Dawn of the Age of the Computer Mouse

From Newton to the period of Kant we see a full cycle of a dialectic that resulted in the distinction of human and natural sciences. This period is lost to us and we live in the secondary downfield arising in the emergence of scientism as a universal discourse. The Science Wars, and the Two Cultures debate, are really echoes of this period near the climax of the Enlightenment when a deeper dimension to rationality was explored against the backdrop of the Romantic movement, and much else. The point for us will be in something like Kant’s distinction of theoretical and practical reason. Whatever we think of his formulation something like it is always present, as a challenge to the reductionist monism ambitious to mechanize all explanation. This distinction is not hard to find in current science. That said, the original formulation of the eonic model consisted of studying systems theory, quantum formalism, artificial life and computer concepts, with Newtonian mechanics in the background. The transition to Kantian ideas and the philosophy of history is a subsequent stage.

Modern science is an attempt to derive the unity of nature in the context of fundamental laws, working upward in a kind of ‘bootstrap’ that is itself reminiscent of the evolution ary. This attitude is as essential as it is misleading. Bootstrap is an historical ‘subhistory’ interacting with general history. We are left with a haunting question. Does physics really apply to reality, to human reality? Reductionism is an essential part of our own argument. And yet we are left to wonder. Look at the desert of theory left behind by the whole initiative of science in the cultural realm.

From Newton to Quantum Mechanics, theoretical bootstrap proceeds on the majestic subtleties of the differential equation, and then, at the threshold of life, squawks like a radio moving between stations. Are we really sure reductionism can do evolution? In general, the means of explanation is both evolving inside a larger system and being used to explain that system. Should culture adapt to each paradigm change or wait until the end times of theory to draw its conclusions? One trap is that a teleological system might evolve anti-teleological sciences teleologically and then find the result wrongly applied to the whole. The deficit between the latest upgrade to the definition of reductionism, and out of date explanations, is already a force to be reckoned with in the consideration of any kind of theory at all. Social science is out of sync with the evolution of physics, and ended up negating the surer insights of our transitional figures, and their careful groundwork for the human sciences, to coexist with the natural sciences.

It is important to remember the history of this reductionism in physics, where, for example, the phenomena of electro-magnetism were ‘reduced’ only after they were first discovered as independent empirical realities. Therefore, our first search is in the field of phenomena. Further, each ‘small’ step sees a tailor-made addition of mathematical methods, with an exotic change of character in the fundamentals as the mathematics of Quantum Mechanics is discovered, at a deeper level of ‘reduction’, voiding the previous set. The issue of reduction is then quite unclear, and does not preempt the nature of phenomena very ‘distant’ from these sources. Finally, one should wonder if the new world of mathematical logic discovered by Kurt Gödel, with its issues of consistency and incompleteness do not impinge directly on the issues of evolution as it ‘stretches’ to encompass the vast domain of separate things. We can detect the failure of bootstrap in the sudden decompression as substandard mathematical foundations in population genetics (despite the great interest in this subject). The plug-in ‘force’ argument is absent, and ad hoc substitution of randomness is all we see. Sight unseen we suspect the failure to observe deep time is misleading theory.

Although the attitude of modern ‘bootstrap reductionism’ in the best sense of seeking the unity of nature on the bedrock of physical laws should be our starting point, or at least a reference point, in practice, issues of evolution are doomed to be empirical mapmaking before they can aspire to being theoretical derivations of first principles. It is often assumed that the application of the causal determinism implied by the use of differential equation in such fields as population genetics or the macro-economic model are ‘scientific’ whilst all other approaches are subjective. The truth is probably very far, if not the reverse, from this. In a nutshell, we will discover that science can as yet claim no generally viable theory of evolution. The confusion over history and the descent of man is but one gray area where the assumptions of reductionism produce pseudo-evolutionary theory.

It is the distinction of facts and values that returns to haunt all theories of evolution , as does the so-called ‘naturalistic fallacy’, whereby the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ are to endure mutual quarantine. The charge of metaphysics is laid against the claims of all violators of these protocols. But then no theory is possible, for the elimination of values may fail to account for the phenomena observed, here the association of religious evolution and periodicity, and the parallel exploration of a spectrum of values.

We can be finished quickly with our business of describing the eonic effect without rendering a final answer to the apparent contradiction of fact s and values, just as we can attend a concert without knowing how the values of music emerge from the facts of violins, tubas, and the administered tempo of parallel productions. But we will abide here with the rule that we will renounce theory for the purely descriptive before we renounce this distinction, and give no license to an evolutionary theory as science that can’t account for the ‘songs in a songbird’. And not the least reason is that we see this antinomy frozen in history, as ‘valuation’ in periodic motion, an example being the ‘timed’ emergence of the great religions and the idea of freedom itself, a strong hint nature does not honor the so-called naturalistic fallacy. In fact, it is just here that the idea of freedom, along with the distinctions of consciousness, as self-consciousness, offers the bridge.

Notes: Systems, selves, self-organizations The category beyond Darwin needed has been found, self-organization. But the actual use of this category never seems to succeed. The resemblance of the eonic data, our turning points, to patterns considered in theories of self-organizing systems is too close (and yet too hopelessly fuzzy) to reject and one is drawn into an immediate inspection of their content. We cannot adapt current theories of ‘self-organization’ to the eonic effect in any rigorous fashion, and yet at the same time this category, taken if necessary as a mere metaphor, is the only one open to us. There is also a pronounced tendency to confuse or collate these theories of self-organization with the ‘self-organization’ of economic systems. That is not at all our usage. Culture does not self-organize in the fashion of economic systems.

The starting point of our enquiry is not philosophy or religious historicism but the idea of a systems model (and the unused but lurking formalism of Quantum Mechanics). Then we pull away quickly in the primordial antinomy of freedom and necessity by attempting to correlate, if not derive, formal freedom (not free will) from a ‘semi-causal system’ or ‘apparatus implying a principle of sufficient reason’. However humble this gesture of the systems modeler (it is a formal gesture since the basic elements have no numerical parameters and require judgment) it is an appropriate beginning. It is in fact similar to situations now directly addressed in computer science.

Indeed it is at the point of seeing the limits here that we can retreat and devise a new type of model, but as a form of bare periodization. It is possible, in a pinch, to produce a block diagram of a refrigerator or an automobile without understanding the foundations of mechanism. In the same way we can devise an ‘eonic model’ to see ‘how history works’ in the sense of what it does, at a high level.

Computer mice The realm of computer science shows us the most obvious example of something like our coming distinction of mixture histories, ‘system’ and ‘free action’. Thus science is already tackling this question in its hybrid systems of computer mechanics, and the code for a computer mouse is most provocative in this sense.

Something like the functionality of a computer mouse must be involved in any genuine statement of historical law in the sense that one system idles while another acts, and must match coordinates, on the computer screen, with events to receive input ‘geographically’. It is interesting that the programming tactic for a computer mouse is a ‘do…while’, or ‘wait until input’ statement that does not execute except in relation to free activity. The computer mouse is clearly evident in the macroeconomic study of the economic cycle, as data from ‘just before’ is recycled into ‘free action’ modification of a system in motion. This system of agent and machine is worthy of reflection, because it contains the seeds of a new approach to science.

There is a symbolic significance to this humble situation. Two circumstances, the physical and the human, are given at the start of a session of interaction, without the derivation of one from the other. In the same way, human psychology is an historical given. We cannot safely derive it in advance from a theory of evolution on the basis of selectionist theory. In general, we wish to derive consciousness from some prior system in a scheme of absolute reduction. But is that possible? We are better off taking two independent realities, as given, at the beginning of our discussion. In the process we look at the history of man’s attempt at self-understanding, and that includes the ‘present of theory’.

Conway’s Game of Life We will be using the term ‘discrete-continuous model’ in the text. The term is very general. But examples abound. A simple example is a computer program such as the Game of Life. A new candidate for evolutionary explanation is the genetic algorithm, and it should have been open to question whether this is a strictly reductionist approach to scientific explanation. Whatever the case, if we allow this form of explanation, then we are on our way, at least in terms of a generalized type of explanation related to the eonic effect, which we will see operates on two levels, as does a genetic algorithm. As we move to invoke the element of discontinuity, we can observe that discontinuity arises in the genetic algorithm in the clocked cycles of the program generating the computational ‘do…while’.

It would be entirely within reason to claim that a program such as Conway’s demonstrates an embryonic ‘universal history’ of the type we are going to construct. That is, it operates on two levels, visible in the ‘do…while’ and what it does ‘while…’. Therefore, as we proceed, we can defend our eonic model by reverse finger wagging. We will do nothing more drastic than what is done in the Game of Life, in principle.

Quantum Mechanics The eonic model began with many explorations of complex systems. But the formalism of quantum mechanics (and the Game of Life) is the only thing that remotely resembles the ‘two levels’ aspect of the eonic model. Quantum mechanics is interesting here, not for its free will debates, but for its contrast of the two levels involved in the basic causal wave mechanics in relation to the quite different formalism of measurement. This relationship links the level of the scientist performing such a measurement, and the system being examined. Note that the scientist’s acts are historical, and his actions the result of a decision ‘historically’ given at such and such a time. The overall contrast of levels resembles our eonic determination and free action, except that it seems the scientist seems the one being ‘measured’ by history. In any case, all we can do is notice the way the formalism of Quantum theory changes as the factor of measurement is introduced.

The Newton riddle We should note that modern science would not find Newton, strictly speaking, one of their number, given his interest in the argument by design, and his realization of the limits of his subject. As one historian of eighteenth century biology notes, the foundational Newton at the threshold of modern physics exempted the human will from the laws of momentum, and found divinity implicit as the sensorium of space as a necessary adjunct to cosmic function.[i]

And it was the philosopher Kant, among others, who moved to bring a theory of stellar evolution into this void where the argument by design was, as in the era of Darwin, still entangled in the deliberations of the new science. A similar resolution of the question of human will has never been successful. We should note at least that the real Newton is almost a foreigner in the era of successful scientific worldviews, and concerned himself with the full spectrum of questions from the theological to the occult and alchemical later discarded as irrational in the coming worldview.

The scientist Kant is forgotten, and the philosopher Kant (next to Rousseau) is little appreciated for his effort to ‘model’ the aspects of the ‘will’ that Newton found intractable. Newton at least knew his business and grasped the nature of the limits of his subject. The complexity of the Kantian response is thus seldom seen in its clear echoes of mechanical explanation in the context of the rising physics. We should note the fact that Newton is almost out of character as a founder of his own subject, while we will rapidly discover that he makes better sense as the hero of our own enquiry. Thus we may proceed, since the scientist has so little use for this inspirational figure seen as better suited to our own.

[i] Peter McLaughlin, Kant’s Critique of Teleology in Biological Explanation (Lewisten, New York: Edwin Mellen, 1990).

Chapter 2