Most parts of the cell are replaceable if damaged, but DNA is a crucial exception. At higher radiation doses, DNA becomes garbled and cells die quickly. Lower doses can cause subtler damage in the form of mutationsaltering the way that the cell functions – for example, causing it to become cancerous, multiply uncontrollably, and spread to other parts of the body.

In animals this is often fatal, because their cells and systems are highly specialised and inflexible. Think of animal biology as an intricate machine in which each cell and organ has a place and purpose, and all parts must work and cooperate for the individual to survive. A human cannot manage without a brain, heart or lungs.

Plants, however, develop in a much more flexible and organic way. Because they can’t move, they have no choice but to adapt to the circumstances in which they find themselves. Rather than having a defined structure as an animal does, plants make it up as they go along. Whether they grow deeper roots or a taller stem depends on the balance of chemical signals from other parts of the plant and the “wood wide web”, as well as light, temperature, water and nutrient conditions.

Critically, unlike animal cells, almost all plant cells are able to create new cells of whatever type the plant needs. This is why a gardener can grow new plants from cuttings, with roots sprouting from what was once a stem or leaf.

All of this means that plants can replace dead cells or tissues much more easily than animals, whether the damage is due to being attacked by an animal or to radiation.

And while radiation and other types of DNA damage can cause tumours in plants, mutated cells are generally not able to spread from one part of the plant to another as cancers do, thanks to the rigid, interconnecting walls surrounding plant cells. Nor are such tumours fatal in the vast majority of cases, because the plant can find ways to work around the malfunctioning tissue.

Scientistic thought is usually accompanied by a reductionist habit of mind, which ruthlessly pares down complex events to a single mechanistic causal explanation. (Two playful dogs are merely establishing dominance and subordination; human institutions from politics to marriage and childrearing are but fig leaves covering the eternal battle for access to scarce economic resources, etc.)

Scientism reached its prior apogee at the end of the nineteenth century, before its positivist certainties fell victim to challenges posed by thinkers in disciplines ranging from psychoanalysis to physics. But now scientism is back, coexisting comfortably—at times interdependently—with neoliberal capitalism and its promoters, whose only standard of value is quantifiable utility. The positivist impulse is most dominant in areas of inquiry that purport to illuminate the mysterious workings of the human mind. In this popular discourse, which infiltrates our public life at every pore, the most influential idioms are pop-Darwinism (known to its adherents as “evolutionary psychology”) and cognitive science. Despite their differences in conception and approach, these idioms have sunk in concert into the morass of half-baked ideas and stale buzzwords that constitutes science journalism.

But the greater dangers of scientism are subtler. It is an impoverished way of knowing, and the particular form the impoverishment takes depends on the idiom that its practitioners deploy. At this mass-market level, evolutionary psychologists reduce human actions to their supposedly adaptive purposes by imagining what life was like on the savannah thousands of years ago, while cognitive scientists equate the brain with a computer and the mind with its software, reducing thought to computation and intelligence to problem-solving. To be clear: these phrasings are the pet locutions of popularizers and propagandists and constitute the language that makes it into the background noise of conventional wisdom. This is not the discourse of serious scientists. These methods seek the simplest, most easily quantified answers to fundamental questions about human conduct; they produce sweeping generalizations devoid of idiosyncrasy or history.

Whether they favor a biological or a computational theory of thought, scientistic thinkers all depend on a behaviorist vision of consciousness, which cannot account for the visceral longings, anxieties, and aspirations that we call subjectivity. Behaviorists, in the positivist tradition, reject any attempt to understand the mind through introspection; inner life is simply off the table. Indeed, for Auguste Comte, who founded the philosophy he called Positivism in the 1830s, introspection was “merely a way to get lost,” as George Makari writes. The formulation is revealing. Positivists—whether they embraced Comte’s philosophy or simply shared his intellectual style—have always feared getting lost, feared ambiguity. This visceral fear is a prescription for reductionist explanations.

Thanks to books like Jessica Riskin’s The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick (University of Chicago Press, 2015), we are beginning to discover that the propaganda peddled by Pinker, Kurzweil & Co. is not “science” per se but a singular, historically contingent version of it—a version that depends on the notion that nature is a passive mechanism, the operations of which are observable, predictable, and subject to the law-like rules that govern inert matter. This is the de-animated, disenchanted universe Max Weber associated with the Protestant Reformation and the rise of scientific rationality. It is also the universe inhabited in our own time by pop-Darwinian evolutionists, whose strict adaptationist program underwrites faith in automatic progress through natural selection—a process that operates independently of any individual organism’s desire but always evolves toward greater “fitness.” (The parallels this outlook shares with the Christian ideas of Providence and the humanist ideal of progress are striking.) Passive-mechanistic accounts of reality and experience did not mandate reductionist scientism, but they did make it the only alternative to transcendental religiosity—i.e., the belief in an immaterial soul or mind. This either-or assumption has characterized theories of mind down to the present. The passive-mechanist worldview, by eliminating purpose and agency from the nonhuman world, allowed Christians to cling to their belief in the uniqueness of the human soul and humanists to cling to their belief in the uniqueness of the human mind. Those beliefs die hard, even among behaviorists.

But as Riskin shows, the tradition of passive mechanism was never the only game in town, even after its triumph in the seventeenth century. For her, the key conflict is not the familiar one between transcendentalist and mechanist points of view but rather the tension between passive-mechanist and active-mechanist perspectives. Recuperating the tradition of active mechanism—the vision of an animated yet material universe—Riskin demonstrates what a powerful challenge it poses to contemporary modes of thought that claim the authority of science. Ultimately, The Restless Clock offers nothing less than an alternative way of seeing the natural world, and being in it.

Passive-mechanist assumptions underwrote the British clergyman William Paley’s argument from design, which he made in Natural Theology (1802), a book that remains a centerpiece of “intelligent design” creationism today. Paley imagined a Watchmaker God, whose existence could be inferred from the organized, clocklike operation of the universe he had created. But, Riskin asks, what if one had a more animated notion of clocks and of machines in general? What if one believed, as the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz had argued a century before Paley, that to be clocklike was “to be responsive, agitated, and restless”? Riskin shows that, for centuries, many scientists and philosophers shared Leibniz’s view. The restless clock becomes her key metaphor for understanding the tradition of active mechanism.

From the active-mechanist view, machines were not mere inert matter; they could be self-changing and self-correcting; indeed, humans and animals could be characterized as “thinking machines.” Champions of passive mechanism viewed the eye as a lens; their activist counterparts saw it as a receiving, perceiving mechanism. The issue was not materialism per se but the endowment of matter with agency. Active mechanism was an animist alternative to dualities of body and mind or body and soul—as well as an alternative to traditional, supernatural animism. Yet this complex and influential intellectual tradition has been rendered nearly invisible, as if in confirmation of the complaint that history is written by the winners—in this case, the passive mechanists. Riskin’s great achievement is to revive the active-mechanist tradition and demonstrate its relevance to the present, deploying an extraordinary range of evidence, from philosophical treatises and scientific papers to chess-playing automata and robotic tortoises.

According to Riskin, the triumph of dualist ontology began with the Protestant Reformation. Medieval Catholics used hovering angels, howling devils, and other automata in churches as forms of religious theater. These figures infused matter with spirit. In the medieval imagination, they became “holy machines” and signs of human closeness to the spiritual world, sources of amusement as well as awe. Protestant reformers, intent on separating the divine and material realms, emptied the machines of spirit and made them targets of iconoclasm. By the 1600s, machines were associated with dead matter, devoid of spirituality.

René Descartes stepped in to save spirit from flesh, but not by denying flesh agency. His notion of the body as an animal-machine, Riskin writes, left it “warm, fluid, responsive, mobile, sentient, and full of agency”—and yet wholly distinct from the soul. Aristotle had postulated three souls: the vegetative, the sensitive, and the rational, with only the last immortal and divine. Writing in the mid-1600s, Descartes dismissed the first two souls and made the rational soul peculiar to humans. This conceptual move created a modern, autonomous self with an objective, God’s-eye view of the physical world. The severing of soul from body marked a departure from the traditional Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, but the unintended consequence of Cartesian dualism was even more significant: by stressing the uniqueness of the human soul, Descartes’s followers drained the vitality from the rest of creation.

Despite the rising prestige of passive mechanism, not everyone was persuaded. Leibniz was one of the skeptics. To him, nothing lacked a soul; what he called vis viva, or living force, was a metaphysical principle, without which (he believed) nature was unintelligible. Leibniz wanted a fully mechanical account of nature that included this active force, anticipating a tradition in physics that culminated in Hermann von Helmholtz’s concept of energy in the nineteenth century. Leibniz traced the source of matter to perceiving spirits he called monads, which were “brimming with life and sentience in every part.” As Riskin writes, for Leibniz “the tiniest particle of matter contained whole worlds of living beings.” Everything in the cosmos was in a state of flux, flowing like a river. Amid the flow “certain souls rose ‘to the degree of reason and to the prerogative of minds.’” Leibniz’s active mechanism included “the generation, over time, of a thinking mind.” Consciousness arose from animated matter.

To Voltaire and other dogmatic rationalists, this was all romantic nonsense, but in fact, Leibniz’s thinking was compatible with some of the leading ideas in natural philosophy during the middle and later eighteenth century. Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, observed an “active power” at work in nature—the tendency of living organic matter to organize itself. Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, advanced the notion of a vibrant, growing cosmos where living organisms, including humans, could be the result of a gradual process; nature could be a kind of self-renewing machine; and humans had sentient self-development in common with the rest of brute creation. “Go, proud reasoner, and call the worm thy sister!” Darwin wrote in Zoonomia (1794). Neither he nor Buffon nor their other proto-evolutionary contemporaries viewed humans as the unique culmination of a linear, progressive process. About progress, they were agnostic.

Life, Sciences

Perhaps the most famous—or notorious—proto-evolutionist was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who in 1802 adopted the word biologie to describe the study of living beings and postulated an intrinsic pouvoir de la vie that animated them. Enacting this life force, plants and animals composed themselves, elaborating and complicating their organization across generations. This process unfolded over an “incalculable series of centuries,” Lamarck wrote, beginning with an “animated point” that he, following Leibniz, called a monade. All plants and animals developed and transformed as a result of the movements of fluids within them, Lamarck theorized. The more complex animals added will to the mix, forming “habits” and “ways of life” in response to circumstance...

Yet some scientists still tried to restore agency to nature. The biologist T. H. Morgan theorized a “power of self-adjustment” in organisms, a capacity that paralleled the work done by a thermostat or a flywheel governor. The notion of internal feedback appealed to cyberneticists like Norbert Wiener, who were merging the new computing technology with robotics, exploring the manufacture of artificial intelligence. What is surprising is how many of them thought they had actually accomplished their goal.

As Riskin observes, “cybernetics did not so much explain the agency of a living creature as explain it away.” Wiener, Alan Turing, and their colleagues set about “reducing agency to behavior” that was “both observable and fully mechanistic.” When they embarked on the quest for “how learning might be directed from the outside in,” they described the initiative of the purportedly intelligent machine in the passive voice; it was, Riskin writes, not “actual initiative . . . but rather the appearance of initiative.” Turing’s inability to conceive of inner life was symptomatic of the shared cognitive style in the AI community. He described thinking as “a sort of buzzing that went on inside my head.” No wonder he was as lost in introspection as Comte had been; no wonder he felt more comfortable with the view of the mind from outside in, from the behaviorist vantage.

This is where the continuity between then and now kicks in. Most contemporary theorists of mind, whether they view thought as information processing or as physical engagement with the world (or both), share a common passive-mechanist view of mental life. According to Dennett and his philosophical compatriots, “agency can only be apparent.” This is also true of intelligence, in the sense that it can only be expressed in observable action. “One had to equate appearance with reality,” Riskin writes, to accept the behaviorist model—to believe that the problem-solving, chess-playing computer is more intelligent than a human being, even a smart one.

The reductionist model of mind requires its devotees to reject any vestiges of vitalism they can sniff in the cultural atmosphere. As Pinker says, “intelligence has often been attributed to some kind of energy flow or force field”—a point of view he derides as little more than “spiritualism, pseudoscience, and science-fiction kitsch.” Pinker is here playing the classic custodian of conventional wisdom, policing the boundaries of responsible opinion with any ideological weapons available, including the rhetoric of scientific expertise. But the reason for Pinker’s disdain, as Riskin observes, is simply that the view he is dismissing “violates the classical mechanist ban on agency in nature.” Pinker is a faithful servant of intellectual fashion.

It would be easier for the reductionist worldview if its defenders faced opposition from a handful of New Age airheads, clinging to their ridiculous ideas with sentimental tenacity. But in fact the notion of agency in nature has gained extraordinary ground among scientists themselves in recent decades. The Viennese physicist Erwin Schrödinger pointed the way in 1944 by asking What Is Life? He proposed a quantum theory of evolution, and speculated that mutations were “quantum jumps in the gene molecule,” rather than the millions of tiny accidents imagined by neo-Darwinians. In this version of evolution, natural selection worked in collaboration with the behavior of individual organisms, which would reinforce and enhance the usefulness of the mutation, leading to further physical change. Natural selection was “aided all along by the organism’s making appropriate use” of the mutation, Schrödinger insisted. Selection and use “go quite parallel and are . . . fixed genetically as one thing: a used organ—as if Lamarck were right.” The complicating force at the heart of evolution was the organism’s inner tendency to use what it had—its agency.

Schrödinger’s “as if Lamarck were right” has acquired more palpable meaning in recent decades with the rise of epigenetics. This field emphasizes the whole context in which genetic material functions, from the cell outside its nucleus to the organism and its environment. Several decades ago, the biologist Barbara McClintock discovered what she called “transposons”: mobile elements in a cell’s genome that respond to stress such as starvation or sudden temperature changes by rearranging the cell’s DNA. McClintock first found transposition in maize, but it has turned out to be important in other organisms as well. Current research suggests, according to Riskin, that bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics “not through a purely random process of mutation followed by natural selection, but in important part by moving their DNA around.” James Shapiro, a bacterial geneticist at the University of Chicago, has extended McClintock’s work by showing that nearly all cells possess the biochemical tools for changing their DNA, and they use them “responsively, not purely randomly.” Epigeneticists are moving toward the ideas of adaptive or directed mutation, but cautiously because such notions breach the Weismann barrier between somatic and genetic change—a breach that in Dawkins’s view would open the floodgates of “fanaticism” and “zealotry” (by which he means Lamarckism). Somewhere, Lamarck is smiling.

In recent years, epigeneticists have begun addressing larger ontological questions. Eva Jablonka has emphasized “the restlessness of matter,” while Gerd Müller and Stuart Newman have gone further, arguing that random variation and natural selection alone do not account for the presence of organic forms in nature. Instead, they invoke an “inherent plasticity” in living matter, an active responsiveness to the physical environment. Plasticity and responsiveness combined to create the capacity for generating new organic forms, though in more complex organisms these “inherent material properties” may have ceded importance to genetic factors, which have obscured the importance of earlier, more primitive epigenetic mechanisms. Given this possibility of change over time, the effort to locate the sources of organic form requires an archeological, historical dimension. As Riskin concludes, Müller’s and Newman’s “approach to the history of life assumes inherent natural agencies whose action over time has produced a history that is neither designed nor random, but contingent.”

The implications of this conclusion are fundamentally transformative. Emphasizing what human beings have in common with the rest of the natural world does not reduce humans to passive mechanisms—not if the rest of the natural world is an animated, active mechanism. And a clearer understanding of our relationship to that world requires more than masses of Big Data; it also demands a sensitivity to the ways that organisms engage with the contingent circumstances of their environment in historical time. That environment includes religions and ideologies and economic systems as well as air and soil and water. Who knows? Maybe scientists will have something to learn from historians, as well as the other way around.

The consequences of a fresh perspective might be political and moral as well as intellectual. A full recognition of an animated material world could well trigger a deeper mode of environmental reform, a more sane and equitable model of economic growth, and even religious precepts that challenge the ethos of possessive individualism and mastery over nature. Schrödinger’s question—what is life?—leads us to reconsider what it means to be in the world with other beings like but also unlike ourselves. The task could not be more timely, or more urgent.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson: pedantry in space
by Sam Kriss

Neil-deGrasse-Tyson

Something terrible happened to you in outer space. All you can remember are the last few moments, the sun fading to a speck as you and your crew broke free from the solar system, the ship’s systems suddenly shutting down, the panic and blackness inside, shouting and sobbing, outside the phosphorescent fringes of the wormhole as it opened up in front of you – and then you woke up, sweat-slick in your own bed at sunrise, with the birds singing outside, in another universe. You are trapped in the world of the popular TV astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and you know this, because here the sunrise isn’t a sunrise at all. In fact, the earth is a sphere orbiting the sun, so the sun does not in any sense actually ‘rise’ – it’s just that you happen to be positioned right on the moving line, known as the ‘terminator’, that separates the illuminated portion of the planet from its dark side. And the birds singing aren’t really singing – actually, they’re just emitting a series of noises without any of the tonal qualities that distinguish singing from other vocal emissions. And the bed isn’t yours, because scientists have never been able to find any way of isolating ‘ownership’ in the physical composition of any object. You jump out of bed and start banging frantically at the walls. Is there no way out? Where are your crew? You rush to the window, and almost collapse in horror. It’s all there, spread out in front of you, exactly like home: everything is exactly the same, but in this sick parody of a universe it’s all been twisted into something hollow, meaningless, and mercilessly dull.

Pink strands of cloud fizzle up from the horizon, and you know that actually the horizon is just the curvature of the earth, and that the clouds, which were once believed to be inhabited by angels, house nothing of the sort. A few people are already outside in the streets below you, jogging, going to work, but they’re not really people. Actually, they’re just apes of the family Hominidae, most closely related to the genus Pan, going about their ape-business, which remains primarily motivated by the ape-needs of food, shelter, and sex. There is nothing that isn’t instantly boring. It’s too much. You rush into the kitchen, rattling the drawer in sheer panic (actually just dyspnea, tachycardia and dilation of the pupils caused by a surge of epinephrine in your body), pull out the knife (actually just a piece of metal attached to a piece of wood), and open your wrists. The blood (which was once thought to be one of the four humours, governing personality traits, but which is actually primarily used to transmit oxygen) glugs out, darker in colour and slower than you’d expected. It’ll be over now, you think. But actually, you’re not dying: you’re just a collection of atoms, and every single one of those atoms will remain. Not only are you in this universe, this universe is in you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is, supposedly, an educator and a populariser of science; it’s his job to excite people about the mysteries of the universe, communicate information, and correct popular misconceptions. This is a noble, arduous, and thankless job, which might be why he doesn’t do it. What he actually does is make the universe boring, tell people things that they already know, and dispel misconceptions that nobody actually holds. In his TV appearances, puppeted by an invisible army of scriptwriters, this tendency is barely held in check, but in his lectures or on the internet it’s torrential; a seeping flood of grey goo, paring down the world to its driest, dullest, most colourless essentials. He likes to watch scifi films, and point out all the inaccuracies. Actually, lasers wouldn’t make any sound in space; actually a light year is a unit of space rather than time; actually, none of this is real, it’s just a collection of still images projected at speed to present the illusion of movement, and all the characters are just actors who have never really been into outer space. When the rapper B.o.B. started loudly declaring that there’s a vast conspiracy to hide that fact that the world is really flat, Neil deGrasse Tyson immediately jumped in to refute him, even featuring on a eye-stabbingly awful rap song insisting that ‘B.o.B. gotta know that the planet is a sphere, G’ – a passionate, useless, and embarrassing defence of the blindingly obvious. In a world that’s simply given, brute fact, any attempt to imagine it into an entirely different shape must be stamped out. Why? The subject-matter is cosmic and transcendental, the object-cause is petty and stupid. Neil deGrasse Tyson strides onto stage to say that actually the Earth orbits the sun, that actually living beings gain their traits through evolutionary processes, that actually your hand has five fingers, that actually cows go moo, that actually poo comes out your bum – and you are then supposed to think yes, I knew that, and imagine someone else, someone who didn’t know it already, some idiot, and think: I’m better than that person, I’m so much smarter than everyone else.

A decent name for this tendency, for stars and spaceships recast as the instruments of a joyless and pedantic class spite, would be I Fucking Love Science. ‘Science’ here has very little to do with the scientific method itself; it means ontological physicalism, not believing in our Lord Jesus Christ, hating the spectrally stupid, and, more than anything, pretty pictures of nebulae and tree frogs. ‘Science’ comes to metonymically refer to the natural world, the object of science; it’s like describing a crime as ‘the police,’ or the ocean as ‘drinking.’ What ‘I Fucking Love Science’ actually means is ‘I Fucking Love Existing Conditions.’ But because the word ‘science’ still pings about between the limits of a discourse that depends on the exclusion of alternate modes of knowledge, the natural world of I Fucking Love Science is presented as being essentially a series of factual statements. There are no things, there are only truths. The fact that the earth is a sphere is vast and ponderous: you stand on its grinding surface, as that fact carries you on its heavy plod around our nearest star. The fact that the forms of organic life emerge through Darwinian evolution is fractal and distributed, so that little fragments of that fact will bark at you in the street or dart chirping overhead. The fact that there is no God, being a negative statement, is invisible, but you know for certain that it’s out there.

Which is not to say that there’s any requirement that these facts be true. None of this is real. Those multicoloured nebulae are not real objects, they exist only in fantastic pictures overlaid with Neil deGrasse Tyson’s face and some vague sentiments about how wonderful the universe is when it’s very far away from human life.  The images are digitally stitched together, the colours are fake, the shapes are not anything that could actually be seen out the window of your spaceship, a real-life nebula is about as exciting as a damp fog. If you’re going to love the natural world, really Fucking Love it, it’s best that you know as little about it as possible, or it might start to seem less lovable. Like when Neil DeGrasse Tyson quipped that ‘if ever there were a species for which sex hurt, it surely went extinct long ago.’ It’s a perfect Tyson fact, true because it’s basically tautologous, its scientific quality having everything to do with the idea that actual phenomena are just instantiations of abstract laws, and nothing to do with any scientific observation, such as listening to the yelps of cats fucking at night, or to women. Or when his TV show Cosmos described the sixteeth-century astrologer Giordano Bruno as a martyr for science, executed by the Catholic church for proposing a heliocentric solar system. See how the idiots persecute us, the rational, with their superstition and their hostility to objective thought. The reality – that Bruno believed in magic, worshipped the ancient Egyptian god Thoth, and was executed not for heliocentrism but for denying the divinity of Christ – is ignored, because that isn’t Fucking Science Love. Or when he decided that ‘Italy valued cathedrals while Spain valued explorers. So worldwide, five times as many people speak Spanish than Italian.’ A spurious reconstruction of the past from present conditions, or the I Fucking Love Scientific theory of history: successful tribes were populated by little atavistic Carl Sagans; if Italians didn’t slaughter millions in the New World it isn’t because the peninsula was at the time fractured into multiple city-states (some of them occupied by, uh, Spain) which supplied significant amounts of capital rather than colonists, it’s because they weren’t interested in spaceships.

But all this is pedantry, the perverse insistence on how the world is, the total apathy to how it could be different. Pedantry could be broadly defined as a hostility to metaphor, the demand that every object stand for itself and nothing else, that words function in the same way as numbers. Which is why it’s pointless to criticise Neil deGrasse Tyson or the I Fucking Love Scientists for being the pompous, self-important, and utterly cretinous pedants that they are: it’s just falling back into their own dismal, boring logic, insisting that a thing is what it is rather than something else. It won’t help you, lying dazed on the lino, the blood now spluttering in half-congealed dribs from your arms, running diagonally to the corner of the room, where the cat is skittishly starting to lap it up with tiny flicks of its tongue. You lie there, and you try to remember if you ever did really go into outer space. It was so black out there, you remember. And all the stars were so far apart.

Here the implication is that the simplest theory isn’t just more convenient, but gets closer to how nature really works; in other words, it’s more probably the correct one.

There’s absolutely no reason to believe that. But it’s what Francis Crick was driving at when he warned that Occam’s razor (which he equated with advocating “simplicity and elegance”) might not be well suited to biology, where things can get very messy. While it’s true that “simple, elegant” theories have sometimes turned out to be wrong (a classical example being Alfred Kempe’s flawed 1879 proof of the “four-color theorem” in mathematics), it’s also true that simpler but less accurate theories can be more useful than complicated ones for clarifying the bare bones of an explanation. There’s no easy equation between simplicity and truth, and Crick’s caution about Occam’s razor just perpetuates misconceptions about its meaning and value.   

The worst misuses, however, fixate on the idea that the razor can adjudicate between rival theories. I have found no single instance where it has served this purpose to settle a scientific debate. Worse still, the history of science is often distorted in attempts to argue that it has.

The so-called paradoxes of quantum physics are easily disposed of as soon as one accepts that there are no such things as intrinsically existing particles and their intrinsic properties, but that both particles and properties are relational “observables.” Accordingly, quantum physics does not offer a “description of the outer world,” but rather a prescription about how to make probabilistic predictions within a participatory environment. The latter view (or rather criticism of views) looks quite radical with respect to standard Western Aristotelian ontology; but it looks natural in the context of the Indian-Buddhist concept of Pratītyasamutpāda which underpins Śūnyatā. Special attention will then be devoted to the quantum feature of non-separability, which displays remarkable similarities with Pratītyasamutpāda. Finally, the meaning of such twofold parallel between quantum physics and Śūnyatā will be discussed. This parallel will be related to the similarity of epistemological situation between knowing a world from which we are not entirely separated and knowing oneself.

While it is true that there is value in ‘normalising’ irrational experiences like this, it comes at a great cost. These interventions work (to the extent that they do) by emptying our irrational experiences of their intrinsic value or meaning. In doing so, not only are these experiences cut off from any world-meaning they might harbour, but so too from any agency and responsibility we or those around us have – they are only errors to be corrected.

In the previous episteme, before the bifurcation of mind and nature, irrational experiences were not just ‘error’ – they were speaking a language as meaningful as rational experiences, perhaps even more so. Imbued with the meaning and rhyme of nature herself, they were themselves pregnant with the amelioration of the suffering they brought. Within the world experienced this way, we had a ground, guide and container for our ‘irrationality’, but these crucial psychic presences vanished along with the withdrawal of nature’s inner life and the move to ‘identity and difference’.

In the face of an indifferent and unresponsive world that neglects to render our experience meaningful outside of our own minds  –  for nature-as-mechanism is powerless to do this  –  our minds have been left fixated on empty representations of a world that was once its source and being. All we have, if we are lucky to have them, are therapists and parents who try to take on what is, in reality, and given the magnitude of the loss, an impossible task.

But I’m not going to argue that we just need to ‘go back’ somehow. On the contrary, the bifurcation of mind and nature was at the root of immeasurable secular progress –  medical and technological advance, the rise of individual rights and social justice, to name just a few. It also protected us all from being bound up in the inherent uncertainty and flux of nature. It gave us a certain omnipotence – just as it gave science empirical control over nature – and most of us readily accept, and willingly spend, the inheritance bequeathed by it, and rightly so.

It cannot be emphasised enough, however, that this history is much less a ‘linear progress’ and much more a dialectic. Just as unified psyche-nature stunted material progress, material progress has now degenerated psyche. Perhaps, then, we might argue for a new swing in this pendulum. Given the dramatic increase in substance-use issues and recent reports of a teenage ‘mental health crisis’ and teen suicide rates rising in the US, the UK and elsewhere to name only the most conspicuous, perhaps the time is in fact overripe.

Gleiser, Frank, and Thompson highlight three particular stumbling blocks: cosmology (we cannot view the universe from the “outside”); consciousness (a phenomenon we experience only from within); and what they call “the nature of matter”—roughly, the idea that quantum mechanics appears to involve the act of observation in a way that is not clearly understood.

Consequently, they say, we must admit that there are some mysteries science may never be able to solve. For instance, we may never find a “Theory of Everything” to explain the entire universe. This view contrasts sharply with the ideal that Nobel laureate physicist Sheldon Glashow expressed in the 1990s: “We believe that the world is knowable: that there are simple rules governing the behavior of matter and the evolution of the universe. We affirm that there are eternal, objective, extra-historical, socially-neutral, external and universal truths. The assemblage of these truths is what we call science, and the proof of our assertion lies in the pudding of its success.”

What Gleiser and his colleagues are critiquing, he says, is “this notion of scientific triumphalism—the idea that, ‘Just give us enough time, and there are no problems that science cannot solve.’ We point out that that is in fact not true. Because there are many problems that we cannot solve.”