Travels (58 page)

But have you ever seen the workbench in his garage at home? What a mess! Tools scattered all around. His wife is always after him to clean it up. And what about the trunk of his car? All kinds of junk in there that he never bothers to clean out.

George is usually neat and orderly
.

But by now you can see where this modification is eventually going to end up—in another essay.

So let’s make a different statement, one that is both concise and complete.

George has gray hair
.

That does it, you think. He has gray hair and there’s no question about it.

Of course, not all of his hair is gray. Most of it is, though, especially around the temples and the back of the neck. So there’s some simplification here, but it’s not objectionable.

Then, too, even if George has gray hair now, he didn’t a few years ago. And at some time in the future, he will no longer have gray hair, he will have white hair. So this is only a correct description of George’s hair right now, at this moment in time. It isn’t a description of George in some universal, invariant way.

Let’s try again.

George is six feet tall
.

Again, true, within the limits of measurement. He’s probably not exactly six feet. He’s probably somewhere between five eleven and six one. And of course he wasn’t always six feet. At an earlier time he was much shorter. So this statement is only approximate, too.

George is a man
.

Well, yes. But “man” is rather unspecific; it’s really a culturally determined word, when you get right down to it. At birth he was not considered a man. You have to attain a certain age and position in society to be considered a man.

George is a male
.

Now, that’s unarguable. George is, and always was, a male. There’s no way to dispute that. It is a true statement about George, both now and in the past. It is an eternal verity. It is an accurate description of the reality of George.

Of course, by “male” we mean that he has an X and a Y chromosome. But we don’t know that for sure, do we? George might have an extra chromosome. He might only be
apparently
male.…

And so on.

There are two points about this exercise in making statements about George. The first is that every single statement we make about George can be contradicted. Why is that?

It’s because our statements about George are only approximations, simplifications. The real person we call George is always more complicated than any statement we have made about him. Thus we can always refer to that real person and find in him a contradiction to what we have said.

The second point is that the statements about George that are most
securely held are also the least interesting. We can’t say anything comprehensive about his moods or his neatness or his complex behavior. We are on much safer ground describing the simplest aspects of his physical appearance: hair color, height, sex, and so on. There—with some qualifications of measurement error and changes over time—we can be sure of what we are saying.

But only a tailor would take pride in this fact. And, indeed, a tailor might. After making many fittings for George, and adjusting the patterns at each fitting, the tailor might eventually be able to cut a suit of clothes for George entirely in his absence, and when George came in for a final fitting the finished clothes would fit him perfectly!

This is a triumph of the art of measurement, but the clothes that fit so wonderfully are draped over a creature whom the tailor may not know at all. Nor is the tailor interested. He couldn’t care less about other aspects of George. It’s not his job.

On the other hand, what interests
us
most about George is not his measurements. We are most interested in precisely those other aspects, which the tailor, by definition, doesn’t care about. We find it far more difficult to define those other aspects of George than the tailor does to define George’s measurements.

The tailor can do his job of description perfectly. We, on the other hand, can’t really describe George at all.

Now, since the tailor is so good—so clearly successful—at what he does, we might be tempted to ask the tailor, “Who is George?”

The tailor will answer, “George is a forty-four long.”

And if we protest that this answer isn’t really satisfactory, the tailor will reply with assurance that he is unquestionably right about George, because he can cut a whole suit of clothes that will fit George perfectly the moment he walks in the door.

This, in essence, is the problem with the scientific view of reality. Science is a kind of glorified tailoring enterprise, a method for taking measurements that describe something—reality—that may not be understood at all.

Science is very good as far as it goes. It has certainly produced powerful benefits. It would be crazy to abandon science, or to deny its validity.

But it would be equally crazy to think that reality is a forty-four long. Yet it seems as if that is what Western society has done. For hundreds of years, science has been so successful that the tailor has taken over our society. His knowledge seems so much more precise and powerful than
the knowledge offered by other disciplines, such as history or psychology or art.

But in the end one can be left with a nagging sense of emptiness about the creations of science. One may even suspect that there is more to reality than measurements will ever reveal.

Let’s return to the earlier problem: describing a person named George. When we looked at anything except his physical measurements, we found that it was extremely difficult to make any statement about George that could not be immediately contradicted by other statements, equally true.

Now, we might struggle with this problem for a while longer, and keep searching for incontrovertible statements about George. But eventually, after repeated failures, we may begin to suspect that there is no way we can succeed at this undertaking. The reality of George keeps slipping away from us. Whatever we say is wrong.

At that point someone who says, “Existence is beyond the power of words to define,” may not sound so esoteric. This seems to be exact

y what we have discovered on our own. However, this statement was made by Lao-tzu, a Chinese mystic, twenty-five centuries ago. Lao-tzu was adamant on this point, repeating it again and again: “Existence is infinite, not to be defined.”

But if that is the case—if reality will always elude our definitions, just as George does—what can we do?

Lao-tzu argues that it is necessary to turn inward, toward an inner sense of reality, instead of looking outward. This would appear to be a criticism of academic undertakings, and indeed he is elsewhere explicit:

Lao-tzu makes many similar statements, which seem to be opposed to scholarly learning, even to knowledge. Why does he think this way?

He is really saying, Don’t make distinctions, because every distinction simultaneously defines its opposite, and in many cases the interplay of opposites is indivisible, just as varying tones make up music. He says, If you approach the world through distinctions, you can never untangle your perceptions.

The attitude of Lao-tzu represents one way to deal with the fact that whatever we say about reality is inevitably wrong or incomplete. Lao-tzu says you must “accept life whole, as it is, without needing … to understand.”

This attitude is in a sense antirational, and certainly anti-intellectual. But it is another perspective, clear and consistent. Although it may not be to everyone’s taste, we are obliged to acknowledge that it is a genuine solution to a genuine problem.

* * *

In his day Jacob Bronowski was at some pains to address a predominantly humanistic audience, persuading them to pay attention to science by drawing connections between humanistic pursuits and scientific pursuits. Thirty years later the balance has shifted to the other side. Now it seems to me it is the scientists who need to be reminded of the similarities between their activities and those of other men, and in particular to be reminded that the rational, scientific, reductionist method is not the only route to useful truth.

I find this the most striking prejudice among the scientists I know. My friend Marvin Minsky, in a recent book, writes about mystical states in a highly critical way. He finds these states “sinister” and speaks of the “victims of these incidents.” His view is expressed thus: “One can acquire certainty only by amputating inquiry.… To offer hospitality to paradox is like leaning toward a precipice. You can find out what it is like by falling in, but you may not be able to fall out again. Once contradiction finds a home, few minds can spurn the sense-destroying force of slogans such as ‘all is one.’ ”
²²

Even more bluntly, Stephen Hawking says that mysticism “is a cop-out. If you find theoretical physics and mathematics too hard, you turn to mysticism.”
²³

Such statements, broadly speaking, agree with Asimov’s comment that intuition is for those who have “lost their nerve.” Hawking takes the idea further, implying that mysticism is a procedure for those who aren’t bright enough to do physics.

I disagree with this attitude. Perhaps the easiest way to state my objection is to say that I do not find the content of physics sufficient to explain the behavior of physicists’ themselves.

Where does the physicists’ belief in consistency, in unification, come from? This belief is so strong that men and women devote their lives to proving its existence. Yet it is nothing visible in the world. What we see before us is a world of apparently disunified objects and events. The underlying unity is something we seek and find. Granted that the scientific perception of unity is not the same as the mystic’s perception of unity, there is still a question: what provokes a scientist to look for unity at all? Is it just a matter of tidying up the mathematics? Does any thoughtful scientist seriously believe that purely formalistic concerns are sufficient to make him work long hours, year after year? Is science such a totally self-referential system that making inner connections between theories is the only driving force?

I think not. I suspect that scientists are driven by the sense that the world out there—reality—contains a hidden order, and the scientist is
trying to elucidate the hidden order in reality. And that
impulse
is what the scientist shares with the mystic. The impulse to get to the bottom of things. To know how the world really works. To know the nature of reality.

A Nobel Prize-winning physicist wrote:

Some of you may recognize the writer as Richard Feynman, a distinguished member of the Cal Tech faculty. I cite the passage because it appears, in broad strokes, to express exactly the kind of unified insight that other scientists denigrate. And also because, from this most confident and unpedantic of authors, the statement is heavily qualified: Feynman says his feeling is “
analogous
to the feeling one has in religion.” It’s an appreciation only of the
mathematical beauty
of nature. And the awe is expressly
scientific awe
, as if scientific awe were somehow different from regular awe.

This strikes me as an oddly cautious expression of what is, I suspect, a nearly universal human emotion.

And while we are talking about Feynman’s artistic career, it’s worth mentioning one of the discoveries he later made. Sometime after he began drawing, he visited the Sistine Chapel. He had left behind his guidebook, so he just went around looking at the paintings. He found some of the paintings to be very good, and others to be, in his word, “junk.” Back in his hotel room, he found that his judgment of the paintings agreed with the guidebook.