This is a retrospective of week 13, 2024 (2024-03-25–2024-03-31).
This week, I started reading The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience by Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson. They emphasize the importance of direct experience in a complex and entagled (Robert Rosen would have said entailed) world:
Ultimately, we cannot forgo relying on our own experience of being alive when we seek to comprehend the phenomenon of life.
—A. Frank, M. Gleiser, E. Thompson, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience
The Blind Spot arrives when we think that the abstraction is more fundamental than the experience. This happens when we get so caught up in the spiral of abstraction and idealization (simplification) that we lose sight of the experience that anchor the abstractions. The success of (objective) science convinced us to downplay (subjective) experience. From the perspective of this worldview, mathematical abstractions (formalisms) are fundamental, while our concrete experiences are illusions. Frank, Gleiser, and Thompson write:
…we suppose that there must be, in principle, a predictive computational model… Of course, we allow that we will probably never be able to formulate these models because they are too complex. Nevertheless, we suppose that they are formulable in principle.
—A. Frank, M. Gleiser, E. Thompson, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience
We should be wary of this way of thinking…
This fundamentalist attitude usually goes hand in hand with the idea that objective measures in the [scientific] workshop are more valid than direct experience of the world based on our bodily perception. But this objectivist idea is misguided…
The combination of fundamentalism and objectivism about scientific models exemplifies the Blind Spot. … It’s based on generalizing from a small number of cases where we do have successful predictive models to a vastly larger number of cases where we do not, and arguably cannot, have this kind of knowledge, because the world outside the workshop is too entangled and complex. … It follows that we will go badly wrong…if we treat the world as if it were just a bigger version of what happens inside the workshop.
This week, I have also listened to interviews with Russell Targ, Iain MgGilchrist, Dougald Hine, and Àlex Gómez-Marín this week. The following caught my attention (my emphasis in italics):
We live in a non-local space-time described as scientifically most recently by Schrödinger in the 1920s, and then proved in the 1970s, 1980s. … The hottest topic in modern physics is exploring nonlocality.
—Russell Targ https://youtu.be/pVZ24r3y5_U?feature=shared&t=226
For 20 years my ritual … is: Close your eyes, quiet your mind, and describes the surprising pictures that appear in your awareness. Don’t try and name it, don’t try and guess. Just describe the surprising images.
—Russell Targ https://youtu.be/pVZ24r3y5_U?feature=shared&t=1139
If you learn to quiet your mind, and move your awareness into timeless awareness, you are likely to begin to experience things that surprise you [and] give you another view of reality.
—Russell Targ https://youtu.be/pVZ24r3y5_U?feature=shared&t=1856
In the vastness of the universe there is almost nothing at all is at all like a machine. There’s just the few machines we have made that are like machines, nothing else is. Not only is life’s not like machines, for eight or ten reasons I could give you, but it’s not that the inanimate world behaves like machinery either. We now know indeed that physics doesn’t obey those Newtonian mechanics, and we’ve known that for at least 100 years. So we need to break out of this mindset.
—Iain McGilchrist https://youtu.be/JDY4m9QprXs?feature=shared&t=162
Things that speak to us intuitively, speak to us profoundly. When they are reduced to superficial level of everyday language, you’re reduced to the language of a everyday use.
—Iain McGilchrist https://youtu.be/JDY4m9QprXs?feature=shared&t=265
The questions that I work with…are: … How do we make sense of this? How did we find ourselves here? … What is worth doing?… How do we…locate ourselves in relation to those questions? …
—Dougald Hine https://youtu.be/sEO1yGLKRL8?feature=shared&t=866
I’m interested in…creating spaces where we can explore all of that—without either there being a kind of rush to answers and to action, or there being a sort of black certainty about it all being over and there being nothing worth trying—…the space in which…the things that might be worth trying change us, rather than us operating from existing understandings of self and agency,…framing problems and identifying solutions and so on… That’s the space…where I’m at home.
One of the gifts of being at a time of endings is that the angle of the light throws into relief things that couldn’t be seen clearly when the sun was shining from directly overhead.
—Dougald Hine https://youtu.be/sEO1yGLKRL8?feature=shared&t=1210
What you want to be doing is looking for where you can contribute to the conditions of possibility, where you can improvise stuff that has a chance of working.
—Dougald Hine https://youtu.be/sEO1yGLKRL8?feature=shared&t=2284
There is some something which is at the origin of everything we can do and say as scientists that we seem to constantly miss and that’s experience itself, embodied lived experience.
—Àlex Gómez-Marín https://www.youtube.com/live/ynk2hwSYsCE?feature=shared&t=755
Galileo said that mathematics is the language in which we speak and nature replies… Lately, there’s a bit of an overdose of these computationalist metaphors.
—Àlex Gómez-Marín https://www.youtube.com/live/ynk2hwSYsCE?feature=shared&t=3830
If we’re just fascinated by the idea that everything is a simulation, [then] we’re just giving giving up direct experience for some…abstraction that’s fashionable.
—Àlex Gómez-Marín https://www.youtube.com/live/ynk2hwSYsCE?feature=shared&t=3985
It’s unfortunate that we submit our most intimate experiences to the abstractions of other people…
—Àlex Gómez-Marín https://www.youtube.com/live/ynk2hwSYsCE?feature=shared&t=4184
Sist och slutligen, noterade Expressens ledarsida denna vecka att:
Sverige brukar berömma sig för att ha platta organisationer med medarbetare som vågar ta egna initiativ. Den självbilden framstår allt mer som ett självbedrägeri. Vid i snart sett varje kris brakar ju hela systemet samman. När myndigheterna behövs som allra mest står de handfallna.
…en formalistisk förvaltningskultur…har slagit rot i svenska myndigheter. Regler och styrdokument…betraktas som facit som tjänstemän inte vågar avvika från – även om effekterna blir absurda.
…det är viktigare att inte göra fel än att försöka göra rätt.
—Patrik Kronqvist (Expressen 2024-03-30) https://www.expressen.se/ledare/patrik-kronqvist/nar-folk-fros-i-snostormen-pa-e22-jagade-staten-ratt-blankett/
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