The Future of Science is Art

As we continue to define our methods for this project - I found an article by Jonah Lehrer in the December 2007 Seed magazine helpful in its exploration of the limitations of reductionism. Lehrer asserts that only by heeding the wisdom of the arts can science gain new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific process...

Here are a few excerpts and some summary:

When we think about the scientific process, a specific vocabulary comes to mind: objectivity, experiments, facts. In the passive tense of the scientific paper, we imagine a perfect reflection of the real world.

But the trajectory of science has proven to be a little more complicated. The more we know about reality - about its quantum mechanics and neural origins - the more palpable its paradoxes become. As Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist and lepidopterist, once put it, "The greater one's science, the deeper the sense of mystery."

The fundamental point is that modern science has made little progress toward any unified understanding of everything. Our unknowns have not dramatically receded. In many instances, the opposite has happened, so that our most fundamental sciences are bracketed by utter mystery. It's not that we don't have all the answers. It's that we don't even know the questions.



Sometimes the whole is best understood in terms of the whole. William James, as usual, realized this first. The eight chapters that begin his epic 1890 textbook, The Principle of Psychology, describe the mind in the conventional third-person terms of the experimental psychologist. Everything changes, however, in with chapter nine. James starts this section, "The Stream of Thought," with a warning: "We now begin our study of the mind from within."

With that single sentence, as radical in sentiment as the modernist novel, James tried to shift the subject of psychology. He disavowed any scientific method that tried to dissect the mind into a set of elemental units, be it sensations or synapses. Such a reductionist view is the opposite of science, James argued, since it ignores our actual reality.



As the neuroscientist Semir Zeki notes, "Artists (painters) are in some sense neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them." Monet's haystacks appeal to us, in part, because he had a practical understanding of color perception. The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock resonate precisely because they escite some peculiar circuit of cells in the visual cortex. These painters reverse-engineered the brain, discovering the laws of seeing in order to captivate the eye.

Of course the standard response of science is that such art is too incoherent and imprecise for the scientific process. But isn't such incoherence an essential aspect of the human mind? Isn't our inner experience full of gaps and non-sequiturs and inexplicable feelings? In this sense, the messiness of the novel and the abstraction of the painting is actually a mirror. As the poetry critic Randell Jarrell put it, "It is the contradictions in works of art which make them able to represent us - as logical and methodical generalizations cannot - our world and ourselves, which are so full of contradictions."



(The power of the poet is that she) compresses meaning into meter, vague feelings are translated into visceral images. It is not coincidence that many of the greatest physicists of the 20th century - eminent figures like Einstein, Feynman and Bohr - were known for their distinctly romantic method of thinking.



No scientific model of the mind will be wholly complete unless it includes what cannot be reduced. Until science sees the brain from a more holistic perspective - and such a perspective might require the artistic imagination - our scientific theories will be detached from the way we see ourselves.