Forum / The World As Is, the World As If

• 
  strannikov

  May 22, 03:58pm

  Ontology, aiming to tell us how our universe is assembled, is the philosophical study of existence and states of being. Across our Modern Era, philosophical reflections have been joined by scientific investigations into “the nature of reality”, more specifically the physical structure of reality from the classical celestial perspectives of cosmography and the astronomies and astrophysics of galaxies, stellar objects, and planets down to the quantum perspective of sub-atomic particles.

  Ontologists ostensibly are content to supply us with “description” rather than “prescription”. Metaphysicians, astrophysicists, and cosmographers are not concerned with explaining what the physical reality of the universe should be or ought to be. They do not seek to explain how the realities of our physical universe (of baryonic matter, that is, with its mass and energy values distinguished from those of dark matter and dark energy) should perform or ought to behave. Astronomers, astrophysicists, cosmographers, cosmologists, and physicists usually settle for the comparatively simple task of describing with reasonable accuracy baryonic mass and energy states, using the helpful notations of mathematics to map the correspondences they observe.

  Across recent centuries, though, philosophers and scientists have discovered that “mere ontology”—the provision of accurate, comprehensive accounts of “what is” and “what are”—is not nearly as simple as they might have preferred to think: ontology has become a far more elusive goal than they might have preferred to believe as recently as one or two or three centuries ago.

  While it is a commonplace today, the startling view that we on Earth reside not within the only galaxy in existence (our Milky Way) but within a universe of baryonic matter strewn plentifully with billions of galaxies is a view barely one century old: astronomers began to make the discovery only after World War I, well within the past century, which makes this astonishing astronomical discovery a decade or so younger than the advent of the career of quantum physics.

  Modern explorations of being thus have vastly enlarged the scope and scale of our ignorance about what constitutes “reality”, what forces make up “reality”, and “what reality is”. The current and tentative consensus after the past century’s efforts remains that our realm of baryonic matter makes up no more than five percent of all the mass and energy known or conjectured to exist: dark matter is thought to constitute at least twenty percent, and dark energy is thought to comprise the balance of some seventy-five percent. To this day physicists and astrophysicists, cosmographers and cosmologists, astronomers and mathematicians and philosophers remain unable to formally characterize the realms of dark matter and dark energy. Nevertheless, they continue to suspect that these two dark realms directly impinge upon and help provide structure to our realm of baryonic matter, mass, and energy—no matter how negligible our own realm is in relation to those of dark matter and dark energy, no matter how vast our universe has been found to be given its age of almost fourteen billion years, no matter its scale and scope after spreading out billions of light years in every direction, in some remote places literally farther than our eyes can see and our telescopes can peer.

  Thus, while we know far more about how to characterize the universe we reside in than at any prior point in recorded history, simultaneously we know far less insofar as we remain unable to characterize the dominant realms of dark matter and dark energy (“dominant” in terms of total mass and energy). These considerations suggest that at all times—today included—our knowledge of
  “states of being” is (and has ever been) never more than provisional and tentative, especially insofar
  as we are not laboring to substantively characterize the full extent, scope, and scale of scientific and philosophical ignorance.

  Because we have developed nothing like a comprehensive “field theory of ignorance” or a robust “calculus of ignorance”, we may well be failing to account properly for those substantive aspects of the ontological realm we do acknowledge. When ontological states are ignored so casually or esteemed with such glib neglect, it is no wonder that the scope and scale of our ignorance encompasses some ninety-five percent of the mass and energy in the known universe. (This circumstance is roughly analogous to the status of the levels of ignorance among neurologists and brain physiologists concerning brain structure and function and of the level of ignorance among philosophers and neuroscientists to account satisfactorily for consciousness itself.)

  One assessment of ontology that may be relevant in these circumstances can be put this way: within the institutional domains of many of our sciences, a number of practitioners remain possessed of outmoded notions derived from late nineteenth century positivism and early twentieth century scientism—dogmatic beliefs amounting to “science fideism” that persist along with reductive materialist notions that quantum physics alone has long since undermined or displaced. Far worse and more troubling is the trumpeting of “science cheerleaders” prominent in public discourse—science popularizers and science journalists (quite often possessing no elaborate science training or philosophical education) who aggrandize “scientific epistemic imperialism” for their own ideological or commercial purposes.

  We could be or become ontologically sober enough to admit that some of our scientists and science journalists are afflicted (some to their ideological cores) with the petty political elements of science reputation, science celebration, science celebrity, and science funding (all of which I group elsewhere under the satiric rubric “Holy Science”). Such scientists and science popularizers animated by outmoded materialist beliefs (some few of whom continue to contribute to public science discourse) amply demonstrate that they are “merely human”—that they are not equipped with more sophisticated or better-informed epistemic prowess but that they defend their respective turfs with stubborn disregard for what their own sciences or those that they advertise have begun to reveal about the ontological status of the universe they are (or claim to be) investigating.

  Even in the heyday of philosophic and scientific materialism in the second half of the nineteenth century, even with the advent of scientific and epistemic positivism by the end of the nineteenth century, even with the dawn of dogmatic and fideistic scientism in the opening decades of the twentieth century, it was never the case that physics alone was capable of stating precisely what the ontological status of human beings was or is. Materialism was not dealing with humans’ psychic and spiritual interior realities—it was dismissing such interiorities as of no enduring consequence or concern, treating them instead as topics that had been displaced by the advent of the modern sciences of biology, chemistry, and physiology. These crude materialist assessments were being made and advertised popularly at the very time that these sciences and their practitioners were beginning to exhibit their brands of dogmatism and fideism.

  To the extent that science fideists were ready, willing, and able to discount traditional doctrines of religious faith and belief, the intellectual hypocrisy of that period is galling. By no means are we in our twenty-first century obliged by scientific discoveries made across the past century to opt hastily or uncritically for “quantum mysticism”—yet we are obliged by evidence derived from quantum physics to concede that crude materialism is not credible in our twenty-first century. The crude materialism of the nineteenth century no longer possesses compelling explanatory power. Any enduring unwillingness to recognize that there is plenty of room in the known universe for psychic and spiritual realities to find modes within which to operate is a sign of obtuse and profound intellectual dishonesty and hypocrisy on the parts of scientists continuing to enjoy the reputation of having “the best-informed and most realistic epistemic perspective” that their sciences permit.

  Ontological realism demands that psychic and spiritual realities be recognized on their own terms and that they thus be recognized formally to enjoy distinct ontological status and significance.

  Just as it might be perverse that we have not yet articulated “a field theory of ignorance” or a comprehensive “calculus of ignorance” to help us measure the ontological status of our beleaguered epistemic states, it might also be deemed distinctly odd that we remain unable to read accounts of “the mathematics of intellectual humility”, “the quantum physics of cognitive humility”, or even “the ontology of epistemic humility”. To begin latterly to develop any such sciences or philosophies, such an ontology would entail and require a profound and profoundly deep and deeply personal professional commitment to extreme intellectual humility, a humility of such character that appears as largely absent from science training and science practice as from philosophical training and philosophical practice, to say nothing of how scientists and philosophers continue to routinely allow their institutions and domains to be represented and perceived in typical glowing terms.

  Were mighty efforts to attain such thoroughgoing intellectual humility to attain sufficient standing, the prospect for developing “an ontology of axiology” (of values, even “an ontological ethics”)—values and meanings derived from the actual ontic status of feeble creatures alone on one single planet among a universe teeming with undoubted trillions of planets (uninhabited or not)— that begins to address the totality of the human condition and the fullness of human psychic and spiritual experience might be able to emerge. Such welcome approaches would begin to recognize the strict limits we all face in attempting to characterize this vast universe and all the forces and powers operating within it.

  The late modern displacement of myths and “religious beliefs” by proto-scientific and scientific accounts and philosophical treatment merits comprehensive revisitation and reassessment, not to explain myth and religions ineffectually by relying solely upon terms of science and the sciences of cognition, epistemology, and consciousness but to recognize that we human beings are, within our own experiences, creatures of only proto-intelligent cognitive and epistemic capacity who have barely begun to explore a vast and vastly unknown universe.

  -END-

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