- 1.1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Science
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OutThe Archdruid Report Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and
the future of industrial societyW EDNES DA Y , DEC EMB ER 18,
2013An Old Kind of Science The attempt to conquer naturein less
metaphorical terms, to render the nonhuman world completely
transparent to the human intellect and just as completely subject
to the human willwas industrial civilizations defining project. Its
hard to think of any aspect of culture in the modern industrial
West that hasnt been subordinated to the conquest of nature, and
the imminent failure of that project thus marks a watershed in our
cultural life as well as our history. Ive talked here already at
some length about the ways that modern religious life was made
subservient to the great war against nature, and weve explored some
of the changes that will likely take place as a religious
sensibility that seeks salvation from nature gives way to a
different sensibility that sees nature as something to celebrate,
not to escape. A similar analysis could be applied to any other
aspect of modern culture you care to name, but there are other
things I plan to discuss on this blog, so those topics will have to
wait for someone else to tackle them. Still, theres one more detail
that deserves wrapping up before we leave the discussion of the end
of progress, and thats the future of science.Subscribe To Posts
Comments The Archdruid Report doesn't accept guest posts. Don't
even ask.If you enjoy reading this blog, please consider putting a
tip in the Archdruid's tip jar. Many thanks!Followers Amiina
Bakunowicz Options Site settings Members (2793) More Invite friends
Sign outSince 1605, when Sir Francis Bacons The Advancement of
Learning sketched out the first rough draft of modern scientific
practice, the collection of activities we now call science has been
deeply entangled with the fantasy of conquering nature. That phrase
the collection of activities we now call science is as unavoidable
here as it is awkward, because science as we now know it didnt
exist at that time, and the word science had a different meaning in
Bacons era than it does today. Back then, it meant any organized
body of knowledge; people in the 17th century could thus describe
theology as the queen of the sciences, as their ancestors had done
for most of a thousand years, without any sense of absurdity. The
word scientist didnt come along until the mid-19th century, long
after science had something like its modern meaning; much before
then, it would have sounded as silly as learningist or knowledgist,
which is roughly what it would have meant, too. To Francis Bacon,
though, the knowledge and learning that counted was the kind that
would enable human beings to control nature. His successors in the
early scientific revolution, the men who founded the Royal Society
and its equivalents in other European countries, shared the same
vision. The Royal Societys motto, Nullius in Verba (nothing in
words), signified its rejection of literary and other humanistic
studies in favor of the quest for knowledge of, and power over, the
nonhuman world.The crucial breakthroughthe leap to
quantificationwas a done deal before the Royal Society was founded
in 1661; when Galileo thought of defining speed as a measurable
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.htmlAbout
Friend ConnectInvite your friendsAbout JMG John Michael Greer is
the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America and
the author of more than thirty books on a wide range of subjects,
including peak oil and the future of industrial society. He lives
in Cumberland, MD, an old red brick mill town in the north central
Appalachians, with his wife Sara.Blog Archive 2014 (3) 1/72
2. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencequantity
rather than a quality, he kickstarted an extraordinary revolution
in human thought. Quantitative measurement, experimental testing,
and public circulation of the results of research: those were the
core innovations that made modern science possible. The dream of
conquering nature, though, was what made modern science the focus
of so large a fraction of the Western worlds energies and ambitions
over the last three hundred years. The role of the myth wasnt
minor, or accidental; I would argue, in fact, that nothing like
modern science would have emerged at all if the craving for mastery
over the nonhuman world hadnt caught fire in the collective
imagination of the Western world. I mentioned last week that Carl
Sagan devoted a passage in the book version of Cosmos to wondering
why the Greeks and Romans didnt have a scientific revolution of
their own. The reason was actually quite simple. The Greeks and
Romans, even when their own age of reason had reached its zenith of
intellectual arrogance, never imagined that the rest of the
universe could be made subordinate to human beings. Believers in
the traditional religions of the time saw the universe as the
property of gods who delighted in punishing human arrogance;
believers in the rationalist philosophies that partly supplanted
those traditional religions rewrote the same concept in
naturalistic terms, and saw the cosmos as the enduring reality to
whose laws and processes mortals had to adapt themselves or suffer.
What we now think of as science was, in Greek and Roman times, a
branch of philosophy, and it was practiced primarily to evoke
feelings of wonder and awe at a cosmos in which human beings had
their own proper and far from exalted place. It took the emergence
of a new religious sensibility, one that saw the material universe
as a trap from which humanity had to extricate itself, to make the
conquest of nature thinkable as a human goal. To the Christians of
the Middle Ages, the world, the flesh, and the devil were the three
obnoxious realities from which religion promised to save humanity.
To believers in progress in the post-Christian west, the idea that
the world was in some sense the enemy of the Christian believer, to
be conquered by faith in Christ, easily morphed into the idea that
the same world was the enemy of humanity, to be conquered in a very
different sense by faith in progress empowered by science and
technology. The overwhelming power that science and technology gave
to the civil religion of progress, though, was made possible by the
fantastic energy surplus provided by cheap and highly concentrated
fossil fuels. Thats the unmentioned reality behind all that pompous
drivel about humanitys dominion over nature: we figured out how to
break into planetary reserves of fossil sunlight laid down over
half a billion years of geological time, burnt through most of it
in three centuries of thoughtless extravagance, and credited the
resulting boom to our own supposed greatness. Lacking that treasure
of concentrated energy, which humanity did nothing to create, the
dream of conquering nature might never have gotten traction at all;
as the modern western worlds age of reason dawned, there were other
ideologies and nascent civil religions in the running to replace
Christianity, and it was only the immense economic and military
payoffs made possible by a fossil-fueled industrial revolution that
allowed the civil religion of progress to elbow aside the
competition and rise to its present
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html
2013 (52) December (4) A Christmas Speculation An Old Kind of
Science Great Man is Dead Man, Conqueror of Nature, Dead at 408
November (4) October (5) September (4) August (4) July (5) June (4)
May (5) April (4) March (4) February (4) January (5) 2012 (49) 2011
(52) 2010 (47) 2009 (50) 2008 (49) 2007 (53) 2006 (34)JMG's Druidry
Links The Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA) The Druidry
Handbook Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth The Celtic Golden
DawnPeak Oil Books by JMG Readers of this blog might also like my
peak oil books from New Society Publications, Founders House,
Karnac Books, and Scarlet Imprint, which can be purchased by
clicking on the images below:Decline and Fall2/72 3. 1/19/14The
Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencedominance. As fossil fuel
reserves deplete at an ever more rapid pace, and have to be
replaced by more costly and less abundant substitutes, the most
basic precondition for faith in progress is going away. These days,
ongoing development in a handful of fields has to be balanced
against stagnation in most others and, more crucially still,
against an accelerating curve of economic decline that is making
the products of science and technology increasingly inaccessible to
those outside the narrowing circle of the well-to-do. Its
indicative that while the media babbles about the latest strides in
space tourism for the very rich, rural counties across the United
States are letting their roads revert to gravel because the price
of asphalt has soared so high that the funds to pay for paving
simply arent there any more. In that contrast, the shape of our
future comes into sight. As the torrents of cheap energy that
powered industrial societys heyday slow to a trickle, the
arrangements that once put the products of science and technology
in ordinary households are coming apart. Thats not a fast process,
or a straightforward one; different technologies are being affected
at different rates, so that (for example) plenty of Americans who
cant afford health care or heating fuel in the winter still have
cell phones and internet access; still, as the struggle to maintain
fossil fuel production consumes a growing fraction of the
industrial worlds resources and capital, more and more of what used
to count as a normal lifestyle in the industrial world is becoming
less and less accessible to more and more people. In the process,
the collective consensus that once directed prestige and funds to
scientific research is slowly trickling away.Forthcoming in March
-- now available for preorder.Green WizardryThat will almost
certainly mean the end of institutional science as it presently
exists. It need not mean the end of science, and a weighty volume
published to much fanfare and even more incomprehension a little
more than a decade ago may just point to a way ahead. Im not sure
how many of my readers were paying attention when archetypal
computer geek Stephen Wolfram published his 1,264-page opus A New
Kind of Science back in 2002. In the 1980s, Wolfram published a
series of papers about the behavior of cellular automata computer
programs that produce visual patterns based on a set of very simple
rules. Then the papers stopped appearing, but rumors spread through
odd corners of the computer science world that he was working on
some vast project along the same lines. The rumors proved to be
true; the vast project, the book just named, appeared on bookstore
shelves all over the country; reviews covered the entire spectrum
from rapturous praise to condemnation, though most of them also
gave the distinct impression that their authors really didnt quite
understand what Wolfram was talking about. Shortly thereafter, the
entire affair was elbowed out of the headlines by something else,
and Wolframs book sank back out of public viewthough I understand
that its still much read in those rarefied academic circles in
which cellular automata are objects of high importance.Not the
Future We Ordered: Peak Oil, Psychology, and the Myth of
ProgressWolframs book, though, was not aimed at rarefied academic
circles. It was trying to communicate a discovery that, so Wolfram
believed, has the potential to revolutionize a great many fields of
science, philosophy, and culture. Whether he was right is a complex
issueI tend to think hes on to something of huge importance, for
reasons Ill explain in a bitbut its actually less important than
the method
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html3/72
4. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencethat he used
to get there. With a clarity unfortunately rare in the sciences
these days, he spelled out the key to his method early on in his
book: In our everyday experience with computers, the programs that
we encounter are normally set up to perform very definite tasks.
But the key idea I had nearly twenty years agoand that eventually
led to the whole new kind of science in this bookwas to ask what
happens if one instead just looks at simple arbitrarily chosen
programs, created without any specific task in mind. How do such
programs typically behave? (Wolfram 2002, p. 23) Notice the
distinction here. Ordinarily, computer programs are designed to
obey some human desire, whether that desire involves editing a
document, sending an email, viewing pictures of people with their
clothes off, snooping on people who are viewing pictures of people
with their clothes off, or what have you. Thats the heritage of
science as a quest for power over nature: like all other machines,
computers are there to do what human beings tell them to do, and so
computer science tends to focus on finding ways to make computers
do more things that human beings want them to do. That same logic
pervades many fields of contemporary science. The central role of
experiment in scientific practice tends to foster that, by
directing attention away from what whole systems do when theyre
left alone, and toward what they do when experimenters tinker with
them. Too often, the result is that scientists end up studying the
effects of their own manipulations to the exclusion of anything
else. Consider Skinnerian behaviorism, an immensely detailed theory
that can successfully predict the behavior of rats in the wholly
arbitrary setting of a Skinner box and essentially nothing else!
The alternative is to observe whole systems on their own termsto
study what they do, not in response to a controlled experimental
stimulus, but in response to the normal interplay between their
internal dynamics and the environment around them. Thats what
Wolfram did. He ran cellular automata, not to try to make them do
this thing or that, but to understand the internal logic that
determines what they do when left to themselves. What he
discovered, to summarize well over a thousand pages of text in a
brief phrase, is that cellular automata with extremely simple
operating rules are capable of generating patterns as complex,
richly textured, and blended of apparent order and apparent
randomness, as the world of nature itself. Wolfram explains the
relevance of that discovery:Free delivery worldwide on this
title.The Blood of the Earth: An Essay on Magic and Peak OilAfter
Oil: SF Visions of a PostPetroleum WorldThree centuries ago science
was transformed by the dramatic new idea that rules based on
mathematical equations could be used to describe the natural world.
My purpose in this book is to initiate another such transformation,
and to introduce a new kind of science that is based on the much
more general types of rules that can be embodied in simple computer
programs. (Wolfram 2002, p. 1)One crucial point here, to my mind,
is the recognition that mathematical equations in science are
simply models used to approximate natural processes. Theres been an
enormous amount of confusion around that point, going all the way
back to the ancient Pythagoreans, whose discoveries of the
mathematical structures within musical tones, the movement of the
planets, and the like led them to postulate that numbers comprised
the arche, the enduring
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html4/72
5. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencereality of
which the changing world of our experience is but a transitory
reflection. This confusion between the model and the thing modeled,
between the symbol and the symbolized, is pandemic in modern
thinking. Consider all the handwaving around the way that light
seems to behave like a particle when subjected to one set of
experiments, and like a wave when put through a different set.
Plenty of people who should know better treat this as a paradox,
when its nothing of the kind. Light isnt a wave or a particle, any
more than the elephant investigated by the blind men in the famous
story is a wall, a pillar, a rope, or what have you; particle and
wave are models derived from human sensory experience that we apply
to fit our minds around some aspects of the way that light behaves,
and thats all they are. Theyre useful, in other words, rather than
true. Thus mathematical equations provide one set of models that
can be used to fit our minds around some of the ways the universe
behaves. Wolframs discovery is that another set of models can be
derived from very simple rule-based processes of the kind that make
cellular automata work. This additional set of models makes sense
of features of the universe that mathematical models dont handle
well for example, the generation of complexity from very simple
initial rules and conditions. The effectiveness of Wolframs models
doesnt show that the universe is composed of cellular automata, any
more than the effectiveness of mathematical models shows that the
Pythagoreans were right and the cosmos is actually made out of
numbers. Rather, cellular automata and mathematical equations
relate to nature the way that particles and waves relate to light:
two sets of mental models that allow the brains of some far from
omniscient social primates to make sense of the behavior of
different aspects of a phenomenon complex enough to transcend all
models. It requires an unfashionable degree of intellectual modesty
to accept that the map is not the territory, that the scientific
model is merely a representation of some aspects of the reality it
tries to describe. It takes even more of the same unpopular quality
to back off a bit from trying to understand nature by trying to
force it to jump through hoops, in the manner of too much
contemporary experimentation, and turn more attention instead to
the systematic observation of what whole systems do on their own
terms, in their own normal environments, along the lines of
Wolframs work. Still, Id like to suggest that both those steps are
crucial to any attempt to keep science going as a living tradition
in a future when the attempt to conquer nature will have ended in
natures unconditional victory.Stories from The Archdruid Report's
2012 peak oil fiction competitionThe Wealth of Nature: Economics as
if Survival MatteredThe Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak
WorldA huge proportion of the failures of our age, after all,
unfold precisely from the inability of most modern thinkers to pay
attention to what actually happens when that conflicts with
cherished fantasies of human entitlement and importance. Its
because so much modern economic thought fixates on what people
would like to believe about money and the exchange of wealth,
rather than paying attention to what happens in the real world that
includes these things, that predictions by economists generally
amount to bad jokes at societys expense; its because next to nobody
thinks through the implications of the laws of thermodynamics, the
power laws that apply to fossil fuel deposits, and the energy cost
of extracting energy from any source, that so much meretricious
twaddle about limitless new energy resources gets splashed around
so freely by people who ought
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html5/72
6. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Scienceto know
better. For that matter, the ever-popular claim that were all going
to die by some arbitrary date in the near future, and therefore
dont have to change the way were living now, gets what
justification it has from a consistent refusal on the part of
believers to check their prophecies of imminent doom against
relevant scientific findings, on the one hand, or the last three
thousand years of failed apocalyptic predictions on the other. The
sort of science that Wolfram has proposed offers one way out of
that overfamiliar trap. Ironically, his new kind of science is in
one sense a very old kind of science. Long before Sir Francis Bacon
set pen to paper and began to sketch out a vision of scientific
progress centered on the attempt to subject the entire universe to
the human will and intellect, many of the activities we now call
science were already being practiced in a range of formal and
informal ways, and both of the characteristics Ive highlighted
abovea recognition that scientific models are simply human mental
approximations of nature, and a focus on systematic observation of
what actually happenswere far more often than not central to the
way these activities were done in earlier ages. The old
Pythagoreans themselves got their mathematical knowledge by the
same kind of careful attention to the way numbers behave that
Wolfram applied two and a half millennia later to simple computer
programs, just as Charles Darwin worked his way to the theory of
evolution by patiently studying the way living things vary from
generation to generation, and the founders of ecology laid the
foundations of a science of whole systems by systematically
observing how living things behave in their own natural settings.
Thats very often how revolutions in scientific fundamentals get
started, and whether Wolframs particular approach is as
revolutionary as he believesIm inclined to think that it is, though
Im not a specialist in the fieldIve come to think that a general
revision of science, a Great Instauration as Sir Francis Bacon
called it, will be one of the great tasks of the age that follows
ours.The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial
AgePosted by John Michael Greer at 5:24 PM +11 Recommend this on
Google137 comments: Joel said... I just got my PhD in materials
science this month. I'm looking forward to starting my career, but
doubts about the mainstream worldview made it tough to find
motivation to finish. As I've begun networking, I've noticed that
society isn't as confident as it was when incumbent scientists were
starting their careers, and a lot of the places that are hiring
look like bad bets to me. I don't want to have a bubble collapse
under me. I also get a vague sense that a lot of opportunities are
opening up, not necessarily for employment, but for good science to
be done. It was good to read some of your thoughts on the matter;
I'll need to work through this topic thoroughly as time goes on.
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html6/72
7. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Science12/18/13,
5:58 PM Andy Brown said... As always, a very thought provoking
essay. I've long noted that people who are trained in modern
medicine often understand a good deal about certain pathologies,
but have no understanding whatsoever of human health and wellbeing.
I think your essay here helps me understand some of that. Health is
the kind of system that our assertive science can't really
understand - (for reasons you lay out in your post) - but
pathologies are often quite a bit simpler and, of course, often
respond to blunt meddling on the part of experimenters and doctors.
Your perspective helps me to understand something that has been a
mystery to me - namely why modern medicine is utterly obsessed with
sickness and pathology and utterly indifferent to health. 12/18/13,
6:10 PM makedoanmend said... I can accept with no qualms that
humankind has been on a sort of quest to tame nature and often try
to eradicate it or remake nature in some human-centric form. But I
also think there has been (and I'm not going to explain myself
well) a concerted attempt by humankind to destroy the human animal,
and that this attempt seems to be again gathering steam lately.
It's been quite obvious that certain sects, like the communists,
had a deeply held distain for humanity; as humanity didn't measure
up to some unspecified ideal. However, neo-capitalist ideology,
especially in its current purist form, seems to be driving to the
same conclusion these days. It's very evident in the UK just now.
I'm just wondering if you think humanity's dislike of humans is a
manifestation of the desire to conquer nature or is it just human
nature asserting itself as the limits of nature confront 7 billion
people jostling for the same resources? Or is this dislike of
humanity a symptom of both the desire to conquer nature but also a
dawning realisation that while we can do much damage, and
exterminate many other creatures, we are finally meeting a cosmic
sized but delimiting nature that might not just be too tameable
afterall? There was a conference recently in Edinburgh, Scotland
whose sole topic was how society could privatise nature and turn
all natural features, like the air we breath, into cash generating
streams of income. Such as deep desire to commodify everything
these days seems to be the final push to conquer nature and to also
loudly declare a dislike of ourselves.
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-12-06/at-theedinburgh-forums-on-natural-capital-and-natural-commons#
12/18/13, 6:25 PM Richard Larson said... There could be some simple
logic to explain why a computer software program would have
tendencies. A pattern in electricty influenced by some universal
motion. As mentioned, a pattern in human use. There could even be
more and less viscosity in
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html7/72
8. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencesequences.
Lots of influneces or combinations, that could lead to its own
tendencies. Does this mean it sentient? Don't believe spending time
on any of these types of patterns is going to be profitable post
carbon. It will be in the category of space vacations and money.
Interesting nonetheless. 12/18/13, 6:42 PM Tom Bannister said...
Thank you once again for another thoughtful descriptive piece about
one of the, 'headaches' of our time. (I don't think its a headache,
I'm just describing the reaction I usually get whenever I point out
that a description of a thing is not actually the thing itself). I
think you mentioned this a couple of posts ago but this is a BIG
problem in the legal profession at the moment. Lawyers, academics
etc are often very unnerved and uncomfortable whenever you mention
that a law is not a piece of concrete (is a piece of concrete
actually a piece of concrete? lol), but a verbal, social, cultural
description. The reaction is usually, but if we didn't have that
there would be CHOAS!!! I do occasionally try and bring up a
broader philosophical point in my law lectures. Some of the
students clearly get it. Often sadly the lectures don't. (and I'm
at one of the more liberal/wacko/progressive law schools in New
Zealand- Waikato. At least with law everyone is at least forced to
admit that law is essentially a value judgement. The Science people
I come across are by and large far worse. They pretend that there
is 'science' 'pure' and 'objective' and free of bias! and then
there is 'everything else' which ought to be more like 'science'.
Anyway, thanks for allowing me to do a bit of ranting. It does make
me ponder though very carefully the various strategies that could
be used to gradually unhinge people from the strict rationalist
'scientific' materialist world-view. (if that's even possible at
all in some cases) 12/18/13, 6:47 PM Cherokee Organics said... Hi
JMG, Quote: "The central role of experiment in scientific practice
tends to foster that, by directing attention away from what whole
systems do when theyre left alone, and toward what they do when
experimenters tinker with them." The above quote sums up the image
/ acceptance problem of alternative agricultural techniques such as
organics and permaculture. It is simply that critics fixate so much
on explaining or criticising the interactions that they are unable
to observe the whole. They simply don't (or can't, or refuse to)
see it. The techniques encourage complexity, when industrial
agriculture - which is supported by many scientists - is a move
towards a simpler
system.thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html8/72
9. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of ScienceThose
critiques drive me bananas too, because those techniques simply
work. As an example, I don't know what the specific interactions
are between comfrey / borage and a citrus tree. I've just observed
that on the ground it actually works and both the trees and herb
are better for those interactions. I always find it curious that
both scientists (and economists too, for that matter) are happy to
make pronouncements without consideration of the facts on the
ground with which they operate in. It is just weird. By the way, it
is 40 Celsius (104F) here today and about a third of the country is
in a heatwave. Such an event is not unusual, but the sheer size and
extent of it is a couple of weeks earlier than previous years. Tidy
work, everyone. Regards Chris 12/18/13, 7:07 PM bryant said...
Bravo, excellent essay! My daughter sums it up thusly: In theory,
theory and practice are the same... in practice, they're not.
12/18/13, 7:13 PM Ruben said... Your note that models can be useful
without being true reminded me of Boids, a computer model of bird
flocking behaviour. The author found that three rulesSeparation,
Alignment, Cohesioncould create flocking behaviour. It was
immediately clear to me that humans have such simple rules for the
pro-environmental behaviours I was studying, things like recycling
and conservation. But even though these simple rules can create a
bird simulator, scientists aren't actually clear that is how
flocking is controlled. As I understand it, the great speed with
which changes pass through the flock means that telepathy, for
example, is still in serious, if somewhat fringe,
consideration.12/18/13, 7:56 PM My donkey said... just a typo
(missing word): "One crucial point here, to my mind, is the
recognition that mathematical equations in science are simply
models used to
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html9/72
10. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencenatural
processes." 12/18/13, 8:02 PM Stephen said... I think you might be
over stating the role of religion when explain why the Roman Empire
never had an industrial revolution. As a slave society instead of a
guild society the Romans never had the technical skill and
craftsmanship to build the necessary machinery and instruments
except for a few rare wonders. There was also much less literacy
than the high medieval period and no printing press to spread new
ideas. In there mines mills there do seem to of tried to use the
technology available to make them as profitable as possible.
12/18/13, 8:20 PM Richard Green said... Hi John, You use of the
past tense in the first sentence stunned me. I guess it is one
thing to accept that we are in collapse, but something very
different to realize that industrial civilization really should be
thought of as something in the past.12/18/13, 8:22 PM Doc said...
Well written once again. As a scietist, i am constantly questioning
the sources of the knowledge we use - too many of these sources
seem to have taken Einstein at his word when he said that
'Imagination is more important than knowledge'; they proceeded to
make up their facts. The new hot issue seems to be the activity of
the science publisher Elsevier, which is withdrawing valid anti-GMO
articles based on thoughts from a new editor that used to work for
Monsanto. I guess revisionist history can be complemented by
revisionist science - the only thing lost is the truth. 12/18/13,
8:28 PM Thijs Goverde said... Eeeeh! Gotta take exception to your
caricature of Skinnerian Behaviourism. I know Burrhus Skinner is
everyone's favourite bogeyman, but operant conditioning works
pretty well, even with yuman beans outside Skinner boxes. It is
applied daily by psychologists the world over with very good
results (and also, methinks, by marketing experts with very bad,
though effective, results). 12/18/13, 8:46 PM John Michael Greer
said... Joel, good. Materials science is potentially very useful in
a salvage society, since it can be used to understand the behavior
of secondhand materials as well -- still, you're right about being
wary of bubbles.
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html10/72
11. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of ScienceAndy, bingo.
These days in the US, mainstream medical practitioners no longer
talk about "healing" or "curing" -- the model now is "health
management," which means they keep you sick but functioning, so
that getting well doesn't interfere with the income stream. Makedo,
it's quite simple, really. Human nature is also part of nature, and
it's human nature that these efforts are aimed at conquering.
Richard, none of that has anything to do with what Wolfram was
discussing; I'm sorry I didn't succeed in making that clear. He was
talking about the behavior of simple rule-based systems, which need
not be run on electronic computers at all. As for sentience, er,
where did you get that from? Tom, by all means rant. I wasn't aware
that the same problem was infesting law, but I'm not surprised.
Cherokee, exactly. The question "does X work?" is logically prior
to the question "why does X work?" -- and one of the core logical
fallacies of modern scientific thought is the insistence that if
the cause isn't known, the effect can't happen. Bryant, an
excellent summary. Ruben, I'd take it further than that. We can't
know why birds flock. All we can do is generate models that more or
less imitate flocking behavior. Stephen, yes, that was Sagan's
theory. Like so many of Sagan's speculations, it doesn't really
hold water -- the US was a slave society at the time of our
industrial revolution, for example. Richard, good. You might
consider contemplating the phrase "progress is over." Doc, good
gods. That's unusually corrupt even for modern science. Thijs,
Skinnerian behaviorism is an effective tool for short term
manipulation of living things in controlled settings -- that is to
say, another expression of the will to power that pervades
contemporary science. As a tool for understanding, it's
contemptible -- and I've read a good many critiques of the claims
that its effects are lasting, or really that effective in the real
world. 12/18/13, 9:04 PM Thijs Goverde said... I don't know that
I'm all that impressed by the critiques you've read, as I know
people who actually do use behaviourial therapy to effectively
create lasting and positive results in a noncontrolled setting. Are
you certain your dismissal of behaviorism's effectiveness doesn't
stem from that contempt you mentioned?
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html11/72
12. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Science12/18/13,
9:13 PM August Johnson said... JMG - Re: Knowing that the model
isn't reality. I'm reminded of when astronomers used the model of
Crystal Spheres carrying the Moon, Planets Sun and Stars. They
clearly knew (and said so) that reality wasn't that way but it was
the best model they had to describe how the movements worked. Now,
today in Physics with Quarks (six flavors; up, down, strange,
charm, bottom, and top), Gluons, and so on, it seems that the model
has been totally and unconditionally accepted as the reality.
Sounds more like porn! 12/18/13, 9:27 PM Pinku-Sensei said... When
I read Peter Watson's "The Modern Mind: An intellectual history of
the 20th Century," one of the things that struck me was that not
only was science involved in the project of conquering nature, but
that science was in the project of conquering other fields of
knowledge, something that scientists themselves would acknowledge
wryly in passing. For example, my undergraduate adviser in Geology
once remarked, somewhat derisively, that "psychology is trying very
hard to be a science, and one of these days, it will get there." I
later dated one psychologist and married another, and decided that
"one of these days" had arrived; research psychology is indeed a
science as other scientists understand it. The same thing has
happened to anthropology, although the cultural anthropologists are
resisting, much to the dismay of the archeologists and physical
anthropologists, who wholeheartedly embrace being scientists, and
is moving through sociology. Economics would be next, except, as
you noted, there is too much wishful thinking going on in that
field to make it a science as the scientists themselves understand
it. Of course, any conquest would be resisted. Watson described one
such effort by the French philosophers, who decided to combat the
materialism of the German and Anglophone scientists by turning to
their own materialism. Instead of following Darwin, they turned to
two of the other great minds of the 19th Century, Marx and Freud,
to combat Scientism. Too bad, as Watson remarked, that Marx and
Freud were wrong. You probably wouldn't be surprised by this
development. As you've noted, anti-religions accept the premises of
their intellectual adversaries, but invert their values. The French
were no different in developing their own materialism instead of
trying to build a spiritual alternative. Then again, I don't find
Anouilh's ennui expressed as Existentialism very comforting, so
maybe it's for the best they didn't try. 12/18/13, 9:31 PM Joseph
Nemeth said... I'm really struggling with this post. At root, the
issue here is this: what is science for?
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html12/72
13. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of ScienceI fully
agree that modern science is about the conquest of nature. If we
abandon that course, then what, exactly, is the point of science?
As you note, the very high civilizations of the Romans, the Greeks,
the Chinese, the Mayans, etc. didn't have what we call "science."
It wasn't because they weren't smart enough. It was because they
didn't see the point. They didn't see the point because they
weren't out to conquer nature. Does science have any other real
purpose? There's a common belief that science begets technology
begets power and wealth and material comfort. It's a somewhat
sketchy belief at best, and grows even murkier as both science and
technology rise on the curve of diminishing returns. Whatever truth
the belief had in the past, it will certainly have less truth in
the future. There's a common belief that science begets a deeper
and truer understanding of the universe, and that this is a good
thing. The second is debatable -- the first is simply nonsense. A
little over a century ago, space had three dimensions, the universe
was infinite in extent and filled with "luminiferous ether," atomic
nuclei were indivisible, and time was absolute. Space now has
between four and ten dimensions, the universe is expanding from a
primordial Big Bang and is filled with a sea of virtual particles
and invisible "dark" matter and energy, atomic nuclei are decidedly
divisible, and time is as stretchy as a rubber-band. I've recently
read of a new theory that our spacetime is some kind of holographic
projection arising from a lower-dimensional universe with perhaps
as little as one "real" dimension. How many left-handed quarks can
dance on the head of a pin? Absent a drive to conquer nature, with
diminishing practical returns on investment in science, and with
every new theory winging off into Alice's Wonderland, what is the
point of science? Observation of nature as-it-is, yes. No problem
with that -- it's valuable. The Romans, Greeks, and Chinese did
that. So did Ugg, the caveman. So do nematodes. But science? I
don't feel the case has been made. 12/18/13, 10:24 PM Tom Bannister
said... -Joseph Nemeth What's the point in the science if its not
about conquering nature? Well of course science is really only a
methodology, a method of inquiry. The direction you put on that
will of course depend on your existing values. Scientific method is
already being used to investigate, say different methods of
sustainable farming or renewable energy or alternative healing
practice. So
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html13/72
14. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencethere you
go. Someone using scientific method can have any number of agendas.
12/18/13, 11:30 PM 41fa48c8-550a-11e3-b48c-000bcdcb2996 said...
Joseph - the purpose of science needs a little elaboration. Do you
really think quantum field theorists believe that predicting the
Higgs boson will grant them power over nature? They know perfectly
well that theoretical physics at the sub-sub-nuclear scale has no
practical relevance. You have to build a 30km long accelerator to
even watch the things as they self-destruct. When Einstein
published E=mc^2, he didn't think it had any earthly application.
Not enough was known at the time about the nucleus to suggest
otherwise. In fact one of Einstein's other papers in that year had
finally given convincing evidence that atoms actually exist, so it
was too early to think about what might happen if someone came
along and started splitting them. My point is that motivations can
vary a lot, but most great scientists are driven by intense
curiosity and a desire to figure out some of Nature's secrets. Is
that conquest? I don't know. However, there is no doubt that the
reason scientists have been given great resources by governments is
because governments think they need to do so to either conquer
someone/something or to avoid being that someone. 12/19/13, 12:20
AM zmejuka-alexey said... John Michael, I have a good background in
mathematics and computer science and IMO you overestimate the
importance of that book. The cellular automats are arbitrary
mathematical models, which are studied on their own in many
details. One just takes some arbitrary axioms ( or rules in the
automats) and study the mathematical universe that results from
them. The problem with arbitrary mathematical models is that they
are unrelated to nature. In contrast, physical laws are
mathematical models carefully constructed so that their behaviour
resembled the behaviour of nature. As for the larger subject
touched in your post, I agree that some transformation of the way
science is done will happen. Though IMO it will likely go to more
practical direction, it will be just a method that allows to
produce results with practical significance. In contrast to modern,
costly and highly specialized science it should be cheap.
Collideres, Mars trips or DNA decoding are unlikely to be present
in that list. On the other hand vaccination, thermodynamics for
steam engines, electromagnetism for long distance communication are
high on my list of surviving
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html14/72
15. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencescientific
fields. They are cheap and give high value to the practioners. And
almost forgot, military science! It also gives immense concurent
advantage to the society that preserves it. For example, basic gun
or even machine gun technology is easy to preserve and can be
reproduced without fossil fuels. Best regards Alexey 12/19/13, 2:04
AM Richard Larson said... I don't know. Reread the blog and I still
get these thoughts out of your description of Wolfgram's work.
Didn't read that book, but my idea has a flow of something, maybe
energy, maybe other things, outside influences for sure, that
create patterns, tendencies, thoughts, maybe has the same influence
on humans as it does, um, everything. Like fighting nature, and all
that entails, going against these flows is a losing battle. Perhaps
even the behaviour of this rule-based system (not a computer
program as I typed, but could still be included in the everything)
is influenced by these forces. Creates a behaviour, but not
sentient? A question not just for you, and like my comment last
week, anyone else reading, to hold the thought, type an answer,
whatever. Even though risky, that was my point, and it was just a
thought. :-)12/19/13, 2:21 AM Christian Herring said... Hey! Your
last few posts make me wonder whether you have ever read Ishmael,
by Daniel Quinn - it touches on many of the issues you've discussed
recently, including the secular mythologies that have led mankind
to assume that it 'owns' nature, and should therefore conquer it. I
would highly recommend it as a book, though I don't personally
agree with absolutely everything it claims, particularly regarding
the 'solutions' it offers to the present state of affairs.
Nonetheless, if you haven't read it, I think it would be worth a
weekend to do so. Let me know what you think! 12/19/13, 3:23 AM
Odin's Raven said... It seems the Greeks were here ahead of us.
Their Talos and ours stops working when the flow of oleaginous
ichor is disrupted. Absent the needs of Europa, the skill of
Daedalus and the laws of Zeus, can there be a telos for Talos? The
scientific spells of the modern Medea may persuade him
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html15/72
16. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencethat he has
eternal life and can rewrite the laws engraven on his brazen back;
and lead to similar destruction. Talos 12/19/13, 3:36 AM Phil
Harris said... JMG I'm glad you picked out 'pompous drivel'. But it
has a lot of hard political and social calculation behind it.
History of the Royal Society is worth strolling through on their
website - illustrates your points about window dressing. (I like
the new President; open-necked shirt and pullover). That sharp guy
Charles II who was brought up away from home - his dad having had
his crowned 'divinely ordained' head chopped off - was onto it in a
flash. Science got increasingly useful in a competitive world; e.g.
physics and bombs when geopolitical structures feared being
'trumped' by somebody else's technological innovation. And nuclear
power was going to trump fossil fuels. GMOs and DNA manipulation
would be a new agricultural and medical revolution. One trouble
with exponential growth is that it gets dreadfully extravagant in
its final two doublings. In a highly geared fossilfuelled society
'Science' like everything else becomes horribly extravagant - and
for most purposes a 'promise' rather than an immediately useful
utility - and those really sharp guys are going to cut off big
lumps if they can't see an immediate use, perhaps leaving a large
bet or two on the table for luck. The 'project' is in the process
of being redefined by simple rules. 'Discovery' is going to mean
what we want it to mean, with a bit of bread and circuses thrown
in? I think you are saying that society/self-generated virtual
reality is one way of living inside our heads, including
entertaining and negotiating with the gods we create there? By
definition some of it is bound, as you imply, to get a bit out of
touch when paved roads are at a premium? Yes, I agree if I read you
right, 'reductionist science' reductio ad absurdum is ludicrous.
best Phil H 12/19/13, 4:24 AM Yupped said... On a day to day basis,
I try to live through my senses, observation, felt experience and
common sense. The more I bring a conceptual layer of ideas and
measurement to my experience, the less in touch with reality I am.
Sometimes this is a good thing, but it wouldn't be sensible to only
relate to life through concepts and measurements. So maybe the
scientific method should just be one tool in the toolbox? A couple
of recent experiences to illustrate:
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html16/72
17. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of ScienceAlthough I'm
not a scientist, I have spent the last few years working with
academic researchers on a large computer science project. In
observing scientists in action there did seem to be a tendency to
cling to ideas and suppositions, often in the face of mounting
contrary evidence from testing and analysis. This seemed especially
true the more hat funding and professional reputation was on the
line. This particular research project went on 5 years. Common
sense intuition could tell what the results were going to be after
12 months. We took another 48 months to fully test and document
that same early insight. This seemed a little pointless to me, but
seemed just fine to the scientists who believed that since the
early idea was now proven with data it could now be considered true
and worthy of publication. Until then it was just a fluffy-headed
hypothesis. In a related vein, my wife has been working on solving
some health problems that have plagued her for years. She has
finally done it with herbs and diet, after many unsuccessful
traditional medical interventions including a couple of surgeries.
Basically, she got in touch with her own body, consulted a
naturopath, followed her experience and intuition, adjusted her
diet and went with what worked. She recently met with her old
doctor who said that this sounded fine but was not something she
was trained in and because she wasn't trained in it she couldn't
really comment - she was a little offended that the healing hadn't
come from textbook medical science. 12/19/13, 4:24 AM Unknown
said... Excellent essay. I believe you have misinterpreted the
motto of the Royal Society, however. 'Nullius' is in the genitive
case: the phrase means literally "on no one's words", i.e., "On the
authority of no man." It could be paraphrased, "Don't believe
anything just because someone says it." 12/19/13, 4:26 AM M said...
Thank you for another illuminating essay. As someone involved on a
citizen level with helping our small river town plan its future,
it's mind boggling and somewhat frustrating how many times the kind
of thinking you describe here serves to inhibit imagining any kind
of future other than the one people have already burnished in their
minds, the one that follows the law of perpetual progress. For one
example, apparently, every human being is born with a set of keys
to a vehicle (grossly oversize for the task) to transport
themselves about in for the duration of their lives. And it goes
onward and downward from there. 12/19/13, 5:38 AM Yossi said...
Joseph Nemeth. Does science have to have a point? Surely the
problems begin when it needs to have a point and then begets
technology. Why isn't natural curiosity sufficient? Unfortunately
scientists need money and only seem to be able
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html17/72
18. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Scienceto get it by
working for organisations that demand technology. Scientist with a
private income like Newton, and nowadays James Lovelock seem to be
rare. 12/19/13, 6:07 AM Just Because said... I'll jump in on the
thread of comments about Behaviorism. It can be a worthwhile theory
in a narrow sense (getting your kids to ask nicely for things
instead of whining and pitching a fit), but does not work well as a
big theory. That is, it has a place within a larger systems theory
to help understand behavior at an individual level, but isn't very
helpful when trying to cope/adapt to a larger system that is not
under one's control. 12/19/13, 6:11 AM Marc L Bernstein said...
James Howard Kunstler has used the term "technotriumphalism" to
mean the assertion that humanity's problems can invariably be
solved by the use of technology. One could expand that concept to
include conceptual and mathematical problem solving. One would then
get "conceptual-mathematicaltechnical-triumphalism". This is what
we often encounter in the scientific world today. An extreme
example of such a view is the singularity hypothesis of Ray
Kurzweil. What is often missing from
"conceptual-mathematicaltechnical-triumphalism" is a combination of
ecological thinking and humility, and sometimes full systems
thought as you've mentioned. I would venture a guess that even as
industrial civilization declines, those who maintain a belief in
the inevitability of human progress will continue to assert that
all is not lost and that a new major technological discovery is
waiting just around the corner. Personally I hope that something
genuinely revolutionary does come out of Kurzweil's singularity
institute [http://singularityu.org/] I suspect that nothing will be
found to overcome the mistakes that humanity is currently making
with respect to sound ecological principles, and that a major
societal collapse is very likely during this century. Observational
science, based upon empirical observation, statistics and
elementary pattern recognition may well survive the coming
collapse. Science based on the notion that nature can be subdued is
probably going to take a severe blow. 12/19/13, 6:24 AM
41fa48c8-550a-11e3-b48c-000bcdcb2996 said... Joseph - you are
misrepresenting current knowledge, which can never be complete.
Just because there are a wide range of
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html18/72
19. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencespeculations
about the dimensionality of space-time does not mean we know less
than a century ago. For example, if there are "extra dimensions"
beyond "3+1", they must be "small", i.e. space is approximately
"3+1" but may have some extra dimensions that are curled up very
small so you can only see them at very small length scales (=high
energy). So in other words, "3+1" is a very good approximation to
the higher dimensional theories, just as Newton's gravity is a very
good approximation to General Relativity. Similarly, classical
mechanics is a very good approximation to quantum mechanics unless
you (again) look at small length scales. It's not useful to make
out that knowledge has not advanced when it clearly has advanced.
Anything can be ridiculed by misrepresenting it. 12/19/13, 6:24 AM
sgage said... Speaking of The Religion of Progress, and its
handmaiden Modern Science, here is a rant (albeit a thoughtful one)
about TED/TED-ism by Benjamin Bratton. He is far from declaring the
End of Progress, and seems to 'believe in' Science, but the piece
is an amusing read. Especially if, like me, you find TED talks to
be glib, over-simplified, feel-good presentations. Or as Bratton
calls them, "middlebrow megachurch infotainment".
http://www.bratton.info/projects/talks/we-need-to-talkabout-ted/
12/19/13, 6:45 AM Adam Funderburk said... Great post, JMG! In the
mental health world there is a definite drive to be more
scientific, particularly amongst psychiatrists and psychologists.
Evidence-based practice gets funded, and using research-based
techniques is becoming the norm in order to receive third-party
(insurance) compensation (Its funny that insurance providers are
the ones with the biggest say in what is evidence-based). Irving
Yalom, a famous psychologist and group moderator, commented that
the scientific quantifiability of [mental health] data was directly
correlated with its triviality. As a mental health counselor, I
have observed that the best practitioners, no matter what their
specific degree or title, act as artisans or craftspeople; they
understand the concrete principles of their job, but there is also
an artistry and a respect for the unquantifiable aspects of the
relationship that makes for good psychotherapy. Carl Rogers,
considered the father of humanistic, client-centered psychology,
described the three core conditions for effective therapy:
genuineness, unconditional positive regard, and empathetic
understanding. These conditions are widely accepted, and their
results welldocumented. A meta-study of research articles strongly
supports the view that the strength of the therapeutic relationship
is the greatest factor in successful therapy, and Carl Rogers core
conditions are all about the relationship. The
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html19/72
20. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Scienceshort of it
is that they work. The thing that frustrates the more
scientific-minded researchers (and not a few of my professors) is
that they arent sure exactly why the core conditions work, and they
cant quantify them properly for real research. Even my professors,
when we came to Carl Rogers, would encourage us to be genuine,
accepting, and empathetic, but wouldnt really explain how to do
that (there arent many quantifiable techniques for being a kind,
genuine, empathetic person) and wouldnt really mention it again (As
a funny side note, we spent more time with Skinner a lot more data
to talk about, and some concrete mental models to discuss).
12/19/13, 6:48 AM Chris Travers said... Great post, once again. It
reminds me very much of Heisenberg's repetitive argument that data
does not imply theory. In the end, we must accept that the map is
not the territory, but is in fact a representation of territory we
cannot even see or really visit. This religion of progress must
come crashing down. It is already under tremendous strain. The only
thing that is sustaining it currently is its own inertia and there
is little chance of it doing anything other than coming crashing
down again. 12/19/13, 6:57 AM William Church said... Very
interesting John. I enjoyed this essay very much. I have a couple
things I'll toss into the mix. One is that the conquering of nature
is one way of looking at science. But some of what you write of is,
as I am sure you know, engineering and not science. At some point
the distinction can get subtle as I know all too well. But one of
the driving motivations of many engineers, including myself, is not
necessarily to conquer nature as it is to build things. There is a
drive in so many of us to design, build, and operate tools,
machines, buildings, etc. I suspect many of us would have been
carpenters and blacksmiths and wheelwrights stone masons and
whathaveyou not too many centuries ago. I would wonder if this
drive to be, for want of a better term, craftsmen is not an
inheritance from our long history where the ability to manufacture
a useful tool could be a huge advantage in tough survival
situations. There was a high price that was paid when the
engineering profession allowed its highest degree to be changed
from a Dr of Engineering to a Doctor of Philosophy. The difference
is subtle and at the same time massive. If the future holds what
you describe then I would not be a bit surprised to see that switch
reversed. And ~that~ would be my offering for today. That the
difference between a Doctor of Engineering and a Doctor of
Philosophy in ~whatever~ Engineering is also the difference in what
would be
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html20/72
21. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Scienceuseful in
the future you describe versus what fits into the economy of today.
Best wishes to you over the holidays Brother. Will 12/19/13, 7:31
AM ed boyle said... I finished reading the 5 volume German history
of technology and the summation of ideas at the end seems to be
pertinent to the discussion. Technology is what practical people do
when trying to get things done. Later others make up rules to
explain what is going on inside the system (Maxwell's equations,
etc.). These explanations help to further develop the higher level
technology. Eventually technologists are way beyond scientific
theories in their own world of practical problems(high level
elctronics, etc.) developing a parallel science of equal value with
all sorts of engineering rules. Engineering is not just applied
science. Technologists are groping to get newer, better, faster or
just different effects from materials and mostly as long as it
works theory of why does not matter but they have learned that as
tech has developed faster and faster that they have to make their
own theoretical knowledge base to accelerate the process. Still,
all that matters is results. Scientists can stay in ivory towers
(see aristotle and quantum theorists) if they want but an engineer
has to live in the real world. To pay due respect to a common set
of internet acquaintances I would like to say that The Oil Drum was
therefore so important for building a basis for resource shortage
concept as engineers are reality based and when empty talk runs out
(economists explanations of reality) and scientists are out in left
field doing their own fantasy thing that engineers do the heavy
lifting turning a good idea into a useful product. Almost anything
can be true, cool but not neccessarily marketable, profitable,
acceptable, financable, etc. Peak oil was this idea from the TOD
crowd. Our limits are now defined more and more by CO2 output of
cars, low energy consumption electrical devices, recyclability.
This recalls to me all those 70s green ideas you'Ve discussed and
the alternative agronomy nowadays. Reality(and resulting theory
thereof, e.g. religion or science) is relative to who we are, what
we need, where(and when) we live(local environment). Without fossil
fuels our current scientific theory would not have come about as it
is mere explanation of what was happening in the world of high
energy technology in scientific theory about physics, electricity,
etc. Most of chemistry started with getting color dyes and
pharmaceuticals from coal tars in 19th century germany. If we
stopped science(attempts at explanation of current observable tech)
before we had access to coal we would have
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html21/72
22. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencestayed with
wood based coals then steel making would have remained primitive
and also our scientific instruments as well and electrics and
chmeicals and pharma would be nonexistent as well as faster than
horse travel and telecoms. In short you can only explain what you
see and can test. Everything else is speculation. This is why
moderns consider themselves above religion as religion is based on
"myth" or childlike "just-so- stories". Mapping the universe, DNS,
etc. needs massive fossil fuel reserves. Ignorance was bliss for us
earlier primitives and the modern sleep of reason breeds
Frankenstein monsters. If Siddha powers are real then in trance one
can perhaps perceive the double ohelix or chemical structures in
one's own body but utilize this on an industrial scale - no way.
Perhaps bilocation and other such miracles of Jesus but not for the
masses. "Don't try this at home" is valid for the hi-tech here. The
future of science is like the man moon landing hoax theories.
Future generations will refuse to believe what they don't see. This
is why the bible belt has such pulling power in their anti science
bias. Intuitive reality is what an emotional animal - primate with
brain or not- likes and a story book religion fits that better than
ten thousand page discourse over the nature of nature. 12/19/13,
8:15 AM Karl said... Here are two links that deal with the topics
raised this week and as part of the theme of war on nature if
people are interested in further reading. I remember debating
holism (high school debate) way back in the late 1980s but I don't
specifically remember Goldsmith although he did write a book about
it in 92.Whatever happened to ecology? by Edward Goldsmith July 1,
2002 The science of Ecology has been taken over by the cult of
scientific reductionism and has become a weapon in the war on the
living world being waged by industrial man.
http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org/753/whatever-happened-toecology/ Is
science a religion? by Edward Goldsmith February 1, 1975 Scientists
are functionally the priests of our industrial society. It is only
they who are capable of mobilising, for our purposes, the limitless
powers of Science, of acting thereby as the intermediaries in our
relationship with this new and formidable deity.
http://www.edwardgoldsmith.org/881/is-science-a-religion/thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html22/72
23. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Science12/19/13,
8:41 AM Kyoto Motors said... The alternative is to observe whole
systems on their own termsto study what they do, not in response to
a controlled experimental stimulus, but in response to the normal
interplay between their internal dynamics and the environment
around them. Id like to think that this is what climate science is
all about, which is, after all, the study of how our attempts to
conquer Nature have failed having altered some significant aspect
of natural weather systems or so the theory goes. The challenge has
always been to separate geological age-scaled patterns from mere
industrial/ historical patterns. Our computer based mathematical
tools have proved to be limited for sure, but the general theme
that comes from climate science does provide something of an
antidote to the ambitious hubris of the day unless you climb aboard
the bandwagon where advocates of planetary-scaled cooling
interventions gather! By the way, I have sorely missed
participating in this weekly forum of late, but have just been so
short on time I have read with great interest every post, and just
want to extend my continued gratitude, along with the seasons
greeting of warmth, health and happiness to you and your loved
ones. Cheers! Maclean12/19/13, 8:52 AM David Rhodes said... Indeed,
Wolfram and yourself are contrarians of the same cloth. When
describing him, one journalist started with an encounter between
the Dalai Lama and a group of Hell's Angels, and how those alien
beings make sense if you realize how much they love their bikes.
Wolfram really loves his cellular automata. Is it fair to say that
you really love morphological thinking? In his physicist way,
Wolfram is advocating for it too. One needs to explore all possible
patterns of behavior, and also to be able to recognize them in new
contexts. On this note I'd like to recommend a gorgeous Coursera
course called Model Thinking by Scott Page (just finishing now
unfortunately). He really drives home the point that "all models
are wrong," but at the same time shows their use with dozens of
practical examples, and shows that one can be systematic and
precise about it all. I like how you've motivated how we can be
systematic without being Baconian. Beyond the flaws of unnatural
experimentation, there are the practical dangers of attempting to
"subject the entire universe to human intellect". Intellectually,
we get farther by working on a more humble scale. 12/19/13, 8:53 AM
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html23/72
24. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of ScienceRobo said...
It seems to me that Wolfram's cellular automata might be one way of
modeling fractal self-similarity in nature ... whereby essential
behaviors or characteristics of energy, particles, substances or
organisms are reflected and multiplied into complex patterns that
recur on a systemic or cosmic scale. As you point out, human
mathematics and science attempt to describe and predict these
patterns, which we then declare to be absolute laws rather than the
high probability tendencies that they really are. 12/19/13, 9:02 AM
librarian@play said... "different technologies are being affected
at different rates, so that (for example) plenty of Americans who
cant afford health care or heating fuel in the winter still have
cell phones and internet access" An interesting cultural
convergence: The rise over the past 2 decades or so of "affordable
luxuries", such as specialty coffees or craft beers or artisanal
foods, which has been driven by marketers' accurate identification
of the need to express taste and take comfort in even small things.
The same faculties that enable us to mistake the model for the
reality it represents also enable us to live with the dissonance of
not having affordable health care, yet having easy and seemingly
affordable access to Tibetan yak's milk cheese that pairs nicely
with a glass of cask porter. 12/19/13, 9:06 AM Kyoto Motors said...
@ Josheph Nameth You may be entering the realm of semantics (?) I
think much of what we call science, the institution, will be up for
debate as to whether it can justify itself/ pay for itself, etc.
For better or for worse (mostly for better, in the very practical
sense of shedding extravagancies like space programs though on a
sentimental level, for worsebut I digress). An example of an old
science may be exactly what youre talking about: observing nature/
working with nature like a good gardener, or parent! The benefits
being self-evident. As you say, no problem with that. At the same
time, maintaining modest technologies and systems to whatever
extent we can may rely on some degree of practical understanding of
post-Bacon scientific principles, like Newtonian physics,
Copernican astronomy, and Mendeleevian chemistry. Never mind that
nuclear radiation, being what it is, will necessitate that we
maintain an understanding of its effects for a long time to come!
12/19/13, 9:14 AM Justin Wade said... @Andy Brown
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html24/72
25. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of ScienceI am a
computer science/programmer guy, but I have spent my career writing
scientific applications, the bulk of it in medical science/biotech.
To your point, I (and many on the inside that I know) believe that
modern medicine is akin to alchemy. The way medical science has
been done for over a century, and this is the research on which all
the knowledge is built, is fundamentally flawed. What they do is to
start a biological process, stop it, then mount whatever is there
on a slide. They do this for a bunch of processes and piece
together a movie out of these slides, then derive a story. The
problem is that, as per this post, living tissue is not functioning
according to what you see at any time, but as a function of the
network of cell and protein signalling as it occurs in real time
over a duration. To continue with the movie analogy, the equivalent
would be to splice together 1 second clips of video from different
movies into an hour long film, and then to build a body of
knowledge about film based on that. This is fundamentally why the
lack of reproduce-ability in experiments is so widespread, the
research keeps turning up very badly stitched together data. The
fundamental limitation has been one part technology, one part
ideology. We have technology now that allows researchers to take
snapshots of a single sample throughout its process and to analyze
those snapshots as one continuous process. The ideological fallacy
is an inability to consider a biological system and its behaviors
with emergent processes that are not strictly a function of what
any of the single pieces are doing at a given time. Incidentally,
the same is true of genetic expression. Recent research has found
that mutation is a relatively common event, but what causes
problems is what is going on in the network of DNA rather than a
single replication/division/apoptosis. The last point to consider
is that disease classification is a model, not real. Its a
heuristic for putting similar manifestations into a category. When
you look at how tissues behave, no two instances of disease or
cancer are exactly alike. There are patterns of perturbations in
signalling and response that are unique to every individual.
12/19/13, 9:28 AM Justin Wade said... @JMG, Well, if man is not
really divisible from nature, and I take this to be true - the line
dividing man from nature is a figment of our collective imagination
- then could one credibly restate the program to render nature
transparent and under human control as the program to render
mankind transparent and under human control? Let's not forget that
the enlightened thinkers brought the practice of slavery back after
a thousand years of taboo, and
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html25/72
26. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencehere we are
now, where people are increasingly finding they are ensnared in
debt traps that keep them essentially functioning as indentured
servants for most of their lives. 12/19/13, 9:32 AM Odin's Raven
said... Worried about running out of cheap oil? Not buying snake
oil or shale oil? Fear not! Soon, real soon, you'll be able to
enjoy the benefits of patented perpetual motion brought to you by
the incomparable technical ingenuity and marketing chutzpah of
America's finest developers. Algal Oil 12/19/13, 10:09 AM SLClaire
said... JMG, thank you for this article. I think this is what I am
trying to do with my practice of dialoguing with my garden. At any
rate I will think deeply about what you've written as I am working
out my garden design for next year. I wrote up what my garden told
me this year in my latest blog post, for anyone who might be
interested. What my garden told me 12/19/13, 10:21 AM John Michael
Greer said... Thijs, nah, a set of practical techniques can have an
absurd theoretical justification and still work. When I was in
college, I knew several professors who had been ardent Skinnerians
during the heyday of the movement -- one of them had built a
Skinner box for his infant son in order to do experiments on the
kid -- and, having recanted, were able to describe in detail the
failings in Skinner's methods. My response to the critiques was
certainly shaped by their discussions. August, exactly! One of the
big points of contention between Galileo and the Catholic church
was that the Church insisted that mathematical models of celestial
phenomena needed to be treated purely as models, while Galileo
insisted that his model was the literal truth about the heavens.
Pinku, oh, granted. Thing is, it's simplistic to claim that Marx
and Freud were wrong -- or, for that matter, that Darwin is right.
All three offer models of the universe of human experience, which
are applicable to certain phenomena and inapplicable to others. The
triumphalism that insists that a theory is true because it happened
to win out over the others is a real barrier to understanding.
Joseph, good. You're grappling with the issues involved here. I'd
point out that classical logic went through the same crisis of
faith -- if the whole world can't be explained by logic, what is
logic good for? -- and the answer turned out to be that, first,
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html26/72
27. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Scienceit's a very
useful tool for solving certain kinds of problems, and second,
learning and practicing it has positive effects on those who do it.
Just as practicing a martial art, say, has value even if you never
get into a serious hand-to-hand fight outside of the dojo,
practicing logic -- or science -- is a healthy discipline for the
mind. Alexey, I think you've missed Wolfram's central point, which
is that arbitrary systems with very simple rules very readily mimic
core aspects of nature even when the systems haven't been designed
to mimic nature. Of course Wolfram's models aren't models of
specific mathematical processes -- but neither are the various
branches of pure mathematics, and yet those provide the models
through which physical scientists pick and choose to find analogues
to natural processes. Richard, it's subtler than that. Take an
absurdly simple set of rules for turning squares black or white in
a grid, set it up under the right conditions, and processes
analogous to growth, evolution, crystallization, etc. emerge
spontaneously from the interactions of the whole system. Nothing
flows into it -- the system itself, despite its apparently mindless
simplicity, becomes a generator of astonishing complexity.
Christian, yes, I read it a couple of years after it first came
out. I have to say I wasn't impressed -- it seemed simplistic to
me. Raven, "a telos for Talos" wins you today's gold star. Good!
Phil, bingo. There are times when I'd like to translate reductio ad
absurdum as "reductionism always ends in absurdity." Yupped,
exactly. Science has become a prisoner of its own relative success,
and more to the point, of the personal advantage of its
practitioners. That's common enough in human institutions, of
course, just as it's common for such institutions to keep on
proclaiming their own infallibility in the face of a growing body
of evidence to the contrary. Unknown, fair enough -- I'll always
accept a grammatical correction. M, I see that sort of thing all
the time. I've come to think that the lag time between when an
ideology stops working and when its believers finally notice that
it's stopped working is one of the least recognized and most
important factors in history. 12/19/13, 11:03 AM zmejuka-alexey
said... John Michael, you are partly right that I miss Wolfram's
central point. I don't think that cellular automats can mimic core
aspects of nature from PRACTICAL point of view. I'll try to
clarify. If I take physical theory of optics, melt some sand and
apply some brain work and hand polishing I can construct a
telescope or glasses. Telescope is hugely helpful for the military,
glasses for the eldery. Notice that without the
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html27/72
28. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencetheory of
optics I am unable by trial and error construct such complicated
objects, though the technology is bronze age maximum. For me this
is the core value of science: ability to make very useful things,
that cannot be done without deep theoretical understanding of
nature. May be I lack imagination, but I don't see how the output
of cellular automats theory can be applied to construct anything
usefull. Going to absurdity: How one can construct glasses using
cellular automats? As for other aspects, I agree with you. Behavior
of cellular automats can resemble that of nature, but it is not of
any practical importance. Thank you for the answer, analyzing it, I
found that my attitude toward science changed to more engineering
approach. Best regards Alexey 12/19/13, 11:57 AM JP said... Wolfram
simply noticed that life has a fractal aspect, I think. Life
deployed in time, that is. You see this in gardens all the time.
Fractal patterns interfering with each other over time. You just
pull out the fractal patterns you don't want there. JMG notes: "The
alternative is to observe whole systems on their own termsto study
what they do, not in response to a controlled experimental
stimulus, but in response to the normal interplay between their
internal dynamics and the environment around them. Thats what
Wolfram did. He ran cellular automata, not to try to make them do
this thing or that, but to understand the internal logic that
determines what they do when left to themselves." And this is
precisely what the cellular automata of the "reach toward infinite
space" did when applied to humanity and millions of years of stored
sunlight. It created the civilization of the West. In any event,
I'm more interested in the issue of mirror symmetry because I
haven't really figured that one out yet. I think it's just as
important as Wolfram's cellular automata. 12/19/13, 12:10 PM thrig
said...
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html28/72
29. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of ScienceEngineered
systems may also evolve curious complicationsfor example, the
Internet now mostly consists of little-endian devices talking to
one another via mostly big-endian network protocols. In other
words, something like: Imagine a vast number of villages, with
paths between them, these paths being used by runners to exchange
messages. The villagers all speak the same language--English,
Klingon, whatever, the language is not important. What is important
is that for any message exchanged between the villages, it must be
written down, and must be written down with the letters of the
words reversed: "good day" is written "doog yad", and then a runner
delivers that message to the next village. Therein, the translator
Olef Byteswapson reads the message, "doog yad", and announces to
his village that the other village has said "good day". They all
agree that this is so, and send back the reply--"dna doog yad ot
uoy sa llew"--and then a runner carries this reply to the original
village. Therein, the counterpart to Olef, another byte swapper,
reads the message, and announces to her village the reply thus
previously stated. And so it goes. How did this state of affairs
come to be? Well, back in the day, "doog yad" was the actual
language, as spoken between the few big castles and towers of the
land. There were also some little villages, but they did not speak
with anyone, at least not yet, and they spoke using the "good day"
form. Now eventually the towers and castles went away, or anyways
became much less important, while the little villages multiplied,
and yet the same tradition of speaking in the manner of the big
castles and towers carried on, at least when exchanging messages
between places. 12/19/13, 12:46 PM Joseph Nemeth said... Curiosity
is one valid reason for continuing to do science. I have no problem
with that. In that sense, doing science can be viewed as something
like art, or at least recreation. That also places science back in
the realm of wonder, since the use of the scientific method isn't
intended to yield anything but beautiful (human) abstractions based
on nature. Like forms in poetry, there are rules, and your
abstractions have to follow the rules, or they stray from "science"
into "fantasy." But both science and fantasy are then on a
more-or-less equal footing, following different rules. We can argue
whether the sonnet (one set of rules) is better than the heroic
ballad (a different set of rules), but it's an aesthetic argument.
It raises the question of how much human resource we're going to
devote to this. Perhaps quite a lot. In post-Renaissance Europe, a
great deal of human resource was devoted to the arts: sculpture,
painting, music, poetry. Most civilizations have been very fond of
entirely impractical (but imposing and beautiful) architecture.
Science can certainly fit as art. It's certainly beautiful to the
educated mind. 12/19/13, 12:55
PMthearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html29/72
30. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencesgage
said... @ Karl, Thank you very much for posting the links to those
Goldsmith articles - very interesting thoughts! And lots of good
references. Lots of food for thought for this ecologist...12/19/13,
1:35 PM John Michael Greer said... Just Because, that is, it's a
workable tool for exercising control in limited contexts, but it's
not an effective tool for understanding whole systems. I can see
that. Marc, well, I'd like to think you're right about Kurzweil's
outfit, but I tend to think that an organization founded to pursue
a religious fantasy decked out in SF drag is unlikely to accomplish
much. Sgage, excellent! "Middlebrow megachurch infotainment" is a
brilliant coinage; clearly I have to catch up with this guy's
writings. Adam, exactly. Who cares that Freudian methods all but
eliminated hysteria, which was once an extremely common and
damaging mental illness -- we can't quantify it, so it must not
work! Chris, the thing that has to happen is that enough people
need to start challenging the myth of progress in public. I'm
trying to contribute to that, but it takes many voices. Will,
engineering has a long and lively history ahead of it -- as long as
there are practical problems to be solved, there'll be a need for
engineering techniques. I'd point out, though, that Roman and
Chinese engineers (among many others) accomplished impressive
technical feats without any sense that they were in the business of
conquering nature; doubtless the engineers of future ecotechnic
societies, as they tighten the screws on renewable-energy
technologies we can't even imagine yet, will be equally free of the
delusion that nature exists so humanity can tell it what to do. Ed,
and that's exactly why -- or one of the reasons why -- I'm so
concerned about making sure that science survives as a living
tradition. If people still know how to ask nature questions and get
replicable answers, it's less likely that the achievements of the
present age will turn into the fairy tales of the far future. Karl,
excellent! Many thanks for the links. Kyoto, and a happy solstice
to you, too! To my mind, the problem with the current climate
debate is precisely that nobody's interested in asking what
actually happens -- a subject about which paleoclimatology has a
lot to say -- because the answers to that question advance nobody's
agenda. David, yes, that's fair enough -- it makes sense of things
to me
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html30/72
31. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Sciencethat other
forms of thinking don't. I suspect the reason I find Wolfram's work
fascinating is that his cellular automata are morphologically
equivalent to a great many other things in nature, and can be
understood in similar ways. Robo, Wolfram got there well ahead of
you. Fractal selfsimilarity is one of the things that cellular
automata readily produce; they also produce chaotic phenomena, and
most interesting of all, they produce complex systems that combine
chaotic behavior and order in ways remarkably reminiscent of
phenomena in nature. Librarian, a fascinating point! 12/19/13, 1:43
PM Joseph Nemeth said... @41fa - I wasn't intending to ridicule
science. My point was that it doesn't generate a coherent,
consistent picture over time. If I were to phrase it
mathematically, I would say that science does not demonstrate
globally convergent behavior. It is, at best, locally convergent
within a particular historical and social milieu. Thomas Kuhn
explored this in considerable length in his Structure of Scientific
Revolutions and various other essays, and it was most pithily
stated by Max Planck's quip that "science progresses one funeral at
a time." I perfectly understand that the scientific picture is
incomplete, and always will be, and that's fine. But it is a matter
of faith -specifically, faith in progress -- that science is
leading in any particular direction, such as "toward a deeper and
truer understanding" of the universe. I brought up the profound
difference between 19th century cosmology and 21st century
cosmology as one illustration of this. You say you believe that we
know more now than we did in the past, but I would respond (as in
the old Lone Ranger joke), "Who 'we', white man?" I suspect that
*I* know a bit more about celestial mechanics than your average
iron-age Druid. I'm pretty sure he knew a lot more about pretty
much everything else relevant to his world, tied together as a
more-or-less coherent whole in something not unlike the Renaissance
ideal of mastery of all knowledge. All I can say about most
subjects is, "Well, I'm sure someone knows the answer to that." We
may have a larger volume of "knowledge," but is it really knowledge
if it isn't known by anyone? Or if it is so fragmented that nothing
fits with anything else? I would argue that this represent less
knowledge, not more. 12/19/13, 1:43 PM Justin Wade said... Alexey,
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html31/72
32. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of ScienceYou should
check out evolutionary algorithms and their applications to
engineering problems. Also, see the work of Reginald Cahill in
physics, in some of his research he used a neural network to
model/predict an iterative, recursive function that intentionally
has noise at each iteration/generation of the function. The neural
network 'learned' how to predict this function by modelling space
and time, that is a dimensional search space to predict the noise
and its range and a linear time to track the sequence of
generations. Sometimes it may not seem to be so, but it is. Science
and logic don't always play nice. 12/19/13, 1:50 PM jt said... I
think many things in this post are conceptually seriously wrong.
For example: "Thus mathematical equations provide one set of models
that can be used to fit our minds around some of the ways the
universe behaves. Wolframs discovery is that another set of models
can be derived from very simple rule-based processes of the kind
that make cellular automata work. This additional set of models
makes sense of features of the universe that mathematical models
dont handle well" But Wolfram's models are also mathematical. There
is no conceptual difference between "mathematical equations" and
"Wolfram's models". Wolfram didn't invent cellular automata. They
were made famous by Conway's game of life in 1970. "It requires an
unfashionable degree of intellectual modesty to accept that the map
is not the territory, that the scientific model is merely a
representation of some aspects of the reality it tries to describe.
" I think all people who do research in natural sciences know and
simply take it for granted that the "model" and "reality" (whatever
the definitions of these words) are different things. For example
Wigner's article "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in
natural sciences" is very well known. Finally it can be argued that
scietific revolution happened already 2000 years ago. It was just
"forgotten" (or destroyed), see Lucio Russo: The forgotten
revolution. 12/19/13, 1:58 PM Joseph Nemeth said... @JMG -- There's
another good use for science: part of a healthy lifestyle, like
getting enough fiber. :-) I'm not sure I'll buy that. I've not
noticed that scientists are particularly happier or better-balanced
than other people. They
thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2013/12/an-old-kind-of-science.html32/72
33. 1/19/14The Archdruid Report: An Old Kind of Scienceget
depressed, divorced, drunk, and suicidal rig