From Mechanism to a Science of Qualities
The papers collected here are the initial installments of a work in
progress by Steve Talbott. They are attempts to describe our reigning
(and mostly unconscious) cognitive habits, the limitations of conventional
science, and the redirections required for a new, qualitative science.
By virtue of its qualitative character, such a science will be holistic
and irreducibly ethical (or unethical).
These papers may be continually revised. I have placed them here in
order to invite the most thorough criticism possible. Send any comments
you have to stevet@natureinstitute.org.
I cannot promise an extended dialogue with you, but I will acknowledge
receipt of your email and I will carefully consider your thoughts. You
can also write me at The Nature Institute, 20 May Hill Road, Ghent NY
12075.
The core papers:
Critique of Reductionism
- Chapter 1,"The Vanishing World-Machine."
How the world as we actually know it disappears into mechanical models
and these mechanical models, as real things, then dissolve (in our thinking)
into the algorithms said to govern them. The world of the theorist tends
continually toward pure, reified abstraction.
- Chapter 2,"The Limits of Predictability."
We commonly overestimate the powers of prediction given to us by science.
Reckoning with this overestimation may give us a key for assessing certain
misconceptions at the foundations of today's science.
- Chapter 3,"Do Physical Laws
Make Things Happen?" The laws given by a mechanistic science are valid
insofar as they are found to be implicit in the phenomena we observe.
But they are not adequate to explain or predict or characterize
these phenomena.
- Chapter 4, "The Reduction
Complex." Terms such as "reductionistic," "materialistic," and "mechanistic"
are used in different ways by different commentators upon science. We
find a powerfully revealing principle for exploring and ordering these
concepts when we look at the mind's one-sided drive toward the simple,
the indivisible, the quantitative, the precise, the unambiguous. The
single, unifying gesture here has profound implications, ranging
from the cognitive to the moral.
Approaching Qualities
- Chapter 8, "Recognizing
Reality". We make two very different and essential gestures of
consciousness when apprehending the world. One of them -- the one
required for recognizing unities (wholes) and the qualities constituting
these unities -- has been systematically undervalued in science.
To acknowledge and investigate the undervalued powers of cognition that
we in fact are exercising all the time (even if we have been allowing them
to atrophy) would be to alter the nature of science in dramatic fashion.
- Chapter 9, "Can We Learn to
Think Like a Plant?" It is impossible to comprehend the sequence of
leaves on a buttercup without drawing upon one's experience of an
imaginal unity that cannot be equated with any material leaf. This
imaginal unity is evidently a shaping power in the world. That is, what
works in us as imagination works also in the world.
How We Know the World
- Chapter X," A Modest Epistemological
Exercise" (a tentative introduction to a later group of chapters dealing
with epistemological issues). How we can begin thinking about the crucial
epistemological questions of our day -- questions that will, in the
end, determine the sort of world we live in. This paper looks at two
worlds, the one given through direct, familiar experience and the other
through scientific explanation, and concludes that one of these worlds
is laced with massive confusions.
Related papers
- "Logic, DNA, and Poetry".
What would happen if geneticists took the genetic text
seriously? A look at the appeal to word, text, and information in
genetics and also in artificial intelligence.
- "From Two
Cultures to One: On the Relation Between Science and Art", by
Vladislava Rozentuller and Steve Talbott. An attempt to show how human
experience provides a language of revelation for the physical world.
- "What Are Qualities?"
Qualities provide the world content that mechanism overlooks. This paper
is a precursor to the chapters that will attempt a characterization of
qualities. It has now been partially cannibalized in Chapter 8, listed
above.
-
"Science and the Child."
There is a huge gap between the world as science presents it and
the world as the child experiences it. Which is closer to the
truth?
- "Hold a Blossom to the
Light".
Lessons in the appreciation of qualities from one of the world's greatest
Amazonian botanists, and also from the tribes native to that region.
Other Related Papers
- "To Explain or Portray?" In Context #9. (Goethe and the nature of
scientific explanation.)
- "A Way of Knowing as a Way of Healing,"
In Context #1. (What is Goethean science?)
- "The Lure of Complexity, Part 1,"
In Context #6. (Abstract simplicity does not give us complexity.)
- "The Lure of Complexity, Part 2,"
In Context #7.
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