Adam Frank
speaker
594 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Frank’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Right, right. So the crisis of meaning is that, you know, on the one hand, science wants to tell us that we're insignificant, we're not important, we're just, you know, biological machines. And, you know, so we're basically an insignificant part of the universe. On the other hand, we also find ourselves being completely significant.
In cosmology, we have to figure out how to look from the inside at cosmology. We're always the observers. We're at the center of this collapsing wavefront of light. In quantum mechanics, it really comes in. The measurement problem just puts us front and center. Some people have spent 100 years trying to ignore the measurement part of the measurement problem.
So on the one hand, we're insignificant, and on the other hand, we're central. So which one is it, right? And so this all comes from not understanding actually the foundational role of experience, this inability. We can't do science without already being present in the world. We can't reduce what happens in science to some sort of formal.
A lot of it is about we love our formal systems, our mathematics, and we're substituting. That's one of the things that we – there's two philosophers we really like. who are heroes. One is Herschel, who is a mathematician who invented phenomenology. And the other is Whitehead, who was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century.
And Herschel came up with this idea of the surreptitious substitution. Part of the blind spot is substituting a formal system, a calculus of data for actual experience, that that's more important than And so let me just do, before I go to those three responses, let's just do the parable of temperature because I think it'll help them understand what we mean. So think about degrees Celsius, right?
We kind of have, in the modern scientific culture we live in, we think like, oh yeah, degrees Celsius, they're out there. The molecular cloud in space is 10 degrees Kelvin. The way we got there is we've forgotten how that idea is rooted in experience, right? We started off with science by, we had the subjective experience of hot and cold. I feel hot, I feel cold, you feel hot, you feel cold.
Science was this process of trying to extract from those experiences what Michelle Bitbol, a philosopher, calls the structural invariance, the things that like we could both kind of agree on.
So, you know, we figured out like, oh, we could make a gradiated little cylinder that's got mercury in it and that, you know, hot things will be higher in that, you know, on that gradiated cylinder, cold things will be lower. And we can both kind of figure out what we're going to agree on our standards for that and And then we have thermometry. Yay.
We have a way of sort of like having a structural invariant of this sort of very personal experience of hot or cold. And then from that, we can come up with thermodynamics, et cetera. And then we end up at the bottom of, you know, at the end of that with this idea of like every day I wake up and I check my phone and I'm like, oh, it's going to be, you know, 60 degrees out. Great.
And we start thinking that 60 degrees is more real than hot and cold. That thermodynamics, the whole... formal structure of thermodynamics is more real than the basic experience of hot and cold that it came from. You know, it required that bodily experience that also, not just me, you, I have to tell, you know, it's part of my communication with you. Cold today, isn't it? Right?
That from that basic irreducible experience of being in the world, you know, with everything that involves, I developed degrees Celsius. But then I forgot about it. I forgot the experience. So that's called the amnesia of experience. So that's what we mean by the, you know, how the blind spot emerges, how we end up, how science purposely pushes experience out of the way so it can make progress.
But then it forgets that experience was important. So where does this show up? Why is this, you know, what are the responses to trying to get this back in and where, where, where this crisis of meaning emerge? So scientific triumphalism is the idea that only the only thing that's true for us are scientific truths.
Unless it can be codified in a formal system and represented as data, captured in some kind of scientific causal network, it doesn't even exist. And anything else that's not part of it, part that can be formalized in that way, is an epiphenomenon. It's not real.
So, you know, scientific triumphalism is this response to the, you know, the weirdness of, you know, I could call it the mystery, the weirdness of experience by kind of just ignoring it completely. So there's no other truth, you know, art, music, you know, human spirituality, it's all actually reducible just to neural, you know, neural correlates. So that's one way that it's been dealt with.
The other way is this sort of, right, you've got on the postmodern, you know, the left, academic left, you get this thing like science is just a game. You know, it's just a game from the powerful come up with, which is also not true. Science is totally potent and requires an account for what is happening. So that's another way to push sort of science away or respond to it.
The denial, science denial that happens, that's also another way of sort of, you know, not understanding science. the balance that science is trying that we need to establish with experience.
And then there's just pseudoscience, which wants to sort of say like, Oh, you know, the new age movement or whatever, which wants to have, you know, wants to deal with experience by kind of elevating it in this weird pseudo spiritual way, or, you know, it said that doesn't have the rigor of science.
Um, so, you know, all of these ways, all of these responses, we have this difficulty about experience. We need to understand how experience fits into the web of meaning, um, and we don't really have an accurate, we don't have a good way of doing it yet.
And the point of the book was to identify very clearly how the problem manifests, what the problem is, and what its effects are in the various sciences.
Yeah, no, that was a problem. Like when you saw, so like I said, you know, my first book was about science and human spirituality. So I was trying to say that, like, you know, science is actually, if we look at what happens in human spirituality, not religion, religion is about politics, right?
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