The Truth of Science and the Science of Truth

I myself used to dabble in theoretical physics -- or rather, those popularized versions that began flooding the market in 1975 with the publication of The Tao of Physics. Now I'm hesitant to do so, because quantum physics is so weird that you can use it to prove just about anything you want, from the multiverse to time travel to creating reality with your mind.

Also, I dropped out of high school physics because a gentleman's C was beyond my reach. Better to take an incomplete and be thought a fool than to complete the course and remove all doubt. 

I'm much more comfortable trying to nail down perennial truths that must be true even for quantum physics -- in other words, a top-down rather than bottom-up approach. 

You can't get from physics to metaphysics, partly because the very pursuit of physics -- or any science -- is already loaded with implicit and unexamined metaphysical assumptions, for example the intelligibility of the world to our intelligence. Or even the existence of time. They say there's no time down there. Nevertheless, it takes time to know that.

[T]he worst metaphysics is generally to be found among those who claim not to have any at all (Smith).

Apparently no one understands quantum physics, no one less so than the one who pretends he does. If only I had known this in high school, I could have explained to my teacher that an F is really an A.

But even if we could understand it, it would leave the understander unexplained. "Understanding" is not reducible to the laws of physics. It reminds me of what Dávila says about history:

 If laws of history existed, their discovery would abrogate them.

Same with any form of determinism, mechanism, or dualism, since we transcend each. 

We've already touched on a number of themes of the book, but let's careen into them in a more orderly fashion, beginning with the preface: "physics proves ultimately not to be the basic science from which, in principle, all others are derived." In short, the very possibility of science is situated in a higher and more encompassing Science.

Which is, of course, the way things used to be: philosophy was queen of the sciences. In which case, who is the king? We'll come back to that one later, but the very notions of king and queen advert to a primordial complementarity at the heart of being, I'll bet.

Yesterday we spoke of how the cosmos is not a monotone, but nor is it a duotone. Analogously, in a stereo system, different information is broadcast from each speaker, which is synthesized in the listener, producing the illusion -- or reality, rather -- of a three-dimensional soundstage.

Back in the 1960s we had bad stereo. For example, in the Beatles Rubber Soul, instruments were to one side, vocals to the other, producing an unrealistic bifurcation that could not be synthesized in the listener. Or, an early Bob Dylan album might have him singing in one speaker while implausibly strumming an acoustic guitar that was ten feet away from him. Call it Cartesian stereo, dividing what is one into an irreconcilable two.

Back when he was a student, Smith wanted to study physics because he believed it to be "the key to understanding the universe." Only after doing so did it dawn on him that it's the other way around,

that in order to "understand physics," one needs first to attain a certain insight concerning the universe: an ontological insight, to be precise.

A good mental stereo capable of reproducing the higher-dimensional image of reality? 

Right brain and left brain?

Surely that must be part of the story. These two are unified in what we shall call a Higher Third. In Smith's case, it is a place where

everything comes together, and one begins to glimpse a previously unsurmised ontological unity and order. One begins to perceive physics in a brand new key... 

Recalling the modulation into a higher musical key discussed yesterday. 

We just spent several posts on the subject of vertical causation, which is complementary to horizontal causation. And as we know by now, in any Primordial Complementarity one of the poles must be ontologically prior, in this case VC. Think about it: although the two are always co-present in any existent, no amount of HC -- even an infinite amount -- could ever give rise to VC.

We can't lift ourselves by our own buddhistraps?

Correct:"the buddhi cannot illuminate itself, since it itself is the object of sight." (We'll return to this question of sight and how to look at it in a subsequent post.)

Smith gives much weight to William Dembski's mathematical proof "that horizontal causation cannot produce what is termed 'complex specified information.'" Now, I dropped out of advanced algebra in high school because a gentleman's C was beyond my reach. 

But I say we don't need any steenking mathematical proof to grasp the bloody obvious. The Beatles are more than the sum of John + Paul + George + Ringo, which can be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with cold geometric logic by the evidence of their solo careers. 

With the exception of All Things Must Pass.

Correct. But most of that was actually written when George was still a Beatle, as long ago as 1965. 

Now, all those years ago, in the 5th century BC, Democritus concluded that 

According to vulgar belief, there is color, the sweet and the bitter; but in reality, only atoms and the void.

Thus, he was an early adopter of Cartesian bifurcation and of bad stereo more generally: qualities to one side, quantities to the other, and then the rookie error of reducing the former to the latter. For with this bifurcation,

What is being "cut asunder" at one stroke are res extensae or "extended entities" on one side, and res cogitantes or "things of the mind" to the other.

Which, like bad stereo, "leaves the 'real' or objectively existent world enormously reduced and vastly simplified." Again, it analyzes the whole into its parts, and elevates the parts to the whole. 

Now, I did happen to squeak by with a gentleman's C in high school geometry, but even I know that a two-dimensional triangle cannot be reduced to the one-dimensional lines of which it is composed. 

Nevertheless, the Cartesian paradigm worked well enough until 1897, until the discovery of the electron, one of those "atoms in the void" first posited by old Democritus: "The problem"

is that this putative building-block -- out of which all things are supposedly compounded -- turns out, in truth not to exist.

Waitwut? Yes, "Its detectable behavior"

proves to be so bizarre that a leading theorist [Heisenberg] describes it as "a strange kind of physical entity just in the middle between possibility and reality."

But that's not so strange, rather, exactly in accord with Aristotle's description of the realm of potency, which is also not yet something but nor is it nothing. Likewise, a single quantum particle has only a tendency to exist until it is measured. Does this mean we create reality by observing it? I wouldn't go that far, but why not?

Because you're not Deepak?

Yes, there's that. We don't want to monetize our ignorance.

This whole subject is tackled in the next chapter, called The Measurement Quandary. Let's save it for the next post.