The greatest gift of science is science
Science has given humanity enormous powers, for better and for worse. On the internet one can easily find many discussions about what the greatest applications of science are, the most helpful as well as the most harmful. But really, each of those choices are like Big Fish caught by a single fishing rod called Science. Science's biggest gift is the methodology of Science.
Science is based on a clever balance between inviting individuals to use their subjective freedom to come up with new theories, while making sure to then use intersubjective agreement to filter the products of that freedom. The results of this growing body of shared knowledge are passed on to future generations through a wide variety of summaries in the form of textbooks on many different levels of expertise.
The recipe for producing science
The methodology of science can be stated very simply:
Science is produced by a self-governing community of scientists, using increasingly detailed working hypotheses for developing theories that are tested at each next step in increasingly accurate experiments.
For more details, see entry #001 in Part 1, in particular the use of what I called the "scientific ratchet": designing refined experiments to test improved theories, and in turn further improving theories, based on the results of more accurate experiments.
After each cycle of the scientific ratchet, experiment trumps theory in a *preliminary* judgment of whether the theory is adequate. And after intersubjective agreement is reached between different teams of experimentalists, the scientific community makes a *consensus* judgment as to what will be passed on to the next generation in terms of textbooks,
Note: many scientists tend to call the result of that form of consensus "objective reality", but that is a misnomer. There is no alien observer looking down at our Universe from the outside to tell us what is "really true". The best we can do is to improve the accuracy of our measurements, in a succession of intersubjective agreements.
Another central aspect of science, also discussed in #001, is the use of working hypotheses, based on *suspending* judgment. In short: don't believe and don't disbelieve any working hypothesis, but keep an open mind.
In short, science is all about judgment. Investigations start with suspending judgment, then moving on to preliminary judgments, followed by stages of reaching consensus, first locally and finally globally.
The key is knowing when to let go of judgment, how to invoke judgment with increasing degrees of certainty, and last but not least to always remain open for further refinement or even replacement of theories when new experiments force such a change. In other words, at any given time, scientists decide together upon a judicious choice.
Prescientific recipes
The old recipes, in use for millennia, were quite different. Let's call these recipes for engineering, to give them a very broad and general name. Using that name, some of our fellow mammals, like beavers, were pulling off engineering feats ten million years ago, while some insects, like bees, did so even a hundred million years earlier. In short, the methodology was one of trial and error, helped by biological evolution at first, and later by cultural evolution in which the recipes were handed down across the generations, as described earlier in entries #000 and #008.
Human engineers learned from experience, while working with material objects, using material tools. Their activities were local, from families to guilds to tribes or countries. They never reached the kind of global form of organization that science provided, from its beginnings in the 17th century.
Another essential difference between science and engineering was the "open source" nature of science, to use a term made popular in the nineteen eighties for freely available software, but one that already applied to scientific publications centuries earlier.
Mathematics and physics, as well as other branches of natural science, are openly accessible if, and that may be a big if, you speak and read the languages in which the "open knowledge" are presented. In principle, anyone is free to learn those languages. Everything is open and available, provided there is the interest from the side of the individual, combined with opportunities provided by education. See also the discussion in the section "From engineering to science" in the FEST ManiFESTo, entry #000.
The relationships between science and engineering are expressed in the middle column of Fig. 39, in a high level bird's eye view of human knowledge production regarding the material side of reality.
Matter and mind: two aspects of reality
Even without any background in science or engineering we can easily see that every moment of our life we are dealing with two different aspects of whatever happens around us: a matter aspect, such as our body, operating in the physical realm, and a mind aspect, operating in a realm where thoughts, feelings, mental phenomena in general, constantly appear and disappear. Our body has a location in physical space, while what we call our mind seems to have space for whatever mental phenomena appear at any given moment.
In our culture, many people find it difficult to resist the temptation to immediately view our mental reality as some kind of illusion produced by our brain, useful for survival in a physical realm, the only realm that is really real, objectively present. But if we reflect on the fact that our empirical knowledge of anything material is given purely within experience, something that happens in our mind, and that our mind is clearly associated with our body, we see a pair of concepts that depend upon each other, body and mind, like two sides of the coin of reality.
A truly scientific start of investigations in the nature of our mind would accept the empirical fact that mind and matter are codependent on the level of everyday observations. Indeed, any culture on Earth has started from that observational fact, even though different cultures have drawn quite different implications from that dual nature of reality. Our largely shared belief that brains produce consciousness and thus in some way what we call our mind, is exactly that, a belief. We are still very far from an empirical understanding of how a brain can "produce" consciousness, if it does; this is a completely open question for now.
To be specific, the implicit working hypothesis of neuroscience is that mind is produced as some kind of emergent phenomenon of matter, which is a very reasonable working hypothesis to start with, since it is undeniable that there is a strong correlation between brain activity and mental activity. The problem is that generations of students were taught that the working hypothesis was more or less self obvious, throughout the twentieth century. For most scientists and students alike, it became a belief, a dogma, rather than a working hypothesis. The result is depicted in Fig. 40.
The great success of neuroscience
In the last quarter century two important new trends have begun to soften the dogmatic stance reflected in Fig. 40. One is the amazing speed of progress of neuroscience. For the first time in history we can begin to actually probe correlations between what someone sees or thinks with various techniques of studying brain activity. We are now at the point where material tools measuring material processes in the brain can begin to detect aspects of mental processes. A huge step forwards, and offering many applications -- as always for better and worse. But apart from applications, what are the implications?
On the one hand, this may seem to confirm the working hypothesis that brains produce minds. On the other hand, the more detailed our studies of microscopic connections of the hundred billion neurons and their more than a hundred trillion synapses become, the more we realize how very far we still are from a deep understanding of the nature of the correlations that have been found.
Actually, we really don't yet know what the nature of causal arrows may be between matter and mind. In quantum mechanics any trace of mechanical causality has evaporated. This sent shock waves through the physics community, from which it still hasn't recovered given the plethora of competing interpretations. Wouldn't it be foolish to make the same mistake with respect to the mind/brain relationship, and have future generations shake their head in disbelief when coming across twentieth and twenty-first century writings in neuroscience?
Note that I am *not* arguing that consciousness is related to quantum effects in the brain; everything on small scales is related to quantum effects, that's not the point. The lesson I draw from quantum mechanics replacing classical mechanics around 1925 is far more general. For centuries scientists interpreted the validity of an approximately correct mechanical model of material reality as a dogmatic view that reality = mechanics, which turned out to be completely false. Shouldn't we be a bit more careful around 2025 when translating the validity of correlations between brain and mind/consciousness as a dogmatic view that reality = matter?
Fig. 41 gives a symbolic sketch of how neuroscience, as one of many branches of natural science, has its sights set on looking "under the hood" of the mind to see how it "works". It may some day, and it may then offer convincing arguments pro or con for the view that brains produce or cause minds in some way. But until we reach or come close to that level of insight, it would be a pity if the prejudice against there being room for a science of mind would continue.
The hard problem of consciousness
The mind-body problem in its modern form was defined by Descartes, and was taught as being a problem ever since to a dozen generations of students in philosophy, up to the present. Given the growing gap between philosophy and natural science (which used to be called natural philosophy!), in due time fewer and fewer scientists were even aware of the fact that historically there had been a perception of there being a problem.
It was the great merit of the philosopher David Chalmers to translate the presentation of Descartes' ideas into a completely modern form, in a way that not only was understandable to modern scientists, but appealing and inspiring. It did also help that five years later the movie "The Matrix" came out, making a big splash, and getting the idea of virtual reality across to a larger public, showing vividly the notion that "objective" reality may be quite different from experienced reality.
The success of David Chalmers' educational move was at least partly due to his choice of the gripping label "the hard problem of consciousness", which he chose for the question why information processing in the brain is accompanied with conscious experience of the person whose brain we are talking about. Wouldn't it be equally possible for us to live in the world without any conscious awareness, and be equally effective in all that we do? There is of course the question "what is the nature of consciousness". But in addition there is the question "why is there consciousness" in the first place.
It is related to the question of machine consciousness. If an AI becomes better and better at emulating the behavior of humans, should we conclude that there is at least some budding form of consciousness that is accompanying such skills? Chalmers posited that the whole question of studying the brain/mind connection, or more precisely the brain/consciousness connection, is intrinsically even more hard than the (already very hard) question of how the neuronal processes in the brain translate into behavior of the body, including anything that we tend to label "subjective".
Recasting in modern terms, with modern ramifications of the mind/body problem, added a new twist to the field of neuroscience. Having an outsider telling you in so many words that all the problems you are so busy working on are relatively easy with respect to the central question, of how a purely material system can generate in some way a conscious experience, was like a clarion call, if not a call to arms.
However, given that the earliest Buddhist literature already talked about the relationship between body and mind, and given that roughly around that time Greek philosophers took up such questions in somewhat similar ways, from Plato on if not earlier, the label "hard problem" in itself was nothing new. In fact, it was a very direct rekindling of an old puzzle. Fig. 42 depicts the alternative conceptualization of the upper right corner in the two by two matrix comparing universal versus non-universal vertically and matter and mind horizontally.
The next step
In this entry, we have taken four steps toward a science of mind, each depicted in one of the four figures above. The first step was to look at the history of natural science, the science of matter, in Fig. 39, to see whether we could draw a parallel for a future science of mind.
The second step was to begin to fill in the upper right quadrant, as shown in Fig. 40. The vast majority of scientists working in any field of natural science immediately respond with "impossible!". Why this strong reaction? For them hearing "science of mind", fully automatically translates into hearing "science of mind treating the mind as if it was some kind of matter". And of course, that *would* be impossible. This is why in entry #001 I whittled down the core methodology of science to what could be applied to *either* matter or mind.
The third step became necessary when scientists began to understand more of the structure and processes within the human brain. At this point they could no longer ignore the fact that studying those material properties would only make sense by making correlations with mental processes. In Fig. 41 the first attempts at looking for correlations are shown as looking "under the hood" of the complex mechanism of the brain.
Finally, the fourth step is depicted in Fig. 42 where the question of taking a scientific methodology, designed for studies of matter, and applying that to studies of mind, is called into question. In attempts to set up detailed studies of consciousness, especially in the nineteen nineties when that field went through a period of exponential growth, the "hard problem" gave reason to pause.
We will take the next step in the next entry, where we will start afresh in populating the two blank quadrants in Fig. 39. We have started to do that already in entry #003, but we will now proceed more slowly and carefully.