The Invisible Landscape, Ch. 3, Terence/Dennis Mckenna

The progress of science is, like all other creative activities of human intelligence, a groping toward pattern—toward the accumulation of assigned pattern for the coordination of observed details and toward the uncovering of novel pattern and the consequent introduction of novel details. This tendency toward synthesis, toward the apprehension of ever more complex and inclusive orders of pattern, appears to be a fundamental quality of human thought. It is characteristic of aesthetics, philosophy, and religion, as well as of science. Understanding consists of the assimilation of patterns encountered in the external world, and insofar as understanding progresses, it is the assimilation of novel forms of pattern and the modification of previously perceived patterns that such novel patterns introduce. One of the chief resistances to this progressive penetration of understanding is the dogmatic tendency to adhere to orthodox modes of assigned pattern when confronted with novel details that call for a re- ordering of understanding. In the case of science, one can point to the persistence, in our conceptual models, of the Newtonian doctrine of concrete material entities possessing the properties of simple location; whereas the order of pattern revealed by quantum physics allows for neither concrete endurance nor simple location at its most basic levels. On the opposite end of the scale, one can point to the doctrine of relativity, which has shown that space and time must be regarded as properties of each other, yet one generally continues to characterize space in terms of the relationships of Euclidean geometry on any scale short of the cosmic. Still another example can be cited in the scientific assumption of the sufficiency of purely physicochemical properties to explain the fact of living organisms and, by extension, the fact of mind.

To carry on its empirical investigations, science must embark on this methodological license of abstracting certain sets of facts from the totality of patterned relationships of which those facts are a part. As long as these assumptions are understood for what they are, as a set of ad hoc hypotheses employed for the purpose of characterizing a given phenomenon, that is, purely for the sake of methodological convenience, then science encounters no difficulty. It is when science proclaims the adequacy of a given order of pattern to characterize all levels of organization that it runs into philosophical difficulties, for then it extends the methodological abstractions used to characterize a phenomenon to sets of phenomena that may in actuality exhibit patterns of a quite different order. It is to the philosophical consequences of this methodological inconsistency of science that this chapter is addressed. We intend to examine in some detail the philosophical problems raised by scientific methodology; we will attempt finally to tentatively suggest the fundamentals of a metaphysics that is consistent not only with the pursuit of scientific abstraction but also with the apprehension of the world as it impinges on us as living, sensing, minded organisms.

Alfred North Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World (1967, p. 7), states: Every philosophy is tinged with the coloring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its chains of reasoning. For science this intuitive speculation consists in its assumption of the knowability of the world, in its belief that every event can be correlated with its antecedents in a definite manner exemplifying general principles. This assumption, that in nature there is a secret, and that that secret can be unveiled, forms the unconscious metaphysical assumption behind all research. This scientific faith was not the creation of science itself but was inherited from the insistence of Greek and Scholastic philosophy on the rational order of nature, on the belief that nature conducts itself according to inexorable, orderly laws. This view in Greek cosmology is found in the conception that all things in nature tend toward a definite and proper end; while in Scholastic philosophy, it is reflected in the instinctive tone of faith centered upon the rationality and scrutability of God. Every detail of nature was conceived as supervised and ordered; the search into nature could only vindicate the faith of centuries. Though the tacit philosophical creed of science is embodied in these antecedent rational traditions, the way was paved for the rise of science itself by a turn away from theoretical contemplation toward an interest in nature for its own sake, the observation of concrete, irreducible facts. In this aspect, modern science arose out of a reaction against the abstract rationalism of Scholasticism. What could not be demonstrated, what was not apparent to observation, was inadmissible as evidence in the scientific worldview. And yet the belief that the diversity of irreducible and stubborn facts was harmonizable into an intelligible, rational order arose not as a result of empirical observation, but out of faith in the order of nature.

In the light of these mixed origins of modern science—its instinctive belief in the rationality of nature, coupled with its insistence on the observation of irreducible facts—it is interesting to consider the role of induction in science. When one observes, one also selects; a pure observation deals only with a particular set of conditions giving rise to a particular phenomenon. When one extrapolates the particular observation to the whole set of phenomena exemplifying similar conditions, this is induction. An entire class of phenomena has been characterized on the basis of a limited sampling of such phenomena. By this process of induction, science thus arrives at a formulation of general conditions that characterize not only the particular entity or occasion under investigation but also any other real or theorized occasion or entity that satisfies the postulated general conditions. This process of framing abstract postulates that bear a reference to no particular occasion or entity (and, in consequence, enters into the description of all such occasions) reaches its height in mathematics. The characterization of number, for example, five, does not depend on whether you are referring to five apples or five minutes; it can be impartially applied to either, regardless of the intrinsic differences of apples and minutes. Pure mathematics exists in the realm of pure abstraction; all it asserts is that reason insists that if any entities whatsoever have any relations that satisfy such-and-such purely abstract conditions, then they must have other relations that satisfy other purely abstract conditions.

To the extent that science seeks to explain the mechanism of physical phenomena with mathematically expressible laws, it reduces the data of concrete observation in particular events to the status of pure abstractions. The abstractions existed antecedently to the physical phenomena they were found to describe. The complex of ideas surrounding the periodic functions had to be worked out, as pure mathematical theory, before their relations to such physical phenomena as the motion of a pendulum, the movements of the planets, and the physical properties of a vibrating string could be discerned. The point is that as mathematics became more abstract, it acquired an ever-increasing practical application to diverse concrete phenomena. Thus, abstraction, characterized by numerical operations, became the dominant conceptual mode used to describe concrete facts.

In the process of induction, one extrapolates given characteristics of a particular past; one does not extrapolate general laws except on the basis of an assumed rationality of nature. The introduction of mathematics into the scheme supplies the nature of the data to be searched for in observation, namely, measurable quantities. In physics, this emphasis on measurable elements reached its satisfaction in the Newtonian concepts of mass and force. Mass was conceived as a constant property inherent in all material bodies in measurable amounts, whether that body was at rest or in motion, and that remained inherent in the body from one moment to the next, for as long as the body endured. Force was defined as mass times acceleration, and hence refers primarily to bodies in motion. It is important for our purposes to note that there is in these laws the tacit assumption of the self-identity of a material body in both space and time; a body is the same body whether it is at point A or point B or any point between them. Similarly, the body remains fully itself in its transitions through time and at any instant, however short, of time. The material is said to have the property of simple location; that is, it can be said to be definitely here in space and here in time, without reference to any other region of space or time. But this notion raises difficulties for induction, for if in the location of configurations of matter through a stretch of time there is no inherent reference to any other times, past or future, it immediately follows that nature at any period does not refer to nature at any other period. Accordingly, induction is not based on anything that is inherent in nature. The order of nature cannot be justified by the mere observation of nature, for there is nothing in the present fact that inherently refers to either the past or the future.

This doctrine of simple location has a further consequence for science in that it explains physical phenomena in terms of the interaction of material entities in space. To the scientific mind of the seventeenth century, physical phenomena, including the phenomenon of a living organism, were understood as a manifestation of the interaction of material entities; the world consisted of physical bodies having mass, location, and locomotion, such entities having these properties as essential qualities. But other qualities exist, which normally enter into observations of a phenomenon, but which are suppressed by the purely physical description that admits only of mass, location, and motion. We refer to such secondary qualities as color, or roundness, or scent, or texture. These qualities were not considered inherent in the entities themselves, but as arising out of our apprehension of phenomena and having no existence apart from apprehension. Such qualities were in fact considered to be products of the mind alone:

. . . But the mind in apprehending also experiences sensations which, properly speaking, are qualities of the mind alone. These sensations are projected by the mind so as to clothe appropriate bodies in external nature. Thus the bodies are perceived as with qualities which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind. Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellency of the human mind. Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly. However you disguise it, this is the practical outcome of the characteristic scientific philosophy which closed the seventeenth century. (Whitehead 1967, p. 54)

This abstraction of the secondary qualities from the primary ones of physical bodies had the unfortunate effect of creating a dualism between mind and nature. Nature became identified with matter and its move- ment, whereas mind, believing, suffering, perceiving, but not interfering, was conceived as existing apart from the external nature that it observed, described, and measured. Yet to the extent that mind is in nature, it is a product of nature. Mind is a quality proceeding from living organisms, and organisms are regarded by mechanist science as arising from the blind interactions of undirected matter; both life and mind become in this view simply the outcome of the random interactions of matter over a vast scale of time. Any apparent meaning to this process, any type of evolutionary advancement or value or purpose, is simply a projection of the observer; in itself, nature is intrinsically blind, without purpose, meaning, or value. This was the philosophical paradox that modern science, based on inductive abstraction, led itself into: confronted with a universe both lifeless and devoid of mind, how to explain the apparent intelligibility of nature and the fact of living organisms.

The preceding discussion has tried to point out that in science certain axiomatic, a priori assumptions accompany any exercise of scientific methodologies. Though we have by no means exhausted the list of such assumptions, we have hopefully pointed to some of the major ones: the implicit faith in the knowability and the rationality of nature, a legacy to science of Greek metaphysics and medieval Scholasticism; the utilization by science of the inductive method, and the twofold assumption of this use—that observation of representative concrete phenomena can lead to the formulation of abstract, general laws, and the assumption of the relevance of past events to present and future events; the assumption of the sufficiency of interactions of material entities having simple location in giving rise to nature, and proceeding from this assumption, the exclusion of mind as a causative factor in the universe, and the consequent exclusion of value and teleology from nature. That science makes these assumptions in the exercise of its methodology is not our criticism; they are necessary for the pragmatic practice of science. In the absence of such self-imposed limitation, the practice of science would be impossible. Our criticism is that these assumptions are not made explicitly, with the understanding that, of course, they are philosophically arguable; they are made merely in the service of methodological convenience. Instead, in the greater number of cases, no attempt at philosophical justification is made; the tacit assumptions of science are left unstated, to be inferred by the philosopher. Because the methods of science work, because they can produce results, science feels no need to concern itself with philosophy.

The progress of science in recent years, that is, primarily since the turn of the century, has unlocked vast new areas to human understanding. It has revealed novel orders of pattern in nature that not only went undetected and unsuspected by the science of an earlier day but also have necessitated almost the complete restructuring of the scientific worldview. We have in mind such discoveries as relativity, with its non-Euclidean topology, and quantum theory, with its notion of the discontinuous nature of matter and energy. Yet, in the face of these novel orders of pattern, whose explication was spearheaded by scientific methodology itself, other areas of science, not concerned directly with investigating such areas, have continued to carry the burden of outmoded, false conceptions as intrinsic components of their epistemological equipment.

In the following section of this chapter, let us focus attention on one area of classical scientific assumption, the notion of materialism, and see in what ways this notion finds itself in need of revision in the light of modern quantum theory. Then let us apply our revised concepts to those two stumbling blocks of classical materialism, organism and mind, to see if we have come any distance toward framing a set of epistemological principles that are both supportive of scientific investigation and truer to our everyday apprehension of the world.

One approach to the quantum theory can be found in the assumption that an electron does not continuously traverse its path in space, but instead appears at discrete positions in space for successive durations of time:

It is as though an automobile, moving at the average rate of thirty miles an hour along a road, did not traverse the road continuously; but appeared successively at the successive milestones, remaining for two minutes at each milestone . . . But now a problem is handed over to the philosophers. This discontinuous existence in space, thus assigned to electrons, is very unlike the continuous existence of material entities which we habitually assume as obvious. The electron seems to be borrowing the character which some people have assigned to the Mahatmas of Tibet. These electrons, with the correlative protons, are now conceived as being the fundamental entities out of which the material bodies of ordinary experience are composed. Accordingly, if this explanation is allowed, we have to revise all our notions of the ultimate character of material existence. For when we penetrate to these final entities, this startling discontinuity of spatial existence discloses itself. (Whitehead 1967, pp. 34—35)

The problem can be overcome if we accord to matter the same vibratory character that we apply to light and sound. The adoption of this vibratory picture of matter is going to necessitate the drastic revision of our ideas of simple location. One recalls that a unit of matter having simple location does not require a given period of time in which to manifest its essential identity—it is fully itself even if the period of its endurance is subdivided indefinitely. Similarly, subdividing the space of the material entity does divide the volume, but its elements are conceived to retain their essential spatial continuity. Note that in this view the passage of time is conceived of as accidental, rather than essential; that is, the pas- sage of time has nothing to do with the character of the material. If we adopt the vibratory description of matter urged by quantum theory, time becomes of the essence of the material. In an analogous way, as a note of music is nothing at any instant, but requires its whole period in which to manifest itself, so the vibratory entity of a primordial unit of matter requires a definite period of time, however small, for the expression of its essential nature. Another consequence arises as well: Quantum theory tells us that the electron, the basic unit of matter, does not have continuous spatial existence, but discrete points of manifestation (quanta) in space. Now, at first sight, this view seems much less in congruence with our everyday experience than the old classical notion of simple location in space. After all, we perceive all around us objects that seem to have continuity both in space and in time; are we then to believe that such apparently solid entities are actually vibratory processes? That such a view is actually more true to experience, in that it opens the way to explain those other commonsense elements of experience, organisms and minds, we will try to show next. However, one feature of the quantum view can be immediately pointed out; that is, that matter ceases to have simple location, mass, and locomotion as primary qualities; these become as referent to the synthesis of a perceiver as such secondary qualities as color, texture, or noisiness. Thus, either matter no more has primary qualities than it does secondary qualities and is in itself without quality, or the secondary qualities are just as real as the primary ones and are there to be perceived by the mind.

Thus, in the quantum view, the notion of material entities having form, a discrete and fixed spatial configuration, and endurance, a continuous sustenance through time, yields to the notion of process, a dynamical act of continuously evolving becoming. Material entities assume the character of an event; apart from process, there is no being. A thing is what it is by virtue of the serial unfolding of pattern through time; if one attempts to isolate an object at a single, nontemporal instant, apart from the instants preceding and following it, the object loses its essential identity. The object requires a self-defined, indivisible epoch for its realization; its reality is defined by the unity of the various processes that enter into its makeup. It is the process of unfoldment of the various components of an entity, gathered into a prehensive unity, that we experience as the sense object; it is not the components themselves that we experience as the sense object, but our unified prehension of these unfolding components. Thus, nature becomes a structure of evolving processes, and space and time the locus of the unification of these processes into sense objects. It is ridiculous, therefore, to ask if color is less real than, say, spatial location; color is one ingredient in the process of realization; it enters into the unified prehension of an event, and apart from prehension, there is no realization.

There is a further consequence derivative of this notion of nature as a unity of processes. This is that the modal ingression (realization) of an event into space-time bears a relation to past events, to contemporary events, and to future events. An event in itself is a unity of processes, but in combination with other events, past or present or future or all three, the event becomes one process in the unity of a still larger event. Thus the mode of ingression of any given event is subject to the influence of its antecedents, its contemporaries, and its descendants, which are in turn influenced by still other events, and so on. The unity of process that is an event therefore incorporates the influence of all events; each event mirrors within itself every other event. Insofar as a given event is considered apart from other events, which participate in its unity in making it just that event and no other, our understanding of the event remains incomplete. The total unity of an event can only be understood with reference to the totality of process, that is, to the whole of nature. Thus, in this view, a way is cleared not only for the implicit reference to past events to be found in the formulation of scientific laws but for our own psychological unity of memory, immediate realization, and anticipation.

Let us see if this definition of an entity as an evolving process can shed light on the problem of organisms. One recalls that an entity is a unity of processes requiring a given, indivisible span of time, or epoch, for its realization. The duration of an epoch can vary for different entities, depending on the complexity and number of processes entering into their realization. An electron or a mu-meson require a very short epoch for their realization, on the order of picoseconds; a mayfly requires a some- what longer epoch, on the order of forty-eight hours; a human or an elephant require an epoch of fifty to a hundred years for their realization, while a universe requires an epoch on the order of tens of billions of years. The point is that each of these entities requires its full epoch to realize it- self as a unified totality of process. Its full identity as a realized actuality depends on its full epoch of evolving becoming. It is nothing at any one of its instants; it is itself only when taken in its unified totality of successive instants.

Thus, identity, for any actual entity, consists of a unity of ongoing process, a unity that incorporates into its present aspect conditioning influences of its past and the anticipation of its future. In a living organism, this immediate experience of ongoing process becomes identifiable with its notion of self; that is, its awareness of itself, its selfhood, becomes synonymous with its experience of dynamical process. To clarify this, let us state what the selfhood of an organism does not consist of. Selfhood does not consist of its identification with the material bodily components, for its material components are continually being effaced and replaced with others by the process of metabolism:

. . . the material parts of which the organism consists at a given instant are to the penetrating observer only temporary, passing contents whose joint material identity does not coincide with the identity of the whole which they enter and leave, and which sustains its own identity by the very act of foreign matter passing through its spatial system, the living form. It is never the same materially and yet persists as its same self by not remaining the same matter. Once it really becomes the same with the sameness of its material contents—if any two time slices of it become, as to their individual contents, identical with each other and with the slices between them—it ceases to live; it dies. . . (H. Jonas 1966, pp. 75-76)

We see, then, that for the organism not only does identity persist in material change but it depends on this material flux. This is what is meant by the statement that its selfhood is derived from its experience of itself as a process. Its self-awareness does not apply to a material structure, but to an event-structure. The event-structure, the process in question, is the persistence and development of bodily form in the face of material flux. For in the case of living organisms, form is not determined by material substrate:

. . . viewed from the dynamic identity of the living form, the reverse holds: the changing material contents are states of its en- during identity, their multiplicity marking the range of its effective unity. In fact, instead of saying that the living form is a region of transit for matter, it would be truer to say that the material contents in their succession are phases of transit for the self-continuation of the form. (Jonas 1966, p. 80)

Thus, the selfhood of the organism is identified with the dynamical persistence of form, a process. It can be seen, then, that organisms exhibit an outward orientation toward a twofold transcendent horizon: toward the horizon of the outer world as the source of material for the sustenance of its form and toward the horizon of the future into which it is ever on the verge of extending by its existence as a continuous process of becoming. But life also must be characterized by an internal horizon, a self-integrating identity of the whole, spanning the succession of ever-vanishing substrata. There is no way of inferring this internal horizon from external characterization alone; it must derive from our own immediate experience of the organic mode of being. But it is the only way by which the self-integrative persistence of a metabolizing organism can be explained. The mode of realization of an inorganic entity can be explained by its external relations alone, but the persisting self-identity calls for forms of process transcending mere external relations.

Thus, the self-integrative persistence of the special form of process that is an organism is characterized by an internal horizon that is indicative of its possessing the quality of mind. Therefore, any view of the organismic process that strives for completeness must take account of mind as a factor entering into the process. If, then, mind is an element of the total process comprising an organism, is it possible to explain the fact of organisms without reference to the influence of mind? This amounts to saying, does mind enter into the organism as a causative element in its existence, or is this merely attributable to physical interactions? One can see that since the states of mind do enter into the total plan of the organism, it follows that it affects each subordinate component of the process, until the smallest subordinate components, for instance electrons, are affected:

Thus an electron within a living body is different from an electron outside it, by reason of the plan of the body; the electron blindly runs either within or without the body; but it runs within the body in accordance with its character within the body; that is to say, in accordance with the general plan of the body, and this plan includes the mental state. (Whitehead 1967, p. 79)

We have been examining heretofore some of the methodological assumptions of science and have found, particularly with reference to the classical notion of material, that many of these assumptions have a limited application. The notion of material entities having simple location and indefinite temporal divisibility, while apparently congruous with (some) aspects of our daily experience, turns out to have the character of an ab- straction when our observations focus on the minutest levels of submolecular organization. We have found the characterization of material entities as vibratory epochal processes to be more consistent with the discoveries of quantum mechanics and have found that this model also opens the way to the explanation of organisms and mind.

Perhaps we have arrived, then, at a point where we can suggest a basic reformulation of the metaphysical basis of science. This suggestion is, first, that science consider the event as the ultimate unit of natural occurrence, and second, that in seeking to analyze the component elements of an event, it should look for primary organisms rather than material parts. For there is in nature virtually nothing that exhibits the classical attributes of a material; nature is a process of processes, and processes within processes. Accordingly, the analysis of nature should concern itself with the analysis of aggregate processes into primary processes. Biology is concerned with the larger processes that are organisms, whereas physics concerns the smaller processes, which are likewise organisms, in that they experience a reference to things past, immediate, and future. For the primary organisms, we observe this relation as a factor in its external aspects; for ourselves, we observe it as an element of our psychological field of awareness. But if we experience, in experiencing ourselves as process, our essential relatedness to other processes in other times and places, are we justified in denying this experience to other, primary organisms? Is it not more affirmative to assume that, in some sense, a primary organism, being a dynamical process, is aware, or experiences itself as process and, to the extent that it does, possesses itself an internal horizon? Of course, this question can never be resolved by science, focusing as it does only on the external aspects of a process. It seems reasonable, however, to postulate an element of mind, that is, an internal horizon, as basically intrinsic to even the simplest primary organism. This postulate allows for the reintroduction of value and teleology into nature. Clearly, nature appears to our common sense to have purpose and value; it seems to evolve from simple to more complex, from primitive to more advanced, from less conscious to more conscious. Indeed, it appears to have direction, and it seems to have purpose, which guides it in that direction. Yet, we are asked by science, in the face of all evidence, all reason, and all intuition, to regard nature as purposeless, meaningless, and valueless. If we admit mind as an aspect of even the most primary organism, however, this vast complexity suddenly takes on an added meaning; a new and deeper sublimity replaces that sense of baffling futility and waste with which a blind universe confronts us.

 -Terence and Dennis Mckenna