Heroes Not Zombies

I don’t know about you but it seems to me that there are some people around who seem to think that science can explain EVERYTHING. Personally, I think there’s a lot more to human endeavour and thought than the scientific method, but that’s another story….perhaps.

Here’s an article from Scientific American where they are posing the question “Too hard for science?” – a question which is actually wondering if there’s anything which can’t be explained by science. They put the question mark at the end because they clearly feel it’s unlikely that that sentence could be a statement. This particular article is by a sleep scientist who talks about how his subjects often want to tell him their dreams (I might be wrong, but I got the feeling he wasn’t that keen on hearing them!).

Dreams often feel profoundly meaningful, bizarre experiences often interpreted over the centuries as messages from the gods or as windows into the unconscious. However, maybe our brains are just randomly stringing experiences together during sleep and investing the result with a feeling of profundity.

Those last three words caught my attention – “feeling of profundity” – is meaningfulness a feeling? Would that make understanding also a feeling? Or insight? Are scientific insights feelings?

He goes on to scope out the “problem” as he sees it….

The problem: The difficulty in exploring this idea is that how meaningful something is might be too hard to measure. “It’s a bit like beauty — it’s in the mind of the beholder,” Stickgold says. “It’s not like heart rate or the level of electrical conductivity of the skin, which you have outside evidence of. If a person says something is meaningful, you’re not sure how to measure that, and you’re not sure how, if at all, that applies to others. One has to come up with a meaningful definition of meaningful.”

That’s the “problem” with the scientific method, isn’t it? It’s all about measurement.  Meaningfulness, beauty (go on, add your own list) aren’t measurable. They’re a subjective expression. Not only that, but one person’s subjective expression is often not at all like another’s. What are we to do with that?

Ken Wilber would point out, I’m sure, that only surfaces are measurable, but depth requires interpretation. I deal with the subjective experience of health and illness all day. It’s only through the telling of their story that an individual can communicate that to me, and it requires me to listen, non-judgementally and compassionately so that I can interpret what they tell me. It wouldn’t be helpful to reduce people to what’s measurable in my opinion. Brian Goodwin, the biologist, also used to point out that objective, “measurable” scientifically described phenomena are only the result of intersubjective consensus anyway, and I think that’s also true.

This distinction between what is “objective” and “measurable” and subjective experience isn’t as helpful as it first appears. Whether we are observing, measuring or interpreting, we need reach a consensus about our subjective experiences. That’s the bottom line for me with patients – it’s their experience, as told by them, which is most important and reliable if I’m going to help them to find greater health.

I guess what I’m saying here is that I don’t think science is “the way, the truth and the light” – it’s an appropriate way to increase understanding in some circumstances, and not so appropriate in others. Or is that just too narrow a view of science?

The Edge recently had an issue on predictability. You can predict why! From the financial collapse of 2008, to the earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes which have devastated so many parts of the world in the last three years, certainty seems increasingly misguided. The first main article in the piece is from Bruce Parker, an oceanographer. He starts with this –

Prediction is the very essence of science. We judge the correctness a scientifictheory by its ability to predict specific events. And from a more real-world practical point of view, the primary purpose of science itself is to achieve a prediction capability which will give us some control over our lives and some protection from the environment around us.

Oh, that bothered me. It’s bothered me since I first read it, and it’s continued to bother me since. You see, I like science. I love those scientific stories of exploration and discovery. But I don’t like the kind of science described in this opening paragraph. “Prediction is the very essence of science”….really? I know what he means, but isn’t there a lot more to science than prediction? I went back to Richard Holmes, “Age of Wonder“. No, it’s not a tale of prediction, it’s a tale of wonder and discovery. And what about this aim of science – “give us some control over our lives and some protection from the environment around us”. Again, I understand why he says this, but isn’t this too narrow a view of science? Doesn’t complexity science itself show how unlikely it is that we’ll be able to predict and control ourselves or the natural environment of which we are a part (not “apart from”)?

So, it was with great interest that I read and article from the biologist, Brian Goodwin, entitled “Towards a Science of Qualities….”

Reductionist science is essentially a strategy of divide and conquer: dividing the world into constituent systems whose parts are simple enough to allow prediction of their behaviour, and hence to exert control over their activity. This has worked remarkably well in many physical systems and even, to some extent, in biology. The approach exemplifies the principle that can be described metaphorically as linear thinking, which regards a whole as no more than the sum of its parts. Manipulation of the parts then results in control over the whole.

He goes on in the article to describe characteristics of complex systems and to argue (convincingly in my opinion) that we cannot hope to predict and control such systems. What we need to focus in instead is to further our understanding of complex systems and to learn how to increase things like “fitness” and “resilience”.

I think that’s the right approach. There’s too much “command and control” in our world – and it’s flawed. Let’s restore a sense of wonder, a desire to discover and understand, and to develop a good, scientific understanding of how to adapt, how to be flexible and how to increase our resilience and our creativity.