From Certainty to Uncertainty

Citation

Abeles, T.P. (2002), "From Certainty to Uncertainty", On the Horizon, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 25-26. https://doi.org/10.1108/oth.2002.10.2.25.3

In the days of our youth, when families still gathered together for the evening meal, at the end of the repast, father would push back, light up a pipe and hold forth on an idea on which he had been reflecting. Peat’s slim volume has that same feel. The author purports to journey from the finite world of the 1900s constructed by the structured world of Newton and colleagues to the less than certain world of non‐linear complex dynamics, chaos theory and fractals.

The volume simultaneously attempts to weave in the views that are created by seeing the world through cross‐cultural lenses. Peat’s slim volume seems to stop at the beginning of the last decade. Implicit in David’s volume is the hope that, with the rise of uncertainty in the models of science, a gentler world, one which emerges from a multicultural perspective, might prevail.

On the other hand, Brockman’s volume is a collection of essays looking forward to the next 50 years from 25 internationally recognized scientists, members of his “Reality club”. Brockman’s authors take the emerging, chaotic models in their stride and, like most in the sciences, integrate these ideas into their worldview, and march straight to the future without seeing the “new science” as a “bifurcation” or catastrophic transformation.

From Certainty is broken up into small portraits roughly held together by the book’s thematic title. As any good story‐teller, Peat draws from his experiences, about many of which he has written, in much greater detail, in the past. In spite of the inclusion of other worldviews, one certainly is seeing these ideas presented through North American eyes. What makes the volume a comfortable story, though, is the broad brush that has been chosen to blend together a spectrum from Western philosophy to Eastern thought. Like a familiar story, Peat’s style will trigger, in the mind’s eye, territories that most readers will have covered. In fact, the lack of a bibliography or extensive references and footnotes, de facto, assumes that we, as readers, are treading on familiar territory and that we will nod appreciatively, as chords are struck in our memories of past struggles with emergent ideas, as students, researchers, or concerned lay persons.

The treatment of each subject is uneven. Peat seems most comfortable with Western philosophy, as exemplified by the carefully unraveled ideas of Wittgenstein; but the reader is left unsatisfied with his brief description of artificial intelligence. Peat dismisses it as being limited, because its ability to reach “consciousness” is bound by the binary nature of the technology. It is as if development of AI stopped at the start of the last decade and the entire domain of A‐life and the ideas that emerged from such thinkers as Kurzweil did not exist, or that spontaneous emergence rising out of work at the Santa Fe Institute could be turned against certainty and yet not offer opportunities at the same time.

Peat, long a student of physicist, David Bohm, draws on Bohm’s “ink drop‐in‐glycerine”, gedanken‐experiment to demonstrate the difference between implicit and explicit order. In the “experiment”, the drop is placed in glycerine residing between two concentric cylinders. Turning one cylinder disperses the drop and reversing the process brings it back. The metaphor seems forced. Unfortunately, Peat fails to rationalize it with his explanation of “chaos” theory, an idea that basically demonstrates that one can never reverse an experiment or even repeat the same experiment.

Perhaps it is here that one feels discomfort and one might start to wonder on which side of the science wars we find ourselves. While this small volume tells the story of the changing metaphors of science, one senses that these tales might fall more in the camp of the cultural studies community than sit on the side of science, seeking a kinder, gentler world view than the default vision of command and control. The idea that science may fail to find its unifying theory, as suggested by Peat, in no way dethrones the discipline from its position within society, because it retains the ability to deliver applications as new knowledge is formed. Science is autopoietic.

David’s argument that a change in Western thinking from the concept that we can use “science” to objectify the world, to one where science, under the new concepts of uncertainty, becomes less of a center‐piece of societal thinking and thus less of a tool to put humans in charge by their ability to define and thus control, fails. While he does bring in other worldviews, he does not attempt to rationalize these with Western thought, as Zukov does in The Dancing Wu Li Masters, or attempt to shift worldviews, as does Capra in The Tao of Physics. Peat, in the end sits firmly in the camp of Western science, though one that he hopes is suitably humbled by the loss of its deterministic dreams, a vision that he believes, nay hopes, will remain as elusive as the carrot in front of the milk horse or as ephemeral as Becket’s Godot.

Peat hopes that the shifted worldview will lead to a more sensitive and caring role for humanity with regard to both the socio/economic and bio/physical environment. Again, David gives the readers a soft landing with his environmental story, the shift from man the dominator to a kinder, gentler and more sensitive human. Peat’s selective vision would have us believe that early humans exhibited such characteristics as environmental sensitivity and a caring relationship between communities, a popular metaphor but one not necessarily consistent with current historical and anthropological studies.

Sandwiched between the discussion on science and the environment is a small story on the rise of the university and its decline as a center for generation of creative and leading edge thinking on issues of societal importance, an issue lamented in many articles including those appearing in On the Horizon. David sees a rise of centers where scholars can again find a place to gather, free from the bindings imposed by the rising corporate model. Peat’s Center for New Learning in Pari, Italy offers such a haven, a retreat where scholars can come and exchange ideas and participate in quiet reflection. The Internet has spawned a number of virtual spaces with similar ambitions. The question that always looms large, and has since the first scholar sat, selling their services, at the entrance to the libraries of Alexandria, is how does one meet the basics within Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?

For those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, and who have not engaged with these issues for several years, From Certainty stirs memories and has us reaching for some old, well‐thumbed volumes. For faculty in liberal studies, this slim volume needs the benefit of an extensive bibliography and will force classes to pick selectively amongst the ideas, spread across a very large intellectual horizon. The volume provides a good summary to the mid‐1980s but needs to be complemented by the amazing body of thought arising from the past decade, including the entire postmodern literature.

On the other hand, John Brockman seems to eschew the past. For many years, he has managed an organization that gathers seminal thinkers together to look at new, emerging ideas. The Reality Club is composed of nationally recognized thinkers primarily from the sciences and social sciences. Brockman believes that it is this community that can easily cross the cultural barriers due to their mastery of the tools of sciences and the vocabulary and worldviews that allow them to manage a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, the bridge between Snow’s “two cultures”.

Of particular interest to this discussion is Brian Goodwin’s short essay, “In the shadow of culture”. He begins at the same point as David Peat, with the defining of a certain world through the efforts of Newton, but defines the destabilizing event, not as the emergence of complexity, but rather the presentation by Lovelock and Margulis of the Gaia hypothesis that challenged two basic tenets of science. The first was the idea that evolution was an interactive process with the environment acting on the organism and the organism reacting by modifying the environment. Second, and more controversial, was a sophisticated concept of animism, a consciousness residing within the earth itself. Science accepted the first premise and, in return, Lovelock “recanted” the latter (but does it still move?). Of course, Goodwin has raised all the troubling issues, such as from where consciousness comes and how it arises from inert materials.

In a parallel vein, Marc Hauser’s article, “Swappable minds”, looks at what might happen, as we start to insert genetic materials in humans, such as porcine tissue in the brain to cure Parkinson’s disease, or whether we really understand what “quality of life” might mean, as we proceed along these biological paths.

Brockman has assembled 25 “public intellectuals” including learning expert Roger Schank, MIT’s Rodney Brooks, whose work on smart robots is pushing the man/machine interface, mathematician Ian Stewart, physicist and computer researcher, David Gelernter, and polymath Stuart Kaufman.

Goodwin purposefully states that he is focusing on the present rather than where we will be in 50 years. And most of the authors would agree that, whether they are looking towards the future, the first step is to be firmly rooted in the present. And, indeed, what we are confronted with, in these essays, is the present, informed by the concerns, many the same as Peat’s, of the future.

There are a number of recurrent themes flowing through these engaging pieces. In addition to the focus on biology, there seems to be a consensus regarding the ubiquity of knowledge, available essentially at the utterance of a question or a request. Thus, as Gelernter asserts, it is the ability to ask questions that is important, a thought echoed by Schank, who has had a running war with conventional fact/test‐driven education for a number of years. What this means for our education system from K‐>gray has not been revealed in this volume but is an issue that has long been skirted by scholars whose pedagogical existence seems assembled from such knowledge. Unfortunately the volume lacks an index that would let one cross‐reference the ideas of the varied authors or a bibliography. Maybe the volume is trying to tell us something.

This is a joint review with The Next Fifty Years