Science, Speculative Philosophy, and the Expansion of Experience

In a previous post I noted Alfred North Whitehead's definition of speculative philosophy. In this post I ask the question: given that speculative philosophy is a creative endeavor, what is its relationship to science?

I've posed this question to somebody in a much better position to offer an insightful answer. But until he gets the chance to respond, I'll share a thought of my own.

Whitehead himself spent most of his career as a mathematical physicist, with philosophy as a side interest that he didn't write much about until fairly late in life. Pierce, responsible for his own works of speculation (though not set forth nearly so systematically as Whitehead) studied chemistry, worked in geodesy, and thought of himself primarily as a mathematician and logician. Both knew and respected science, and had a keen sense of when they were venturing beyond it.

Reprising Whitehead's quote from the previous post:

Speculative Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. (p. 3)

Science has greatly expanded the number and scope of the elements of our experience that Whitehead refers to. Observationally, we can look much farther into space with our telescopes. To smaller levels with our microscopes. To different ranges of the spectrum of light with our various detectors.

Also added to our experience are the understanding of relationships that scientists have worked out from the range of things they have seen. These days, we "see" apples falling under the influence of gravity, whereas in the past they were seen to be returning to the earth because they were also composed of earth.

While we acknowledge how incredibly expanded our experience is because of what science gives us, we shouldn't forget the narrowing it also involves. If an observation or experiment cannot be replicated, science cannot work with it. Usually this will simply mean that the observer or experimenter was mistaken, and we should accept this as the default assumption that will be correct in most cases.  But it is at least theoretically possible that it was a truly one-of-a-kind experience, never to be repeated.

Whitehead and Peirce were wise enough to recognize the possibility of such experiences. (William James went further, rushing to embrace them.)

If speculative philosophy is to answer to our experience: in the modern era, science provides most of this experience. It's possible that our current understanding of that expanded experience will undergo minor or even major revision--the history of science displays page after page of examples. So it's OK for speculative philosophy to go not just beyond but also against current science. But it must recognize that it does so on borrowed coin. The number of claims that it makes in the face of science, and the length of time it maintains those contrary claims, constitute a debt upon which interest compounds rapidly.

Does a Particle have a Personality?

(I once heard of somebody who named their two cats Article and Particle. But I digress...)

Among the many things I'm currently in the middle of reading is Lisa Randall's Warped Passages. It's a good way for a layman to learn a bit about many recent developments in theoretical physics. Even if some of her stories are a bit hokey and her name-dropping a bit grating.

I was led to the following thought:

Generally a mathematical abstraction is just that, an abstraction of certain aspects of objects (or situations or experiences or whatever). They gather together what entities have in common, explicitly leaving aside what makes them individuals, unique. Uniquenesses do not mathematical relations make.

When statisticians count "households" in a demographic, there's no concern for who is arguing with whom under any particular roof. We count nine planets (wait...eight...damn you Neil DeGrasse Tyson...) without in counting distinguishing that Saturn has rings and Mercury does not.

But particles are represented differently, as nothing beyond pure abstraction. There is nothing that makes them individuals. A photon is a photon is a photon. Same with electrons, etc. Any can be replaced with another of its own kind, and this replacement makes not the slightest bit of difference.

But...can this be right? Does a particle's individual history not matter at all, not serve to distinguish it from others of its kind? Does photon #17483 have no individual quirks and eccentricities that serve to distinguish it from photon #334981?

For nothing at scales above simple molecules is this true. Unicellular organisms are (barely) distinguishable individuals. Galaxies and galactic clusters are unique. Potentially, so are universes, with separate sets of physical laws (or at least separate constants and parameters of those laws) and different, quite complex histories.

Is there a scale of sizes of things such that, when we get small enough, we suddenly (or is it gradually) transition from the incorrigibly unique to the thoroughly interchangeable?

An Atheist Search for God

From Salon.

From this article, I'm quite interested to read the rest of Nancy Ellen Abrams' book.

What she describes is much along the lines of the sort of spirituality I look for, and try at times to articulate. I hesitate to bring in the words "religion" and "God" for the result. I find those terms so tied to, and evocative of, anthropocentric monotheism and its history that I despair of re-purposing them for something so different, so much more honest and better. (Whereas some people find the word "spirituality" irredeemably cheapened by kitsch, New Age uses.)

Others (besides Abrams) disagree with me.  Alfred North Whitehead held on to it, for instance, while dismissing the Abrahamic religions (and others) as "the last refuge of human savagery".  He speaks in Religion in the Making about the religion and the gods we've had so far as being humanity's savage prehistory of the real religion to come. (I'd have to read back through the work to find the exact quote.)  Sadly, those who appropriate Whitehead have not learned from him and have used him as "inspiration" for a lot of Protestant treacle.

There is a lot of very substantial beauty that comes as an somewhat incidental by-product of traditional religion. Sacred music and church architecture, for two examples. But the aesthetic appeal of the beliefs, and the texts in which they are expressed, are surpassed by innumerable orders of magnitude by the beauties of the natural world, on this earth and in the wider cosmos. Do not worship and obey. Instead, wonder and learn.

Nietzsche's Individualism

When a traveler who had seen many lands and national and several continents was asked what characteristic he discovered to be common to all of humanity, he replied: "They have a tendency toward laziness." To many it will seem that his reply would have been more accurate and valid if he had said: "They are all fearful. They hide behind customs and opinions." At bottom, every human being knows perfectly well that he lives in the world just once, as a unicum, and that no coincidence, regardless how strange, will ever for a second time concoct out of this amazingly variegated diversity the unity that he is. He knows this, but he conceals it like a bad conscience. Why? Out of fear of his neighbor who demands convention and who cloaks himself with it. But what is it that forces the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a part of a herd instead of taking pleasure in being himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare instances. In most instances it is convenience, indolence--in short, that tendency toward laziness of which the traveler spoke. He is right: human beings are lazier than they are fearful, and what they fear most are those hardships that unconditional honesty and nakedness would foist upon them. Artists alone despise this lethargic promenading draped in borrowed manners and appropriated opinions, and they expose the hidden secret, everyone's bad conscience, the principle that every human being is a one-of-a-kind miracle. They dare to show us how every human being, down to each movement of his muscles, is himself and himself alone; moreover, they show us that in the strict consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and worthy of contemplation, as novel and incredible as every work of nature, and anything but boring. When the great thinker disdains human beings, it is their laziness he disdains, for it is laziness that makes them appear to be mass-produced commodities, to be indifferent, unworthy of human interchange and instruction. The human being who does not want to be a part of the masses need only to cease to go easy on himself; let him follow his conscience, which cries out to him: "Be yourself! You are none of those things that you now do, think, and desire."

(from "Schopenhauer as Educator" in Unfashionable Observations, p. 171-172)

Or in contemporary slang: do you.

What is (Speculative) Philosophy?

Some time back, I was happy to discover in Gilles Delouse and Félix Guattari's What is Philosophy? others who shared my sense of what philosophy is. In their terms, it is the "creation of concepts". I pushed this further: I think that what a philosopher does is the creation of world-views; creation of individual, specific concepts can occur within the specific sciences, when scientists are doing philosophical/foundational work in their disciplines. But the point is, Delouse and Guattari share we me the thought that philosophy is primarily artistic, rather than analytical or argumentative.

But there are downsides. Most of this work's prose is incomprehensible--even if you read it in English as I did. They are far more interested, it seems, in dadaist language play than in saying what they have to say.

Enter Alfred North Whitehead. I started reading his work and learning about his thought in 2008, just after I have my revelation regarding the core of my own philosophic thought. I realized that much of what Whitehead thought was very close to my own philosophy that was beginning to take clearer shape.

However, the most central and important of his works, Process and Reality, comes with a daunting reputation. I've seen it described as one of the most obscure texts in the Western philosophical tradition. So I was cautious to jump in, feeling that I needed to line up a set of secondary works to help me get through.

This week, I decided it was time to jump in, and see what I could make of it. And so far (just a few pages in, admittedly), it's going just fine.

In the first few pages, Whitehead defines "speculative philosophy"--the task he is setting himself. I find this a more satisfying, helpful guide to what the task of philosophy is.

Speculative Philosophy is the endeavor to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted. (p. 3)

He continues in this section and the next few to elaborate the meanings of each of the components of this definition.  It bears a striking resemblance to the account of scientific inquiry given by Peirce. For Whitehead imagination (what Peirce called abduction or reproduction) is essential to both philosophy and science--there is no mere deduction from observation. Rather, one starts from some arena of experience. One formulates general principles that seem capable of accounting for what is fundamental to those experiences, and amenable to application to further experience. Then, if the principles fall sufficiently short in accounting for further experience, we go back to the drawing board.

Whitehead says that we will never get to a final set of principles, but that we will approach one asymptotically. Peirce thought that a community of inquirers would converge on the truth, over the long run.  I do wonder if either of these formulations leave enough room for the creativity at the end that they have brought in at the beginning. Could different philosophers end up having created different sets of principles differently expressed, equally adequate to experience? My thought is, yes. But my sense is that Whitehead and Peirce think that scientists and philosophers will converge on single answers.

Despite this possible criticism, I strongly appreciate how Whitehead maintains Deleuze and Guattari's appreciation for creation, for the artistic element in philosophy, while also insisting that this creation must answer to both logical and empirical constraints that the French writers completely ignore.