Rational Philosophy

On abstraction and the real world.

It’s been nearly 150 years since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. The NY Times reports on a new exhibition that provides insight into Darwin’s scientific life and work. We learn that Darwin, inspired by musings on the natural world around him, tested out his ideas on the plants in his garden. He cross-pollinated plants with complementary anatomical parts, for instance, and found that the hybrids were more robust than their parents.

Through his inspiration from life, experimentation with life, and abstraction from life, Darwin derived the theory of evolution, forever changing our understanding of the world we live in, and bringing scientific understanding forward in one huge leap.

My teenage daughter has the most difficulty with science and math when she’s required to apply newly learned abstract concepts to “real world” problems. I expect she’s not alone. A new study indicates that people learn abstract concepts more successfully if taught the abstract theory first rather than expecting them to learn by deduction from “real world” examples. The conclusion: “Real world” examples aren’t as effective as a thorough briefing on the equations and theories concerned.

What surprised me about this article was not the conclusion (since it seems to make common sense — Darwin spent many painstaking years deriving his theories from real world examples, and the results are only obvious because he abstracted them!) but the realization that anyone ever thought that real world examples could effectively impart complex abstract knowledge. It’s useful to tie abstract concepts back to real world examples, of course, but this step is tough and challenging because it requires the additional skills of distilling the pertinent information and understanding how to apply the appropriate theory.

Studies of language and reasoning underscore this lesson: Children who have no language for numbers can count up to three instinctively. Primates have the same skill. But with larger numbers our ability to count without language diminishes rapidly. As the article points out, language can help enormously in processing problems.

Mathematics and scientific concepts provide a rich, inclusive language that abstracts the concepts of space, time and causality: This language helps us process the abstracted workings of the real world. Without it we would be fumbling around anew with each new problem. As with anything in the real world, though, discerning and holding on to sound ideas and methods provides its own challenge. At each turn there are those who want to forge on on new paths, or turn back down old ones.

Footnote: When I wrote the back cover blurb for my book a couple of years ago I made the apparently extravagant claim that in its contribution to human understanding it was the most important book since Darwin’s The Origin of Species. This offended some people. For a while I was embarrassed to have ever claimed such a thing. But today as I read about Darwin’s methods and saw how he’d sketched out his evolutionary ideas, I felt a renewed sense of conviction that when we can understand how evolution relates to the fundamental principles of space and time we will have taken another big step forward. And I am still convinced that Life! achieves this feat.

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

The New York Times Science section today summarizes a debate that’s more than 2,000 years old: Can we say that the universe reflects fundamental laws? As its hook, the article highlights the thoughts of Dr. Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State, who brought the debate to a rolling boil recently by opining that science was, to some extent, a matter of faith.

Despite all of the hoopla and the plethora of theories on the subject, it seems to me that we can satisfy ourselves about the nature of the universe as follows:

First, we can restrict our field of inquiry to the universe that we live in. Sure, it’s interesting to postulate what other universes may exist, but let’s explain the one we live in first.

Second, we can say that the universe operates according to the principles of space and time. (This is a pragmatic statement of fact; what other principles would it operate in accordance with?)

And here’s the most important part: Since principles are concepts, and since concepts don’t exist in the concrete, but only in the abstract, the principles that govern space and time must exist outside space and time. Space and time don’t create them, but must concur with them. (This leaves open the possibility that another universe may concur with other principles.)

I believe that this adequately addresses much of the uncertainty. (Quantum mechanics is simply another principle of space and time, perfectly maleable as an abstract concept, and nothing to get hung up on.)

With these founding ideas, we can make rapid and comprehensive progress in understanding our universe and our existence. (As I explain in my book.)

And when we read stories like the one from Detroit in which a seven year old girl was shot six times as she tried to shield her mother from an attack, or those from Iraq where the dire feuds between factions and attacks by insurgents continue to cause misery and mayhem, we realize that we yet have a lot to understand and address in our own universe without needing to go looking for others.

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