Bridging Domains of Science
I find it interesting to consider what knowing meant to people in really ancient, pre-civilization times. Did primitive humans think about morality the same way that we do? Did they have a concept of ownership? Did stealing mean anything to them? What about medicine or math?
I find it interesting partially for the historical significance and partially because I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to for something to be true. At the end of the day, I think all we have are ways of thinking that relate to our experience in one way or another. And I've always had a sneaking suspicion, as someone trained a computer science, that even logic itself wasn't always understood by people in ancient, pre-civilized times.
If that's true it would mean that logic itself was something that came about as the result of a discovery. That would mean that perhaps there are still fundamentally new ways of thinking about the world around us that could give us categorically more power in understanding things.
I think this is undeniably true. If you think about the best and most fundamental classes of ideas that help us understand the world around us today you can see they are innately limited. For instance, most modern science is based in some form of reductionism. You pick things apart, find a principal which determines how the thing works and put it back together to predict how it will behave. Basically all of our science is based in that idea.
But a simple casual observation shows that that idea is limited if the goal is a complete understanding of the world around us. If that idea weren't limited, we wouldn't need different domains of science. There wouldn't be a distinction between physics and biology or chemistry and psychology. There would just be one domain we call science that tells us everything. But that's not the case. And it's not the case because it seems that in terms of understanding the world around us it simply isn't possible to pick it all apart and then build it back up together in a single model to understand it.
And even on top of that, there are lots of other distinctions that the modern method of reductionism has to contend with. People seem to be perfectly capable of simultaneously holding contradicting ideas in their minds at a single point in time. True or not those ideas shape behavior. And the behaviors of people change the world around us. You can't build a coherent picture of the world and ignore these qualities of humanity.
So still there even greater intellectual challenges facing a complete understanding of the world that don't align purely with the reductionist tendencies of modern science.
Anyhow, this blog is really just me describing one avenue that I suspect to be promising in making new ground in developing some of those ways of understanding the world that aren't purely based in the form of reductionism that dominates the scientific thinking of our era. Or at the very least to propose what could be a way of augmenting our current understanding of reductionism to create a powerfully new way of thinking about the world that allows us to understand it.
It it seems to me that one way that modern reductionism could be augmented to have a more powerful means of representing the world is through finding ways of formally mapping the connections between domains of science.
My observation is based in the fact that because reductionism is limited, and because to understand the world around us it is necessary to define different domains of science, we can't necessarily say that many fragmented models of the world will ever be sufficient in truly understanding it on their own. While it seems we can't have a single master model of the world it is perhaps still possible to understand more completely the dynamics of the world by finding the ways that the different classes of models (in this case, I mean domains of science like biology and chemistry) interrelate. And having some formal distinction for ideas which bridge the gap between theories in different domains.
I don't have a concrete example of this because this is simply an abstract idea, but a speculative example could be something like the correlation between chemistry and biology as it relates to the functioning of a cell. This is a complete abuse of biology and chemistry which is inherently necessary based on what I described above as reductionism being limited (a single person not being able to deeply understand multiple disparate domains simultaneously), but suppose that to function properly it's understood biologically that a certain component of a certain type cell needs a certain chemical to be present in the environment.
An example of an idea like this would be finding the amount of the chemical that that type of cell needs to functional properly. Neither domain completely encapsulates the idea of how much of that chemical is necessary, but nonetheless, the idea is relevant to both domains. A chemist might know that that chemical has certain properties which would affect the physical structure of the component of the cell. A biologist might know that the physical structure being in a certain state could have an influence on the functioning of the cell in a broader sense. The chemist might know how to administer a drug that could influence the amount of that chemical without causing harmful effects. The biologist might know when affecting the structure of that component of the cell is beneficial for certain diseases. The simple fact of knowing that number could be remarkably powerful in finding new treatments for certain diseases.
That is a means of interrogating the world that's not cleanly mapped to our current domains of science, but that would still be fruitful and could be very effective and developing new medicines or the new way of deriving new theories in both domains. Such ideas already exist in abundance, but aren't clearly identified as distinctive from the typical reductionist fashion of our modern science. It wouldn't seem to make sense for anyone to become an expert in these types of relations, but they could be something that is set up as a focus of different departments in universities which seek to intentionally develop set of these relationships and share them as a special category of theory.
Here's a Scientific American article describing some classes of theories in mathematics that are in some ways similar to the ideas I'm describing in this blog. These theories are a little bit different because they are different disciplines within one domain, the domain being mathematics, nonetheless, it's still an interesting hint and example of the power of finding relationships between different classes of ideas.