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Zen Physics
Chapter 9. Science and the Subjective
Matter is less material and the mind less spiritual than is generally supposed. The habitual separation of physics and psychology, mind and matter is metaphysically indefensible.
-- Bertrand Russell
p119 We live in a culture dominated by scientific thinking: by analysis and the partitioning of knowledge. So it is curious to find that science has never really taken root except among peoples who were strongly influenced by the Greeks. All the other great cultural traditions around the world, particularly those of India and China, have evolved along quite different lines... Shouldn’t it be obvious to any intelligent, civilized person... that science is the best way, perhaps the only way, to discover how things really are? Yet we need to remember the extent of our own conditioning: from an early age, we are inculcated with a certain approach to looking at nature. We have a very specific attitude and perspective on the world encoded in our brains. And this makes it hard for us to appreciate that there may be other, perhaps equally valid ways of apprehending reality.
p120 The wellspring of science can be traced to Ionia... in the sixth century B.C. Here the sages of the Milesian school of philosophy established as their goal the discovery of the essential nature, or true constitution of things, which they called physis. Yet they were certainly not physicists in the modern sense because their speculations roamed freely over subject matter that would today be considered not only scientific but also philosophical and religious. To later Greeks they were known as “hylozoists,” or “those who believe that matter is alive,” since as far as the Milesians were concerned, life and nonlife, matter and spirit, were all one. Such a unified outlook is unmistakably mystical in flavor. And it is especially interesting and appropriate, in the light of recent developments, that physics, and Western science in general, should have had such a source.
The Milesians would also have been contemporary with the early, “good” according to Nietzsche, days of the cult of Dionysus. When the chorus dominated the theaters/places of worship.
The mystical attitude to understand the world was even more evident in the work of Heraclitus of Ephesus. Although Heraclitus accepted the Ionian “physicists’ ” idea of the wholeness of nature, he was strongly opposed to the reality of Being [this brings us back, again, to Ontology and Dasein] -- the endurance of objects -- which they upheld. For Heraclitus, there was only Becoming, a continuous flow and change in all things which he saw as arising from the endless cyclic interplay of opposites. Two opposites compromised a unity which Heraclitus called the Logos. But this was a unity soon to be broken -- and with it the monistic and organic tradition of the first period of Greek philosophy.
The split was started by the Eleatic school in southern Italy, which assumed that above all gods and men a divine principle operated. To begin with, this principle was equated with the totality of the universe, but later its identity shifted to that of an intelligent and personal God who orchestrated the cosmos from outside. So began a trend of thought which was to have far-reaching consequences. It would lead, in time, to the divorce of mind and matter, of subject and object, and to a profoundly dualistic mentality that pervaded all future Western culture.
p121 A further step along the road to dualism was taken by Parmenides of Elia, who rejected Heraclitus’s notion of continual Becoming. [This is a little disconcerting, since Parmenides is usually considered the founder of the Eleatic school. I guess we have to believe that Darling is of the faction that sees Xenophanes as the true founder of the school while Parmenides and Zeno came later.] Parmenides argued that change was logically impossible and that its appearance was a mere illusion of the senses. It then fell upon the Greek philosophers of the fifth century B.C. to try to reconcile the sharply contrasting views of Parmenides (unchangeable Being) and Heraclitus (eternal Becoming). This lead to the idea that Being is represented by certain indestructible substances that form the material basis of the universe, while Becoming -- change -- comes about as these substances mix and separate. A further development was the notion of the atom as the smallest indivisible unit of matter. And the key point here is that the Greek atomists, led by Leucippus and Democritus, drew a sharp distinction between spirit and matter, depicting the latter as being made up purely of passive and inanimate particles moving in the void. Any spiritual element was thus effectively sucked out of the material universe and confined to a realm of its own.
It’s interesting that this account mentions all the Hellenic philosophers Nietzsche leaves out and doesn’t mention Socrates at all.
In the Hellenistic age which followed the Classical period of Greece, in the fourth and third centuries B.C., opinion tended to polarize around two principal worldviews. The Epicureans favored a radical form of atomism, rejecting any need for spiritual intervention and placing the gods in the empty space between worlds where they were aloof from the affairs of man. The Stoics, on the other hand, taught that the world is governed by unbreakable natural laws that were laid down by God. Furthermore, they held that the soul is what makes a human being cohere: that it is some subtle essence diffused throughout a person’s frame, much as God, according to their belief, is diffused throughout the world. In the Epicurean view, perception, not the soul, is the source of true and indisputable information. Against this the Stoics maintained that the soul is what both observes and reasons. These contrasting positions can be seen as an early stage in the development of the debate that continues to this day between science and religion about the fundamental nature of the world.
From the Greeks in general, then, we have inherited a deeply dualistic mind-set, an instinctive, urgent tendency to divide everything into two contrasting, often mutually exclusive, aspects: matter and mind, actual and ideal, observed and theoretical, and more generally, this and that, and right and wrong...
[I’m skipping Aristotelianism and the decline of Western thought through the Middle Ages.]
p123 Central to this [experimental] methodology was Galileo’s precise distinction, first made public in 1623, between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ qualities. This was a vital step in establishing a clear future direction for science, but it was based upon a reaffirmation of the old Greek way of splitting the world in two. Primary qualities were those, such as mass, distance, and time, that could be measured by some suitable instrument. Only these, Galileo maintained, were amenable to scientific study because only these could be treated as if they were independent of the observer. A primary quality can be measured and therefore described by a number in some appropriate system of units -- ten grams, six thousand miles, 58.3 seconds, and so on. By contrast, secondary qualities, such as color and love, cannot be reduced to an empirical form and so were deemed to fall outside science’s domain.
Galileo’s cleaving of nature was manifestly Greek in origin. But he and the other new-wave Renaissance thinkers of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe tightened the focus of science to mean the systematic study of the material universe -- the universe of things presumed to exist independently of the mind. Henceforth, if science did refer to color, it would not be in terms of red or yellow or blue, but in terms of the wavelength of light, a measurable property. And if science did eventually attempt to analyse human emotions, then it would be in terms of quantifiable, physiological events in the brain -- electrical potentials, the timing of synaptic firings, the rate of movement of chemicals, and so on. The same sharp distinction between primary (objective) and secondary (subjective) qualities that Galileo brought to science, Descartes, with his separation of matter… and mind… [had] introduced to philosophy. And so the scene was set for the emergence of the worldview commonly held in the West today.
This is Settembrini and Naphtha’s primary battlefield in The Magic Mountain.
p124 Previously, in ancient and medieval times, the universe had seemed organismic [not orgasmic] ; all matter had been held to be living and interconnected. But the clear Cartesian division between subject and object allowed scientists to treat matter as dead and completely separate from themselves, [Descartes treated animals the same way] and to envision the universe as a plethora of different objects assembled into a huge machine. At the same time, this was paralleled by the concept of a supervisory God who ruled the world externally and remotely. The laws of nature sought by scientists were thus seen, ultimately, as being the laws of God, eternal and inviolable, to which the world was subjected. This religious component was important because the Church, though weakened, was still far-reaching. And men such as Newton and, later Pascal and Mendel, to name but a few, were devout Christians.... The separation of matter and spirit allowed them to keep faith both in science and God, without the risk of compromise to either.
That the human body itself was nothing more than an object, a machine, amenable to scientific investigation was an idea promulgated by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who had met Galileo in Italy in 1635. Hobbes’s view was inspired to a large extent by the discovery of the circulation of blood by William Harvey, Physician to Elizabeth the First... But Harvey’s new mechanistic portrayal of the heart as a pump, and blood vessels as a complex system of tubes and valves, had a deep effect on philosophers of the time. Hobbes simply generalized the image to the whole human being. And thus man took on a new appearance, as a complex mechanism, his behavior potentially explicable in terms of mechanical laws.
There is... a cold and remote feel to the universe as cast by post-Renaissance science... As... Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, remarked:
{The scientific picture} gives us a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in magnificent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously. [I'm not sure he's the best person to make this point since Schrödinger today is best known for his "cat" thought experiment, the point of which was to demonstrate how silly Quantum mechanics was.]
...
p126 Science has yielded startling insights into the mathematical infrastructure of the world -- the hidden rules by which stones fall, planets orbit, electrons whirl, and stars explode. But in order to do this it has had to first expunge everything that refuses to succumb to description by formulas. From the start, then, science renounces all interest in such matters as are essentially dependent on the presence of a human observer. It set out to investigate what it assumed would be the case if we didn’t exist. Yet the underlying weakness of this approach was exposed a long time ago. As early as 420 B.C., Democritus realized that in studying nature both reason and the senses must be brought to bear. In the case of atoms, for instance, they are assumed to have none of the sensual qualities which are the common everyday experience of human beings. Yet it is precisely because of these qualities that we are able to infer the existence of atoms. Schrödinger again:
So we are faced with the following remarkable situation. While the stuff from which our world picture is built is yielded exclusively by the sense organs as organs of the mind, so that every man’s world picture is and always remains a construct of his mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence, yet the conscious mind itself remains a stranger within that construct, it has no living space in it, you can spot it nowhere in space.
Two and a half thousand years have taken us from Greek intellectualism to technological mastery [our Faustian adventure] over the planet. But this impressive conquest of nature has been at the cost of estranging us -- our conscious selves -- from the universe that is our birthplace and home. Galileo and the other early scientists portrayed the world of nature as being a realm of objects set over and against the mind. And yet it is clear that every datum used by science in formulating its supposedly objective worldview comes in through the human senses. Every attempt at making an impartial objective observation is foiled at the onset and becomes, instead, a subject of our attention. The human observer cannot be left out of the reckoning or be reduced to insignificance, because he or she is the only means by which science is prosecuted... To comprehend the nature of things, our reason has proposed a view of the world which fails to account for the sense impressions upon which its conclusions rest....”
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p128 ... Thus that whole aspect of the world which science tries so assiduously to ignore -- the subjective -- is in fact the very means by which the phenomena explored by science are initially brought to its attention. Viewed in this light, Galileo’s categorization seems curiously reversed: our primary and immediate experience is actually subjective, this experience being then projected outward as the expression of a mental model upon which our culture is generally agreed. The subjective cannot be dismissed as a mere derivative or aside. On the contrary, it is inextricably bound up with the world in which we find ourselves -- a fact that has recently been demonstrated in the most startling and unexpected way.
This is also the essence of Phenomenology and the like, starting at least with Kant.
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