie, an error caused by the mistaken thoughts of “mortal mind.”
There is only God and Her love, everything else is a shared delusion, a
consensus reality. Thus, if you’re in suffering, disassociate. If you
face obstacles, work harder at convincing yourself they’re not a
problem. If you’re privileged, bask in the knowledge that you must be
doing something right as a matter of character. It’s basically The
Secret for 1880s housewives.
Rarely is the core of faith exposed so openly. Christian Science caters
to the poor, the mentally ill, and rich conservatives with hippie
inclinations. Washington DC is filled with them. My impoverished family
was once bizarrely taken yachting by a former assistant director of the
CIA.
So if you’re going to invent a stripped down version of Christianity
that resolves its incoherencies by claiming the universe doesn’t exist
and expressing distrust if not intense hostility to any sort of hands-on
engaging with material reality or even consistent bayesian logic — if
you’re going to become famous for letting children die rather than
concede to basic science — why adopt the label “Science”? Well put
simply, in the 1800s when the church’s founder Mary Baker Eddy was
trying to win over the world, “science” was a popular buzzword with a
lot of awe but little public comprehension. (So exactly like today.) The
founding saga of Christian Science is that a middle class schizophrenic
white girl addicted to morphine slipped and hurt herself, some doctors
allegedly told her she would never heal and in a few days she did. Bam.
New religion.
There’s a couple things to note here.
Even before Baker appropriated the term for herself, the dastardly
representatives of “science” in this story, the “doctors” (they were
actually homeopaths) had just as brazenly appropriated said mantle for
themselves. Little about practiced medicine at the time involved
anything remotely close to the kind of knowledge of root causes and
relationships that had driven the public stature of “science.” Physics
and mathematics, with chemistry and some limited realms of biology
dogging at their heels, had seen a stunning burst of conceptual
developments and dramatic evidence over three centuries. We were old
hats at advanced calculus and were sending electric signals across the
transatlantic cable — but we didn’t even really have the germ theory of
disease. Would-be doctors, like everyone else, were trying to position
themselves as inheritors and compatriots of if not indistinguishable
from physicists. Such baldfaced appropriation of anything garnering
respect is venerable tradition and those in power were well-versed long
before Baker. From the days of Newton there’ve been rich statesmen like
Francis Bacon leaping to define what those folk garnering respect were
really all about and how it could be applied to other things. In fact
the barrage of quacks, cultists, con-men, and politicians so dwarfed the
numbers of those they were emulating that very quickly they managed to
seize the mantle of “science” in the public’s eye for all manner of pet
projects. It didn’t matter that the people five-seconds prior considered
scientists emphatically dismissed nonsense like phrenology and other
such ‘sciences of peoples’ as ridiculous, the establishment showered any
halfbaked fool willing to defend patriarchy, white supremacy, and
capitalism with money and displays of respect. Neither her neighborhood
“doctors” nor Mary Baker Eddy herself (the original name she chose for
her religion was “Science of Man”) were doing anything different than
most people throughout modern history; they found something respected or
liked for whatever underlying reason and mischaracterized that reason or
offered a different explanation so they could hitch their own stuff to
it.
But Baker didn’t just ride this popular wave of appropriation, she took
advantage of the way it muddied the waters to discredit and disregard
the original scientists. The rhetorical tactics common in bible study
when I was a kid will be familiar to anyone today: Stripping merely
brilliant and unparalleled models or insights of their explicit context
and assigning them strawman pretensions as Absolute Knowledge; using the
shoddy results of appropriators to slander by association the original
endeavor; belittling anything too far outside the everyday concepts,
experiences, and concerns of those in a certain cultural/economic space…
it was a by-the-numbers affair; the same sort of rhetoric you hear from
theocrats or nihilist burnouts today. (If the ideologies that use such
defenses vary so wildly it’s because once you chuck pursuit of coherence
and the roots of dynamics you can “argue” any arbitrary position.) The
thing is, it worked. It’s one thing to latch onto a bigger phenomena in
hopes of becoming indistinguishable from it, quite another to use it as
a ladder to reach respect and then turn around and try to set that
ladder on fire.
Mary Baker Eddy’s wild success is a testament to human weakness and
oppression. People who have no power, who are trapped or locked out,
will go through all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid coming to terms
with their reality. Minds are always looking for avenues of exploration
and the only thing more painful than being fundamentally barred is not
knowing where to start. Conscious minds can’t figure out how to live in
stasis and the result of trying is always insanity. To minimize this as
best we can we turn to escapism, we shrink our horizons, we frantically
model alternatives in hopes of finding a useful perspective. And when
that grows weak we simply deny. There’s no way they could know something
we don’t. No way our abuser or a person with more privilege could have
legitimately discovered realities by virtue of their situation. To admit
this is to come face to face with the full nature of power and either
strip us of hope or open yet another exhausting frontier of conflict.
I single out Christian Science as an illustrative example of the
disingenuousness surrounding use of the word “science” in particular
because it arose simultaneous with an array of more influential
appropriations, from “Social Darwinism” to Comte’s “Sociology” to Marx’s
“Scientific Socialism”, at a historical moment when most of the academic
categories we know today were being hashed out.
To understand the tangles of philosophical attempts over the last
century to define “science” it’s important to grasp the context
surrounding exactly who got in and who didn’t when the modern lines were
drawn. In the mid 1800s the explosive cultural force of the
Enlightenment had been mostly spent and the social prescriptions of its
political ideologues were undeniably losing cachet amid the complexities
of industrialization. Mathematics and physics were still accelerating at
a breakneck pace but the days when political theorists could pretend to
be of the same cloth were fading. Studies were moving out of social
halls and into an increasingly segmented academia. In the thereto
standard academic distinction social concerns that we’d today classify
as economics and sociology were commonsensically denoted as “moral
philosophies” — ie. inherently political — while the real drivers of
undeniable advances in knowledge like physics and mathematics were
“natural philosophies.” This distinction within academia brought a
clarity that threatened to undermine those forces looking to appropriate
intellectual authority.
Thankfully for them there were distinct aesthetic qualities to the
arguments of Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Hobbes that resembled
the mathematical proofs and rigorous surveys of early physicists or
sought to tenuously extend models within natural philosophy into
normative social theories. That was after all the whole game of Hobbes
and company. And so eventually the term “science” was settled on as a
means by which economists, sociologists and the like could be grouped
together with the natural philosophies.
Over the previous centuries, with the decline of tradesmen and the rise
of industry, “science” had quietly shifted from an adjective describing
the individual cleverness and experiential know-how of craftsmen and
artisans to a noun mainly signifying the systematic collection of data.
“Science” thus provided an effective way to redefine what exactly was
the source of success in the early cluster of physicsy fields, and to
blend them with certain moral philosophies (usually wed to the kinds of
state power or capital that could perform extensive data collection)
into a intentionally hazy and exploitable bundle of popular
associations, primarily characterized by an air of inevitability and
absolute knowledge.
It’s this last impression that still galvanizes people today, often
quite violently.
As you might expect with stakes this high philosophers promptly spent
much of the twentieth century squabbling in direct and tangential ways
over what qualifies a statement or claim as “scientific”, or what counts
as a “scientific fact.” I’d argue that this approach, while
understandable, is ill-conceived.
The project of drawing a boundary between the inside and outside of
Science! — a project called the Demarcation Problem — has mostly played
out as contests over the mantle of science as an adjective denoting a
kind of truth value. Thus for the philosophers and demagogues who have
invested so heavily in this battle “science” is primarily viewed in
terms of its service or danger as a rhetorical weapon. As something that
might be slapped on a statement to make it a certain type of
unassailable.
It should thus come as no surprise that virtually none of the most
prominent voices in this debate and resulting commentary have been
scientists themselves (not that we haven’t had strong opinions). And
even when the intention of those involved has been good — like finding
clear definitions that get evolution and global warming accepted as
truthful but not homeopathy — the attempts invariably trend greedy in
their praise or dismissal. Either way they often end up claiming fields
like psychology and economics as being of the same primary category or
essential nature as physics. At the same time almost all of these
philosophers and demagogues have felt the need to hobble science lest it
get too uppity and say more than they want it to say. There’s a
widespread and frequently vocalized fear of science ceasing to function
as a highly limited tool and instead getting unleashed as an
orientation, motivation, or desire.
And so we get the simplistic Baconian picture taught in high schools
since the Cold War: Where a limited methodology or proceduralism is
almost entirely divorced from context or analysis and held up as the
single defining characteristic of Science!. The almost entire process of
theory or model development and comparison is handwaved away, and all
that’s left is data collection and calculation of error bars.
Under this regime science is — at least officially — limited to the
smallest of inductive steps forward. There is no space for analysis or
models that require a complicated hashing out before data collection.
The vast array of analysis of probabilities, bayesian dependencies,
contextual considerations, limits, etc. that good scientists crank
through — or any serious comparison of differing models, paradigms or
lines of investigation prior to data-collection — is waved away as not
really core to science. In the methodology picture a miracle occurs
whereby some arbitrary hypotheses emerge fully formed — each more or
less as a priori good as the next. There is no room for nuanced
contextual considerations or the extended development of analysis that
does not immediately offer experimentally falsifiable or verifiable
predictions, nor any explicitly preferred direction in the winnowing
down or comparison of such analysis. All that matters is the data
collection and everything else is ultimately treated as a kind of
handwavey excuse for it. “Signals” are then found, but how fundamental
they are is anyone’s guess. Indeed, as an exercise, it can be
illustrative to survey the notoriously horrid headlines of pop science
and see how many times phrases like “science says” could just as well be
replaced with “data says.”
This preposterously limited model of science obviously parallels the
various currents of panopticon-aspiration we know all too well today,
but it has its roots in classical imperialism — not just in the obvious
necessity of taking censuses and mapping shorelines, but in the
competitive collection of superficial “curiosities” by the upper classes
to strengthen hierarchies at home.
It’s a sadly underemphasized fact that the aristocracy pioneered aspects
of consumerism long before industrialism. In particular many fields that
came to be considered “sciences” in the 1800s like lepidoptery were
originally launched as fields of curio collecting whereby members of the
aristocracy hunted down rare items from around the world and displayed
them as one might today display a record collection. The key to
understanding this dynamic is that anything with barriers to entry and
scarcities can be used as currency to prop up a hierarchy. When the
things we might otherwise value become less scarce those invested in
social hierarchy itself respond by culturally promoting the valuing of
other scarce things.
When — as is common in the modern era — information is made the scarce
good, the resulting data collection or generation of lingo & taxonomies
need not bare any real relation or insight into what true underlying
dynamics are involved, and can happily countenance the most superficial
or limited models.
The problem with identifying science in terms of all this is that data
collection unto itself doesn’t really signify any concept or dynamic of
substance. It’s hard to realistically speak of there being a passionate
movement or culture or ideology or idealism of data collection. And data
collection is not in any real sense descriptive of what motivated those
original scientists everyone else appropriated from. Any old pile of
data might show how particulars happen to be arranged, but alone it
offers little insight into how or why. Some statistical analysis on that
data might make for good predictions, but only within a certain given
context, whose bounds we remain entirely ignorant of. At least without a
serious sort of thoughtfulness, the contours of which are blithely
ignored by the methodology tale. Incorrect surface-level impressions and
models might well be falsifiable, verifiable, etc, yet remain
unchallenged outside a given context; how and where we search matters.
As do our motivations.
It’s easy to apply the trapping of the scientific method — even the
broader definitions of science promoted by many philosophers — and end
up with little in the way of deep insight. Indeed that’s often the point
of much that the sticker of “Science!” is slapped upon: to map the world
as it is and hide how else it might be or how it might change. Those who
are invested in existing systems have little interest in mapping
alternate possibilities. And those preoccupied with their own
situatedness have little desire to look beyond it or press beyond the
effective realm of their understanding.
Thankfully outside a few caricatures in some hilariously detached
postmodernist polemics few people widely accepted as scientists today
pursue data for data’s sake — as the sort of currency or fetishized
commodity that so attracts aristocrats, bureaucrats, middle-managers,
and hipsters. What motivates us is typically the search for deeper
insights and models that might be made clear — to hack our way through
the muddled chaos of first impressions, intuitions, and naive beliefs
and find the real underlying dynamics of a phenomenon.
This strong, persistent, and near-uniform tendency among scientists is,
I would argue, a good starting point for sorting out a clearer
perspective on the whole affair.
Sure “science” as a term was championed to facilitate a disingenuous
blurring and appropriation — a campaign that created a hazy umbrella of
uses in practice, filled with more contradictions and tensions than any
clear commonality — but a great deal of shaking-out has occurred since
the 1800s. And further many important traits of those originally
appropriated from have begun to be internalized by the appropriators.
Not enough, obviously — the journals of medicine and the social sciences
are still infamously rampant with irreproducible crap — but enough to
warrant notice. In no small part because there really was a unifying
tendency in the fields everyone else sought to steal legitimacy from.
Something deeper than a mere tactic or procedure.
Few would deny physicists are located at the dead center of whatever
‘science’ supposedly is. (Well okay, the most absurd appropriators like
Mary Baker Eddy and Auguste Comte eventually did, but their claims have
fared poorly at undermining the historical centrality of physics.) And
yet physics is also at the center of a wide and deep tradition within
science that is not motivated by shallow data collection and labeling
but by getting to the roots. Hence physicists’ uniform frustration
towards people attempting to derive general rules from surface data on
complex systems. And our fury historically at psuedosciences like
phrenology that the rest of the world happily accepted as science.
Ernest Rutherford’s famous cry that “All science is either physics or
stamp collecting!” arose deeply embedded in this context.
Our famed “arrogance” in this matter is better understood as an
annoyance at the lack of humility or diligence on the part of those
making such sweeping statements about macroscopic aggregate systems like
human beings. In practice “political science” and the like have often
functioned like cargo cult physics, and much of the literature of social
science and biology has remained in a continuing crisis as a direct
result of their failure to doggedly look for deeper root dynamics and
instead just catalog surface impressions. Not to mention their
corruption by economic interests seeking to derive useful tools or
actionable prescriptions, pressuring them to behave as technologists or
engineers rather than inquirers. And so we see within these broken
fields an attachment to the scientific method, rather than to what I
would term the heart of science. When you don’t actually really know why
and how something works, just that it in a certain context does — or
kinda does — from a bunch of data, you don’t have scientific knowledge
so much as mere empirical knowledge.
Of course there’s certainly space for speaking substantively about messy
abstractions like humans and human social relations, and data collection
can of course facilitate this. But the frequent lack of humility in the
social sciences & chunks of biology— the lack of any honest appreciation
and accountability for just how insanely hazy and attenuated most of it
is, often dealing entirely in immediate surface impressions — remains
stark. While things have certainly gotten better as the rigor of physics
and the like has leeched out (in particular see Scott Alexander’s
impassioned defenses of modern psychiatry and nutrition), significant
currents within these fields remain happy to speculate in shallow terms
and collect data without any diligent root-seeking or explicit
recognition of how tenuous and overly-simple their hypotheses are likely
to be.
The fact of the matter is that the remarkably successful phenomenon that
the term “Science!” has wrapped itself around is not so much a
methodology as an orientation. What was really going on, what is still
going on in science that has given it so many great insights is the
radicalism of scientists, that is to say their vigilant pursuit after
the roots (or ‘radis’). Radicals constantly push our perspectives into
extreme or alien contexts until they break or become littered with
unwieldy complications, and when such occurs we are happy to shed off
the historical baggage entirely and start anew. To not just add caveats
upon caveats to an existing model but to sometimes prune them away or
throw it all out entirely. Ours is the search for patterns and
symmetries that might reflect more universal dynamics rather than merely
good rules of thumb within a specific limited context. As any radical
knows “good enough” is never actually enough.
To be sure there are naturally going to be certain tactics and
strategies that are generally quite useful in such pursuit — some in
very deep and inescapable ways — but never any single magically simple
and always efficient procedure or methodology.
Kuhn and Feyerabend pointed out half a century ago that no simple set of
rules of procedure could explain numerous important instances in the
actual history of scientific discovery. Galileo’s heliocentric model for
example was among other failings easily and immediately falsified by the
astronomical data of the time. Its greater pull lay not in perfectly
matching the data, but in an underlying conceptual critique of the
arbitrariness of the perpetually added circles-within-circles necessary
to prop up a geocentric model. That’s a meaningful critique in terms of
the free parameters and kolmogorov complexity, but it’s not reducible to
a simple and universally valid procedure or tactic.
Science, in short, is not just mere empiricism, not merely collecting
data and doing statistics. Science most critically involves an
exploration of possible models, their dependencies, and the many
possible vectors by which they might be winnowed down, all in search for
the deepest roots. The most universal symmetries, most unique patterns
and attractors in the relations of a system. Those often hidden but
least moving foundations from which everything else in all its grand
complexity can be grown. Our probings are not randomly directed, we pull
and tug on our models, see what doesn’t shift about, and re-focus our
efforts on it directly.
So for example theories that have internal logical inconsistencies
aren’t necessarily dismissed absolutely but they do get focused on far
less because such a characteristic (inconsistency) is not rare among
possible theories: there are infinitely more possible incoherent
theories than possible coherent theories. Incoherency in a theory
provides a lot of flexibility — quite a bit of freedom to wriggle it
about. Sometimes upon investigation the inconsistent theory will
entirely unravel, a phantom temporary knot, not actually a deep root.
But sometimes the inconsistency will turn out to be patchable if we give
the theory some more attention.
Similarly — in a more practical direction — if an expanse of theories
under consideration predict that it’s infinitely more likely that all
our memories are lies and we will cease to exist in another instant, we
can in some sense abandon such theories. That’s an absolutely real
example by the way. There are certain (otherwise perfectly empirically
valid models) possible in particle physics wherein it just so happens
that as a consequence of a possible model (with particular field
strengths, a geometry of spacetime, etc) it’d be infinitely more likely
for a bowl of petunias or a human brain with all of your memories etc to
be spontaneously generated out of the quantum vacuum at some point in
the infinite history of the universe than for a brain with your
memories/feelings/etc to arise in the causal fashion those memories and
feelings would suggest. This reductio ad absurdum is called “Boltzmann
Brains” and it’s engaged with quite seriously and rigorously. It may
well be that you have never existed before this moment and will never
exist after it, but if so there’s no consequence to attempting to spend
time modeling that reality or thinking in any direction really. All
desires or motivations a mind might have would instantly dead-end in
that reality. Thus we consciously mark off those possible physics models
that imply such as “not worth dwelling on”, invest our attention in
other possible models, and call a theory a certain type of ‘failed’ when
it ends up predicting that you’re infinitely more likely to be a
Boltzmann Brain than a regular one in a regular universe. But we are
explicit about that step, and this is what marks scientific knowledge:
not a claim about a single true model, but rather an understanding of
varying possibilities and their dependencies.
The atomist framework, for instance, bore a lot of fruit and so we
sought to push it as far as it could go. And yet in field theory and
string theory certain dualities make “fundamental elements” unclear —
when two different representations are exactly equivalent to each other
in results we arguably can’t speak as to which is the “correct”
portrait. The nouns we’ve wrapped as metaphors around the mathematical
relationship fall short in their description — these can be either
reveal a redundancy in our metaphorical description or a limit to our
experimental capacity. But the fundamental relations that duality
uncovers is clear as day. This requires a nuance between what the public
views as ‘reductionism’ and what many reductionists view it as. The
reductionism of scientists is not a caricature of atomism where all
simplified macroscopic layers of abstraction, intuition or practical use
are entirely erased. After all having the word “finger” doesn’t
invalidate our use of “hand” but it does help us remember that there’s
no magical emergent platonic “handness” resisting or orchestrating the
existence of fingers — it’s just useful to have language for differing
contexts or scales of abstraction. Similarly the objective of
reductionism is not to break everything into nounish-pieces or to
simplify away complexity, but to unearth fundamental relations/patterns
from which everything else can be grown. Whether for instance these
patterns take the form of particles, fields or things like symmetry
relations.
(Incidentally this is oft repeated in my circles but it really is a
goddamn crying shame that few outside of physics have any clue just how
dramatically Emmy Noether affected our field. Outsiders talk of
Newtonian and Einsteinian paradigms, but the more refined Noetherian
paradigm of the universe as a bundle of symmetry relations has ruled
physics for almost a century. This injustice to one of the greatest
mathematicians of all time is certainly a result of patriarchy but also
partially a matter of how much harder her insight is to explain to a
general public that has, through a tyrannical, alienating and deeply
anti-science education system, been denied familiarity with even basic
calculus.)
It’s ludicrous to assume that a single hammer, a single obtuse strategy
of sharply limited meta-complexity would be capable of entirely mapping
the structure of our reality much less narrowing down fundamental roots.
There will of course be complications to our search — things like the
Boltzmann Brains — that we must take into consideration in order to do
science with any efficiency. But those who want to somehow consign
science to empiricism alone do so to artificially preserve their own
domains from contact with the scientific drive, from explicitness and
analytical rigor in mapping the probabilities and dependencies of
different possibilities.
That is not to say that that experimentation, falsifiability,
verifiability, etc, don’t play quite important roles in practice, but
rather that they should be repositioned in our language as strategies
we’ve developed or come to recognize as highly useful in pursuit of
science.
The physicist approach — seen to various degrees in other fields — to
speak explicitly in terms of what gives rise to the plausibility of a
model or research branch rarely bothers with the cartoonish notion of
steps and laws taught in high schools. Physicists enjoy an excuse to
have a go at the strongest absolutes like entropy or the speed of light.
We just keep in mind the complete chain of things implying them. And so
while a few have fun going off and publishing some “let’s chuck half of
everything we know and try over in this direction” papers, even they
know it’s unbelievably more likely an experimental result indicating a
violation of the speed of light reflects a hidden wiring problem in the
experimental apparatus than a true violation of special relativity. One
can frame this in terms of induction, as “no particle yet observed has
gone faster than c”, but that’s not remotely close to how the arguments
go down in practice which take into account the root complexity of
various models, their many meta-dimensioned bayesian dependencies, etc.
This might be thought of as a kind of Feyerabend Part II. Yes, ‘anything
goes’, but to varying degrees. In ways deeply dependent upon context.
Statistically speaking there’s a strong inclination to certain
strategies and tactics, and that’s good. That’s because the radical
impulse of science is grounded in bayesian learning, an optimal approach
it turns out our neural networks also follow at the smallest level. As
in any bayesian system comparisons between models are not arbitrary
decisions hidden behind a veil of subjectivity about which we can say
nothing. Examining meta-decisions does not oblige suddenly throwing up
one’s hands and allowing charlatans free reign to claim anything about
global warming; we can still trace everything, our entire network of
assumptions and weightings, or relations. What defines science — or
rather what is the single most important and fundamental dynamic of note
within the hazy cluster of shit called “science” — is not so much the
strategies and models it has accumulated at any meta-level but the goal
of root-pursuing, a drive that hashes through the infinite possible
configuration space and gravitates towards a single locus, or sometimes
merely to more unique regions or sets of loci.
One might approach this looking for traditional philosophical claims,
and say that such an orientation assumes the existence of universal
patterns and thus is making a truth claim about reality being
consistent, but I think the orientation is better stated as an emergent
line of exploration.
If there are literally no universal consistencies then pattern searching
is useless because there cannot even be local consistencies. To give an
impression of how this works consider if 1+1=2 was only local to some
neighborhood: Then you could continuously transform to some other
neighborhood where 1+1=”duck” and then transform back. If the transforms
are always perfect pullbacks such that 1+1 continues to equal 2 upon
returning locally then you’ve exposed a universal consistency on some
meta level that has structure. If not then local consistency dissolves
entirely. (In general I abhor mere arithmetic examples as violently
misrepresenting the nature of mathematics and implicitly bundling in
certain philosophies of mathematics; “1+1=2” should be read as serving
in this context only as a loose and popularly accessible metaphor for
some manner of local consistency.) My point is that consistency or
lack-of-consistency in thought is ultimately radically infectious; there
is no middle ground. Upon any motion things either collapse in one
direction or the other. And since all intentional action explicitly
requires an assumption of some level of consistency, it implicitly
assumes a universal consistency — regardless of whether or not the agent
has full access to its nature.
We can, in a certain trivial sense, never know anything truly — in an a
priori sense. Even Descartes’ ‘cogito ergo sum’ provides no firm ground.
The qualia of the act of thought is in many substantive respects
suspect; every way we might frame it is laden with baggage of
assumptions. The formation of conscious narrative is itself an
abstraction that fails at points and dissolves under examination. Even
the recursive knowledge of the motion of our own thoughts and
self-experience doesn’t happen instantaneously, and requires an
assumption that our memory or state of mind an instant prior in the loop
of recursion is real. There is no winning epistemology. What we can do
is identify patterns, make models of dependencies.
Science in no way condemns postulating outside the assumptions that the
“external” world is real, that nature really is uniform, etc. Rather
scientific or radical thinking very quickly notes just how much of a
formless uninteresting arbitrary muck happens beyond those assumptions.
As with the Boltzmann Brains we put up a sign and move on.
Similarly the ‘problem’ of induction is only a problem if you are
interested in stating things as though they were laws rather than
symmetries, ‘absolute truths’ rather than patterns. We don’t have to
make that jump to do science. It’s a faint distinction, but one that
reveals many confusions that plague philosophy of science. The
difference is intent: between understanding/modeling a reality and
achieving an ends. Science’s goal is not so much to be useful as to give
a map of more unique, simple but descriptive, accounts of reality. We
may happily mark off some of those accounts as not useful but science
retains those accounts. And if multiple theories of similar complexity
and arbitrariness give identical predictions or no predictions then they
are of less interest than the theory that gives the same predictions but
derives such from simpler roots, with less arbitrariness.
I haven’t been making any real distinction so far between mathematics
and the sciences, and the above description of science as radicalism
obviously places mathematics as a science. This fits the historical arc
where “science” was adopted to more widely appropriate the prestige of
advances in physics and mathematics, but the saga goes back further. The
notion of a distinction between physics and mathematics has always been
rather ludicrous and has persisted in the west mostly as an artifact of
Greek mysticism and Christian theology. In fact this mistaken deep
division between the supposedly “a priori” patterns of math and the a
posteriori patterns of physics is arguably partially responsible for the
general paralysis of science in Europe for over a thousand years until
Newton and Leibnitz got audacious enough to challenge it. The great
advances of math and physics that started in their era on were in no
small part tied to the blurring of the two into a single tradition of
diligent radical inquiry.
Yet in the great academic reshuffling and sweeping appropriations of the
nineteenth century mathematics was rather quietly pushed out of the nest
while physics was kept. The broken language that has resulted
continually makes for very frustrating conversations. One person
declares that obviously mathematics is a science because it involves
vigorous modeling and pursuit of elegant fundamentals (in short, because
it’s radical). Whereas the other person declares that obviously math is
part of the humanities as it is not grounded in empirical
experimentation “in the physical world.”
But of course our brains are part of the physical world. Exploration of
all possible theories of formal patterns comprehensible to humans is
itself a form of experimentation — essentially a form of experimental
computer science — and data collected from such exploration is widely
taken as meaningful proof. Mathematicians for instance probe problems of
computational complexity and the meta patterns to how these explorations
have turned out has been taken as strong evidence of the complexity
classes and the incollapsibility of the polynomial hierarchy. This is
perfectly reasonable bayesian inference, but it often shocks and offends
those outside math and the other hard sciences who’ve accumulated a very
limited notion of what can constitute evidence.
And it’s worth pointing out that physicists have always taken doing math
to be both a valid realm of experimentation and the twin discipline of
physics. V.I. Arnold said it best: “Mathematics is the part of physics
where experiments are cheap.” In fact the biggest discoveries in physics
have often been mathematical reformulations of existing knowledge, from
action principles to symmetry relations to modern thermodynamics.
Physics often involves momentous discoveries that are not a prediction
of empirical data, but a restructuring of how to construct models.
Indeed the last couple decades have rapidly dissolved whatever lines had
been drawn between mathematics, computer science, and physics. These
somewhat separate academic communities are still reeling from the force
of dramatic reveal after dramatic reveal. It’s been hard for many
blindsided specialists to eat humble pie but there’s now a widespread
awareness that the three fields will have to become deeply interwoven if
not altogether indistinguishable in the future.
While there are certainly purist traditions within mathematics clinging
to the sort of Diophantine work in the tradition of the Greeks and
making snide remarks about calculus, it’s even unclear what could
possibly constitute a truly “pure” math as there are unlimited possible
formalisms or models one can work with. The inescapable fact of the
matter is that the various underlying foundations we’ve gravitated
towards choosing (like ZFC Set Theory or the increasingly popular
Homology Type Theory) are chosen because the models they generate are
better at integrating with our experiences of the world.
When John Preskill said that, “I favor the view that ‘Mathematics is
Physics’ over ‘Physics is Mathematics’,” he was expressing a relatively
common perspective from the trenches that is nevertheless shocking and
transgressive to the peanut gallery commenting on science from without.
In no small part because the division is useful to those in power.
In his work The Utopia of Rules David Graeber traced the evolution of
popular notions of “imagination” from first being seen as something
deeply tied to navigating reality to later something escapist and almost
irrelevant. Mathematics has followed a similar arc — redefined partly by
the powerful and partly in self-defense as a kind of solipsistic poetry
for the boffins whose dreaming we can’t control, regulate, or demand
immediate results from. In the end this attempt to pluck mathematics out
of the heart of science has left it as the only refuge for truly
advanced modeling, while those historical forces attempt to suppress
such everywhere else.
This artificial exclusion of mathematics from science serves a vision of
“science” that ultimately wants scientists to function as nothing more
than mechanics and sees the only meaningful exploration as that which
can be visibly embodied in a physical experiment. It wants to treat
theory as a kind of afterthought or fig leaf, and all twists and turns
in the process of theorizing as more or less equivalently suspect,
equivalently random flights of fancy. It should be no wonder this kind
of categorical framework has been gobbled up by those academics whose
experiences are largely limited to those humanities where all theorizing
away from immediate experience/experiment is often reasonably seen as
more or less equivalently tenuous, or equivalently suspect.
Under this lens that I have been presenting in a certain sense
everything is science and nothing is. The radical inquiry at the core of
science doesn’t reflect a collection of claims or practices with tightly
policeable borders, but a direction, an arrow of struggle or direction
of development. And when we recenter ‘science’ on this current we find
it to be a constantly resurgent throughout human history. From the
conceptual modeling used by hunter-gatherers to some of those used by
the social sciences.
While neuroscience, for example, may not have always been consistently
scientific it’s clearly become more so over time. Appropriation is a
complicated thing; many fields that started out as absurdities have
gradually integrated the tools, instincts and ideals of those they were
appropriating from. On the other hand chemistry was a science for a long
while, and yet is increasingly turning into a technologist discipline
interested in engineering particulars, as little in the way of relevant
root dynamics remain unferreted. Science and technology have a
complicated interplay in practice, a given scientist or technologist or
a given research project or development team will sometimes have to
switch directions repeatedly. But they still denote distinct vectors,
distinct inclinations of thought. One burrows down to the roots, the
other takes the simple nutrition from these roots back out and blossoms
it into a million applied particulars.
All human thought involves induction or rather association into models.
Those instances that feedback into more engagement — rather than
defensive mechanisms of retreat to a limited context — are surely in the
scientific or radical direction, however tentatively they end up
pushing.
I could even sing a sweet song here about how love and empathy should be
properly seen as representing the spirit of science in human one-on-one
relations; constantly pursuing better models, better impressions of one
another, and updating our models of self to grow more expansive in
response. Science and love are very closely related, and a number of
jokes in physics and math reflect on the parallels between these
hungers. A longing for a deeper intimacy than a shallow surface
modeling. That many lovers and scientists shy away or abandon their
pursuit past a certain point by no means makes the point at which they
end up settling a great reflection of “science” or “love” — the point is
the general thrust of their efforts.
It’s important to note that every historical moment in every society was
alive with flickers of radical exploration, modeling, and discovery.
It’s easy to gloss over the studious play of crafting that discovered so
damn many things, but we are in many unappreciated ways standing on the
shoulders of giants. Every single society is thick with knowledge
accumulated through experimentation and record. From first hacking our
audio cortex with musical notes to developing stronger ropes.
We should be open about the fact that much of the European explosion in
science emerged not so much from the onset of a single procedure but
through the scrabbling for deeper insights, even through abortive
attempts within the tradition of magic and the occult. Those currents
that most resemble modern science in Europe, like the development of
optics and telescopes, were for a while using the term “natural magic”
like Naples’ Academy of Secrets. The core element that drove such
advances was a suspicion that nature was governed by hidden forces and
that these that could be understood. That the secrets could be pried
open, deeper underlying patterns revealed. It was this radical drive and
fervor in the fringe communities of Europe that helped drive the
scientific revolution and really flourished when they were coupled with
the printing press’ distribution of journals to tradesmen and poor
tinkerers who leapt at the chance to contribute theories and findings
back.
In resistance some have taken to demonizing everything since the
European explosion as “western science” while validating virtually any
other explanation of the world as also “science.” And while their
conclusions that the cosmological models of some random witchdoctor
confined in experience to the Kalahari are equivalently valid to those
of a modern cosmologist is absurd liberal pluralism, it can be legit to
mark both as scientific. Models generated in other cultural or
historical contexts certainly count to varying degrees as reflective of
the arrow of radicalism. Although it’s no small point that any sort of
vigilance in today’s context should quickly reveal the failings of such
models, just as it quickly reveals the failings of those early European
“natural magic” theorists. There have absolutely been many brilliant
insights around the world and the portrait where “science” doesn’t
officially start until Francis Bacon decided to lecture physicists on
what they were doing is clearly a shitty imperialist narrative.
Mary Baker Eddy’s “scientist” “doctors” were certainly far less rigorous
or vigilant than many Chinese experimenters in medicine. Indeed Iroquois
or Chinese medicine would have been arguably better than the best
western doctors of the day. The atomic and fundamental element models
postulated by both Indians and Greeks obviously turned out to be pretty
close to the mark, but given how little there was to work with back then
early Chinese cosmology deserves appreciation as an also ran — the
yin-yang and wu xing mode were valid attempts to model the world. And
Bacon’s methodology and paradigm of experimentation? Alberuni, an Indian
Arab, had pushed for this in the middle ages and the 8-18th centuries in
India saw systematic experimentation too. Three thousand years of
science in northeast Africa burnt to the ground with Alexandria (the
word “chemistry” likely has its roots in a word meaning the knowledge of
“the black land”). On and on it goes, the astronomy of the early
Chinese, the navigational techniques of Pacific islanders, the ancient
medical knowledge of sub-Saharan Africans… Upon any investigation it’s
simply impossible to paint a picture of a discrete “western science”
that is disconnected from this global tendency.
Humans have always played with symmetries and metaphors, trying to
internalize better impressions of the world. Much of scientific
reasoning is so natural to us because we’ve been constantly doing it
since we were hunter-gatherers. Primitive cosmologies like animism and
panpsychism were quite reasonable early hypotheses. We’re a social
species with brains built primarily to navigate social relations and
model psychological dynamics; of course we would search for metaphors
there. And those that did should be lauded as doing a decent job in the
limited context they had access to.
The deeper regularities immediately visible in things like astronomy
have long been interesting to hunter-gatherers, but it was civilization
that happened to provide the scope, intellectual permanence and
continuity necessary to get further in our investigations. Of course
“civilization” is an absurdly simple way of bundling a wide array of
deeply conflicting historical currents and dynamics, and what elites
emerged in most (but not all) city societies often worked hard to
suppress science. Frequently as the first step in undermining radicalism
more broadly.
We’ve covered how “curiosity” was taken by the Victorian aristocracy and
draped over shallow and exploitative consumerism. But this attempted
appropriation followed another, more dramatic reversal: It was only in
the seventeenth century that curiosity had transformed from being seen
as a vice to a virtue. Before that watershed “curiosity” had been
consistently condemned by western civilization. The Greeks were actually
highly critical of curiosity, a tendency they felt was useless,
intrusive, and disruptive. Inquiry for its own sake, the hunger for
knowledge, was correctly identified it as uncontrollable or prone to
wildness. Curiosity was a force in conflict with the ossified and
sedentary structures of their civilization. The Christians continued
this prohibition and condemnation of curiosity, the desire for knowledge
was marked as fundamentally sinful. Rejecting the hunger of inquiry is
the very foundation of the myth of The Fall, a narrative repeated in
many societies riven with power structures. Once Authority ruled divine
and the natural order was unchallenged, then some damned girl got too
inquisitive for her britches and God could no longer maintain things the
way He liked.
Today’s primitivist ideologues emerged from a long genealogy of
complaints by the elites that the masses’ inquisitive desires
constituted a horrifying monster that had to be suppressed at any cost
lest it run amok. During the “Enlightenment” Bacon made the argument to
his fellow elites that by promoting a rigid systematizing, curiosity
after the roots could be harnessed by the state. But Hobbes’
contemporaneous attack on scientists for their abstract theories and
pursuit of understanding for understanding’s sake reflected wider social
forces seeking to suppress curiosity and that repeatedly ridiculed them
as boffins.
Some scientists persisted nonetheless, but few could be so fortunate or
tolerate the poverty and ignominy that would accompany it. Many tried to
find excuses or shields against public derision, and thus many fell into
collaboration with imperial, capitalist, and aristocratic power systems.
You see currents like this again and again throughout the fight between
science and power in history, with those in power deeply opposed to
hypotheses. Only desiring details.
Physics is intimately aware of this deep and bitter conflict. The second
world war saw most of the world’s physicists either forced to work as
engineers and technologists on weapons or at best starved of funding.
And this was paralleled and followed for decades by the widespread
blacklisting of the great number of physicists who’d been inclined to
radical politics. The legacy of those who embraced their service to the
state or crumpled under its thumb has been a vicious hostility towards
too sweeping of curiosity, imagination, and extended theorizing within
STEM practice. Physicists are today still split between those who
approve of or revile the bootlicking slogan from the Manhattan Project:
“Shut up and calculate.” Variants of this hostility and anxiety towards
theory permeate STEM culture, visible in some hackerspaces in the form
of “shut up and hack.” The cowed timidity and institutional allegiances
of engineers and data collectors versus the sweeping and unrelenting
audacity of the theoreticians.
The historical arc is clearcut: Whatever complicated entanglements
momentarily emerge in their long war, science and power are unavoidably
at odds. “I would rather discover a single cause than become king of the
Persians,” declared Democritus. What science represents is the sharpest
sort of radicalism possible, a kind of thinking and a desire in-itself
that is indomitable. The externalities of scientific inquiry overturned
established power structures and created immense instability and
complexities that are hard for power structures to navigate. Those power
structures that survived did so by awkwardly clinging to certain
predictable processes of change and trying to control and divert the
development of science. But even this is often laughable and is
certainly unlikely to be sustained.
This restructuring of how to view science is geared not just at
defending science from charges of reactionism from leftists, but at more
broadly clarifying how we might view that much looser bundle invoked by
the word “science” as a political force. Because the array of things
popularly associated with “science” is so wildly varying and hazy most
of the political claims surrounding science that don’t slice it away to
near irrelevance or neutrality as a formulaic procedure have sought to
identify underlying ideological commitments and then define “science” in
terms of them.
The problem of course has been that those undertaking this kind of
analysis (aristocrats, industrialists, liberals, marxists, & continental
philosophers) very rarely have a radical bone in their body, and so we
see writers lazily claiming that certain popular scientific models or
paradigms that emerged briefly and with attendant explicit
qualifications are in fact the core driving ideology of science. And of
course — if they even note them — the emergence of alternative
scientific models is presented as science conceding defeat or pulling
itself apart from within. But it’s not as though newtonian mechanics
were some motivating religion, rather science’s drive for the roots
ended up legitimately judging newtonian mechanics as overwhelmingly
promising for an extended period of time.
This kind of rabid preoccupation with things like positivism, atomism,
and determinism (although almost always wild strawmen thereof) is rife
among those coming from an academic or political lineage whose contact
with science is Nth-hand at best. See in particular the ongoing
cringeworthy hazy-association-fest of lazy psychology leftists have
formed around the the word “quantification.” (To be sure, as a physicist
I make the obligatory sneers and jokes about the aesthetic inferiority
of discrete math to continuous math, but come on.) There are clear
reverberations of lingering PTSD motivating these defensive obsessions
and in some sense that’s quite understandable. There has, afterall, been
a good few centuries of those in power referencing or extending popular
scientific frameworks or theories to prop up terrible ideologies. But to
characterize ‘science’ in terms of those ideologies is akin to
characterizing an elephant by the leeches, ticks and flies on its hide.
They may have swallowed some tiny bits of it, but that doesn’t make them
the elephant. And at the end of the day they don’t decide where the
elephant roams.
Yes, the political, economic, social, and cultural commitments of
scientists as a class have in many ways been largely captured and
constrained by today’s most dominant power structures; just as those
unions most critically situated at points of weakness in the system were
long ago bought off, lumpenproles defanged with welfare, artists by
commerce, etc. Although ‘pure science’ is constantly being whittled away
as capitalism attempts to reshape and replace it by more easily
predictable, controllable and overseeable fields of engineering — and
basic science education is suppressed or replaced by tradeschool-style
training — those who remain have been urged in a multitude of ways to
identify with the status quo. It’s a simple fact that fewer scientists
today face murderous repression from the establishment’s fear of
disruptive effects. For a first in history the power structures ruling
our societies have come to uneasily rely on certain predictable marches
of development (although curveballs are still strongly discouraged). And
since the creation of the modern academic system most scientists have
come to rely on government funding in deeply problematic ways that
impede a shift to alternatives. But once identified — less as a
structured procedural commitment than a cognitive inclination or
orientation of desire — science is exposed as having intense social or
political inclinations almost entirely opposed to the interests of
science’s current benefactors/enslavers.
This recognition is of profound import to anyone looking for allies and
fecund frontiers of resistance, and presents a powerful way to push back
against those corruptive or appropriative forces that have been
exploiting the situation.
I’m interested in this restructuring of our language and narratives
around science because as an anarchist I come at science from a
stridently idealistic and radical perspective and thus am attracted to
those currents within it. But also because — having consequently
developed a background in high energy theoretical physics — it’s
continually astonishing to me the vast disconnect between the analyses
of “science” popular within the left and the actual reality in the many
fields close to my own work. A lot of what I’m saying is mainstream in
physics and has been for a long long time.
While “purity” within the sciences is a widely recognized dynamic and
common joke fodder, somehow few philosophers or pundits of science have
felt any need to build any recognition of this into their definitions of
science, or even mention it. (Richard Dawid deserves special mention
here for recently taking some rarely listened to perspectives on science
not being equivalent to empiricism common among theoretical physicists
and finally giving some of our perspectives a voice in philosophy
departments.)
The abusive and unproductive wall erected after the erasure of “natural
philosophy” between science (as any immediately testable hypothesis) and
philosophy (as literally any theorizing) has pressured scientists to be
shortsighted and shallow in their theorizing and given bad philosophical
models sufficient buffer from rigor and the march of new discoveries.
And when philosophy does come up with anything concrete it’s immediately
no longer classified as philosophy! Not only is this unfair but
obviously it has a terrible influence upon philosophy!
Of course when philosophy and science aren’t defined in contrast to one
another it’s much harder to present some kind of unified Scientist
front. A definition of science centered on radical analysis would
undermine the “we’re all in this together perspective” that a lot of
science communicators have pushed to rally solidarity against attacks
and to give disparate researchers a sense of ownership or investment in
work beyond their own field. But honestly we shouldn’t have solidarity
with many people in the STEM world. We could all do with more clarity
about people’s varying underlying motivations and less fuzzy-wuzzy
collective identity. If those STEM minds in conservative, religious or
anti-intellectual contexts want to huddle around each other for warmth
they can surely do so without obscuring important distinctions over
motivations and degrees of rootedness. Our language should not be
defined in reaction to the Kansas school board.
Yes, in some immediate sense stepping back from the shallow litmus tests
for science weakens our rhetorical toolbox when it comes to rejecting
pseudoscience. But I don’t think it’s worth risking our clearheadedness
by twisting our conceptual language just to more quickly win some short
term battles. We can still grapple with these people directly. Not with
“it was peer reviewed! 99% agree!” badgering appeals to democratic
morality, but by directly calling out the intellectual laziness of
denialists. It’s unfeasible to personally tackle each and every
anti-vaxxer, chemtrailer, or cartesian dualist; the amount of energy
necessary to generate bullshit is always orders of magnitude less than
the amount of energy necessary to refute it. There are maybe ten
thousand times more wingnuts with strong opinions about particle physics
or neuroscience than there are particle physicists or neuroscientists in
the world. We will never beat back all their diverse nonsenses
one-on-one in Facebook comment sections, and implicit appeals to social
pressure via arguments from ‘scientific consensus’ fail when a climate
change denier or quantum mystic is already subject to social pressures
of consensus within their more immediate community of fellow wingnuts.
The root problem with the people “contesting” evolution or the big bang
or whatever isn’t that they’re doing it the wrong way or using the wrong
tools of argumentation; it’s that they don’t actually care about
understanding. They care about the sensation of knowing, or the
appearance of iconoclasm, or a fantasy of the gold star they might wrest
away from the establishment. Our pluralist liberal society obsesses over
the equality of all opinions, in which my ignorance is as good as your
knowledge, and consequently in which abusers can never be pinned down
because “everything’s subjective.” We leap to find opinions and then
raise them as identity-banners. And so we bristle at the notion of
better or more objectively reachable accounts that might disrupt our
most fond self-deceptions. The ugly reality is that if people put even
the faintest effort into vigilant inquiry we wouldn’t be having these
debates.
First and foremost we should be focusing on making the models or
arguments we’ve discovered more accessible. As we lower barriers
dramatically there will cease to be any excuse for the smug 37 year old
punk with a theory of gravitation as friction. Or the endless barrage of
numbskulls in the anarchist milieu — from oogles rejecting treatment for
scabies because “science is a religion” to Wolfi citing wildly off base
secondhand misaccounts of quantum mechanics and getting lauded for it.
Point them to the mappings. Quickly call out the particulars: “Okay, how
do you account for __ ?” Scientists already do this by habit.
Often however we utilize existing barriers to entry as a kind of wall
slam in people’s face. Someone repeats the well popularized woo that
quantum mechanics has anything to do with conscious “observers” or the
poorly defined notion of “consciousness” itself and we quickly snap that
quantum mechanics is a just a theory of complex probabilities, of
operators in a hilbert space, and continue rattling off mathematical
context until the wingnuts feel sufficiently browbeaten or at least
leave us be.
This is highly understandable, and often there’s no better tool
available to make the frothy nutjob or haughtily ignorant continental
philosopher go away, but it is unfortunate. Exploiting unfair existing
barriers to scientific knowledge to harangue those on the outside is
hardly in keeping with the core idealism of science.
Thankfully there are presently many projects on various levels to
restructure every aspect of science as an institution. Peer review,
journals, even colleges themselves are under constant criticism and
attack in the core of science. And while physicists led the push decades
ago to open source everything and bypass or abolish intellectual
property, it’s well past time to make that material not just available
but accessible. Doing this, replacing peer review with more organic,
open, and situationally nuanced associative networks of trust and
decentralized certification, is no simple task, but many are working on
it. Just as many are working to replace the astonishingly primitive
technology of pdfs with a richer more deeply tagged and accessible
literature, ideally leading to fields of knowledge as mindmapped wikis
where dependencies and sources are instantly visible. The solution to
people with smugly uninformed opinions is to take away any excuse for
their ignorance. To build a culture where our instincts are to just look
something up if you’re interested in it rather than to try and
accumulate ‘opinions’ from shallow data as though building a record
collection.
I’ve heard people in the left or the supposedly post-left milieu sneer
and argue that the deplorable filters of pop science reporting are the
fault of scientists, that we are complicit in the whole circus that
leads to horrid phrases like “god particle” and all the narratives that
get validated as a result. And there’s an ounce of truth to that. Not in
the sense that we scientists presently feel anything other than
murderous rage at the pop science media machine, but that there are
still many wars for us to win. Thankfully we’re clearly up for the task.
I will never forget the day the head of my old department discovered
Wikipedia. With bags under his eyes from an all-nighter editing articles
he animatedly and earnestly beseeched his statistical mechanics class
“Did you all know about this? Why are you all here when you could be at
home learning on your own? I wanna blow off my next class to adopt some
of my lecture notes! Oh! I guess this means I’m out of a job. Huh. Oh
well! Good riddance actually.” All good scientists hunger for the death
of academia, in the sense of our present institutional context, this
gross distortion, this unnaturally frozen battlefront in the struggle to
expand science to everyone. It is unfortunate our relatively recent
treaty with the state and other appropriative forces led to an abrupt
freeze in the previously exponentially increasing ranks of scientists.
We don’t always appreciate this violent pruning of science, the prison
signified by our still small numbers, but the loss is astonishing when
you plot it out.
I delight at the inevitable accusations of “imperialism!” I will receive
for the crime of desiring to persuade people or even make arguments more
accessible, but outreach does have to be nuanced. Instead of outright
declaring “you should want this” we need to go after the biggest traps
people get themselves into. I find myself having to tackle the old
“anyone can argue anything!” quite frequently: Well that’s quite a
surprisingly strong statement! How do you know every possible
perspective is perfectly and evenly mappable into all others? How can
you be so certain that when considering every possible meta structure
for ‘argumentation’ there are not emergently inferior and superior ones?
You seem to be extrapolating very vigorous results from a very small
dataset of personal experience!
But there are many more holes people dig themselves into, and some are
quite relatable.
The reality is that people not trusting scientists or scientific
consensus is in many regards reasonable. What are you going to trust,
your eyes and everyday lived experience or a single teacher in school
and some nerds online?
Most arguments over catching people up to scientific knowledge usually
come down to 1) how integrated a person is with a relevant culture,
society and institutions, and 2) how unoppressed they are. There are
many other logjams and twisted arguments that can occur, but these tend
to be the most primal. If no one you know can in any meaningful way
vouch for the stranger thumping on the Particle Data Group book their
claims of peer review and the like will appear no different than a
theologian claiming to be correct because other theologians have
checked. And of course, if you’re locked in modern versions of chattel
slavery, exploring the workings of the universe is not really a good
strategy for survival; nor will your first instinct be to trust the
claimed findings of those who do have that privilege.
Honestly the only reason a good number of folk these days would sneer at
anyone saying sun goes round the earth, that Jesus rode dinosaurs, or
that the universe is 6,000 years old, or that anthropogenic global
warming isn’t real, is that they recognize these claims as cultural cues
of being on ‘the wrong side.’ It’s a not-popular thing. A shun the
“outgroup” thing. As such appealing to the spirit of social consensus
and democratic moralism is a weapon that will almost always backfire on
scientists.
To most of the kids that get shuffled into ‘radical politics’ or the
like scientists are the outgroup. The cultural divide that takes root in
college between STEM majors and humanities majors has been long cemented
and reinforced. And the few scientists in this whole affair tend to sigh
and keep their heads down rather than contest every nonsense. Meanwhile
expecting someone whose gone through the theoretical and social
conditioning of academic fields that practically define themselves by
suspicion and hostility to science — someone whose social connections
are almost certainly overwhelmingly in the same boat — to just cede
before the overwhelming consensus within the scientific community is
like telling a FOXnews troglodyte to adopt queer terminology because
everyone in San Francisco is doing it. It’s just totally disconnected
from the realities of social pressures, and it expects magic from human
trust networks.
Why on earth should you trust what one teacher says? Or wikipedia the
time you strayed over to it? You don’t have knowledge of the immense
amount of work it would take to maintain a false belief within say
mathematics journals, so both sides appear roughly equivalent. Science
appears to most as just a codification of what’s popular in certain
circles except with those people saying “it’s extra true because someone
somewhere totally tested it, whatever that means.”
Smart people come up to me and express derision or discomprehension of
science all the time. A skilled hacker asks me bemusedly at a party, “so
you actually think there’s like truth??” Brilliant girl in my high
school chemistry explains why she doesn’t pay attention in class,
“Theories in science are always changing, why bother learning one, it’ll
be totally different in two hundred years anyway.”
These express themselves as philosophical critiques and sometimes
develop into more challenging ones, but they’re grounded in a sense of
social alienation and a rebellious dismissal of seemingly arbitrary
authority.
It’s not for nothing that one of the most instinctive ways Leftists have
interacted with science has been by critiquing sources or playing games
of slander by association. “Don’t get me started about Game Theory, it
was invented by a paranoid schizophrenic who worked for the government
and feared communists.” (Nevermind its parallel discoverers or that game
theory has ultimately provided some of the strongest arguments for
anarchism and clearest insights into the landscape of challenges we
face.) Similarly it’s quite popular today to talk about “cybernetics”
and criticize anything that touches information theory by cherrypicking
the ideologies and rhetoric of associated parties — an approach that
quickly grows so disconnected from the actual reality of the material
and field that it starts to sound like conservative rants about
“cultural marxism.”
(Although quite a few authoritarians have spun out hopes that it would
provide tools for absolute control, cybernetics’ objective success in
grasping root dynamics has also revealed profound limits to the
information processing capacity of power structures and computational
neuroscience has enabled a much richer and more productive ethical
discourse. “Cybernetics” in fact is a sweeping term mostly used by its
critics. The actual fields bundled up in absurd polemics like Tiqqun’s
do not easily fit in the grand ideological narratives claimed by these
critics. Additionally, since every essay on how the ‘inherent logic’ of
cybernetics somehow inexorably saddled us with our current surveillance
state loves to point to the reactionary associations of a couple famous
researchers, let me point out that one of computational neuroscience’s
most influential early pioneers, Walter Pitts, was a homeless runaway
from a poor family who’d joined a commune of radical supporters of the
Spanish Revolution.)
There can be — of course — a sliver of relevance to who the original
discoverers are and what assumptions or constrained perspectives may get
subtly baked in, but an even remotely scientific field is quite a bit
different from say endless discourses on the writings of Heidegger;
models and paradigms in science are frequently replaced rather than
merely appended with footnotes and there are a multitude of very strong
pressures in scientific practice driving researchers toward the same
underlying root dynamics. That’s the ideal at least. But it’s a coherent
and substantive ideal that many discourses asymtotically approach and
that we are all the better for having a term for.
When alleged ‘radicals’ these days rail against science what they’re
typically arguing against — or at least what they get started rallying
against — is having to integrate with the social and institutional
structures mediating such ‘facts’. The semi-ironic embrace of mysticism
and the occult among the queer community and twentysomethings more
broadly is such a successful sociopolitical signalling game not just
because of the boogeyman of Dawkinsite atheists and the broader STEM vs
humanities culture war, but because it publicly demonstrates a rejection
of the authorities and institutions that have positioned themselves
between scientists and just about everyone else.
The error here isn’t not trusting the account of those with the right
magic words. It’s — again — not investigating more thoroughly or
proactively. A stark case of Gell-Mann Amnesia whereby people recognize
when the institutions of power appropriate and drastically misrepresent
one’s own team, but then immediately assume those same institutions and
media gatekeepers are more or less honest about everyone else.
Anarchists are happy to recognize how poorly “anarchy” is represented in
the media and how many appropriators are out there, and yet so many of
us embarassingly turn around and take representations and claimants of
“science” at face value.
Modern liberalism asks us to wrap ourselves in as many flags as
possible, to feel entitled to the sense of identity provided by a strong
opinion. Doing due diligence by looking at depth into the subject is in
no way seen as a prerequisite, and since the goal is social positioning
there’s no impetus for such investigation.
However I don’t highly trust someone’s account of a mixing angle because
it’s spoken in the magic tongue of science, but because I’ve done a lot
of looking into the social and cultural context, because I have many
points of contact with it, and thus I know how difficult it would be for
a lie to propagate or persist. Further I’ve compared theories and
considerations myself, followed them down into their nitty-gritty and
seen just how elegant and more realistic an account is.
And yes there often really is a universally accessible or “objective”
direction of “better theory.” Although it can be hard to precisely
compare two theories roughly close to each other in virtues, a broad
gradation between possible models is strongly apparent upon any fucking
due diligence.
All this is maddeningly hard to convey to people with a limited
vocabulary of experiences to draw upon. You have to go digging around in
the systemically impoverished lives of those deprived meaningful contact
with science and find the one experience that will make such dynamics
clear. Someone to whom all discussion of say ‘complexity’ is meaningless
hot air with no connection to anything in their lives cannot really be
expected to fathom any talk of scientific legitimacy outside of
experimental validation, and even that is likely to be tough going. Many
people in our world lack critical qualia, have never even experienced
basic things we take for granted, and it is fiendishly difficult to
catch them up. Try explaining turbulence to someone who has never played
with water or watched clouds fly by. I’ve listened to multiple people in
various contexts demonstrate that a system is non-linear in a trivial
way and then promptly sit back under the impression that such equates
unsolvability.
Part of the solution is obviously — as most scientists know and will
angrily rant to you at length about — destroying the prison system
masquerading as “education.” The “disgustingly boring gymnastics used
only for punitive purposes,” as a mathematical physicist I’m friends
with characterized them, that comprise all contact with supposed
“mathematics” most students ever have bares as little relation to the
actual practice as spelling bees do with literature or poetry. Of course
to merely list the myriad failings of how we are “educated” would
require the space of a book, so I won’t bother trying. But that is only
one component of a wide array of ways our present society suffocates and
denies access to deep and incredibly important concepts or experiences
regarding how the world functions that are necessary to build better
intuitions.
And even chucking those is not enough. It would not be enough to burn
this horrid system to the ground because many of the monsters impeding
access to or understanding of science have sown the ideological seeds of
their own upkeep and reestablishment.
It is, after all, not just an education or accessibility problem, it’s
also a vigilance problem.
So why do people fail to even set out on paths of exploration that would
eventually lead them to catch up and recognize science? Why do people
turn away from radicalism to reactionary perspectives?
What we must remind ourselves is that people will be prompted by their
contexts to grow into different cognitive strategies. A child that’s
beaten for exercising inquisitiveness will quite rationally decide that
thinking is a bad strategy in life. It’s often quite rational to stop
being rational, or at least to abandon intellectual vigilance. (There
are many competing popular definitions of “rationality,” some expansive
to the point where they describe literally all possible developments in
a neural net and others far more specific and aspirational, I am not
deeply wedded to any one.)
Sometimes when the goal is feeling smart rather than actually being
right, the most optimal strategies are postmodern rationalizations that
add more and more complications and slippery fallacies of association in
a kind of fractal way until it’s turtles all the way down and your
interlocutor can’t vanquish them as fast as you can generate them.
Particularly common in our society is the strategy of enforcing rituals
and spectacles of public modesty that aggressively drag yourself and
everyone else down to avoid any one of you ever being challenged.
Obviously this is the case most of the time when the outraged howls
start of “How can you claim to know anything? No one knows anything!
You’re just a confused slob like the rest of us! How dare you put on
airs!” Too frequently people in this situation start talking past each
other with entirely different notions of humility.
People are deeply afraid of science’s potency. Scratch that, it’s much
broader: People are deeply afraid of intellectual vigilance. They’re
afraid of fields they haven’t studied. They’re afraid people will come
at them one day with something from beyond their horizons that overturns
and shakes up their core perspectives or narrative of self.
The reason commentators try to fence in science, make it trivial or
incidental to our lives is because they can feel the magnitude of its
philosophical impacts lurking. There are, after all, no a priori truths.
Just deeply seeded priors that can be overruled by sufficient
conditions. Physics might very well reveal that causality or time itself
don’t work the way we develop a working assumption of at a very young
age. Physicists are unafraid of overturning the kind of intuitions
biology or our formulative experiences have built into us, but for lots
of people there’s a catastrophic sense of vertigo — and soon after,
rage. How dare you!
Yet all we humans ever do is model the world. Even logic and the most
cherished axioms are just models that have to be chosen. We see patterns
and look for stronger patterns. To discount the search for the strongest
possible patterns is to cast oneself to the winds of happenstance. And
ultimately it risks unmooring one from any good reason to even believe
in other people’s existence. If you have some kind of deep assumption
about the universe or even how you think and science reveals deep
failures of your model or better alternatives you have to postulate an
increasingly conspiratorially extended and implausible alternative
explanation of how the scientific consensus is rife with somehow
systematically unseen failures. Soon you’ve added piles and piles of
redundant or unnecessary complexities, even magical interventions. You
are pulled more and more towards solipsism.
And yes, sure, this can feel freeing. People with little agency in their
world often find any sensation of ‘possibility’ freeing, even incorrect
or deluded possibility. There’s an unlimited number of models incoherent
internally or with one’s experiences, and they’re all relatively easily
morphable into one another. This freedom of mind can be exhilarating,
but it offers a false and limited freedom, because a failure to
understand the world around you means an inability to move it.
The radical impulse is critical. It’s long been noted that people with
some basic intelligence but no deep drive often realize they can “argue”
anything and, upon such realization, stop, failing to examine the
meta-characteristics and topologies to such expanses of possible
“arguments.” Because the utility of vigilance is not immediately obvious
their instinct to rigorously examine atrophies and they get away with it
by simply upping the complexity until no one can manage to call out all
their mistakes. I once heard an 80 year old professor sincerely argue
that — never mind their individual persuasiveness or coherency — because
he had more distinct arguments for creationism it was therefore correct.
We’re playing the “how can we use words to figure dynamics out” game,
but so much of society is instinctively playing the “how can we use
words to manipulate and get what we want” game, habits that have been
adopted by the naive as well. That sort of thing is not a conversation
and it’s certainly not worth bothering with. You can always arbitrarily
increase the complexity of a stupid argument to fend off critique. The
formula is simple: start with some loud populist appeals to common
everyday abstractions, models, or language (however unfounded) and pour
on supporting claims and excuses with increasing complexity until
challenging them is too exhausting. Through this process you can marshal
armies whenever you like.
There are infinite possibilities when you abandon coherence, simplicity
and empiricism. But the infinite is boring, it’s a quagmire. What
science represents is the winnowing down of the infinite, the pursuit of
the most fascinatingly unique possibility (or possibilities).
The problem with Christian Science isn’t that it’s unfalsifiable;
falsifiability, while certainly a useful indication, isn’t absolutely
critical to science, and there’s nothing unscientific about postulating
that the entire world might be an illusion. Even though we may label
extensive thinking about it as unfruitful, we still note the possibility
and are honest about it. And — as with Boltzmann brains — there are even
fringe considerations that could have ramifications or relevance or
testability. Thinking about models involving reality being simulated,
for example, has prompted people to narrow down possible signatures
given certain assumptions regarding the hidden reality that can be
compared with experiment. The unscientific leap is just how wildly
arbitrary the claims are once you get beyond the mere statement that our
entire impression of material reality could be a lie. There’s a very
large infinity of possible configurations of hidden realities, of which
Christian Science’s claims about God etc are but one. They say suffering
is an illusion but why not claim that non-suffering is the illusion? Why
not postulate that we’re all in the dream of a cosmic green sheep? Etc.
A model with infinite arbitrary parameters is a bad model. Or at least
it’s uninteresting, or a bad model on which to predicate communicating
or collaborating with others. Hell, we need to find unique points within
the space of possible models that everyone else can identify just to be
able to meet each via those frameworks.
‘Christian Scientists’ love to claim that their conclusions follow from
a priori introspection, but the more broadly and vigilantly one engages
with the world the more one sees just how limited introspection can be
and prone to confusion or accidental self delusion. The language of
subjective experience and introspection is riddled with errors that it
alone is incapable or dramatically inefficient at recognizing. Whereas
cognitive science provides us with another useful vantage point to
integrate and rectify these mistakes. At the end of the day the
presumption of fully a priori meditation is simply not as good a
framework as the neurological model and any question you want answered
in the former can be revealed through the later as either more
efficiently and directly answerable or poorly posed and thus ultimately
unanswerable in any model. Consciousness, the self, and the ideological
edifices built in the language of subjective experience are in many ways
spooks, errors, narrative simplifications with fraying edges to their
usefulness upon any close investigation, akin to when marxists talk in
mystical ways about Capitalism or primitivists about Civilization as a
moving spirit more than the sum of its parts. The entire cartesian
assumption of an a priori vantage point is ultimately a faulty model
when examined from all angles or pushed to its breaking points.
Of course someone could retort in a Zerzan-esque vein that the only real
reality is immediate sensation and any conceptual processing of that —
any modeling of any kind — is the “abstraction.” Nevermind how easy it
is to verify things like our blind spots and optical processing defects,
our immediate sensations or qualia are not just often wrong, they have
to be heavily processed by neural columns for us to make sense of them
in any way that corresponds to the world we interact with. Indeed the
less “modeling” we do the less we’d be able to see or hear. And if you
attempt to discount those wellworn insights of neuroscience the number
of other things you must discount to do so spreads in effect quite
rapidly and dramatically. Especially if you have any instinct towards
intellectual vigilance.
There is a kind of circularity here, but it should really be viewed as a
matter of feedback. If you’re interested in parsing through your
sensations in pursuit of deeper relations, you’ll discover that any
rigorous examination reveals the superficiality of “immediate
impressions.” And conversely if you wall yourself off from such
investigations, if you champion the reactionary ideology that
immediatism is all that matters, you can ignore anything else. However
there’s a difference between these two positions. Radicalism is a stable
and attractive equilibrium, whereas reactionism is unstable under
perturbation. Once you start investigating you’re quite likely to
encounter evidence that your immediate impressions are wrong and that
deeper dynamics exist, which increases your evaluation of how useful
root-seeking is.
However the way from one equilibrium to the other is not always an easy
slide. If one revolts at the thought of searching to clarify fundamental
dynamics then one will revolt at the very idea of investigating a
definition of “science” that isn’t all-inclusive of every association,
every appropriating charlatan, and every rhetorically dressed up
atrocity. What one might call the postmodern instinct has been to reject
breaking apart conceptual bundles to identify separable sub-dynamics and
instead speak of ‘real existing science’ — the entirety of everything
its name gets slapped on — and look for fuzzy tendencies across this
abstraction. This approach takes the macroscopic abstraction as
foundational, certain rough commonalities as characteristic qualities,
and then handles any exceptions or additional complexities by means of
perpetually appending footnotes and excuses. Great for justifying
people’s preexisting impressions, opinions, or allegiances. Terrible at
better mapping the dynamics at play. As such it’s incapable of spurring
progress or meaningful change.
It goes without saying that we shouldn’t waste our lives fighting a war
over every preferred definition. Language is often fluid, and not every
term can be redeemed. A “language” is often really forked into many
simultaneous languages and there can be strategic and empathic virtues
in swapping between them. But it’s also important to have our terms
describe the most meaningful realities or distinct dynamics they can.
Gaping conceptual holes, unspoken or unspeakable realities in a given
language, can end up having a huge impact in our lives and impeding our
capacity to fight. Language determines what we focus on by default, what
gets left as awkward addendums, and thus what loops of debate we most
frequently retread trying to get at realities outside the terms we have
available.
When possible it’s good practice to shift our language to clearer and
more conceptually distinct and workable definitions of terms, regardless
of popular associations. This is after all the foundation of our
redefinition of anarchy. “Anarchy” is a nebulous word whose use varies
wildly. But its most widespread associations beyond the anarchist milieu
bundle in the assumption that there can be no freedom from the
oppressive dynamics of rulership, that our only speakable choice is
between fractured or unified power structures. Anarchism was founded on
a revolt against this orwellianism, and it has retained enough
distinctiveness to spur resistance to appropriation of that term by
neonazis, capitalists, and maoists as our respect has risen.
The situation with science is similar. There is a sharply distinct
subset within what gets called “science” who few would deny qualify as
science. This subset is a lot more distinct in certain ways that matter
than the “any empiricism” set and unfettered by its failings. The
present widespread identification of science with the merely anything
empirical or data-related consistently invalidates by association the
valid work of this subset, for whom there is presently no other
identifying term available besides “science.” Further this subset was
who science was originally centered on, who it appropriated from, and
it’s a subset that has vehemently and vocally resisted the wider
definition. It has accumulated various social institutions, cultures,
and other parasites around its practice but these are obviously distinct
from the core idea.
The science that lies at the core of and drives anything one might call
“science” is characterized by a radical impulse: to search for the most
deeply rooted patterns, to push beyond the existing or the immediate,
into extremes, to look for what can break and how, and to not be afraid
of throwing everything out, all in order to better grasp what is
possible.
We need to be humble about the complexity of our world, but audacious in
searching for models anyway. We must reject the traumatized mewling that
“you can’t ever know anything” or the abusive “how dare you compare
things” but also shy away from accepting shallow impressions.
This is the beating heart of science and it is what has driven its rise,
rectified its mistakes, and continually resisted its capture by power.
It is what makes it the most fecund site for resistance in our world
today.