Abstract
I want to make it clear that I have no quarrel with most scientists, but even many good scientists in general have developed some bad habits in dealing with time during the last century.
This paper has benefitted from the criticism of a number of people, and in no way does my acknowledgement of their help imply their agreement with what I assert here. Joungbin Lim of Troy University, Jim Shelton of the University of Central Arkansas, John Bickel of Mississippi State University, and my friend and regular collaborator Gary L. Herstein all criticized an early version of the paper. I have also benefitted from the comments of the members of the Philosophy and Biology Departments of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, and must thank Greg Jesson and Laura Mueller for arranging the opportunity to pass these ideas through their pleasant gauntlet. A version of the paper was criticized in its late stages by Bogdan Ogrodnik and Łukasz Lamża, to the great benefit and improvement of the result.
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Notes
- 1.
Greene, Debating Darwin, p. 154. The Mayr quote is from p. 86 of Toward a New Philosophy of Biology.
- 2.
The metaphor of “progress” is the one that receives the most attention in the debate between Greene and Mayr. See Debating Darwin, chs. 2 and 8–11.
- 3.
Green, Debating Darwin, pp. 162–163.
- 4.
I will not here go into a critique of the received approaches to formal models of time, but I will say that the classic book by Michael Friedman captures well the habits of inquiry of these “normal scientists” and well summarizes the formal models of time favored by contemporary physics, as well as their development after Einstein. These have not changed in any significant way since the book appeared, but the whole paradigm of inquiry is currently under serious attack and is, in my view, collapsing under the weight of incoherencies that it always had. See Michael Friedman, Foundations of Space-Time Theories: Relativistic Physics and the Philosophy of Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983). See esp. pp. 309–320 for a summary of the simultaneity problem raised by Minkowski space and its relation to the conventionality thesis of Reichenbach. I believe this part of the received formalizations is effectively destroyed by the recent book by Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). One aspect Canales documents thoroughly was the conscious effort on the part of Einstein and Minkowski to suppress questions they could not answer, a practice carried forward by Hans Reichenbach to philosophy in the USA when he immigrated. It is his theories, and the formal models they embrace, that Friedman concentrates on in his book. But Friedman recognizes the limitations and describes them well. In addition, see Friedman pp. 317–320 for the real gremlin in the space-time model of general relativity. Friedman says:
The central problem for both Reichenbach and [Adolf] Grünbaum [who have defended Einstein’s approach by appealing to conventionalism as the way to understand measurement], then, is that the standard simultaneity relation is much more intimately connected with the rest of the geometrical structure of Minkowski space-time than they have realized. In particular, they have not seen that the standard simultaneity relation is an integral part of the conformal structure of Minkowski space-time. (p. 320)
Friedman is too kind here. I think these philosophers knew very well that the measurement problem of cosmology went right to the heart of the assumptions of general relativity and its spatialization of time. They simply buried this problem in modeling it. People were impressed with the math and were willing to say “close enough,” completely ignoring the fundamental assumptions. Canales shows this in historical detail in her book, and Gary L. Herstein shows the structural and philosophical problems with the standard model of space-time cosmology in his book Whitehead and the Measurement Problem of Cosmology (Frankfort am Mein: Ontos Verlag, 2006). Unfortunately, the otherwise impressive looking work of Reichenbach, and Einstein’s other minions, bequeathed to the world of physics and scientific journalism, and eventually to the life sciences through former physicists such as Francis Crick, habits of modeling and of thinking about models that have been nothing short of disastrous for honest inquiry. The disciplines dependent upon a deep understanding of time have been in the grips of an ideology about the relation of time to space for almost a century.
- 5.
It may be that my sketch here will have significant overlap with the current project of John Dupré at the University of Exeter. From the description available of his current grant, it would appear that his concerns and sources are quite similar to mine as regards the constructive parts of this paper. See his description here: https://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/sociology/research/projects/details/index.php?id=236, accessed April 26, 2016. Thanks to Gary Herstein for directing my attention to this work.
- 6.
One could spend a good deal of time arguing whether human experience is or is not relevant to a scientific conception of time. The claim is a red herring. There is no scientific conception of time that is not dependent upon a group of philosophical ideas and assumptions, and these are, manifestly, thoroughly human. The human experience of time is not all there is to time, surely, but what we experience as temporal change cannot be wisely or even reasonably excluded from the consideration of scientific time. See, for example, Charles M. Sherover, in his headers and footers to The Human Experience of Time (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999).
- 7.
A scholarly problem in combining Whitehead’s and Bergson’s ideas is addressed in my article “Influence as Confluence: Bergson and Whitehead,” Process Studies, in the special focus section on “Bergson and Whitehead,” 28:3–4 (Fall/Winter 1999), 267; 301–338; 339–345.
- 8.
Kant’s distinction between determinate and reflective judgment, in judgment’s logical function, is just one example of the different structures, but at the very least, in some cases, thinking begins in the particular and searches for generals and universals that will fit the experience. In other cases, we begin with generals or universals and seek particulars that are subsumed under these concepts. The structures are quite different. See Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), First Introduction.
- 9.
See Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected ed. by D. Sherburne and D.R. Griffin (New York: Free Press, 1978), pp. 83–129, 168–183, 208–217. The presentational space we create from the causally efficacious transition underway, the “flux,” is a symbol of that flux. It is analogous to the flux, but is more stable, obviously, and captures enough of the flux to be useful, at the price of error. But its creation is “creativity” par excellence. Following Whitehead, Susanne Langer says:
There is a profound difference between using symbols and merely using signs. The use of signs is the first manifestation of mind. It arises early in biological history as the famous “conditioned reflex,” by which a concomitant of a stimulus takes over the stimulus function. The concomitant becomes sign of the condition to which the reaction is really appropriate. This is the real beginning of mentality, for here is the birthplace of error, and therewith, of truth. If truth and error are to be attributed only to belief, then we must recognize in the earliest misuse of signs, in the inappropriate conditioned reflex, not error, but some prototype of error. We might call it a mistake. Every piano player, every typist knows that the hand can make mistakes where consciousness entertains no error…. The use of signs is certainly a mental function.
Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957 [1942]), p. 29. (Langer dedicated this book to Whitehead.) Langer’s ideas come close to a highly empirical morphological theory. Although I will not be able to discuss it here, it is worth noting that botanists, as distinct from zoologists, have long discussed and often favored morphological ideas that follow a different historical course, from Goethe through Schleiden and into the present; see the work of, for example, the Polish dendrologist Paweł Kojs (a list of papers is here: https://scholar.google.pl/citations?user=eAU98osAAAAJ&hl=pl).
These are, in my view, non-Darwinian evolutionary ideas, and the public and even the scientific community has been so focused.
- 10.
I go into some detail about how our bodied deal with the flux in “In Vino Veritas,” in Southwest Philosophy Review, 30:1 (January 2014), 39–66; and “Image and Act: Bergson’s Ontology and Aesthetics,” in Sztuka i Filozofia/Art and Philosophy, 45 (2014), 64–81.
- 11.
See Bergson, Creative Evolution, auth. Trans. Arthur Mitchell (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983 [1911]), Part IV.
- 12.
The best formal description I know of regarding this is Feynman, et al., 1965, summarized by the physicist Bogdan Ogrodnik in this way:
In classical mechanics, a particle moves along the trajectory on which a variation of action reaches the minimum. The particle does not ‘see’ or ‘feel’ the neighbouring, possible trajectories but at once ‘chooses’ the optimum. The situation is completely different from a quantum point of view. Is it true—asks Feynman—that a particle does not simply follow the right path but it ‘looks around’ to ‘see’ other possible trajectories? And if it finds such obstacles which unable it ‘to look’, does this result in diffraction? The true miracle is that it is exactly as has been described. It may be seen, however, that the principle of least action has not as yet been formulated completely, for this is not the way that a particle chooses the path of least action. Rather it ‘feels’ all the nearby paths and chooses the one the action is the least. The right path is the one for which there are plenty of neighbouring paths with the same phase.
See Ogrodnik, “The Metaphysical Dimension of Optimizing Principles,” in Concrescence: Australasian Journal of Process Thought, 5 (2004), p. 3. He is summarizing Richard Feynman and A.R. Hibbs, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965).
- 13.
Ogrodnik, “The Metaphysical Dimension of Optimizing Principles,” p. 3.
- 14.
Other examples of such process-friendly theorizing that would work for a truly general theory of evolution include Łukasz Lamża, “Six Phases of Cosmic Chemistry,” in Hyle: The International Journal for the Philosophy of Chemistry (2014), http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/11272/1/Lamza_Six_Phases_of_Cosmic_Evolution_DRAFT.pdf, accessed June 9, 2016.
- 15.
The “use” criterion is Bergson’s favorite landing zone for his flights into intuitive temporal experience. To my mind, he relies on it a bit too heavily. Langer notices, for example, that symbol formation seems to await useless experience. See Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 116–117.
- 16.
Whitehead says:
If we go below the quanta of time which are the successive vibratory periods of the primate, we find a succession of vibratory electromagnetic fields, each stationary in the space-time of its own duration. Each of these fields exhibits a single complete period of the electromagnetic vibration which constitutes the primate. This vibration is not to be thought of as becoming of reality; it is what the primate is in one of the discontinuous realisations. Also the successive durations in which the primate is realised are contiguous; it follows that the life history of the primate can be exhibited as being the continuous development of occurrences in electromagnetic field.
See Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), pp. 137–138. Here we bring together, of course, what I am calling the space of life and that of mentality as primarily electromagnetic overlapping of temporal modalities. It is true that the electric and magnetic character can be divided and there is displacement, so there is no reason to assert an ultimate simplicity in this mode of the flux, only that the overlap is productive of spaces that include the space of life. See Ogrodnik, “Towards a Metaphysics of Light: Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Vibrations”.
- 17.
For more on the relation between such tools as language and concepts and ordinary physical tools, see Larry Hickman, Philosophical Tools for Technological Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001).
- 18.
In response to Stuart Hameroff’s announcement that LIGO had measured the gravitational waves, I wrote the following to him, and to the full list of academic discussants on the public discussion of science among intellectuals on the list called Sadhu Sanga:
“With due respect –and I really mean respect, not merely “due” but in all sincerity: They [LIGO] are attempting to re-discover or re-insert genuine time (eliminated by the theory of GR) as wave forms of variable space (also static). They have not even begun to accomplish the task of temporalizing the standard model of gravitational cosmology. These “measurements” (and they are barely that at all, they admit) are not temporal transformations, they are whatever of a transformation remaining that can be conformed to wave-shapes. This is geometry first, algebra subordinated, just like all of GR. The LIGO people, in interpreting their measurements, fail to consider that (1) there is more to time than the spaces it creates; and (2) all spaces are created by variable time-spans overlapping and inter-nested. They are only looking for the tiny, tiny aspect of time they can conform to the static 4D model. They are not interested in time. This isn’t a “direct detection” of anything, nor does it confirm GR (any more than it confirms any other model of gravitational cosmology that allows the spatialization of gravitational transformations as wave-forms).”
“Even if the LIGO experiments showed what they claim, there would still be massive, massive problems with General Relativity. There is a fundamental problem with the form of the argument itself. Showing x exists in accordance with Theory T's prediction does not imply the truth of Theory T. It shows that T is not eliminated, and it also shows that and any other Theory T1, T2, T3, etc., that predicts x exists is also not eliminated. Further, even if a gravitational wave “exists,” we do not learn from that fact its full character, implications, effects, or causes. AND, the claims being made completely ignore the measurement problem of cosmology, and the problem of the cosmological constant, and the reconciliation of GR with quantum phenomena. These are not even addressed by this line of experimentation, among other things. They simply ignore the problems and make self-referential, model-centric claims in circles.”
There was some outcry among the scientists at what I said, but nothing that was argued publicly subsequent to my statement by a number of prominent physicists and philosophers gives me any cause to think this statement needs revision. A number of scientists agreed with what I said, in part or whole, including Deepak Chopra of UC San Diego and Stanley Klein of UC Berkeley. The fact is that when we allow the theoretical model to dictate the terms and evaluations of the experiment, we are no longer doing reliable science. We can neither confirm the model itself nor discover its flaws. It is close to what Greene said in the passage I extracted early in this essay. The formal models developed by Mayr and Crick and others for testing selection are not exactly “natural” or “science.” The selection they measure, if it occurs (and it does), is “natural” by courtesy of analogy, tenuous analogy, between any fully formalized model and natural processes.
- 19.
I cannot help recommending here Voltairine de Cleyre’s moving description of the dead morning glory vine that she saw bloom, and her poetic but not altogether unscientific understanding of how such things happen, how they are possible. See “The Dominant Idea” (1910), http://www.voltairine.org/dominantidea.php, paragraphs 2–4 (accessed May 18, 2016).
- 20.
See Megan Mustain, Overcoming Cynicism: William James and the Metaphysics of Engagement (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 62; and see Francis Crick, Of Molecules and Men (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2004), 98; cited in Mustain, Overcoming Cynicism, 63.
- 21.
See Robert G.B. Reid, Evolutionary Theory: The Unfinished Synthesis (New York: Springer, 1985); and Biological Emergences: Evolution by Natural Experiment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). I also recommend as a summary of such literature Pete A.Y. Gunter’s article, “Darwinism: Six Scientific Alternatives,” Pluralist, 1:1 (Spring 2006), 13–30. Gunter discusses quantum evolution, thermodynamic evolution, non-linear evolution, neo-Lamarckian theories, the revival of the Baldwinian thesis, and the genome capture hypothesis.
- 22.
Highly informative in this regard are the debates of John C. Greene with Mayr and Theodozius Dobzhansky. See Debating Darwin: Adventures of a Scholar (Claremont, CA: Regina Books, 1999). This is Greene’s memoire, dedicated to Ernst Mayr, “in friendship,” but Mayr did Greene a bad turn in the late 1980s. After they had been debating genially for more than two decades (and their correspondence bears this out), Mayr published an attack on Greene called “The Death of Darwin?” which stimulated a good bit of acrimony. In that essay, Mayr was not wholly up front about the debate as it had existed in both private and public for that extended number of years, and he labeled Greene with views he knew to be half truths. Greene’s reputation was damaged and he was obliged (with permission) to publish their correspondence in full, to defend himself, in a major journal. But then Mayr placed his attack essay, unchanged, in his widely studied collection Toward a New Philosophy of Biology. Rather than becoming petulant, Greene worked through the problems with Mayr. Still, in his memoire, Greene gently sets the record straight.
- 23.
See Auxier and Herstein, The Quantum of Explanation: Whitehead’s Radical Empiricism (London and New York: Routledge, forthcoming), esp. chs. 7–9.
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Auxier, R.E. (2017). Evolutionary Time and the Creation of the Space of Life. In: Wuppuluri, S., Ghirardi, G. (eds) Space, Time and the Limits of Human Understanding. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44418-5_31
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