By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY
We have been told that we have learned more about the thinking brain in the last ten to fifteen years than in all of human history, and a wag might add, forgotten what the ancients have to teach us about human nature.
Thinking brain? If my brain is doing all the work, why do I feel so tired after grading all those papers? And why do I have to concentrate to remember, to distinguish, and to analyze to understand a datum of importance? The truth, of course, is that the brain does not think any more than the eye sees or the ear hears.
A report in the Wall Street Journal some time back goes on to say that “new techniques of neuroscience have allowed scientists to observe thoughts.” Is that so? Perhaps with the aid of an MRI it can visualize that part of the brain which is active when I am trying to understand an equation. A thought is abstract, immaterial, and universal by nature. It is beyond observation. It is real, to be sure, but of a different order of being than the particular from which is derived.
This brings us to a discussion of the difference between sense perception and abstraction. And here the ancients have much to teach us. Both Plato and Aristotle, each in their own way, grappled with the problem. How is it that from one or more instance of some material object we prescind from all its properties and form an idea of what the thing is essentially? We don’t have to experience all instances of copper to know what copper is, or all horses to distinguish a horse from a mule or a donkey. We know what a horse is in spite of the species’ variety.
Readers of major newspapers are aware that all reporting reflects the editorial policy of the paper in question. Reports of climate change, global warming, poverty, welfare initiatives, and political candidates reflect decisions reached in the editorial boardroom. That is not what we wish to talk about here. Scientific enquiry is so infused with all sorts of human values and judgments that what ends up being proclaimed to be the structure of reality may have little resemblance to the structure of the real world.
Investigators often see what is in their social interest to see. The involvement of instruments in virtually all scientific observation, and the use of physical and abstract models in scientific theorizing, can lead us far from the structure of the real.
Science necessarily deals with things in their abstract permanence, not with the singular. Science is possible because of the mind’s ability to abstract from the singular. The abstractive power of intellect not only enables us to identify laws of nature but provides the basis of all taxonomy.
Mathematical abstraction is something else. Celestial observation sometimes yields a theoretical conclusion that can be expressed only as an equation. Equations consist of a subject and predicate which defy translation into ordinary language. A theoretical physicist may start off as a realist as understood in the Aristotelian manner, but in the end will recognize that explanation of the subatomic consists of a set of useful but unrelatable equations in a realist sense.
We are reminded of an incident when quantum theory was in its infancy, when Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann was quoted as saying, “We all know how to use and apply it to problems, and so we have learned to live with the fact that nobody can understand it.” Steven Weinberg in a 1992 interview admitted that he felt a little uncomfortable working in a field that nobody understands.
Sheilla Jones, from whom this account is taken, had this to say: “There seems to be a lot of resistance in the physics community to talking about such questions, since it does rather undermine the authority of the professionals to whom we look for an explanation of their world, if the professionals don’t understand it themselves.”
“Scientists observing thoughts”? Think again.
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(Dr. Dougherty is the author of Briefly Considered: From the Mainstream: Notes and Observations on the Sources of Western Culture, available at amazon.com.)
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