Intuition and the New Science
Logic gave us Materialism; the New Science is intuitive.
The word ‘paradigm’ comes from the Greek word ‘paradeigma’. It refers to a shared outlook or way of looking at the world; we are not just individuals, we live in a community of others. A paradigm means that the assumptions and attitudes of the culture we live in are taken for granted, and we think and act and speak within them. In a religious paradigm, disturbing behaviour was attributed to demonic possession; in a secular era it is attributed to chemical imbalance. A shared outlook can determine not just how something is seen, but even whether it is seen at all.
The idea of a paradigm was made popular by Thomas Kuhn, who wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). Kuhn was an historian of science, and the broader view provided by history gave him the overview needed to see how the shared values of a community can affect the thinking of the individuals within it:
‘Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable cost.’
We are not normally aware of the paradigm we are operating in. It is only when the paradigm changes, that, with hindsight, we see much that we once overlooked or dismissed in a completely new light. What distinguishes a paradigm from a belief system is that a paradigm is not formally stated; its values and assumptions are inherent in its outlook, and yet it operates much like any other belief system.
Materialism
The paradigm of the present era is materialism. From the point of view of materialism, matter and energy are regarded as the basis of all the observable phenomena of nature. Owing to it being the dominant paradigm, to suggest that matter and energy do not explain the whole of nature is regarded as unscientific. Indeed, any scientists who have questioned the assumptions of materialism - Rupert Sheldrake, Harold Saxton Burr, and Hans Driesch, are examples - have been dismissed as cranks or malcontents. When Rupert Sheldrake published A New Science of Life to propose a means to study patterns in nature independently of their material content, the book was denounced by John Maddox, the editor of Nature Magazine as an ‘exercise in pseudoscience’ and a ‘book for burning’.
Materialism, like any other paradigm, cannot be proven any more than a political ideology can be proven. The problem arises not from science, but from the assumption that the present paradigm represents an absolute, unchallengeable truth. When this happens, the paradigm becomes a dogma, or ‘correct opinion’, and of course dogmatic truth cannot be challenged. When dogma is applied to science, it becomes ‘scientism’, which is altogether foreign to a free and open-minded inquiry into nature and its causes.
The word ‘scientism’ was coined by the economist Friedrich Hayek in his book The Counter-Revolution of Science (1952). He subtitled the book Studies in the Abuse of Reason, and it was his aim to show that through the ‘slavish imitation of the method and language of science’, dogma was being introduced into science.
Reductionism
Materialism is founded on a reductionist view of nature. This is the view that all observable phenomena can be explained in terms of pure mechanics, and particularly by the behaviour of atoms and molecules. Reductionism had its source in ancient Greece, notably in the teachings of Democritus. About Democritus we know little, and we have only second-hand accounts of what he taught, nonetheless we know that he was one of the first Atheists in recorded history. According to Sextus Empiricus he said ‘The gods are only beings made out of atoms, and are not immortal’. And Diogenes Laertius tells us:
‘His principal doctrines were these. That atoms and the vacuum were the beginning of the universe; and that everything else exists only in opinion.’
Atheism is the view that the whole of nature can be explained purely in terms of blind mechanics, and without need of reference to gods or spirits. This sits well with reductionism, because there is no need to transgress beyond pure mechanics to explain the phenomena of nature.
Mathematics
Reductionism has elevated mathematics as the key tool to decode the laws of nature. Our admiration for mathematics owes much to ancient Greece, and to Pythagoras in particular. Pythagoras showed that by applying mathematics to our observations of nature we can make sense of what might otherwise appear incomprehensible.
Isaac Newton sealed the relationship between mathematics and science with the publication of his Principia Mathematica (1687), which laid the foundation for our understanding of gravity, the laws of physics and the movement of the planets. In the Rules of Reason outlined in the book, the primary rule was:
‘We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.’
The combination of materialism, reductionism, and mathematics now informed science to the degree that anything that didn’t match this criteria was dismissed as unscientific. And yet what most validated the paradigm of materialism was not intellectual debates about the nature of reality, but something more fundamental and down to earth - namely its application to technology.
Technology
Newtonian mechanics led to improvements in the steam engine, structural engineering, the telescope, and the marine chronometer. Newton was a rationalist, which meant he began with a coherent view of the world and then looked for evidence for it in his observations of nature.
The other founding father of modern science, Francis Bacon, adopted the opposite approach. Bacon was an empiricist, which meant he began by observing nature and then, having made a sufficiently thorough study, sought to collate it into a coherent outlook. It is recorded that he died of pneumonia after stuffing a rabbit carcass full of snow to test whether freezing it acted as a preservative. Bacon’s view was that what validates any belief, theory or outlook is not its coherence or appeal, but how it could be employed to further mankind’s interests. He was a thoroughgoing technologist, and wrote The New Atlantis to illustrate its possibilities.
The combination of Newton’s analytical method and Bacon’s empirical method meant that mechanics and its application to technology was now firmly established as the dominant paradigm in science.
Patterns
This meant that all aspects of nature, even self-evident phenomena, had to be explained in terms of their underlying material nature. For many aspects - gravity, heat, light, and physics - this worked well. For other aspects - organic nature and human communities - reductionism limited observation to the activity of the elements alone, rather than to their interactive nature. This was particularly the case with the study of patterns. Patterns in nature, such as a spider’s web, a flock of starlings, and the shape of a leaf, were regarded as the product of matter and energy alone rather than as phenomena in their own right.
The problem with this approach is that organic nature displays properties not found in inorganic nature. One of these is that, while the material content of an organism can change, its overall form or pattern remains constant. Such is the dominance of materialism that any attempt to explain this element in terms of more than matter and energy was seen as introducing what Laplace called an ‘unnecessary hypothesis’ into science.
Not all scientists agreed. William Morton Wheeler (1865 – 1937), for example, drove a metal plate into the centre of an anthill and then destroyed one half of the hill. He observed that the ants rebuilt the destroyed half with such exactitude that when the metal plate was removed, the tunnels inside both halves matched perfectly.
Hans Driesch (1867 – 1941), an embryologist, found that when he separated the two cells of a sea urchin embryo after the first cell-division, each cell developed, not as two half-urchins, but as two complete whole urchins. He went on to develop the concept of a holistic field or ‘entelechy’ to explain the phenomenon.
Harold Saxton Burr (1889 – 1973), professor of anatomy at Yale University School of Medicine, adopted the same concept as Driesch. He studied organisation in biology by employing a voltmeter to measure the electric potential in living organisms. After decades of work, he published the book Blueprint for Immortality (1972), in which he stated that all living organisms are governed by a measurable electro-dynamic field or ‘life field’:
‘More than establishing pattern, it must maintain pattern in the midst of a physio-chemical flux. Therefore, it must regulate and control living things. It must be the mechanism, the outcome of whose activity is wholeness, organisation, and continuity. The electro-dynamic field, then, is comparable to the entelechy of Driesch...’
The contributions made by all three thinkers were either overlooked or dismissed, not least because they did not conform to the paradigm of materialism.
Cybernetics
Until recently, any reconciliation between materialism and the recognition of patterns as an observable and existing phenomenon seemed unlikely. An important step, however, occurred in the middle of the last century, although the change was noted by very few.
Norbert Wiener (1894 - 1964) the founder of Cybernetics, provided the conceptual basis for the automation that informs the modern era. In order to deal with the emergent technology, Wiener had to define many processes for which there had previously been little or no definition, and applied his thinking to the previously ignored areas of messages and information. It led him to the conclusion that information was something quite independent of matter and energy. He pointed out that the same amount of matter and energy was needed to transmit both noise and a message; the difference being that the latter is organised and the former is not. This led him to make the following remarkable statement in his seminal work Cybernetics (1948):
‘Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day.’
An electronic message - morse code as an example - has to be encoded, transmitted and then decoded in order for it to be of any practical value. For it to function as a message, it has to have a recognisable pattern. Apart from his work in developing automated systems, Wiener knew that cybernetics would provide a sound mathematical basis for the study of patterns. What had been dismissed as pseudoscience was now central to the emergent new science of communication and control. In The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), he wrote:
‘It is the pattern maintained by this homeostasis, which is the touchstone of our personal identity. Our tissues change as we live: the food we eat and the air we breathe become flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone, and the momentary elements of our flesh and bone pass out of our body every day with our excreta. We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.’
Systems Thinking
Wiener was not alone. The same approach was adopted by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901 - 1972), who wrote General System Theory (1968), which laid the foundations for systems science. Von Bertalanffy’s definition of the systems view of science makes it clear that he was aware of its potential for a wide application.
‘General system theory, therefore, is a general science of ‘wholeness’ which up until now was considered a vague, hazy, and semi-metaphysical concept.’
In a different field - Gestalt psychology - and particularly through the work of Max Wertheimer (1880 - 1943), the same holistic approach was applied to the study of perception. Wertheimer is regarded as one of the founding figures of Gestalt theory. In his essay on the subject, he defined the approach this way:
‘The fundamental ‘formula’ of Gestalt theory might be expressed in this way: There are wholes, the behaviour of which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of the whole.’
Technology
A pragmatist might say; ‘All good and well, but what practical difference does this make to life?’. The new science, quite apart from throwing light on the nature of patterns, information and organisation, has directly informed the technology of the modern era. This is particularly the case with cybernetics and its counterpart in automation and artificial intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence grew out of the application of cybernetic principles to computing, through, for example, the concepts of feed-forward and back-propagation. What is more, self-driving vehicles, robotics, thermostatic control systems, light sensors, and assembly line automation are all dependent on the cybernetic principles of homeostasis, self-governance, and pattern recognition.
A message is a form of organisation. Whereas the tendency of a purely physical system is towards entropy and disorder, the tendency of an information system is towards self-organisation and a greater order. A self-organising system doesn’t just maintain its pattern, but becomes more organised over time. In many respects, self-organisation more closely resembles the organisation we observe in organic nature.
The combination of cybernetics, systems thinking and gestalt has provided the means for the direct study of patterns in nature, in society, and in human thinking, and without recourse to metaphysical speculation.
The New Paradigm
It will no longer be possible for orthodox science to dismiss the direct study of patterns in the way it once could. In short, the idea of an organising field over and above its constituent elements is no longer an ‘unnecessary hypothesis’, but key to the technology which is informing - and will continue to inform - the modern era.
This will have a profound impact on the way we see the world. Areas that were once deemed metaphysical can now be studied directly, and with mathematical precision. For example, a zeitgeist, an outlook, and even a paradigm can be studied as self-organising wholes. Equally, fashions, artistic styles, political movements, local dialects, conventions and customs can be regarded as organising fields.
The study of patterns will open science up to the reconsideration of matters as diverse as organic nature, human societies, and even physics - the crown in the paradigm of materialism. In this light, remarks made by Max Planck, the physicist who founded quantum theory, are highly revealing:
‘All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent spirit.’
Areas once dismissed as mere speculation now have the potential to be studied directly, and with the same precision as heat, light and gravity. The limitations of materialism have been overcome, even if this is not yet widely recognised, and the coming years will make it increasingly more obvious. We are now entering an age where patterns will play an important part in our understanding of the world.
New Technology
We have not yet exploited the full potential of systems technology. Just as Newtonian mechanics led to improvements in the design of gears, levers, dams and bridges, systems thinking will give rise to new and as yet undiscovered forms of technology. Any discussion about the validity of the new paradigm will be settled not by argument, but by the technology it produces.
Systems thinking will be applied to create new forms of energy, new approaches to health and medicine, new forms of transport, new means of production and distribution, new hybrids of plants, new approaches to farming, new means of communication and so on. All the possibilities envisaged by Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis are waiting to be realised. In the future - and a not too distant future - the problem will no longer be technology but in the way a limited and reductionist view of the world has been applied to human nature.
Constant change will render much of our present thinking redundant. New possibilities made real by technological change will make many of our present assumptions about what is ‘true and good’ subject to review. Either we address this directly or we will be forced to address it through circumstance. Norbert Wiener wrote God and Golem Inc. in order to point out that unless we think about what kind of world we want, we will end up creating a world we don’t want:
‘In the past, a partial and inadequate view of human purpose has been relatively innocuous only because it has been accompanied by technical limitations that made it difficult for us to perform operations involving a careful evaluation of human purpose. This is only one of the many places where human impotence has hitherto shielded us from the full destructive impact of human folly.’
The new paradigm is upon us whether we are ready for it or not. Not recognising it is a limitation of the imagination rather than any fault in the new paradigm. In October 1903, the New York Times published a front page editorial, Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly, confidently stating that it would take ‘one to ten million years for humanity to develop an operating flying machine.’ Little more than two months later, Orville and Wilbur Wright did just that.
Intuition
It will become necessary to cope with constant change. Logic works well enough in a fixed context; if what was true yesterday remains true today then logic is sufficient to deal with the world. Constant change means that what we regard as true today may not be true tomorrow. To cope with constant change, we need better intuition.
Intuitive judgement is contextual. What makes an action right or wrong is the context in which it takes place. A context is an organised whole. A zeitgeist is a context, as is a paradigm, as is a fashion. In a time of constant change, such contexts are more organic than fixed. Intuition allows us to continually adjust to change, whereas logic demands that we respond to change in terms of what presently exists. Those who adhere to logic will see constant change as a threat to their existing values.
As the rate of change increases (barring social catastrophe), the development of a good intuitive ability will become a necessity to make sense of that change. If the paradigm of the past was dominated by logic, the paradigm of the future will be intuitive.