In an essay I published on 2013/01/13, How Can We Describe a Human Being?, I criticized the psychologist Jerome Kagan for making a mostly valid statement in a slanted way: “Biological sentences cannot replace psychological ones, for the same reason that the language that describes the history of a hurricane will never be replaced with propositions descriptive of the single molecules of air and water in the storm because the former sentences refer to processes applicable to very large numbers of molecules.” In my opinion, he would have been on more solid ground if he’d written about being and not language.
Kagan was right in pointing to the importance of language, words and sentences and—I would add–stories, but he missed the point that problems in our mis-understanding about, or lack of insight into, created being underly our difficulties forming proper sentences to speak about, for example, complex systems which seem to have properties which don’t come from a simple summing of their members.
Let me quote a professor of physics, Robert C. Hilborn, from an introductory work, Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics:
[W]hy study chaos? To answer this question, we have to cast off the blinders that most twentieth-century physicists have worn. The blinders have kept our attention focused on learning more about the microscopic world that underlies the phenomena we observe. We cannot deny that this has been an immensely successful enterprise both in terms of what we have learned abuot the fundamental structures of matter and in the application of those fundamental ideas to the practical needs of society. In this drive toward the microscopic, however, many scientists have lost sight of the complexity of phenomena outside the tightly controlled domains of laboratory experiments. In some sense we expect that this complexity follows from the fundamental microscopic laws and is, in some way, embodied in those laws. However, the fundamental laws do no seem to give us the means to talk about and understand this complexity. If we are to understand and explain the universality of chaos, for example, we need to go beyond the specific predictions made by the fundamental laws for specific systems. We must approach this complexity at a different “level of explanation.” Instead of seeing chaotic behavior as yet another tool to help us probe the mircroscopic world, we should think of this complexity as an essential part of the world around us, and science should attempt to understand it. Nonlinear dynamics and the theory of chaos are our first (perhaps rather feeble) attempts to come to grips with this dynamical complexity. [page 60, Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics, Robert C. Hilborn]
Professor Hilborn speaks of a different “level of explanation.” That phrase has a pretty strong feel of moving in the right direction; it’s a way of speaking which is compatible with the idea that the primary issue isn’t “a way of speaking” but rather the nature of created being. The problems with language arise because there is a true problem, a serious inadequacy and misunderstanding, about the nature of created being. Our traditional understanding of created being isn’t rich enough, isn’t complex enough to handle our existing knowledge about the physical world or about human communities as they have evolved and developed in recent centuries. I’ve written about this again and again, because it is the foundation of any plausible understanding of God’s Creation. For example, I spoke of the need to have a proper grasp of the relationship between realms of relatively abstract created being and the concrete, thing-like created being of our world in The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding which deals with the problems the New Englanders had in dealing with the concrete humanity of the native Americans. I addressed the general issue of created being from a wider perspective in From Abstract Being to Concrete Being and Narratives.
I cannot stress too strongly that we need a new understanding of created being, from a metaphysical viewpoint and also from the viewpoint of all fields of study which deal mostly with concrete being and narratives. We Christians, in particular, need a plausible understanding of the story God is telling set in the context of all of Creation, all realms of abstract to concrete created being. That story will be our ways of stating the Creed and talking about Jesus Christ’s life and living in imitation of that life.
This isn’t to deny the existence and importance of language problems, lack of adequate words and—I’d add—lack of proper grammatical constructions. It is to say that the language problems are due to deeper problems: the lack of proper concepts for understanding created being. We probably have to work on both language and conceptual problems at the same time, each component of a proper understanding rising at different rates and then being used to pull up the other components.
We seem to be in a situation where the knowledge of theoretical physics and mathematics are inordinately important in moving forward from our current state of seeming chaos, but, as is often true with so-called chaotic systems, there is order underlying the confusion and that order is gradually coming into our human view.
In an early and short essay, Shaping Our Minds to Reality, I provide a quotation from John Polkinghorne, a physicist become Anglican priest, on the problems even physicists have in gaining a conceptual understanding of quantum mechanics:
The wavefunction is the vehicle of our understanding of the quantum world. Judged by the robust standards of classical physics it may seem a rather wraith-like entity. But it is certainly the object of quantum mechanical discourse and, for all the peculiarity of its collapse, its subtle essence may be the form that reality has to take on the atomic scale and below. Anyone who has had to teach a mathematically based subject will know the difficulties which students encounter in negotiating a new level of abstraction. They have met the idea of a vector as a crude arrow. You now explain to them that it is better thought of as an object with certain transformation properties under rotation. ‘But what is it really?’ they say. You implore them to believe that it is an object with certain transformation properties under rotation. They do not believe you; they think that you are holding back some secret clue that would make it all plain. Time and experience are great educators. A year later the student cannot conceive why he had such difficulty and suspicion about the nature of vectors. Perhaps we are in the midst of a similar, if much longer drawn out, process of education about the nature of quantum mechanical reality. If we are indeed in such a digestive, living-with-it, period, it would explain something which is otherwise puzzling. A great many theoretical physicists would be prepared to express some unease about the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics — in particular, about Copenhagen orthodoxy — but only a tiny fraction of them ever direct serious attention to such questions. Perhaps the majority are right to submit themselves to a period of subliminal absorption. [“The Quantum World”, J.C. Polkinghorne, Princeton Science Library, 1989, page 82]
The rest of that short essay is my commentary upon Polkinghorne’s insight and is printed below.
J.C. Polkinghorne was from the group of theoretical physicists at Cambridge which also included Stephen Hawking. He quickly became a Professor, which is not the same as Professor at an American university but rather somewhat the same as a holder of an endowed professorship. Around 1980, when he was still young, he heard God calling and entered a seminary to become an Anglican priest, returning to Cambridge as a chaplain and administrator after ordination. He’s a clearheaded thinker in the domains of science and theology.
I just want to emphasize the importance of what Polkinghorne is saying from his personal experience in learning and in educating young scientists. I may well go further than he would support.
We do not come into this life with brains which are some sort of wetware general processors. We don’t really process information in the way of a computer or a communications channel. We handle information by reshaping ourselves to what we find when we actively engage what lies around us. Like a totemic hunter making himself one with the bear he hunts, we shape ourselves in some substantial ways to what we find and we can only find what we seek. Learning, in the general and academic senses, is an active process and, moreover, a process in which the mind itself is altered rather than just having new content loaded in. The hunter doesn’t think he can become one with the bear by imagining a bear which accords with his preconceptions. He learns how bears behave over his years as a boy and then begins to think as if he were a bear. The astrophysicist doesn’t think — not for long in any case — to become one with the Milky Way by building a galaxy as if using an erector set. He studies how the universe really is for many years and shapes his mind around the reality that he perceives. When the hunter begins to understand the bear or the astrophysicist the galaxy, then he can begin to enter the story of that entity, to travel along with it through time.
It all begins with a suspension of conscious efforts, a suspension of the will, that the mind, and perhaps other parts of that human being, can be reshaped to accord with reality. You’ve got to be willing to learn the rules of the game rather than thinking you’re entering some sort of game for which you have inborn knowledge of the rules as well as inborn skills that only need the developing. We have inborn knowledge of the general rules of this world, very general skills of the sort needed to function in this world. That’s all.
Polkinghorne raises an issue not addressed by St. Thomas Aquinas so far as I know:
Perhaps we are in the midst of a similar, if much longer drawn out, process of education about the nature of quantum mechanical reality.
This process has already gone on for three generations or so in quantum mechanics. Is it possible that there are some reshapings of the human mind so radical that it takes generations to build the foundations before the building can even rise? Or is it just that few there are willing to accept reality especially in an age where we’ve deluded ourselves to believe we’re born as some sort of fully formed ‘persons’? How can we be reshaped if we’re already fully formed? How can we need reshaping to suit ourselves for lives as hunters or scientists or God-centered human beings if we’re autonomous agents who merely make decisions or consume knowledge or experiences the way we think to consume toothpaste?