Yuri
Tarnopolsky
ESSAYS
Essay 45. The Place of Philosophy in
Science
|
![]() ![]() Essay
45. The
Place of Philosophy in Science In
my youth I was strongly attracted to philosophy
because I believed it could give me the understanding
of the world. With time—and rather quickly—I realized that
philosophy could not offer anything of the kind
because one philosopher’s creation was
immediately snatched out and torn into pieces by
another one, who wrote his own treatise, usually of
great length, with new terminology, and on a different
array of topics. Close
to the very beginning of philosophy, Plato addressed
the audience in plain language because his method was
a dialog from a hilltop with a common mind below.
Aristotle turned dialog into monolog, which is still
readable because he did not address an audience of
other philosophers, but took care to list their
views. Some philosophers, like Descartes,
maintained a dialogue with themselves, which is, by
the way, a part of scientific method of doubt and
check. —And
further, as I sometimes think that others are in error
respecting matters of which they believe themselves to
possess a perfect knowledge, how do I know that I am
not also deceived each time I add together two and
three, or number the sides of a square, or form some
judgment still more simple, if more simple indeed can
be imagined? (Descartes, First Meditation). Others
argued with imaginary opponents. —Therefore a being absolutely
infinite, such as God, has from himself an
absolutely infinite power of existence, and hence he
does absolutely exist. Perhaps there will be many
who will be unable to see the force of this proof,
inasmuch as they are accustomed only to consider
those things which flow from external causes. (Spinoza, Ethics, Part I,
Note to Proposition XI) Kant
and Hegel tried to elaborate a blueprint for
Everything, as if they created this world up to the
smallest detail, including their own presence in it.
But with Heidegger and Sartre I felt the end of the
road lost in the thicket of words. I got an impression
that modern philosophy became what it was in the very
beginning: art. As art, it was for human enjoyment,
but with a modern shift of the emphasis from esthetic,
logical, or otherwise "nonprofit" enjoyment to a
pragmatic enjoyment that could be measured in some
way, often monetary one. The
distinction of our postmodern world is that what has
no quantitative measure has no value. In the
Antiquity, value was what could not be expressed in
numbers. An
ancient king could boast a stela with the numbers or
killed enemies, or a list of his glorious epithets,
but there was only one king and he needed no other
values. Thus,
modern visual art, is usually, but not always, a
handmade object that sells like art, is treated,
entitled, presented, exhibited, explained, and praised
like art, but may not look like art at all (see Essay 60, Art and
Nexistence). Modern art
needs a body of mediators or middlemen between the
author and the consumer and so does philosophy,
especially since the German classical
philosophy. The need of interpretation is
something that brings philosophy close to
religion for its lack of consensus. Plato today may
need comments but not necessarily an
interpreter. Regarding
philosophy, there has always been a pragmatic
expectation: a young person looks for a guidance or
explanation, as I did. Today the young person often
finds it in music and videos. Those whom pop sources
failed, which becomes apparent by mid-life, may
turn to spiritual preachers, self-help pushers, and
snake oil peddlers. By my mid-life I lost all my
expectations from philosophy, but not the interest and
reverence. Philosophy became another mystery. As a
whole, it wants to say something, but what? Under
the influence of Ulf Grenander's Pattern Theory,
I arrived to a new pragmatic appreciation of
philosophy. In
order to share it, I have to start with Pattern Theory. In
short, Pattern Theory is a mathematical way to
represent complex systems of any nature,
including life forms, societies, and doctrines, as
structures (configurations) built of atom-like
elements (generators), similar to molecules built of
atoms in chemistry. The revolutionary step made by Ulf
Grenander, himself a Renaissance man, was to attribute
a measure of probability to various structures,
depending on the properties of their building blocks
and bonds between them. As a chemist I was naturally
captivated by this typically chemical view of the
world. I had some vague ideas of this kind
long ago when I lived in Siberia and thought about the
remarkable properties of the Soviet totalitarian
structure and its prospects. Ulf
Grenander's work was the richest treasure of ideas I
had ever found. My entire web site, including simplicity, complexity, and poetry sections is
nothing but a chemist's view of the world, strongly
influenced after 1980 by Pattern Theory and further by
personal encounters with Ulf Grenander. Poetry
finds its place in the picture because it is based on
metaphor: representation of one structure by
another within the same pattern. Such representations
allow for linking very complex intuitively
comprehensible objects and images with much simpler
ones, directly perceptible or more familiar. Analogies
and metaphors (I do not see much difference between
the two) have always been
frown upon by exact sciences, although physicists used
them in discussions and popularizations. Yet nobody
seemed to notice that the phenomenon of analogy, which
often suggested a mathematical similarity, and
metaphor, which looked like a swirl of poetic
imagination, was a property of the world and not just
of our perception of it. Complex
systems, however, such as life, society, culture,
mind, and individual internal world of a human being,
are not completely indeterministic—there is a lot to be
tackled with probability theory—but they contain
unique singular subsystems that exclude statistics.
Indeed, there is one and only Napoleon. Pattern Theory
is the only way to pull such complex singular systems
into the orbit of science, thereby liberating sciences
from the tyranny of exactness and humanities from the
infamy of subjectivity (so much valued in art). NOTE (2016). Indeed,
Napoleonic complex is a pattern well beyond French
history. The pattern of a dictator with continental
or, in our days, global power is alive and well and
some people like me, who have lived long enough, are
contemporaries of Hitler and Stalin. The Western
analysts are trying to take apart and look through a
magnifying glass at the inside screws and gears of
Putinism, while it is the view from a long historical
distance that matters most: it is one of the kind
nuclear dictatorship of a global caliber that
remembers its victory over Napoleon and Hitler, as
well as its defeat by a nuclear democracy of a global
caliber. I
see my mission as popularization of Ulf Grenander's
ideas outside exact sciences that are well known in
computer science and are popularized by Grenander
himself. Outside that area, however, they still
wait for professionals open to new ideas. The
difficulty is that the scientist who wants to explore
this area has to abandon some fundamental
preconceptions about his or her profession,
namely, what constitutes science. According to my
observations, the current shift to science as a
business, in which the intellectual adventure is
driven or restrained by considerations of investment
and return, whether personal (in terms of career,
attention, and money) or social (a promissory note of
return will do), may hamper our integral
understanding of the world and, probably, fundamental
knowledge itself. Unlike the knowledge
of science, which is open for all, but accessible to
few, understanding is one's personal and
inalienable possession, which can be shared with
many. As
an example of the postmodern atmosphere in theoretical
physics, the sanctum of knowledge, see current
arguments around string theory. Jim
Holt, Unstrung: Two
Critiques of String Theory, The New Yorker,
October 2, 2006, p. 86. The critiques are: Lee Smolin,
The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String
Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next?
Houghton Mifflin, 2006 and: Peter Woit, Not
Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the
Search for Unity in Physical Law, Basic Books,
2006. More on the Web. Nevertheless, I can
present at least one reason why a better, however
"underscientific," understanding of the world could
give a great historical return. This world is too
complex for members of a democratic society, as well
as for its top elected leaders, to make rational
decisions. A professional specialist is never elected
because presidency, for example, is not a profession.
Simplification of complexity at the expense of
exactness is exactly the task of the
pattern science as I see it. This approach is not
quite new, however, and the example of biology
illustrates how generalization serves for
understanding very complex systems. Chemistry deals with
individual configurations. It is an exact
science—well, to
be exact, not completely and with a lot of
approximations. What helps chemistry is that
all the myriads of molecules of the same structure
are, for practical purposes, identical. In biology,
however, complex organisms within a species could be all
different even if they are clones because of the
individuality of experience. In the twentieth
century we could watch the process of the invasion of
exactness into biology, coming from chemistry. Molecular
biology is as exact as chemistry, exactly. This
makes biology an incomparably more complex science than
it was in the times of Charles Darwin. But this makes it
much more understandable for the people who have to make
important decisions about themselves, their progeny, or
the fate of other people. To draw an analogy from
today to well beyond the horizon of tomorrow, this is
what I expect from the pattern science of complex
systems: understanding of choices and consequences of
important decisions in complex historical situations by
citizens of a democracy. Because if they are incapable
of that, an equally incapable government will make the
decisions for them, with some ancient book in hand. Regarding
philosophy, I begin to see a place of philosophy in a
wider science. Philosophy looks at
the world under a powerful microscope and makes
distinctions so subtle that they look irrelevant for
our crude earthly life. Struggling with Aristotle,
Hegel, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, or even, hopelessly,
Heidegger and Sartre, we can see a forceful drive to
analyze the depressingly complex world in terms of its
tiniest “atoms”
and their “isotopes” even if we cannot make
sense of the significance of the fine differences of
meaning. Thus, becoming
is certainly being and being is
obviously a becoming,
but it takes a philosopher to show the difference and,
moreover, to offer a menu with being-in-itself,
being-for-itself, being-in-and-for-itself
and being-for-another. Hegel
was
the greatest both chef and gourmet of the cuisine
based on the German verb sein, to be—a
big leap from Shakespeare who knew only to be and not
to be. The opposite process
of synthesis has not been as successful. While
none of the philosophical systems has any advantage
over another, except in terms of comprehensibility and
compactness, philosophy has left us an inventory of
atoms of reason and a registry of their properties for
which we are still expected to formulate a chemistry.
Unlike the atoms of the Periodic System and molecules
made of them, the atoms of philosophy are immaterial.
But so are joy, suffering, progress, decline, success,
and failure. So is the reverberating in history past
and the future that stirs up our hopes and fears. From this
perspective should be viewed my non-professional
attempts to take Hannah Arendt
under the chemical wing and my experiments
with ideograms as atoms of complex
systems—not objects, machines,
institutions, goods, or anything tangible and for
sale. I see them
as atoms of understanding complex systems. I
dream of young beginners in philosophy playing
with this Lego. |
Page
created: 2006
Revised:
2016
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Essay 44.
Remembering Russia: 1940-1987
Essay 46.
Postmodernity: Postmortem for Modernity
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