Mightier than the Sword
(Un)certainty of Knowledge
May 1, 2000written for ENGL 396H, Scientific and Literary Paradigms in Modern Thought
The idea that we are limitless in our intellectual pursuits may be pleasing to humans, but thus far we have proven to be consistently fallible and regretfully muddled in our scientific journeys. We study and research and experiment and hypothesize and still we are haunted by mysteries and questions with answers that in turn, lead us to even more questions. Is it that we are incapable of reaching the absolute depths of the laws that dictate the operation of our world, or is that those depths are infinite and the nature of the knowledge itself is unknowable in its entirety?
There have always been areas of human existence that were by definition out of our realm. Most religions, for example, include a footnote that divorces supreme knowledge from mortal knowledge. When Milton decided to justify the ways of God to man, he still had to use man's language to tell the story. In Book V (571-576) of Paradise Lost, the Heavenly Raphael explains that in order to compensate for Adam's mere human understandings, he will try to tell the story of the War in Heaven in human terms. Here Raphael is clearly distinguishing a limit to man's ability to understand the divine. The implied limit goes unrecognized by Eve, whose hunger for knowledge leads directly to the fall of man. The only indulgence in Paradise that is forbidden to man is that of knowledge, and fittingly, Milton's (mortal) attempt to reconcile Heaven with Earth does not succeed. Whether religions in general are an external part of the natural world, and therefore subject to whatever natural laws exist, or simply social constructions created to explain the parts of those laws that we don't understand, they're part of the overarching ontological questions that drive science and philosophy. What do we know, what can't we know, and why can't we know it?
Legitimation of scientific knowledge is key to general epistemology because, especially in the Western world, science and technology tend to be valued as the highest and perhaps purest manifestation of knowledge. Galileo railed against accepting truths based on authority alone and urged his fellow scientists to explore and test for empirical evidence and numerical data to support claims. Long after science became mathematical, Jean-Francois Lyotard pointed out that in order to prove the proof, one must find consensus within the scientific community based on standards that the community arranged. "It is recognized," he wrote, "that the conditions of truth, in other words, the rules of the game of science, are immanent in that game, that they can only be established within the bonds of a debate that is already scientific in nature, and that there is no other proof that the rules are good than the consensus extended to them by the experts. (Lyotard)" The experts, though, grew up in the same scientific paradigms as their contemporaries and often learned with the same methods. With similar pasts and a highly defined context, defining the rules of truth becomes slightly less complicated.
If truth, scientific or not, is defined by rules based on consensus, then what actually exists is a socially constructed culture which validates knowledge by social agreement. Lyotard also likens scientific knowledge to a type of discourse and says that the leading technologies in the past forty years have had to do with languages and communication (Lyotard). In order to do research or transmit acquired knowledge to others, scientists must use language, which is a prime example of social constructionism. The arbitrary nature of language necessitates an agreement of meaning and syntax, generally provided by culture, before two people can communicate. In light of Lyotard's belief that one feature of the postmodern world is the commodification of knowledge, it makes sense that language would also be inherently persuasive. Richard Weaver said that "to utter words is to give impulse to others to see the world in our way," which will be important if knowledge is produced in order to be sold; someone needs to be the salesman.
As knowledge becomes a commodity, the goal shifts away from knowledge for knowledge's sake and toward knowledge as a means to an end. Technology has contributed to this onslaught of information by granting us access to absurd amounts of it. Those who apply science in order to invent new and wondrous technologies often have a goal of making something more efficient. Originally, technology was intended to serve as "prosthetic aids" for the human senses and help minimize input while maximizing output (Lyotard). Every advance in communication technology, from the telegraph to the Internet, has increased the amount of context-free information we receive. The influx of information comes from around the globe, and relevance is more or less irrelevant. As a "global community," everyone's business becomes our own and the information-action ratio approaches zero because the news we consume has little or no effect on how we live our lives. As we drench ourselves with facts and information that has negligible bearing on our day to day activities, we simultaneously invent contexts in which the factoids and soundbites constantly flowing through our minds become useful. Game shows, crossword puzzles, and trivia puzzles allow us to "use" the knowledge we've acquired, but to no constructive end except entertaining ourselves (Postman, 1986).
The quantity of information available to anyone also brings up quality issues. Public access to communication media means public control over the content and dissemination. Commitment to truth and integrity become secondary to entertaining whatever audience may exist or lavishing one's own opinion onto the world. With so many sources contributing to the noise, the structures meant to monitor and regulate what is considered "scientific truth" are lost in the disorder. The previously established rules for legitimation fall by the wayside and those remaining credible sources lose some of their potency because of the overwhelming amount of questionable information that's also available. The sender and receiver need to know that they're both operating under the same set of rules and assumptions.
Likewise, a game of high-level chess depends on both players' conformity to certain standards. These norms are well-established in the chess-playing community, but the norms and expectations depend on another player following those same guidelines. When talkshow host Rosie O'Donnell had a young chess champion on her show, he bet her that he could win in less than twelve moves. If he had been playing someone with more knowledge about the game, he would have been more successful in predicting how the game would go, but as it were, it took him more than twelve moves. Rosie's lack of knowledge tossed an unknown into the equation because she did not react to the young champion's moves the way a more experienced chess player would, so his plan was the subject of constant revisions based on her moves and the options they left available. That chess game and his inability to predict what would happen was an example of chaos mathematics. Highly trained chess masters may actually approach linearity as their games become more and more determined, but the strategies held by both players, and especially their option of purposely departing from those strategies depending on the assessment of the game and opponent, still involve elements of chaos. Chaos theory sets limits to the predictability of complex non-linear systems (Woods & Grant).
Math and science tend to sequester events in order to study them. By eliminating as many variables as possible, scientists can better gauge how exactly a dependent variable reacts to the independent variable. With the relatively simple relationship determined and the equation developed, behavior of that system can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy. The problem is that the world isn't composed of millions of small, simple, isolated systems. Rather, the systems show signs of interaction and the elements never operate completely independent of one another. The seemingly infinite number of small influences on a system is responsible for the departures from the predicted behavior. Small differences of input create wildly different results, like in the so-called "butterfly effect" where a butterfly beating its wings can be that small variation of input that eventually causes a monsoon in a distant country. Similarly, the genetic makeup of chimpanzees only differs by 2% from that of humans. Again, a relatively small deviation of input results in an entirely different species through evolution. Darwin's evolutionary theory revolves around another critical issue in scientific inquiry and knowledge: chance. If no randomness or chance existed in the development of species, the theory of evolution would be empty. Spontaneous mutations need to occur consistently across the span of millions of years for any species to evolve. Each mutation is an opportunity for adaptability and a better hope of survival, and with better survival comes more offspring who will pass on that mutation to their own progeny. Consciousness itself has been called a "glorious accident," as it too resulted from the chance survival of a random genetic change.
Similar to chaos theory, Marxism attempts to predict the eventual evolution of one of the most complex of all systems, human society. Marxists predict that the power instilled in the means of production and the subjugation of the proletariat would eventually lead to a classless society, and that the seeds of the societal structure's own decay already exist. Marxism doesn't look to predict singular events or details, but rather the general trend toward socialism. In H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, the time traveler visits a world in the far distant future where the inhabitants of the planet have evolved into two distinct groups. The surface-dwellers have atrophied in mind and body from generations of abundance and comfort. A second race of beings, the Morlocks, live underground and nocturnally feed on the soft, slow "upper" class. If the future described by the traveler is indeed governed by chaos theory and chance, then the traveler might return to the future numerous times to discover and endless number if iterations of development and evolution. The Marxists, on the other hand, would predict that every trip forward in time would reveal a culture on its way toward a socialist utopia, at which point the development of the culture would cease.
If chaos theory foils our attempts at predicting the evolution of man or precipitation patterns across the country, quantum mechanics foils our attempts to directly comprehend the motion and nature of subatomic particles. Classical physics rests on the notion that everything is knowable and that the only limiting factor is the huge number of variables that influence any given system. Probability arises from the lack of information about these causal systems. In Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, the precocious Thomasina asks her tutor about the possibility. "If you could stop every atom in its position and direction," she asks, "and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so clever as to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could. (Stoppard)" In actuality, though, Thomasina did not account for quantum physics in her mental model for mathematically predicting the entire future. Unlike classical mechanics, quantum mechanics has nothing to do with insufficient information, but rather an uncertainty that's intrinsic in the system. The explanations fly in the face of all the rules of the classical model, which is by far the prevailing paradigm taught to non-scientists. In the well-known double slit experiment, electrons are shot at a plate with two holes in it and another plate on the other side that will detect the arrival of the electrons. At times the electrons seem to behave like waves, showing interference patterns beyond the first plate, and other times like particles with discrete arrivals and paths. If the viewer could, in principle, know which hole each electron passes through, the interference pattern disappears. The electrons behave like particles and waves at the same time, and the observer couldn't calculate a probability for the behavior of the electrons unless he or she could account for the possibility that they might pass through both holes at the same time (Feynman).
We have knowledge that we construct and reify within our epistemic communities. The dynamics of language carry such knowledge along and subject it to the rigors of constant interpretation and reinterpretation. Other mysteries are chalked up to lack of information and limits on our observational abilities, which serve to tantalize us with the possibility of knowledge- the ultimate horizon. And then there's quantum mechanics, which creates a logical paradox if the rules of classical physics are applied and yet so far hasn't been understood well enough to receive an entirely new set of rules and causal behaviors. People flock to mysteries and the unexplained; elements of uncertainty enthrall and captivate our attention as we look deeper into our sciences and try to bend our mathematics to fit the behaviors. If our hunger for more information doesn't fade and our scientists continue to search for a new perspective, perhaps someday we'll find a worldview that can bring the mysteries of the universe into focus. Then again, perhaps it really is turtles all the way down.
Works Cited
Feynman, Richard. The Character of Physical Law (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998) pp. 128-148.Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
Milton, John. Paradise Lost & Paradise Regained (NY: New American Library, 1968) p. 165.
Postman, Neil. "The Peek-a-Boo World" and "The Age of Show Business," Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (NY: Penguin, 1986) pp. 64-98.
Stoppard, Tom. Arcadia (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1993) p. 5.
Woods, Alan & Grant, Ted. "Chaos Theory" and "Time, Space and Motion: Revolution in Physics," Reason in Revolt: Marxism and Modern Science (online at http://www.marxist.com/rircontents.html, 1995).