2025-07-27

Science and ascetic ideal

Physicists have a universal approach to understand things: to break them down into the chain of physical events. Along the way, any seemingly miraculous phenomenon is unmasked and trivialized. Yet, this approach stumbles when we look into human beings. How a physicist addresses the mind, the human experience? A physicalist has two ways. The easiest way is to deny. There is no consciousness. Consciousness is a made up thing as ghosts and such. It’s imaginary or illusory. This argument crumbles under one question: who’s having the illusion? Illusion is mental. It is felt. Yet, however you bend the atoms unto themselves, they do not compound a mental experience. Another way is to substitute. Be it a touch or the light reaching our eyes, we trace the chain of causes. Nerves lead us to the brain. What happens in the brain must be the experience. Because there’s no way further. But how can it be? Experience is something immediate. It can’t be something that we arrive at through a long story about nerves, impulses, and neurons. This story relates to experience, but it doesn’t embody it.

I think many scientists inadvertently create an ascetic ideal. That is what we put above everything else, even life: pure art, pure science, science for its own sake (in reality, for hidden selfish reason). An ideal worshiped to the extent that it matters more than corporeal experience. Why? The power of better argument. In school, at work, in a debate: we strive to arrive at better argument. Empirical science wins the argument. It is so powerful that to maintain its credibility, and the power that rests upon it, we are ready purge the self. The power of better argument is rarely wielded to persuade. Mostly, it is strive to power, towards the advantage of superior knowledge. In its peak, it leads to self-denial.

I experienced something that can be called scientific nihilism. It’s when you see all and everything as a collection of particles. To really yield to this view means to surrender everything that makes us human.

Atomism or quantum physics shouldn’t be an ontology. I think we should hold science for what it is: a story. A useful story, a convincing story. But it’s bad at returning from its odyssey into the world of causal chains back to the world of human experience. In classrooms, we tell stories of atoms, of waves, of intricate tech designs, we observe the reproductions of experiments and utter - it’s true. When skilled narrator of Iliad described in minute detail the design of warrior shields and the ships approaching Troy, listeners uttered same - it’s true.

Narrative nature of science recedes only when you actually go to the lab, do the experiment and see what you theorized really happen (within a margin of error). STEM students, our modern priests, have such an oportunity. But even in the lab, can we really escape from the narrative? We would need to write the experiment from scratch. We would need to check all presuppositions that we accept when we exercise the procedures. We would need to extract the reactants from the Earth with our own hands or at least know who does it in the distant part of the globe. These are practical problems, not gnoseological. If we imagine a man who in his work relies largely on his own creative powers and who knows all that is done by other people, science can be what it claims to be - the grasping of the world.

Science is creative destruction. It can elevate something to the status of existing in the world only to bring it down after a new experimental breakthrough. In this regard, it is opposite to myth. The myth tells profound story that sprawls via infinite side plots. Science is good at uprooting the false and finding what’s really standing. But the scope must be limited. Uprooting traditions doesn’t foster a human life.

As a kid, I was religious or rather superstitious. The abstract figure of all-embracing God filled the whole world with meaning. Until I had Physics class in school. The old world crumbled. A new meaning didn’t step in. It’s not in the world to be found. Our world is empty, or rather, full with non-places. Meaning is to be brought into the world.