Bubbles
A bubble is the thin veil between the world inside it and the world outside it, the world within and the world without. It is rare that the volume occupied by the substance of the veil is comparable to either the volume it encloses or the volume it excludes. The late Fritz Leiber famously once speculated (through the voice of Fafhrd the barbarian) that our worlds might be bubbles forever rising through the sea of the cosmos.
Maybe, as someone I know recently said, "our lives are just little drifting bubbles... and all we do is bounce off each other."
It's that 'all we do' that misleads in its simplicity. Surely, that's not all. Reality is not ideality; each collision of our personal spheres does something to us. The old and jaded receive challenge and energy from the young and newly cynical; and sometimes those same young receive inspiration from the old. The system becomes something more than the sum of its parts, or than some of its parts. The physical constraints of the universe fail to be absolute, and new things are born from the odd and particular interactions between us all.
We are not particles subject merely to natural laws of action and reaction, of conservation, of perfect elasticity and of negligible volume, of assumed total randomness and inconsequential interaction. Such a system would be breathtakingly ideal, and emotionally sterile. And it is somewhere here that C S Lewis's thin and potent tome, The Abolition of Man, comes to mind.
Lewis's thesis, shorn of its complexity and rhetorical trimmings, says something which is also misleading in its simplicity. It is the thesis of the magician, and oddly, also of the scientist: the purchase of knowledge may leave the buyer in debt to its source. As man seeks to conquer nature, it may be nature that is conquering man.
Consider what we mean by 'natural sciences'. When we use that phrase, we mean the world of particles and laws that is observable and describable and somehow subject to our understanding. But the more we learn to control this lower-order world, the more we learn to describe ourselves in terms of physics, chemistry and biology, the less we see the grand sweep of human love, and life, and learning. We turn the living, breathing world of human interaction into the dry statistical world of the social sciences (famously described as neither social nor science).
What we forget is that higher-order complexity, at some point, must be indescribable and unpredictable in terms of the lower-order elements. This is one aspect of what we call Chaos Theory. (Strangely, it is the Greek chaos from which the English word gas is derived.)
Our lives are not to be merely subject to gross physical law; neither should our lives be dedicated to the pursuit of the purely mathematical, physical, and statistical. Rather, it is our duty to make higher-order sense out of the inchoate and unformed world of particles, to perceive patterns, to see visions, to dream dreams. Unless we inject passion and perception into the world around us, we are merely abolishing whatever makes us human, sinking (as our bodies do after we're dead) into the lower realm of chemistry and physics.
That is why I have always maintained that the sciences are but a narrow window into the humanities. We should never forget that the sciences are a rarefied strand of natural philosophy, itself an outgrowth of human thinking on the elements of our complex world. The sciences, if you will, are a barnacle on the skin of a whale, and not the whale itself, no matter what scientists (barnacle-dwellers) think. Time, then, to stop contemplating bubbles qua bubbles; time to start savouring the champagne in which those bubbles become something more — the champagne which is the stuff of life itself.
Maybe, as someone I know recently said, "our lives are just little drifting bubbles... and all we do is bounce off each other."
It's that 'all we do' that misleads in its simplicity. Surely, that's not all. Reality is not ideality; each collision of our personal spheres does something to us. The old and jaded receive challenge and energy from the young and newly cynical; and sometimes those same young receive inspiration from the old. The system becomes something more than the sum of its parts, or than some of its parts. The physical constraints of the universe fail to be absolute, and new things are born from the odd and particular interactions between us all.
We are not particles subject merely to natural laws of action and reaction, of conservation, of perfect elasticity and of negligible volume, of assumed total randomness and inconsequential interaction. Such a system would be breathtakingly ideal, and emotionally sterile. And it is somewhere here that C S Lewis's thin and potent tome, The Abolition of Man, comes to mind.
Lewis's thesis, shorn of its complexity and rhetorical trimmings, says something which is also misleading in its simplicity. It is the thesis of the magician, and oddly, also of the scientist: the purchase of knowledge may leave the buyer in debt to its source. As man seeks to conquer nature, it may be nature that is conquering man.
Consider what we mean by 'natural sciences'. When we use that phrase, we mean the world of particles and laws that is observable and describable and somehow subject to our understanding. But the more we learn to control this lower-order world, the more we learn to describe ourselves in terms of physics, chemistry and biology, the less we see the grand sweep of human love, and life, and learning. We turn the living, breathing world of human interaction into the dry statistical world of the social sciences (famously described as neither social nor science).
What we forget is that higher-order complexity, at some point, must be indescribable and unpredictable in terms of the lower-order elements. This is one aspect of what we call Chaos Theory. (Strangely, it is the Greek chaos from which the English word gas is derived.)
Our lives are not to be merely subject to gross physical law; neither should our lives be dedicated to the pursuit of the purely mathematical, physical, and statistical. Rather, it is our duty to make higher-order sense out of the inchoate and unformed world of particles, to perceive patterns, to see visions, to dream dreams. Unless we inject passion and perception into the world around us, we are merely abolishing whatever makes us human, sinking (as our bodies do after we're dead) into the lower realm of chemistry and physics.
That is why I have always maintained that the sciences are but a narrow window into the humanities. We should never forget that the sciences are a rarefied strand of natural philosophy, itself an outgrowth of human thinking on the elements of our complex world. The sciences, if you will, are a barnacle on the skin of a whale, and not the whale itself, no matter what scientists (barnacle-dwellers) think. Time, then, to stop contemplating bubbles qua bubbles; time to start savouring the champagne in which those bubbles become something more — the champagne which is the stuff of life itself.
etched with acid at 8:06:00 am
1 Comments:
An eloquent, powerful and entirely appropriate ending, sir. =)
But I beg to differ on, and I am even surprised by, what you say of the 'natural sciences', and even social sciences. I learn science because it is beautiful. In the way it uncovers with such clarity and precision what you called the lower-order world, I experience what you called higher-order complexity for its indescribable elegance and simplicity. It undefineably takes my breath away, for it is beautiful. As for the social sciences, you proved to me yourself in Chiang Mai watching the Thai dancers how intriguing its unique perspectives can be.
I know what I'm saying is somewhat beside the point of what you're saying, I see the point of what you're saying and largely agree. I just feel that as much as there's always a compromise, and a sacrifice, we cannot betray our love for the sciences by condemning them to the realms of the lower-order. Everything you say about the higher order is true. We often need to take a step back in our lives to experience the champagne. But science helps, not hinders that. And I'm surprised that you, the Alchemist, seems to have forgotten it.
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