Science

The Mind In Science

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Foreword: This article was first published as a letter in the January 2016 edition of The Psychologist: the monthly publication of the British Psychological Society; volume 29, no 1. (www.thepsychologist.org.uk)

I would like to add some philosophical observations to the recent contributions on the performance of psychological research.

There is a fundamental ‘uncertainty principle’ in psychology because the study of behaviour can change it, intentionally or not, whilst psychological research cannot control for the incalculable influences of its findings. In addition, psychology is open to the accusation of being subjectively invested in its subject matter to the detriment of ‘pure objectivity’ – after all, don’t we start with subjective premises like thoughts, feelings, memories, attitudes etc? And, despite the physical sciences being just as susceptible to ‘confirmation bias’ they seem better placed to get away with the trick of being ‘essentially objective’ – as if ‘objectivity’ is independent of the meaning we give to it. In fact, it may be fair to say that scientists are more like tinkerers than independent observers, and to make this point I take my cue from the works of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper.

Science faces a continuous challenge to determine the facts, which, aside from the most general of interpretations, are rarely conclusive. Indeed, the ideal of science – that the facts will speak for themselves – is a complete myth. Furthermore, every fact is a fact in multiple contexts and its isolation does not necessarily reflect its true nature. Evidence, such as it is, is a construct of the questions we ask, and is limited by all those we fail to ask. In general terms, there is no evidence without a mind to be convinced, and it doesn’t matter how objective we strive to be, we cannot escape the fact that there would be no objectivity without a subjective backdrop; indeed objectivity exists as a selective version of subjectivity. It is no wonder then that as the evidence accumulates, we find ourselves overturning or re-interpreting facts of prior investigations that were hitherto taken to be conclusive.

In reality, science remains a community of tinkerers. We like to think that our discoveries bolster our claims to have mastered the facts and that we know what we are doing because, like Little Jack Horner, we have managed to pull the plum out of the pie. And though we might have good reasons for selecting our pie, our generalisations don’t mean that the facts have told us what to think, or that that the ‘hard evidence’ runs our research – indeed it remains very much the opposite. Meanwhile, we strive to remain in control of our selections, so ensuring that the results remain subject to our foibles – which is why, as Karl Popper pointed out, we can always find confirmations of our pet theories and still be wrong.

A cynic might conclude that reliability and replication thereby serve to promote a line of research at the expense of the wider truth. But what kind of truth is to be found outside research? It would seem that the answer lies in our assessments of validity, so long as we remember that those assessments remain no more than that – since no fact speaks for itself whilst it requires a theory to speak for it. Nevertheless, there is one conclusion we are entitled to draw on the basis of our privileged position as subjective entities in an objective universe – that no matter how research proceeds and performs in the future, it remains relative to the unique ‘contamination’ of the mind in science, and necessarily so, albeit, paradoxically, not necessarily sufficient to convince us.

Mike Laidler MBPsS
philosophyalive.co.uk

References
Kuhn, Thomas S (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.
Popper, Karl R (1957). The Poverty of Historicism. Routledge & Kegan Paul

Factualities

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Explanation is not all it seems.  Explanations owe more to matters of language than fact.  They echo the voice of authority, partly borrowed from the facts, but crucially sponsored by the credibility of who says what.  For most purposes they serve as rarefied beliefs – vouching for the way things ‘must be’.  At the cutting edge they take the form of specialised communications between like-minded thinkers claiming to speak for the truth – assuring us that facts dispel uncertainties, and truth is furthered by the elimination of contradiction.  Contradiction showcases opposing statements of fact.  Either way, the facts are neither disposed to tell us anything, nor explain themselves.  In most cases the facts have been selected to suit the explanation, though their proponents gain rhetorical advantage in pretending it is the other way round.   Politicians are particularly adept at this – the fuzziness of language being the politician’s weapon of choice and first line of defence.

Scientific explanation tackles the problem by putting its explanations on trial – as if the facts will decide.  Scientists acknowledge known unknowns, but it is the unknown unknowns that weaken their conclusions, which harbour a persisting hiatus that outstrips all progress in working towards an ultimate truth.  The strange thing about scientific explanation is that it can seem right, because it works, yet still be wrong – being ‘right’ for the wrong reasons.  Nevertheless, for scientists, it is the explanation that counts, and they soldier on without knowing whether their findings will ever have a practical application.   In the meantime the whole of explanation comes down to tentative theories which remain fallible because of the ever vacant space for the unknown.  But the greater fallacy is due to our precepts of what we need and don’t need to know, given the fact of what we take to know already – prescribing that whereof we cannot know, thereof we must ignore.

Mike Laidler

Questions: ‘Loaded dice’ and ‘a theory of everything’

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’What is a theory of everything?
Based upon the current idiom of science, it is a theory that can capture the whole of existence in a single factual or mathematical proof – as if that fact or equation can stand apart from the realms of theory, and as if reality dictates to theory that everything reduces to that one thing.

What is a theory of chance?
We are surrounded by chance events, which prompts us to ask whether the universe might have started that way. Chance can be seen to operate within certain boundaries to yield uncertain outcomes. For instance, rolling a die can have uncertain outcomes, but they are limited by the nature of the die, which doesn’t look like it got here by chance. Of course there may be additional uncertain consequences, such as an ensuing fight, but these are indirect and tend to remain only notionally connected. Normally, chance and probability are used to calculate the likelihood of an outcome, but that’s not quite the same thing as explaining it; however, other, more fanciful suppositions court the idea that anything can happen by chance – that a rolling rock could in theory turn itself into a die – although fewer still would go so far as to say it is theoretically possible for a rolling rock to turn into a chicken. Yet many hypotheses are promulgated, to varying degrees of nonsense, in the attempt to explain changes we can’t explain except by putting them down to chance – even to the point of decrying the importance of known non-chance events – as if the works of Shakespeare could, in theory, be replicated by placing typewriters in an infinite monkey cage. Other theories place chance at the origin of ‘life, the universe and everything’ – as the essential pre-existing or spontaneously exiting cause, or as a nexus in multiple universes.

If the answer isn’t ‘in the beginning’, where is it?
It’s likely to be in ‘an end-point’ outside of our reach. That’s why we prefer to look to beginnings – because they seem more accessible and there are still clues to be found, although we tend to treat each discoverable beginning as not the actual beginning of ‘it all’. However, an ‘ultimate beginning’ is not likely to be a repository of everything in any event, simply because of the fact that we can see things changing to become more than they were, and it is happening right before our eyes. So we are witnessing new beginnings all the time and remain challenged by the inexplicable facts of change, which we try to make explicable by looking in vein to ever more distant beginnings for a more ample cause. Meanwhile, theories of beginnings and ends remain highly theoretical – for isn’t every end a new beginning in the bigger picture of a dynamic universe where effects adorn the reality of their causes with something new? Furthermore, the idea of a first cause setting up a consistent chain of events, seems to suggest that ‘the dice were loaded from the start’, unless this consistency is an illusion of our place and time in ‘our universe’ – because the infinite variety of alternatives that are consistent with chance remain hidden from us in an unobservable ‘multiverse’.

Is there a purpose to existence?
This is a question we can feel more at home with, indeed we can also make some firm inroads towards an answer, because we already know there is purpose and meaning in existence, if only by way of our own presence, nature and outlook – and since we happen to be a real part of the universe we bear proof in ourselves of what can transpire. This change in the nature of nature is no less significant in cosmic terms just because we find it happens to be peculiar to us. But questions remain to be answered: where does it all lead and does it end with us? It seems that the answers lie in the bigger picture, where ends turn out to be bigger than beginnings – whereby our sense of meaning and purpose, despite manifesting as a part of us, may in fact be a staging point of a further beginning. (The question of ‘a bigger picture’ has been examined above).
So it may well be the case that we are privy to only a part of the answer, given that it is fair to assume that we exist in a universe that is bigger than us and that the nature of our being owes to more than we bring to it. Nevertheless, we can take comfort from the incompleteness of our situation, in the stark realisation that the purpose in existence is likely to be bigger than all we can make of it, just as the facts are likely to remain bigger than all we can make of them. Thereafter, the main obstacle to our progress is ourselves and our equally deficient observation that reality is confined to the facts of a purposeless nature that fixes the fate of what it all adds up to, which we uphold by promising ourselves that this explanation will win through in the end – as if we can deem ourselves adequate to explain the existence of existence or the extent of its nature and possibilities.

Mike Laidler

Loaded dice: The chances of a ‘theory of everything’.

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If the mystery of existence is that it exists, then that mystery carries through into every aspect of it, including our observations of necessity and all the explanations built upon them. Also the question of necessity persists despite all the revelations of observation and explanation – since we still don’t know how the universe came to be as a necessary fact, and if not, why it came to be at all? Meanwhile, the mystery deepens in the knowledge that everything can be observed to come down to something less than itself – indeed explanation seems to rely on this fact.

On the other hand, things can be seen to change to become more than they were – such as when the universe takes form, or chemicals constitute bodies that become alive, or thoughts emerge with knowledge to frame ‘the facts’. Yet things don’t change, remaining as they were beneath the surface, everything being reducible to the basic elements. So change is at the centre of the mystery of existence – being shrouded in the paradox that things change without changing in a universe that appears to grow from nothing in the same way – because everything is traceable to something less than it becomes, which remains unchanged beneath it all.

In short, explanation doesn’t do justice to the facts that are simultaneously one thing and another. For example, to claim that we are just atomic particles because ‘in reality’ that’s all there is, neither represents the reality of atomic particles nor ourselves, and does not instate atomic particles as the source of feelings, intentions and purposes. So a ‘reductionist’ explanation of the origins of the universe cannot count as ‘a theory of everything’. Neither can we expect knowledge, as part of the universe, to encapsulate the reality in which it is encapsulated – for it seems that realities, like dice, turn on outcomes and inevitabilities bigger than themselves in which the ‘laws of necessity’ get redefined. Meanwhile explanation is fated to chase perpetually the facts that outstrip it.

Furthermore, a theory of chance neither explains itself nor the necessities that come to overlay it, or how causes lead to change. Nor can explanation pin its authority on the consistency of causes – since the observation of a ‘necessary outcome’, in providing a premise for explanation, doesn’t yield an adequate explanation of its beginning in something less. Thus, in the paradoxical reality of fact, everything reveals the fact of itself in a reality bigger than itself; and reality presents ‘itself’ as a plurality of realities: in unity and diversity, stasis and change, explanation and contradiction – the plural ‘it’ encompassing the living and the unliving, chance and design, action and inertia, possibility and limitation, inevitability and uncertainty, coincidence and intention, necessity and choice, knowledge and oblivion, meaning and irrelevance. Then if there is more to reality in its outcomes than its origins, the ‘absolutes’ remain definitive only of truths that are incomplete truths in a reality bound to change, together with its mantle of explanation.

Mike Laidler

Turing’s Avatar

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Can a machine think? Can a thinking machine tell us something about ourselves – or does it need to ask its own questions?
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Abstract: The Turing test poses problems for explanation in supposing that different causes, synthetic and biological, can converge upon the same effect, namely intelligence. In particular, the recognisable change from cause to effect depends upon a capacity for recognition that cannot be subtracted from the appearance of intelligence or its explanation.

Historical background: Alan Turing was a pioneer in the field of Artificial Intelligence. In 1950 he devised a famous thought experiment as an objective means of assessing the equivalence between an intelligent machine and a human competitor: If an independent examiner, who can’t see whether he is dealing with a man or a machine, cannot discriminate between their performance, then it is reasonable to assume that the machine is intelligent, indeed thinking for itself, and that thinking and intelligence can be explained as a programme. Various advances have been made since then plus diverse claims about the prowess of thinking machines. There is an annual competition called the Loebner Prize which is broadly based on the Turing test. The 2014 competition was held at Bletchley Park and won by a machine called Rose, which was awarded a bronze medal. If a machine eventually passes the Turing test, a special prize will be awarded and the competition will end.
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Causality is a conundrum. Everything we know about atoms and molecules doesn’t tell us what comes next until we see what comes next. So it is by the nature of the effect that we are able to establish the nature of the causal properties of the atom – observable in the changes attributed to it. These attributions reassure us that the change is within bounds, but those bounds are discoverable by observation of the recurrent fact of the effect, not the continuing presence of the cause in its original state. So all we have really established is that things change, with implications for both the cause and the effect.

In fact all we see is change as a fact of change. The causality is a fact we have construed. Our causal proof is based on the fact that the cause came first, in its unchanged state, plus the ‘fact’ that there is nothing else to observe – save for the effect that results. But this observational framework is directly challenged when it comes to our understanding of our own thinking – because here the effect comes first, as an active observational prerequisite, and all the facts we can observe as causes can’t match the nature of the effect we seek to explain.

Likewise, we attribute consciousness to its causes knowing that any comparison is based on the change to consciousness – an effect that supplements the cause, meaning the cause is less than the effect – a difference that calls into questions the explanatory power of our causal proofs. However, the Turing test proposes a situation in which the difference disappears when comparing our version of thinking with an ‘intelligent machine’ – suggesting that if we can’t tell the difference we can dismiss it, and implying that we can also ignore the physical differences in its causes. Also, we can begin to understand the mind as a physical process, knowing that the Turing machine is an entirely material thing.

But what does the machine know? Is it aware that it knows – of knowing as a state of awareness? Is awareness no more than a physical process? Presumably an alert machine would recognise this much of itself and could simply tell us or show us, providing the answer from the material information in its operating systems and programmes – the corollary being that the reality equates to its physical activities, that there can be nothing more to our thinking, knowing and understanding. In this vein, the ‘change’ to awareness is seen as a feature and function of its physical causes; but it was the change to awareness that led us to identify this feature with its causes, and without the effect emerging as something else we have no cause to attach any function to the cause. Furthermore, the possibility of different causes, biological and synthetic, leading to the same effect also endorses the significance of the effect as a real change. Whichever way we look at the facts we can’t escape the fact that the special nature of our state of awareness is really its special nature as something else, which can’t be the nature of the cause as it was.

An explanatory gap lurks within our theories of where thinking comes from, as if its properties can and need to be known as the output of something else – to the point that we can also identify our awareness with that something else, in its cause. Current reasoning avers that we can’t really know what knowledge amounts to in ourselves, subjectively, without observing it objectively as an objective fact in the world, with the unknowing unconscious physical cause instated as the complete explanation. This is the same reasoning that subsumes the nature of the effect to that of the cause. Accordingly, reason itself is seen as belonging to the properties of an external world and as such gives our reasoning its authority. However, the universe is an unthinking fact occupied by a thinking fact – in one sense it can be seen to give the thinker their thoughts, but in another, very real sense, it cannot – for it has no thoughts to convey.

Even though science hasn’t explained the physical nature of consciousness ‘it’ remains sure that there is a physical explanation in its causes. But causality is a conundrum. It comes down to the fact that we know the conscious mind is possible, but we are expecting the impossible of it in trying to explain it away in the properties of something else that is less than conscious – in the unconscious causes of the physical world. These material proofs attempt to reconstruct the mind as an avatar, by which we might know it better. However, even the ‘thinking machine’ cannot show us what its thinking is really like without doing something really unusual, without joining us in the speculation over its own faculties and their origin – for it is evident that the reality is simultaneously one thing and another, being one thing as the cause and another as the effect. It appears that we introduce our own reasons for wanting the appearance of appearances to be a reality we must explain in terms of its insentient causes.

Mike Laidler

The Sound of Silence

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Science is a reality proceeding to its completeness through the realisation of possibilities and the discovery of what is there. A prerequisite for this exercise is the capacity for knowing which the knower uniquely brings to the facts under study in a reality now extended by a new and different kind of realisation – one that takes place in the mind.

This process of completion began long before we invented science. Hearing a sound extends the reality from its physical state into a co-existing mental state. It is futile to argue whether the one or the other is the more real, they both add up a new reality – a reality that has already changed with the advent of its perception. We now know that we occupy both versions of this new reality – knowing that the physical waveform of sound is not everything to know, that perception brings sound to life and without that living perception the ‘sound’ remains in the silence of its physical state. Meanwhile the forests may fall and the mountains crumble without the full reality of sound having made its appearance.

Scientists know that the reality of knowledge is incomplete without an objective basis, yet tend to overlook the fact that the objective basis is incomplete within a wider reality that is known to obtain – that the world is incomplete in the oblivion of its physical completeness without the presence of a knowing realisation to change what happens next.

Mike Laidler

 

The science paradox

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Is science defined by scientists or is it the other way round?

Scientists proceed by trying to prove their hypotheses wrong and can be certain only when they know they are wrong: ‘ … we make measurements, we make models and we try and give some answers. The key thing to understand is science is never right. It’s the one discipline where you can be absolutely wrong, you can be shown to be wrong, but it’s just the best we can do given our current knowledge – that’s very important.’ (Interview on BBC Radio 4 Today Programme on 16th June with the scientist Brian Cox.)

So is science identifiable as the set of scientists who can never know for sure when they are right – and can those scientists be right in saying: ‘science is never right’? For like the barber who shaves everyone who doesn’t shave himself and therefore can and cannot shave himself, these scientists can and cannot be right.   But there is a deeper paradox at the heart of science, namely science does and doesn’t owe its presence to the work of scientists – being populated and popularised by scientists who do not know whether their current state of knowledge is right, yet who strive assiduously to prove that it is by doing the opposite.

Mike Laidler

 

 

The ‘dark matter’ of science

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There is more to existence than can be captured by that part of it called explanation, because explanation is merely a part of it.  Accordingly, there is a dark matter in science that science attributes to the ‘dark matter’ of the universe – the 95% of the ‘known’ universe that remains inexplicable.  This inexplicability is currently described as the problem of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’, as if the problem lies with the facts of nature.  However, the problem of explanation does not rest with the facts of nature, for science’s inability to explain is actually explanation’s inability to explain.

Explanation is a selective statement of fact that reveals, upon reflection, a fact about itself – that there are many ways to look at reality, but no way to see it as a whole.  And the selectivity in explanation creates the parameters of the inexplicable – in terms of what is necessarily excluded.  It doesn’t matter whether this is intentional or unintentional, the result is the same – explanation carries a cost that we accept as a fair trade, a price that we are willing to pay to find out what we want to know.  And so long as the knowledge we glean accords with the facts we know about, we are content to claim that the facts can’t be wrong, as if the facts are the source of their explanation, indeed as if knowledge belongs to those facts.  Factual knowledge becomes the agency of its own ignorance.

The relative nature of explanation highlights a longstanding problem of what it actually explains, for explanation has to be more than a matter of faith or acceptance, indeed it purports to be more.  But the whole basis of explanation sits on a point of faith – that one thing explains another – so the universe owes its explanation to something else – facts that we deem ourselves privileged to know from a position of neutrality.  However nothing is altogether neutral, not even the ‘nothingness’ of dark matter, and especially the urge to know.  Everything known is relative to a point of reference.  We tentatively proceed to commission explanations as ‘objective’ observers of reality, but objectivity is a subtle version of subjectivity, for there can be no objective point of view without a point of view – objectivity owes its existence to a subjective presence.

All knowledge attests to a fact that objectivity tries to preclude – the inexplicable nature of subjectivity in the fact of the known, in the nature of existence itself.  Explanation has much to do with what is said to be the fact of the matter, on the premise that it is the ‘objective’ facts that are saying something about themselves.  We like to think that the fact of a mental entity sitting in the midst of the universe has no relevance to the place or form of explanation, so we believe that the place of explanation is outside us, thereby giving credibility to explanation – and to make doubly sure that our explanations are not misunderstood as belonging to us, we claim that they belong to science, as if science is out there waiting to explain things for us.

Unfortunately this view of explanation is a myth and its fault lines are evident once we stop keeping faith.   The myth is built on a false belief in what causality explains.  We believe that everything has a cause and that causes explain how things change.  But there is a problem; whereas we can see how this works in reality, in our perceptions of reality, it fails as an explanation of how ‘existence got here’ – that is, in the realities outside our participation as subjective entities, where the explanation of the universe and existence is meant to be found.  Our view on causality represents our predilection toward the idea of what comes first – first being a fact of elevated psychological significance in our partial viewpoint on reality.

Explanation doesn’t work as an explanation of existence if explanation implies that everything owes its existence to something else – for the evidence we uncover as a validation of that paradigm merely pushes the problem back one stage, into the realms of dark explanation, currently manifesting as the ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ of science.  And the problem gathers momentum with the observation that everything has a definitive cause – as if the change, of which causality is the vehicle, is explained by hitching a ride.

Paradoxically, the energy invested in the elevated status of explanation is the true dark matter awaiting its enlightenment in the realisation that explanation neither explains things for us nor ourselves in the bargain.  Science sees the problem otherwise, in terms of a shortage of facts, in terms of the dark matter out there in nature, on the premise that matter is a conversion of energy explicable by the fact that it happens.  But how are we to calculate a conversion of energy, such as we are, to exist in the midst of the universe in a form that is animated to explain itself and the rest of existence in the process?   Are we not deluding ourselves that existence is inherently explicable because it happens, in the same way that our explanations are intrinsically viable because they ‘explain’.

 

Mike Laidler

Infinity in an atom

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No thing compares to nothingness without the creation of an infinity in comparison. So compared to nothingness, the existence of something is already infinitely greater than the ‘antithesis’ it is seen to replace, even when that infinity is condensed into the presence of a ‘single atom’ – displacing the infinity of ‘nothingness’ into a different universe.

And the reality that prevails over all seems to be an infinity of infinities, created in no small part by our attempts to see it as something finite.

Mike Laidler

The appearance of evolution

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Evolution is meant to have its limits, it is not meant to be everything, and it is meant to be understood within those limits; otherwise it will set limits to our understanding, otherwise we will tend to see it as the it that is meant to make possibility possible.

We see nature revolving around evolution and its possibilities, instead of looking at evolution revolving around nature and its possibilities. We see things change and call it evolution, and then we say the evolution explains the change. Yet evolution is not everything. It does not determine the possibility of what can happen, though it certainly appears to – that is, if certainty can be attributed to appearances. But did Copernicus not teach us a lesson in that regard?

“It’s true to say that evolution is not an ascent. There is no march towards complexity in evolution.” Professor Brian Cox. (20.10.14). http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-29686627

Mike Laidler