This book, THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE: Uniscience and the Modern World, by Robert Hanna, presents and defends a critical philosophy of science and digital technology, and a new and prescient philosophy of nature and human thinking.
It is being made available here in serial format, but you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text–including the BIBLIOGRAPHY–of THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE HERE.
This forty-fourth installment contains section 4.2.
We know the truth not only through our reason but also through our heart. It is through the latter that we know first principles, and reason, which has nothing to do with it, tries in vain to refute them. (Pascal, 1995: #110, p. 28)
If there is any science humankind really needs, it is the one I teach, of how to occupy properly that place in [the world] that is assigned to humankind, and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be human. (Rem 20: 45)
Natural science will one day incorporate the science of humankind, just as the science of humankind will incorporate natural science; there will be a single science. (Marx, 1964: p. 70, translation modified slightly)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A NOTE ON REFERENCES TO KANT’S WORKS
0. Introduction: Science, The Four Horsemen of The New Apocalypse, and The Uniscience
0.0 How Uncritical and Unreformed Science Is Literally Killing The Modern World
0.2 The Uniscience and Pascal’s Dictum
Chapter 1. Natural Piety: A Kantian Critique of Science
1.0 Kantian Heavy-Duty Enlightenment and The Uniscience
1.1 Kant’s Neo-Aristotelian Natural Power Grid
1.2 Kant, Natural Piety, and The Limits of Science
1.3 From Kant’s Anti-Mechanism to Kantian Anti-Mechanism
1.4 In Defense of Natural Piety
1.5 Scientific Pietism and Scientific Naturalism
1.6 How to Ground Natural Science on Sensibility
1.7 Sensible Science 1: Natural Science Without Natural Mechanism
1.8 Sensible Science 2: Natural Science Without Materialism/Physicalism
1.9 Sensible Science 3: Natural Science Without Scientism
1.10 Frankenscience, the Future of Humanity, and the Future of Science
2.1 Wrestling with Modernity: 1900-1940
2.1.1 Six Sociocultural or Sociopolitical Developments
2.1.2 Two Philosophical Developments: Classical Analytic Philosophy and First Wave Organicism
2.1.3 Architectural and Artistic Trends
2.2 The Historical Black Hole, The Mechanistic Mindset, and The Mechanistic Worldview: 1940-1980
2.2 The Emergence of Post-Classical Analytic Philosophy
2.2.3 The Two Images Problem and its Consequences
2.2.4 Modernism and Countercurrents in the Arts and Design
2.3.1 The Rise of Po-Mo Philosophy
2.3.2 Po-Mo Architecture: Unconstrained Hybridity
2.3.3 Other Apocalyptic Developments: Crises in Physics and Big Science, and The One-Two Punch
2.4 From The Mechanistic Worldview to Neo-Organicism
2.4.0 Against The Mechanistic Worldview
2.4.1 Seven Arguments Against The Mechanistic Worldview
2.4.1.1 Logical and Mathematical Arguments
2.4.1.2 Physical and Metaphysical Arguments
2.4.1.3 Mentalistic and Agential Arguments
2.4.2 Beyond The Mechanistic Worldview: The Neo-Organicist Worldview
2.4.2.1 The Neo-Organist Thesis 1: Solving The Mind-Body Problem
2.4.2.2 Dynamic Systems Theory and The Dynamic World Picture
2.4.2.3 The Neo-Organicist Thesis 2: Solving The Free Will Problem
2.4.2.4 Dynamic Emergence, Life, Consciousness, and Free Agency
2.4.2.5 How The Mechanical Comes To Be From The Organic
3.1 A Dual-Content Nonideal Cognitive Semantics for Thought-Shapers
3.2 The Cognitive Dynamics of Thought-Shapers
3.3 Constrictive Thought-Shapers vs. Generative Thought-Shapers
3.5 Thought-Shapers, Mechanism, and Neo-Organicism
3.6 Adverse Cognitive Effects of Mechanical, Constrictive Thought-Shapers
3.7 How Can We Acknowledge Organic Systems and Organic, Generative Thought-Shapers?
3.8 We Must Cultivate Our Global Garden
Chapter 4. How To Complete Physics
4.2 Frame-by-Frame: How Early 20th Century Physics Was Shaped by Brownie Cameras and Early Cinema
Chapter 5. Digital Technology Only Within The Limits of Human Dignity
00. Conclusion: The Point Is To Shape The World
APPENDICES
Appendix 1. A Neo-Organicist Turn in Formal Science: The Case of Mathematical Logic
Appendix 2. A Neo-Organicist Note on The Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem and “Skolem’s Paradox”
Appendix 3. A Neo-Organicist Approach to The Nature of Motion
Appendix 4. Sensible Set Theory
Appendix 5. Neo-Organicism and The Rubber Sheet Cosmos
BIBLIOGRAPHY
4.2 Frame-by-Frame: How Early 20th Century Physics Was Shaped by Brownie Cameras and Early Cinema
We design, create, and use tools to change the world, for better or worse; but in so doing, our tools also change us, for better or worse. An important elaboration of this truth is The Theory of Thought-Shapers, aka TTS, as I spelled it out and defended it in chapter 3 above. Again, bounded in a nutshell, TTS says this:
Necessarily, all human thinking is partially determined, formed, and guided by essentially non-conceptual mental representations of allegories, analogies, blueprints, catechisms, diagrams, displays, icons, images, lay-outs, metaphors, mnemonics, models, outlines, parables, pictures, scenarios, schemata, sketches, spreadsheets, stereotypes, symbols, tableaux, and templates,[i] featuring egocentrically-centered, action-poised temporal representations and spatial representations as fundamental, in a way that’s not only causal but also irreducibly normative, and inherently external-context-sensitive or indexical, for better or worse.
In this section, I want to apply TTS to early 20th century physics, and in particular to the Kuhnian-paradigm-shifting, revolutionary physics provided by relativity theory and quantum theory, roughly one hundred years ago. As I asserted in the Introduction, the early 20th-century creations or discoveries of relativity theory and quantum theory by Mach, Einstein, Planck, Poincaré, de Broglie, Bohr, Born, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and others, were not pure or unmixed examples of creative piety, but in fact impure or hybrid examples of it. I do think that pure creative piety was expressed in their Kuhnian-paradigm-shifting, revolutionary “turn” from thinking about physics (i) as a mathematical theory about the natural or physical universe and all the objects in it, to thinking about physics as (ii) a mathematical theory about the operations of experimental measuring devices—measuring rods, light-signals, cloud chambers, particle-tracking and wave-tracking equipment (including single-slit devices, two-slit devices, the Mach-Zehnder inferometer and so-on), cameras of various kinds, early digital computers, and so-on—that are used for measuring the natural or physical universe and all the objects in it. Now, this “turn” in physics was itself basically a neo-Kantian move, switching scientific attention from the objects of representation, considered as cognitively inaccessible noumena, or “things in themselves,” to the representations of those objects, considered as experimentally-verified phenomena or “mere appearances”; and indeed, neo-Kantian philosophy was still dominant in Europe during the late 19th and early 20th century (Willey, 1978; Köhnke, 1991; Luft and Capeillères, 2010; Beiser, 2014; Crowell, 2017; Heis, 2018; Clarke, 2019). Nevertheless, if, as I believe, sharply contrary to the neo-Kantians, that the physical universe and all the objects in it are in fact manifestly real, and neither inaccessible things-in-themselves nor mere appearances (Hanna, 2015a, 2017b), then it’s a fundamental mistake to hold that the mathematical properties of the operations of experimental measuring devices—which of course, are all machines—are to be identified with the mathematical properties of the objects being measured by those devices, most of which are not machines. I call this The Representation –> Represented Fallacy, since it consists in systematically but falsely substituting properties of the representations of objects for properties of the objects being represented. Correspondingly, I believe that the repeated commission of The Representation –> Represented Fallacy by the discoverers of relativity theory and quantum theory is in large part responsible for our contemporary “crisis in physics” (Smolin, 2013, 2014; Hossenfelder, 2018), roughly one hundred years later.
If I’m correct about all this, then relativity theory and quantum theory, as created or discovered by means of the impure creative piety and Kuhnian-paradigm-shifting, revolutionary, thought-shaped thinking of physicists like Mach, Einstein, Planck, Poincaré, de Broglie, Bohr, Born, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and others, were in fact partially causally determined, formed, and normatively guided, in their historical context, and ultimately for the worse, by a small set of mechanical, constrictive thought-shapers that primitively represent causation. In turn, I’ll call this set of mechanical, constrictive thought-shapers high modernist causal thought-shapers. By “high modernist,” I’m again referring to what James C. Scott has aptly called “a high modernist ideology,” or high modernism for short:
[High modernism] is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. (Scott, 1998: p. 4)
In the grip of high modernism, the Kuhnian-paradigm-shifting, revolutionary early 20th century physicists created or discovered physical theories that postulate systems of deterministic or indeterministic mathematical natural laws, but the meanings of the theory-bound statements of those laws are strictly underdetermined by their conceptual and propositional content, hence high modernist causal thought-shapers are required to fix their meanings.
Now for what I’ll call John Locke’s big idea: that we get cognitive access to causal thought-shapers by generalizing from our own primitive subjective experience—i.e., our phenomenology—of mental causation in rational human intentional action (see Locke, 1975: book II, ch. xxi; Hanna and Maiese, 2009: esp. chs. 3-5; Hanna, 2020e).
For the purposes of classical/Newtonian physics, our phenomenology of rational human intentional action provides a classical causal thought-shaper that mimics intentional acts that manipulate objects in our local environment, within a single overarching container-space and using a single overarching time-frame/clock, for example, playing billiards, shaking apple tree limbs until the apples fall down, etc. Then this classical causal thought-shaper is conservatively extended via conceptualization and generalization to all of macrophysical reality, at all distance-scales, time-scales, size-scales, and force-scales, according to The Force Law F=MA and also The Inverse Square Law for gravitational attraction.
For the purposes of Einsteinian relativity physics, our phenomenology of rational human intentional action provides a high modernist causal thought-shaper that mimics intentional acts using local causal intermediaries, for example, light signals, and also rulers/measuring rods, clocks, and classic Brownie film-roll cameras of the kind Einstein would have known circa 1905, used as experimental measurement devices. Then, taking light-signals, and the speed of light operating as an absolute and universal causal intermediary-and-constraint, we derive relativistic causal operationality, aka “locality.” In turn, this high modernist causal thought-shaper is conservatively extended via conceptualization and generalization to all of macrophysical reality, at all distance-scales, time-scales, size-scales, and energy-scales, according to The Energy Law E=MC2, inherently limited, however by light-signals and the speed of light as an absolute and universal causal intermediary-and-constraint.
For the purposes of the classical Bohrian/Heisenbergian Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (Faye, 2019), our phenomenology of rational human intentional action provides a high modernist causal thought-shaper that mimics intentional acts with absolutely synchronous (aka “non-local”) body-movements—for example, the intentional performance of raising my arm—as captured on film by means of a classic hand-cranked movie camera loaded with classic 35 mm filmstock, 16 frames per second, used in silent films of the kind Bohr and Heisenberg would have known circa World War I and in the early 1920s, and then represented mathematically. In this cinematic high modernist causal thought-shaper, each frame in the film stands for a single quantum state. Then, further exploring the internal stucture of this cinematic high modernist causal thought-shaper, let’s consider the position of any proper sub-part (and let’s call that a “particle”) of the picture within a given frame, say, the particle of a framed picture that contains an image of a finger on one of my hands. There’s a certain probability as to where that particle will appear in the picture in the next frame, and as to what its black-white pointilliste quality (energy-state quantity: say charge, momentum, or spin) will be. But its particular position and its black-white pointilliste quality (energy-state quantity) in that next frame will also depend on all the positional configurations and black-white pointilliste qualities (energy-state quantities) of all the particles in that frame, and there’s an irreducible causal gap or jump (quantum leap) between frames, no matter how many frames per second the film contains.
Now let’s even further consider the film rolling, frame by frame, whether forward or backwards (it ultimately makes no difference in an equilibrium, time-reversible system), in a way that that represents the deterministic evolution of the wave function according to the Schrödinger equation. The standpoint of the film viewer/experimenter, who “intervenes” by watching/measuring, is the classical Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. And the “god’s-eye” standpoint of the film editor, who can cut frames, insert/splice bits of film, or doctor individual frames (call those “hidden variables”), is the post-classical Bohmian hidden-variables/pilot wave interpretation of quantum mechanics, insofar as it’s construed as deterministic[ii] (Bohm, 1952, 1982; Bohm and Hiley, 1975; Goldstein, 2017). The god’s-eye deterministic Bohmian editor-physicist sees the whole “movie,” the physical universe, as nothing but a single “film roll,” the nomologically-necessitated evolution of the wave function, laid out flat on the editing table, or wound up in the Moviola—a classical movie editing device invented in 1924 (Wikipedia, 2022i)—as a series of essentially static individual “frames,” quantum states) with inherently mechanical clock-time development from any given “frame”/quantum state or set of “frames”/quantum states to later “frames”/quantum states, but also with (i) merely probabilistic relations between positions and energy-state quantities of particles between any given “frame”/quantum state and the next “frame”/quantum state, (ii) causal “gaps” or “jumps”/quantum leaps from “frame”/quantum state to “frame”/quantum state, (iii) holistic non-locality inside each frame, and (iv) the in-principle reversibility of the entire film roll of the movie/physical universe, together with enantiomorphic/mirror-reflected flips of the positions of all particles inside the “frames”/quantum states.
As Lee Smolin rightly points out, the cosmological primitive fact of real, asymmetric time (as immanent, for example, in my bodily performance of raising my right arm and hand, as subjectively experienced by me, which was being “captured on film” in the cinematic high modernist causal thought-shaper) has been completely edited out by classical quantum cosmology (Smolin, 2013: ch. 7, 2014). So too, although Smolin overlooks this, the other cosmological primitive fact of real, orientable global space with object-embedding-and-local-centering in which, for example, right-handed particles inherently cannot be made congruent with left-handed particles within the same global orientable 3-dimensional space, has also been completely edited out by classical quantum cosmology.
Wordsworth wrote, in “The Tables Turned,” that
[s]weet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect. (Wordsworth, 1798)
Thus, by means of the 19th century mechanistic biologist’s “meddling intellect,” we murder to dissect by turn living organisms into nothing but ordered heaps of dead organic material mysteriously related by deterministic causal and mathematical connections, natural machines. Homologously, but now in an infinitely expanded way, and with cosmological scope, in relativity theory and classical or post-classical quantum mechanics, we murder to represent. And thereby, by means of our early 20th century high modernist mechanistic physicist’s equally “meddling intellect,” we turn real, asymmetric time (and especially the real, asymmetric time of our lives) into nothing but the operational tick-tock of clocks measuring light signals recorded by Brownie-style cameras, “captured” in non-Euclidean geometry ascurves in a fourth dimension of space (thereby spatializing time—but it’s also crucial to note that the temporalization of space would be equally mistaken[iii]), or into ordered heaps of quantum states, each of which is an essentially static holistic configuration of entangled, handed particles in a single frozen “now,” comprehended from the platonic god’s-eye standpoint of The Great Quantum Cosmology Film Editor, cranking His cosmic Moviola—whether forward or backwards, and whether with mirror-reversed frames or not, it doen’t really matter—and extra-cosmologically contemplating (for example) The Implicate Order (Bohm, 1982: esp. chs. 5-7). Genuine but still epicyclical advances in quantum cosmology like quantum gravity block-universe theory, or quantum field block-universe theory, make no essential difference to this fundamentally chronocidal or real-time-murdering and geometrocidal or real-space-murdering cosmological picture: namely, the cinematic high modernist mechanical, constrictive causal thought-shaper, i.e., the ultimate franchise in 20th and 21st century quantum-mechanical movie-making.
As I mentioned above, the Kuhnian-paradigm-shifting scientific revolution in physics that happened in the early 20th century came about because physicists, in a moment of pure creative piety, discovered that by operationalizing our access to manifest reality in terms of the experimental devices we use to measure it, we can apply mathematical physics to the operations of these experimental devices of measurement themselves, and thereby generate many true predictions. But although, via his theory of transcendental idealism for human sensibility Kant taught us that necessarily, the manifestly real or phenomenal world conforms to the structures of our sensible cognitive capacities for representing that world, and not the other way around, whether the world is phenomenal or noumenal (see also Hanna, 2016b), nevertheless Kant’s Copernican Revolution does not extend either to the thesis (i) that necessarily, the manifestly real world conforms to the operations of the experimental devices we use to measuring it, or to the thesis (ii) that necessarily, the manifestly real world conforms to the mathematical physical theories we apply to the operations of the experimental devices we use to measure it. On the contrary, it’s a fundamental fallacy to hold either of these theses: the fallacy of substituting the properties of representations, for the properties of the objects represented by those representations, aka The Representation –> Represented Fallacy.
This TTS-driven philosophical diagnosis-&-critique of The Representation à Represented Fallacy is made really possible and rationally justified by the fact that essentially embodied, essentially non-conceptual thought-shapers not only provide direct cognitive access to the manifestly real world, but also are essentially independent of (i) all concepts and conceptualization, (ii) all measurement, which always and only proceeds under some or another concept of a unit, scale, or system of measurement, and (iii) all theories, which are built out of propositions and logical relations, which in turn are built, respectively, out of concepts and logic. That crucial threefold point, in turn, sharply distinguishes TTS from the thoroughly conceptualist and social-conventionalist theory of mental representation developed by Nelson Goodman and other leading figures in the emerging post-behaviorist “cognitivist” movement of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s (Goodman, 1951, 1978; Gombrich, 1960), that’s presupposed, for example, by Kuhn in Structure of Scientific Revolutions. TTS and creative piety constitute a manifest realist and dual-content theory of human cognition that’s neither a conceptualist/social-conventionalist theory about how we individually or socially construct interpretations of complexes of mere appearances nor a naïve noumenal realist/”innocent eye” theory of how we passively copy a world of things-in-themselves. Instead, TTS says that all our conceptual, logical, and theoretical thinking is necessarily shaped by essentially embodied, essentially non-conceptual contents that are, considered on their own, veridical representations of a manifestly real world. And pure creative piety bears witness to that thought-shaping, precisely insofar as that shaping is inherently organic and generative, and not mechanical and constrictive.
Now, to be sure, as I’ve said, Mach, Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Bohm, Wheeler, Hawking, and all the other the creators/discoverers of and contributors to the Standard Models of cosmology and particle physics (aka SMC and SMPP) all exemplified brilliant, revolutionary pure creative piety in bringing about their Kuhnian paradigm shift in physics. I’m not denying that in the slightest. It’s just that they also all committed The Representation –> Represented Fallacy, and that they’ve all also had their thinking partially causally determined, formed, and normatively guided by high modernist mechanical, constrictive causal thought-shapers, ultimately for the worse.
If we look back 250 years behind the early 20th century modernist relativity-theoretical/quantum-theoretical scientific revolution in physics and its endemic tendency to commit The Representation –> Represented Fallacy, then we can see that synchronous/non-local causation already appears macrophysically in Newtonian physics: for example, The Force Law F=MA says, in effect, that acceleration acts absolutely synchronously/non-locally on mass in order to produce force. But even leaving aside Newton and just focusing on the commonsense or manifestly real world, whenever, for example, you turn a corner to the right in your car, the rotation of the steering wheel and steering column act absolutely synchronously/non-locally in a global orientable space with object-embedding-and-local-centering, on the rotation of the wheels relative to the pavement; and absolutely synchronous/non-local causation applies to the ordinary operations of rotation-devices more generally. Indeed, the minded human animal body is itself a living rotation device that’s constantly and spontaneously in action throughout its life-span, whether in repose or in self-initiated movement, embedded and locally centered in a global orientable space, and proprioception in rational human intentional bodily performances, is an essentially embodied, essentially non-conceptual, pre-reflective or non-self-consciously conscious awareness of that lifelong ongoing absolutely synchronous/non-local action, always embedded and locally centered in global orientable space.
What’s radically different in Standard Models-style quantum cosmology and particle physics, however, is that the macrophysical cinematic high modernist mechanical, constrictive causal thought-shaper that, via The Representation à Represented Fallacy, murders the real asymmetric time and real asymmetric space of nature and of our lives, and is then conservatively extended via conceptualization and generalization, so that absolutely synchronous causation/non-locality applies to all entangled/complementary microphysical wave-particle phenomena anywhere in the universe, hence at all distance-scales, size-scales, and energy-scales. All the paradoxes of quantum cosmology and particle physics flow from cinematic high modernist mechanical, constrictive causal thought-shapers, together with the original sin of The Representation à Represented Fallacy, including, of course, paradoxical quantum uncertainty/indeterminacy in the two-slit experiment (and other two path experiments), and Schrödinger’s not-so-very-practical, yet also highly paradoxical, tragical cat (Wikipedia, 2022j). Again, however, it’s crucial to see that causally efficacious non-locality in and of itself is not paradoxical, and not “spooky action-at-a-distance”—on the contrary, it’s a commonsensical and phenomenological mainstay of the manifestly real world, and our “human, all-too-human” rational intentional life-careers in and through that world, most intimately and vividly exemplified by the neo-Aristotelian hylomorphic mind-body relation that we ourselves incarnate (Hanna and Maiese, 2009; and sub-sub-section 2.4.2.1 above). But a particle or cat whose statistically-openended life/death, or momentum/position, in the next cosmological film frame/quantum state depends either on the “intervention” of the viewer/experimenter-measurer or on the Moviola/hidden variable crankings of The Great Quantum Cosmology Film Editor is highly paradoxical. Non-locality appears to be paradoxical only if you have already dogmatically internalized the Einsteinian/special relativity assumption that, necessarily, all causal efficacy in the natural world rides the rails of photons or surfs the undulations of light-waves. But it just ain’t so, as non-local causation in the manifestly real world self-evidently demonstrates. The honest-to-goodness truth, then, is that some causal efficacy in the natural world conforms to the physical properties of light, namely, deterministic relativity-constrained causation, whereas other and more fundamental causal efficacy in the natural world does not, namely , non-deterministic, non-indeterministic processual, purposive, self-organizing, temporally asymmetric or irreversible, non-equilibrium negentropic thermodynamic matter/energy flows, including all organismic life, all minded animal life, and all rational human free agency(Hanna, 2018b). But purveyors of the Standard Models simply cannot recognize this, because their thinking has been partially causally determined, formed, and normatively guided—shaped—for roughly a century, and ultimately for the worse, by high modernist mechanical, constrictive causal thought-shapers of various kinds, including mental representations of Brownie cameras and early cinema.
NOTES
[i] [This list isn’t intended to be complete, but instead only to be a working list of paradigm cases I’m aiming to connect in an essential way to the nature of human thinking, and more generally, to explain. After I’d provided a more precise characterization of thought-shapers in sections 3. 1 and 3.2, the list could in principle have been extended according to those criteria. Moreover, allegories, catechisms, and parables differ slightly from the other items on the list, in a way that I briefly described in section 3.1.]
[ii] Indeed, only insofar as it’s construed as deterministic. I specially emphasize this, because in section 4.3 I’ll spell out a non-deterministic version of the Bohmian hidden variables/pilot wave interpretation that doesn’t require a god’s-eye deterministic standpoint on the evolution of the wave-function.
[iii] Indeed, temporalizing space is Smolin’s equal-and-opposite mistake to Einstein’s mistake of spatializing time, insofar as Smolin “murders” real space by turning it into a derivative, purely relational fact that emerges from the primitive fact of asymmetric time at some point after The Big Bang, by means of “geometrogenesis”: see (Smolin, 2013: ch. 15).
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