The Auguries of Science

Lee Smolin, in his book The Trouble with Physics, complains that his generation of theoretical physicists dropped the ball. In the early 1970’s graduate students like himself were sure they were close to a major revolution in humanity’s understanding of the universe. But just when a “theory of everything” seemed to be within reach, theoretical physics divided into ideological camps and began arguing philosophy and metaphysics rather than investigating the meaning of experimental results and the testability of their hypotheses.

In the last 50 years, industry, government and individual entrepreneurs have been busy applying the knowledge gained in the previous 500. Up until 1960, even Newton’s laws were fundamentally untested. It wasn’t until the first earth-orbiting satellites that even those most basic laws of physics could be demonstrated unambiguously. Technology has been rapidly advancing since, and today its routine to use the equations of quantum electrodynamics in the design of computer processors. But technology, though useful, both as tool and as metaphor, doesn’t directly advance our understanding of ourselves or of the universe.

There have been breakthroughs in the brain sciences, but much of the science is marginalized, the breakthroughs aren't universally acknowledged as such, and the various disciplines aren't as yet connected by a common muse that would enable them to affect each other directly. Theories overlap and their redundancies and contradictions are ignored for lack of a common language.

The list of arts and sciences that may fall under the umbrella of “brain science” is more or less everything, and all speak different languages: there are the philosophers and theologians; the visual artists; the musicians & composers; the poets, novelists, playwrights, essayists and historians; archeologists; anthropologists; and, of course, neuroscientists. What separates the neuroscientists from the others is their need of a physical verification for a metaphysical experience, as if there might be doubt that everything we experience--whether impinging directly on our sensory ganglia or generated internally--is "real".

Neuroscientists like Oliver Sacks and V.S. Ramachandran, by carefully documenting pathologies of the nervous system, are, like all careful observers, giving the theorists the information they need to build models that can, in turn, guide future research. The model that Julian Jaynes proposed back in 1976 in his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, came perhaps too soon to stimulate and guide the brain sciences. Its suggestion that religion is the cultural echo of a universal wish to return to a pre-conscious state, before the self (or the “analog I”) replaced and silenced its metaphorical precursor, the gods, has provoked religious ideologues who can’t abide any objective examination of the anthropological and psychological origins of religion. And its assertion that monotheism, astrology, tarot cards, palm reading, animal sacrifice and science are all compensation for the loss of certainty that came with consciousness offends many scientists as well.

That science is just another set of auguries for reading the mind of God, differing from other superstitions only by virtue of its methodological rigor, may offend those scientists who see science not only as a method for falsifying hypotheses, but as their only protection from the dark side of human nature. Examining religion under the objective light of anthropology and psychology may be worthwhile, but subjecting science to the same scrutiny goes too far. Why? Possibly because reason itself has become a god, and gods can’t abide scrutiny; objectivity robs deities of their power.

Few would argue a preference for tea leaves and animal entrails over the axioms and postulates of science, but science may be less a revolution as an evolution of augury established at the dawn of civilization. When we flip a coin or draw straws, we're applying a method, a way of structuring the question to produce an answer. Is this so very different from the administrative methods a rational technocrat employs? Both reflect a failure of imagination and a distrust of intuition. Both rely on methodologies for producing answers that reason can act on unencumbered by ethical ambiguities.

What Julian Jaynes implies and John Ralston Saul states explicitly is that reason used in isolation can be just as reckless and prone to delusion as those other qualities we lump together as emotion, instinct or sentiment. V.S. Ramchandran has observed that patients whose neural pathways from the sensory organs to the emotional centers of the brain were physically damaged while the pathways to the cerebral cortex were intact, were far more likely to make bad decisions, to confuse fact and fiction, to put their trust in unworthy people and to distrust their friends. (See V.S. Ramachandran, A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Impostor Poodles to Purple Numbers)