It is the whole elephant that is sick - not just it's trunk

(This piece appeared in the Daily Mirror and may also be read there)

(This is the third part of a three part series that anecdotally explores the fundamental question of whether science is an adequate tool/system /conduit to arriving at truth) 

The insanity of specialization 

These days, when I go to a doctor, I feel like the elephant that was analyzed by five blind men. I get shunted from the trunk-lady to the foot-dude who consults the tail-gal who speaks to the ear-guy who phones up the mahout. Each selectively tests everything from my teeth enamel to my toe nails. Each gives me five different types of medication specific to each person’s specialization. They attack my wallet to the tune of fifty thousand rupees and turn me into a chronic, serial pill popper.  Almost, I want to tap them on their shoulders and whisper “people, it is the whole darn elephant that is sick, not the elephant’s trunk. That is only diseased. Curing that will only cure the disease not the sickness”.  I know it won’t do any good though. Specialization has blinded these people and telling them they are blind won’t give them back their sight. Nor will it give sight to those who equally blindly believe in these sightless scientific surgeons when they poke and prod at people, ideas and things, hitting a few, missing a lot and mostly destroying the things on which their intellectual scalpels land.

I’ve written about this many times in many ways but this line of thinking started some fifteen years ago because of a casual statement made by an American busker (and biochemist) named Stewart on the banks of the Huron river at the University of Michigan. My guitar and his harmonica were talking to each other under a bower of maple, linden and aspen blazing their autumn shades off caramelized leaves. On one of the breaks from the music he waved his hand to take in the red-gold forest and casually said “AJ, did you know that most trees are standing on their heads?” and I’m like “huh?”. He shrugged. “Think about it, most of them absorb nutrients through their roots and excrete oxygen and water vapor through stomata in their leaves”.  hmm?! That was a new one for me although Stu’s observation is as old as the hills.

“I’ve never thought of them that way before” I said as I put my guitar down. As I pondered what he said, something triggered, something kindled, something became. “mmm… so too is the tree of knowledge”. He’s like “huh?”  

“Think about it” I said. “The source energy of the knowledge tree comes from the roots. Not the trunk, large branches, sub-branches, twigs, leaves or fruit. Those are the outcomes of processing root nutrients not the source of the nutriment itself. We cannot truly know anything by going up that tree. We must climb down from its sub-branches to bigger branches to large branches to massive branches to trunk to root. Each lower level providing baser, greater, wider levels of understanding as to why the entire tree from root to fruit exists”.

Stu had this habit of rapidly popping his lips when he is thinking of something and he popped away for a long time, his double barreled harmonica forgotten before he said (paraphrased) “So a huge branch would be the physical sciences, a big branch would be chemistry, a smaller one would be biochemistry, a twig would be Lipids, a leaf would be cholesterol and a fruit would be the finding that cholesterol is bad. So if a biochemist says cholesterol is bad, that finding is the excrement of some fundamental food intake of a form and source that chemistry knows nothing about?”. 

I nodded vigorously. “And, here’s the thing. You will have to drill down below chemistry to figure out if your conclusion about cholesterol is good shit or not. You have to know the reason why the massive branch of the physical sciences exists in the first place since chemistry is merely a sub-branch. That will give you a minor paradigm shift like the crossover from Newtonian to Quantum mechanics. But  that is not enough. One level lower you land on the trunk which is a large paradigm shift such as those being proposed by the meta-physicists and noetic scientists. That won’t’ cut it either. You will have to mosey down to the root like the wise and the spiritualists do.  Those feed off a plethora of nutrients that enable them to reflect, assimilate, consolidate, reject, interact, intermesh and direct their ever growing insight and understanding of wholes within wholes. Only then can one stabilize knowledge and obtain key clues as to how the food and why the waste”. 

I pulled out a piece of paper from my backpack and hastily sketched the figure that I have recreated here. He studied it, engaging in some very serious lip-popping.

“You just now cooked this up?”

“Well yeah, because of what you said, but it’s pretty obvious and I am sure there are others who’ve come to the same conclusion before me Stu”.

He shook his head. “No. This is simpler. Damn it  man, following your reasoning, all that we have been doing for a long time is showering the world with shit. AJ? That’s some serious shit you are claiming and the thing is – it makes sense. We are no longer seekers, we are just excrement manufacturers”.

Soon after,  I returned to Sri Lanka and Stu?…well… I dunno. But folks, if all that French was confusing, let me try to explain this a bit more.

For 400 years, we have refused to believe that understanding exists at the root of the knowledge tree and conveniently messed around with twigs, leaves and fruits trying to stand it on its head. Valiantly, we have attempted to legitimize the case for calling it’s excretory organ its intake organ. Responding exclusively to symptoms and surface observations, we have tried to re-label its backside as its mouth.  Yet, when we want to describe someone who is totally with it, we say “she has her ear to the ground” and when we want to describe someone who has totally lost it we say “he has his head is in the clouds”. Right? Smile.  

Collecting facts into fact-buckets like biochemistry is selectively useless, merely subscribing to the fallacious view I described in my previous piece. A view that believes that everything can be broken down into their component pieces, studied in mutually disassociated states, deductively or inferentially linked together through analysis and understood as a whole.

Here is the general rationale: If you break a car into its component parts, you can understand exactly how it works and if you put it back together it will come back alive. Here is the fallacy: If you do that to a dog, once it is put back together it will remain dead.

Something very essential to the idea of the living dog, the whole of its existence is lost in the process of dismembering it.  Similarly, when attempting to understand systems that exist dependent on an infinity of parameters (living beings, ecosystems, social groups, nations etc.), breaking them down has only one practical outcome – it breaks them.

But we are never taught that. Instead, we are told that we must break things into sectors and pieces to know what is going on in the cosmos despite the fact that the cosmos is neither made that way nor exists that way nor functions that way. And so, we’ve landed ourselves with hundreds of specializations and thousands of minor ones, each basically a fact-bucket. Inside them lives that very strange animal – the specialist or, the fact-sop - answering a series of (mostly) irrelevant questions that yields a lot of nothings about mostly everything.

Preoccupied with crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s, they expend years and dollars to find out say, “the impact of water droplets on the air-water interface” or, in English, what happens when a drop of water is dropped into a glass of water, or, in even simpler English, “oh lord, is this guy serious?” Yes, he is. He believes, erroneously, that he is manufacturing gourmet chocolate when all he is doing is making dung.

Let us pause here for a while and take a careful look around. What has this type of science done for us? Have we understood the world clearer or made it better? No. As I said in my last piece, everything science has cooked up is cyclically false. Moving round and round in circles of error, we are now at Armageddon. Do we need fact-sops like climate specialists, agriculture experts, energy gurus, military strategists or money moguls to tell us that? No!

Can we solve it? Sure. There are no questions that we feel like asking that don’t have solutions, provided that we are not afraid to look wide and deep. However, acknowledging those two keywords is a challenge for most. Because of specialization we fear them both.

Instead of scrambling up into the branches and twigs of the tree of knowledge, we need to scurry down to its root. Instead of flying up into its canopy like eagles, we need to scratch at its base like turkeys. Instead of selecting the particular type of tunnel vision we will use for the rest of our lives, we need to buy ourselves the widest angled scope possible. Instead of selective facts we need holistic awareness. We need to be able to study the dog in situ and figure out how it actually manages to be alive without trying to make mincemeat out of it. Try. I did. The result is heady. Or, should I say, *smiles* - rooty? 

The rise of the great good religion of science

(This piece appeared in the Daily Mirror and may also be read there)

(This is the second part of a three part series that anecdotally explores the fundamental question of whether science is an adequate tool/system /conduit to arriving at truth)  

“The scientific method is the addition of new truths to the stock of old truths, or the increasing approximation of theories to the truth, and in the odd case, the correction of past errors”

The above um… heroic definition or Whig Interpretation of scientific history appears in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In that, one can almost see with one’s mind’s eye, cohorts of theorists, researchers and experimenters marching resolutely on a journey if not towards the truth, then at least towards a cumulatively better understanding of the natural world. Beautiful. Unfortunately, it is the greatest myth ever promoted to a gullible modern world. You ever heard the phrase “Paradigm shift” yes? These days, every Tom, Dick and Kusumalatha uses it to describe some fundamental change, some intellectual progress, some shake-up idea. The term was first coined by physicist Thomas Kuhn who,  after having a jolly good laugh at that goody-two-shoes view of science sobers up sufficiently to give the world an alternative take on this imaginary, utopic idea of what science is all about

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He proves  that there is no such thing as incremental progress in science and argues instead for an episodical model.  Science, he says, is quite comfortable running around in happy circles within a given knowledge structure, making little scientific toys and trinkets in the form of casual discoveries, attending conferences, writing papers and generally being of no practical use to anyone until BAM! Some nutjob somewhere comes up with something totally crackpot and completely different than anything that went on for a hundred years before. End, episode 1 and start, mad scramble for episode 2. The period of transition from one episode to another is awash in turmoil and doubt where no one knows what the hell is going on, everyone has an opinion and no one has a reasonable answer. Example: the crossover from Newtonian to quantum mechanics. What happened there, as you’ve probably guessed,  is a paradigm shift. 

Khun’s airtight, historically consistent claims traumatized a lot of scientific philosophers at the time but what really pissed all of them off was his assertion that competing paradigms were incommensurable. This means that there was absolutely no way of determining which of any two contenders was closer to the truth. For example, Newtonian mechanics looked at the externalities of an object while quantum mechanics looks at stuff at the sub-atomic level and there was absolutely no baseline against which to measure their relative merits or demerits. No benchmark that is scientifically consistent, triangulated and validated. So, what he implicitly asked (and what caused the aforementioned angst among the scientific philosophers) was this: When we celebrate our next so-called scientific breakthrough are we not simply subscribing to yet another outbreak of mob psychology or, more brutally, fashion?  Amusing if it were not so earth shattering.

This, from a man whose work has been described as one of the most influential in the 20^th century, is the stuff of nightmares for the so-called scientific purists. It is the death knell to their blithe claim of a of concord of intellectual thought driving forward in a juggernaut of truthful effort through a linear, Cartesian view of the world to greater and greater heights of knowledge, larger and larger ecosystems of understanding. Looking at the actual history of science as opposed to the fashionable, favorable view of it, it is not hard to figure out the utter absurdity of the claims of the purists. Kuhn’s work spawned a whole new area of study into the sociology of science which proved that science was not this sacred, untouchable product of enlightened beings but simply a subculture.  A deeply self-protective subculture where nothing novel is attempted by normal science which simply defaults to preserving and cleaning up the status quo. Content, contrary to all norms of seeking, as Ian Hackings states, to discover what it expects to discover. 

We are fifty odd years on from the time that Kuhn paradigm shifted the common idea of science and its methods. I would go a few steps further along the way. I will go so far as to say that science has now thrown caution to the winds to abuse and misuse the fanatic trust that people place in its methods to a) suborn highly questionable research, b) bumble along from useless conference to negligible summit, c) espouse not truth but expedience and d) tag along with trends and fashion mostly engineered by business interests with no thought or desire or requirement to delve deep into the core of truth.

Science has now digressed beyond linearity or episody. It’s entire structure is driven by a base stupidity (unfortunately I cannot find a less scathing word here) that has made it, laughably, cyclic in its fallacies. For example, back in the seventies, eggs were good. Next they were horrible. Then whites were great, yolks were bad. Then yolks were fine, whites were slime. Finally, the whole darned egg was good – again.  Sum total of egg-research, human effort, forty years and millions spent? A round, smooth, humpty. Bad cholestrerol? Oh la la. A very recent study shows absolutely no correlation between that and heart disease among the aging population. Yet, ask yourself how many times have you messed up your food patterns, how many mad adverts appeared on TV, how many new products more poisonous than butter you stuffed your face with because some set of scientific crack heads screamed cholesterol at you?   Ask yourself if there is any difference between the fear instilled in you by religions and that instilled in you by science. Coconut oil? Great a century ago. Insane until a year ago. Now? Wow!

What does this tell us? Science didn’t lose its senses – It never had any sense. Another example. Evolution. No one has proved it but everyone believes it. The operative word is belief. They believe that we came down from monkeys. Apparently our genes match more closely to a species of African tree frog than anything else. As kids these days are wont to say, wtf?

Wtf indeed. We still believe with absolute faith that science is the best weapon we have regardless of the fact that its collective effort, through all of its disciplines, from economics to agrochemicals to petrochemicals to soil science has us teetering on the brink of destruction. I know, for certain, that every scientist who reads this would rather issue a fatwa against me than acknowledge the very inconvenient truth that science as it is, is a piece of junk. This is tragic. It shows science for what it is – the playground of a group of religious fundamentalists who feed off the trust of millions and feed them fear in return. Other religions started out with great base ideas and processes, driven by charismatic leaders and genuine seekers. So too, we saw the dawn of science. We saw how other religions degenerated into ritual and self-preservation. So too, we see the evolution of science. We saw the high priests of other religions dumbly following something that was far removed from its original base and create entire hierarchies of falsehood, lies and fear. So too we see the degeneration of science. We must now be bold enough to acknowledge that mainstream science is no better than the religions it sneers at. If we reject the one, it is high time we also reject the other – and for the same reasons.

In the first segment of a three piece series, I mildly encapsulated the fact that science was just a story inside another a story. In this second segment, my treatment of the subject is bordering on the vitriolic. I apologize for the fact that I cannot sugarcoat it, just as much as I cannot sugarcoat my critique of religions. 

 

But all is not lost for science. Its great advantage over other religions is that it has given itself the capacity to rethink its thinking, restructure its structure and redo it’s doing. It can start by rejecting this absurd, fairytale idea of itself and its jocular belief that everything can be studied in parts to understand the whole. It can take the advice of physicists like Fritjof Capra (Tao of Physics, Belonging to the Universe), reject its Cartesian foundation  and embark on a more holistic approach. It can take Capra’s advice in The Web of Life, and focus on systemic information generated by the relationships among all parts as a significant additional factor in understanding the character of the whole, emphasizing the web-like structure of all systems and the interconnectedness of all parts.

With the world going belly-up as we speak, we are now, as a civilization, actively moving towards rejecting the industrial era and espousing the sustainable era. It also sees us actively considering holistic science over normal science. In that transition, come all ye faithful, joyfully confused and questionably triumphant, and see for yourselves that this might be the foundation level paradigm shift that saves science as a tool for seeking the truth and not yet another failed religion that decided to continue with mindless ritual.