Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection: The White Book of “Einstein Meets Magritte” (Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary ... Nature, Art, Human Action and Society, 1) 9789401059794, 9789401147040, 9401059799

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EINSTEIN MEETS MAGRITTE: A N INTERDISCIPLINARY REFLECTION

EINSTEIN MEETS MAGRITTE: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on Science, Nature, Art, Human Action and Society Series Editor Diederik Aerts, Center Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brüssel, Belgium

Volume 1

Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection The White Book of 'Einstein Meets Magritte' Edited by Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert and Ernest Mathijs

Volume 2

Science and Art The Red Book of 'Einstein Meets Magritte' Edited by Diederik Aerts, Ernest Mathijs and Bert Mosselmans

Volume 3

Science, Technology, and Social Change The Orange Book of 'Einstein Meets Magritte' Edited by Diederik Aerts, Serge Gutwirth, Sonja Smets and Luk Van Langenhove

Volume 4

World Views and the Problem of Synthesis The Yellow Book of 'Einstein Meets Magritte' Edited by Diederik Aerts, Hubert Van Belle and Jan Van der Veken

Volume 5

A World in Transition: Humankind and Nature The Green Book of 'Einstein Meets Magritte' Edited by Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert and Willy Weyns

Volume 6

Metadebates on Science The Blue Book of 'Einstein Meets Magritte' Edited by Gustaaf C. Cornelis, Sonja Smets, Jean Paul Van Bendegem

Volume 7

Quantum Structures and the Nature of Reality The Indigo Book of 'Einstein Meets Magritte' Edited by Diederik Aerts and Jarosfow Pykacz

Volume 8

The Evolution of Complexity The Violet Book of 'Einstein Meets Magritte' Edited by Francis Heylighen, Johan Bollen and Alexander Riegler

VOLUME 1

Einstein Meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection The White Book of "Einstein Meets Magritte" Edited by

Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert and Ernest Mathijs Center Leo Apostel, Brussels Free University, Brussels, Belgium with contributions by

John Ziman • Bas C. van Fraassen • Barbara Herrnstein Smith Robert M . Pirsig • Ilya Prigogine • Constantin Piron • Rom Harre Diederik Aerts • Francisco J. Varela • William H. Calvin Adolf Grünbaum • Zygmunt Bauman • W. Brian Arthur

VUB

mm

VRIJE UNIVERSITEIT BRÜSSEL BELGIUM

SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

Library of congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-94-010-5979-4 ISBN 978-94-011-4704-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-011-4704-0

Printed on acid-free paper Cover Image after "Le Therapeute" by Rene Magritte. Copyright C. Herscovici, SABAM - Belgium 1999.

All Rights Reserved © 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers and Vrije Universiteit Brüssel in 1999 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1999 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.

Table of contents

General Introduction Diederik Aerts

Vll

Editorial Introduction: Somewhere over the Rainbow Diederik Aerts, Jan Broekaert and Ernest Mathijs

xv

1. Einstein Meets Magritte: The Scholar, the Muse and the Barfly Diederik Aerts

1

2. Basically, It's Purely Academic John Ziman

11

3. The Manifest Image and the Scientific Image Bas C. van Fraassen

29

4. Microdynamics of Incommensurability: Philosophy of Science Meets Science Studies Barbara Herrnstein Smith

53

5. Subjects, Objects, Data and Values Robert M. Pirsig

79

6. Einstein and Magritte. A Study of Creativity Ilya Prigogine

99

7. Quanta and Relativity: Two Failed Revolutions Constantin Piron

107

8. The Redundancy of Spacetime: Relativity from Cusa to Einstein 113 Rom Harre 9. The Stuff the World Is Made of: Physics and Reality Diederik Aerts

129

10. Dasein's Brain: Phenomenology Meets Cognitive Science Francisco J. Varela

185

11. What Creativity in Science and Art Tell Us about How the Brain Must Work William H. Calvin

199

v

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

12. The Hermeneutic Versus the Scientific Conception of Psychoanalysis: An Unsuccessful Effort to Chart a Via Media for the Human Sciences Adolf Griinbaum

219

13. Immortality, Biology, Computers Zygmunt Bauman

241

14. The End of Certainty in Economics W. Brian Arthur

255

Index

267

DIEDERIK AERTS

EINSTEIN MEETS MAGRITTE

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

The series of books 'Einstein meets Magritte' presented here originates from an international interdisciplinary conference with the same title, which took place in Brussels in Spring 1995. On the eve of the third millennium, we assembled scientists and artists to reflect together on the deep nature of reality and the knowledge and skill humankind has gathered in this field. We had decided to call this meeting 'Einstein meets Magritte' because we believed that meaningful keys could be found at the place where the two meet. It is the way of the world that has made Einstein and Magritte into icons of our culture. The purpose of the conference was to reflect and debate without fear on the most profound and timeless questions. On one of those evenings, when the talks and discussions were long and exhausting and the press were doing all they could to get Albert Einstein and Rene Magritte in front of the microphones and cameras, a few of my most loyal aides and myself succeeded in getting them safely and quietly to a taxi, which then carried us off into the Brussels night. We got out at Manneken Pis, since that was on Einstein's list, and we concealed ourselves among the many tourists who were coming and going, expressing their wonder in every language under the sun at the famous little statue. And one of us was taking pictures: Einstein and Magritte leaning against the railings, with us beside them, and one more, arm in arm, and then another in case the first was no good, when suddenly I felt a heavy slap on my shoulder: "How you doing, mate?" It was Jacky and his inseparable girlfriends Nicole and Sylvie, and everyone embraced everyone else. I introduced Albert and Rene, and interest was immediately shown, and I had my heart in my mouth, because Jacky was a painter, poet and urban philosopher. We walked together through the alleys of Brussels in dismal Belgian rain, over cobblestones that glistened in the street lamps. When we had provided for the inner man with 'Rabbit in Beer' and 'Mussels with fries', and finally a 'Dame Blanche' topped with warm chocolate sauce as apotheosis, Jacky enticed us to his house in the Rue Haute where we threw ourselves into deep, soft armchairs. Albert and Rene were offered the best places and as always Jacky told the story vii

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1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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of his life and discussed his rightness, as he did repeatedly, with a confidence and suppleness that distinguished him so sharply from modern science. Albert listened enthralled and Rene was fascinated, and once more my heart was in my mouth, but Nicole winked reassuringly, and Sylvie brought us snacks on cushions of Brussels lace and sweet white wine in tall, old-fashioned crystal glasses. The topic of discussion for the evening turned out to be 'the doubts of modern science'. In science there is not a single hypothesis for which one cannot find two groups of hard-working scientists, one of which can 'prove' a hypothesis while the other can 'prove' its negation. And the more fundamental and important the question is, the more clearly the situation turns out like this. "It's crazy," maintained Jacky, "In fact science states that one doesn't know anything anymore." "That's right," said Albert, "Truth is not a simple concept, and I believe that the history of science makes it clear how often erroneous hypotheses have been believed over the centuries." "A good thing too," replied Rene, "Things can only happen as a result of the movement brought about by that constant doubt." Meanwhile Sylvie came to join us and handed round pictures of the exhibitions of Jacky's paintings and poems. Jacky suddenly got very excited, as if something had inspired him, and he leapt up and vanished into his studio. A few minutes later he returned with his palette and brush poised. Before I could stop him he had started painting violently right at the spot where Albert and Rene were sitting. A large, gossamerthin piece of Brussels lace gradually took shape and Albert and Rene vanished. Fortunately, my young assistants, Jacky's girlfriends and myself got away with just a few vicious daubs of paint in the face. The series of eight volumes introduced here are not just the results of the conference, as would be the case with a record of the proceedings. The authors were invited to write with the events at the conference in the back of their mind, so that the books would form a second phase in the process of thought set in motion at the conference. A second phase more clearly crystallised than the self-organising forum that arose during the conference, but one which focuses on the same timeless questions and problems. The whole ensemble was already streamlined at the conference into a number of main topics named after the colours of the rainbow - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet, as well as white, the synthesis of all colours. This order was maintained and led to eight separate books in the series.

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Volume 1: Einstein meets Magritte: an Interdisciplinary Reflection The White Book of Einstein meets Magritte The white book contains more fully developed versions of the contributions made by the keynote speakers at the conference. So this white book covers various scientific topics. In his article, 'Basically, it's purely academic', John Ziman asks himself what 'basic research' really is in today's world. In his contribution, 'The manifest image and the scientific image', Bas van Fraassen analyses the considerable differences between the theoretical scientific description of the world and the way it appears to us. He argues that most formulations of this problem may themselves be tendentious metaphysics, full of false contrasts, and that insistence on a radical separation between science and what we have apart from science, and on the impossibility of accommodating science without surrender, may be a way of either idolising or demonising science rather than understanding it. In the 'Microdynamics of incommensurability: philosophy of science meets science studies', Barbara Herrnstein-Smith examines the bemusing but instructive logical, rhetorical and cognitive dynamics of contemporary theoretical controversy about science. In his contribution 'Subjects, objects, data and values', Robert Pirsig proposes a radical integration of science and value that does no harm to either. It is argued that values can exist as a part of scientific data, but outside any subject or object. This argument opens a door to a 'metaphysics of value' that provides a fundamentally different but not unscientific way of understanding the world. Ilya Prigogine discusses in 'Einstein and Magritte: a study of creativity', the global transformation of a classical science which was based on certainties into a new science that takes possibilities as its basic concepts. Constantin Piron demonstrates in his contribution 'Quanta and relativity: two failed revolutions' that none of the two great revolutions in physics, quantum mechanics and relativity theory, have actually been digested by the physics community. He claims that the vast majority of physicists still cling to the idea of a non-existent void full of little particles, in the spirit of Leibniz or Descartes. Rom Harre reflects on the significance of the theory of relativity. In his article 'The redundancy of spacetime: relativity from Cusa to Einstein', he defends the hypothesis that relativity theory is best interpreted as a grammar for coordinating narratives told by different observers. In his contribution 'The stuff the world is made of: physics and reality', Diederik Aerts analyses the consequences of the recent advances in quantum mechanics, theoretically as well as experimentally, for the nature of reality. He analyses the deep conceptual paradoxes in the light of these recent data and tries to picture a coherent model of the world. In his contribution 'Da-

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sein's brain: phenomenology meets cognitive science', Francisco Varela puts forward the hypothesis that the relation between brain processes and living human experience is the really hard problem of consciousness. He argues that science needs to be complemented by a deep scientific investigation of experience itself to move this major question beyond the sterile oppositions of dualism and reductionism. In his contribution 'What creativity in art and science tell us about how the brain must work' William Calvin defends the prospects for a mental Darwinism that operates on the milliseconds to minutes time scale, forming novel ideas and sentences never previously expressed. Adolf Grunbaum in his article 'The hermeneutic versus the scientific conception of psychoanalysis: an unsuccessful effort to chart a via media for the human sciences' argues that the so called 'hermeneutic' reconstruction of psychoanalytic theory and therapy proposed by Karl Jaspers, Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas fails both as a channel and as alleged prototype for the study of human nature. In his article 'Immortality, biology and computers', Zygmunt Bauman analyses the shift that postmodern society has provoked regarding the concept of immortality. He points out that strategies of collective and individual immortality have shifted from the modern deconstruction of death to a postmodern deconstruction of immortality, and points out that the possible consequences of this process need to be taken into consideration. Brian Arthur, in his article 'The end of certainty in economics', points out that our economy is very non-classical, meaning that it is based on essentially self-referential systems of beliefs about future economic conditions. He argues that our economy is inherently complex, subjective, ever-changing, and to an unavoidable degree ill-defined. Volume 2: Science and Art The Red Book of Einstein meets M agritte And then Magritte comes in. Many obvious differences exist between science and art. But the Science and Art volume of this series addresses not only these differences but also the possibilities of crossing several of the gaps between science and art. Several contributions deal with sociological and philosophical elaborations of the similarities and differences between science and art, while others approach science from an artistic point of view and art from a scientific point of view. The volume also considers several approaches that attempt to go beyond the classical dichotomy between the two activities. In a special section, attention is paid to the particular role played by perception in both science and art as a regulator of human understanding. Together, these contributions strive for an intensive interaction between science and art, and to a con-

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sideration of them as converging rather than diverging. It is to be hoped that both science and art will benefit from this attempt. Volume 3: Science, Technology and Social Change The Orange Book of Einstein meets M agritte The major subject of the orange book is that society as a whole is changing, due to changes in technology, economy and the changing strategies and discourses of social scientists. The collected articles in the orange stream discuss a range of specific societal problems related to the subject of social change, the topics of the articles range from the scale of for instance sociology of health and psychohistory to more specific social problems like for instance anorexia nervosa, art academies and the information superhighway. Although the authors approach different subject matters from dissimilar perspectives and work with various methods, all the papers are related to the theme of science, technology and social change. In the orange book the reader will find a lot of arguments and hints pertaining to questions like: To what exactly will this social change lead in the 21st century? What kind of society lies ahead? She/he will be confronted to a plethora of enriching conceptions of the relationships between social sciences and social changes. Volume 4: World Views and the Problem of Synthesis The Yellow Book of Einstein meets Magritte A rapidly evolving world is seen to entail ideological, social, political, cultural and scientific fragmentation. Many cultures, subcultures and cultural fragments state their views assertively, while science progresses in increasingly narrowly defined areas of inquiry, widening not only the chasm between specialists and the layman, but also preventing specialists from having an overall view of their discipline. What are the motive forces behind this process of fragmentation, what are its effects? Are they truly inhospitable to the idea of synthesis, or do they call out, more urgently than ever before, for new forms of synthesis? What conditions would have to be met by contemporary synthesis? These and related questions will be addressed in the yellow book. Volume 5: A World in Transition; Humankind and Nature The Green Book of Einstein meets Magritte

iA World in Transition; Humankind and Nature' is appropriately entitled after its aim for an intrinsic property of reality: change. Of major concern, in this era of transformation, is the extensive and profound interaction of humankind with nature. The global scaled, social and technological project of humankind definitely involves a myriad of changes of

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the ecosphere. This book develops, from the call for an interdisciplinary synthesis and respect for plurality, acknowledging the evolving scientific truth, the need for an integrated but inevitably provisional world view. Contributors from different parts of the world focus on four modes of change: i) Social change and the individual condition, ii) Complex evolution and fundamental emergent transformations, iii) Ecological transformation and responsibility inquiries, iv) The economic-ecological and socio-technical equilibria. Primarily reflecting on the deep transformations of humankind and on the relationship between humans and nature it adresses major points of contemporary concern. Volume 6: Metadebates on Science The Blue Book of Einstein meets M agritte This book provides a meta-disciplinary reflection on science, nature, human action and society. It pertains to a dialogue between scientists, sociologists of science, historians and philosophers of science. It covers several topics: (1) the relation between science and philosophy, (2) new approaches to cognitive science, (3) reflections on classical thinking and contemporary science, (4) empirical epistemology, (5) epistemology of quantum mechanics. Indeed, quantum mechanics is a discipline which deserves and receives special attention here, for it still is a fascinating and intriguing discipline from a historiographical and philosophical point of view. This book does not only contain articles on a general level, it also provides new insights and bold, even provocative theories on the meta-level. That way, the reader gets acquainted with 'science in the making', sitting in the front row. Volume 7: Quantum Structures and the Nature of Reality The Indigo Book of Einstein meets M agritte This book refers to the satellite symposium that was organised by the International Quantum Structure Association (IQSA) at Einstein meets Magritte. The IQSA is a society for the advancement and dissemination of theories about structures based on quantum mechanics in their physical, mathematical, philosophical, applied and interdisciplinary aspects. The book contains several contributions presenting different fields of research in quantum structures. A great effort has been made to present some of the more technical aspects of quantum structures for a wide audience. Some parts of the articles are explanatory, sketching the historical development of research into quantum structures, while other parts make an effort to analyse the way the study of quantum structures has contributed to an understanding of the nature of our reality.

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Volume 8: The Evolution of Complexity The Violet Book of Einstein meets M agritte The violet book collects the contributions that consider theories of evolution and self-organisation, on the one hand, and systems theory and cybernetics, on the other hand. Both can add to the development of an integrated world view. The basic idea is that evolution leads to the spontaneous emergence of systems of higher and higher complexity or "intelligence": from elementary particles, via atoms, molecules, living cells, multicellular organisms, plants, and animals to human beings, culture and society. This perspective makes it possible to unify knowledge from presently separate disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, etc. The volume thus wishes to revive the transdisciplinary tradition of general systems theory by integrating the recently developed insights of the "complex adaptive systems" approach, pioneered among others by the Santa Fe Institute. Even these books only signify a single phase in the ever-recurring process of thought and creation regarding the basic questions on the reality that surrounds us and our place in it. Brussels, July 17, 1998. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The process of going public with the 'Einstein meets Magritte' books as a sequel to the conference has been a quite formidable task. From the first initiatives of the conference organisers themselves and the thoughtful, eminent and enthusiast contributors, to the many editors and lay-outers at CLEA, all have spent countless efforts in finishing the series towards a good ending. We wish to thank everybody who realised or helped in some moment or part of this publication. Some special thanks for the overall design and trouble-shooting (electronically and otherwise) are due to Didier Durlinger. The editorial process of all the volumes was realised with the aid of AWl-grant Caw96/54a of the Flemish Community and Caw96/54c for the Yellow Book. Some of the scientific research papers are acknowledging their support as well: The papers by Diederik Aerts in the White, Orange, Yellow, and Green books were realised with the aid of AWl-grant Caw96/54a of the Flemish Community. The introduction to the Worldviews Project in the Yellow Book by Jan Van der Veken was realised with the aid of AWl-grant Caw96/54c of the Flemish Community. The funding by the "FWO-Onderzoeksgemeenschap. Onderzoek naar de constructie van integrerende wereldbeelden" was applied in realising the Yellow Book of Einstein meets Magritte.

D. AERTS, J. BROEKAERT AND E. MATHIJS

SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW: EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION The colours of the volumes of the Einstein meets Magritte series correspond to the colours of the rainbow. They are diverse but closely connected and present no hierarchy. Yet they are not randomly placed alongside each other. The same goes for the contributions in this volume: Einstein meets Magritte: An Interdisciplinary Reflection, which is the white book of the Einstein meets Magritte series. The white book contains the papers of the invited speakers at the Einstein meets Magritte conference, held in May and June 1995 at Brussels Free University. The resulting articles were initially meant to express the theme of the conference: an interdisciplinary reflection on science, nature, art, human action and society. All of the articles in this volume do elaborate on this theme, but somewhere along the road the volume grew out to become more than an expression of a conference theme. The articles have one thing in common: they all address some of the most fundamental questions of science in the world of today. They carry the experience, research and conclusions of 13 renowned scientists and writers. The articles not only deal with the sciences and with contemporary life, they are science. As such, this volume presents a state-of-the-art of science today, in all its diversity. All the contributions approach the fundamental questions from different angles. With different approaches come different observations, and hence no general and decisive conclusions are presented in this volume. In the first contribution, John Ziman tries to unravel what basic science is and stands for. He compares Einstein's 'basic research' with contemporary conceptions of science. What do people mean when they say that basic science should be fostered? For Ziman, the conventional responses to this important question are confused and contradictory. Historical accounts are out of date. Philosophical criteria are too reductionist. Sociologists deconstruct basic research entirely. Psychological interpretations are too self-indulgent. Populists deplore its elitism. Economic theory discounts it heavily. Industry merely wants to exploit it. Academia celebrates its pure irrelevance~and yet policy-makers imagine it can be planned. Perhaps Magritte tells us that the nature of basic scientific research is a suitable theme for basic metascientific research. xv © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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In the second contribution of this volume, Bas van Fraassen considers the image of the world, in relation to the scientific image. For him, there are striking differences between the scientific theoretical description of the world and the way it appears to us. The consequent task of relating science to 'the world we live in' has been a problem throughout the history of science. But has this problem been made impossible to resolve by how it is formulated? van Fraassen elaborates on several possible answers to this question. Some say that beside the successive world-pictures of science there is the world-picture that preceded all these and continues to exist side-by-side, elucidated by more humanistic philosophers. Wilfrid Sellars codified this conviction in his dichotomy of 'scientific image' and 'manifest image'. Others say that all world-pictures are transient, evolve, conflict with and replace each other, undergo violent revolutions as well as periods of normal development, and may be incommensurable, allowing of no meaningful dialogue. All such formulations may themselves be tendentious metaphysics, full of false contrasts. Insistence on a radical separation between science and what we have apart from science, on the impossibility of accommodating science without surrender, may be a way of either idolising or demon ising science rather than understanding it. Barbara Herrnstein-Smith directs her attention towards the philosophy of science and science studies. Her article examines the bemusing but instructive logical, rhetorical and cognitive dynamics of contemporary theoretical controversy. It focuses on the recurrent non-engagements and mutually frustrating impasse between, on the one hand, those who-like philosopher of science Philip Kitcher in his recent The Advancement of Science-defend or attempt to rehabilitate traditional ideas of knowledge, truth, proof, objectivity, reason and reality and, on the other hand, theorists in fields such as history and sociology of science whose research and analyses have issued in more or less radical critiques of those ideas and more or less radical rethinkings of the operations of science itself. Robert M. Pirsig approaches science from a distinct angle. He proposes a rational integration of science and value that does not do violence to either. For Pirsig, in the past, rejection of 'values' by scientific method has helped prevent corruption into religious dogma, social propaganda and other forms of wishful thinking, but it has also prevented scientific explanation of huge areas of human experience: art, morals and human purpose. This inexplicability undermines the universality and validity of scientific thought. Pirsig argues that values can exist as a part of scientific data, but outside of any subject or object. This argument opens the door to a 'Metaphysics of Value' that provides a fundamentally different but not unscientific way of understanding the world.

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In his contribution, Ilya Prigogine deals with one of the basic characteristics of Western science since Galileo and Newton: the formulation of the laws of nature which are both deterministic and time-reversible. Today classical mechanics has been superseded by quantum theory and relativity. Still, the basic characteristics of Newton's laws, namely determinism and time-reversibility have survived. In contrast, on all levels of experience, be it in cosmology, geology, biology or human societies, we observe evolutionary patterns. How then are there patterns rooted in the laws of physics? Prigogine shows that once we incorporate instabilities and chaos into their formulation, we can overcome this contradiction. The fundamental laws of nature then take on a new meaning. The role of creativity in this interpretation is given special consideration. Constantin Piron builds his argumentation around similar lines. He specifically considers what he calls the failed revolutions of quanta and relativity. Bohr suggested that the usual rules of mechanics be abandoned to explain the hydrogen atom spectrum. Louis de Broglie associated a wave with each particle, and Erwin Schrodinger provided a non-local equation for the de Broglie particle wave. The use of the term 'aether' was rendered obsolete by Einstein after the discovery that the velocity of light was the same in every direction and independent of the chosen reference frame. Nevertheless, recent literature is indicative of how the vast majority of physicists still cling to the idea of a non-existing void full of little particles in the spirit of Leibniz or Descartes. This implies that quanta and relativity revolutions have yet to come. Rom Harre provides a historical account of special relativity, and connects it with the redundancy of space-time. It is not always easy to see whether an important theory in physics is about the world or a way of expressing the rules for talking about the world. Therefore Harre concentrates on the important differences in interpreting relativity theory, particularly with respect to the question of the real existence of Minkowski space. A look at the history of relativity, from Nicholas of Cusa to Galileo to Einstein shows that special relativity is best interpreted as a grammar for coordinating narratives told by different observers. This viewpoint has consequences for other problems in physics, such as the EPR experiment. Diederik Aerts investigates in his contribution 'the stuff the world is made of: physics and reality' recent findings and insights of theoretical physics. Two fundamental theories have reshaped our view of reality: quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Aerts analyses in which way some of the paradoxes of quantum mechanics are due to shortcomings of the axiomatic structure of the theory and others point to real new

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and mysterious aspects of reality. He also points out the deep problem introduced by relativity theory as to the question 'what is reality?'. Through his analysis he elaborates a view on reality, that he calls 'the creation discovery view', in which creation and discovery cooperate as two fundamental aspects of the process of reality. Francisco Varela's article deals with the relation between brain processes and living human experience. In his view, both can be seen as the really hard problems of consciousness. Varela's article takes up some of the most important alternatives today in dealing with this problem. Its main proposal is that science needs to be complemented with a sustained, disciplined analysis of experience itself to move this major question beyond the sterile oppositions of dualism or reductionism. William H. Calvin devotes attention to the role of creativity. For Calvin, creativity on the forefronts of both science and art consists of trying new combinations of old things in the hope of discovering a good fit-though doing a great deal of the groping off-line, thinking before acting. Such is at the heart of intelligence (to paraphrase Piaget, intelligence is what you use when you don't know what to do, when there is no tried-and-true routine to fall back on). But mechanistically, random combinations of old things have always seemed improbable, as most random combinations are nonsense (and sometimes dangerous). We know, however, that the Darwinian process shapes up quality from random recombinations: new species in millennia and new antibodies during the days and weeks of an immune response. Calvin discusses the prospects for a mental Darwinism that operates on the milliseconds to minutes time scale, shaping up novel ideas and sentences never before spoken. Adolf Griinbaum aims to chart a via media for the human sciences by concentrating on psychoanalysis. He argues that the so-called 'hermeneutic' reconstruction of psychoanalytic theory and therapy proposed by Karl Jaspers, Paul Ricoeur and Jiirgen Habermas fails to multiply as a viaduct and alleged prototype for the study of human nature. One key to the failure is the misconstrual of so-called 'meaning connections' between mental states in their bearing on casual connections between such states. Zygmunt Bauman concentrates on immortality, and considers its evolution from modernity to postmodernity. In Bauman's article, consciousness of mortality and the dream of the transcendence of death are the constant moving force of cultural creation. The postmodern era, however, has modified the cultural perception of time in a significant way. Strategies of collective and individual immortality have shifted from modern

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deconstruction of death to a postmodern deconstruction of immortality. Bio-technology engenders individualisation of collective immortality, whereas electronic technology brings about collectivisation of individual immortality. Bauman urges us to take the possible consequences of this process into consideration. Finally, Brian Arthur considers the practice of economics and economy in general to announce the end of certainty in economics. For Arthur, standard economics reduces the problems that concern us in economy to well-defined mathematical ones that can be 'solved' by deductive logic. But often in actual fact, our economic actions depend on our beliefs about others' future actions and beliefs, and these depend in turn on their beliefs about our actions and beliefs, so that deductive logic-the theorist's standby-becomes self-referential and breaks down. In reality humans use little deductive logic in economy. Instead they form subjective beliefs about future economic conditions and 'test' these against conditions created in large part by other's subjective beliefs and expectations; and these compete, co-evolve, form patterns, appear, and decay over time. In Arthur's view, our economy is therefore a 'Magritte Economy': one that is inherently complex, subjective, ever-changing, and to an unavoidable degree ill-defined. Albert Einstein and Rene Magritte meet each other where these articles meet. To know where that place lies is to read the articles, and to think. Think of an arena where Einsteinian basic science, fundamental and pure, meets Magrittean emotion and sensation; a place where logic not necessarily disappears but is superseded by surprise, amazement and a general sense of wonder.

DIEDERIK AERTS

EINSTEIN MEETS MAGRITTE: THE SCHOLAR, THE MUSE AND THE BARFLY We present a short play that has been written for three actors: the Scholar, the muse Terpsichore and the Barfly. The play was performed as opening act during the 'Einstein meets Magritte' conference at Brussels Free University from 29 May till 3 June 1995. The scholar was interpreted by Moira Pastra, the muse by Catherine Fitzgerald and the barfly by Ross Feller. l. THE ELYSEAN FIELDS

The scenery: It is a sunny day and Terpsichore sits in the grass under a tree. The scholar stands and watches with a meditating smile over the fields. The barfly stumbles around with an empty bottle of wine in his hands. Barfly (only half sober and shouting at the sky): Science and art. Do they embrace reality? Or do they make wicked plans to seize the world? Terpsichore (shocked by the raspy voice of the barfly, but then looking again at the beauty of the landscape): Once upon a time, in the cradle of mankind, they were one. They walked hand in hand in Elysean fields, washing their hands in gurgling brooks, and resting down in the peace of a mountain side. The muses that dwelt near the springs of creation, they were the daughters of heaven and earth, custodians of knowledge and art, those that inspired life. The white clouds in blue skies were their audience~the playing of their clear flutes, the rippling song of their choirs, their scathing parodies and noisy comedies, and exciting stories. Infused by a breathless admiration for the stars, their dances were as bewitching as their poetry of love. Scholar (looking critically at the muse and neglecting the presence of the barfly, she reads from her book): Clio reflects on the things of the past, the stories that have been entrusted to her, history. Urania examines the stars, their movements and the powers that move them in their turn: physics. Eutherpe is the flute. But hers is also the drama of sounds and their meanings. Thalia is taken by the laughter of men. She looks on the bright side of life, and leaves it up to Melpomene to show some sympathy

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for the dramas and turbulence of man: his struggle with fate. Terpsichore fuses cheerful voices into harmonies, building alliances and connections. Erato sees to love, so she takes care of human perpetuation. Polyhymnia dances the celebration of human existence, while Calliope sponsors man's attempt to grasp human action into theories and descriptions [1]. Terpsichore: Science and art have walked hand in hand from the dawn of consciousness. They stood together, until rational forces impelled them along different paths. They would gaze at each other from a distance with admiration, or suspicion or even contempt. Science and art manifested themselves as man's grasp of the world, handing him the tools to participate in creation. They expressed his dreams about future worlds and reflected his anxieties about death and nothingness, his struggle and alliance with Fate. They tried to answer his many question as to what could be the meaning of life and, inevitably, to satisfy his urge for power. 2. THE STUFF SCIENCE AND ART ARE MADE OF

Barfly (now suddenly interested and talking to the two others): It was a sunny day in the Peloponnesos. Pythagoras had gone for a walk when he came across a forge. The blacksmith was making long irons. He was sweating and working really hard. After all, the irons had to be ready before next week. They were to support a stage in Pieria, very close to Olympos. There was to be a great spectacle. It would bring together artists and scholars from all over the place. All cities had publicized the event from the rooftops, calling it "Uranus meets Apollo", science meets art. When he passed the smithy, Pythagoras was deep in thought and didn't pay much attention to the blacksmith's heavy work. He stopped in the shade of an olive tree and his thoughts were disturbed by the loud beat of the hammer on the irons. The smith was producing irons of different lengths, together, blow by blow, fast, trying to do as much while the metal was red hot. Pythagoras began to notice how the different sounds from the forge made a beautiful harmony. He picked out a recurring melody, one tone, another one-slightly higher, and yet in perfect harmony with the one that preceded it. Then another, also in harmony with the first, and so on. Pythagoras put his lips together and whistled, and tried to follow the smith's tune. He went over to the poor man who was sweating heavily. The smith was taken aback to see a mathematician interested in his work. Scholar (reading again from her book): This is how Pythagoras discovered that sound harmonies were directly related to the unit length of the

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iron bars that the smith was preparing for the stage of "Uranus meets Apollo". He noted that two iron bars, one twice as long as the other, resonated in perfect harmony with another bar twice their length [2]. Barfly: Pythagoras thanked the smith for his patient demonstrations and rushed off home. He began experiments with strings and the sounds which they made. Scholar: The Pythagorean system of music that arose from these discoveries not only started an entire tradition of Western music. It placed music in the thrall of mathematics forever. And yet, it would take physicists many centuries to reveal the ground for Pythagoras' discovery. When it became clear to them that sound is carried by vibrations of air molecules, they understood why differences in sound vibrations should be explained by the length of the bars which produced the sounds. This simple mechanism appears to be the ground for harmony. Terpsichore: Pythagoras' discovery is the stuff science and art are made of. Many, if not all scientists after him, were guided by an identical quest for simplicity and harmony, beauty and perfection. 3. THE HARMONIES OF THE SPHERES

Scholar: Johannes Kepler's explorations into the movements of the planets are an example. Kepler was obsessed by the idea that the structure of the planetary system could be related to the five regular polyhedrons. He took successive canonic spheres to inscribe the movements of the planets. His astronomy referred to Pythagorean numeric speculations, and he was convinced the planetary system reflected the same mathematical harmonies. To his mind, the scientist was to grasp the same mathematical laws by which, obviously, the Maker had been inspired

[3].

Barfly: Well, Kepler must have been disappointed ... Scholar: He was, when his observations of planetary movements revealed symmetries different to those he wished to find. Planets were not seen to describe polyhedrons. Nevertheless, the laws that Kepler formulated did open the way to Isaac Newton's discoveries. 4. THE P R INC I P I A

Barfly: I know the story well. Don't we all? It all happened when Newton had gone for the weekend to his summerhouse. He was obsessed at the

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time with the movements of the planets and the laws that Kepler had extracted. Nobody knew what they meant, but Newton was positive that they lead to a great secret. One sunny day-another sunny dayhe went off for a picnic and set out through the fields and the woods. When the sun was high he was starving and sat down under an apple tree, and began to devore his cheese sandwiches. His thoughts were far away, turning over Kepler's second law, when out of the blue an apple fell from above and nearly hit him on the head. Terpsichore: Then it dawned on him the secret behind the motions of the planets. The force making the apple fall to the ground had to be the same force keeping the moon in its orbit about the earth, and the planets around the sun. What a discovery! The moon was not connected to the earth by some means, she was constantly falling to it, but in such a way that she always fell to one side, falling over and over again, never reaching her destination. Barfly: He dropped his sandwiches and ran home-another one! Scholar: Indeed, this is how Newton proved that the force of gravity caused all planetary motions, and he formulated his findings in the laws carrying his name [4]. Terpsichore: And then another area of reality opened up, an area that was even more beautiful than Kepler had ever conceived. Reality proved greater than human prejudice took it to be, but it also appeared much more cunning and sly. Barfly: In my opinion, Newton's laws took away one misunderstanding, only to replace this with a new type of belief. This one took reality to be a large machine, a 'clockwork orange', an automaton. Terpsichore: Some would say a miracle had happened. Nature was there, independent of man, playing its own game. 5. THE CAMERA OBSCURA

Barfly: Yes, but man was pushed into silence. He only had his eyes left. He could only watch like a camera. Scholar: Indeed, the camera obscura was a Newtonian preconception, a place where reality and image coincided, and it substituted the Self with the passive retina. The lens analyzed the light beams that streamed

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in and hit the retina. This is how the retina viewed the projection as 'image'. When Newton's laws were polished by Lagrange and Hamilton, the prejudice was only to be confirmed. Important contemporary sections of art were being invaded by the power of this Newtonian paradigm. By that same process visual art was reduced to the mere act of looking, whereas before it had explored the whole of man's vision. Terpsichore: 'Seeing' was replaced by 'looking'. Perspective brought us painters that pre-empted the photograph. Scholar: The pendulum that propelled this Newtonian prejudice came to its climax at the end of the last century. The conceit of the 'camera obscura' even affected language, language the thing we can see in the dark, without camera obscura, without lens and retina. It reduced the understanding of what language was to a mere instrument of the romantic and emotional side of reality. It was no longer taken for a valuable attempt to build models of reality. On the other hand, language became the object of an obsessive attempt at formalization, the logical structure of the world, the Wiener Kreis [5]. 6. THE S QUA R E ROO T, THE B I R D, THE PIP E , THE GLASS AND THE KEY

Barfly: Till Kurt Godel came along and said anyone following this path was sure to bump his head into a cardboard wall. I guess that is when the paint began to peel. Scholar: No earlier, the first hesitation was only skin deep. Physics was beginning to make apparently 'accidental' discoveries: Max Planck and the radiation of the black body, the quest for the atom model. Terpsichore: The arts were drifting into the same model. When photographic techniques became available, they did away with the relevance of camera obscura painting. In this way, they were confronted with the trivialities of the prejudice in which they had become embroiled. Barfly: And then probably Albert Einstein en Rene Magritte stepped onto the stage. Terpsichore: What would Magritte and Einstein have talked about, had they met over a glass of wine in a candle lit Brussels restaurant near the Grand Place? Would they have talked openly about the motives that

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inspired both? Would they have discretely concealed the memory of the whispering voices of the muses, the voices they knew so well? Barfly: Or did they put their cards on the table, and reveal their sources? Scholar: Einstein might recall how his quest for beauty had seduced him into formulating a theory of relativity that woke mankind into a world that would never be the same again, and how this world had caused a first blow to the Newtonian camera obscura. After this blow, the retina and the lens lost trust in each other. Einstein might say how man returned to the picture of reality as a by-stander, one occupied with watches and measuring rods. He might continue his story, hinting at his struggles with quantum mechanics which had shown a glimpse of more exotic places, so staggering as to hold him back from attempting to explain the formal abstraction that he thought bore the imprint of another kind of being. Quantum mechanics brought a sledgehammer blow to the old Newtonian prejudice. The lens and retina were blown apart, and the blindman was forced to sacrifice his world view in order to learn to see. Barfly (in a Rastafarian rhythm): You see, I am here again, I am, speaking loud and clear, there is so much of me, sensual, colorful, smelling loud and swearing. Terpsichore: Einstein would complain bitterly, that the popular classification of his work as an opponent of quantum mechanics did him no justice. If only they could see how much more sweat and emotion that he had spent on quantum mechanics than on relativity. Barfly: Yes, I remember that they all thought that was his babe. Terpsichore: He would try to convince Magritte how it was actually his deep interest and fascination that had warned him about the cuts and cracks that quantum mechanics had already caused. And why he had refused to chime in with the enthusiasts of the first hour, who had been primarily interested in destruction, deconstruction, ruins, blindness rather than seeing anew. Whereas he had always wanted more. He wanted to find out what was going on, why, and where this was to bring mankind. He wanted to 'see' again. Magritte smiled at this turn of the conversation, listening to Einstein's fervor. Barfly: Yes, of course he understood very well ... All those clouds and pipes and bowler hats.

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Terpsichore: He would have pointed out that the ordinary is never ordinary and light up his pipe. Scholar: He would conjure up an image for their meeting, reflecting and transforming it, and reflecting it once again. He would tell how he 'systematically' disrupted each dogmatic image of the world and was not just exploring just new expressive techniques. Terpsichore: He preferred exploring the nature of this expression, which was generally taken for granted, even by his best friends, the avant-garde. Barfly: But are we so sure about that? Terpsichore: Einstein would run a hand through his hair and say that he was actually in it for the deeper beauty and simplicity of the nature of things. Scholar: He would recall the frustration of the discussions he had had with many of his colleagues, who mostly had been interested in the formal aspects of the new theories, and not in their meaning. 7. RENE AND ALBERT

Barfly: By this time, Magritte would have told Einstein to call him Rene and asked him if he would call him Albert. Terpsichore: Having come this far, they would realize how much their mutual explorations were inspired by a common pattern; Magritte's canvasses inviting the observer to doubt every reality that is revealed to him. Each of his creations carry the suggestion that it is actually something else, and even many different things at the same time. In this way, the object carries with it the possibility of all the other objects that it might have been. Some of these potentialities are realized in the interaction with the observer, but ultimately which of the potentialities is realized is decided through the interaction between the observer and the object. Barfly: Interaction, potentialities, quantum mechanics? Terpsichore: ... situations which have the potential to toss and turn about the moment any measuring device comes into play; situations that show how measurement determines which of the potentialities will be realized when it enters the scene.

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Scholar: In quantum mechanics, the change of the state of an entity is described by the Schrodinger wave function. In most cases, the measurement changes the state of the entity under study, and a particular measurement result can only be predicted with a certain probability, depending on the state and the measurement [6]. Barfly: Albert and Rene would call for another bottle as the candle flickered, and talk into the wee hours of the morning. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wants to thank Zygmunt Bauman for the suggestive ideas in his correspondence about the conference, An Vranckx, Catherine Fitzgerald, Moira Pastra and Ross Feller for their stimulating reading of the text-the whole concept of the play was created during the interaction that I had with them about the text-and Jan Broekaert for his help with the direction of the play. Diederik Aerts Center Leo Apostel Brussels Free University Brl1,ssels, Belgium REFERENCES

[1] Hinds, S., The metamorphosis of Persephone: Ovid and the selfconscious Muse, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987. [2] Gorman, P., Pythagoras: a life, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979, De Vogel C.J., Pythagoras and early Pythagoreanism: an interpretation of neglected evidence on the philosopher Pythagoras, Van Gorcum, Assen, 1966. [3] Kepler, J., Le secret du monde, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 1984, Gerard, S., Kepler: astronome, astrologue, Gallimard, Paris, 1979, Field, J.V., Kepler's geometrical cosmology, Athlone Press, London, 1988. [4] Curtis, W., Astronomy from Kepler to Newton: historical studies, Variorum, Aldershot, 1989. [5] Aerts, D., "Construction of reality and its influence on the understanding of quantum structures", International Journal of Theoretical Physics, 31, 1992, p. 1815. [6] Heisenberg, W., "Uber den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik", Zeitschrift fur Physik, 43, 1927,

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p. 172, Bohr, N., "The quantum postulate and the recent development of atomic theory", Nature, 121, 1928, p. 580, Schrodinger, E., "Die gegenwiirtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik", Naturwissenschaften, 23, pp. 807; 823; 844, 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen, "Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?", Physical Review, 47, 1935, p. 777.

JOHN ZIMAN

BASICALLY, IT'S PURELY ACADEMIC

l. INTRODUCTION

Einstein was surely one of the greatest "basic" scientists that ever lived. Yet it is doubtful if he was ever referred to as such during his lifetime. A glance at a few books suggests that this usage did not become common until the 1970s. It wasn't the default expression that every scientist's word processor was coded to insert automatically at suitable points in any text about research. It wasn't even listed, along with Basic English and the basic wage, in the largest dictionaries of the time. Basic science seems such a distinctive activity, such a significant category, within the whole science-and-technology, research-and-development complex, that it is hard now to imagine how we ever managed without this term for it. Mostly, the word "science" did the whole job on its own, further qualified, when necessary, as "pure", "fundamental", or occasionally "academic". A few stock phrases were also available for rhetorical contexts. The cliche record is held by a much respected and relatively sober Minister of Education, whom I once heard address "you chaps who are pushing back the frontiers of knowledge" no fewer than seventeen times in the same after-dinner speech. Words fall in and out of fashion. Only a person sensitive to the nuances of language need be worried that a single word has taken over where several other slightly different ones might have served slightly different purposes. The real question is: what does this word mean? We feel that it represents a distinct concept, with a number of different aspects, but are all those aspects coherent and consistent with one another? Could we derive all its properties from a single definition? More directly: what is "basic research"? We fund it, celebrate it, monitor it, patronise it, institutionalise it, play politics with it, profit from it, belittle it or reward it, publicise it or keep it secret, and even devote our lives to it-but seldom ask ourselves what it is that we are really talking about. When the present crowd of micro-, nano- and femto-Einsteins say that they too are doing basic research, what do we understand them to be asserting? 11

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This could be the topic of a Ph.D. thesis. Perhaps some learned philosopher of science has already deconstructed it remorselessly. But I don't know of any such work, so I propose to take just a short walk into a large and subtle subject. There are no established paths, so I am going to set out through the policy gate in the direction signposted "basic". This soon dwindles to a sheeptrack, forking and turning back on itself, so I decide to make my way across country towards certain obvious landmarks, labelled by the conventional alternatives that I have mentioned"fundamental", "pure" and "academic". These words, we discover, are far from synonymous with "basic", or with each other. Each of them represents a significant aspect of the concept we are trying to capture, and yet each of them is much more questionable than we had previously assumed. Eventually, looking back over the scene, we shall find that the outlines of what we recognised originally as basic research are rapidly fading. That will be the moment to meet Magritte. 2. "B A SIC" RES EAR C HAS A POL ICY CAT EGO R Y

In Einstein's heyday, the very idea of science policy was scarcely conceivable: now it fills our horizons and overclouds our skies. Basic research is one of its operational categories. For example, Japan has been criticised for its low national spending on basic research. But what is basic research? Few of us have had to read the Frascati Manual [1], where it is very officially defined: "Basic research is experimental or theoretical work undertaken primarily to acquire new knowledge of the underlying foundation of phenomena and observable facts, without any particular application in view". A great deal of dubious metaphysics is packed into that definition. The key phrase, however, comes at the end: "without any particular application in view". The many attempts to elaborate on Frascati all retain this feature. In more Basic English, "Basic research is what you are doing when you don't know what you are doing it for." The inner logic of such a negative entity is obviously very fuzzy. Indeed, it doesn't have any inner logic: it is defined only in terms of the unstated entities that presumably border it, such as other modes of research. Sometimes it is labelled "advancement of knowledge", but that too is a residual category, a complementary set, that seems to exist more as the silhouette of a fractal frontier than a structured form.

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To make any sense of the policy definition of basic research, we must identify the conceptual universe in which it is embedded. This is a general socio-economic theory called "the linear model of technological innovation" [2]. In this model, basic research is just the "upstream" end of the process by which scientific discoveries eventually create wealth and add value to our otherwise miserable, impoverished, brutish lives. Separate the products of research from this context, and you have an intangible asset that companies cannot profit from, accountants cannot audit and economists are inclined to discount to zero. As for the sociologists of science and technology-their fully justified scepticism about anything like the linear model persuades them to debunk the whole notion of basic research. In doing so, however, they are overlooking one of the facts, real, relative or constructed, of laboratory life. This is a point to which we shall return in due course. What this definition does make clear is that we are not concerned with knowledge as such, but with research-that is, conscious action to acquire a particular kind of knowledge for some particular purpose. That is a blessing, since it liberates us from epistemological commitments and controversies. In practice, every act of scientific research generates quantities of knowledge-"tacit" and "embedded" as well as codified-some of which plays an important part in shaping subsequent acts, in an ongoing process. This shaping does not depend on whether this supposed knowledge is "true" in any objective sense. It just has to be believed sufficiently to be parlayed into the next experiment by the assiduous researcher. From a policy standpoint, therefore, intentionality is the name of the game. This is a general point that is often overlooked by academic metascientists. The romantic view of science as "discovery" misses nine tenths of the action. Even in its most exploratory mode, research is always carried out according to a conscious plan [3]. This plan may be very flexible. It may only last for a week, or a day, or half an hour. Or it may require a billion dollar instrument taking years to design, build and operate. But research is never just doodling, or inspired improvisation, or artistic self-expression without a logical rationale. That is why basic research is often funded in terms of projects. It makes sense for an aspiring researcher to present a plan for an investigation in a way that might persuade some more affluent body to provide support for it. To promise a specific outcome would be self-contradictory. But a project proposal would seem pointless without an indication of the purposes that might be served by what might be discovered.

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This is the context in which the notion of basic research has evolved. The practical applications that "might be in view" are presumably those specifically mentioned in the original project proposal, or in some equivalent justificatory text. "The purpose of this research is to discover a more alluring cheese for baiting a bigger and better mousetrap ... and so on" . Or they might be inferred from the nature of the problem which the research is designed to solve~for example, "The problem of why cheese attracts mice to mousetraps has long puzzled rodentologists ... etc." The trouble is, as every grant applicant and grant donor knows, these statements of purpose are promissory notes that will never be called in. They may be made in good faith, but they are rhetorical rather than affirmative. They are addressed to very particular readers, to serve very particular interests. If you are approaching The Kindly Killer Kompany for a contract, indicate that a patent is in the offing. For the Small Animal Protection Society, you suggest that the research could lead to the development of an anti-mouse trap olfactory vaccine. The Fundamental Biology Research Council would expect you to show just how deeply the same project might be expected to advance our understanding of zoo-physio-micro-molecular-ethological phenomena. And so on. The deconstruction of such malleable and self-serving discourse is manna to the cynicism of the sceptical sociologists of scientific knowledge. How can it possibly be taken seriously as the criterion for policy data, to be aggregated into a line item in the national research budget, and produced with a flourish as evidence that the government is not, as its critics assert, failing to protect the national science base? Even if we wanted to determine the original objectives of research projects, we would usually be faced with a heterogeneous web of incommensurable motives. So far, the metascience of "problem choice" has done no more than scratch the surface. What weight should be given to recollections of intimations of a potential application, possibly prompted by hindsight? Does the suggestion of a totally absurd application~some perfectly respectable high energy particle physicists once tried to justify research on quarks as a long term source of electrical power~count? A broad definition of "strategic research" in terms of "potential applicability", would include the whole of biology, chemistry and the earth sciences, leaving only particle physics and cosmology as genuine domains of basic research. The Russian doll patterns of patronage in modern science confound the issue. OK, so Dr X, an enthusiastic zoo-physio-micro-molecular-

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ethologist, has conceived this exciting project as a contribution to basic knowledge in his sub-discipline. But he is working under Professor Y, who heads an interdisciplinary group specifically devoted to oriented basic research on the behaviour of rodents in man-made environments. This group is partly financed by the Small Animal Protection Society, whose Chairman, Lord Z (no relation) thinks of it as applied research, along the way to the development of a novel generic technology. Little do they know that most of the funding of the SAPS comes by a roundabout route from The Kindly Killer Kompany, who have already gone beyond the stage of pre-market research on the design of an even kindlier mousetrap based on just such a principle. How many of these boxes should we open, or close, in our hunt for a PC-Policy-Contextual-label? The situation is more reminiscent of Escher than Magritte! 3. "FUNDAMENTAL" RESEARCH AS A COGNITIVE CATEGORY

Einstein's marvellous papers of 1905 tell us nothing of their purpose: they justify themselves by their contents. This is scientific research at its most basic. The problems they solve are, as we say, absolutely fundamental. The knowledge produced by these papers is apparently of a special kind, which can be determined without reference to itsossible applications. When we say that a certain piece of research is "basic", might we really be asserting that it is-or aspires to be-"fundamental" in this sense? In everyday usage, the word "fundamental" is almost synonymous with "basic", and sometimes appears with that meaning in policy discourse. The newly-coined alternative, "foundational", fails to liven up this discourse because it is just another version of the same dead metaphor. These three words all derive from the representation of human knowledge as a many-storied building. It is presumed that the cognitive products of research can be arranged rationally in a layered structure, where the "deeper" layers provide "support" for the layers that are "above" them. We take this metaphor so much for granted that we seldom try to deconstruct it. But what, after all, is this "gravitational force" that Ossa has to counteract when Pelion is piled upon it? In what sense can a certain body of knowledge provide "support" for another body of knowledge? Does the metaphor imply that there is necessarily a "bedrock", on whose strength and integrity the whole structure depends? In a word, by adopting this metaphor we are paying allegiance to the doctrine of reductionism, which asserts that any given body of knowledge stands in

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a one-way relationship to another body of knowledge which encompasses it in principle. Reductionism rules amongst working scientists, but it belongs more to metaphysics than to science. Even as an abstract principle, it does not really demarcate any particular body of knowledge as peculiarly fundamental. The traditional hierarchy of the sciences put the social sciences and humanities at the top, reducing them down through psychology and biology to chemistry, physics and mathematics. But now we know that mathematics cannot be reduced to logic without reference to human languages and other social institutions. The foundations of the whole edifice are not merely insecure: they are all up in the air. Einstein tells us how to transform away the gravitational force by putting the Great Chain of Being into orbit. There is a well-known Escher image of a cycle of ascending staircases without a bottom step. Magritte would surely have appreciated the cognitive significance of this perceptual paradox. Post-modern epistemology repudiates "foundationalism". At best, a piece of research can only be said to be "fundamental" by comparison with some other research in the same problem area. But even the concept of "local" reductionism is rejected in principle by many philosophers. It never turns out to be possible to encompass all that might be discovered by research of a particular kind within the frame of knowledge obtainable by some other means. The dream of a final theory that would explain everything is as vain within the narrow confines of scientific sub-specialty as it is for the whole cosmos. Across the whole map of human knowledge there are blank areas to be explored, and characteristic phenomena to be charted in their own terms. Research is often deemed to be "fundamental" if it is general rather than specific, theoretical rather than empirical, or conceptual rather than factual. A positive indicator of fundamentalism is the inferred operation of hidden mechanisms involving invisible entities, such as quarks, molecules, genes or psychic structures to explain observable natural and human phenomena. Negative indicators include the elucidation of phenomenological relationships, the laborious collection and classification of data, and the construction of research instruments. Ideally, fundamental research focusses on naturally-occurring objects, such as stars, rocks, and organisms. That is why the term doesn't sound quite right in the social sciences, where we ought to understand the entities to be investigated because (as Giambattista Vi co pointed out,

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nearly 300 years ago) we constructed them ourselves, rather than receiving them from God. For the same reason, it is not easy to decide whether the study of the behaviour of elaborate, artificial systems, such as magnetically confined plasmas, or hypersonic fluid flows, should be called truly fundamental. It is sometimes asserted that the outcome of fundamental research is peculiarly uncertain. But this must depend on the way in which problems are posed and projects formulated. The "fundamental" science of astronomy is notoriously dependent on routine observations whose results are almost always unsurprising. Materials scientists, by contrast, are currently revelling in the investigation of high-temperature superconductivity, which seems to occur without rhyme or reason. It is not obvious that research is somehow less fundamental if it is undertaken in a field where there is already an acknowledged paradigm that permits some degree of finalization [4]-that is, prior specification of plausible cognitive goals-for research projects. In practice, what we usually mean when we describe a piece of research as "fundamental" , is that it has made, or claims to have made, or promises to make an "important" discovery. This might be, for example, evidence of unsuspected connections between different aspects of the subject, or a general way of explaining a number of puzzling phenomena, or an opening into a new, unexplored field. But this sublime quality is enormously dependent on the context. As so often demonstrated by the years of delay before the award of a Nobel Prize, it can only be decided after the event. And to characterize it more precisely would soon lead us-quite properly-into detailed accounts of the situation in various fields of science, the nature of the outstanding problems, the methods that might be used to solve them, and innumerable other interesting topics. This investigation would not, however, guide us to our immediate goal-the formulation of an objective procedure for recognising "basic" research simply by inspection of its cognitive claims or intended scientific outcomes. The words "fundamental" and "basic" may indeed be treated as synonymous, but only in relation to a dubious metaphor of very limited operational significance. We must shift the focus of our study towards more humanistic features of the research process.

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JOHN ZIMAN 4. "PURE" RESEARCH AS AN INDIVIDUALISTIC IDEOLOGY

Devotees of science do not really care whether it is basic: they just like it to be pure. But there is something precious about this word. So they talk about it as "open-ended", or "curiosity-driven". For in-group occasions they wax lyrical about "blue-skies" research, which is a metaphorical ellipsis for "the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, wherever it may lead them, perhaps up in the air, out of touch with the solid earth of the established paradigm, etc.". Some of the policy-literature refers to "pure basic" research, meaning that is without strategic implications, and that no effort is made to apply the results to practical problems, or even to transfer them to sectors responsible for such applications. In other words, "pure" is synonymous with "basic", only more so. The dictionaries stress the "theoretical" aspect of this usage, which nearly equates it with "fundamental". Policy studies get themselves into a twist over whether it is possible to put a quasi-economic value on the "cultural" role of research that is avowedly useless. But the most interesting aspect of the notion of "pure" research is psychological. It draws attention to the researcher as a person, rather than as a typical social actor performing a typical professional role. The romantic stereotype of the pure scientist as a "lonely seeker after truth" evokes an ethic of self-imposed dedication, a participant in the Quest of the Holy Grail, a person committed to a cause that transcends all other interests and considerations. His or her research would be contaminated spiritually, and perhaps intellectually, if it were motivated by such worldly considerations as the possibility of winning a valuable prize or making a commercial profit. Ideally, the pure scientist is an amateur, playing the research game obsessively without thought of personal gain except the satisfaction of having understood something better, or recognition for having made a contribution to knowledge. This repudiation of professionalism has, of course, its snobby side. The scientist aspires unconsciously to the status of the Indian Brahmin, who can comfort himself with the thought that he must be, indeed, of enormous societal value precisely because society rewards him so well for being of no obvious use. This is not only egregiously self-serving. It also encourages the irresponsible attitude of the researcher who insists that her work on chemical weapons is OK because (after all!) it has given her just the resources she needed to do some very good chemistry [5].

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But such elitist claims were always rather suspect, and are not worth much in hard cash. There is little reverence nowadays for research professors: they are classified en masse as QSEs-"Qualified Scientists and Engineers" -and are liable to suffer the ignominies of redundancy like everybody else. The main thing is that research scientists usually do get a great deal of satisfaction out of their work, not merely because they are the sort of people who enjoy solving challenging technical problems but also because they really do feel personally committed to it, as something more than a socially esteemed job. This satisfaction is also closely connected with the individualism that is immanent in the "lonely seeker" stereotype. The pure researcher is deemed to be motivated by "curiosity", a personality trait that can only be exercised by someone who is free to look around them, reflect on what seems strange, and inquire further into it. In other words, the essence of "pure" research is that it is supposedly undertaken by researchers who formulate their very own research problems, and set their very own research goals, according to their very own criteria. They are the sort of people who want to be in charge of what they do. The name of the game is autonomy, not ethical or even intellectual correctness.

It is impossible to overestimate the value that scientists attach to personal freedom, in and for research. These go far beyond the normal attractions of being one's own boss. Not every researcher really requires strategic autonomy--freedom to choose one's own research problemsbut technical autonomy--freedom to decide how to tackle these problems-is vital. This is the appeal of a tenured professorial chair. The competition for such posts is also a challenging test-bed for a number of personal qualities, such as determination, originality, and technical virtuosity, as well as elementary curiosity. These are precisely the qualities needed for the principal players on any research scene, whatever its relationship to possible application. What is not clear is whether the most effective way of advancing human knowledge would be to set free a whole crowd of individuals, each exercising their curiosity, honestly seeking truth, setting off into blue skies, etc. regardless of the others. Such a characterisation of "pure research" is obviously very incomplete. Like the economic ideal of perfect competition in a free market, it is meaningless when detached from its institutional frame and its regulatory practices.

It is not even obvious that researchers who enjoyed this autonomy would necessarily use it to undertake research that would be defined as "ba-

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sic" in the policy sense. Indeed, there seems no reason in principle why they should not choose problems with highly applicable solutions, from which they might expect to profit. We all know that the personal delights (and disappointments) of scientific discovery are very close to those of technological invention. Even Albert Einstein, the acme of scientific purity, took out several engineering patents. The supreme scientific virtue of originality is enabled and fostered by just the same conditions as the equivalent virtue of technological creativity---sometimes in the same people. This is slightly puzzling, since pure research is often defined as the direct antithesis of applied research, and ergo of all technology. One explanation might be that scientific curiosity is supposedly focussed principally on the natural world, rather than the world of human artifacts and institutions. It is aroused by regularities, or by deviations from such regularities, amongst naturally-occurring objects, and hence seeks peculiarly "fundamental" explanations and interpretations. This could be connected with the notion that basic research is especially indebted to serendipity, with the important proviso that "chance favours the prepared mind". There are echoes here of the principle of Evolutionary Epistemology, whereby our knowledge of the external world, whether stored cognitively or coded organically into our behaviour, genetic make-up and bodily form, is an adaptive selection from the innumerable random variations and vicissitudes of the historical experience of our whole lineage [6]. This is a rather complex thought, whose opacity I shall not try to elucidate here, but it deserves further attention. Basic research cannot be differentiated from other forms of research solely in terms of its psychology. The image of the pure researcher as a perfectly isolated individual animated by a strictly personal vision is a fantasy. At best, it is a generalised and simplified version of the stories that researchers customarily tell when trying to explain their actions. Such stories are perfectly sincere. But they totally ignore the social setting in which these actions are performed. This is the theme to which we now turn. 5. "ACADEMIC" RESEARCH AS A SOCIOLOGICAL CATEGORY

The social institution that largely frames and sustains "pure research" is academia. This is very convenient for policy makers. When asked to give an account of their support for basic science, they issue data on

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"government funded R&D undertaken within university-level establishments", to which they add, less precisely, "government-funded research in other closely linked, or similar organisations" [7]. This imprecision about the extent of the "Science Base" is typical of our whole subject, but at least it gets around the insuperable problem of labelling basic research, project by project, wherever it happens to be carried out. Fortunately for the indicator merchants, it is not difficult to spot the characteristic features of academic research, even when it is not closely associated with university teaching-even when it is undertaken in laboratories and institutes that have no direct connections with higher education. Einstein, for example, spent the second half of his scientific career at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, which is surely a high peak of academic science, despite being notoriously detached from the adjacent university. Academic science is a sociological category, not because it is organisationally structured in terms of universities but because it is socially structured in terms of disciplines. Academic researchers locate themselves and their work on a fine-grained map of innumerable specialties

[8].

The number of distinct "fields" of science and scholarship runs into the thousands, all carefully differentiated in the minds of their devotees. These are not just temporary research sites, to be entered casually as occasion demands. A major discipline is a well-defined institution, delineated by a variety of intangible but effective social practices. Membership of such a tribe is not just a matter of occasional, personal preference: it is a privilege earned by laborious apprenticeship and maintained by life-long commitment. Academic scientists win tribal membership by publishing the results of their investigations. Open publication is the hallmark of academic research-so much so that Admiral Bobby Inman designated publishability as the standard criterion of basic research: he had, of course, previously ruled that the military security of the United States required that all research that was not basic was automatically classified, and not publishable without special permission. Even without such buffoonery, however, the right to publish academic research results is far from absolute. As we are all uneasily aware, it is circumscribed by the opinions of editors, referees and other licensed critics, usually with no redress.

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Peer review of publications is only one of a number of practices by which communal norms are brought to bear on academic researchers [9]. Many of these practices, such as the award of prizes, have a long and honourable history. Others, such as the competitive funding of project proposals, are relatively new and not always as objective as they claim. Some traditional practices operate unobtrusively through genteel networks of personal patronage. Others, such as the calculation of bibliometric indicators of performance, are absurdly formalised. Taken together, these practices combine into a powerful social mechanism for setting the standards and controlling the quality of a academic research, whether basic or applied. The remarkable feature of this mechanism is that it is carefully designed so as not to conflict with a thoroughly individualistic ethos. One often hears academic scientists talking about "doing their own work" [10], by which they mean the research that they publish in their own names, even though it was actually carried out in a university laboratory, in the course of their working days as university employees-perhaps even by students or assistants rather than with their own fair hands. This is the actual social setting whose legitimacy is affirmed by the ideology of the "lonely seeker after truth" . Excellence in pure research is thus defined, specialty by specialty, in relation to a communal image of what constitutes good science within that specialty. No doubt this image incorporates a broadly shared ideal of truth, and of the search for principles uniting large areas of knowledge. In many disciplines it is systematically disconnected from considerations of practical utility. But it is an image that is biassed towards the solution of problems that are considered important by the relevant peer group. As a consequence, the research interests of academic scientists, pure and fundamental as they often may be, become narrowly channelled into the central "main streams" of their disciplines. Their serendipitous opportunities are strictly limited, their native curiosity is blinkered, and the notorious tunnel vision of academicism restricts them to the merest glimpses of those seductive blue skies of the unfettered intelligence. 6. THE R I SEA N D R I S E 0 F P 0 S T - A CAD E M I esc lEN C E

We set out originally on a hunt for "basic" research. We thought of it as cognitively "fundamental", and vocationally "pure". What we have ended up with is "academic" research-all too often pedantic, sectarian and corrupted with careerism. These are harsh words, but they reflect the exasperation of decision-makers trying to develop a rational policy for the support of science. They insist, again and again, that they value

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basic research and must rely on the scientific community to conduct it for the common good. And yet the failure of academic research to live up to their expectations impels the policy-makers to intervene more and more deeply in the detailed running of the science base [11]. Some of the expectations of the policymakers are, of course, quite unrealistic. They want to impose practical objectives on an activity that is defined as having no such objectives. They want to plan for the unplannable, and account in advance for the unaccountable. They want to sell the patent rights in discoveries that have not yet been made, and short-circuit the long and complex cycles of invention and commercial exploitation by confiating the science base with industrial R&D. Much of this is ill-conceived, sometimes destructive, political or managerial zeal. But there remains a solid core of genuine dissatisfaction with the discrepancy between what society actually gets nowadays from academic research and the ideal of a reliable, disinterested source of original, universal, pervasive, yet ultimately useful knowledge. A significant indicator of this dissatisfaction is the emergence of an entirely new mode of research. In their seminal work on The new production of knowledge [12], six distinguished metascientists-let us refer to them as the GLNSST group-differentiate this clearly from the traditional "Mode I" of academic science. The new "Mode 2" is focussed on problems rather than centred in disciplines. Typically, these problems are formulated in specific and localised contexts, but are tackled by heterogeneous groups of researchers, often sited in different organizations, networked together and collaborating temporarily in relatively loose managerial structures. Research is thus redefined as cooperat'ive activity, where competitive individualism has to be subordinated to teamwork, and can only express itself in leadership roles. But this collectivization is not necessarily elaborately managerial. The trend, rather, is towards a market structure, where research groups compete like small firms for project grants and contracts. The new mode has mainly evolved in practical situations, to deal with technological, environmental, medical or societal problems. But the taint of utility is not what distinguishes it from academic research as traditionally defined. This is one of the weaknesses of the convention of equating basic research with what is done in academia. Universities have long been active sites of strategic and applied research, provided that it is properly disciplined into faculties and departments under headings such as engineering, medicine, agriculture and the social sciences.

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The crucial point is that most practical problems do not emerge readymade in the middle of existing research specialties. They materialise amidst the booming buzzing confusion of the life world and cannot even be identified until they have been viewed from many different angles. The defining feature of the new mode of research is that it is multidisciplinary. It engages the combined expertise of researchers drawn from a number of distinct scientific traditions, and is judged by their apparent success in solving significant problems rather than by the criteria for "good science" in their parent disciplines. In principle, academia welcomes multidisciplinary research. Academics often expatiate on the virtues of interdisciplinarity, conjuring up visions of a community of scholarly saints, marching forward together under the banner of a final theory. The actual trend is in the opposite direction. Even the most fundamental fields of academic research have become increasingly specialised, diversified and fragmented. Ironically, the label "interdisciplinary" attached to a research centre, indicating that it is bucking this trend, has come to mean that it is the opposite of "basic" in its research interests. The irony is, of course, that the most "fundamental" scientific problems are essentially trans disciplinary. As the various sciences extend their areas of understanding, they make contact, overlap, and interpenetrate along innumerable cognitive and technical channels [13]. The traditional metaphysical question of how to "carve nature at the joints" thus becomes less and less answerable. The same uncertainty applies, moreover, to the boundaries between theoretical principles and practical procedures, and between natural phenomena and human artifices. As research is oriented towards larger "problems", whether these arise in "applied" or "basic" contexts, it must necessarily adopt an interdisciplinary approach. Once upon a time, universities set the pattern. "Science"~"pure", "basic", or even to some extent "applied" ~was equated with academic research, which diffused outwards as a bundle of social practices into other sectors of society. Now a new mode of knowledge production has emerged outside academia, and is percolating back into the science base. This process seems irresistible. If universities are to continue as major sites for research, they too will have to adopt the new mode, systematically and wholeheartedly. This is a much more radical change than it might appear on the surface. As we have noted, academic research is a highly individualistic

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activity organised around specialised scientific disciplines, which are themselves powerful social institutions. Multidisciplinary teamwork challenges this organisational structure at every turn-personal autonomy, career prospects, performance criteria, leadership roles, intellectual property rights, and so on. The changes that are required are so profound that the question arises whether "Mode 2" is institutionally compatible with "Mode 1". The GLNSST group are undecided on this point, and leave open many other questions concerning the sociological, psychological and epistemological characteristics of knowledge production in the new mode. My own inclination is to refer to this as "post-academic" research, indicating that academic research has been transformed into, or superseded by, an essentially new institutional form [14]. Meanwhile, one thing is clear: the notion of "basic research" will surely become even more nebulous than it is at present. The standard Frascati definition in terms of designated purpose is vacuous in a situation where multidisciplinary teams are working on a mixture of "curiosity-oriented" and "mission-oriented" problems, whose contexts they are continuously redefining as they seek funds opportunistically from government agencies, charitable foundations and commercial firms. Cognitive definitions break down when there is so little distinction between the search for fundamental principles and the exploration of specific contexts, between theory and practice, between the construction of abstract concepts and the collection of factual data. Definitions in terms of personal interests and motives are also inoperable when researchers overflowing with insatiable curiosity have to collaborate closely with tight-lipped technical experts, and natural philosophers must share computer terminals with ingenious inventors. Again, the notion that certain disciplines are inherently basic loses its force in a world where soft-centred anthropology is called in to reinforce the applications of hard-edged molecular biology, and physicist lions are induced to lie down with ecologist lambs. Even the pragmatic policy of equating the "national science base" with "academic and academic-related research" is frustrated. Post-academic research groups are distributed across the whole research system, networking indiscriminately from institution to institution and from sector to sector. It is not realistic nowadays to fund higher education as if it were still true to say of research that "basically, it's purely academic" .

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The principles underlying all those league tables of national expenditures on basic research were always suspect, and have now become vacuous. In the end, we have failed to pin down those pure-minded chaps who satisfy their natural curiosity by "pushing back the frontiers of knowledge". Although we have no doubt of their existence and would surely recognise them if we came across them, we cannot define precisely who they are or what it is they do. We know that the advancement of knowledge is by no means a residual activity in terms of its importance to society, yet we cannot determine how it differs in principle from many other problem-solving activities. But the cloud of semantic indeterminacies and ambiguities surrounding the concept of "basic research" hides genuine matters of concern. We must be careful not to throw out the newborn babies of ideas with the bathwater of instant utility. The world according to Albert Einstein still requires space and time to materialise in the real world-the world according to Rene Magritte. John Ziman Emeritus Professor of Physics Bristol University NOTES

[1] DECD, The Measurement of Scientific and Technical Activities, OECD, Paris, 1980. [2] Ziman, J .M., "A neural net model of innovation", Sci. & Pub. Pol., 18, 1991, pp. 65-75. [3] Ziman, J.M., Of One Mind: The Collectivization of Science, pp. 265310: "What are the Options?", American Institute of Physics, Woodbury NY, 1995. [4] Bohme, G., van den Daele, W., Hohlfeld, R., Krohn, W. & Schafer, W., Finalization in Science: The Social Orientation of Scientific Progress, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1983. [5] Ziman, J.M., loco cit., pp. 181-199: "The Social Responsibility of Scientists: Basic Principles", 1995. [6] Campbell, D.T., "Evolutionary Epistemology", in: Schilpp, P.A. (ed.), The Philosophy of Karl Popper, Open Court Publishing Company, LaSalle IL, 1974, pp. 413-463: Hooker, C.A., Reason, Regulation and Realism: Towards a Regulatory System Theory of Reason and Evolutionary Epistemology, SUNY Press, Albany NY, 1995. [7] Irvine, J., Martin, B.R. & Isard, P.A., Investing in the Future: An International Comparison of Governmental Funding of Academic and Related Research, Edward Elgar, Aldershot, 1990.

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[8] Ziman, J.M., loc.cit., pp. 87-98: "Pushing Back Frontiers-or Redrawing Maps?": pp. 99-120: "What is your Specialty?", 1995. [9] Merton, R.K., "The Normative Structure of Science", republished in The Sociology of Science, Chicago University Press, Chicago, pp. 267278, 1973; Ziman, J .M., An Introduction to Science Studies, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984. [10] Ziman, J.M., loc.cit., pp. 360-378: "The Individual in a Collectivized Profession", 1995. [11] Ziman, J .M., Prometheus Bound: Science in a Dynamic Steady State, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994. [12] Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., & Trow, M., The New Production of Knowledge: The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies, Sage, London, 1994. [13] Ziman, J .M., loc. cit., 1991. [14] Ziman, J.M., "Post-academic Science", 1995 Medawar Lecture to the Royal Society: to be published.

BAS C. VAN FRAASSEN

THE MANIFEST IMAGE AND THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGE

And new Philosophy calls all in doubt ... And freely men confesse that this world's spent, When in the Planets, and the Firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies. 'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone; All just supply, and all Relation ... John Donne, "An Anatomie of the World, The First Anniversary" [1] Let me begin with a question: how well does science represent the world? How well does it describe nature, us, and our relation to nature? Does it give an adequate, exact, accurate picture, which shows what there is in the world and what it is like? This question has a presupposition. It assumes that science represents, that it gives us a picture, so to speak: the scientific world picture. This is not an unusual assumption or way of speaking. Philosophers and scientists themselves have been writing about the scientific world picture at least since Galileo, who said that it was a picture drawn by means of geometry [2]. You may well have recognized this way of talking from various 20th century writers as well; perhaps you thought of Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, or Paul Churchland, or even Fritjof Capra. In fact, this way of talking, in terms of world pictures or world views, comes very easily to us, it seems, it feels very plausible and natural to speak this way about our intellectual history. But that very ease should make us suspicious! If is comes that easily, isn't it too easy and too good to be true? What horrors of the intellectual deep are we letting in, as we speak of this so blithely? What illusions will prey on us, what muddles are we getting ourselves into? PART ONE. WORLD VIEWS IN COLLISION (7)

1. The Clash The question, as I said, has a presupposition, namely that science represents, that it gives us a picture, or perhaps a lot of pictures that somehow 29

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combine into one: the scientific world picture. Such a presupposition engenders further questions that automatically come along with it. Has this picture changed radically, so that there were perhaps 'ancient', 'medieval', and 'classical' world pictures, while now we have yet a different one, the 'modern' or even 'postmodern'? Yes, it seems so. In fact there seem to have been scientific revolutions which replaced an old picture with a very different new one. Could there be at any given time more than one rival scientific world picture, competing for hegemony? Again, yes, it seems so-in fact they could be so radically different as to be incommensurable. Well, what about pictures besides science or outside science or before science, is there also a picture we already have or had about the world, that lives in common sense so to speak-the picture of the world as it ordinarily appears to us-which still exists side by side with science, but may eventually be replaced by science in its entirety? Such are the questions which are brought along automatically by the presupposition of our original question. If the presupposition were seen to be false, all its engendered questions would of course evaporate. To discuss them-and eventually that presupposition itself-I will focus on one specific philosopher who made all this very explicit. Wilfrid Sellars presented us with a clear dichotomy: the world as described by science. which he called the Scientific Image, and the world as it appears to us, the Manifest Image. Not that the dichotomy was so novel: Sir Arthur Eddington's famous example of the two tables is an obvious precedent. The table we see is solid, it is mostly material even if there are some small pores and little gaps in the wood. The table science describes, however, is mostly empty space, filled with small electrically charged particles frantically whirling around in the void. So the Scientific Image is astonishingly different from how things appear to us. Yet science is meant to represent the very same world in which we live-and there is the rub. Wilfrid Sellars argued that the two world pictures are in irreconcilable conflict, and that the infinitely superior Scientific Image must eventually displace the Manifest Image altogether. Now I'm going to ask: is this right? What about these arguments for superiority? What about this irreconcilability? Is there a real dichotomy, or is that dichotomy itself just an illusion-a snare and a delusion created by the smooth talk that comes so easily to us? And if so, could we not find a better way to see these apparent clashes between science and the appearances? Obviously I am not sympathetic to this 'world view' discourse, even if I must admit that I fall as easily into it as the next philosopher, when not on my qui vive. I am going to ask you to think

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about rejecting this sort of discourse altogether-to think about life without a world view, life without world pictures ... 2. The Three Main Differences Between the Images The first main difference between the Manifest and the Scientific Image lies in their history: each image has a history, and while the main outlines of what I shall call the Manifest Image took shape in the mists of pre-history, the scientific image, promissory notes apart, has taken shape before our very eyes [3]. The second difference lies in their encoding. In the case of science we can find a concrete representation: written texts setting out theories which, even if they have no author, have many contributors. Are there, similarly, concretely available descriptions setting forth the Manifest Image? Yes, Sellars replies: certain philosophers have been writing them. He refers here to the Aristotelian tradition, which tried to systematize common sense into a systematic scheme of categories, but also in our century to the Continental phenomenologists and in the Anglo-Saxon world to the so-called 'ordinary language' analytic philosophers. Clearly not all philosophers are engaged in making the Manifest Image explicit. Some (call them 'metaphysicians') are engaged in quasi-scientific system building of their own, either continuous with or rivalling both Scientific and Manifest Image [4]. Other philosophers there are who oppose systematizing of any sort, engaged instead as intellectual gadflies or midwives, or intent on showing the flies the way out of the fly bottle, as Wittgenstein said. Let us therefore give a special name to those philosophers putatively engaged in systematic exposition and elaboration of the Manifest Image: call them the 'systematizers'. So here are the first two important differences: the Scientific Image is being created, by scientific theorizing; the Manifest Image "took shape" in the mists of pre-history, but is systematically described by the 'systematizing' philosophers. There is a third difference, which will come to light when Sellars argues for the former's superiority. In this enterprise we should, I think, see Sellars' aim as continuous with Idealism [5]. For to argue the inferiority and indeed discardability of the Manifest, that comes pretty close to saying that all we see around us, at least in the way we see it, is sheer illusion, 'mere appearance' and not reality. This is not a new theme in philosophy. The British Idealists of the nineteenth century classified all we see around us, all we feel within, the very bodies we have and thoughts we think, as Appearance.

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In fact, they mounted various arguments to the effect that the world as we experience it cannot be real, must be mere appearance. These are arguments to show that this realm is full of contradictions-pursuing our understanding of it we inevitably find ourselves embroiled in selfcontradiction. (Of course we land in inconsistencies! We are enmeshed in illusions, in Maya, so what do you expect?) Such were McTaggart's arguments concerning time, and Bradley's about relations, and many another wonderful dialectical deconstruction.

Sellars had worked through these arguments and found them wanting. The Manifest Image-his version of Appearance-is consistent, he thinks; but it has other defects. His account will "compare [the Manifest Image] unfavorably with a more intelligible account of what there is" (ibid., p. 29). This sounds modest. In actuality, Sellars attempts more. He tries to show that the Manifest Image is necessarily incomplete with respect to explanation-that it must admit fissures, ruptures, discontinuities which of their very nature admit no explanation within the terms of the image itself. Here emerges, in Sellars' essay, a crucial third characterization of the two images. The Manifest Image is the world of a theory which took shape in the mists of prehistory and which was interiorized by us who (speaking generally, and not entirely literally) created that theory. But this interior theory is different from current science not only in its age, but in that its formation involved no postulation of non-manifest entities of any sort. The postulational technique of theorizing is entirely foreign to it. This is the basis of Sellars' argument that the Manifest Image will necessarily remain in the position of admitting phenomena which cannot be explained within it. For sometimes explanation is possible only by postulating realities behind the phenomenal scenes. To put it bluntly then, the Manifest Image must be regarded as Appearance only, and not as Reality, because it is necessarily explanatorily incomplete. If philosophy has largely been an effort to systematize the Manifest Image, and is equally in the grip of the eternal "why?" question, then we certainly have a clue here to its continual self-destruction. The 'systematizing' philosopher, if this is correct, tries to complete the Manifest Image by supplying the explanations it cries out for, but finds every avenue blocked: anyexplanation would involve postulating something real beyond or different from anything found in the Manifest Image. This is his first argument, and I will not stop long to examine it. I have no sympathy with its implicit uncompromising demand for explanation. Why should we not admit that perhaps every candidate explanation

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is a fiction, that perhaps reality harbors no reasons at all for those phenomena that puzzle us so, that perhaps the mysteries, as well as the humdrum facts, are brute?

But I can't leave the issue with this dismissal of Sellars' first argument, for he has a second argument, to show that the Manifest Image cannot be of something real. The incompleteness to which he points is not simply that manifest phenomena lack manifest causes. Rather, the manifest physical phenomena are incomplete in the way images and other mental things-Locke's general triangle, which is neither right-angled nor obtuse nor acute, for example-are incomplete. To this we now turn. PART TWO. THE PLAGUE OF IRREMEDIABLE VAGUENESS

3. Deconstructing the Manifest Image

Sellars had a favorite example: the pink ice cube, made by freezing a soft drink [6]. Within the Manifest Image it is described as pink all the way through. Suppose you cut it into finer and finer pieces-eventually you have pink crushed ice. But if the very small pieces are separated they look individually white or colourless-so perhaps we have to say the ice cube was not pink all the way through after all? Well, trying to elaborate the Manifest Image here, we have several choices, and different philosophers have tried out all of them. Placed in a heap, this crushed ice is pink-so one option is to say that perhaps the pieces are pink collectively but not individually? There is another option: the pieces did not exist in actuality while we still had the ice cube. The cube was divisible but only potentially divided, so the pieces only existed potentially. Hence we could maintain that the ice cube was actually pink through and through, though potentially white or colourless. In either of these cases we have a problem with vagueness. For where is the lower bound? At what precise point do we get collective colour-or, alternatively, at what small size would the colour disappear if we perform the division? The Manifest Image is not given to this level of precision: we can ask the question, but we won't get a precise answer-precision would have to be postulated, and that we can't do here. Let us be quite clear on this. Whether we think that the manifest pink ice cube is a continuous expanse of pinkness through and through, or that it is a vague object whose lower fineness bound to pinkness is ill-defined, there is no such object to be found in the Scientific Image. First of all atoms and subatomic particles are not pink; and secondly,

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there is nothing vague, everything is precisely quantified-if classical boundaries disappear they are replaced with equally numerically precise probabilities, and if those disappear they are replaced by exact sets of probability measures, and so forth. The two images are of worlds which cannot both be real, for as described the pink ice cube cannot be identical with any object in the world described by science. What Sellars is denying here is that the Manifest Image can be accommodated by science, that it can be reduced to something scientifically respectable. It can be replaced, but it cannot be reconstructed or reduced to something in the Scientific Image, for any reconstruction or reduction would distort or change or improve, it just couldn't leave it the same. However we try to explain the way things appear to us, we run up against the openness of ordinary language. The assertions we make in our ordinary language is full of vague promises which we know we cannot make good on-but life is like that. When the openness is irremediable, within our own terms, does it not follow that we literally don't know what we are saying? Metaphysics and science, on the other hand, with their regimented languages, precise concepts, and quantifiable distinctions, appear to provide new terms in which the openness is remediable, ... a framework where vagueness or unstated qualifications are at most a practical defect, in principle removable. There we can speak responsibly, by the strictest standards, for the first time. Or so, at least we may hope ...

4. Deconstructing the Scientific Image But now, with that problem in mind, let us take a close look at the Scientific Image. The revolution of Renaissance science and its codification in the seventeenth century aimed to remove these defects from our world picture once and for all. The primary qualities are really quantities, exhaustively described with full numerical precision in analytic geometry and differential calculus [7]. But science has higher standards of precision, and so, when it comes to discussing vagueness and indeterminacy we have to hold the Scientific Image to much higher standards than the Manifest. Those higher standards are proper to its examination exactly because it set itself so much higher standards, namely those of mathematics. We should raise questions concerning the Scientific Image proper to it, of a sort it would have been unfair to raise for pink ice cubes: mathematical questions. Consider this beer glass: it has a shape. What that shape is, precisely, we do not know. It was assumed that it is an analytic function of the

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spatial coordinates (in the way that a straight line "is" a function y = ax + b). It has one shape, and that shape is a geometric object; with equal justice it is a function defined on the continuum of real number coordinates. We are speaking here of the continuum of classical mathematics which has equal use for the representation of each primary quality: length, duration, shape, size, number, mass, velocity, what have you. The equation of the primary quality shape with geometric shape-on which Galileo placed such emphasis-is in effect the assertion that a certain representation is completely adequate. But now we must ask: what exactly is this representation? Well, shortly after Galileo, Descartes created analytic geometry, in which shape is represented in the way I just explained. But you have to realize that what he created was not exactly the analytic geometry we have today. For example, Descartes allowed only finitary constructions in geometry, so a point only exists if two lines are constructed to intersect there. It was his contemporary Pascal who, very controversially, insisted on the ubiquity of the infinite, and said that a line or a plane is composed of infinitely many points. So the beer glass' shape already had rival representations at this early point. In the nineteenth century mathematics had developed much further, and it was sensible to ask: is this shape an analytic function? There is no question but that, as a reconstruction of the world picture of Galileo, Descartes, and Newton, we can choose either option. They had not said that every physical magnitude in nature is an analytic function, but they had not conceived of any alternative. Nothing would have been lost from the subject as developed so far if we had added to it that all the functions describing the primary qualities of real physical things are analytic-nor if we had added that some are not. The description was open, indeterminate in that respect. Nor was there any kind of experimental evidence to cite. The only questions asked are, it seems, about which options could lead to more fruitful developments in later physics. If we go on to still later mathematics, the strange and previously unaskable questions multiply. Around the turn of the century, Lebesgue and others developed measure theory. This made it possible for Birkhoff and von Neumann to raise a new and interesting question about the shape of the beer glass [8]. They pointed out that when classical mechanics solves problems about systems with given precise configurations, we can construe it as using conveniently simplified descriptions. For those descriptions will distinguish between regions that differ only by point

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sets of measure zero-ones that are not empty but literally have no length, no area, and no volume. More realistic, they suggested, would be the description that results if we transform the precise descriptions by identifying regions that differ only by sets of measure zero. Their reasons for thinking of that as more realistic mayor may not be cogent, but it suffices here to note the conceptual possibility. That is, after Lebesgue we can look back to the older description of nature and we have a new option. We can accept or reject the following advice: "Let the calculations go on as usual, but the shape is correctly represented not by one region in geometric 3-space, but by an object in the quotient construction that identifies regions modulo differences of measure zero" . You will realize that I am simply giving examples of how, in many ways, we must in retrospect look upon the Scientific Image inherited from the older generation as open, vague, ambiguous in the light of our new understanding (that is: in the light of alternatives not previously conceived). What is the shape of this beer glass really? What was it in the Galilean, Cartesian, Newtonian Scientific Image? Indeed, we need to cast our net more widely still, if we want to find all the ways in which we could now understand the Scientific Image fashioned in the seventeenth century. There is no such thing as the classical continuum, if that is meant to be the continuum on which the classical (= modern) Scientific Image was erected originally. Cantor, Brouwer, and Weyl had equal right to regard it as erected on their continua, which are very different. Of course, today we will use "the classical continuum" to refer to the subject of real number theory as it now exists in main stream mathematics. That is the politics of linguistic usage. But there are these alternatives, which can within what we now call classical mathematics be regarded as perfectly well defined mathematical objects. So, what would you like the shape of the beer glass to be? The openness of scientific description here come to light is irremediable. Of course, every time we outline a range of alternatives for ourselves, we can ascend our private throne-are we not all kings and pontiffs in realms of the mind?-and assert that one of these alternatives is the one true story of the world. When the range of alternatives is refined by new conceptual developments---or simply by having our attention drawn upward by logical reflection-we can choose a new option and make yet another declaration ex cathedra. Arbitrary perhaps, but as definite as can be, by choice. What we cannot pretend is to be non-arbitrary, or to close our text once and for all.

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Yet the form of understanding is always one of presumed objectivity and univocity. The Scientific Image is as replete with uncashed and ultimately uncashable promissory notes as the Manifest Image. 5. Philosophical Choices in Response

We have gone some way now to dispelling the air of superiority of the Scientific Image over the Manifest; but nothing I have said need necessarily be seen as a disaster for either. With respect to vagueness and ambiguity there is at most a difference of degree; there is no difference in principle, and if there is a problem of principle then the two images are in the same boat. What does follow is that anyone taking seriously either our ordinary way of understanding the world, or the way of science must take vagueness and ambiguity very seriously. The lesson learned in these reflections is that vagueness is irremediable, in science as well as in pre-theoretic description. Accordingly, this vagueness is, in itself, no defect, though one might wish to opt for or privilege the less vague Image. One option would be to insist that one of these images, or one of their possible successors in the course of human history, is actually a complete, non-arbitrary, correct representation of what there is. The world is vague; our task it is to develop conceptual tools adapted to the non-distorting description of a vague world. Another option is to postulate that at each juncture, one refinement that diminishes vagueness will be more accurate than its rivals. The world is sharp, but impossible to represent sharply; that sharp world lies jenseits aZZer Vorstellung, beyond the endless task of constructing its image(s). Both options, however, commit us to leaving the basic dichotomy of images intact. If we adopt either, we would be deeply engaged in metaphysics, and find ourselves on one side of a very deep divide in that putative enterprise. But can we really be so complacent about this dichotomy? I say not: the difficulties which this account of incommensurable world views led us to, seem to me to indicate something much more fundamentally wrong with the entire dialectic. That any description will always, upon a little pressing, turn out to be vague and often ambiguous, that every text is open, that despite all philosophical ambition no one can produce a text invulnerable to deconstruction-that, I think is definitely so. But this philosophical story of images and worlds, perspectives, conceptual frames, and all their ilk is not thereby shown to have a coherent fall-back position in a metaphysics of vagueness. The flaw in

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Sellars', or any, story of clashing world views may lie much deeper. PART THREE. AN INCOHERENT FICTION

When all the answers available lead you into absurdity, Kant argued in a famous passage, it's time to examine the presuppositions of your question. For a question may itself have something wrong with it, and thus make all its own answers impossible.

In our present context, it would mean this: there are no such things as the Manifest and the Scientific Image at all. Is that possible? Yes, in fact I can think of some very good reasons for that conclusion. If you agree to them, you may even find some reason to generalize this skeptical conclusion to all those-what shall I call them?-world-pictures, conceptual frames, worlds (as in "the world of science", "the world of the physicist" , "the Ptolemaic world") which have so easily and smoothly crept into our discourse. 6. The Images as Philosophical Miscreants

My first two reasons concern how Sellars has misrepresented both our ordinary understanding, when we are not consciously or even implicitly drawing on science, and also science itself. 6.1 What is this thing called the Manifest Image? The Manifest Image is the way the world appears to us; it is also the world as described by the 'systematizing' perennial philosophy, and it is the image to whose evolution and development all postulation remains forever foreign. There is nothing that fits this description. The philosophy in question engages freely in reification and postulation of all sorts [9]. Putative entities like conceptions, conceptual frames, images, and world views are indeed introduced within the perennial philosophy, through the reification of the language forms we create in such easy profusion-but that is exactly what disqualifies the perennial philosophy from describing something to which postulation is foreign [10].

Should we say then that those philosophical descriptions are simply faulty accounts of the Manifest Image as it really is? Unfortunately we have no description at all of that Image except by the philosophers Sellars singled out as engaged in that enterprise. Can we take Sellars' own initial description-the Manifest Image is the world as it appears to us-as the definitive identification? Could we in fact say that in this phrase, the Manifest Image is introduced into the philosophical pantechnicon by explicit definition?

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Now here we encounter the philosophical "as". This "as" is really the same as the infamous philosophical qua, a hyper-intensional locution of dubious intelligibility. A description of a thing may be correct or incorrect-what is denoted by "the thing as described"? Something that exists regardless of whether the description is correct or incorrect? Or does it simply denote the thing, if correctly described, and denote nothing at all otherwise? On the latter option, if "Manifest Image" and "Scientific Image" are not denotationless, they denote the very same thing, thus ending all philosophische Spitzfindigkeit at once. But with the former option we would commit ourselves to an ontology which most of us-including Sellars-would explicitly reject, and for which he takes no responsibility. So one side of this dichotomy is simply a self-created muddle, designed to give us a house of cards ready to fall apart under the scientific stare. 6.2 And what of that thing called the Scientific Image? What about the Scientific Image? Isn't that at least real, and don't we have to confront it, cope with it, and relate ourselves to it every day? And does it not, by its very design, omit those colours, textures, smells, feelings and emotions, drives and aspirations that constitute our human existence? Isn't that reduction to the physical minimum our heritage from Calileo's insistence that science proceed entirely in terms of the quantifiable 'primary' quantities, which set the program, in essence, for all future science, all the way to our day and for what we still expect in our future? Once again, what I see here is something designed with the resources of rhetoric, that bears little relation to the actual history to which it appeals. When Calileo insisted that science restricted its descriptions to a very few primary qualities, he had a good point. One of the defects that rendered the Scholastics' scientific tradition less and less effective was the unconstrained multiplication of properties which passed for theorizing among them. So this innovation of Calileo's was much needed discipline. Compare this practical point with the later philosophers' reading of it: as a move introducing the great divide, the separation of those properties which do really pertain to the systems described by science-the Scientific Image-and all those other properties of our acquaintance which do not belong there. Scientific discipline did not require that idea! Calileo himself was to blame. He could simply have claimed certain theories to be true and left it at that. Calileo was not so modest. A complete description of nature would give all its qualities, both primary

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and secondary~but the latter, he claimed, could all be reduced to the former, so that science [the theory framed in terms of primary qualities only] would be complete. In this contention he made two dubious moves, neither of them vindicated by our later history. First, there is his completeness claim for the total list of properties~which all, at that time, were humanly sensible properties, very different from what science eventually marshalled as its basic theoretical quantities. Second, there is his claim of reduction. In fact, very little of the generally accepted description of the world at the time could have been given simply in terms of that list of properties; nor could it be now! 6.3 The Dialectic that Engenders the Dichotomy At this point you can see the dialectic moving with its own inner necessity. If B is not reducible to A, then either A is incomplete or the two are incompatible. So if A purports to be complete, then either it is false or else B is false~one of the two must be eliminated. Here we have the picture: there are two putatively complete images of the world, and they are incompatible.

But remember how I introduced this dialectic: Galileo's restriction of science to the primary qualities was a very good practical move for science, because it imposed a much needed discipline on scientific theorizing. What does that highly practical and commonsensical endorsement have to do with the ensuing dialectic? This dialectic can persist only through the maintenance of an illusion. That is the illusion that "the scientific description of the world" or "the primary qualities" refers, and keeps referring, to one definite subject. Look at Galileo's primary qualities. He was still a bit soft; Descartes was the master of discipline, and made the cut at the only natural joint in sight, namely, the quantities definable in terms of spatial and temporal extension. But what happened when these were demonstrably not enough? Scientists understood the idea of discipline better than philosophers: at that point they very common-sensically introduced additional primary quantities. In the centuries that followed, not only did they repeat this manoeuvre as needed, but they also changed the original list, replacing spatial and temporal quantities by spatio-temporal quantities for example. So the exclusion from the scientific vocabulary is a practical matter, it is provisional exclusion, not a matter of ontological principle. We abstract as far as we can to strip our problems to the bone, so as to see through the superfluous flesh to the skeleton~but when we encounter new problems, we may have to retrench a little on that scorched flesh

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policy. That is not only the practical way to proceed in science; science must have learned it from practical men and women. When something is provisionally excluded, that is with the idea that eventually either (a) it will be shown to be reducible to what is included, or (b) it will itself be introduced into the scientific vocabulary, or (c) we will find that something new is introduced to which it is reducible [11]. The argument for scientific realism from the incompatibility of Scientific and Manifest Image-given the imperative to maintain the correctness of the science we have accepted-is therefore disingenuous. For from the point of view of science there is no incompatibility, there are only temporary sticking points. Adjustments will be made on both sides, as need be, so as to reach accommodation. There are no stable A and B which have proved to be mutually incompatible. The argument is disingenuous in another way. For the completeness claim which is crucial to the argument for incompatibility is itself a dialectical miscreant. First of all (this is related to the preceding point) it is infinitely malleable in content: no one claims completeness for current science, but only for science in principle in the ideal long run. Since no one can know what that will be like, no one can know what is being claimed in this completeness claim. But secondly (this is a new point) the completeness claim does not come from science, it is the philosopher's distorted codification of certain laudable aspirations in science. The scientific project is to reach a point (as Nancy Cartwright puts it [12]) of predictive closure. Descartes thought that he could develop a deterministic pure kinematics; but the true kinematic descriptions at t + d cannot be predicted from the true kinematic descriptions at preceding time t. Therefore the list of quantities is increased by Newton, to include dynamic quantities; and it seems that closure is attained. But predictive closure does not imply descriptive completeness-that was not even the aim! 7. The Very Idea of Images

Very striking in Sellars' characterization of the manifest and Scientific Image are two facts that should have greatly worried him. The first is this: Sellars had said that he would explain his terms, but was then content to do so in the language of folk psychology. That is the account of human nature which introduces such mental entities as images and conceptions that populate the world together with platforms and Constitutions. So when he explains what sorts of things these images are, he resorts to terms belonging to traditional philosophical psychology

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and to folk psychology-alltuff that finds no place in the Scientifi c Image, unless it be the place of phlogiston, N-rays, entelechies, and cold fusion. Note well: I am not disparaging psychological discourse here; I am saying it is not reducible to the discourse of physics, and Sellars cannot help himself to it in this context. The second fact to be noted is that by his own account, within the Manifest Image introduction of such ideas as these-that there are these images, world-pictures, conceptual frames or what have you-counts as postulational and is therefore by definition foreign to it! In telling his story of those images, Sellars was therefore speaking from a perspective located neither in the Manifest Image nor in the Scientific Image-thus, according to that very story, located nowhere at all. So Sellars is, as it were, speaking from within an ontology which he does not make explicit, which in effect he had already implicitly disowned, and for which he takes no responsibility. Finally, let us be quite blunt, and bear down on this term "image" itself. We know very well what an image or picture is, in the primary usage of that term-we see such things every day. But here the terms are of course used analogically. The effect of the analogy was to suggest that the philosopher is not thinking about real things but about a humanly created "likeness" (picture, graven image, description) or alternatively some naturally arising "likeness" (after-image, reflection in a pool, fata morgana). To draw an analogy is only to say that it is "as if", and that we may gain some understanding from focusing on one respect in which two things are alike. But this particular analogy is apparently used to reify, to introduce an entity [indeed, two entities] which are like pictures. What sort of entities are they? Perhaps you would like to say that these images must be things existing in the mind, mental images, mental entities. I do not know how far you are willing to trust this sort of talk, whether as part of folk psychology or in some more technical guise within cognitive psychology. But we have for a long time, at least since Wittgenstein, found it impossible to rely on it uncritically. You may know Wittgenstein's demonstration that the very idea of a mental image makes it something fundamentally unlike a real image, so that the analogy pretty well destroys itself. This is his demonstration from the so-called "duck-rabbit" picture, an optical illusion which is seen alternately (and quite spontaneously) either as a duck or as a rabbit. This sort of phenomenon is what supported the idea of mental images, for the explanation offered was that when two people look at the real picture, and see something different, they have different

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mental images. For this sort of explanation to work at all, we have to say that a real image is something that can be seen in two different ways, while a mental image is something that can only be seen in one way. But it is crucial to the very idea of a real image that it is something that can be seen in different ways~so, conclusion, mental images aren't images at all. PART FOUR. REAL LIFE WITH SCIENCE

Perhaps you accept this, and say fine, Sellars told a little fable to draw attention to something important. Images, conceptions, categorical frameworks, world-pictures are themselves fictions that facilitate the discussion of something really important. Since this very way of talking, if taken so literally, seems to lead us into incoherence, let's not take it too seriously, but concentrate on what is important. Important is the crucial insight: the insight into the impossibility of reconciling science and our ordinary commonsensical way of thinking. Well, if you are so compliant, let us see what follows from this. We have to start all over again! What does the clashf images, their vagueness, and so forth, amount to if there are no images? 8. A New Beginning

Many philosophers separate science sharply from ordinary life and ways of thinking. With such a sharp separation, our options reduce to extremes. One option is instrumentalism, while attempting to place our ordinary way of thinking on a pedestal and preserve it through isolation. This ignores the fact that our response to our experience never takes a necessary form but is a historical product that could certainly have been different, and is in any case subject to constant change. The option is at war with itself for it purports to safeguard our history by abrogating the historical process. The other extreme is scient ism: if science is radically different and also superior, then we must submit ourselves to it wholly, forsaking all others. While the first option ignores the historical origins of our ordinary way of thinking, this one ignores the equally checkered historical development of science. Science has never enjoyed such undisputed superiority, has never ceased discovering its own shortcomings, and can't pretend to a faultless process of self-perfection or self-purification. It seems to me that our verdict for both extremes should be the same. Not only is reification of world views a highly theoretical move of doubt-

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ful internal coherence, it stems from a radical misconception of the human condition.

If you ask me how things seem to us, I cannot do anything but speak and write. There is some choice: I can either invite you to observe the way I speak and write in response to my experience, or I can describe to you how things seem to me. On the first choice, you will see and hear me using the language of daily life-some of which could of course be life in a laboratory if I am a scientist. This language certainly does not embody perfect understanding, you will detect some misunderstandings and some lack of understanding both in the language itself and in my use of it. You'll spot the defects all the more easily if you are aware of theories and myths that have played a role in our history, for those have certainly been factors in the evolution of our linguistic practices. The defects get considerably worse, however, if I choose the option of describing how things seem to me. If I give you a philosopher's account, it will be pretty medieval, full of dispositions, possibles, potentialities, universals, and the like. If I give you a scientific account, whether from psychology, physiology, or physics, you'll notice that the feel and taste of real experience just is not there. Science is driven by highly practical motives. For that reason, the scientific account slashes and burns, to eliminate all factors that do not contribute to meeting its own criteria of success. That is only right, and as a practical person I applaud it-but then cannot understand the philosopher who insists that the scientific account must be the one that is complete, that its sparsity is simply irredundancy with respect to all criteria for adequate description. Yet, as with all great philosophical mistakes, there must be something to it: For everyone of us there is therefore some point of rupture between, as we are inclined to say, the way we see the world and the way science describes it. On the other hand, we have the impulse to say with great conviction something that we can't seem to disentangle from metaphor but insist on nevertheless: that on a certain, familiar level, we would be in a position to communicate with all our forebears and descendants, that we can reach through all cultural differences to the shared human and earthly reality beneath. Could we possibly, ever (now, finally?) discuss this without slipping into metaphor at every turn? 9. The Continuity of Common Sense and Science in Method What of Sellars' noble savage who lives, moves, and has his being in the Manifest Image? We have never been like that. The great and crucial

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divide, according to Sellars, is that scientific world views are fashioned by postulation while the Manifest Image contains nothing postulated, only things experienced though misdescribed. Common sense, ordinary thinking has just one major dynamic principle, and it is superstition. The tactics and gambits of superstition are exactly analogy, metaphor, and linguistic extension followed by personification and reification, thus furnishing the world with vast arrays of newly postulated entities. Its driving force is the demand for explanation and the satisfaction derived therefrom. Inference to the most probable conclusion or to the best explanation are endemic in the tabloid newspaper, books about UFOs, the chariots of the gods, the miraculous efficacy of herbal cures, and so forth. Of course the description I just gave of the mechanisms of superstition bears some likeness to various philosophical disquisitions on the structure of science. Nor need those be wrong: superstition, rational common sense, and science may have much in common. In fact, I was describing superstition here exactly in order to argue that Sellars' description of life in the Scientific Image fits all life, including that of the pre- and un-scientific-not in order to convict us of irrationality. But there is a difference: that in science these processes are bridled, constrained, checked in their course by harsh demands of productivity-which they are much less, and never systematically, in ordinary life. Science is bridled superstition, just as rationality is bridled irrationality. So there is a clash, yes: bridling the unbridled meets with opposition. Science teaches us how not to believe things, how to let go of our ideas; but we love and cherish our ideas and their security. Rightly did Isaac Levi speak, in his epistemology, of relief from agnosticism. But note well: this bridle is not the yoke of a foreign prince, imposed in alien fashion from outside. Rather, if within our common sense we reflect on ourselves, we already applaud such bridling. 10. Perspectival Discourse and Relativity

There are many differences between 'ordinary' and scientific description. The first is that ordinary description is always perspectival, for obviously practical reasons. But such perspectival descriptions are banned from theoretical science. Here we have in a nutshell the idea of relativity: as soon as tacit relativity is detected it is first made explicit and then banished in favor of the (more) absolute. (Hence the irony of lumpen relativisms' air of warrant from science.) But we must make a crucial distinction here, easily illustrated by what

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is perhaps the earliest illustration of such a theoretical change. The first astronomical frame of reference is the observer's Zenith and horizon. But already in ancient times, its relativity was realized. Hence there was a shift to the North Star and the Celestial Equator as frame of reference, which is independent of the observer. Now the distinction: the relativity detected was clearly not precisely observer-dependence but rather location-dependence. In order to use the description given in the common, "absolute" frame of reference, the observer still has to locate himself therein, so he still needs to use perspectival, or to be more precise, indexical language: "I am there, here is my Zenith, this region is within my horizon". This perspectival or relative form of description cannot disappear from science if it is also to be applied science. But in theoretical science, there is no such indexical description, and the location-dependent description is replaced by location-independent description. There are two wrong reactions when intellectual reflection has brought to light a new and still farther reaching relativity. (We have seen this very clearly illustrated in the two well-documented philosophical reactions to Galilean and Einsteinian relativity.) The first is, obviously, denial: "No, there is absolute simultaneity and length, it is simply not describable in the language of Einstein's physics". The second is sickly affirmation, a bee-line for a new security: "Space and time are unreal, simultaneity and length are characteristic only of objects-of-thought, of the world we pictured to ourselves which turns out not to be the real world. Only what is invariant under the newly understood group of transformations-Galileo's, Lorentz's-is real. We lived in Maya, created by our own minds. Develop process metaphysics! Abandon persistents, develop an ontology of time-slices, punctal events, space-time worms"! I say, do not heed these counsels of despair. The only authentic reaction is the one that happens quite naturally in practice: nothing is given up, no form of assertion is discarded as meaningless, though of course we have now a richer and more nuanced construal of what we used to say. That is to say, the very same 'local', 'perspectival' description is now related to a different theoretical model. Just as ordinary thoughts about the pink ice cube were never (except in the philosopher's fiction) wedded to pinkness-through-and-through so ordinary thought was never wedded to a denial of Einsteinian relativity.

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11. Value- and Function-laden Discourse

There is another source of apparent conflict between science and experience: our ordinary descriptions are charged with value and emotion, with needs, intentions, goals, and instrumental evaluations relative to those goals. At first sight, ordinary naming and classifying seems largely use-independent. That may be so; but the dimension of praxis reaches for deeper than might be at first apparent. What about, for example, "tree", "rose", "lettuce"? Are these ordinary nouns completely characterizable without reference to praxis or intentionality? Well, roses are flowers; you may tell me that you gave your mother roses, or equally appropriately say that you gave her flowers. So why not, if you like, just tell me that you gave her pieces of plants? [13] This use-related character of discourse is of course evident also in the laboratory (as is perspectival, 'pre'-relativistic discourse). Things are called by names that relate to their function, not to their physical constitution, when scientists work. The disparity with theoretical discourse is then all the more blatant. Neither in pointing to indexical language nor when I mention value-, use-, and function-laden discourse am I contrasting the language of the scientist with the language of the layperson. Both are indispensable to us, both inside and outside science, exactly when we turn back to those principles and constructions we have made as 'objective' and impersonal as we possibly can, in order to draw on them for living and acting. Is there a clash here? Only apparently so. Our ordinary discourse is not reducible to theoretical descriptions in the language of physics, even if the latter is complete within its own terms of reference. Within science as activity, the two forms of discourse are happily integrated. That activity includes after all, besides the construction of theories and models in all their pristine purity, our use and application of those pure beings in our practice. That theoretical description does not pay heed to the location and interests of the speaker is just right. It does not mean that values, use, and intentionality exist only in some rival to what theoretical language describes. Nor does it mean that the theoretical description is factually incomplete; it means that theoretical language has a limited use. Its resources are not sufficient for ordinary discourse, not even for applied science; but they are not meant to be.

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12. Theory-laden Discourse Now let me admit to one genuine source of conflict engendered by scientific theory change. It is true that language is always theory-infected, loaded with assumptions of all sorts. Consequently, when a new scientific theory comes along, contradicting older such theories and also common assumptions, it pulls the rug from under the way we speak. First it cleanses and then it infects our language in its turn ... Metaphors aside, this is surely so, since some new words are brought to birth in the laboratory, theoretical monograph, and patent office. Let us, for simplicity, imagine that the radio was patented by Edison, and that the patent description is in terms of vibratory wave-like motions in the aether. This is where the new word "radio" received its meaning. A device is a radio if and only if it satisfies that description. Today's science says that the aether does not exist. So, anyone who believes current (1995) science and claims to have a radio is contradicting himself~right? Well, language is a little more complicated than that. Language is more like a wily, survival-adaptive animal than like a machine. The word "radio" left the patent office, forgot its theoretical origin~or was adopted by a society happily oblivious of those theories~and continued to flourish well after its original meaning turned out to exclude everything from its extension. As soon as the word "radio" became common coin, the criteria for application in common use were relaxed~and those relaxed criteria obviously had priority, they alone seemed to matter when the "defining" theory was given up. Dictionaries are updated; patent law too is flexible. How the judge would laugh if lawyers tried to argue infringement of patents on such a theoretical basis! [14] I chose this example only partly to show that there is real conflict here. Such a case as this is in fact a prime example of how ordinary language can become theory-laden. At the same time, it shows how needlessly overblown is the dichotomy of Manifest and Scientific Image. It is true that assumptions and theories get 'embodied' in our language, that there are theoretical presuppositions of applicability even for very common nouns. But this is not a clash between ordinary and scientific thinking. It is a type of clash to be expected equally within Sellars' and Churchland's ideal scientific speaker community of the future, as well as within the most illiterate pre-scientific society. Behind many puzzles over the clash of appearance and scientific description lies the conviction that communication is impossible or seriously hampered if conducted in a language laden with a false theory, or

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with a theory not believed to be true. In the original sense, there are no radios; but no one noticed. So if one person used "radio" in an attempt to refer to a real thing, other people, relying on the same false beliefs, took him to refer to exactly the thing he meant. But furthermore, when they all realized that there were no radios in that sense-and perhaps had as yet no new, accepted theory to replace the original definition-they kept using that same word to refer to real things and kept communicating successfully. The adjustment was, at least, pro tern, a small bit of semantic ascent. For if someone said "radio" everyone took him to refer to those things which were classified as radios under the now rejected theory. There is therefore no difficulty in principle in simultaneously saying that you doubt the existence of the aether, electromagnetic waves, electrons, etc. and describing the objects around you as radios, VHF receivers, computers, electric lights, and so forth. A good theory of language must be in accord with this, and shed some light on this. 13. The Spirit of Gravity Versus the Unbearable Lightness

What a state of affairs we are in! Doesn't it cry out for metaphysical labor? At such moments as these, when the language in use is laden with doubted theories, discredited old assumptions, and already given up beliefs, we do not have a coherent opinion at all. Common sense has become a hodge-podge, laden with ontologies that fit only long discarded scientific views, hobbling along on make-shift metaphor and hastily carpentered crutches. Metaphysicians must set to work and show us how to cleanse, regiment, and elaborate a new system of beliefs, together with a language laden at most with the stablest of those beliefs. We need a coherent ontology, fit for science and accommodating common sense, a world view in which we can rest in peace. Do you agree? I do not. There is clearly a lot to be said for straightening out our concepts 'locally'-for example, those involved in our beliefs about the pens, pencils, and writing paper we use every day, the roads we walk, the rocks we climb-to the extent appropriate to our immediate goals [15] [16]. The question is: are we in poor condition if we do not do so 'globally'? That is, if we do not achieve unlimited cleansing of our language-the entire description of nature and our own place in it-from presuppositions that we do not fully believe. What could be the argument to the effect that, prior to success in such a far-reaching enterprise, we are in poor condition? One premise might be that local efforts of the same sort cannot yield a coherent view if made within an overall defective context. But that, I think, is false. We live in that conceptual quicksand-morass if you like-we dance on that sort

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of tightrope fastened to highly suspect supports, we do build on sand, and look! we function perfectly well! A second premise might be that it is possible to succeed in that global enterprise, and that it is a project worthy of one created only a little less than the angels. (A work worthy of a man, as one might have said only a generation or so ago.) But here I beg to differ. Not only does it seem clear, from the actual structure of our existence, that we flourish while lacking any coherent world view. It seems equally clear that the proposed global representation of beliefs and cleansing of language is literally impossible [17]. LFrom this I draw uncompromisingly the consequence: clear thinking in local matters does not require that we have, either actually or potentially a global conceptual scheme, metaphysical system, or world view. A task more worthy of philosophy than the spinning out of such systems is trying to understand how this can be. That is the task of defeating a Spectre which claims the consequent utter meaninglessness of all thought. It is the problem all of us have, being post-foundationalist, post-modern: to describe ourselves without resorting to or falling into what Kant called the illusions of Reason. Where exactly does Aristotle describe walking? If I remember it right, he says that we keep our center of gravity over one foot while moving the other to a secure place, and then shift our mass. This would indeed be prudent! But it describes a sort of goose-step, not our real walking which is a continuous falling forward, a slow version of a headlong run, trusting ourselves to fortune. Learning to walk is learning to fall. Bas C. van Fmassen Department of Philosophy Princeton University Princeton, New Jersey, USA ENDNOTES

[1] This paper was presented as part of the James B. and Grace J. Nelson Lectures, University of Michigan (Oct. 1994), and of the Kant Lectures, Stanford University (Apr. 1995) as well as at the Einstein meets Magritte Conference (Brussels, May 1995). For earlier thoughts on this subject, see my "On the Radical Incompleteness of the Manifest Image", PSA 1976, vol. 2 (East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, 1977), pp. 335-343 and "Critical Study of Paul Churchland, Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind", Canadian Journal of Philosopy, 11, (1981), pp. 555-567. I would like to thank Prof. J. van Brakel for helpful comments and discussion; his "Empiricism and the Manifest Image" (ms.

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1995) includes a response to my view as well as to an extensive ambient literature (see further note [9] below). [2] The recent popularity of such terminology, however, appears to begin with Hertz in the late nineteenth century. [3] "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man", chapter 1 in Sellars, W., Science, Perception, and Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), p. 5. [4] The reader may suspect that there is not such a great difference between the two classes which I'm calling the 'systematizers' and the 'metaphysicians'. My nomenclature tries to follow Sellars' typology here, and we'll have to see whether it is well based. [5] See "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man", section V, p. 26ff (especially p. 29). [6] See "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man", p. 26, which is however just one of the places where this example appears. See also for example the section "A Pink Ice Cube" in Lecture 2 of Amaral, Pedro, The Metaphysics of Epistemology: Lectures by Wilfrid Sellars (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Pub. Co., 1989), and section V of "Scientific Realism or Irenic Instrumentalism", Cohen, R.S. and Wartowsky, M. (eds.), Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. II (New York: 1965). [7] There was just one voice in the wilderness: Berkeley arguing that the primary qualities were not originally any better off than the secondary ones. I do not want to examine his argument here, but I will state in contemporary terms what I take to be his conclusion: the privileging of primary qualities and their geometric representation was an act akin to pure postulation, an assertion that a certain created representation is perfectly adequate, which gave the primary qualities their privileged status. Compare Husserl, E., The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (tr. D. Carr; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), Part II sect. 9 "Galileo's mathematization of nature" (espec. pp. 23-41) and Appendix B II "Idealization and the science of reality-mathematization of nature" (espec. pp. 309-310). [8] Birkhoff, G. and von Neumann, J., "The logic of quantum mechanics", Annals of Mathematics, 37, 1936, pp. 823-843. [9] Compare here Sellars and van Brakel on the manifest/scientific image dichotomy: van Brakel does not conflate the manifest image in the sense of how things seem to us ordinarily with the postulationally constructed world of the perennial philosophy, as Sellars does. See especially van Brakel J., "Natural kinds and manifest forms of life", Dialectica, 46, 1992, pp. 243-263; "Interdiscourse on supervenience relations: the priority of the manifest image" , Synthese, forthcoming; "Empiricism and the

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Manifest Image", ms. 1995. [10] I cannot except phenomenology from this charge; Husserl urged us to go back to the things themselves in phenomenological analysis, but his Platonism was crucial involved in shaping that analysis. [11] The sense of "reducible" can in fact not be too strict; it does not mean that the old excluded descriptions will turn out to be logically deducible from the new scientific descriptions. Both Feyerabend and Kuhn's more realistic description of what has been touted as reduction in the sciences, and leger-de-main with such ideas as supervenience, functionalism, the intentional stance, or instrumentalism, give us clues as to 'acceptable' weakening of the claim. [12] Cartwright, Nancy, "Fundamentalism vs. the patchwork of laws", ms. 1995. [13] The example, and the point, is not my own: see Heidegger, M., History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (tr. T. Kisiel, Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1985), Ch. 2 sect. 5.c.a, p. 38. [14] Compare Feyerabend's distinction between the characteristic and interpretation of a language in Ch. 2 of his Realism, Rationalism, and Scientific Method (Philosophical Papers vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). It does not seem to me, however, that we can rest easy with his discussion. There is not enough to really speak of a theory, only a sketch for a theory. [15] I do take it, contrary to some epistemologists, that the very point of forming a set of full beliefs (on whatever subject) is to have a single (therefore consistent, coherent) view (of that subject). But we do so on specific subjects, confronted as they come, related to "live" problemsfor-us, in ways suited to exactly those problems. [16] The preceding few sentences earned me some laughs at the Einstein meets Magritte Conference, where I delivered this paper on crutches, after a rock-climbing fall. [17] Again: contrasted with 'local' reconstructions, whether of large parts of our past or small parts of our present-such as logical reconstructions of classical physics or of population genetics.

BARBARA HERRNSTEIN SMITH

MICRODYNAMICS OF INCOMMENSURABILITY: PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE MEETS SCIENCE STUDIES If the theme of this volume- "Einstein meets Magritte"-evokes the possibility of an intersection or convergence of ideas between parties who never meet empirically, then the topic of the present essay can be seen as the reverse: that is, the possibility of a failure of convergence, intersection, or even engagement of ideas between parties who not only encounter each other in empirical space but repeatedly converse there. It is the structure and dynamics of such failed meetings, especially as they occur between traditional philosophers of science and theorists, historians, and sociologists working in the relatively new field of "science studies," that I mean primarily to explore here. I am also concerned, however, with the more general theme and issue of in/commensurability, which figures centrally and by no means incidentally in the debates that divide them. The question is whether, as traditionally maintained, rival theories are always ultimately measurable against a common standard of truth so that, at least in principle, their divergent claims may be compared and the superior ones chosen accordingly; or, as argued by a number of philosophers and historians of science, there may be conditions under which supposedly conflicting theories cannot be measured or compared that way: when, for example, they assume radically divergent but (arguably) equally credible conceptions of the universe, or, as in the case of these epistemological debates themselves, when part of what divides the parties is how to conceive the standards (truth, rationality, evidence, and so forth) by which the merits of their divergent theories could be measured-if, indeed, merits, measurements, or even choices, as classically conceived, are relevant to the outcomes of such conflicts, if, indeed, those divergences need be seen as conflicts. As this latter example suggests, the situation that concerns us here has a distinctly reflexive quality: that is, certainly evidently rival views of knowledge and science differ on, among other things, how to describe, explain, compare, and assess rival views. The reduplicative-echoing, mirroring-structure of this situation is intriguing and, I think, instructive. For it indicates the order of perplexity involved in these encounters and failed engagements, and also raises the more general question-very general, I would say, with ethical and political resonances as well as extensive theoretical implications-of how to understand the cognitive 53 © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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intractability (or, as it may be seen, blindness, stubbornness, and folly) of those who disagree with us. In exploring these questions here, I focus on the epistemological debate as played out in the pages of a recently published book by the Anglo-American philosopher of science, Philip KitcheL In a move quite familiar in these debates, Kitcher seeks, in the name of a "middle way" between two allegedly "extreme" positions-one a familiar and more or less established account, the other a relatively novel and currently controversial alternative-to redeem precisely the former: in this case, the set of interrelated ideas about science shared over the past century or so by most academic philosophers, many scientists, and much of the educated lay public [1]. It is this set of familiar ideas, currently challenged in a number of quarters, that Kitcher alludes to in the subtitle of his book as "Legend;" [2] and, indeed, he does display a certain ambivalence or affectionate irony toward some of its hoarier features. Nevertheless, his clear and intermittently explicit aim is to rehabilitate and ultimately to reaffirm it in all its crucial elements. Citing the "old-fashioned virtues" of the "broadly realist" conception of science he defends, Kitcher rehearses those elements as follows: "scientists find out things about a world that is independent of human cognition; they advance true statements, use concepts that conform to natural divisions, [and] develop schemata that capture objective dependencies" (127). His defense of this set of ideas could claim its own virtues as well. Unlike other defenders of besieged orthodoxy who snipe and snort at often unnamed, commonly unquoted, and largely unread "postmodernists," Kitcher identifies his adversaries explicitly, quotes from their texts directly, gives evidence of having read them in some sense carefully, and frames his objections politely and painstakingly. Moreover, he sets forth his own views of science through patient rehearsals of standard arguments, detailed reconstructions of classic cases in the history of science, elaborate analogies and thought experiments, and established models drawn from other fields, including economics and evolutionary biology. These are substantial virtues from most perspectives and, in Kitcher's own understanding of intellectual history, decisive ones. That is, they embody and exhibit what he sees as the processes and strategies that distinguish well-designed and properly activated cognitive propensities from dysfunctional or improperly activated ones and which, accordingly, yield propositions likely to prove true rather than false (178-218). Given the epistemic criteria that Kitcher promotes and seeks to satisfy in his book and the cognitive procedures he describes and seeks to exemplify there, The Advancement of Science should carry the day in competition

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with the more skeptical, revisionist accounts of science he seeks to refute. And, indeed, as indicated by appreciative reviews in The New York Times and elsewhere, it does carry the day for a number of readers~ especially, it appears, those who already grant the decisive authority of those epistemic criteria and the propriety of those pointedly rational procedures [3]. As indicated, however, by more critical reviews in other journals, it does not carry the day for all its readers, especially not, it appears, those already persuaded (or, as it may be seen, seduced or deluded) by more skeptical revisionist accounts [4]. This divergence of critical judgments regarding the success of Kitcher's efforts could be explained in various ways, but the explanations of that divergence would probably themselves diverge in more or less strict accord with the tenor of those judgments. This familiar self-doubling, self-confirming regress of judgment and justification recalls the reflexive echo I noted a moment ago in traditional and revisionist views of the commensurability of traditional and revisionist views. It thereby exemplifies as well the more general structure of cognitive and rhetorical circularity which, I shall be suggesting, is a crucial feature of the dynamics that concern us here. 1. CONSTRUCTING CONSTRUCTIVISM

Among the critiques of, and alternatives to, traditional realist/rationalist philosophy of science that Kitcher seeks to defuse or rebut, some are clearly more provocative for him than others. Thus, while he takes issue on some points with other philosophers [5], he is most seriously exercised by the ideas of a particular group of historians and sociologists of science, many of whom are institutionally as well as intellectually inter-affiliated and a number of whom, not insignificantly here, have been Kitcher's colleagues at the University of California in San Diego. The general group includes Barry Barnes and David Bloor, founders of the "strong programme" in the sociology of science at Edinburgh; their British and American associates, Simon Schaffer, Andrew Pickering, Steven Woolgar, and Steven Shapin (the latter now also at San Diego); and, perhaps preeminently, Bruno Latour, the classification-resistant anthropologist, sociologist, and theorist-at-Iarge from Paris who was, for a time, also Kitcher's colleague in California. I'll return below to the significance of these institutional overlaps and intersections, but my interest for the moment is the structure of Kitcher's engagements~or, rather, non-engagements~with the ideas of the group just mentioned. The question that Kitcher himself sees as most fundamental is whether, in the last analysis, the propositions of science reflect, as he puts it, "stimuli from external asocial nature" (166) or, as some revisionists

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seem to claim, they are the product of something else distinctly social and verbal, such as "social forces," "conversations with peers" (162), or "remarks made by teachers, friends, colleagues, and adversaries" (164). The crucial issue, he writes, is "the constraining power of ... nature" (166): whether or not, "given the actual social structures present in scientific communities, the input from asocial nature is sufficiently strong to keep consensus practice [i.e., the generation of scientific truth or knowledge as such] on track" (165). The alternatives posed by Kitcher's formulations here-i.e., asocial nature versus mere social exchanges, empirical observations versus mere conversation, and the inexorable movement towards truth versus the deflecting pressure of mere exterior forces-are certainly familiar, and so is the structure of distinction and opposition through which he frames them. There is some question, however, as to whether, as he maintains, the crucial issue is the choice between that set of alternatives or, as his adversaries would see it, the coherence of just that notion of choice, of just that set of alternatives, and of the entire system of concepts and conceptual routines marked out by just such familiar but, in their view, dubious distinctions and oppositions. In a revealing footnote, Kitcher declares himself baffled by Latour's rejection of both "nature" and "society" as explanatory concepts in the history and sociology of science [6]. "I find myself," Kitcher writes, "quite at a loss in understanding what resources are left for understanding the genesis and modification of scientific cognitive states" (166, n. 52). The sense of perplexity he expresses here-the feeling that something obvious and necessary has been arbitrarily removed, a conceptual space suddenly evacuated, an indispensable resource inexplicably annihilated-is a recurrent and perhaps inevitable result of a collision of ideas of this kind and order. Read from a post-Legendary perspective, Latour does not, of course, reject Nature or Society per se. Rather, he exposes the instability of the classic dualism that defines and constitutes each of these concepts by mutual contradistinction-or, to put it another way, what he rejects is just the idea of their per-se-ness. Similarly (and contrary to common charges), Latour and other revisionists do not reject Reason or Rationality per se. What they reject, rather, is the conception of reason as a distinct, ortho-tropic process that can be separated from-or ideally, as in science, purified of-the supposed pressures and distortions of such supposedly exterior forces as the reasoner's individual embodiment, immediate situation, prior intellectual investments, and ongoing verbal interactions. It is clear that part of the difficulty here-as elsewhere in current epistemological controversies-is a crucial divergence of conceptions of concepts, especially with regard to their relation to language. For

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Latour and a number of other epistemological revisionists-or, as they are sometimes called in this respect, "constructivists" -all the classic concepts in play in these debates (concepts such as "nature," "reason," "reality," and "knowledge") are understood and treated as, precisely, constructs: that is, as variable discursive and conceptual products of our ongoing interactions with the physical, cultural, and verbal worlds in which we live and act. For Kitcher and most traditional realists, however, those classic concepts are understood and treated as autonomous entities: that is, as the ontologically prior and independently determinate "referents," as it is said, of the words that merely name them [7]. Other important differences of conceptualization are closely related to this one. For example, Kitcher sees what he calls "the effects of nature" as exclusively unidirectional-informational "inputs," as he also calls them-and, in relation to the formation of scientific knowledge, as necessarily prior and causal. For Latour and other constructivists, however, the effects of nature are, precisely, effects: that is, relatively stable configurations of beliefs about the domains in which we live and act that are produced and maintained through the ongoing reciprocal coordination of our verbal, manipulative, and other practices. Reciprocal coordination is the key idea here: not social interaction or discourse alone, and not social interaction or discourse simply added to empirical evidence as the latter idea is classically understood, but a complex interactive process that is simultaneously dynamic, productive, and self-stabilizing. I shall have more to say about this process below. What is significant for the moment is that the sources of Kitcher's bafflement appear to be more complex than he recognizes, and that they reflect a divergence of ideas more radical than he might be willing to grant as possible. But this, of course, is just the issue of incommensurability. A more general set of observations may be offered at this point. What sustains the recurrent impasses in these and related theoretical controversies are not, I think, just differences, as it is sometimes said, of "vocabulary," or conflicts between limited sets of already charted "positions," but, rather, systematically interrelated divergences of conceptualization that emerge at every level and operate across an entire intellectual domain. The exasperation and sense of intellectual (and sometimes moral) outrage that often attends these failed exchanges can be understood accordingly. Various scholars-historians and sociologists of science, epistemological theorists in related fields, and a number of philosophers as well-have, by one route or another, come to operate conceptually and to interact discursively with their professional and intellectual associates through currently heterodox conceptual idioms. For these scholars, the terms, concepts, and distinctions of traditional epistemology and phi-

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losophy of science are no longer either workable or, for the most part, necessary in conducting their professional and intellectual lives. For that reason, they find it usually difficult and sometimes (given the limits of mortal beings) impossible to answer theoretical arguments framed in the traditional terms or appealing to the traditional distinctions and oppositions-impossible, at least, to answer them in ways that anybody finds gratifying or dignified. Conversely, traditionalist philosophers of science are, by definition, trained in, committed to, and in a sense intellectually and professionally constituted by, a particular theoretical orthodoxy. Accordingly, they operate quite well with the traditional concepts, terms, and distinctions-at least within the orbits of the principal domains of their intellectual lives. And also accordingly, they are likely to find the critiques and alternatives elaborated by their heterodox colleagues absurd, arbitrary, and nihilistic: unmotivated rejections of what is commonsensical, solid, and well-established; irresponsible fiatteningsout of what must be, and has been, carefully distinguished; reckless abandonments of what is most desirable and indispensable. Given the matched and mirrored difficulties just described, it is not surprising that the misconnections in these exchanges are sometimes spectacular. A more extended example is Kitcher's reading and discussion of Latour and Woolgar's book, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, which is an ethnographic study of the day-to-day doings-technical experiments, casual conversations, formal meetings, preparations of scientific articles, and so forth-of a group of scientists in a particular laboratory at the Salk Institute. Explaining an important feature of their own work, Latour and Woolgar observe at one point, "We do not use the notion of reality to account for the stabilisation of a [scientific] statement ... because this reality is formed as a consequence of this stabilisation" [8]. Kitcher cites the remark as evidence of Latour and Woolgar's commitment to the "extreme view that inputs from nature are impotent" (164) or, as he also paraphrases that supposed view, that scientific statements are the product only of the "social arrangement" of a particular laboratory (167) and that "acceptance of [such] statements as firm parts of consensus practice [i.e., of scientific knowledge] is to be explained in a ... fashion that makes no reference to the constraining power of stimuli from external, asocial nature" (165-166). The authors of Laboratory Life, Kitcher writes, want us to understand that "the encounters with nature that occurred during the genesis of [the scientists'] belief about TRF [the substance ultimately identified as a particular chemical compound] played no role" in the formation of that belief. In short, he concludes, in apparently aghast italics: "However those encounters had turned out the end result would have been the same" (166).

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It could be argued, however, that, contrary to Kitcher's interpretation of it, the point of the scandalizing observation he cites from Latour and Woolgar is not that nature is impotent or that reality is infinitely socially malleable, but that to appeal to what the scientific community now accepts as an established fact in order to explain how that fact came to be established is to explain nothing at all: it is only to tell again the familiar (Legendary) story of scientific manifest destiny-that is, the story of how the truth always comes out in the end. But that story, of course, is exactly what Kitcher himself affirms and seeks most strenuously to defend [9]. Latour and Woolgar's forbearance from present-privileging assumptions is a significant methodological feature of Edinburgh-tutored sociology of science and constructivist science studies more generally. To Kitcher, however, that forbearance looks like gratuitous skepticism: an unnecessary and irrational refusal to credit the truth of established scientific knowledge (188). It is one of the ironies of the present scene of controversy that just this scrupulous self-skepticism on the part of constructivists-or what mutatis mutandis could be called, in the classic idiom, their "striving for impartiality and objectivity" -is routinely indicted by defenders of traditional realist epistemology as evidence of their reprehensible "relativism." Kitcher is persuaded by his own perception, interpretation, and report of Latour and Woolgar's ideas that those ideas are absurd. What is significant here is not simply that he misunderstands and misrepresents them but that, given his paraphrases of their specific claims and arguments in the idiom of his own intellectual tradition and disciplinary culture, he could hardly avoid doing so [10]. Throughout his book, Kitcher employs the idiom of realist/rationalist epistemology-"inputs from asocial nature," reconstructed "reasoning processes," "the constraining power of stimuli" versus "social forces," and so forth-as if its lexicon and syntax (terms, concepts, distinctions, oppositions, and so forth) were altogether unproblematic and, indeed, as if it was the inevitable language of serious thought on questions of knowledge and science. Relevantly enough, he observes good-naturedly at one point that "few are born antirealists," that such ideas, strongly counter-intuitive as Kitcher himself experiences them, can only be the result of a certain line of argument being "thrust upon them" (131). But, of course, few-or none-are born realist/rationalist epistemologists either, however intuitively natural and inevitable that line of argument feels to those who argue it. Kitcher finds the accounts of science and knowledge offered by constructivist social scientists absurd. He is perplexed, however, not only by the accounts themselves but also by the fact that they are advanced by people he has reason to think are intellectually competent and in-

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deed highly accomplished: several of them, we recall, including Latour and Shapin, have been his colleagues. Accordingly, he ventures a number of explanations for this curious situation. For example, he suggests at one point (perhaps humorously) that Latour's rejection of not only Nature (which might have been expected of a sociologist) but also of Society reflects an "admirable" but clearly misplaced fondness for "formal symmetry" (166, n. 52). Or, he remarks at another point, the socialpolitical account of the ascendancy of the experimental method offered by Shapin and Schaffer in their study, Leviathan and the Air Pump [11], derives from those authors' exaggerated sense of the significance of the theory-ladenness of observation [12]. The latter suggestion bears some scrutiny for, from a constructivist perspective, the significance of theoryladenness in intellectual history can hardly be exaggerated. Moreover, the phenomenon itself appears deeply implicated in the misconnections that concern us here. Both points are vividly illustrated in Kitcher's own reading of the work in question. Shapin and Schaffer seek to demonstrate in Leviathan and the A irPump that concerns about the political authority of citizens and sovereigns in seventeenth-century England helped shape the contemporary controversy between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle over the epistemic authority of experimentation versus deduction; and, more significantly and controversially, they suggest that the considerations involved in the political debate were important in determining the outcome of the intellectual debate. Commenting on their analysis, Kitcher writes: "Because [Shapin and Schaffer] are so convinced of the power of underdetermination arguments" (another way of stating the idea of theoryladenness[13]), they fail to focus on "the gritty details of the encounters with nature" and "the complexities of the reasoning about a large mass of observations and experiments" -details and complexities, he suggests, that would, if focused on with "extrem[e] car[e]," turn out to have been decisive in Boyle's victory (169, n. 55). As Kitcher acknowledges, he has not himself undertaken this purely hypothetical observation of those purely hypothetical gritty details and complexities of reasoning. Nor, it appears, has anyone else. Nevertheless, so laden is he, so to speak, with his theory of the minor significance of theory-Iadenness and the decisive significance of "encounters with nature" and proper "reasonings" that he is prepared to affirm that, "when that is done," Shapin and Schaffer's "thesis becomes implausible" (ibid.) and his own view of the history of science is vindicated. The degree of unabashable conviction displayed in this argument is remarkable, but more significant here is the self-affirming circularity through which it operates. The cognitive process exemplified by Kitcher's

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resilience in the face of contrary argument and, arguably, contrary evidence is sometimes called the theory-ladenness of observation, sometimes the underdetermination of theory by fact, sometimes the hermeneutic circle, and sometimes the reciprocal determination of perception, belief, and behavior. That process or tendency-I have discussed it elsewhere as "cognitive conservatism" -is, I believe, crucial to the dynamics not only of all theoretical controversy but of all theory, which is to say, all knowledge and cognition at both the micro and macro level [14]. I return to all these points below. 2. RECIP RO CAL COO RDI NATES A/SYMMETRICAL ALTERNATIVES

In setting forth his own views of how to understand the history of science, Kitcher stresses that science is a definitively epistemic enterprise, with the single, uniform, and unchanging goal ("independent of field and time," he writes) of "attain[ing] significant truth" -which he explains as "charting divisions and recognizing explanatory dependencies in nature" (157). Accordingly, he pays little attention to the historical and ongoing development of laboratory tools, skills, and techniques or to the historical and ongoing emergence of technological applications-all of which he evidently sees as incidental to the macrodynamics of science (or, in his teleological view of those dynamics, to its "advancement") and as irrelevant to the central goal of the philosophy of science, which is, in his view, the reconstruction of the reasoning processes of winning arguments [15]. Kitcher's views and practices in these respects have important consequences both for his understanding of revisionist science studies and also for his rejection of them. First, because laboratory techniques, technological applications, and other so-called "non-cognitive" matters are bracketed out in his own conception of science, Kitcher is not disposed to recognize their role in the alternative accounts developed by revisionist historians and sociologists. Thus he seems not to have noticed the important idea, associated with the more recent work of Latour, Pickering, Michel Callon, and others, of the complex relations between laboratory routines, technological extensions, and the formation of scientific statements themselves-all of which are seen in their work as reciprocally motivating, reciprocally determining, and (in Pickering's terms) mutually stabilizing, practices [16]. In other words, the dynamics of science are understood in these accounts as neither the dis-covering (removing the covers from) a prior, autonomous truth nor the fabrication (making up whole-cloth) of a sheer collective fantasy but, rather, as the ongoing coordination (weaving together) of

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observation, theory-formation, and material manipulation, each of these being continuously adjusted in relation to the others. Thus, details of theory are adjusted to details of technical manipulation and consequent observation; focal points of observation are adjusted to extensions of both technological and theoretical application; material manipulations and details of theory are adjusted to emergent observations; and so on, around again [17]. The situation of operative conceptual, discursive, and pragmatic stability that emerges from these kinds of ongoing reciprocal coordination is what we often call, in relation to the practices of science, truth. In relation to activities of individual cognition or belief-formation, the corresponding situation of operative stability is what we usually call knowledge [18]. And, in relation to what can be seen as cognition in its broadest sensethat is, an organism's self-maintaining coordination with the domain of its operations [19]-the corresponding situation is often called adaptation or biological fitness. Of course, "truth" is commonly attributed not to sets of interactive practices but just to statements. And "knowledge" is commonly seen not as the state of a global organic system but as a specifically mental state. And "fitness" is treated often enough (as we will see in a moment) not as a phenomenological feature of the ongoing interactions of organisms with their environments but as an inherent property of organisms themselves. In each case, what could be seen as the name we give to the state of a dynamic system as viewed from a particular perspective is classically or commonly seen as an objective property of a logically and/or ontologically prior, autonomous, entity. The alternative and perhaps rival conceptualizations of truth, knowledge, and fitness outlined above are commonly framed asymmetrically by the parties on both sides as "Our" enlightened truth versus "Their" error or illusion. But the alternatives could also be framed symmetrically on both sides as reflections of Our-and-Their differences of conceptual style and cognitive taste, those differences of style and taste themselves being seen as products of Our-and-Their more or less extensive differences of individual temperament and intellectual history as played out within more or less different disciplinary cultures and sustained under more or less different epistemic conditions. Of course, these alternative and perhaps rival ways of describing and explaining alternative conceptualizations (either symmetrically or asymmetrically) could themselves be described and explained either asymmetrically or symmetrically: either as (for example) Their hopelessly old-fashioned asymmetrical realist dogma versus Our genuinely enlightened symmetrical constructivist revelations or (reversing the perspective) as Their trendy, dangerous relativism versus Our established, crucially necessary, nor-

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mative epistemology-or, again, as differences between Our-and-Their diversely shaped and situated conceptual styles and cognitive tastes. Thus the linked epistemological issues of-and commonly matched positions on-explanatory aj symmetry and evaluative inj commensurability could reduplicate themselves ad infinitum, at least theoretically. It is worth stressing, however, that they need not-and perhaps never cando so in practice. Indeed, it appears that a taste for and commitment to unbroken epistemic symmetry ("relativism" in that sense) on the part of constructivist epistemologists may-and perhaps inevitably does-lapse (or rise) at certain psychologically or rhetorically significant points into a taste for asymmetry and an exhibition of unapologetic epistemic self-privileging. Thus, for example, Latour, distancing himself from an "absolute relativism" that he attributes to some of his science-studies associates, stresses that the theoretically presumptive epistemic symmetry (or potentially equal credibility) ofrival scientific (or other) accounts is continuously broken by, in effect, history and politics: that is, by the fact that, under the prevailing relevant conditions (institutional, intellectual, and so forth), one particular account will be more credible to the relevant populations because it operates with an efficacy that is more powerful and extensive than that of its rivals. And, he suggests, the recognition of this historical and pragmatic asymmetry constitutes, in effect, a more enlightened relativism [20]. Since, as Latour would no doubt grant, the superior efficacy of an account can only be determined after the fact, it might be objected that he is, at the least, premature and perhaps logically inconsistent in maintaining the (presumably ultimate) epistemic superiority of his own (relative) relativism. It might be replied, however, that the rhetorical energy and power that his own account secures at the expense of modesty and consistency may turn out, in the long run, to be what makes it more effective-and credible-than the accounts of his rivals, sociological as well as philosophical. 3. AM B IV ALENT PRO C ES S ES, NORM A TIVE MI S S 10 NS

To return, however, to Kitcher's state of conviction. It appears that, precisely because revisionist accounts of the reciprocal determination of conceptual and material practices in the history of science do not conform to his preferred conception of science as unidirectional progress toward propositional truth, many of the substantive features of those accounts seem to be, in effect, invisible to him. These include, significantly enough, "gritty details" (such as laboratory manipulations, technological extensions, and the effects of material tools and physical skills) that

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are quite at odds with the all-in-the head, nothing-but-Ianguage, meresocial-forces caricatures of constructivist accounts that alarm traditionalists and are staples of current backlash publications. Because those features of revisionist science studies are invisible to Kitcher, however, they cannot affect either his conception of science or his understanding and evaluation of the revisionist accounts. The negative route to self-confirming coherence and cognitive immobility just indicated in Kitcher's reading practices-where prior theoretical commitment leads to conceptual bracketing-out, which leads to selective perception, which leads to sustained theoretical commitment, and so on around again-is, of course, just the other side of the cognitive mechanism referred to above as the hermeneutic circle, the theory-Iadenness of observation, and the reciprocal determination of perception, belief, and behavior. But here we have a very curious and instructive situation. For, as already suggested, the self-securing circularity by which that unhappy-logically objectionable, psychologically embarrassing, cognitively confining-mechanism operates could be seen as duplicating, at the level of individual cognition, the complex processes of reciprocal determination or mutual stabilization that are, according to revisionist science studies, central to the dynamics of scientific practice, and, according to revisionist theoretical biology, central to the dynamics of all living systems. What I would emphasize here is not only the evident importance of circularity to everything we call cognition, but also the evidently irreducible ambivalence of all the relevant mechanisms or processes, where what is most problematic (circular, self-immuring) duplicates what is most essential (coherence-maintaining, life-sustaining), and what appears positive from one perspective or at one level of analysis appears negative from another perspective or at another level of analysis-or, in other words, where it is difficult to say, simply or finally, what's good and what's bad. But this brings us back again to Kitcher's book, one of the major goals of which is to affirm both the normative mission of traditional philosophy of science-that is, precisely its effort and claim to say what's good and what's bad, to distinguish genuine science from pseudoscience and right thinking from wrong thinking-and its related "meliorative" project: that is, as Kitcher explains, "the delineation of formal rules, principles, and ... informal canons of reasoning, [which,] when supplemented by an appropriate educational regime, can ... make people more likely to activate propensities and undergo processes that promote cognitive progress" (186). Kitcher defends the normative ambitions of philosophy of science by way of a parallel to evolutionary biology-under, it must be added, the

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strongly progressivist and heavily adaptationist interpretation of evolution favored by most realist epistemologists [21]. "Darwinians," he writes, "want not only to claim that successful organisms are those that leave descendents, but also to investigate those characteristics that promote reproductive success" (155-56); and, analogously, he claims, philosophers of science, reviewing the historical fortunes of various competing scientific theories, want to identify what it is that "confers explanatory and predictive success" on those that succeed (156-57). The answer to that question, he observes, is clear to the realist: just as certain organisms succeed because they are adapted to their environments, certain theories in science succeed "because they fasten on aspects of reality" (156), which is to say, because they are true [22]. These parallels between traditional normative philosophy of science and evolutionary biology are, Kitcher remarks, "thoroughly Darwinian," the emphasis being required, perhaps, because significantly different interpretations of evolutionary theory could be offered and, as he acknowledges, significantly different analogies (and lessons) have in fact been drawn. It could be observed, for example, that, since the biological fitness of an organism can be specified only in relation to a particular, contingent, environmental situation, the idea of general "sources of fitness" makes little sense, and the search for inherent traits that "endow [organisms] with high Darwinian fitness" or "dispose them to survive" (156) is pointless-and, analogously, that we are no more able to devise a method for distinguishing or producing "cognitively progressive" or inherently more-likely-to-be-true beliefs than for distinguishing or producing inherently more-likely-to-be-fit organisms ... or people. Indeed, if Darwinian "fitness" is taken as a metaphor of truth, then the meliorative project of traditional epistemology would have to be seen as the eugenics of philosophy. 4. COG NIT I V E RIG H T SAN D W RON G S

We may turn now to how, in fact, right and wrong thinking are separated in Kitcher's account of rationality. Insisting, as always, on the supposedly "relativism" -dashing availability of objective criteria for the assessment of cognitive activities and products, he writes: People can make cognitive mistakes; perceiving badly, inferring hastily, failing to act to obtain inputs from nature that would guide them to improved cognitive states ... Some types of processes are conducive to cognitive progress; others are not (185-186). To illustrate the difference between these types, he contrasts the ("reconstructed") reasoning of Darwin and his followers with the cognitive in-

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transigence of nineteenth-century skeptics and present-day creationists. Reft.ecting on the latter and their current debate with Darwinians-a debate, it should be stressed, in which Kitcher himself has participated extensively [23]-he writes: The behavior of creation scientists indicates a kind of inft.exibility, deafness, or blindness. They make an objection to some facet of evolutionary biology. Darwin's defenders respond by suggesting that the objection is misformulated, that it does not attack what Darwinists claim, that it rests on false assumptions, or that it is logically fallacious. How do creation scientists reply? Typically, by reiterating the argument. Anyone who has followed exchanges in this controversy .. . sees that there is no adaptation to any of the principle criticisms .. . (195, italics in text). He means, of course, that there is no adaptation by creationists to the criticisms of their views by Darwinists such as himself [24]; but the "anyone" who sees this could not be quite anyone, since creationists could observe that, as far as adapting to criticism goes, Darwinists-blind, deaf, and inft.exible as anyone can see they are-have not budged an inch either. Kitcher explains the overt intransigence of creationists as signs of their underlying cognitive unwholesomeness. Creationists, however, could probably give a comparable array of reasons for their opponents' stubbornness in error: ignorance of the Bible, secular humanist prejudice, modern infatuation with evolutionary theory, plus, perhaps, certain sins of sloth and pride. My point here is not, of course, that the opinions of the Darwinists and the creationists regarding evolutionary theory are "equally valid" but that, for all the differences in their favored idioms and authorities, the explanation Kitcher offers for the cognitive intransigence of his long-time adversaries exhibits the same asymmetrical structure as their explanation for his, which is to say the same perhaps endemic tendency to absolute epistemic self-privileging [25]. Kitcher claims that the distinctions he draws between proper and improper activations of good and bad cognitive propensities are based on objective norms and criteria. There is reason to suspect, however, that here-as commonly elsewhere in the case of such objectivist claims-the judgments of goodness and badness, propriety and impropriety, preceded and were indeed presupposed by the framing of those norms and criteria. Latour remarks, in a passage that Kitcher quotes with some exasperation, that all efforts to separate rational and irrational belief are no more than "compliments or curses", saying nothing about the beliefs in question but "simply help [ing] people to further their arguments as swear words help workmen to push a heavy load, or as war cries help karate

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fighters intimidate their opponents" [26]. Kitcher objects that such remarks "disguise both the serious purpose and the genuine difficulties involved in appraisals of rationality" (185). But perhaps we have here just another (disguised) curse and compliment. For how, and from what presumptively objective perspective, can it be determined whether Latour is disguising a serious purpose and genuine difficulties or exposing an earnest but vacuous enterprise? 5. EP I STEM Ie A UTH 0 RITY, EPISTEMI e DOMAIN S

To draw together, now, a number of points touched on above. First, in connection with Kitcher's distinctly asymmetrical and often overtly self-privileging notions of mental fitness, we may recall that cognitive conservativism-the process or mechanism that produces what we call, under some conditions, circularity and stubbornness and, under other conditions, coherence and stability-is conceived here not as an inherent flaw in certain (other) people's cognitive design but as an endemic tendency or characteristic of human (and perhaps not only human) cognitive operations [27]. Indeed, it appears that hermeneutic circularity, the theory-ladenness of observation, and, more generally, the reciprocal determination of belief, perception, and behavior are crucial features of that complex set of cognitive processes that we call-depending on where we are standing and how we are cutting it-perception, reasoning, thinking, belief-formation, theory-formation, experiencing, responding, behaving, and living. The value-"fitness," "functionality," "progressiveness," "success" -of those processes cannot be indicated or characterized independent of the domains in which they are played out or the perspective from which their products (that is, particular beliefs and related behaviors) are being assessed. The cognitive processes that, on occasion, lead us (or is it only them?) astray and confine our thinking to circles of self-confirming self-affirmation appear to be the very same processes that give coherence to our individual beliefs, that sustain and stabilize all scientific knowledge as such, and that lead us to what we sometimes call truth [28]. Second, foregrounding the idea of cognitive or epistemic domainsthat is, the spaces or, one could say, niches-in which we play out our particular beliefs, we may recall here the institutional overlaps and interconnections that I noted above among the various participants in these controversies. What can be stressed now is that the academic and professional arenas in which the parties play out their more or less divergent ideas may themselves diverge or coincide to greater or lesser extents. Philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science, respectively, typi-

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cally belong to distinct disciplinary cultures, publish in different professional journals, and train different graduate students. In these respects, their epistemic domains are relatively discrete. At the same time, however, they may be located in the same universities, attend some of the same interdisciplinary conferences, teach some of the same undergraduate students, and write for some of the same general interest magazines. In these respects their epistemic domains will overlap and they-and their respective beliefs-will inevitably, and for better or worse, bump into each other. Where the domains in question are relatively discrete, as in the former cases, there is little occasion for the divergences of their beliefs to become conflicts, and their respective ideas and idioms can continue, so to speak, to live side by side. It is, of course, where those domains overlap or coincide that divergences of belief and conceptual idiom, and related differences of cognitive taste and disciplinary projects and practices, do become conflicts: exhibited, for example, in the debates I have examined here and, in some places, in active, sometimes bitter, rivalries for intellectual and institutional authority. Epistemic authority is involved in other ways as well in these quite general social and cognitive dynamics. Theoretical accounts that are more or less incompatible with what we already take for granted as obvious, selfevident, or unquestionable are likely to appear inadequate, incredible, or incoherent to us, and also, depending on our sense of the intellectual authority and sometimes other social characteristics of the people who offer them-for example, their institutional credentials, age, gender, or class [29]-as ignorant, silly, outlandish, wildly radical, or fraudulent. We may resist such alternative accounts even though they are presented with detailed arguments and evidence that other people seem to find coherent and compelling; for, of course, those other people may themselves, for that very reason, appear ignorant or intellectually inept to us and/or, depending again on our sense of them otherwise, as gullible, trendy, brain-washed, or ideologically motivated. The energy we devote to resisting such accounts will correspond, of course, to the general significance to us of the ideas with which they are in conflict. The form of that resistance, however, is likely to be shaped by the type and degree of our own intellectual authority in the relevant epistemic domains, and may range, accordingly, from perplexed and resentful withdrawal to elaborate condescension, detailed counter-argument, virulent attack, or attempted suppression. Since broader political resonances are inevitable here, a further general point can be added. In situations of intellectual rivalry, it sometimes happens that the only acceptable outcome for at least one of the parties is absolute epistemic supremacy: the claim is made, in other words,

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that there is but one truth, that the party in question is enlightened as to its true nature and proper pursuit, and that it is universally desirable that this be universally acknowledged. In such cases, any divergence of professed belief, conceptual idiom, or discursive practice in any domain whatsoever is seen as dangerous error requiring intervention and correction-or, in other words, as heresy. Accordingly, all intellectual divergence is seen as deviation, all deviation becomes conflict, and, for the party (or parties: it may be both) so disposed, all conflict becomes zero-sum rivalry, with winners properly taking all, and taking it for all time, and losers properly disappearing forever. Indeed, it is precisely when institutionalized systems of ideas and related conceptual idioms and discursive practices claim absolute epistemic supremacy-or, of course (though there is often no difference) , when they entail visions of universal political supremacy-that the Wars of Truth become duels to the not always figurative death. My description here is meant to be quite general, but it is not irrelevant that Legend insists on the unity not only of truth but also of epistemic domains. These indeed are its defining orthodoxies in relation to the contra-defining heresies of what it calls "relativism" and, accordingly, a major source of the resistance of traditionalists to the idea of incommensurability and to the related notion of multiple "worlds" -which could also be understood as multiple epistemic domains. 6. CON F LIe T, COM MEN SUR A T ION, T RAN S FOR MAT ION

Returning to the issue of incommensurability as framed at the beginning, we may ask where we stand at this point. Having lined up and compared these divergent accounts of science, are we prepared now to choose the better-that is, epistemically superior-one? From the perspective of the present analysis, the question is unanswerable and the choice irrelevant. This is not to say that we can not or should not assess different ideas, theories, or beliefs; on the contrary, we can and must assess them continuously, in the very process of playing and living them out in the relevant domains of our lives-intellectual, political, technological, religious, and so forth. It is to say, rather, that the occasions for such terminally decisive adjudicative activities, as they are classically depicted, never arise. We may recall here Kitcher's somewhat vehement insistence on "the limits of proper tolerance." One may agree that there are indeed such limits, but observe, in accord with the present analysis, that they are mundane-practical and quotidian-matters of social and institutional geography and politics, not matters for the high courts of epistemic ad-

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judication. The point is illustrated well enough by the situation that evoked that vehemence, that is, the debates between creationists and Darwinists. As long as the domains in which their alternate accounts (of the origin of species, the mutability of life-forms, the age of the universe, etc.) are played out remain effectively discrete, there is no reason for intellectual or political tolerance to be limited or, in fact, any occasion for it to be displayed-except, of course, as forbearance from invasive missionary activity on one side or the other. Conflict arises, however, where there is, or threatens to be, a coincidence of domains, as in the demand by some citizens that Scriptural accounts of the relevant phenomena be taught in American public schools in place of, or as an "equal time" alternative to, evolutionary theory. It is quite a temptation but, from the present perspective, a conceptual mistake for Darwinian-minded citizens to imagine this conflict on the model of the struggle between Galileo and the Pope or between Darwin himself and his nineteenth-century clerical adversaries. It is certainly a strategic mistake for them to play it that way at local school-board meetings or in the nation's courts. For, unless Darwinists agree to have the issue framed in such terms, the relevant question is not whether evolutionary theory satisfies such arbitrary and arguably vacuous general epistemic criteria as "incontrovertible factuality" but, rather, which authorizing institutions are appropriate for evaluating material to be taught specifically in American public schools. Given the constitutional doctrine of the separation of church and state, it could be argued that, although scriptural and religious authority are appropriate enough in church-affiliated Sunday schools, the only appropriate institutional authorities for assessing public school materials are secular. That would mean, in this case, that the theories of the origin of species, the mutability of life-forms, and the age of the universe (etc.) taught in science classes in American public schools are properly assessed in relation to currently established scientific knowledge and practice, where "established" is understood as broadly accepted by members of the relevantly authorized secular epistemic communities. Alternative interpretations of "established" as "incontrovertibly factual" or "determined as finally, objectively, and transcendentally true" could be seen, accordingly, as red herrings. Red herrings can be rhetorically effective, of course, at school-board meetings and even in national courtrooms. But the effectiveness of this one has depended, it appears, on the readiness of Darwinists (including some biologists and philosophers of science) to rise to the epistemic supremacist bait dangled by their opponents [30]. There are, it appears, few particular occasions and no particular ways to select winners and losers in theoretical controversies, and, in a sense, no winners or losers either, at least no objectively determinate ones. It

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seems clear that none of the presently rival orthodox/heterodox accounts of science will survive and endure in any of their present forms. There will be "advancements" and retreats, of course, but only in the sense of the increased or decreased authority of one or another such account in various more or less restricted epistemic niches. In other words, the fitness, success, or survival of any theoretical account of science will still be measurable only in relation to particular conditions and only from particular perspectives. And the same could be said of any theoretical account whatsoever. There can be no ultimate comparison of or decision between the epistemic merits of these rival theories, moreover, because each of them is being transformed by, among other things, the dynamics of their very rivalry. Academic philosophy of science has undergone substantial transformation at both the individual and institutional level since at least the 1960's, when Kuhn and Feyerabend first presented their unignorable challenges to Kitcher's Legend. Claims, methods, and missions have been modified, in some respects drastically. Alliances have been formed with other disciplines, including the biological and physical sciences themselves, and new interdisciplinary fields, such as cognitive science, have emerged and seem relatively well established [31]. The reciprocal of this is also occurring. Revisionist science studies keeps revising itself in response to, among other things, the resistances of traditional realist/rationalist epistemology. To mention only one example here, but a telling one: Pickering's increased emphasis on "material practices" in his accounts of the history of particle physics and his related delineation and embrace of a position he calls "pragmatic realism" appear to have been shaped by, among other things, his prior and ongoing interactions with some persistently resistant philosophers of science [32]. Incommensurability is, it appears, neither a logically scandalous relation between theories, nor an ontologically immutable relation between isolated systems of thought, nor a morally unhappy relation between sets of people, but a contingent experiential relation between historically and institutionally situated conceptual and discursive practices. Some radically divergent ideas never meet at all, at least not in the experience of mortal beings. In other cases, meetings are staged repeatedly but never come off, ending only in mutual invisibility and inaudibility. Sometimes, however, meetings do occur, perhaps intensely conflictual and abrasive but also, in the long run, mutually transformative. Thus it may be that, at the end, at the real Judgment Day-if there is one-for which the philosophers are always preparing us, when all the stories are told and all the chips are in, counted, and compared, we will not only be unable to say who finally won but even to tell which was which.

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Barbara Herrnstein Smith Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory Duke University Durham, NC, 27708 USA NOTES

This essay is adapted from Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary Theoretical Controversy, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1997. A slightly different version appears in Mathematics, Science, and Postclassical Theory, ed. Barbara Herrnstein Smith and Arkady Plotnitsky (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). [1] Allusions to Scylla and Charybdis are frequent in contemporary theoretical controversy, along with more general statements as to the desirability of steering a middle course between such alleged extremes as objectivism and relativism, realism and constructivism, old-fashioned rationalism and newfangled postmodern irrationalism, and so forth. The advertised via media usually turns out to be, as here, a (con )temporized version of received (e.g., objectivist, realist, rationalist) wisdom. [2] Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science without Legend, Objectivity without Illusions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Page references will be cited in the text. [3] See, e.g., David Papeneau, "How to Think about Science" [rev. of Kitcher], New York Times Book Review (July 25,1993), pp. 14-15; J.A. Kegley, rev. of Kitcher, Choice (November, 1993), pp. 471-472. [4] See, e.g., John Ziman, "Progressive Knowledge," Nature, 364 (22 July 1993), pp. 295-296; Steve Fuller, "Mortgaging the Farm to Save the (Sacred) Cow," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 25: 2 (1994), pp. 251-261. [5] Notably Larry Laudan, Hilary Putnam, and Bas van Fraassen. [6] See Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), and We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). [7] Kitcher seems unaware of critiques of the referentialist model of language to which he appeals or of related alternative accounts. Given the mutual segregations of continental and Anglo-American philosophy, it is not surprising that neither Foucault nor Derrida appears in his lengthy bibliography. It is surprising, however, that neither Wittgenstein nor Rorty-or, aside from one minor brush-off, Hesse-does. For related discussion, see Michael A. Arbib and Mary B. Hesse, The Construc-

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tion of Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 147170. [8] Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986; orig. 1979), p. 180. [9] Kitcher-with a glance, it seems, at S.J. Gould and R.C. Lewontin's celebrated essay, "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme" (Proceedings of the Royal Society of London [1978] 205: pp. 581-598)-explicitly rejects the telling of "just-so-stories" in the history of science. Nevertheless, he cites, endorses, and is evidently influenced by Howard Margolis's defiantly and explicitly Whiggish history of science in Paradigms and Barriers: How Habits of Mind Govern Scientific Beliefs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Margolis maintains that the symmetry postulate of Edinburgh sociologists and historians of science-that is, their refusal to privilege present scientific knowledge methodologically as always already true-is a foolish overreaction to "an older history of science" that got "a bad reputation" because it said impolite things about the losers in scientific controversies. That was, Margolis observes, crude-but, he adds, "of course, being winners, the winning side must have had more of something" (p. 197, italics in text). Kitcher's own version of that "something" is discussed below. [10] Misunderstandings and misrepresentations occur on both sides of these debates, of course, for revisionists as well as traditionalists interpret the arguments of their adversaries through their own assumptions. Symmetry-conscious constructivist epistemologists such as Latour and Woolgar would presumably acknowledge this in principle but, since one is always blind to one's own blind-spots, would not be able to point out their own misunderstandings and misrepresentations, nor, given my own perspective on these issues, am I well-situated to do so for them. [11] Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the AirPump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). [12] Kitcher believes that a "pessimistic" overestimation of the significance of theory-ladenness is a general feature of contemporary sociology of science. The claim that "we see just what our theoretical commitments would lead us to expect" is, he writes, "a gross hyperextension of what philosophers and psychologists are able toshow" (p. 167, n. 53; see also p. 141, n. 18). His statement of that claim is itself something of a hyperextension, however, setting up a spurious contrast with the "eminently sensible conclusion," attributed to Kuhn, that "anomalies emerge in the course of normal science" (ibid.). The crucial issue, of

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course, is not the emergence of anomalies~something no sociologist of science would, I think, deny-but how to describe their operation in intellectual history. Kitcher evidently sees them as epistemic arrows shot straight from reality, piercing our otherwise theory-clouded or theoryskewed observations and setting us, and our theories, straight. The alternative view-and, arguably, the one Kuhn himself favors-is that perceived anomalies may destabilize specific theories but that, like all other perceptions, must themselves be interpreted via prior conceptualizations. For detailed discussion of Kuhn's views on this and related topics, see Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science, trans. Alexander T. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 223-244. [13] Theories are "underdetermined" by evidence or observation of fact and, conversely, observation of supposed fact is overdetermined by, or "laden" with, prior theory. [14] In the larger study from which this essay is drawn, knowledge, cognition, and, by implication, "theory" are treated as embodied processes, practices, and products, not as matters of disembodied or purely formal intellectual activity. [15] Kitcher defends this traditional goal of philosophy of science rather ambivalently and awkwardly. On the one hand, he maintains that the abstractions and idealizations of "philosophical reflections about science"like the models of economic theorists vis-a-vis "the complicated and messy world of transactions of work, money, and goods" -are necessary to "lay bare large and important features of the phenomena" and to "recogniz[e] the general features of the ... enterprise" (10). On the other hand, he cautions that, "to rebut ... charges [of unrealistic irrelevancy]or to concede them and to do better service to philosophy's legitimate normative project-we need to idealize the phenomena but to include in our treatment the features [e.g., complicated and messy ones?] the critics emphasize" (ibid., italics added). [16] See, e.g., Latour, B., Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), The Pasteurization of France, and "On Technical Mediation~Philosophy, Sociology, Genealogy," Common Knowledge 3,2 (Fall 1994), pp. 29-64; Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, ed., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987); Pickering, "From Science as Knowledge to Science as Practice," in Pickering, ed., Science as Practice and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) pp. 1-28; CalIon, "Society in the Making: The Study of Technology as a Tool for Sociological Analy-

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sis," in Wiebe Bijker and John Law, ed., Constructing Networks and Systems (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1994); Charles Goodwin, "Seeing in Depth" [on the collaborative use of instruments in oceanographic research]' Social Studies of Science, 25:2 (May 1995), pp. 237-274. [17] Contrary to common misunderstandings, "around again" in both the classic idea of the hermeneutic circle and more recent analyses of the reciprocal determination of theory, action, and observation describes not a continuous repetition of the same path but-if spatial images are sought-a set of continuously linked loops. For related discussion, see Arbib and Hesse, The Construction of Reality, 8, and Smith, "Belief and Resistance: A Symmetrical Account," Critical Inquiry 18, 1 (1991), pp. 125-139. [18] For an influential, though not unproblematic, account of stabilization at this level of analysis, see Jean Piaget, Biology and Knowledge: An Essay on the Relations between Organic Regulations and Cognitive Processes trans. Beatrix Walsh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971; orig. 1967). [19] See Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Boston: D. Reidel, 1980) and The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Boston: Shambhala, 1988); see also Maturana, "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Drift, or Lineage Diversification through the Conservation and Change of Ontogenic Phenotypes," trans. Cristina Magro and Julie Tetel (forthcoming; orig. pub., Occasional Publications of the National Museum of Natural History, Santiago, Chile, 43, 1992). [20] Cf. Latour, B., We have Never been Modern, pp. 111-114. [21] For examples, see Ruth Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories: New Foundations for Realism, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984); Gerard Radnitsky and W.W. Bartley, eds., Evolutionary Epistemology, Rationality, and the Sociology of Knowledge (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987); William G. Lycan, Judgement and Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). [22] Kitcher illustrates the point with the success of genetics, which he explains as follows: given the crucial role of "references" to "genes" in its explanatory "schemata," the reason genetics can explain and predict biological phenomena so well is "that there are genes" (157). [23] Kitcher, Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982). [24] Kitcher's term is "Darwinists," not "Darwinians," here, perhaps to indicate that the defenders of evolutionary accounts are not always professional biologists. [25] Interestingly enough, one of Kitcher's most rhetorically effective

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arguments in Abusing Science is, in effect, the epistemic asymmetry of creation scientists, who, he points out, appeal to different criteria for determining the scientificity of the Darwinian account and their own. [26] Latour, B., Science in Action, p. 192, italics in text. [27] The exposure by feminist theorists, among others, of the self-privileging biases commonly involved in normative invocations of human universals have gone some distance toward making any reference to general human traits ideologically suspect. It may be stressed, therefore, that the references here to apparently endemic cognitive processes are not normative and that they operate in the argument in a pointedly anti-(self-)privileging way. [28] For discussion of related ambivalent and apparently endemic cognitive processes, see R.E. Nisbett and L. Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1980); Kahneman, D., Slavic, P., and Tversky, A., ed., Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For a survey of pseudodoxia epidemica from a staunchly realist/rationalist perspective, see Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds trans. Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini and Keith Botsford (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1994). [29] For the relation between class and epistemic authority, see Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). [30] Difficult practical situations of this kind-dealing with published denials of the Nazi Holocaust is another example-are often cited as real-life refutations of (supposedly merely theoretical) epistemological relativism. The implication is that, at the "limits of tolerance" presented by such situations, the choice can only be between, on the one hand, declaring certain people objective fools or absolute liars or, on the other hand, capitulating to their demands or agreeing to the "equal validity" of their claims. As just indicated, however, and as I have discussed elsewhere (cf. Smith, "The Unquiet Judge: Activism without Objectivism in Law and Politics," Annals of Scholarship, 9, 1-2 [1992]' pp. 111-133, and "Making (Up) the Truth: Constructivist Contributions," University of Toronto Quarterly, 61, 4 [1992], pp. 422-29), these are not the only alternatives, nor is it clear that the recommended beyond-tolerance responses-that is, the issuing of strenuous absolutist/objectivist declarations of morality and truth-would (in themselves) have (only) the presumably desired outcomes. [31] Philosophy of science appears, in some places, to be merging with its own subject-sciences, e.g., philosophy of biology with theoretical biology

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(see Robert N. Brandon, Adaptation and Environment [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990]; Elliott Sober, ed., Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology 2nd ed. [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994]). In other places, it seems to have naturalized not only its lingo but also its projects and methods, either jumping ship altogether in anticipation of neurophysiological replacements of philosophical accounts of cognition (see Patricia Churchland, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind/Brain [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986]) or reconceiving its task as that of mediating or "intertranslating" the discourses of traditional epistemology and contemporary cognitive science (see Andy Clark, Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science and Parallel Distributed Processing [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991]; Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained [Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1991]; Owen Flanagan, Science of the Mind [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992]). [32] See Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also Shapin's recent (and, from the present perspective, dubious) affirmation of the "incorrigible presupposition" of a realist ontology by "virtually any form of praxis" (A Social History of Truth, pp. 29ff. and 122). In the formal acknowledgments to the latter book, Shapin alludes to "a series of friendly arguments with my colleague Philip Kitcher" (iii). Kitcher, in turn, notes in the formal acknowledgments to The Advancement of Science that his "thinking about epistemology and the history and philosophy of science has been greatly helped by discussions with [among others] ... Steven Shapin," who, he adds, is not "likely to agree with the conclusions of this book, but can pride [himself] on having diverted me from even sillier things that I might have said" (viii).

ROBERT M. PIRSIG

SUBJECTS, OBJECTS, DATA AND VALUES The title, "Subjects, Objects, Data and Values," concerns the central theme of the Einstein meets M agritte conference-the meeting of art and science. Science is all about subjects and objects and particularly data, but it excludes values. Art is concerned primarily with values but doesn't really pay much attention to scientific data and sometimes excludes objects. My own work has been concerned with a Metaphysics of Quality that can cross over this division with a single overall rational framework. A suitable subtitle could be, "Some Connections Between the Metaphysics of Quality and Niels Bohr's Philosophy of Complementarity." As I see it, Bohr's Complementarity and the Metaphysics of Quality stand midway between Einstein and Magritte. I have concentrated on Bohr's work as a way of making the larger connection. Although Bohr's stature in science is somewhat diminished from its dominance in the 1920's and 1930's and his metaphysical ideas are all but forgotten, the negative blow he dealt to the supremacy of objectivity in science is still with us today. The seriousness of this blow was first pointed out and objected to by Albert Einstein in one of the most famous objections in the history of science. It occurred in Brussels in October 1927 at the Fifth Physical Conference of the Solvay Institute. Here is a brief account of what happened, described by Bohr's biographer, Ruth Moore: Bohr and Einstein were there, "as well as nearly all others who were contributing to theoretical physics. Lawrence Bragg and Arthur Compton came from the United States. De Broglie, Born, Heisenberg, and Schrodinger all were to speak on the formulation of the quantum theory. "The subject was 'Electrons and Photons.' To leave no doubt that it was directed to the main question, the theme embroiling all of physics, discussion was centered around the renunciation of certainty implied in the new methods [of physics] ... Bohr was invited to give the conference a report on the epistemological problems confronting quantum physics. By asking him to speak on the science of knowledge and the grounds for it, the conference gave him full opportunity to present Complementarity. There was no avoidance; the issue had to be directly faced. "Excitement mounted as Einstein rose to speak. He did not keep them long in suspense. He did not like uncertainty. He did not like the abandonment of 'reality'. He did not think Complementarity was an acceptable solution, or a necessary one. 'The weakness of the theory lies in the 79 "Subjects, Objects, Data and Values" by Robert Pirsig. Copyright © by Robert Pirsig. Reprinted by permission of the author.

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fact that on the one hand, no closer connection with the wave concept is obtainable,' he said, 'and on the other hand that it leaves to chance the time and the direction of the elementary processes'. "A dozen physicists were shouting in a dozen languages for the floor. Individual arguments were breaking out in all parts of the room. Lorentz, who was presiding, pounded to restore order. He fought to keep the discussion within the bounds of amity and,order. But so great was the noise and the commotion that Ehrenfest slipped up to the blackboard, erased some of the figures that filled it, and wrote: 'The Lord did there confound the language of all the earth.' "As the embattled physicists suddenly recognized the reference to the confusion of languages that beset the building of the tower of Babel, a roar of laughter went up. The first round had ended." [6, p. 164] The conference was carried on in events but also in private meetings and personal conversations with "thought experiments" carried out where physical conditions were imagined and results were predicted on the basis of known scientific facts. Behind the thought experiments was an all-important question of scientific certainty. Bohr was saying that the particles that constitute our material universe can only be described in terms of statistical probability and never in terms of absolute certainty. He regarded the development of the quantum revolution as in a certain sense "complete". Quantum theory need no longer await some enlightening revelation that would put everything right from a classical point of view. Einstein wasn't having any of it. Quantum theory was not complete, he said. The universe is not ultimately a set of statistics. It was at one of these meetings that Einstein asked his famous question, "Do you really believe God resorts to dice playing?" Thus began the controversy over Complementarity that continued for the rest of Bohr's life. It seems that I have heard about this famous schism all my life and wondered what it was about but never thought I would ever study it because I do not have the background in physics or mathematics to study it properly. However, after my second book, Lila, came out in 1991, a friend in Norway wrote me that there was some attention being paid to Lila in Copenhagen by followers of Niels Bohr. It was suggested that the Metaphysics of Quality was similar to the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum Theory. 1 That sounded like good news to me and something I should look into. When similarities 1

Later I recalled that N. Katherine Hayles had commented in [8] "The reader will recognize [in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance] a model very similar to the one Bohr proposed in his interpretation of the Uncertainty Principle."

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of this sort exist, they can either be an odd coincidence or they can be evidence that both systems of thought are describing something that is true independently of either thinker. If the Copenhagen Interpretation, which is an important explanation of quantum theory today, agrees with the Metaphysics of Quality, and if the Metaphysics of Quality is a correct theory of art, then there may be here a unified theory of art and science. Einstein will have met Magritte and the purpose of this conference will have been to some extent fulfilled. The volume of literature on quantum theory is enormous, and to a non-mathematician much of it is inscrutable. Physicists who do try to explain quantum theory in common language point out what a terrible burden it is to try to discuss it in non-mathematical terms. For me, a non-mathematician, it is also a burden to deal with secondary sources on the problem without knowing what the original mathematical language means. But there are two aspects to quantum theory: the mathematics of quantum theory and the philosophy of quantum theory. They are very deeply separated. The first seems to work very well. The second does not seem to work very well. Most physicists use the mathematics of the quantum theory with complete confidence and completely ignore the philosophy. I want to reverse that and concentrate on the philosophy and bypass the math. A minimum summary here of what brought things to this state of conflict in 1927 is as follows: Before 1900 there existed in physics a problem known as "the ultraviolet catastrophe". Radiation from black bodies was not behaving according to predictions. In 1900 Max Planck solved this problem by theorizing that the radiant energy was coming in packets, rather than in a continuous flow. In 1905 Einstein saw that light was doing the same thing and named these packets "quanta". In 1913 Niels Bohr, who had developed the most widely accepted picture of the atom at that time, saw that a description of the way these quanta behaved also fitted the behavior of the electron in the atom. With this new picture of the universe came a number of paradoxes: the disappearance of space-time locality, the abandonment of causality, and the contradictory appearance of atomic matter as both particles and waves. The record of the period just before the conference of 1927 is best given by physicist Werner Heisenberg who worked with Bohr on this problem: "I remember discussions with Bohr which went through many hours till very late at night and ended almost in despair, and when at the end of the discussion I went alone for a walk in the neighboring park I

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repeated to myself again and again the question: "Can nature possibly be as absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?" [3, p. 42] At another point Heisenberg said, "When you speak about the model, you mean something which can only be described by means of classical physics. As soon as you go away from classical physics, then, in a strict sense you don't even know what a model could possibly mean because then the words haven't got any meaning anymore. Now this was a dilemma ... Bohr tried to keep the picture while at the same time omitting classical mechanics. He tried to keep the words and the pictures without keeping the meanings of the words of the pictures. Both things are possible in such a situation because your words don't really tackle the things anymore. You can't get hold of the things by means of your words, so what shall you do? ... Bohr's escape would be into the philosophy of things." (qtd. in [1, p. 111]) Heisenberg remembers, "Those paradoxes were so in the center of his mind that he just couldn't imagine that anybody could find an answer to the paradoxes, even having the nicest mathematical scheme in the world ... The very strange situation was that now by coming nearer and nearer to the solution the paradoxes became worse and worse. That was the main experience ... nobody could know an answer to the question, 'Is an electron now a wave or is it a particle, and how does it behave if I do this or that and so on.' Therefore the paradoxes became so much more pronounced in that time ... only by coming nearer and nearer to the real thing to see that the paradoxes by no means disappeared, but on the contrary got worse and worse because they turn out more clearly ... like a chemist who tries to concentrate his poison more and more from some kind of solution, we tried to concentrate the poison of the paradox". (qtd. in [1, p. 85]) Heisenberg said, "Bohr was more worried than anybody about the inconsistencies of quantum theory. So he tried really to understand what is behind these difficulties ... Bohr really suffered from it, and Bohr couldn't talk of anything else ... He in some ways directly suffered from this impossibility to penetrate into this very unanschaulich, unreasonable behavior of nature ... But that was Bohr's whole philosophical attitudehe was a man who really always wanted to get the last degree of clarity. He would never stop before the end ... Bohr would follow the thing to the very end, just to the point where he was just at the wall ... He did see that the whole theory was on the one hand extremely successful, and on the other hand was fundamentally wrong. And that was a contradiction which was very difficult to bear, especially for a man who had formulated the theory. So he was in a continuous inner discussion about the problem. He always worried, 'what has happened?' "( qtd. in [1, p. 36-37])

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During this early development of quantum theory there appeared a disagreement between Bohr and Heisenberg that is important to notice. Heisenberg was satisfied that the mathematical solution, matrix mechanics, gave all the understanding of atomic systems that was needed. Verbal pictures of what was going on were not necessary. Classical theoretical notions as "objects" are no more than conceptual instruments for predicting successfully the outcome of various experiments. Heisenberg said, "Well, we have a consistent mathematical scheme and this consistent mathematical scheme tells us everything which can be observed. Nothing is in nature which cannot be described by this scheme ... Since classical physics is not true there, why should we stick so much to these concepts? Why not say just that we cannot use these concepts with a high degree of precision ... and therefore we have to abandon the classical concepts to a certain extent. When we get beyond this range of the classical theory we must realize that our words don't fit. They don't really get a hold in the physical reality and therefore a new mathematical scheme is just as good as anything because the new mathematical scheme then tells what may be there and what may not be there." (qtd. in [1, p. 94]) This early view of Heisenberg's is, I understand, the view of most physicists today. If the mathematics works who needs the philosophy? But Bohr did not agree at all with this view. Bohr saw that the quantum theory's mathematical formulation had to have a connection to the cultural world of everyday life in which the experiments are performed. If that connection were not made there would be no way to run an experiment that would prove whether a quantum prediction was true or not. Quantum theory must be verified by classical concepts that refer to observable properties of nature. Heisenberg remembers, " ... Sometimes Bohr and I would disagree because I would say, 'Well, I'm convinced that this is the solution already.' Bohr would say, 'No there you come into a contradiction.' Then sometimes I had the impression that Bohr really tried to lead me onto Glatteis, onto slippery ground, in order to prove that I had not the solution. But, this was, of course, exactly what he had to do from his point of view. It was perfectly correct. He was also perfectly correct in saying, 'So long as it is possible that you get onto slippery ground, then it means that we have not understood the theory." (qtd. in [1, p. 86-87]) Heisenberg said the controversy was so intense, "I remember that it ended with my breaking out into tears because I just couldn't stand this pressure from Bohr." (qtd. in [5, p. 65]) But Heisenberg concluded, " ... just by these discussions with Bohr I learned that the thing which I in some way attempted could not be done. That is one cannot go entirely away from the old words because one has to talk about something ...

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So I could realize that I could not avoid using these weak terms which we always have used for many years in order to describe what I see. So I saw that in order to describe phenomena one needs a language ... The terms don't get hold of the phenomena, but still, to some extent, they do. I realized, in the process of these discussions with Bohr, how desperate the situation is. On the one hand we knew that our concepts don't work, and on the other hand we have nothing except the concepts with which we could talk about what we see ... I think this tension you just have to take; you can't avoid it. That was perhaps the strongest experience of these months." (qtd. in [1, p. 96]) As I read these statements it occurred to me that the tension that Heisenberg referred to still exists today. Although scientists have great problems in their work with the use of the everyday language of literature and the arts, they cannot do without it. When Bohr formulated his philosophy of Complementarity that was what he was trying to do-find a common ground between the new quantum theory and the language of everyday life. It was this effort that Einstein attacked here in Brussels in October 1927. Bohr was really caught in the middle between anti-realists like Heisenberg who said, forget the philosophy and the realists like Einstein who said, if you stay with statistics without specifying what it means in terms of real external objects, then you are leaving reality behind. The debate was always in terms of thought experiments. Although Bohr had said, "Reality is a term we must learn to use," the debate was never raised to the level of a discussion of what this "physical reality" is whose description is either complete or incomplete. The reason may be that in those days a philosophic discussion of "reality" was greatly discouraged. Discussions of reality were metaphysics and metaphysics was something associated with medieval religious mysticism. Yet as I read through the material even I could see that this was not primarily a quarrel about physics, it was about metaphysics. And I saw that others had noted that too. 2 There is no way one can possibly construct a scientific experiment to determine whether or not an external reality exists if there is a difference in metaphysical interpretation. Whatever results you come up with can still be explained differently in each metaphysical system. 2

Folse has an end note saying that "An account which does a superb job of showing that the debate involved radically opposing conceptions of reality is C.A. Hooker, 'The Nature of Quantum Mechanical Reality: Einstein Versus Bohr', in Paradigms and Paradoxes, ed. by R.G. Colodny (Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1972), pp. 67302." Jammer cites both Hooker and K. Hubner who declared "for Einstein relations are defined by substances, for Bohr substances are defined by relations." [5, p. 157]

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'\'\'/'/1/1 :~~ DATA

Figure 1

So it is necessary to get into a closer look at the metaphysical system of Complementarity itself. As almost everyone comments, it is not easy to understand. I have been over the materials dozens of times and still am not at all sure I have it completely right. I want to show some simple diagrams first to make it clearer. This first drawing represents the classical view of science. We are the subject. The external world is the object. We study the object with measuring instruments to collect data about the object, work with logic and math on this data and develop a theory to explain what this object really is. This view is so well known to us today we think of it as common sense. If there were space it would be valuable to get into the history of how this view came into being. In 400 of the last 500 years it has worked with enormous success. It is only in the last hundred years or so that our measurements are showing that the objects we are studying are -apparently impossible. Since the phenomena from the measurements are not about to change, Bohr concluded that the logic of science must change to accommodate them. Here is the second diagram:

DATA

Figure 2

?•

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Complementarity is easier to understand when it is described in two steps, of which this is the first. There is a shift in reality shown here from the object to the data. This view, known as phenomenalism, says that what we really observe is not the object. What we really observe is only data. This philosophy of science is associated with Ernst Mach and the positivists. Einstein did not like it and assumed Bohr shared it, but Bohr did not reject objectivity completely. He did not care so much which philosophical camp he was in. He was mainly concerned with whether Complementarity provided an adequate description to go with the quantum theory. In this third diagram we get down to the details of Complementarity: ,\I\d'/I/,

~~~

(UNMEASURED PHENOMENAL OBJECT, "NATURE")

-------

....

------

I

I

\

~

OBSERVER A

/

I

PROPERTIES OF WAVES

t

T~ PROPERTIES OF PARTICLES

UNAMBIGUoulCOMMUNICATION

""

~

MEASURING"" " INSTRUMENT "

\

EXPERIMENT A MEASURING INSTRUMENT

i

t

OBSERVER B

I

I /

EXPERIMENT B,/ ,/

Figure 3

This diagram is not anything Bohr generated. It is something I have assembled myself and although I have revised it many times I would still expect Bohr to find things wrong with it, and others too who are more familiar with this subject than I am. Bohr saw the Complementarity that is diagrammed here as a way of solving many paradoxes but the wave-particle paradox was the paradox he seems to have given the most attention to and I will use this paradox only. First, notice that within this phenomenal object all things are together except the visualized object that is surrounded by an inner oval. There is no sharp exclusion of the observer from the observation. There is no sharp distinction of the measuring instrument from the experiment. The

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whole phenomenon is treated as one big observational interaction in which the distinction between observing system and observed phenomenal object is clear but is arbitrary. Second, notice that on the right hand side of this larger oval there are two experiments: Experiment A and Experiment B. From Experiment A the observer observes waves. From Experiment B the observer observes particles. The experiments never put these two together. It is wrong to say that the experiments are on the same object or on any object at all. It is wrong to say that waves or particles are there before the experiment takes place. We can never say what goes into the experiment. We can only comment on what comes out. Third, notice that when observer A observes experiment A and then, at another time, he observes experiment B, he may afterward in his mind combine the results of experiment A and experiment B to produce a "visualized" or "idealized" object. This visual object is a sort of mental collage created by the observer. Experiment A and Experiment B have been combined in a complementary way to produce a physical description. And that is where Bohr gets the name Complementarity for his philosophy. Fourth, notice that this "visualized" object, that now may be called "light" , is both waves and particles. Its description is what we must mean when we speak of objectivity. When Bohr says "It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." [2, p. 45] He means that this visualized object is all we can talk about. It is an abstraction, but there is no other object. There is no "deep reality" . Fifth, notice that observer A then communicates this visualized object in an unambiguous way to observer B. By "unambiguous" is meant that A communicates it through a mathematical formalism combined with a word picture. All measuring equipment must be included in an unambiguous description. Later observer B can run his own experiment using the same measuring instruments and testing conditions to confirm the unambiguous communication from observer A. The proved unambiguity of this communication verifies the true objectivity of A's visualized object. It can now be said that, because of this way of understanding things, a truly objective description has been given of light as both waves and particles without involving nature in a contradiction. Finally, notice that this largest oval, the unmeasured phenomenal object shown with the dashed line, contains everything that Bohr talks about. He never discusses the old physical reality shown with the question mark off to the right that is external to this unmeasured phenom-

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enal object. But, more importantly, he never mentions this larger oval, this unmeasured phenomenal object itself, presumably because to do so would be meaningless. It has no properties. The properties result only from the experiment that occurs within this oval. I have made this oval with a dashed line because I have a feeling Bohr wouldn't approve of it. But I think this larger unmeasured phenomenal object with the dashed line has to be there because if it were not there the only thing the experiments would be measuring is the measuring instruments themselves. Though Bohr doesn't describe it, something has to go into the front end of each experiment. I may be missing something but I don't see how you can have an experiment where nothing goes in but phenomena come out. Bohr may say that what goes in the front end of the experiment is "meaningless" and by the use of that term invite us to never think of it at all. But there has to be something going in whether it is meaningless or not. I make this point now because I will be coming to it later. It has been said that neither Einstein nor Bohr seemed explicitly aware that although they conducted their dispute in terms of thought experiments, the dispute is nevertheless about metaphysics. The metaphysical issue at the root of it all is the old mind-versus-matter issue, the subjectversus-object issue that has dogged philosophy since the days of Isaac Newton and David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Bohr's Complementarity was accused of being subjectivistic. If the world is composed of subjects and objects, and if Bohr says the properties of the atom are not in the objects, then Bohr is saying that the properties of the atom are in the subject. But if there is one thing science cannot be it is subjective. You cannot seriously say that science is all in your head. However, in his early writing on Complementarity that is what Bohr seemed to be saying. [1, p. 24] Bohr was trying to work out a problem in quantum physics, not just juggle a lot of philosophic categories, and Henry Folse says it didn't seem to occur to him what the implications of this might be. In his first paper on Complementarity Bohr made no mention of objectivity and actually made the gross mistake of calling his Complementarity subjective. He also spoke of scientific observation as "disturbing the phenomenon" which suggested that either he was talking about thoughts disturbing objects or else talking about phenomena being subjective. Given this attack on his subjectivity it can be seen why Bohr developed the concepts of "phenomenal object" and "visual object" as independent of the subject in the diagram I have just shown you. He was constantly under pressure to prove that what he was talking about was not subjective.

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His repeated argument is that Complementarity is not subjective because it provides unambiguous communication. When the results of the experiment exist unambiguously in the mind of several scientists Bohr says it is no longer subjective. However, in my own opinion, that still doesn't get him out of the charge of subjectivity. When Bohr says the test of objective, scientific truth is "unambiguous communication" he is saying that it is not nature but society that ultimately decides what is true. But a society is not an objective entity. As anthropologists well know, societies are subjective too. The only truly objective aspects of "unambiguous communication" are the brain circuits that produce it; the larynx; the sound waves or other media that carry it; the ear drum, and the brain circuits that receive it. These can process falsehood just as easily as truth. Folse says that Bohr never overcame the criticism that his philosophy was subjectivistic. "Bohr had envisioned Complementarity spreading out into wider and wider fields, just as the mechanical approach of Galileo had started in astronomy and simple phenomena of motion and gradually spread to all of the physical sciences." [1, p. 168] But that never happened. Quantum physics dominates the scientific scene today but not because of Bohr's philosophy of Complementarity. It dominates because the mathematical formalisms of quantum theory correctly predict atomic phenomena. Bohr was disappointed all his life by what he regarded as the failure of philosophers to understand Complementarity. Except for William James he "felt that philosophers were very odd people who really were lost" [1, p. 44]. Late in his life he remarked, "I think that it would be reasonable to say that no man who is called a philosopher really understands what is meant by the Complementary descriptions." And as Folse concludes, "that somewhat wistful comment by this great pioneer of modern atomic theory is as sadly true today as it was over fifty years ago" [1, p. 44]. Although Bohr had intended to write a book that contained and developed his philosophical ideas he never wrote it. This leads me to think that he realized his philosophy wasn't working the way he hoped it would but didn't know what to do about it. He talked as though he was sure it was right but was frustrated and disappointed that it never seemed to have caught on with others. Henry Folse said that, "In what was to be his last interview, the day before his death, Bohr was questioned by Thomas Kuhn about the nature of his interest in fundamental philosophical problems. His answer was direct: 'It was in some ways my life, you see" [1, p. 31]. That reply had an understatement and sadness to it that left me quiet for a long time.

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ROBERT M. PIRSIG THE METAPHYSICS OF QUALITY

I want to make a sharp shift now from Copenhagen to the town of Bozeman, Montana and the English department of Montana State College in 1959 when I was a teacher there. Sometimes people come at me when I talk about the problem of understanding quality as though I had made it up by myself. But I was under legal contract with the state government of Montana to teach quality even though I had no clear idea what it was, and nobody else did either. Anthropologists know that every culture has strange and bizarre practices that make no sense from a practical view, but it is much easier to spot those practices in other cultures than in our own. I will point out to you that for centuries rhetoric instructors in our culture have been paid to pass and fail students on the quality of their writing without ever having any viable definition of what that quality is or even if there is such a thing at all. That is a bizarre practice that I tried to end. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance I described how the question, "What is quality?" had been arrived at, and I described the first attempt to solve it where Phaedrus thinks to himself: "Quality ... you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's selfcontradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes pouf! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist. What else are the grades based on? Why else would people pay fortunes for some things and throw others in the trash pile? Obviously some things are better than others ... but what's the 'betterness'? ... So round and round you go, spinning mental wheels and nowhere finding anyplace to get traction." It was a common mischievous practice for students to send the same rhetoric paper to different teachers and observe that it got different grades. From this the students would argue that the whole idea of quality was meaningless. But one instructor turned the tables on them and handed a group of papers to several different students and asked each student to grade them for quality. As he expected, the students' relative ran kings correlated with each other and with those of the instructor. This meant that although the students were saying there is no such thing as quality, they already knew what it was, and could not deny it. So what I did is transfer that exercise into the classroom, having the students judge four papers day after day until they saw that they knew

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what quality is. They never had to say in any conceptual way what kind of object quality is but they understood that when you see it you know it. Quality is real even though it cannot be defined. Eventually my unusual teaching methods came to the attention of the other professors in the department and in a friendly way they asked the question that connects all this with the struggles of Niels Bohr: "Is quality in the subject or in the object?" The answer that was finally given was, "Neither. Quality is a separate category of experience that is neither subject or object." This was the beginning of the system of thought called the Metaphysics of Quality. It has lasted for more than 35 years now. The question today is, if Niels Bohr had given that answer would his system of Complementarity have been improved? In the Metaphysics of Quality the world is composed of three things: mind, matter, and Quality. Because something is not located in the object does not mean that it has to be located in your mind. Quality cannot be independently derived from either mind or matter. But it can be derived from the relationship of mind and matter with each other. Quality occurs at the point at which subject and object meet. Quality is not a thing. It is an event. It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object. And because without objects there can be no subject, quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects is made possible. Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality! The most striking similarity between the Metaphysics of Quality and Complementarity is that this Quality event corresponds to what Bohr means by "observation." When the Copenhagen Interpretation "holds that the unmeasured atom is not real, that its attributes are created or realized in the act of measurement" [2, xiii], it is saying something very close to the Metaphysics of Quality. The observation creates the reality. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance left one enormous metaphysical problem unanswered that became the central driving reason for the expansion of the Metaphysics of Quality into a second book called Lila. This problem was: if Quality is a constant, why does it seem so variable? Why do people have different opinions about it? The answer became: The quality that was referred to in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance can be subdivided into Dynamic Quality and static quality. Dynamic Quality is a stream of quality events going on and on forever, always at the cutting edge of the present. But in the wake of this cutting edge are static patterns of value. These are memories, cus-

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toms, and patterns of nature. The reason there is a difference between individual evaluations of quality is that although Dynamic Quality is a constant, these static patterns are different for everyone because each person has a different static pattern of life history. Both the Dynamic Quality and the static patterns influence his final judgment. That is why there is some uniformity among individual value judgements but not complete uniformity. Here is a drawing of the basic framework of the Metaphysics of Quality:

DYNAMIC QUALITY

~

----------------------------------,,

Intellect

i

[SUbjective l--- Static Patterns

Social Patterns ----------------------------------.,

Biological Patterns

,,

~ , ,

Objective [ Static Patterns

Inorganic Patterns - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ______ 1

Figure 4 In this diagram you will notice that Dynamic Quality is not shown in any block. It is in the background. This seems the best way to represent it. It is not only outside the blocks, it pervades them but it goes on where the blocks leave off. The blocks are organized in the order of evolution, with each higher block more recent and more Dynamic than the lower ones. The block at

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the top contains such static intellectual patterns as theology, science, philosophy, mathematics. The placement of intellect in this position makes it superior to society, biology and inorganic patterns but still inferior to Dynamic Quality. The Metaphysics of Quality says there can be many competing truths and it is value that decides among them. This is the very essence of William James' philosophy of Pragmatism which Bohr greatly admired. The name "Complementarity" itself means there can be multiple truths. The social patterns in the next box down include such institutions as family, church, and government. They are the patterns of culture that the anthropologist and sociologist study. In the third box are the biological patterns: senses of touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. The Metaphysics of Quality follows the empirical tradition here in saying that the senses are the starting point of reality, but-all importantly-it includes a sense of value. Values are phenomena. To ignore them is to misread the world. It says this sense of value, of liking or disliking, is a primary sense that is a kind of gatekeeper for everything else an infant learns. At birth this sense of value is extremely Dynamic but as the infant grows up this sense of value becomes more and more influenced by accumulated static patterns. In the past this biological sense of value has been called "subjective" because these values cannot be located in an external physical object. But quantum theory has destroyed the idea that only properties located in external physical objects have reality. The bottom box shows inorganic patterns. The Metaphysics of Quality says objects are composed of "substance" but it says that this substance can be defined more precisely as "stable inorganic patterns of value". This added definition makes substance sound more ephemeral than previously but it is not. The objects look and smell and feel the same either way. The Metaphysics of Quality agrees with scientific realism that these inorganic patterns are completely real, and there is no reason that box shouldn't be there, but it says that this reality is ultimately a deduction made in the first months of an infant's life and supported by the culture in which the infant grows up. I have noticed that Einstein in his 1936 essay Physics and Reality also held this view [5, p. 230]. Bohr is sometimes mistakenly thought to say that this inorganic level does not exist. However both Folse and Max Jammer argue at length that this is not true. He does not deny this inorganic reality. He simply says that the properties the physicist describes cannot be said to reside at this level. I can now say some general things about this diagram: First, each higher pattern grows out of the lower one so we tend to think of the higher pattern as the property of the lower one. However,

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if you study the world you will observe that the higher patterns often oppose the lower ones. Biological values of life oppose physical values of gravitation and entropy. Social values of family and law and order oppose biological values of lust and greed. Intellectual values of truth and freedom of opinion often oppose social patterns of government. This opposition of levels of static patterns offers a good explanation of why science in the past has rejected what it has called "values". The "values" it has rejected are static social prejudices and static biological emotions. When social patterns such as religion are mixed in with the scientific method, and when biological emotions are mixed in with the scientific method these "values" are properly considered a source of corruption of the scientific method. Science, it is said, should be "value free", and if these were the only kind of values the statement would be true. However, the Metaphysics of Quality observes that these two kinds of values are lower on the evolutionary ladder than the intellectual pattern of science. Science rejects them to set free its own higher intellectual pattern. The Metaphysics of Quality calls this a correct moral judgment by science. However, science never rejects the value of truth. It never rejects the value of experiment. It never rejects the value of mathematical precision. Most important, it never rejects Dynamic Quality. The greatest strength of the scientific method is that it always allows new experiences, new ideas and new evaluations of what it learns. Next, notice that the Metaphysics of Quality provides a larger framework in which to integrate subjectivity and objectivity. Subjectivity and objectivity are not separate universes that have no connection to each other. They are instead separate stages of a single evolutionary process called value. I can find no place where the words subjective and objective are used where they cannot be replaced by one of these four categories. When we get rid of the words "subjective" and "objective" completely often there is a great increase in the clarity of what is said. One person who I'm sure would agree with me on this would be Niels Bohr. A third piece of evidence that reveals the similarity between the Metaphysics of Quality and Complementarity occurs when Bohr says, "We are suspended in language", the Metaphysics of Quality completely agrees. In the block diagram of the Metaphysics of Quality we see that each higher level of evolution rests on and is supported by the next lower level of evolution and cannot do without it. There is no intellect that can independently reach and make contact with inorganic patterns. It must go through both society and biology to reach them. In the past science has insisted on the necessity of biological proofs, that is, proofs in terms of sense data, and it has tried to discard social patterns as a source of scientific knowledge. When Bohr says we are suspended in language

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I think he means you cannot get rid of the social contexts either. That was his argument to Heisenberg. The Metaphysics of Quality supports it. The fourth evidence of similarity is that the Metaphysics of Quality substitutes the word "value" for cause. It says that to say "A causes B" can be better said as "B values precondition A". This has seemed to me to be a better terminology for describing quantum phenomena. The term "cause" implies an absolute certainty that quantum theory says does not exist. The fifth evidence of similarity is that probability itself may be expressed as value, so that "a static pattern of inorganic values", which is a definition the Metaphysics of Quality gives to "substance", is the same as "a pattern of probabilities" , which is a definition quantum theory gives to substance. If the atomic world is composed of probability waves and if probability is equal to value then it follows logically that the atomic world is composed of value. The literature on probability is very large and I haven't read it but I have noted that Heisenberg has said that "the possibility or 'tendency' for an event to take place has a kind of reality-a certain intermediate layer of reality, halfway between the massive reality of matter and the intellectual reality of the idea or the image ... it is formulated quantitatively as probability and subject to mathematically expressible laws of nature." (Qtd. in [5, p. 44]) This intermediate reality Heisenberg talked about may correspond to value, but I'm not sure of that. Although probability may equal inorganic value it certainly doesn't equal any of the other value patterns. All of these patterns-all of life-seem to be in a war against it. In biology, conformity to inorganic probability is another name for death. The sixth piece of evidence is that the Metaphysics of Quality answers a problem that Bohr refused to answer. His refusal has weighed against him. Bohr "refused to comment on the relationship between Complementarity and the nature of physical reality" [1, p. 223]. "Bohr never makes clear in what sense we can have knowledge of the reality which causes our experiences" [1, p. 241]. He leaves it just hanging in limbo. The question is why would Bohr do that? It is absurd to think that he forgot about it, that it just slipped his mind. He must have had a reason. The explanation, I think, is that Bohr is prohibited from speaking about any external physical reality ahead of the experiment. Before the experiment he must say there is nothing to know. In the old classic physics an external object was put into the front end of the experiment. It was subjected to one or another forces and the results studied. Now that external object is gone. Whatever Bohr says about anything that goes into the front end of the experiment will be taken as a property

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of an independent physical reality. It is vital to Complementarity that there are no properties until after the observation. So Bohr never mentions the unmeasured phenomenal object shown as the larger dashed oval in the diagram of Complementarity. But as was said before, something has to be there. If it were not there the measuring instruments would just be measuring their own internal characteristics. It is clear from what Bohr does say that the unmeasured phenomenal object is unpatterned. The patterns only emerge after an experiment. This unmeasured phenomenal object is not the object of classical physics. This unmeasured phenomenal object is not the subject of classical physics. So what is left to conclude? It seems to me that it is not a very large jump of the imagination to see that this unmeasured phenomenal object is in fact a third category, which is not subject and not object because it is independent of the two. When this assertion is made Complementarity is out from under its lifelong accusation of subjectivity. We no longer need to claim that we ourselves alter scientific reality when we look at it and know about it-a claim that Einstein regarded as part of a "shaky game". The similarity between Dynamic Quality and Bohr's unmeasured phellomenal object does not at first seem very great. It is only when one sees that the unmeasured phenomenal object is not really phenomenal and not really an object that the two draw closer together. The unmeasured phenomenal object is not really phenomenal because it has no characteristics before an observation takes place. It is not really an object because objects are over in that right oval with the question mark in it. Those objects are what are being rejected in the first place. So what is this unmeasured phenomenal object? It seems to me that a keystone in a bridge between the Metaphysics of Quality and Complementarity may be established if what has been called the "unmeasured phenomenal object" is now called "The Conceptually Unknown" and what is called "Dynamic Quality" is also called "The Conceptually Unknown". Then the two come together. I would guess that the Conceptually Unknown is an unacceptable category in physics because it is intellectually meaningless and physics is only concerned with what is intellectually meaningful. That also might be why Bohr never mentioned it. However I think that this avoidance of The Conceptually Unknown should be revised. It is like saying that the number zero is unacceptable to mathematics because there's nothing there. Mathematics has done very well with the number "zero" despite that fact. The Conceptually Unknown, it seems to me, is a workable intellectual category for the description of nature and it ought to be worked more. As a starting axiom I would say, "Things which are intellectually meaning-

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less can nevertheless have value." I don't know of an artist who would disagree with that. Certainly not Rene Magritte. For those who would like more information about this "Conceptually Unknown" than I can give today there is a valuable book called Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel from which I derived the title for my own first book. When the Zen Archer refers to an "it" that shoots the arrow he is referring to what I mean by Dynamic Quality. For those who prefer to stay more within the confines of Western analytical thought there is a book by Prof. F.S.C. Northrop of Yale University called The Meeting of East and West. It is the book that really started me on this philosophic quest that has now lasted 47 years. Northrop's name for Dynamic Quality is "the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum". By "continuum" he means that it goes on and on forever. By "undifferentiated" he means that it is without conceptual distinctions. And by "aesthetic" he means that it has quality. I think science generally agrees that there is something that has to enter into experiments other than the measuring instruments, and I think science would agree that "Conceptually Unknown" is an acceptable name for it. What science might not agree on is that this Conceptually Unknown is aesthetic. But if the Conceptually Unknown were not aesthetic why should the scientific community be so attracted to it? If you think about it you will see that science would lose all meaning without this attraction to the unknown. A good word for the attraction is "curiosity". Without this curiosity there would never have been any science. Try to imagine a scientist who has no curiosity whatsoever and estimate what his output will be. This aesthetic nature of the Conceptually Unknown is a point of connection between the sciences and the arts. What relates science to the arts is that science explores the Conceptually Unknown in order to develop a theory that will cover measurable patterns emerging from the unknown. The arts explore the Conceptually Unknown in other ways to create patterns such as music, literature, painting, that reveal the Dynamic Quality that produced them. This description, I think, is the rational connection between science and the arts. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance art was defined as high quality endeavor. I have never found a need to add anything to that definition. But one of the reasons I have spent so much time in this paper describing the personal relationship of Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr in the development of quantum theory is that although the world views science as a sort of plodding, logical, methodical advancement of knowledge, what I saw here were two artists in the throes of creative discovery. They were at the cutting edge of knowledge plunging into the

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unknown trying to bring something out of that unknown into a static form that would be of value to everyone. As Bohr might have loved to observe, science and art are just two different complementary ways of looking at the same thing. In the largest sense it is really unnecessary to create a meeting of the arts and sciences because in actual practice, at the most immediate level, they have never really been separated. They have always been different aspects of the same fundamental human purpose. Robert Pirsig Box 3292 Portsmouth NH 03802-3292 USA REFERENCES

[1] Folse, Henry J., The Philosophy of Niels Bohr, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., Amsterdam, 1985, p. 281. [2] Herbert, Nick, Quantum Reality, Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, NY, 1985, p. 259. [3] Heisenberg, Werner, Physics and Philosophy, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1958, p. 206. [4] Herrigel, Eugen, Zen in the Art of Archery. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Vintage Books, New York, 1989, p. 82. [5] Jammer, Max, The Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1974, p. 536. [6] Moore, Ruth, Niels Bohr: The Man, His Science, & the World They Changed, First MIT Press paperback edition ed. Cambridge, Massachusetts London England: The MIT Press, 1985, p. 436. [7] Northrop, F.S.C., The Meeting of East and West, Ox Bow Press, Woodbridge CT., 1979, p. 531. [8] Hayles, N.K., The Cosmic Web, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1984, p. 65.

ILYA PRIGOGINE

EINSTEIN AND MAGRITTE. A STUDY OF CREATIVITY I am happy to participate in this symposium "Einstein meets Magritte". This could be a painting by Magritte. It gives me the opportunity to present some remarks on creativity. Creativity is the recurrent theme in the work of the great French poet, Paul Valery. In his Cahiers, Valery comes back again and again to the problem "What is creativity?". His main point is: "Mon esprit cherche a biitir quelque chose qui lui resiste". "My mind tries to build something that resists." For him, creativity relates to a question, to an ambiguity. This idea of ambiguity is for him crucial. He writes: "Peut-etre serait-il interessant de faire une fois une oeuvre qui montrerait a chacun des ses noeuds, la diversite qui peut s 'y presenter a l' esprit, et parmi laquelle il choisit la suite unique qui sera donnee dans le texte. Ce serait la substituer a l'illusion d 'une determination unique et imitatrice du reel, celle du possible-a-chaqueinstant, qui me semble plus veritable."

In a sense the artist, creator, scientist chooses one of these possibilities. Valery emphasizes that the mind in his work goes from "disorder" to "order" contrary to what man says about the law of entropy which says that nature goes from "order" to "disorder" and he adds: "Jl importe qu'il se conserve jusqu 'a la fin, des ressources de desordre, et que l 'ordre qu'il a commence de se donner ne le lie pas si completement, ne lui soit pas un tel bandeau-qu 'il puisse le changer et user de sa liberte initiale." Everybody acknowledges the genius of Michelangelo, of Mozart. Mozart dies: there will be no second Don Juan. Galois dies young but this is supposed only to lead to a delay: group theory will be rediscovered. Kant even concludes that creativity cannot be associated with science because Newton has discovered the laws of nature, even the final laws of nature in the view of Kant, and once this is done there is just no more place for creativity but only for applications of Newton's laws. We know today that this is not true: Newton has explained us some aspects of the universe but most remains to be done. In the famous book by Kuhn, he writes that creativity is associated to the exceptional moments where some new paradigm appears, moments where there appear contradictions. This conclusion is not completely correct. When Einstein published his first paper on the special theory of relativity in 1905 there was really no apparent contradiction. But what Einstein did in contrast to Lorentz and to Poincare who were thinking about the same problem

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at the same moment, Einstein concentrated his analysis on a revision of the concepts of space and time. And that is really his modernity: his modernity is very much like the modernity of Cezanne in painting or of Schonberg in music, his aim was not to write the last chapter of an old science but to write the first chapter of a new science. However, of course there also appear differences when we consider creativity in the arts and the sciences. This is the point of view we shall develop first by comparing creativity as conceived by Magritte to the creativity as conceived by Einstein. That will form the first part of my lecture, then in the second part I shall relate more closely creativity to the problems of time and determinism. This lecture gave me the opportunity to read books on Magritte and to look at his paintings but specially it gave me the opportunity to read his own writings. These writings gave me a very curious impression. He seems to live in a quite closed universe. The word that comes back and back is the idea of mystery. Creativity reveals the basic mystery: the mystery of the world. But there can and there should be no explanation of this mystery. Any attempt of an explanation is deforming the mystery. I think that in fact Einstein and Magritte could not have beer together in a Brussels cafe and Magritte would refuse any discussion with Einstein. In fact he quotes Einstein only two times: once in a very ironical way and in the second case in a rather derogative way. Magritte is in general very critical of all intellectual activity. He quotes very few philosophers. He is somewhat interested in Heidegger, who is "anti-scientific". He writes: "Plato and Socrates interest me more than the scientists. Socrates knew a great deal because he knew that he knew nothing. " The only scientific passage which I have found in this whole book is: "The other day someone asked me what the relation was between my life and my art. I could really think of nothing except that life obliges me to do something, so I paint. I'm not a determinist but I'm not believing in chance either". His decision is precisely in not accepting any explanation of the world either through chance, either through determinism. Magritte's world is a closed world in which the painting is revealing the essence of the universe which appears as through spontaneous generation. That is the reason why I believe that Einstein and Magritte would not have much to say each to the other. Magritte obtains the impression of mystery by combining objects, for example an umbrella and a glass to give the impression of the unusual. In contrast Einstein started with a trivial remark. But he makes out of it his general relativity which is called rightly the most beautiful theory of physics. The remark with which Einstein starts is that the inertial

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mass is equal to the gravitational mass. You have heard about Newton's law: force = mass multiplied by acceleration, this mass is the inertial mass. But the force for gravitation depends also on mass which is the gravitational mass. So the remarkable thing is that the masses cancel in Newton's law. And that leads to Calileo's laws that all objects fall with the same speed in vacuum. That was Einstein's starting point. A starting point which was known for 300 years and still leads to an extraordinary theory which has changed our view of the universe and has made our image of the universe quite different. A very important element in physics is the consideration of the interval between space-time events. In Newtonian physics you can separately consider the space interval and the time interval. Time and space are separated. In special relativity you combine them to express that the velocity of light is the same for all inertial observers. In general relativity the space-time interval becomes something which has to be expressed using Riemannian geometry which means you have to introduce curvature and that gravitation determines the curvature and that in turn the curvature is due to the material content of the universe. Now, this is of course an extraordinary idea but what is also very remarkable is the coming together of mathematics and physics. This coming together of physical ideas and mathematical methods is really one of the curious aspects of Western science. The physical problem in gravitation is the identity of the inertial mass and the gravitational mass and the mathematical method is differential geometry, Riemannian geometry. We see here the creativity of Einstein which is deductive. Einstein always said that these were the most creative years of his life, when he struggled to achieve out from the initial trivial observation his formulation of general relativity. We see also something else. For Magritte there is nothing outside human thought. In other words the activity of man is doomed to be an activity in a closed medium. On the contrary, the main point in Einstein's approach is that his theory is subject to contestation, to verification, that it leads to a dialogue with nature. It is interesting that this dialogue with nature led against the initial ideas of Einstein. Einstein's ambition was to apply his idea of Riemannian space time structure to the universe as a whole. That lead him to the idea of a static eternal universe. And then came a lot of very unexpected events. First of all, people like Friedman and Lemaitre in Belgium showed that Einstein's solutions were unstable. But more important was the experimental discovery; that the universe is expanding and that there is a residual black body radiation which shows that the universe was at some point very hot and very dense and this brought in exactly what Einstein hated the most: the flow of time, historicity. He hoped to prove that the essence of the universe is eternity, an eternal

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harmony. I like to say that in some sense Einstein against his will has become the Darwin of our century. In a letter to R. Tagore, Einstein wrote: "If the moon in the act of completing his eternal way round the earth would be gifted with self consciousness it would feel thoroughly convinced that it would travel its way of his own, accord on the strength a string of resolutions taken once for all. So would a being indulged with higher insight and more perfect intelligence watching man and his doings smile about the illusion of his that he was acting according to his own free will." The main point is here: man is an automaton, exactly like the moon and we should smile because determinism cannot stop in front of the human brain. So here the most creative of all men is defending the most mechanistic concept: a universal determinism. Time is rejected as an illusion. Everybody knows the statement of Einstein to Besso's sister, after Besso's death, that time is an "illusion". What is time? I was very interested to read a special issue of Scientific American in October 94 called "Life in the universe." On all levels, be it cosmology, geology, biology, human society, we see instabilities, fluctuations, evolution. Therefore we cannot avoid the question how these evolutionary patterns are rooted in the fundamental laws of physics. There is an article written by an eminent physicist, Steven Weinberg, that is relevant to this problem. He writes: "But as much as we would like to take a unified view of nature we keep encountering a stubborn duality in the role of intelligent life in the universe as both subject and student. On one hand there is the Schrodinger equation which describes in a perfectly deterministic way how the wave function changes with time. Then quite separate there is a set of principles how we have to use the wave function to calculate the probabilities of various possible outcomes when someone makes the measurement". What is the implication of such a statement? The implication is that we introduce through our measurement time into the universe. In other words we would be in some sense at the origin of the irreversibility. We would not be the children of time, the children of evolution, we would be the father of the evolution. Now, that is very difficult, for me at least, even to conceive. Weinberg's view is very common among modern cosmologists. For example you find it in the book by Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time. In this book, the universe is considered to be purely geometrical, and time becomes an accident of space. However, nobody knows how this accident could ever arrive. In addition there is life, Hawking says "intelligent life", and therefore as many other cosmologists, he introduces the so-called anthropic principle to take into account that we

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are there in the universe. The universe is such that it is possible for us to be there. Instead of explaining how life is possible in the universe, it is the fact that we exist which is used as an argument to explain the universe. In my opinion this is a very strange philosophy. It goes back to the dualistic view of Descartes in the 17th century. It is the expression of his famous dualism, on one side "res extensa" described as geometry, on the other the mind associated with "res cognita". And I think that in a sense Roger Penrose is completely right when he wrote in the "Emperor's New Mind" that it is our present lack of understanding of the fundamental laws of physics that prevents us from coming to grips with the concepts of mind in physical and logical terms. Therefore essentially the question is: can we accept a dualism which isolates man and life and makes creativity an illusion? What is then creativity? Einstein on one page says the world is deterministic; three pages later he says that theory comes from a free play with ideas. That is difficult to understand. In a famous book The First Three Minutes, Weinberg wrote that the more the universe becomes understandable the more it becomes pointless. Is this true? In my opinion the more we understand the universe the more it is interesting. Weinberg's view expresses a kind of "disenchantment". Our view is quite different as it leads to some kind of re-enchantment of the world, to a view in which there is place for matter, but place also for life, place for time and for creativity. Indeed over the last decades there has been a radical change of perspective which is witnessed in science following the realization that systems obeying nonlinear evolution laws (which is the general case) show complex behavior in the form of multiplicity of states, self-organization, coherent structures, erratic motions called deterministic chaos and so on. In other words the physicist-as well as scientists in many other disciplines-have discovered "complexity". In a sense classical science was emphasizing simplicity and Einstein from this point of view was the last of the classical physicists, while now we emphasize complexity. Popper spoke about the physics of clouds and of clocks, well we have now to make the physics of clouds. And there are two fields of modern science which in my opinion have contributed very much to this change of perspective. One field is non-equilibrium physics. In short, there appears far from equilibrium a new coherence. Again using anthropomorphic terms I like to say that matter at equilibrium is "blind" , and far from equilibrium it begins to see. What is the outcome? There are ideas such as self-organization, associated to bifurcations in which new solutions and dissipative structures appear. There are two conclusions which play here a very important role and that is the constructive role of the flow of time. Also the idea of randomness, because at bifurcations there are many solutions of the equations which describe

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the time evolution out of which one will emerge. And I would go even so far as to say that irreversibility is the basic concept which determines the unity of the world around us and also its variety. Unity because your future is my future, the future of the sun is the future of any other celestial body. The future is common to all objects in our universe and at the same time the flow of time marks the differences. In this room there is the atmosphere which is more or less at equilibrium and highly disorganized and there are the flowers which correspond to highly organized structures maintained in far from equilibrium conditions. The arrow of time is an essential element for both the understanding of the unity and the diversity of the world. Therefore we cannot avoid the question: from where is this arrow of time coming? I already mentioned that there are two sciences which contributed to the change of our view of the universe. One is non-equilibrium physics and the second is the theory of dynamical systems. We know now that not all dynamical systems are similar one to the other. But where is here the novelty? We knew since about 100 years that physical laws can be expressed both on the level of individual trajectories or wave functions in quantum mechanics, or on the level of ensembles which means collections of trajectories or wave functions. It was always assumed that the two descriptions, the individual description or the "collective" descriptions are basically identical. This is true indeed for stable dynamical systems. But it is no more true for unstable systems in general. And the fact that it is not true has a very deep mathematical reason because the evolution operators which are involved in the statistical description have new solutions which were not known. In other words we come to a very similar situation as in general relativity: you could not relate a physical problem-gravitation-to mathematics without going from Euclidean geometry to Riemannian geometry. Here you cannot solve the physical problem, the transition from reversibility to irreversibility, without leaving the usual function spaces, associated to simple regular functions. We have to use more general functions spaces which have been, for different reasons, studied by great mathematicians like Gelfand and also physicists like A. Bohm and M.adella. This means that for unstable dynam ical systems, laws of nature acquire a new meaning. Laws of nature are no more leading to certitudes, they only express "possibilities" . In the early stage of the world, the world was like a small child which could become a musician, a lawyer or whatsoever, but not all at the same time. Similarly the laws of nature whether they are classical, quantum or relativistic are no longer expressing deterministic situations, they express possibilities. We rehabilitate the idea of an event, there are not only laws but also events.

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It is time to conclude. Both Magritte and Einstein have emphasized our feeling of mystery of the complexity of the world. We see now that the world is a historical world, that there are instabilities, fluctuations, going on at all levels. A. Koyre, the famous historian of science said that the transition from middle-age to modern science can be characterized as the transition from a finite closed universe to an open infinite universe. The universe of the Newtonian revolution was open from the point of view of space. But in some sense it was closed from the point of view of time. It was emphasizing periodic motions, repetition. Nature is not only a geometry, it contains a narrative element, it is more like a novel. I think these conclusions are not only of interest for a scientist. They are of interest in the general perspective of our understanding of civilizations, of our life, because time is after all a fundamental existential dimension. What would be the meaning of our existence if time is an illusion? As Popper has written: that would then lead to a situation like that when we look at a movie. We do not know who will be killed and we do not know who will kill, but somebody knows who will be killed and somebody knows who will kill. But it is very difficult to believe that we are in front of such a movie. Coming back to Valery, I agree when he wrote that time is "construction" and being a construction, creativity becomes part of the laws of nature, something in which we participate. In their own way both Magritte and Einstein have participated in this construction. Ilya Prigogine International Solvay Institutes Campus Plaine, ULB-C.P. 231-Boulevard du Triomphe Brussels, Belgium Ilya Prigogine Center for Studies in Statistical Mechanics and Complex Systems The University of Texas at Austin Texas 78712, USA REFERENCES

[1] Magritte, Rene, Ecrits complets, Flammarion, Paris, 1979. [2] Prigogine, I., Einstein, Triumphs and Conflicts. in: Four Commemorative lectures, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1981. [3] Prigogine, I., La fin des certitudes, Odile Jacob, Paris, 1996, (English translation), The End of Certainty, The Free Press, New York, 1997.

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PIRON

QUANTA AND RELATIVITY: TWO FAILED REVOLUTIONS This article is divided in two parts, one on Quanta and Quantum Mechanics and the other on Relativity and Gravitation. In each the plan will be the same: after having recalled briefly the situation and the problem as it was at the very beginning of this century, I will introduce the two new revolutionary sciences, Quanta and Relativity. I will explain how they have grown up and attracted the attention of the physical community. Curiously, the impact has not been so profound and has not radically changed the image of the world in the mind of the physicists, theoreticians, experimentalists or even philosophers, this in spite of all their successes. But let me begin with Relativity. In the middle of the 19th century, Maxwell [1] published his famous equations for the electromagnetic field having in mind as a mechanical model some luminiferous ether. When in 1888 Hertz discovered experimentally electric waves in complete agreement with Maxwell's waves, every physicist was convinced that light was a vibration of the ether. There was nevertheless a fly in the ointment: Michelson in his first experiment and Michelson and Morley in their second and more conclusive one had found no effect due to the earth's moving through a stationary ether. This conclusion, as Michelson [2] says in his first article, directly contradicts the explanation of the phenomenon of aberration which had been hitherto generally accepted, and which supposes that the earth moves through the ether, the latter remaining at rest. Soon after, Lorentz [3], with his idea of contraction, apparently saved the idea of immobility of the ether: material lengths make contractions when moving in the ether. But it was Einstein who made the decisive step with his principle of relativity. An inertial frame which is good to explain Newton's laws of inertia is also good to explain Maxwell's laws of electromagnetism and optics, and such laws possess no property corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. In particular, the velocity of light is always the same independent of whether or not the emitting source moves. As we all know, the success of this principle and the relation between momentum and velocity so derived is now part of the daily life of the physicist. The gravitational effect on an atomic clock has been verified with great accuracy. In conclusion, Einstein and Infeld [4] stress in their book "The Evolution of Physics" that we must accept the relativity principle without bothering 107

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any more about the "e--r" problem [po 185]. They summarise by saying that a new concept appears in physics: the field. It needed great scientific imagination to realise that it is not the charges nor the particles but the field in the space between the charges and the particles that is essential for the description of physical phenomena [po 258]. The general theory of relativity gives a still deeper analysis. The validity of the theory is no longer restricted to inertial coordinate systems. But as we read in Einstein's [5] "Mein Weltbild" that according to general relativity space is endowed with physical qualities and in this sense an ether exists ... but this ether must not be thought of as endowed with the properties of ponderable media ... nor may the concept of motion be applied to it. In spite of all of these convincing arguments, all actual textbooks present the quantisation of the photon as a linear vibration of a ponderable medium having then, of course, difficulties with the zero point energy (which is infinite, the same kind of infinity as in Thomson's theory of the luminiferous ether). The Einstein Revolution didn't wash! Let us now consider Quantum Mechanics. Max Jammer [6], in his famous book "The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics", introduces quantum mechanics as follows [po 1]: Quantum theory, in its earliest formulation, had its origin in the inability of classical physics to account for the experimentally observed energy distribution in the continuous spectrum of black-body radiation. He continues [po 11] to say that Planck most probably based his programme of research on the following considerations. Wien's derivation of his radiation law, in spite of its untenable theoretical foundations, seemed to produce a correct result. Planck therefore assumed that Wien's approach was probably not altogether wrong. The basic element in Wien's derivation was the Maxwell-Boltzmann velocity distribution. Now, since cavity radiation is a process related to electromagnetism rather than to the kinetic theory of gasses, Planck decided that he could nevertheless do the same for Maxwell's theory of the electromagnetic field. Working along this direction Planck was able to announce his famous Planck's law of radiation at the October 1900 meeting of the German Physical Society as an improvement of Wien's radiation law. In the next chapter of the same book [po 62] Jammer states that it was generally agreed that classical physics was incapable of accounting for atomic or molecular processes. Of course this idea of discontinuous variation of the energy, this "quantisation" of the harmonic oscillator, was applied to the problem of lines in the hydrogen atom spectrum. The formula of Balmer for the position of such lines was already known for

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more than fifteen years. The model of Joseph John Thomson, a negative point charge moving inside a sphere uniformly positively charged, was studied also by many other physicists. Such a model gives almost automatically an explanation of the monochromatic spectrum of lines whose frequencies were independent of the energy vibration. But they failed to account for the results on a diffuse reflection of a-particles found by H. Geiger and E. Marsden [7], two of Rutherford's students. The basic problem which Bohr had to face was the question of how to apply Planck's quantum conditions to the Rutherford model, where the hydrogen atom consists of an electron evolving around a positive charge whose mass is very large in comparison. Realising the inconsistency of such a model with ordinary mechanics and Maxwell theory, Bohr [8] boldly postulated the existence of a discrete set of permissible stationary orbits, and as long as the electron remains in such an orbit no energy is radiated. In 1915 Sommerfeld [9] proposed his rule of quantification to characterise the stationary orbits, setting

J

Pk dqk = nkh.

In November 1924, L. de Broglie [10] in his thesis associated a wave to each particle according to the formula

h

P =).,

where P is the momentum and A the wavelength, and then recovered the Sommerfeld rule for circular orbits. At the same time, E. Schrodinger [11] wrote his famous equation, and the mathematics of this equation was made precise by J. von Neumann [12]. According to Schrodinger's own interpretation the electron is all around the proton. But the interpretation which almost all physicists have in mind these days is nevertheless a mechanical model where the real motion of the particle is very complicated but hidden. Such classical views of Quantum Mechanics are reinforced by the strong belief that only the statistical interpretation of Born is compatible with the whole Quantum formalism, contrary to the view of J. von Neumann expressed in his book, where he says simply that he does not know of another one. Such interpretations seem attractive to the stage that Kim and Wigner [13] in their article in the American Journal of Physics in 1990 don't hesitate to present the Wigner phase space picture, in contrast to the Heisenberg or Schrodinger pictures, as the simplest language for demonstrating the transition from classical to quantum mechanics and for describing the probabilistic characteristics of a quantum state. They say all this without mentioning in

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the rest of their article anything about the negative probabilities which appear when two Gaussian states are superposed. But the editor, to save face, added in postscript a citation from Richard P. Feynman in 1967 where he admits that such superpositions as we see in the two-slit experiment are still a mystery for him, a mystery into which no one can go any deeper today. In conclusion, the Quantum Revolution didn't wash either. Obviously there must be some common reason for the failure of these two revolutionary attempts, and to overcome the situation we must reconsider our fundamental views on the real world. According to me, the source of these difficulties has its origin in the conscious or unconscious holding of most physicists to the Descartes-Leibniz philosophy, where space of itself, the void space, is imaginary, is a non-being and only material bodies surrounded by more subtle media such as the luminiferous ether, the Dirac sea and other fluctuating dressed vacua have reality. I am convinced that we must follow Newton and Clarke [14] and admit the separate existence of space and time. As Clarke says, the void space is not an attribute without subject but a space without bodies. The fundamental concept to study space and define its own reality is the concept of element of reality. First defined by Einstein in the famous paper written with Podolsky and Rosen [15], such a concept has been elaborated by Dirk Aerts [16]. Given an experimental project, that is an experiment that you could eventually perform, if you know in advance that the expected result would be certain, this means that the system has an element of reality, otherwise called a property. As an example, the space here has the property to be Euclidean, since if you were to construct here a triangle with three solid rods then certainly the sum of the three angles would be found to be 'Jr. Space itself has this Euclidean element of reality and also in the absence of rods. Another example: space has at this moment a gravitational field, for if you were to place here a little particle then it would accelerate. To study space we must choose an inertial reference frame, in practice a big body (the earth for example), and so define coordinates at rest in this frame. The IR.3 space just obtained in this way is a model of the void space, but paraphrasing Magritte this is not the space. With a clock at rest in this frame we define IR. to model the time, also IR. is not the time. Putting IR. 3 and IR. together we obtain one Minkowski spacetime relative to the chosen reference frame. In such a spacetime we represent a possible motion by a trajectory. The Lorentz transformation gives another physically possible trajectory. Each one of these Minkowski spaces is equally good to describe the laws of physics, but the comparison between two spacetimes must be done via the sole physical space and the sole physical time. In such a picture of the world

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there is no longer any trouble between relativity and quanta, nor with experiment. But now what is a quantum object like an electron for example? It is not a little ball of some electric substance, but is an entity with a well defined charge and spin which cannot be divided in separate pieces. Such an object influences the space all around and not just in a point: it is by essence non-local [17]. This is why each single electron can cross together the two slits in Young's experiment, exactly as each single neutron goes via the two paths in the Rauch diffraction experiment [18]. But it is not like a Descartian substance moving in space: it is only its influence on the successive different parts of the space which changes. The Hilbert space description by the wave function 'l/Jt (x) is a model of such reality, but 'l/Jt(x) is not the electron itself. It gives you all indications about what it is possible to do with such an object, like a picture of a pipe can give you an idea how to smoke. But please don't light the painting to smoke the pipe! Constantin Piron Universite de Geneve Departement de Physique Theorique CH-1211 Geneve 4 Suisse REFERENCES

[1] Maxwell, J.e., Philosophical Magazine, 4, 23, 1862, p. 12. [2] Michelson, A.A., "The Relative Motion of the Earth and the Luminiferous Ether", American Journal of Science, 22, 1881, p. 20. [3] Lorentz, H.A., "Electromagnetic Phenomena in a System Moving with any Velocity less than that of Light", Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences Amsterdam, 6, 1904, p. 809. [4] Einstein, A., and Infeld, L., "The Evolution of Physics", Cambridge University Press, 1947. First Edition 1938. [5] Einstein, A., "Mein Weltbild", Amsterdam, 1934. English translation "The World as I see It", Covici, Friede, New York, 1934. [6] Jammer, M., "The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics", McGraw-Hill, New York, 1966. [7] Geiger, H. and Marsden, E., "On a Diffuse Reflection of the a-Particles", Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 82, 1909, p. 495. [8] Bohr, N., Philosophical Magazine, 26, 1, 1913, pp. 476, 857.

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[9] Sommerfeld, A., "Zur Theorie der Balmerscher Serie", Miinchener Berichte, 1915, p. 425. [10] de Broglie, L., Thesis "Recherche sur la theorie des quanta", Annales de Physique, 10th Series, III, 1925, p. 22. [11] Schrodinger, E., "Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem", Annalen der Physik, 79, 1926, p. 361. [12] von Neumann, J., "Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik" , Springer-Verlag, 1932. [13] Kim, Y.S. and Wigner, E.P., "Canonical Transformation in Quantum Mechanics", American Journal of Physics, 58, 1990, p. 439. [14] For an exposition of Newton's philosophy and a refutation of Descartes and Leibniz see Voltaire, "Elements de la philosophie de Newton mise a la portee de tout Ie monde", Etienne Ledit, Amsterdam, 1738. [15] Einstein, A., Podolsky, B. and Rosen, N., "Can QuantumMechanical Description of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?" Physical Review, 47, 1935, p. 777. [16] Aerts, D., Thesis "The One and the Many", Vrije Universiteit Brussel (1981). See also Aerts, D., "Description of Many Separated Physical Entities Without the Paradoxes Encountered in Quantum Mechanics" , Foundations of Physics, 12, 1982, p. 1132. [17] For an up to date exposition of Quantum Mechanics see Piron C., "Mecanique quantique bases et applications" , Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, Lausanne, 1990. [18] Rauch, H., Treimer, W. and Bonse, V., "Test of a Single Crystal Neutron Interferometer", Physics Letters A, 47, 1974, p. 369.

ROM HARRE

THE REDUNDANCY OF SPACETIME: RELATIVITY FROM CUSA TO EINSTEIN The history of the development of physics is full of arguments and debates about whether space and time are absolute or relational. Just what does this contrast mean? Absolutists hold that there are two manifolds to which spatial and temporal concepts apply. There is an array of things and a sequence of events, and there is also an array of places and a sequence of moments at which such things and events can be located. Relationists assert that only the arrays of things and events are real. It follows that spatial and temporal concepts refer to certain relations between things and between events. Analysis shows that spatial and temporal concepts express the conditions of identity and difference, upon which the individuation of things and events depends. For example two non-identical things that co-exist must be related by 'spatial separation', and so on. The argument against absolutism, that is against the interpretation of spatial and temporal relations in terms only of the locations and moments of a spatio-temporal manifold that is independent of the material system of the world, would be greatly strengthened if the redundancy of an independent space-time could be established from an analysis of the conceptual structure of physics itself. I shall try to show that by attending to the history of the relativity principle, interpreted in terms of the concept of covariance an overwhelming case for the redundancy of any form of independent spatio-temporal manifold can be made. We say that a law of nature is covariant under a coordinate transformation if in substituting one system of coordinates for another the form of the law remains the same. If we think of systems of coordinates as fixed to material frames of reference then a coordinate transformation expresses a change in the reference frame to which we turn to determine the values of such variables as position, velocity and acceleration. If the form of a law remains the same through such a transformation of coordinates then we can say that the physical process which the law describes is not affected by the change in frame of reference to which we refer in determining the values of the relevant variables. The key idea that links covariance to the absolute/relational debate is this: changes in spatial location, temporal moment and uniform velocity of some physical system can be expressed in terms of a transformation

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of coordinates, in that shifting a material body 2 km to the right is equivalent to referring its position to an alternative coordinate system that is fixed to a frame that has moved 2 km to the left. If a law of nature has the same form through a coordinate transformation that expresses a change in its location in space, this implies that the spatial location of a material system has no effect on the process described. A principle of covariance under some coordinate transformation is the equivalent of a principle of indifference with respect to the relevant aspect of the reference frame to which the coordinate transformation is related. Using this technique it has been shown that the processes in material systems are indifferent to their spatial locations, their temporal epochs and to their uniform, rectilinear velocities relative to a certain class of frames of reference. For example it can be shown that flat Newtonian space and time are redundant at the level of covariance expressed in Galilean relativity. According to Galileo physical processes are unaffected by their degree of relative, rectilinear uniform motion. The causal processes of nature are the same whatever the relative motion of the material system displaying them to some arbitrary frame of reference. It follows from this principle that there are no place, moment or velocity dependent changes in such processes by means of which we could determine our absolute motion, if there are none by which we could determine our relative motion in the absence of ways of consulting any external frame of reference. The cabin of Galileo's ship, wherein he imagines experiments to be conducted is closed, so that the experimenter cannot look out to see whether there is a shoreline with respect to which the ship is moving. Since, a fortiori, we have no direct access to absolute space for us it must be like the distant shoreline to the shipboard experimenter shut in the cabin. This holds, even though the measures of the common, frame independent processes the laws describe when made in one frame of reference differ from the measures obtained by investigators in other frames of reference related to the first frame in the relevant way. If we want to know the results obtained by investigators in another frame of reference we can translate them into the terms of our frame by the use of a coordinate transformation, serving as translation manual. Of course these are measures of the same process only if the laws of nature that describe the process are covariant under the very same coordinate transformation that we used to translate the exotic measures. Only the process of the propagation of light, whose measure is 'c', yields the same result in every frame and so is in no need of translation. If the laws of nature are of the same form regardless of their relations to some alleged independent manifold then that manifold plays no role in physics and can be

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discarded as redundant. To refute all absolutist interpretations of the spatial and temporal concepts of physics the Leibnizean and other conceptual arguments against the possible existence of an independent purely spatial, temporal or spatio-temporal manifold are not enough. Even if there were no matterindependent spatio-temporal manifold there might be a privileged system of spatial and temporal relations embedded in some material substrate, which could serve the same absolutist role. For example there might be an all pervasive aether to which all motions could ultimately be referred. We shall need Einstein's elegant argument to show the redundancy of the electromagnetic aether to complete the task of exorcising absolutist spatio-temporal concepts from physics. A frame of reference will be taken to be a multidimensional set of material entities, the relations between which do not change during the relevant time. How do we know they do not change? Perhaps because there are no signs of any causal process which would alter their mutual relations, or perhaps because there is a larger frame to which their relative positions can be referred, and their mutual spatial relations can be seen to be conserved. But the larger frame will need a yet larger frame to guarantee its integrity, and so on. So the notion of a frame of reference is a pragmatic or working notion, defined ad hoc for some purpose. An inertial frame is a frame of reference in which a body subject to no impressed forces is at rest or moves in a straight line with respect to the fixed bodies of the frame. How do we know that a body is not being acted on by an impressed force? Because it is at rest or moving rectilinearly with respect to the fixed bodies of the frame. The circularity is obvious, but need not trouble us in practice. Again in the concept of an inertial frame we have another pragmatic ad hoc concept. 1. COVARIANCE IN PERSPECTIVE

Let us suppose that there is a manifold of locations and moments independent of the material system of observed things and events. Let us call this the 'absolute background'. It might be immaterial (Newtonian absolute space and time) or material (the luminiferous aether). The history of physics displays a progressive realisation that the processes of nature are indifferent to the ways that physical processes might be related to that absolute background. Instances of a type of physical process might be occurring at different places, at different times or both. They might be moving with different uniform velocities relative to that background, and so to each other. They might be rotating at different angular velocities relative to it, and so on.

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The history of physics discloses a progressive realisation that physical processes are indifferent to differences in location, moment or uniform linear velocity with respect to any such imagined absolute background, and so to differences of the same type from each other. An elegant explanation of the ubiquity of these principles of indifference is that there is no such background as the immaterial absolute space, time or space-time, nor is there a material aether. This is the thesis of that the hypothesis that there exists an absolute space, time and space-time for the conduct of physics plays no part in physics and is therefore redundant. From eusa we have a principle of the indifference of the unfolding of material processes to the place or moment at which they occur. From Galileo we have a principle of the indifference of the unfolding of mechanical processes to their velocity relative to any unobservable background, of which absolute space, time and space-time would be cases. Finally from Einstein we have a conceptual demonstration of the indifference of all physical processes, mechanical and electromagnetic, to their relative velocity to some alleged absolute material background, the aether. Each level of indifference can be expressed as a principle of covariance, in that the laws of nature describing physical processes take the same form under progressively more restrictive coordinate transformations. Displaying the development of relativistic physics as a progressively more stringent application of the covariance requirement involves, in a queer way, the retention of the absolutist concepts for the exposition of relativity. We set up the progressively tighter relativity 'theories' by affirming, step by step, 'No change in the laws of nature with respect to changes in absolute positions, moments or motions, in an imagined basic manifold or set of manifolds.' Expressing the laws of nature in such forms as meet the covariance conditions for each level of stringency we can then safely ignore such absolutes in physics. We can throwaway the ladder once we have ascended it! Making the totality of the laws of physics, mechanics, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics and so on covariant under the Lorentz transformation, is just to make them independent of the most general candidate for an absolute spatio-temporal manifold, the Minkowski space-time. To show that there is an absolute reference frame we would need to show: 1. that there was a difference between the laws of nature describing some process in one frame from those describing the very same process in another) in motion relative to the first frame; 2. that one of these frames was privileged; that it enjoyed some unique attributes which justified our claim for its absolute status.

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If (1) fails then (2) does not arise. All that the critics of the thesis that there is an absolute frame of reference need do is to disprove or otherwise dispose of (1). Clearly the argument against absolute space and time as unique and usable frames of reference and their absolute attributes is easier to bring off than an argument in their favour. Spatio-temporal absolutism, as a part of physics, then can be disposed of up to and including the most stringent covariance conditions so far established-but no further. If there were some laws which were not covariant under any transformation that formed a group then they would be candidates for a criterial role in picking out a privileged frame of reference, in which, for instance, they took the simplest or most coherent form. 2. THE PRO G RES S I VEE LIM I NAT ION 0 F A B SOL UTE LOCATION, ABSOLUTE MOMENT, AND ABSOLUTE LINEAR UNIFORM VELOCITY FROM PHYSICS: CUSA TO EINSTEIN

2.1. Nicholas of Cusa

The elimination of these concepts from physics begins with the De docta ignorantia of Nicholas of Cusa [1]. One condition for the possibility of establishing an absolute location would be that one should be able to identify the 'centre of the world' and locate oneself in relation to it. But Cusa argues that any material thing will serve as a marker for the centre of a system spatial reference. Wherever we are we can take ourselves to be at the centre of a spherical frame of reference. We can explain the cosmology of Nicholas of Cusa with the help of the idea of 'perspective'. Cusa's analysis of the foundations of knowledge in De docta ignorantia leads to the conclusion that all knowledge is perspectival, that is infected with the point of view from which it is obtained. For philosophy of physics the central Cusan insight is that all points of view from which to learn about the physical universe are equivalent. The view of the universe from our point of view is infected with our perspective. The views from each of the indefinitely many other points of view are similarly infected. None of these points of view is privileged as a location from which a true view is to be obtained. Our ignorance, which is profound, is irremediable. This conclusion is based on two arguments. The first argument was repeated by both Copernicus and Galileo. The situation of the cosmic observer is likened to that of someone on a ship. ' ... if someone did not know that a body of water was flowing

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and did not see the shore while he was on a ship in the middle of the water, how would he recognize that the ship was being moved?' [1, II, 12:117]. It would be natural for such a person to take his position on the ship as the physical and geometrical centre of the world. eusa continues 'Because of the fact that it would always seem to each person (whether he were on the earth, the sun, on another star) that he was the 'immovable' centre, so to speak, and that all other things were moved: it would assuredly be the case that if he were on the sun, he would fix a set of poles in relation to himself; if on the earth, another set; on the moon, another; on Mars, another, and so on' [1, II, 12:117]. This first argument leaves the concept of 'centre of the universe' still intact. It shows only that no human observer can say with certainty where that centre is and whether he is standing at it. eusa's second argument goes to deny the intelligibility of the very concept of the centre of the universe. This is the famous argument that as far as cosmology is concerned the centre and circumference of the universe are identical. The reasoning turns on the question of the boundedness or unboundedness of the cosmos. 'For if it [the cosmos] had a centre, it would also have a circumference ... hence it would be bounded in relation to something else, and beyond the world would be both something else and space' [1, II, 11:114]. But if the universe encompasses everything it is unbounded and so 'cannot be enclosed between a physical centre and a circumference'. For a circle the 'maximum' is the circumference and the 'minimum' is the centre. 'For with reference to motion we do not come to an unqualified minimum, that is a fixed centre. For the minimum must coincide with the maximum, therefore the centre of the world coincides with the circumference. Hence the world does not have a circumference.' Without a fixed circumference there can be no fixed centre, so any point can be chosen as a centre. To suppose there is a fixed centre is to suppose something contradictory. LFrom this brief sketch of eusa's seemingly mystical but actually hardheaded geometrical cosmology a quite modern sounding argument can be drawn, without, I believe, much distortion. It follows from the cosmology that there is no physical centre. Wherever an observer is stationed will appear to be such a centre but the argument shows that that appearance is not a registration of a true physical centre. A privileged geometrical centre could only be identified if it were possible to identify a physical centre and to colocate the two. But there is no physical centre. So there is no physically identifiable location for a privileged geometrical centre.

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But all locative acts must be referred to some geometrical centre. Taking second and third points together we reach the physically significant conclusion that there are no privileged locative acts. 2.2. Galileo Galilei

The next step involved the explicit formulation of Galilean relativity, as a principle of indifference, or covariance of physical processes with respect to their velocities relative to any material reference frame. It was not until relatively recently that the Galilean transformation was algebraically formulated, so that data obtained by the measurement of some process can be transmitted to an observer on another frame of reference, moving with uniform velocity relative to the former as if they had been obtained by the dweller in the second frame. Here is Galileo's presentation of covariance. Shut yourself up with some friend in the main cabin below decks on some large ship, and have with you there some flies, butterflies, and other small flying animals. Have a large bowl of water with some fish in it; hang up a bottle that empties drop by drop into a wide vessel beneath it. With the ship standing still, observe carefully how the little animals fly with equal speeds to all sides of the cabin. the fish swim indifferently in all directions; the drops fall into the vessel underneath; and in throwing anything to your friend, you need throw no more strongly in one direction than in another, the distances being equal; jumping up with your feet together, you pass equal spaces in every direction. When you have observed all these things carefully (though there is no doubt that when the ship is standing still everything must happen in this way), have the ship proceed with any speed you like, so long as the motion is uniform and not fluctuating this way and that. YOU WILL DISCOVER NOT THE LEAST CHANGE IN THE EFFECTS NAMED, NOR COULD YOU TELL FROM ANY OF THEM WHETHER THE SHIP IS MOVING OR STANDING STILL [3, pp. 186-7].

The formulation of the Galilean transformation, the rules for transforming the results of measurements made on a physical system in one frame of reference into the results that would have been obtained by measuring the same properties of the same physical system in another frame of reference moving with uniform linear velocity relative to the first, had to wait until the late nineteenth century. Before the innovations suggested by Einstein, it was known that the laws of mechanics are Galileo indifferent but it was thought that absolute motion could be detected relative to an electromagnetic aether, between

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which and some suitable physical process there could be an interaction. This idea can be expressed in terms of the boat and stone analogy. If one is boating on the surface of a lake and the shores are hidden in the mist, it is possible to determine one's velocity relative to the stationary water in the lake by dropping a stone overboard. The stone will produce concentric rings of ripples on the surface of the lake whose velocity is independent of both the vertical and horizontal components of the velocity of the stone. So the velocity of the ripples will be independent of the velocity of the boat, since it is this which endows the stone with a horizontal component of velocity. The 'absolute' velocity of the boat with respect to the lake can be simply determined by observing the relative velocity of the boat with respect to the motion of anyone of the ripples. We could see this as an analogy behind the setting up of the MichelsonMorley experiment. To take the next step both Minkowski space-time as the abstract post-Newtonian absolute immaterial background and the luminiferous aether as the best candidate for a material absolute background must be disposed of in our step by step establishment of a relational account of space, time and space-time.

2.3. Albert Einstein If we can find a coordinate transformation under which the electromagnetic laws are covariant for frames in relative motion to one another we should be able to work out a corresponding metaphysical principle of indifference. There is just such a transformation, namely the Lorentz transformation. To express this in an indifference principle we shall need to imagine a possible absolute space and time with respect to relocation in which and motion relative to which the electromagnetic processes are indifferent. This imagined background is the space-time invented by Minkowski. The troubling situation for Einstein was that the laws of mechanics were known to be covariant with respect to the Galilean transformation but those of electromagnetism were not (Voigt's theorem of 1891). On the other hand under the Lorentz transformation the laws of electromagnetism are covariant but the Newtonian laws of mechanics are not. Which set of laws should we favour? To which space and time should we suppose the processes of nature to be indifferent-Galilean transformation privileged Newtonian Space and Time. The Lorentz transformation we can see in hindsight privileged the Minkowski Space-time. Which absolutist background was to be declared redundant? The only material candidate was the luminiferous aether. Einstein thought that there was

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reason to deny that the electromagnetic aether served any useful purpose, so this left only the immaterial Minkowski manifold of space-time points as the surviving candidate. If a version of the laws of mechanics could be created which was covariant under the Lorentz transformation, say by revising such leading mechanical parameters as proved necessary, the whole of physics would be unified at the level of Galilean relativity. The processes described by the new comprehensive set of mechanical and electromagnetic laws would be unaffected by changes in relation to any location, moment or uniform velocity and so indifferent to the corresponding absolute manifold, Minkowski space-time. Minkowski space-time as a 'candidate' for the absolute, must be declared redundant. 2.4. Einstein's Argument Against the Idea that there is an Absolute Material Background Manifold If there were to be a candidate for an absolute material background it would surely be the electromagnetic aether, the alleged medium by which light is propagated. Einstein's reasons for declaring this 'stuff' redundant did not come from the result of the Michelson-Morley experiment which had failed to detect any effect of absolute motion, but was based on an analysis of the seemingly paradoxical role the aether played in the explanation of electromagnetic induction. I quote the first paragraph of this famous paper in full. It is known that Maxwell's electrodynamics-as usually understood at the present time-when applied to moving bodies, leads to asymmetries which do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena. Take, for example, the reciprocal electrodynamic action of a magnet and a conductor. The observable phenomenon here depends only on the relative motion of the conductor and the magnet, whereas the customary view draws a sharp distinction between the two cases in which either the one or the other of these bodies is in motion. For if the magnet is in motion and the conductor at rest, there arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet an electric field with a certain definite energy, producing a current at the places where parts of the conductor are situated. But if the magnet is stationary and the conductor in motion, no electric field arises in the neighbourhood of the magnet. In the conductor, however, we find an electromotive force, to which in itself there is no corresponding energy, but which gives rise-assuming equality of relative motion in the two cases discussed-to electric currents of the same path and intensity as those produced by the electric forces in the former case.

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Examples of this sort, together with the unsuccessful attempts to discover any motion of the earth relatively to the 'light medium', suggest that the phenomena of electrodynamics as well as of mechanics possess no properties corresponding to the idea of absolute rest. They suggest rather that, as has already been shown to the first order of small quantities, the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference ... [2]. The analysis is directed essentially to throwing into doubt the importance or even the role of the aether as a universal and absolute material foundation for electromagnetism. The structure of the argument is perhaps best appreciated in the form of a diagram.

A (moving magnet) Phenomenon: Current

B (moving coil) Phenomenon: Current

Explanation: Electric Field Model: Aether Tension

Explanation: Electromotive Force Model: None

Common ontology: Aether Einstein's argument was very simple: The phenomena of physical processes A and B reveal the same electromagnetic effect and involve the same relative motion-but the explanations built upon the assumption of the electromagnetic aether as a common ontology and an absolute manifold of places are different. Should not symmetrical phenomena have symmetrical explanations? The source of the asymmetry in explanations is the aether. Abandon it. We have now shown that absolute space and time, however conceived, are redundant for physics up to and including the Galilean degree of indifference. 3. SPECIAL RELATIVITY AS THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENTIFIC COMMUNICATION

3.1. Grammar of What? What then is one learning if one learns the Special Theory of Relativity? Is it a physical theory in the sense that theory of blackbody radiation is a physical theory? With the absolute background in both its abstract and its material manifestations declared redundant up to the Galilean degree of indifference, any role in physics of the Minkowski space-time is ruled out. Yet it is of immense importance to physics. I shall try to show that

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it is best interpreted as a grammar for a certain kind of communication. Of course this is not a novel or original suggestion. It is worked out in detail by Lucas [4, Section 44] and by Lucas and Hodgson [5, Ch. 2]. A set of coordinate axes, 'bolted' to a frame of reference, can be used to describe locations in that frame unambiguously. A coordinate transformation is a set of rules for rewriting the results of making measurements on some physical process in one frame of reference as if they had been made in another frame, related to the former in some determinate and physically relevant way. For example the Galilean transformation permits an observer in one frame of reference to translate the results of measuring the motion of a body relative to that frame into the results that would have been obtained by another observer making measurements of the motion of the very same body in another frame of reference moving with uniform linear velocity relative to the first frame. Or to put the point slightly differently the Galilean and Lorentz transformations allow observers in different frames of reference to communicate their results to one another in such a way that their results are mutually intelligible and do not contradict one another. The reason why we use the Lorentz rather than the Galilean transformation is just that that transformation guarantees the widest possible range of physical processes to be accommodated in a unified physics. In examining Cusa's, Galileo's and Einstein's (Special) relativity theories we have compared two frames of reference which differ from one another in at least the following physically relevant ways: a. The origin of the spatial axes of the second frame does not coincide

with the origin of the axes of the first frame.

h. The origin of the temporal axis of the second frame does not coincide

with the origin of the temporal axis of the first frame. c. The second frame is moving with uniform linear velocity with respect

to the first frame. We have not considered cases in which frames are mutually accelerating, for example the case in which the second frame is rotating with uniform angular velocity with respect to the first frame. If we take Newton's Second Law as our guide then whenever there is an acceleration there must also be a force, and the concept of 'force' is not kinematic. Forces are causes and should be able to be independently identified, say by the smoke of a rocket exhaust, or by the tension in the string that joins Newton's globes that spin about a common centre in an 'immense vacuum'. The arguments supporting the Special Theory take us only as far as principles of indifference with respect to place, moment and velocity.

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3.2. The Thesis of Reciprocity The measurements made by an observer in the second frame have as much validity for physics as those made by an observer in the first frame. Since the postulate applies to the measurements obtained in any two frames of reference, it is equivalent to the principle of relativity, that there is no privileged frame. Expressed mathematically the thesis of reciprocity amounts to the requirement that coordinate transformations always form a group, that is by repeated transformation through a sequence of coordinate systems suitably fixed to frames of reference related in the way required for the application of the transformation, the original measurements results are always recovered when we reach the frame from which we started the sequence of transformations. So far these principles represent the grammar of exchanges of information between observers. Built in to this is the assumption that all observers measure the properties of one and the same process. This assumption enters into the physics of the universe through its expression as the principle of covariance, that the forms of the laws describing physical processes are independent of the frames of reference within which they are studied. But where is the physics in all this? So far we seem to be recording only the rules of grammar for successively communicating the results of observations and measurements from one observer to any other, whose situations differ either by location, by epoch or by uniform relative rectilinear velocity (and perhaps by the scale of the measuring devices they are using). Why this grammar and not some other? The answer highlights the first fragment of physics reflected in coordinate transformations. It amounts to the thesis that there is no causal relation between an inertial frame of reference and a physical process that occurs in it. Or to put the matter more clearly, only for such frames is a coordinate transformation under the constraint of covariance possible. The second fragment of physics that has to be accommodated in whatever grammar we devise, and is responsible for the Lorentz transformation taking the form that it does, is the fact that the velocity of light, as measured, is the same in all frames of reference. The one measurement result that can be sent from observer to observer without being subject to the relevant transformation is that of the velocity of light. It follows also that we cannot use the physics of light propagation to identify a privileged frame of reference. But are not Maxwell's Laws the laws of just that process? How can they possibly be covariant if the measure of c is the same in all frames of reference? By showing that the best reading of the relativities is as grammars

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for exchanging information obtained by the making of measurements in different frames of reference, we undercut any argument for a substantival interpretation of space and time. By Ockham's Razor there is no need to introduce a manifold of locations and a manifold of moments, or a joint manifold of locations at moments, in addition to the things and events of the material world. Spatial and temporal concepts refer to nothing but relations between things and between events, relations that reduce to rules of mutual exclusion and coexistence. 4. THE EX C E P T ION: THE T R 0 U B LEW I T H L I G H T

The result of measuring the velocity of light propagation is the same in every frame. So there is no need to use the rules of the relevant transformation as a grammar to enable dwellers in different frames to incorporate the measurements of this velocity made by every observer in the histories written by each. For those processes which were indifferent to their relations to the absolute, and so were the same for all those who wished to measure their properties in whatever frame, the results of their measurements could only be coordinated by the use of the transformations. The results of the measurements of the velocity of the propagation of light would be wildly paradoxical if the process of propagation was unaffected by its position, epoch or velocity relative to the absolute background. (Is it that it is affected in just such a way as to compensate for the effect on measurement by different frame dwellers? This has never seemed to me remotely plausible). If, as the Einstein symmetry argument suggests, there is no aether, then there is no material mechanism for the propagation of light. So the fact that its measure is the same in all frames and that it is in no need of a translation grammar to be incorporated into all histories is not paradoxical. However, it is utterly mysterious. Thus, having shown: 1. That independent manifolds of spatial places, temporal moments and spatio-temporal 'location' are redundant, and that there is no good argument for an immaterial absolute background; 2. that measurements conducted on the same process in different reference frames can be coordinated and mutually translated; 3. that there are no privileged frames of reference, since there is no good argument for supposing there is an absolute material background; 4. by the covariance test being able to identify which processes are unaffected by their relations either to an absolute immaterial or

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material background, and found that all physical processes are of this sort; it is surely astonishing that c is a measure of a process and that it can be exchanged between inhabitants of different frames without modification. The same processes of mechanical propagation have different measures, why does the same process of luminiferous propagation have the same measure? The process the properties of which are being measured by different frame dwellers in a certain well defined set of frames, is the same process. What guarantees to all frame dwellers that it is the same process for all? The covariance of the laws which describe that process under coordinate transformation. So if there is covariance, that is the process measured is the same for each frame dweller, then there must be a grammar for coordinating the measures each obtains for the same property of the common process. Sameness of process is expressed in the coordinate transformation under which the laws are covariant. It must be that very same transformation which serves to coordinate the results of measurements, made, in principle, by any frame dweller whose frame is in that relation to all others in the set. It seems quite astonishing that this simple and elegant relationship does not hold for the propagation of light. 5. THE BREAK IN THE HISTORICAL GROWTH OF THE RELATIVITY PRINCIPLE

5.1. The Genesis of General Relativity

At the heart of General Relativity is the extension of the Relativity Principle from velocity to acceleration. At first sight this looks like an extension of the fable of the closed cabin in Galileo's ship, within which no experiment could help us to determine whether we were in motion or stationary and if in motion at what speed, to acceleration. We could create a situation in which the concept of motion could be applied, only by opening a porthole and looking for a material frame against which to observe our relative motion. Nothing in the behaviour of the experimental materials in the closed cabin would be indicative of it. Einstein's extension takes us to the enclosed lift cabin in which no experiment can determine whether we are being accelerated or whether we are stationary in a gravitational field, or any combination of the two. If we open a window we will be able to decide that we are accelerating relative to some material frame of reference and not being acted on by a gravitational force while standing relatively still. So the absolute character of

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acceleration, as it appears in the Special theory, in the context of which it is detected by reference to external causes and effects, and so seems to be an exception to the Relativity Principle seems to be resolved, since the only external causes or effects in the case of the closed lift cabin are gravitational force and acceleration. The claim for the physical identity of the processes in the accelerating lift cabin and in the stationary cabin subject to gravity has been called the '[Extended] Equivalence Principle'. It is evident that the Galilean ship and the Einsteinian lift are not exactly parallel cases. In the cabin the physical phenomena are the same whatever the uniform rectilinear velocity of the ship, and so that velocity cannot be detected inside the closed cabin. In the elevator the phenomena are not the same when the elevator cabin moves with different degrees of acceleration. The indeterminacy is between the explanation that they are due to the acceleration of the cabin or that they are due to a force field. There seems to be a parallel in that the phenomena in the closed cabin will not allow us to decide whether the cabin is accelerating or being acted on by a force. In the case of the ship the alternatives are both kinematic. The phenomena inside the cabin of the ship do not allow us to decide whether we are moving or stationary or if moving at what speed. In the original Einstein fable of the closed lift cabin the gravitational field the effects of which were mimicked by the effects of acceleration, was uniform. The brilliant exploitation by Grossman and Einstein of the tensor calculus allowed them to work out the accelerated motions for experiments in a lift cabin that would reproduce the phenomena of a non-uniform gravitational field (a force), and then, via the Einstein equation linking the metric tensor to the energy-momentum tensor, to the actual distribution of masses. From the point of view of the metaphysician intent on looking for the best interpretation of General Relativity the success of the tensor 'trick' is necessary to force us to take the Extended Equivalence Principle seriously. However, I have been convinced by Harvey Brown that the mathematical adjustments of the elements of the metric tensor do have physical significance. In finding the 'right' metric tensor one is finding the coefficients for the relevant analogue of Pythagoras' Theorem which specifies the character of the 'space'. Since it has turned out that the elements of the metric tensor are functions of the spatial and temporal parameters of that 'space', and vary with the spatio-temporal displacement of the point of application of the Pythagoras analogue from some field source, they must implicitly incorporate causal assumptions, essentially the causal structure of the gravitational field. The question of the status of the derivation of the tensor equations is far from simple. In one

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sense it has something of the character of the a priori, that is Grossman and Einstein and later Einstein on his own, worked on adjusting the elements of the metric tensor till they allowed an application of the Extended Equivalence Principle to mimic gravity. But there was a further a posteriori constraint on this work, in that whatever functions of sand t turned up had to be physically plausible. That they were able to be developed to meet both these requirements was one of the great tours de force of mathematical physics. Does this exegesis show that the space-time of General Relativity is as relational as that of the Special Theory? Not unequivocally. The standard interpretation is to treat the metric tensor as expressing a nonEuclidean space-time. But if all spaces, times and space-times are, as Leibniz would have it, abstracted in thought from real relations between material things and events, then the account of space-time distortions as having causal efficacy does not go through. To develop this intuition in a fully convincing manner must be left to another occasion. Rom Harre Linacre College, Oxford University Subfaculty of Philosophy 10 Merton Street Oxford OX4]] UK

REFERENCES

[lJ Nicholas of eusa, De docta ignorantia, (1440) trans. G. Heron,

Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1954. [2J Einstein, A., 'On the electrodynamics of moving bodies' in: The principle of relativity, Dover, New York, 1905, p. 37. [3J Galileo, G., Dialogues concerning the two chief world systems, (1632) trans. S. Drake, California University Press, Berkeley, 1953. [4J Lucas, J.R., A treatise of time and space, Methuen, London, 1973 [5J Lucas, J.R. and Hodgson, P.E., Spacetime and electromagnetism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990.

DIEDERIK AERTS

THE STUFF THE WORLD IS MADE OF: PHYSICS AND REALITY

Absolute space, in its own nature, without relation to anything external, remains always similar and immovable. Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equally without relation to anything external. Isaac Newton, 1642-1726 An intelligence that would know at a certain moment all the forces existing in nature and the situations of the bodies that compose nature, and if it would be powerful enough to analyze all these data, would be able to grasp in one formula the movements of the biggest bodies of the Universe as well as of the lightest atom. Simon Laplace, 1749-1827 Because of the relativity of the concept of simultaneity, space and time melt together to a four dimensional continuum. Albert Einstein, 1879-1955 Everything is still unclear to me, but my feeling is getting stronger everyday. I believe that in the scheme that I am developing the particles will not move anymore on orbits, and we shall have to reconsider fundamental classical concepts. Werner Heisenberg, 1901-1976 The word Physics comes from the Greek word 'phusis', which means 'that what comes into existence', and itself is derived from the Greek verb 'phuoo' which means 'to create, to come into existence'. In this paper we want to investigate what we can say about reality taking into account the latest insights from physics. We shall see that our intuitive conception of reality is challenged by the two fundamental physical theories of modern times, quantum mechanics and relativity theory. Instead of starting here with subtle philosophical considerations-we shall have ample place for that later-we want to confront the reader immediately with one of the more mysterious aspects of quantum reality, namely, non-locality.

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DIEDERIK AERTS 1. MAGIC WITH NEUTRONS

In this section we present an experiment on single quantum entities that illustrates, in our opinion, the problem of non-locality as encountered in quantum mechanics in its most crucial form. It is an experiment in neutron interferometry performed by Helmut Rauch and his collaborators. The preparation of the experiment was published in [1], while the actual experiment, as presented here, was performed a year later and the results were published in [2]. Rauch has also written a 'review article' on the numerous neutron experiments that have since been performed [3]. Helmut Rauch and his group had built their first neutron interferometer in 1976. To do this, starting from a perfect monocrystalline silicon block, they had cut out a crystal in the shape shown in Figure 1, with three parallel walls or lips of precisely the same thickness. In their experiments, they directed a neutron beam onto one side of the crystal lips, and detected it on the other side. According to quantum mechanics the beam should behave in a rather mysterious manner, and Rauch and his group wanted to verify if the predicted behavior was correct. Fig. 1: The perfect silicon crystal, as used by Helmut Rauch's group at the Laue-Langevin Institute in Grenoble.

The beam was directed onto the crystal from the "northwest" direction (see Figure 2). On the first lip, the incident beam splits into two beams, which we shall call the northern and the southern beams; these then travel on towards the second lip. The northern beam undergoes refraction at the first lip, and travels on a northeast course, while the southern beam continues in the prolongation of the incident beam. On the second lip, the two beams again split, and of the four resultant beams, two will converge from north and south to cross on the third lip. Two detectors placed on their paths make it possible to count the neutrons as they emerge from the crystal. Rauch's crystal is 7 cm long and 8 cm wide, so that the top view of Figure 2 is half of the real size. The neutrons are emitted one at the time from a reactor at an average speed of 2200 meters per second, which is approximately 5000 miles per hour, and on average they are separated by a distance of 300 meters. This means that there will never be more than one single neutron within the crystal. In point of fact, when a given neutron passes through the crystal lips, the neutron that will follow has not yet been produced in the reactor.

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In Rauch's experiments each of the neutron has a "coherence length" of one millionth of a centimeter. This means that the region within which the neutrons exercises an action, or inversely, within which it can be acted upon, is restricted to a cube of side one millionth of a centimeter. This is a very small volume indeed, and one of the problems that we are confronted with is that we lose all intuitive feeling on such small scales. To understand fully just how strange the results of Rauch's experiments are, let me scale the volume up to a size where we can better visualize it. Let us therefore reconsider the Rauch experiments on a scale 25 million times larger.

South

Fig. 2: Two representations of th full) h cxp rilllent. The incid nL beam come~ in from northwest, and is split on the first lip into two beams: one is rcfracted to thc northeast (the northern beam), and the 0th r (the :;Qulh TIl b >lm) continu~ in thc 'outh ast TIl direction. On the second lip there is a further splitting gh'ing rise to four beams, of which two, thc northcrn and thc southern beam. cross on the third lip, and upon cmerging from the crystal, arc det cted, and the nelltrons countcd.

To do this, first take the real crystal and place it on a map of Europe scaled down twenty five million times. Then scale back up to get an imaginary super crystal covering a large area of Central Europe (Figure 3). The neutrons will now seem to be coming in from over the Atlantic Ocean, penetrating the super-crystal in Paris. The first lip, in which the neutron beam is split, lies over France and Great Britain. The northern beam flicks north-east over Belgium, and penetrates the second lip somewhere between Denmark and Norway. The southern beam passes over Bern, and attains the second lip in Trieste. In the second lip, the beams are again split in two, so that four beams emerge, of which two in the direction of Warsaw where they cross. The northern beam has passed over Copenhagen, and the southern over Vienna. Upon emerging from the crystal, the neutrons fly on towards Saint Petersburg or the Crimea, where they will be detected.

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We mentioned that in the real experiments the field of influence of the neutrons can be considered as localized within a small cube of side one millionth of a centimeter. This becomes a cube of 25 centimeters on the scale for which the crystal covers half of Europe.

Fig 3: The super-crystal projected on Europe

The passage of the neutron beam through the crystal lips will probably have suggested the following picture in most readers' minds: the neutrons as small projectiles, and the beam as a machine-gun fire of these projectiles. Let us think through a Rauch experiment assuming that the projectile analogy is correct. The machine-gun which is firing the neutrons lies somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean and is aiming at Paris. Remember that there is never more than a single neutron within the crystal at any given moment. This means that our machine-gun fires very slowly, one neutron after the other at large time intervals. A given neutron will have been detected in Saint Petersburg or in the Crimea long before the next neutron is fired. In our projectile analogy we can thus consider individual trajectories for each neutron taken separately. A given neutron comes in above the Channel, penetrates the crystal in Paris, then either continues through towards Vienna on the southern beam line, or is deflected towards Copenhagen on the northern beam. In the second lip, the same thing happens again: either the neutron passes through undeflected and leaves the crystal, or it is deflected, and flicks over Vienna or Copenhagen in the direction of Warsaw where it reaches the third lip. Yet again the neutron can proceed undeflected, and it will finally reach the detectors in Saint Petersburg or the Crimea. If this machine-gun projectile analogy were correct, it would be difficult to imagine anything mysterious about this experiment. But it is not correct. Further on, we shall give a complete quantum mechanical

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description of what takes place, so that we shall be able to see step by step how the mystery arises. At present, let us just consider what actually happens in Rauch's experiments, because that is our direct concern at present. The experimental set-up is such that Rauch is able to act upon each neutron as it crosses lip 2 of the crystal, i. e., in our upscaled model, within a 25 centimeter cube either in Copenhagen, or in Vienna. More precisely, Rauch can rotate the neutron, using experimental apparatus located in Copenhagen or Vienna, and which has only a local effective range. The rotation of the neutron can be carried out from either of the two experimental sites, Vienna or Copenhagen, and will be observed by one of the detectors, in Saint Petersburg or in the Crimea. From this it is clear that the neutron does not behave like a small projectile, for then it would pass either through Copenhagen, and Rauch could not rotate it from Vienna, or it would pass through Vienna, so that he could not act on it from Copenhagen. The experiment establishes that it is truly possible to rotate the neutron both from Copenhagen and from Vienna, without anything happening in the space between Vienna and Copenhagen. No signal which could influence the neutron in any way is transmitted between Vienna and Copenhagen. The apparatus which Rauch uses to rotate the neutron is a magnetic field localized in a small region in Vienna and Copenhagen. There is no possibility whatsoever that the magnetic field used in Copenhagen to rotate the neutron could have any action outside Copenhagen, let alone in Vienna; at least if we think of magnetic forces varying in space. And there is no possibility that the neutron is partly in Copenhagen and partly in Vienna (whatever this would mean), because, if we were to set up detectors there, what we would detect in Vienna or in Copenhagen would always be either a complete neutron or no neutron. More specifically there is one chance out of two for the whole neutron to be detected in Copenhagen and one chance out of two for it to be detected in Vienna. It is 'as if' the single neutron is present simultaneously in both places, in the small cube in Vienna and in the small cube in Copenhagen, and that it can be acted upon from both these places as though it really and truly be there. An object which is simultaneous present in two distant places, can such a thing possibly exist? Yet this is the result predicted by the theory of quantum mechanics and obtained experimentally by Rauch. But quantum theory does not tell us of how to understand this effect, and it is only recently that we are beginning to understand more of it.

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The Ptolemean system for our universe was not abandoned by reason of experimental errors, for it fitted very well with all existing observations. To incorporate the descriptions of the known phenomena it only had to introduce additional constructions, called epicycles, which gave rise to many complications but gave a good fit to the experimental observations. But since the primary hypothesis (a) the earth is the center of the universe and (b) all celestial bodies move in circles around the earth were felt to be absolutely essential, the complications could be interpreted as being due to specific properties of the planets. Copernicus (and Greek scientists long before him) dropped hypothesis (a), substituting it by a new one (c) the sun is the center of the universe. Clearly this new hypothesis gave rise to a model that is much simpler than the original Ptolemaeus model. Until the theoretical findings of Kepler, using the refined experimental results of Brahe, hypothesis (b), the circle as the basic motion for the celestial objects, remained unaltered, and Kepler was very unhappy when it became clear to him that it was a wrong hypothesis. Now that we know the motion of the planets around the sun as a general solution of Newton's equations, the fact that these motions proceed along ellipses does not bother us anymore. On the contrary, the elliptic orbits have become a part of a much greater whole, Newtonian mechanics, which incorporate more beauty and symmetry than the original two axioms that were of primary importance to Ptolemaeus. The change from Ptolemaeus to Copernicus is typical in the evolution of scientific theories. Usually one is not conscious of the concepts that prevent scientific theories from evolving in a fruitful direction. We claim that we have now a similar situation for quantum mechanics, and that the concept of quantum entity, and its meaning, is at the heart of it. We believe that the pre-scientific preconception that has to be abandoned can be compared to that of the earth being the center of the universe. It is a preconception that is due to the specific nature of our human interaction with the rest of reality, and of the subjective perspective following from this human interaction. We can only observe the universe from the earth, and this gave us the perspective that the earth plays a central role. In an analogous way we can only observe the micro-world from our position in the macro-world; this forces us to extend the concepts of the world view constructed for this macro-world into the world view that we try to construct for the micro-world. That space-time is the global setting for reality is such a hypothesis, and it leans only on our experience with the macroscopic material world. The experiment with the neutrons is only one of the many experiments

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that have been carried out recently to exhibit the quantum effect that has been called non-locality. We cannot go into all details in this paper and refer the reader to [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] for extensive analyses of Rauch's experiment. Meanwhile, more than two decades later, experimenters play in the laboratory with quantum entities brought very explicitly in nonlocal states. In 1997, Nicolas Gisin-with whom the author of this article made his first steps in research as young students at the university of Geneva-managed to produce a pair of non-local photons over a distance of 20 kilometers, using glass fibers of Swiss Telecom between two Swiss villages. All this shows that non-locality is a genuine property of quantum entities. It is our opinion that one cannot retain in quantum mechanics the hypothesis that at every moment every entity is effectively present in space. The behaviour of quantum entities, not only in Rauch's experiment with neutrons but also in many other experiments, shows us that this idea must be incorrect. Let us therefore explicitly introduce the following hypothesis: We shall assume that quantum entities are not permanently present in space, and that, when a quantum entity is detected in such a nonspatial state, it is 'dragged' or 'sucked up' into space by the detection system.

In our everyday reality, each material entity has at every instant its place in space. In classical mechanics, there are various ways of specifying position in 3-dimensional space. For a solid body, one can give the position of its centre of gravity, and its orientation in a coordinate system with origin in the centre of gravity. For a liquid or a gas, one will use continuum mechanics and a description in terms of fluid particles, filling that part of space where the mass density of the liquid or the gas is different from zero. Waves too, although often spread out, can be given a place in space. In classical mechanics, whatever the description used and whichever entity is considered, it is in a well defined place. In the picture that we now want to propose for quantum entities the situation is very different. We assume that the experiment in which the quantum entity is detected contains a creation-element: this actually in part creates a place for the entity, at the moment when the detection is carried out. More explicitly this means that, before the experiment, the quantum entity did not necessarily have a place in space and that its place is created by the experiment itself. An analogous process happens when the momentum (product of velocity times mass and intuitively thought of as the impact that an entity has on another entity when colliding) of the quantum entity is measured. The quantum entity will not in general

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have a momentum before the experiment carried out to measure it. As often happens, everyday language helps us to understand this change in meaning of the concept of space. One often considers reality as the setting in which everything takes place. Events, when we do not yet consider them as entities, still 'take place', which can be considered to imply that they are not necessarily in space to start with. At first sight it might seem that such a picture cannot satisfy those scientists who seek the intuitive support of their imagination; but we shall see that this impression is erroneous, and that it comes from preconceived ideas over what 'being' really is. This brings us thus to the central question: the nature of 'being', or in other words, the nature of reality. It is perhaps now the moment to say that the results that we present in this article have been acquired over a period of two decades. In a first period, this was mostly by myself, but certainly inspired by my experience as a doctorate student in the school of Constantin Piron in Geneva. Later, together with my young collaborators in our research group FUND at the university of Brussels. The totality of our results together form a specific view, an interpretation of quantum mechanics, that we have called the creation-discovery view. We refer to [4, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12] and first give here a short description of this creation-discovery vzew. Within the creation-discovery view it is taken for granted that during an act of measurement there always exist two aspects, a discovery of a part of reality that was present independently of the act of measurement, and a creation that adds new elements of reality to the process of measurement and to the entity under investigation. When we put forward the creation-discovery view in this way, it does not seem to contradict our intuition. Indeed creating part of reality during the act of measurement is certainly not contra-intuitive. We are confronted with so many situations in our daily life where such creation aspects are obviously present. To make clear what we mean let me give a very common example from our everyday life. Suppose that an interviewer is questioning a person for an opinion poll. It is obvious that the act of interviewing itself, the way the question is asked, the attitude of the interviewer, in short, each aspect of the context in which the interview takes place, can in part create the answer of the person interviewed, depending on the type of question that is asked. In this example of the interview for an opinion poll, the creative aspect is well known and not mysterious at all. The creation-discovery view as applied to the interpretation of quantum mechanics has, however, far reaching consequences that do contradict certain aspects of our intuition. More precisely, and we come back now

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to the situation of Rauch's experiment, it is the hypothesis that the whole of reality can be contained within space that turns out to be at stake. Indeed, we can show that within 'the creation-discovery view' as applied to the micro-world, the creation aspect of a quantum measurement in the detection of a quantum entity contains in part the creation of the place of the quantum entity itself. This means that the place of this quantum entity did not exist before the entity was detected, and this place is created during the process of detection. The same is true for the property 'momentum' of a quantum entity. It is partly created during the process of the measurement of this property, and did not exist before. As a consequence, a quantum entity in most of its states does not have a place-in technical jargon, we say that it is not localized-and it does not have a momentum (or impact which is a property more easy to imagine for us). We want to state clearly that the reason we have developed this creation-discovery view is not because we just wanted to try it out for philosophical purposes. The reason is that we were compelled to formulate it, on the one hand, due to the new and very subtle experiments on single quantum entities like the one of Helmut Rauch, and on the other hand, as a result of new theoretical investigations, the details of which are, however, too technical to be presented here. Let us now analyse in which way we apply the creation-discovery view to describe the experiments like the one of Helmut Rauch. Within the creation-discovery view, we propose that the mysterious aspects of the Rauch experiments result from the fact that the neutron involved is 'not present in space'. And that the two experimental cubes, the one in Copenhagen and the one in Vienna, can be considered as windows through which we can act on the neutron in its non-spatial state. The two cubes are openings which give us access to the reality 'out of space'. We no longer visualize space as an all-embracing setting in which the whole play of reality takes place, but as a structure that we, as human beings, have constructed, relying upon our everyday experience of the macroscopic entities around us. We make a distinction between the following two properties: 1) Every entity can be detected in space, and space is then one of the structures in which we, as human beings, come into contact with and create a reality; 2) Every entity is present in space, and space is then the setting in which all of reality develops. While the first property also applies to quantum entities, the second does not. Our creation-discovery view introduces a new quality of reality for space. Space as an intermediate structure in which encounters occur, rather than as an all embracing setting. Things make their place instead of having a place. Yet again, language is clearer in terms of events than of entities: think of the expression 'participate' in the making of an event.

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In our creation-discovery view we participate in the making of an entity. We actually suspect that it is the failure of space as a global setting for reality which accounts for the unsuccessful outcome up till now of every attempt to unify relativity theory, for which space is a fundamental ingredient, with quantum mechanics. We shall turn to this question in a later section of this paper. 3. THE EPICYCLES OF DE BROGLIE AND BOHM WAVES AND PARTICLES

The pictures that have been put forward in a last but hard struggle to fit quantum entities within the space-time setting make use of two basic prototypes: particles and waves. The particle is identified by the fact that upon detection it leaves a spot on the detection screen, while waves are to be recognized by their characteristic interference patterns. Certain experiments with quantum entities give results which are characteristic for particles, other experiments reveal the presence of waves. This is the reason why the concepts of particles and waves are used to attempt to represent quantum entities.

(1) De Broglie and Bohm: particles and waves There exists a representation using waves and particles together, introduced by Louis de Broglie [13] in the early years of quantum mechanics, and which after a long period of neglect, was rediscovered by David Bohm and Jean Pierre Vigier [14] and which is still now the object of active study in different research centers. In this representation, it is assumed that a quantum entity is at the same time always both a particle and a wave. The particle has the properties of a small projectile, but is accompanied by a wave which is responsible for the interference patterns. This representation of de Broglie and Bohm incorporates the observed quantum phenomena and attempts to change as little as possible at the level of the underlying reality where these quantum entities exist and interact. This reality is the ordinary three-dimensional Euclidean space; the quantum entity is considered to be both a wave and a particle, existing, moving and changing in this space. The specific quantum effects are accounted for by a quantum potential which is effective in this three dimensional Euclidean space, and which brings about the quantum nonlocal effects. The quantum potential is the entity that carries most of the strange quantum behavior. The quantum probabilities appear in the de Broglie-Bohm picture as ordinary classical probabilities, resulting from a lack of knowledge about the position of the point particle associated with the quantum entity. This is exactly as for the probabilities in a classical statistical theory, and is due to a lack of knowledge about the

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micro-states of the atoms and molecules of the substance considered. The de Broglie-Bohm picture is thus a hidden variable theory. The variables describing the state of the point particle are the hidden variables, and the lack of knowledge about these hidden variables is at the origin of the probabilistic description. There is, however, a serious problem with the de Broglie-Bohm theory when one attempts to describe more than one quantum entity. Indeed, for the example of two quantum entities, the wave corresponding to the composite entity consisting of the two quantum entities is a wave in a six dimensional configuration space, and not in the three-dimensional Euclidean space, and the quantum potential acts in this six-dimensional configuration space and not in the three-dimensional Euclidean space. Moreover, when the composite entity is in a so called 'non-product state', this wave in the six-dimensional configuration space cannot be written as the product of two waves in the three-dimensional space (hence the reason for naming these states "non-product states"). It is these non-product states that give rise to the typical quantum mechanical Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-like correlations between the two sub-entities. The existence of these correlations has meanwhile been experimentally verified by different experiments, so that the reality of the non-product states, and consequently the impossibility to define the de Broglie-Bohm theory in three-dimensional space, is firmly established. This important conceptual failure of the de Broglie-Bohm theory is certainly also one of the main reasons that Bohm himself considered the theory as being a preliminary version of yet another theory to come [15].

(2) Bohr: the Copenhagen interpretation The usual representation of quantum entities makes use either of a wave or of a particle, and although it is now associated with the Copenhagen school, it was present in quantum mechanics from the very start. In this picture it is considered that the quantum entity can behave in two ways, either like a particle or like a wave, and that the choice between the two types of behavior is determined by the nature of the observation being made. If the measurement one is making consists in detecting the quantum entity, then it will behave like a particle and leave a spot on the detection screen, just as a small projectile would. But if one chooses an interferometric experiment, then the quantum entity will behave like a wave, and give rise to the typical interference pattern characteristic for waves. When referring to this picture one usually speaks of Bohr's complementarity principle, thereby stressing the dual structure assumed for the quantum entity. This aspect of the Copenhagen interpretation has profound consequences for the general nature of reality. The com-

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plementarity principle introduces the necessity of a far reaching subjective interpretation for quantum theory. If the nature of the behavior of a quantum entity (wave or particle) depends on the choice of the experiment that one decides to perform, then the nature of reality as a whole depends explicitly on the act of observation of this reality. As a consequence it makes no sense to speak about a reality which exists independently of the observer. N n

A S

=

DI

Fig. 4: The delayed-choice experimental setup as proposed by John Archibald Wheeler. A source emits extremely low intensity photons that are incident on a semitransparent mirror A. The beam divides into two, a northern beam n, which is again reflected by the totally reflecting mirror N and sent towards the photomultiplier Db and a southern beam s, which is reflected by the totally reflecting mirror S, and sent towards the photomultiplier

D2.

S

N Fig. 5: The delayed-choice experimental setup as proposed by John Archibald Wheeler, where a second semitransparent mirror is introduced. Following the Copenhagen interpretation, in this experimental situation the photons will behave like a wave.

=

S

DI

This dramatic aspect of the Copenhagen interpretation is best illustrated by the delayed-choice experiments proposed by John Archibald Wheeler, where the experimental choice made at one moment can modify the past. Wheeler's reasoning is based on an experimental apparatus as shown in Figure 4, where a source emits extremely low intensity photons, one at a time, with a long time interval between one photon and the next. The light beam is incident on a semitransparent mirror A and divides into two beams, a northern beam n, which is again reflected by the totally reflecting mirror N and sent towards the photomultiplier D 1 , and a southern beam s, which is reflected by the totally reflecting mirror S, and sent towards the photomultiplier D 2 . We know that the outcome of the experiment will be that every photon will be detected either by Dl or by D 2 . Following the Copenhagen complementarity in-

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terpretation, this experimental situation forces a photon to behave like a particle, that will be detected either in the northern detector D2 or in the southern detector D 1 . It is quite easy to introduce an additional element in the experimental setup, that according to the Copenhagen interpretation will make the photons behave like a wave. Wheeler proposes the following: we introduce a second semitransparent mirror B as shown on Figure 5, and the thickness of B is calculated as a function of the wavelength of the light, such that the superposition of the northern beam and the southern beam generates a wave of zero intensity. In this experimental setup nothing will be detected in D2 and all the light goes to D 1 , and the photons of the beam are forced into a total wave behavior. Indeed, each photon interferes with itself in region B such that it is detected with certainty in D 1 . So, we have two experimental setups, the one shown in Figure 4 and the one shown in Figure 5, that only differ by the insertion of a semitransparent mirror B. Wheeler proposes the semitransparent mirror B to be inserted or excluded at the last moment, when the photon has already left the source and interacted with the mirror N. Following the Copenhagen interpretation and this experimental proposal of Wheeler, the wave behavior or particle behavior of a quantum entity in the past, could be decided upon by an experimental choice that is made in the present. We are dealing here with an inversion of the cause-effect relationship, that gives rise to a total upset of the temporal order of phenomena. To indicate more drastically the profound subjective nature of the world view that follows from a consistent application of the Copenhagen interpretation, Wheeler proposes an astronomical version of his delayedchoice experiment. He considers the observation on earth of the light coming from a distant star. The light reaches the earth by two paths due to the presence of a gravitational lens, formed by a very massive galaxy between the earth and the distant star. Wheeler observes that one may apply the scheme of Figure 4 and 5, where instead of the semitransparent mirror A there is now the gravitational lens. The distant star may be billions of light years away, and by the insertion or not of the semitransparent mirror, we can force the next photon that arrives to have traveled towards the earth in the form of a wave or of a particle. This means according to Wheeler that we can influence the past even on time scales comparable to the age of the universe. Not all physicist who believe in the correctness of the Copenhagen interpretation go as far as Wheeler proposes. The general conclusion of Wheeler's example remains, however, valid. The Copenhagen interpretation makes it quite impossible to avoid the introduction of an essential effect on the nature and behavior of the quantum entity due to the choice

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of the type of measurement that is performed on it. The determination of the nature and the behavior of a quantum entity independently of the specification of the measurement that one is going to carry out is considered to be impossible in the Copenhagen interpretation.

(1) The creation-discovery view: quantum entities and space Let us explain now in which way the creation-discovery view that we want to bring forward is different from both of the above mentioned interpretations, the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation and the Copenhagen interpretation. It is a realistic interpretation of quantum theory, in the sense that it considers the quantum entity as existing in the outside world, independently of us observing it, and with an existence and behavior that is also independent of the kind of observation to be made. In this sense it is strictly different from the Copenhagen interpretation, where the mere concept of quantum entity existing independently of the measurement process is declared to be meaningless. The creationdiscovery view is, however, not like the de Broglie-Bohm theory, where it is attempted to picture quantum entities as point particles moving and changing in our three-dimensional Euclidean space, and where detection is considered just to be an observation that does not change the state of the quantum entity. In the creation-discovery view it is taken for granted that measurements, in general, do change the state of the entity under consideration. In this way the view incorporates two aspects, an aspect of 'discovery' referring to the properties that the entity already had before the measurement started (this aspect is independent of the measurement being made), and an aspect of 'creation', referring to the new properties that are created during the act of measurement (this aspect depends on the measurement being made). 4. THE QUA N TUM MAC H I N E: AGE N ERA L OPERATIONAL FORMALISM PROVIDING A CLOSER APPROACH TO THE MYSTERY

The fact that it took so long to come to the kind of view that we propose, is largely due to the way in which quantum mechanics arose as a physical theory. Indeed, the development of quantum mechanics proceeded in a rather haphazard manner, with the introduction of many ill-defined and poorly understood new concepts. During its first years (1890-1925, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Louis de Broglie, Hendrik Lorentz, Niels Bohr, Arnold Sommerfeld, and Hendrik Kramers), quantum mechanics (commonly referred to as the 'old quantum theory'), did not even possess a coherent mathematical basis. In 1925 Werner Heisenberg [16] and Erwin Schri::idinger [17] produced the

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first two versions of the new quantum mechanics, which then were unified by Paul Dirac [18] and John von Neumann [19] to form what is now known as the orthodox version of quantum mechanics. The mathematical formalism was elaborate and sophisticated, but the significance of the basic concepts remained quite vague and unclear. The predictive success of the theory was, however, so remarkable that it immediately was accepted as constituting a fundamental contribution to physics. However, the problems surrounding its conceptual basis led to a broad and prolonged debate in which all the leading physicists of the time participated (Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Pauli, Dirac, von Neumann, etc.) The von Neumann theory constitutes the standard mathematical model of quantum mechanics [19]. We give now a short description of this standard model. Those readers who are not acquainted with the jargon, are advised just to skip the next paragraph, and proceed. Standard quantum mechanics: the state of a quantum entity is described by a unit vector in a separable complex Hilbert space; an experiment is described by a self-adjoint operator on this Hilbert space, with as eigenvalues the possible results of the experiment. As the result of an experiment, a state will be transformed into the eigenstate of the selfadjoint operator corresponding to a certain experimental result, with a probability given by the square of the scalar product of the state vector and of the eigenstate unit vector. It follows that, if the state of the quantum entity is not an eigenstate of an operator associated with a given experiment, then the experiment can yield any possible result, with a probability determined by the scalar product of the state and eigenstate vectors as indicated above. The dynamical evolution of the state of a quantum entity is determined by the Schrodinger equation. The orthodox quantum mechanics of von Neumann is still dominant in the classroom, although a number of variant formalisms have since been developed with the aim of clarifying the basic conceptual shortcomings of the orthodox theory. In the sixties and seventies, new formalisms were being investigated by many research groups. In Geneva, the school of Josef Maria Jauch was developing an axiomatic formulation of quantum mechanics [20], and Constantin Piron gave the proof of a fundamental representation theorem for the axiomatic structure [21]. Gunther Ludwig's group in Marburg [22] developed the convex ensemble theory, and in Amherst, Massachusetts, the group of Charles Randall and David Foulis [23,24] was elaborating an operational approach. Peter Mittelstaedt and his group in Cologne studied the logical aspects of the quantum formalism [25]' while other workers (Jordan, Segal, Mackey, Varadarajan, Emch) [26, 27] focused their attention on the algebraic

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structures, and Richard Feynman developed the path integral formulation [28]. There appeared also theories of phase-space quantization, of geometric quantization and quantization by transformation of algebras. These different formalisms all contained attempts to clarify the conceptuallabyrinth of the orthodox theory, but none succeeded in resolving the fundamental difficulties. This was because they all followed the same methodology: first develop a mathematical structure, then pass to its physical interpretation. This is still the procedure followed in the most recent and authoritative theoretical developments in particle physics and unification theory, such as quantumchromodynamics and string theory. But from 1980 on, within the group of physicists involved in the study of quantum structures, there arose a growing feeling that a change of methodology was indispensable, that one should start from the physics of the problem, and only proceed to the construction of a theory after having clearly identified all basic concepts. Very fortunately, this change in attitude to theory coincided with the appearance of an abundance of new experimental results concerning many subtle aspects of microphysics, which previously could only have been conjectured upon. We here have in mind the experiments in neutron interferometry, in quantum optics, on isolated atoms, etc. The new insights as to the nature of physical reality, resulting in part from the new experimental data and in part from the new methodological approach, have made it possible to clarify some of the old quantum paradoxes and thereby to open the way to a reformulation of quantum mechanics on an adequate physical basis. In Brussels we have now decided to work explicitly along this new methodological approach, starting from the physics of the problem, and only proceeding to the construction of a theory after having clearly identified all basic concepts [11,29,30,31,32]. We clearly want to state the following, however. One could get the impression that such an approach, starting from the physics of the situation and then introducing the mathematics, solves the old problem of operationality. Indeed, such a theory is by definition operational, since the basic mathematical concepts are linked to well known 'operations' and 'situations' in the physical world. Philosophically speaking, however, we do not believe that in this way we shall be able to reduce quantum mechanics to a purely operational theory. We do not believe this because we are convinced of the fact that the micro-world contains fundamentally new aspects of reality that cannot be reduced operationally to aspects of reality that we take from the macroscopic world that surrounds us. But, we do think that an operational approach has to be pushed to the limit as far as it can, because in thi~ way we shall be able to come closer to these new strange aspects of reality of the microworld.

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We shall now describe the basic steps of our approach, illustrating it by means of the very simple example of a quantum machine [7, 8, 9, 10, 12], which we shall here use to explain that part of quantum mechanics that can at present be understood.

(1) The ontological basis: the concept of entity and its states An entity S is in all generality described by the collection ~ of its possible states. A state p, at the instant t, represents the physical reality of the entity S at the time t. It represents what the entity 'is' at the time t. We use the concept of the state p in the following way: At each instant of time t an entity S is in a specific state p, that represents the reality of the entity at the time t. We remark that no mathematical structure is a priori assigned to this collection of states, contrary to what is done in quantum mechanics (a Hilbert space structure) or in classical mechanics (a phase space structure). Fig. 6: A representation of the quantum machine. In (a) the physical entity P is in state pv in the point v, and the elastic corresponding to the experiment e u is installed between the two diametrically opposed points u and -u. In (b) the particle P falls orthogonally onto the elastic and sticks to it. In (c) the elastic breaks and the particle P is pulled towards the point u, such that (d) it arrives at the point u, and the experiment e u gets the outcome oj.

The quantum machine (denoted qm in the following) that we want to introduce-to illustrate the concepts that are defined in a more general way-consists of a physical entity Sqm constituted by a point particle P that can move on the surface of a sphere, denoted surf, with center o and radius 1. The unit-vector v giving the location of the particle on surf represents the state Pv of the particle (see Fig. 6, a). Hence the collection of all possible states of the entity Sqm that we consider is given by ~qm = {Pv I v E sur J}.

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(2) Operational foundation: experiments and outcomes We acquire knowledge about the reality of the entity by performing experiments. In this way to each entity S and its set of states 'E there corresponds a collection of relevant experiments~we shall denote this collection by E~that can be carried out on the entity S. For an experiment e E E we denote its outcome set by O(e) and each outcome by x(e)i' hence O(e) = {x(e)ili E I}. Again, no a priori mathematical structure is imposed upon E. For an entity S in a state p an experiment e can be performed and one of the outcomes x(e)i' i E I will occur.

For our quantum machine we introduce the following experiments. For each point u E surf, we introduce the experiment eu . We consider the diametrically opposite point -u, and install an elastic band of length 2, such that it is fixed with one of its end-points in u and the other endpoint in -u. Once the elastic is installed, the particle P falls from its original place v orthogonally onto the elastic, and sticks to it (Fig 6, b). The elastic then breaks and the particle P, attached to one of the two pieces of the elastic (Fig 6, c), moves to one of the two end-points u or -u (Fig 6, d). Depending on whether the particle P arrives in u (as in Fig 6) or in -u, we give the outcome xl or x'2 to eu . Hence for the quantum machine we have Eqm = {e u I u E sur J}. v p

Fig. 7: A representation of the experimental process in the plane where it takes place. The elastic of length 2, corresponding to the experiment eu , is installed between u and -u. The probability. P(x] ,Pv), that the particle P ends LIp in point u is given by the length of the piece of elastic LJ divided by the total length of the elastic. The probability, P(x 2,Pv), that the particle P ends up in point -u is given by the length of the piece of elastic L2 divided by the total length of the elastic.

(3) Change of state resulting from an experiment

If an experiment e is performed on an entity S in state p, and an outcome x( e)i occurs, this state p will in general be changed into one of the states qi, i E I after the experiment. For an entity S in a state p and an experiment e with outcomes x( e)i' the state p is changed into one of the states qi, i E I by the performance of the experiment e.

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For the quantum machine the state Pv is changed by the experiment eu into one of the two states Pu or p-u. (4) Probability For a given entity S in a state p and an experiment e performed on this entity, each outcome x( e)i will occur with a certain probability P(x(e)i'p), where this probability is the limit of the relative frequency of repeated experiments. Hence we also have L-iP(x(e)i,p) = 1. For an entity S in a state p and an experiment e with outcomes {x(e)ili E I}, there is a probability P(x(e)i'p) that the outcome x(e)i will occur and L-iP(x(e)i,p) = 1. For the quantum machine we make the hypothesis that the elastic band breaks uniformly, which means that the probability that a particle in state Pv, arrives in u, is given by the length of L1 (which is 1 + cosO) divided by the total length of the elastic (which is 2). The probability that a particle in state Pv arrives in -u is given by the length of L2 (which is 1 - cosO) divided by the total length of the elastic. If we denote these probabilities respectively by P(xl'Pv) and P(x2'Pv) we have: 1 + cosO - - = cos 20-

2

1 - cosO

--- = 2

.

2

20

S2n-

2

(1)

(2)

In Figure 7 we represent the experimental process connected to eu in the plane where it takes place, and we can easily calculate the probabilities corresponding to the two possible outcomes. In order to do so we remark that the particle P arrives in u when the elastic breaks in a point of the interval L 1 , and arrives in -u when it breaks in a point of the interval L2 (see Fig. 7). We have remarked already that in our approach we do not demand a priori any specific structure for the set of states, for the set of experiments or for the probability model. This is one of the new and strong aspects of the approach. One can question whether the structure that can be derived for such a situation is not too general to be of any value. The method that we shall follow is, however, the following: for certain specific entities we shall demand extra conditions to be fulfilled, but these conditions will also come from the physics of the situation and will characterise exactly these specific entities. We refer the reader to [32] for a very detailed outline of our operational and realistic approach.

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(5) The quantum machine is a quantum entity We can easily show that the quantum machine is an entity the description of which is isomorphic to the quantum description of the spin of a spin 1/2 particle. Hence, speaking in the quantum jargon, the quantum machine is a model for the spin of a spin 1/2 quantum particle. This means that we can describe this macroscopic machine using the ordinary quantum formalism with a two-dimensional complex Hilbert space as the carrier for the set of states of the entity. The quantum machine as a model for an arbitrary quantum system described by a two dimensional Hilbert space was presented in [7, 8, 9]. It is now possible to prove that for any arbitrary quantum entity one can construct a model like that of the quantum machine [11, 33, 34, 35]. The explanation of the quantum structure that is given in the quantum machine can thus also be used for general quantum entities. We have called this explanation the 'hidden measurement approach', hidden measurements referring to the fact that for a real measurement there is a 'lack of knowledge' about the measurement process in this approach. For the quantum machine, for example, this lack of knowledge is the lack of knowledge about where the elastic will break during a measurement process. This 'physical' formalism has already led to a number of concrete and far reaching results, some of which we shall explain in the following. The most important achievement however, in my opinion, consists in an explanation of the structure of quantum mechanics, and in identifying the reason why it appears in a natural way in nature. 5. W HAT ARE QUA N TUM S T RUe T U RES AND WHY DO THEY APPEAR IN NATURE?

Already in the early development of quantum mechanics it was realized that the structure of quantum theory is very different from the structure of the existing classical theories. This structural difference has been expressed and studied in several mathematical categories, and we mention here some of the most important ones:

(1) the structure of the collection of experimental propositions If one considers the collection of properties (experimental propositions) of a physical entity, then it has the structure of a Boolean lattice for the case of a classical entity, while it is non-Boolean for the case of a quantum entity [20, 21, 36]. (2) the structure of the probability model The axioms formulated by Kolmogorov in 1933 relate to the classical

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probability calculus as introduced for the first time by Simon Laplace. Quantum probabilities do not satisfy these axioms. John von Neumann was the first to prove a "no go" theorem for hidden variable theories [19]. Many further developments were, however, required before it was definitely proved that it is impossible to reproduce quantum probabilities from a hidden variable theory. Quite definitely the structure of the quantum probability model is not Kolmogorovian [7, 8, 9, 23, 24, 37, 38, 39]. (3) the structure of the collection of observables

If the collection of observables is considered, a classical entity gives rise to a commutative algebra, while a quantum entity does not [26, 27, 40, 41]. The presence of these deep structural differences between classical theories and quantum theory has contributed strongly to the belief that classical theories describe the ordinary 'understandable' part of reality, while quantum theory confronts us with a part of reality (the microworld) that escapes our understanding. This is why the strong paradigm that quantum mechanics cannot be understood is still in vigour. The example of our macroscopic machine with a quantum structure challenges this paradigm, because obviously the functioning of this machine can be understood. We now want to show that all the main aspects of the quantum structures can indeed be explained in this way and we shall identify the reason why they appear in nature. We shall focus here on the explanation in the category of the probability models, and refer to [11,42,43, 44, 45, 46, 47] for an analysis pertinent to other categories. The original development of probability theory aimed at a formalization of the description of the probabilities that appear as the consequence of a lack of knowledge. The probability structure appearing in situations of lack of knowledge was axiomatized by Kolmogorov and such a probability model is now called Kolmogorovian. Since the quantum probability model is not Kolmogorovian, it has now generally been accepted that the quantum probabilities are not associated with a lack of knowledge. Sometimes this conclusion is formulated by stating that the quantum probabilities are ontological probabilities, as if they were present in reality itself. In the approach that we follow in Brussels, and which we have named the hidden measurement approach, we show that the quantum probabilities can also be explained as being due to a lack of knowledge, and we prove that what distinguishes quantum probabilities from classical Kolmogorovian probabilities is the nature of this lack of knowledge. Let us go back to the quantum machine to illustrate what we mean. If we consider again our quantum machine (Fig. 6 and Fig. 7), and

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look for the origin of the probabilities as they appear in this example, we can remark that the probability is entirely due to a lack of knowledge about the measurement process. Namely the lack of knowledge of where exactly the elastic breaks during a measurement. More specifically, we can identify two main aspects of the experiment eu as it appears in the quantum machine. (1) The experiment eu effects a real change on the state Pv of the entity S. Indeed, the state Pv changes into one of the states Pu or P-u by the experiment e u . (2) The probabilities appearing are due to a lack of knowledge about a deeper reality of the individual measurement process itself, namely where the elastic breaks. These two effects give rise to quantum-like structures, and the lack of knowledge about the deeper reality of the individual measurement process comes from 'hidden measurements' that operate deterministically in this deeper reality [7, 8, 9, 12,48,49,50,51,52]; and that is the origin of the name that we gave to this approach. One might think that our 'hidden-measurement' approach is in fact a 'hidden-variable' theory. In a certain sense this is true. If our explanation for the quantum structures is the correct one, quantum mechanics is compatible with a deterministic universe on the deepest level. There is no need to introduce the idea of an ontological probability. Why then the generally held conviction that hidden variable theories cannot be used for quantum mechanics? The reason is that those physicists who are interested in trying out hidden variable theories, are not at all interested in the kind of theory that we propose here. They want the hidden variables to be hidden variables of the state of the entity under study, so that the probability is associated to a lack of knowledge about the deeper reality of this entity; as we have mentioned already this gives rise to a Kolmogorovian probability theory. This kind of hidden variables relating to states is indeed impossible for quantum mechanics for structural reasons, with exception of course in the de Broglie-Bohm theory: there, in addition to the hidden state variables, a new spooky entity of 'quantum potential' is introduced in order to express the action of the measurement as a change in the hidden state variables; and as we have already remarked, the description of more than one entity causes deep problems. If one wants to interpret our hidden measurements as hidden variables, then they are hidden variables of the measuring apparatus and not of the entity under study. In this sense they are highly contextual, since each experiment introduces another set of hidden variables. They differ from the variables of a classical hidden variable theory, because they do

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not provide an 'additional deeper' description of the reality of the physical entity. Their presence, as variables of the experimental apparatus, has a well defined philosophical meaning, and expresses the fact that we, human beings, want to construct a model of reality independent of our experience of this reality. The reason is that we look for 'properties' or 'relations between properties', and these are defined by our ability to make predictions independent of our experience. We want to model the structure of the world, independently of our observing and experimenting with this world. Since we do not control these variables in the experimental apparatus, we do not allow them in our model of reality, and the probability introduced by them cannot be eliminated from a predictive theoretical model. In the macroscopic world, because of the availability of many experiments with negligible fluctuations, we find an 'almost' deterministic model. We must now try to understand the consequences of our explanation of the quantum structure for our understanding of the nature of reality. Since some of the less mathematically oriented readers may have had some difficulties in following our explanation of quantum mechanics by means of the quantum machine we shall now give a second, more metaphorical and less technical, example of our creation-discovery view. 6. CRACKIN G WALNUTS AND QU ANTUM MECHANIC S

Consider the following experiment: 'we take a walnut out of a basket, and break it open in order to eat it'. Let us look closely at the way we crack the nut. We don't use a nutcracker, but simply take the nut between the palms of our two hands, press as hard as we can, and see what happens. Everyone who has tried this knows that a number of things can happen. A first possibility to envisage is that the nut is mildewed. If after cracking the shell the walnut turns out to be mildewed, then we don't eat it. Assume for a moment that the only property of the nut that plays a role in our eating it or not is the property of being mildewed or not. Assume now that there are N walnuts in the basket. Then, for a given nut k (we have 1 .::; k .::; N), there are always two possible results for our experiment: E l , we crack the nut and eat it (and then following our hypothesis, it was not mildewed); E 2 , we crack the nut and don't eat it (and then it was mildewed). Suppose that M of the N nuts in the basket are mildewed. Then the probability that our experiment for a nut k yields the result El is given by the ratio (N ttl) , and that it yields the result E 2 , by r:r. These probabilities are introduced by our lack of knowledge of the complete physical reality for the nut. Indeed, the nut k is either mildewed or not before we proceed to break it open. Had we

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known about its being mildewed without having to crack the nut, then we could have eliminated the probability statement, which is simply the expression of our lack of knowledge about the deeper unknown reality of the nut. We could have selected the nuts for eating by removing from the basket all the mildewed ones The classical probability calculus is based, as above, upon a priori assumptions as to the nature of existing probabilities. Everyone who has had any experience in cracking walnuts knows that other things can happen. Sometimes, we crush the nut upon cracking the shell. We then have to make an assessment of the damage incurred, and decide whether or not it is worth while to try and separate out the nut from the fragments of the shell. If not, we don't eat the nut. Taking into account this more realistic situation, we have to drop our hypothesis that the only factor determining our eating the nut is the mildew, existing before the cracking. Now there are two factors: the mildew, and the state of the nut 'after' the act of cracking. Again we have two possible results for our experiment: E l , we eat it (then it was not mildewed and cleanly cracked); and E2, we don't eat the nut (then it was mildewed or is crushed upon cracking). For a given nut k these two possible results will occur with a certain probability. We perceive immediately that this sort of probability depends on the way we crack the nut, and is thus of a different nature from the one only related to the presence of mildewed nuts. Before cracking the nuts, there is no way of separating out those which will be cleanly cracked and those which will be crushed. This distinction cannot be made because it is partly created by the cracking experiment itself. This is a nice example of how aspects of physical reality can be created by the measurement itself, namely, the cracking open of the walnuts, and it can be clearly understood why the probability that comes in by this effect is of another nature and cannot be eliminated by looking for a deeper description of the entity under study. We can state now easily our general creation-discovery view for the case of the nuts. The mildewed nature of the nut is a property that the nut has before and independently of the fact that we break it. When we break the nut and find out that it is mildewed, then this finding is a 'discovery'. These discoveries, related to outcomes of experiments, obey a classical probability calculus, expressing our lack of knowledge about something that was already there before we made the experiment. The crushed or cleanly cracked nature of the nut is not a discovery of the experiment of cracking. It is a creation. Indeed, depending on how we perform the experiment, and on all other circumstantial factors during the experiment, some nuts will come out crushed, while others will be

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cleanly cracked. The mathematical structure of the probability model necessary to describe the probabilities for cleanly cracked or crushed nuts is quite different from that needed for mildewed or non-mildewed ones. More specifically: The probability structure corresponding to the indeterminism resulting from a lack of knowledge of an existing physical reality is a classical K olmogorov probability model. The probability structure corresponding to the indeterminism resulting from the fact that during a measurement new elements of physical reality, which thus did not exist before the measurement, are created is a quantum-like probability model.

Quantum probabilities can thus be taken as resulting from a lack of knowledge of the interaction between the measuring apparatus and the quantum entity during the measuring experiment. This interaction creates new elements of physical reality which did not exist before the measurement. This is the explanation which we propose to account for quantum probabilities. We should point out that the non-Kolmogorovian nature of the probability model corresponding to situations of creation cannot be shown for the case of a single experiment, as considered. At least three different experiments with two outcomes of the creation type are necessary to prove in a formal way that a description within a Kolmogorovian model is not possible. We refer to [7, 8, 9] for the details of such a proof for the quantum spin 1/2 model. The fact that we need at least three experiments does not, however, suppress the fact that the physical origin of the non-Kolmogorovian behavior is clearly due to the presence of explicit creation aspects [52]. Let us now assume that we have removed all the mildewed walnuts from the basket. We then have the situation where none of the nuts are mildewed. In the physicist's jargon we say that the individual nuts are in a pure state, relative to the property of being mildewed or not. In the original situation when there were still mildewed nuts present, an individual nut was in a mixed state, mildewed and not mildewed, with weighting factors ~ and (N -;r). In the new situation with the basket containing only non-mildewed nuts, we consider an event m: we take a non-mildewed walnut, and carry out the measurement consisting in cracking the nut. We have here the two possible results: E 1 , the nut is cleanly cracked and we eat it; E 2 , the nut is crushed and we don't eat it. The result depends on what takes place during the cracking experiment. We therefore here introduce the concept of potentiality. For the case

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of mildewed or non-mildewed nuts we could assert for each nut that, previously to the experiment, the nut was mildewed or not. For the case of cleanly cracked or crushed nuts, we cannot relate the outcome of the cracking to any anterior property of the walnut. What we can assert, however, is that each walnut is potentially cleanly cracked (and will then be eaten), or potentially crushed (and then will not be eaten). Nobody will have any difficulty in understanding the walnut example. What we propose is that one should try to understand quantum reality in a similar manner. The only difference is that for the measurements in quantum mechanics which introduce a probability of the second type (i.e., with the creation of a new element of physical reality during the measurement), we find it difficult to visualize just what this creation is. This is the case for instance for detection experiments of a quantum entity. Intuitively, we associate the detection process with the determination of a spatial position which already exists. But now, we must learn to accept that the detection of a quantum entity involves, at least partially, the creation of the position of the particle during the detection process. Walnuts are potentially cleanly cracked or crushed, and likewise quantum entities are potentially within a given region of space or potentially outside it. The experiment consisting in finding or not finding a quantum entity in a given region takes place only after setting up in the laboratory the measuring apparatus used for the detection, and it requires the interaction of the quantum entity with that measuring apparatus. Consequently, the quantum entity is potentially present and potentially not present in the region of space considered. It will be observed that this description of quantum measurements makes it necessary to reconsider our concept of space. If a quantum entity in a superposition state between two separated regions of space is only potentially present in both of these region of space, then space is no longer the setting for the whole of physical reality. Space, as we intuitively understand it, is in fact a structure within which classical relations between macroscopic physical entities are established. These macroscopic entities are always present in space, because space is essentially the structure in which we situate these entities. This need not be, and is not the case for quantum entities. In its normal state, a quantum entity does not exist in space, it is only by means of a detection experiment that it is, as it were, pulled into space. The action of being pulled into space introduces a probability of the second type (the type associated with cracking the walnuts open), since the position of the quantum entity is partially created during the detection process. Let us consider now a neutron (photon) in Rauch's experiment (Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment) and let us describe this situation within

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the creation-discovery view. We accept that the neutron (photon) while it travels between the source and the detector is not inside space. It remains a single entity traveling through reality and the two paths n and s are regions of space where the neutron (photon) can be detected more easily than in other regions of space when a detection experiment is carried out. The detection experiment is considered to contain explicitly a creation element and pulls the neutron (photon) inside space. If no detection experiment is carried out, and no physical apparatuses related to this detection experiment are put into place, the neutron (photon) is not traveling on one of the two paths n or s. We can understand now how the 'subjective' part of the Copenhagen interpretation disappears. In the creation-discovery view the choice of the measurement, whether we choose to detect or to make an interference experiment, does not influence the intrinsic nature of the quantum entity. In both choices the quantum entity is traveling outside space, and the effect of an experiment appears only when the measurement related to the experiment starts. If a detection measurement is chosen the quantum entity starts to get pulled into a place in space where it localizes. If an interference experiment is chosen the quantum entity remains outside space, not localized, and interacts from there with the macroscopic material apparatuses and the fields, and this interaction gives rise to the interference pattern. 7. WHERE DO THE QUANTUM PARADOXES GO?

We have analyzed in foregoing sections the manner in which the creationdiscovery view resolves the problems that are connected to the de Broglie theory and the Copenhagen interpretation. We would like to say now some words about the quantum paradoxes. Our main conclusion relative to the quantum paradoxes is the following: some are due to intrinsic structural shortcomings of the orthodox theory, while others find their origin in the nature of reality, and are due to the pre-scientific preconception about space that we have been able to explain. In this way we can state that the generalized quantum theories together with the creationdiscovery view resolve the well-known quantum paradoxes. We do not have the space here to go into all the delicate aspects of the paradoxes, and refer therefore to the literature. We shall, however, present a sufficiently detailed analysis of certain cases, so that it becomes clear how the paradoxes are solved within the generalized quantum theories and the creation-discovery view.

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(1) The measurement problem and Schrodinger's cat paradox If one tries to apply orthodox quantum mechanics to describe a system containing both a quantum entity and the macroscopic measuring apparatus, one is led to very strange predictions. It was Schrodinger who discussed this problem in detail, so let us consider the matter from the point of view of his cat [53]. Schrodinger imagined the following thought experiment. He considered a room containing a radioactive source and a detector to detect the radioactive particles emitted. In the room there is also a flask of poison and a living cat. The detector is switched on for a length of time such there is exactly a probability 1/2 of detecting a radioactive particle emitted by the source. Upon detecting a particle, the detector triggers a mechanism which breaks the flask, liberating the poison and killing the cat. If no particle is detected, nothing happens, and the cat stays alive. We can know the result of the experiment only when we go into the room to see what has happened. If we apply the orthodox quantum formalism to describe the experiment (cat included), then, until the moment that we open the door, the state of the cat, which we denote by Peat, is a superposition of the two states "the cat is dead", written Pdead, and "the cat is alive", written Plive. Thus, Peat = (Pdead + Plive) / J2. The superposition is suppressed, giving a change in the quantum mechanical state, only at the instant when we go into the room to see what has taken place. We first want to remark that if we interpret the state as described by the orthodox quantum mechanical wave function as a mathematical object giving exclusively our knowledge of the system, then there would be no problem with Schrodinger's cat. Indeed, from the point of view of our knowledge of the state, we can assume that before opening the door of the room the cat was already dead or was still alive, and that the quantum mechanical change of state simply corresponds to the change in our knowledge of the state. This knowledge picture would also resolve another problem. According to the orthodox quantum formalism, the superposition state Peat = (Pdead + Plive)/J2 is instantaneously transformed, at the instant when one opens the door, into one of the two component states Pdead or Plive' This sudden change of the state, which in the quantum mechanical jargon is called the collapse of the wave function, thus has a very natural explanation in the knowledge picture. Indeed, if the wave function describes our knowledge of the situation, then the acquisition of new information, as for instance by opening a door, can give rise to an arbitrarily sudden change of our knowledge and hence also of the wave function. The knowledge picture cannot be correct, however, because it is a hidden variable theory. Indeed, the quantum mechanical wave function does

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not describe the physical reality itself, which exists independently of our knowledge of it, but describes only our knowledge of the physical reality. It would then follow, if the knowledge picture is correct, that there must exist an underlying level of reality which is not described by a quantum mechanical wave function. For the cat experiment, this underlying level describes the condition of the cat, dead or alive, independently of the knowledge of this condition we acquire by entering the room. The knowledge picture therefore leads directly to a hidden variable theory, where hidden variables describe the underlying level of reality. As we mentioned already, it can be shown that a probabilistic theory, in which a lack of knowledge of an underlying level of reality lies at the origin of the probabilistic description (a hidden variable theory), always satisfies Kolmogorov's axioms. Now, the quantum mechanical theory does not satisfy these axioms, so that the knowledge picture is necessarily erroneous. One also has direct experimental evidence, in connection with the Bell inequalities, which confirms that any state-type hidden variable hypothesis is wrong. Hence, the quantum mechanical wave function represents not our knowledge of the system, but its real physical state, independently of whether the latter is known or not. In that case, however, Schri::idinger's cat presents us with a problem. Is it really possible that, before the door of the room is opened, the cat could be in a superposition state, neither living nor dead, and that this state, as a result of opening of the door, is transformed into a dead or live state? It does seem quite impossible that the real world could react in this manner to our observation of it. A physical reality such that its states can come into being simply because we observe it, is so greatly in contradiction with all our real experience that we can hardly take this idea seriously. Yet it does seem to be an unescapable consequence of orthodox quantum mechanics as applied to a global physical situation, with macroscopic components. In the new physical general description that we have proposed [29, 30, 31, 32] it is perfectly possible and even very natural to make a distinction between different types of experiments. One will thus introduce the concept of a classical experiment: this is an experiment such that, for each state p of the entity S, there is a well-determined result x. For a classical experiment, the result is fully predictable even before the experiment is carried out. A collection [; of relevant experiments will generally comprise both classical and non-classical ones. It is possible to prove a theorem stating that the classical part of the description of an entity can always be separated out [29, 31, 54]. The collection of all possible states for an entity can then be expressed as the union of a collection of classical mixtures, such that each classical mixture is determined by

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a set of non-classical micro-states. When we formulate within this general framework the axioms of quantum mechanics, it can be shown that the set of states in a classical mixture can be represented by a Hilbert space. The collection of all the states of the entity is then described by an infinite collection of Hilbert spaces, one for each classical mixture. Orthodox quantum mechanics is in this formulation the limiting case for which no classical measurement appears, corresponding effectively to the existence of a single Hilbert space. Classical mechanics is the other limiting case, which is such that only classical measurements are present, and for which the formulation corresponds to a phase space description. The general case for an arbitrary entity is neither purely quantum nor purely classical, and can only be described by a collection of different Hilbert spaces. When one considers the measuring process within this general formulation, there is no Schrodinger cat paradox. Opening the door is a classical operation which does not change the state of the cat, and the state can thus also be described within the general formulation, and the quantum collapse occurs when the radioactive particle is detected by the detector, which is a non-classical process, also within the general description. The general formalism provides more than the resolution of the Schrodinger cat paradox. It makes it possible to consider quantum mechanics and classical mechanics as two particular cases of a more general theory. This general theory is quantum-like, but introduces no paradoxes for the measuring process because one can treat, within the same formalism, the measuring apparatus as a classical entity, and the entity to be measured as a quantum entity. The paradoxes associated with measurements result from the structural limitations of the orthodox quantum formalism. This decomposition theorem of a general description into an direct product of irreducible descriptions, where each irreducible description corresponds to one Hilbert space, had been shown already within the mathematical generalizations of quantum mechanics [20,21]. The aim then was to give an explanation for the existence of super-selection rules. The decomposition was later generalized for the physical formalisms [29, 31, 54].

(2) The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox

The general existence of superposition states which lies at the root of the Schrodinger cat paradox, was exploited by Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR) to construct a far subtler paradoxical situation. EPR consider the case of two separated entities 51 and 52, and the composite entity 5 which these two entities constitute. They show that it is always possible to bring the composite entity 5 in a state in such a manner that

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a measurement on one of the component entities determines the state of the other component entity. For separated entities, this is a quantum mechanical prediction which contradicts the very concept of separateness. Indeed, for separated entities the state of one of the entities can a priori not be affected by how one acts upon the other entity, and this is confirmed by all experiments which one can carry out on separated entities. Here again, we can resolve the paradox by considering the situation in the framework of the new general formalism. There, one can show that a composite entity 8, made up of two separated entities81 and 8 2 , never satisfies the axioms of orthodox quantum mechanics, even if allowance is made for classical experiments as was done in the case of the measurement paradox [11, 29, 30]. Two of the axioms of orthodox quantum mechanics (weak modularity, and the covering law) are never satisfied for the case of an entity 8 made up of two separated quantum entities 8 1 and 8 2 . This failure of orthodox quantum mechanics is structurally much more far-reaching than that relating to the measuring problem. There one could propose a solution in which the unique Hilbert space of orthodox quantum mechanics is replaced by a collection of Hilbert spaces, and one remains more or less within the framework of the Hilbert space formalism (this is the way that super-selection rules were described even within one Hilbert space). The impossibility of describing separated entities in orthodox quantum mechanics is rooted in the vector space structure of the Hilbert space itself. The two unsatisfied axioms are those associated with the vector space structure of the Hilbert space, and to dispense with these axioms, as is required if we wish to describe separated entities, we must therefore construct a totally new mathematical structure for the space of states [55, 56, 57].

(3) Classical, quantum and intermediate structures To abandon the vector space structure for the collection ~ of all possible states for an entity is a radical mathematical operation, but recent developments have confirmed its necessity. The possibility of accommodating within one general formalism both quantum and classical entities has resolved the measurement paradox. If the quantum structure can be explained by the presence of a lack of knowledge on the measurement process, as it is the case in our 'hidden-measurement' approach, we can go a step further, and wonder what types of structure arise when we consider the original models, with a lack of knowledge on the measurement process, and introduce a variation of the magnitude of this lack of knowledge. We have studied the quantum machine under varying 'lack of knowledge', parameterizing this variation by a number E E [0, 1], such

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that E = 1 corresponds to the situation of maximal lack of knowledge, giving rise to a quantum structure, and E = 0 corresponds to the situation of zero lack of knowledge, generating a classical structure, and other values of E correspond to intermediate situations, giving rise to a structure that is neither quantum nor classical [4, 45, 46, 47, 58, 59, 60]. We have called this model the E-model, and we have been able to prove that here again the same two axioms, weak modularity and the covering law, cannot be satisfied for the intermediate situations-between quantum and classical [4, 45, 46, 47, 58, 59]. A new theory dispensing with these two axioms would allow for the description not only of structures which are quantum, classical, mixed quantum-classical, but also of intermediate structures, which are neither quantum nor classical. This is then a theory for the mesoscopic region of reality, and we can now understand why such a theory could not be built within the orthodox theories, quantum or classical. 8. ST ANDARD QU ANTUM MECHANICS AS A FIRST ORDER NON CLASSICAL THEORY

As our E version of the quantum machine shows, there are different quantum-like theories possible, all giving rise to quantum-like probabilities, that differ numerically however, from the probabilities of orthodox quantum mechanics. These intermediate theories may allow us to generate models for the mesoscopic entities, and our group in Brussels is now investigating this possibility. The current state of affairs is the following: quantum mechanics and classical mechanics are both extremal theories, corresponding relatively to a situation with maximum lack of knowledge and a situation with zero lack of knowledge on the interaction between measuring apparatus and the physical entity under study. Most real physical situations will, however, correspond to a situation with a lack of knowledge of the interaction with the measuring apparatus that is neither maximal nor zero, and as a consequence the theory describing this situation will have a structure that is neither quantum nor classical. It will be quantum-like, in the sense that the states are changed by the measurements, and that there is a probability involved as in quantum mechanics, but the numerical value of this probability will be different from the numerical value of the orthodox quantum mechanical probabilities. If this is the case, why does orthodox quantum mechanics have so much success, both in general and in its numerical predictions? In this section we want to suggest an answer to this question. Let us consider the case of an entity S, and two possible states Pu and Pv corresponding to this entity. We also consider all possible measure-

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ments that can be performed on this entity S, with the only restriction that for each measurement considered it must be possible that, when the entity is in the state Pv, it can be changed by the measurement into the state Pu' Among these measurements there will be deterministic classical measurements, there will be quantum measurements, but there will also be super-quantum measurements (giving rise to a probability greater than that predicted by quantum mechanics) and sub-quantum measurements (giving rise to a probability that lies between classical and quantum predictions). All these different measurements are considered. We suppose now that we cannot distinguish between these measurements, and hence the actual measurement that we perform, and which we denote ,6,( u, v), is a random choice between all these possible measurements. We shall call this measurement the 'universal' measurement connecting Pv and Pu' We may remark that if we believe that there is 'one' reality then also there is only 'one' universal measurement ,6,( u, v) connecting Pv and Pu. We now ask what is the probability Pt::,(Pu,Pv) that by performing the universal measurement ,6,(u, v), the state Pv is changed into the state Pu' There is a famous theorem in quantum mechanics that makes it possible for us to show that the universal transition probability Pf::,(Pu,Pv) corresponding to a universal measurement ,6,( u, v) connecting states Pu and Pv is the quantum transition probability Pq (Pu, Pv) connecting these two states Pv and Pu' This is Gleason's theorem. Gleason's theorem proves that, for a given vector u of a Hilbert space 'H, of dimension at least 3, there exists only one probability measure /-Lu on the set of closed subspaces of this Hilbert space, with value 1 on the ray generated by u, and this is exactly the probability measure used to calculate the quantum transition probability from any state to this ray generated by u. Gleason's theorem is only valid for a Hilbert space of dimension at least three. The essential part of the demonstration consists in proving the result for a three-dimensional real Hilbert space. Indeed, the three-dimensional real Hilbert space case contains already all the aspects that make Gleason's theorem such a powerful result. This is also the reason that we here restrict our 'interpretation' of Gleason's result to the case of a three dimensional real Hilbert space. Theorem (Gleason): The only positive function w(Pv) that is defined on the rays Pv of a three dimensional real Hilbert space R 3 , and that has value 1 for a given ray Pu, and that is such that w(Px)+w(py)+w(Pz) = 1 if the three rays Px, Py, pz are mutually orthogonal, is given by

(3)

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Let us now consider two states Pu and Pv, and a measurement e (which is not a priori taken to be a quantum measurement) that has three eigenstates Pu, Py and Pz, which means that it transforms any state into one of these three states after the measurement. The probability Pe(Pu , Pv), that the measurement e transforms the state Pv into the state Pu is given by a positive function f(v,u,x,y) that can depend on the four vectors v, u, x and y. In the same way we have Pe(Px,Pv) = f(v, x, y, u), Pe(Py,Pv) = f(v, y, u, x), and f(v, u, x, y)+ f(v, x, y, u)+ f(v, y, u, x) = 1. This is true, independent of the nature of the measurement e. If e is a quantum measurement, then f(v,u,x,y) = < v,U > 2 , and the dependence on x and y disappears, because the quantum transition probability only depends on the state before the measurement and the eigen state of the measurement that is actualized, but not on the other eigenstates of the measurement. Gleason's theorem states that 'if the transition probability depends only on the state before the measurement and on the eigenstate of the measurement that is actualized after the measurement, then this transition probability is equal to the quantum transition probability'. But this Gleason property (dependence of the transition probability only on the state before the measurement and the eigenstate that is actualized after the measurement) is precisely a property that is satisfied by what we have called the 'universal' measurements. Indeed, by definition, the transition probability for a universal measurement only depends on the state before the measurement and the actualized state after the measurement. Hence Gleason's theorem shows that the transition probabilities connected with universal measurements are quantum mechanical transition probabilities. 1

1

We now go a step further and proceed to interpret the quantum measurements as if they are universal measurements. This means that quantum mechanics is taken to be the theory that describes the probabilistics of possible outcomes for measurements which are mixtures of all imaginable types of measurements. Quantum mechanics is then the first order non-classical theory. It describes the statistics that goes along with a random choice between any arbitrary type of manipulation that changes the state Pv of the system under study into the state Pu, in such a way that we know nothing of the mechanism of this change of state. The only information we have is that 'possibly' the state before the measurement, namely Pv, is changed into a state after the measurement, namely Pu' If this is a correct explanation for quantum statistics, it accounts for its success in so many regions of reality, both in general and also for its numerical predictions.

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9. R E L A T I V I T Y THE 0 R Y: IS REA LIT Y V A N ISH I N G ?

When James Clerck Maxwell developed his field theory for electromagnetic radiation the seeds were sown of a problem of the 'the classical mechanical view'. Indeed, while the classical mechanical equations are invariant for Galilean transformations-this invariance expresses mathematically an additional intuition within our intuitive view on reality, namely, that the laws of physics remain the same in another coordinate system moving relatively to us with constant velocity-Maxwell's equations turn out to be invariant for a totally different type of transformations. The problem was recognized by Hendrik Antoon Lorentz-hence the name 'Lorentz transformation' given to this new set of transformations-as also by Henri Poincare and others, around the turn of the century. As the story goes, the young Albert Einstein also pondered on this problem as a physics student, and his reflection was at the origin of the article in which he formulated the theory of relativity [61]. In relativity theory a very subtle but straightforward fundamental subjective element is introduced within the nature of reality itself. It is well recognized in broad circles that the meaning of quantum mechanics as related to the nature of reality has not yet been understood. For relativity theory there seems to be a common belief however, and this is certainly partly due to the straightforward operational manner in which the theory was introduced by Albert Einstein, that its consequences for the nature of reality have been well understood by the specialists. As our analysis will show-and contrary to what is believed by many physicists-the profound meaning of relativity theory for the nature of reality has not yet been understood at all. Usually relativity theory is introduced with a seemingly very well defined ontological basis [62]. The collection of events, each event parametrized by four real numbers (xo, Xl, X2, X3), is considered to be the basic structure of the theory. For a particular observer connected to a particular reference frame, there is no problem of how to use this fourdimensional time-space manifold scheme to decide what 'his personal reality' is. His personal reality is indeed the 'space-cut' that his reference frame makes with the four-dimensional time-space manifold. This space-cut, however, only determines a reality connected to a particular reference frame, and at first sight it is not possible to put together the space-cuts of different reference frames in such a manner that they form one reality. All this is well known, and this problem was in fact already at the origin of the construction of special relativity in the original paper by Albert Einstein, namely his critique on the concept of simultaneity [61].

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But there is a fundamental problem in relativity theory in relation to the question: "What is reality?". Sometimes the statement is made rather vaguely and never with a sound conceptual basis, that reality in relativity theory 'is' the four-dimensional time-space continuum. But if this position is taken, there is another major conceptual problem: indeed then there is no change and no evolution in time. Eventually we could still accept that material reality would be frozen in four dimensions, but then the question remains: what are we? I myself, and I suppose also all of you readers, am convinced of the fact that I am not my past and my future. I am now. In this way, relativity theory conflicts with our deep intuition about the nature of reality in a manner such that we can not even well identify just where the contradiction lies. We have analysed in great detail this situation in [63, 64]' and shall come back to it after introducing an operational definition for reality such that we can detect what is the 'real' mystery. (1) Experiences

The basic concept in our analysis of the operational foundation of reality is that of an experience. An experience is the interaction between a participator and a piece of the world. When the participator lives such an experience, we shall say that this experience is present, and we shall call it the present experience of the participator. We remark that we consciously use the word 'participator' instead of the word 'observer' to indicate that we consider the cognitive receiver to participate creatively in his cognitive act. When we consider a measurement, then we conceive that for this situation the experimenter and his experimental apparatus together constitute the participator, and that the physical entity under study is the piece of the world that interacts with the participator. The experiment is the experience. Let us give some examples of experiences. Consider the following situation: I am inside my house in Brussels. It is night, the windows are shut. I sit in a chair, reading a novel. I have a basket filled with walnuts at my side, and from time to time I take one of them, crack it and eat it. My son is in bed and already asleep. New York exists and is busy. Let us enumerate the experiences that are considered in such a situation: (1) E1(I read a novel) (2) E2(I experience the inside of my house in Brussels) (3) E3(I experience that it is night) (4) E4(1 take a walnut, crack it and eat it) (5) E5 (I see that my son is in bed and asleep) (6) E6(1 experience that New York is busy)

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The first very important remark 1 want to make is that obviously 1 do not experience all these experiences at once. On the contrary, in principle, 1 only experience one experience at once, namely my present experience. Let us suppose that my present experience is EI (I read a novel). Then a lot of other things happen while 1 am living this present experience. These things happen in my present reality. While 'I am reading the novel' some of the happenings l that happen are the following: HI (the novel exists), H 2 (the inside of my house in Brussels exists), H 3 (it is night), H4(the basket and the walnuts exist, and are at my side), H5(my son is in bed and is sleeping), H6(New York exists and is busy). All the happenings, and much more, happen while 1 live the present experience EI(I read a novel). Why is the structure of reality such that what 1 am just saying is evident for everybody (and therefore shows that we are not conscious of the structure and construction that is behind this evidence)? Certainly it is not because I experience also these other happenings. My only present experience is the experience of reading the novel. But, and this is the origin of the specific structure and construction of reality, 1 could have chosen to live an experience including one of the other happenings in replacement of my present experience. Let me recapitulate the list of the experiences that I could have chosen to experience in replacement of my present experience: E 2 (I observe that I am inside my house in Brussels), E3 (I see that it is night), E4 (I take a walnut, crack it and eat it), E5(1 go and look in the bedroom to see that my son is asleep), E6(I take the plane to New York and see that it is busy). This example indicates how reality is structured by us. First of all we have tried to identify two main aspects of an experience. The aspect that is controlled and created by me, and the aspect that just happens to me and can only be known by me. Let us introduce this important distinction in a formal way. (2) Creations and happenings To see what I mean, let us consider the experience E4(I take a walnut, crack it and eat it). In this experience, there is an aspect that is an action of me, the taking and the cracking, and the eating. There is also an aspect that is an observation of me, the walnut and the basket. By studying how our senses work, I can indeed say that it is the light reflected on the walnut, and on the basket, that gives me the experience of walnut 1

I use the word happening to distinguish from the word event as it is used in relativity theory. The reason is that this word 'event' in relativity theory is used explicitly to indicate a 'space-time event' while in our approach the word 'happening' can also indicate a non-space-time event.

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and the experience of basket. This is an explanation that only now can be given; it is, however, not what was known in earlier days when the first world-models of humanity were constructed. But without knowing the explanation delivered now by a detailed analysis, we could see very easily that an experience contains always two aspects, a creation-aspect, and an observation-aspect, simply because our will can only control part of the experience. This is the creation-aspect. For example, in El (I read a novel) the reading is created by me, but the novel is not created by me. In general we can indicate for an experience the aspect that is created by me and the aspect that is not created by me. The aspect not created by me lends itself to my creation. We can reformulate an experience in the following way: E4 (I take a walnut, crack it and eat it) becomes E 4 (The walnut is taken by me, and lends itself to my cracking and eating) and El (I read a novel) becomes El (The novel lends itself to my reading). The taking, cracking, eating, and reading will be called creations or actions and will be denoted by C 4(I take, crack and eat) and C 1 (I read). The walnut and the novel will be called happenings and will be denoted by H 4 (The walnut) and H7(The novel). A creation is that aspect of an experience created, controlled, and acted upon by me, and a happening is that aspect of an experience lending itself to my creation, control and action. An experience is determined by a description of the creation and a description of the happening. Creations are often expressed by verbs: to take, to crack, to eat, and to read, are the verbs that describe my creations in the examples. The walnut and the novel are happenings that have the additional property of being objects, which means happening with a great stability. Often happenings are expressed by a substantive. Every one of my experiences E consists of one of my creations C and one of my happenings H, so we can write E = (C, H). A beautiful image that can be used as a metaphor for our model of the world is the image of the skier. A skier skis downhill. At every instant he or she has to be in complete harmony with the form of the mountain under-neath. The mountain is the happening. The actions of the skier are the creation. The skier's creation, in harmony fused with the skier's happening, is his or her experience. (3) The structure and construction of reality, present, past and future Let us again consider the collection of experiences: El (I read a novel), E 2 (I observe that I am inside my house in Brussels), E3(I see that it is night), E4 (I take a walnut, crack it and eat it), E5 (I go and look in the bedroom to see that my son is asleep) and E6 (I take the plane to New York and see that it is busy). Let us now represent the structure

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and construction of reality that is made out of this small collection of experiences. El (I read a novel) is my present experience. In my past I could, however, at several moments have chosen to do something else and this choice would have led me to have another present experience than El (I read a novel). For example: One minute ago I could have decided to stop reading and observe that I am inside the house. Then E2 (I observe that I am inside my house in Brussels) would have been my present experience. Two minutes ago I could have decided to stop reading and open the windows and see that it is night. Then E3 (I see that it is night) would have been my present experience. Three minutes ago I could have decided to stop reading, take a walnut from the basket, crack it, and eat it. Then E4(I take a walnut, crack it and eat it) would have been my present experience. Ten minutes ago I could have decided to go and see in the bedroom whether my son is asleep. Then E5 (I go and look in the bedroom to see that my son is asleep) would have been my present experience. Ten hours ago I could have decided to take a plane and fly to New York and see how busy it was. Then E6(I go to New York and see that it is busy) would have been my present experience. Even when they are not the happening aspect of my present experience, happenings 'happen' at present if they are the happening aspect of an experience that I could have lived in replacement of my present experience, if I had so decided in my past.

The fact that a certain experience E consisting of a creation C and an happening H is for me a possible present experience depends on two factors: (1) I have to be able to perform the creation. (2) The happening has to be available. For example, the experience E2 (I observe that I am inside my house in Brussels) is a possible experience for me, if: (1) I can perform the creation that consists in observing the inside of my house in Brussels. In other words, if this creation is in my personal power. (2) The happening 'the inside of my house in Brussels' has to be available to me. In other words, this happening has to be contained in my personal reality. The collection of all creations that I can perform at the present I will call my present personal power. The collection of all happenings

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that are available to me at the present I will call my present personal reality.

I define as my present personal reality the collection of these happenings, the collection of happenings that are available to one of my creations if I had used my personal power in such a way that at the present I fuse one of these creations with one of these happenings. My present personal reality consists of all happenings that are available to me at present. My past reality consists of all happenings that were available to me in the past. My future reality consists of all happenings that will be available to me in the future. My present personal power consists of all creations that I can perform at present. My past personal power consists of all the creations that I could perform in the past. My future personal power consists of all creations I shall be able to perform in the future. Happenings can happen 'together and at once', because to happen a happening does not have to be part of my present experience. It is sufficient that it is available, and things can be available simultaneously. Therefore, although my present experience is only one, my present personal reality consists of an enormous amount of happenings all happening simultaneously. This concept of reality is not clearly understood in present physical theories. Physical theories know how to treat past, present and future. But reality is a construction about the possible. It is a construction about the experiences I could have lived but probably will never live. (4) Material time and material happenings l.From ancient times humanity has been fascinated by happenings going on in the sky, the motion of the sun, the changes of the moon, the motions of the planets and the stars. These happenings in the sky are periodic. By means of these periodic happenings humans started to coordinate the other experiences. They introduced the counting of the years, the months and the days. Later on watches were invented to be able to coordinate experiences of the same day. In this sense material time was introduced in the reality of the human species. Again we want to analyze the way in which this material time was introduced, to be able to use it operationally if later on we analyze the paradoxes of time and space. My present experience is seldom a material time experience. But in replacement of my present experience, I always could have consulted my watch, and in this way live a material time experience E7(I consult my watch and read the time). In this way, although my present experience is seldom a material time experience, my present reality always contains a material time happening, namely the happening H7(The time indicated

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by my watch), which is the happening to which the creation C 7 (I consult) is fused to form the experience E 7 . We can try to use our theory for a more concrete description of that layer of reality that we shall refer to as the layer of 'material or energetic happenings'. We must be aware of the fact that this layer is a huge one, and so first of all we shall concentrate on those happenings that are related to the interactions between what we call material (more generally energetic) entities. We have to analyze first of all in which way the four-dimensional manifold that generally is referred to as the 'timespace' of relativity theory, is related to this layer of material or energetic reality. We shall take into account in this analysis the knowledge that we have gathered about the reality of quantum entities in relation with measurements of momentum and position. 10. TH E STR U CTURE AND CON S TR U CTIO N OF REALITY AND RELATIVITY THEORY

We consider the set of all material or energetic happenings and denote this set by M. Happenings of M we shall denote by m, n, o. Let us consider such a happening m that corresponds to a quantum entity. Then this happening is characterized by the fact that it is always accessible to a creation of localization (consisting in localizing the particle in a certain region of space), let us denote such a creation of localization by l. Then the experience (l, m) is an experience that can be parametrized by the coordinates of a certain point (xo, Xl, X2, X3) of the four dimensional manifold that is referred to as time-space. However, instead of performing a creation of localization, one can choose to perform a creation that consists in measuring the momentum of the quantum entity. Let us denote this creation by i, then the happening (i, m) can be parametrized by the coordinates of a certain point (po, PI, P2, P3), that can be interpreted as the four-momentum of general relativity theory. We know from quantum theory that the quantum entity can be in different states, all corresponding to a different statistics as related to repeated localizations and measurements of momentum. Let us denote these states by q, p, ... The quantum entity can be in an eigenstate q(xo, Xl, X2, X3) of position, which means that the creation of localization in this eigenstate leads with certainty to a finding of the quantum entity in the point (xo, xl, X2, X3). The quantum entity can also be in an eigenstate p(PO,PI,P2,P3) of momentum, which means that by a measurement of momentum the entity will be found to have the momentum (pO,PI,P2,P3). But in general the quantum entity will be in a state that

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is neither an eigenstate of position nor an eigenstate of momentum. It is only after the happening p (the state of the quantum entity) has been fused with one of the creations I (the localization measurement) or i (the momentum measurement) that will be in an eigenstate of localization (a point of time-space) or of momentum (a point of four- momentum space). This is the general situation for material happenings. To show what are the problems that we can solve by means of our framework, we will concentrate now on the question 'what is reality in relativity theory?'. Since we have an operational definition of reality in our framework, we can investigate this problem in a rigorous way. Let us suppose that I am here and now in my house in Brussels, and it is June 1, 1996, 3 pm exactly. I want to find out 'what is the material reality for me now?'. Let us use the definition of reality given in the foregoing section and consider a place in New York, for example at the entrance of the Empire State building, and let us denote, the center of this place by (Xl, X2, X3). I also choose now a certain time, for example June 1, 1996, 3 pm exactly, and denote this time by Xo. I denote the happening that corresponds with the spot (Xl, x2, X3) located at the entrance of the Empire State building, at time Xo by m. I can now try to investigate whether this happening m is part of my personal material reality. The question I have to answer is, can I find a creation of localization I, in this case this creation is just the observation of the spot (Xl, X2, X3) at the entrance of the Empire State building, at time Xo, that can be fused with this happening m. The answer to this question can only be investigated if we take into account the fact that I, who want to try to fuse a creation of localization to this happening, am bound to my body, which is also a material entity. I must specify the question introducing the material time coordinate that I coordinate by my watch. So suppose that I coordinate my body by the four numbers (Yo, Yl, Y2, Y3), where Yo is my material time, and (YI, Y2, Y3) is the center of mass of my body. We apply now our operational definition of reality. At this moment, June 1, 1996 at 3 pm exactly, my body is in my house in Brussels, which means that (yo, Yl, Y2, Y3) is a point such that Yo equals June 1, 1996, 3 pm, and (Xl, X2, X3) is a point, the center of mass of my body, somewhere in my house in Brussels. This shows that (xo, xl, X2, X3) is different from (Yo, Yl, Y2, Y3), in the sense that (Xl, X2, X3) is different form (YI, Y2, Y3) while Xo = Yo. The question is now whether (xo, Xl, X2, X3) is a point of my material reality, hence whether it makes sense to me to claim that now, June 1, 1996, 3 pm, the entrance of the Empire State building 'exists'. If our theoretical framework corresponds in some way to our pre-scient.ific construction of reality, the answer to the foregoing question should be

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affirmative. Indeed, we all believe that 'now' the entrance of the Empire State building exists. Let us try to investigate in a rigorous way this question in our framework. We have to verify whether it was possible for me to decide somewhere in my past, hence before June 1, 1996, 3 pm, to change some of my plans of action, such that I would decide to travel to New York, and arrive exactly at June 1, 1996, 3 pm at the entrance of the Empire State building, and observe the spot (Xl, X2, X3). There are many ways to realize this experiment, and we will not go into details here, because we shall come back later to the tricky parts of the realization of this experiment. I could thus have experienced the spot (Xl, X2, X3) at June 1, 1996, 3 pm, if! had decided to travel to New York at some time in my past. Hence (xo, Xl, X2, X3) is part of my reality. It is sound to claim that the entrance of the Empire State building exists right now. This does not mean that I have to be able to experience this spot at the entrance of the Empire State building now, June 1, 1996, 3 pm, while I am inside my house of Brussels. I repeat again, reality is a construction about the possible happenings that I could have fused with my actual creation. Since I could have decided so in my past, I could have been at the entrance of the Empire State building, now, June 1, 1996,3 pm. Until this moment one could think that our framework only confirms our intuitive notion of reality, but our next example shows that this is certainly not the case. Let us consider the same problem as above, but for another point of time-space. We consider the point (zo, Zl, Z2, Z3), where (Zl,Z2,Z3) = (Xl,X2,X3), hence the spot we envisage is again the entrance of the Empire State building, and Zo is June 2, 1996, 3 pm exactly, hence the time that we consider is, tomorrow 3 pm. If I ask now first, before checking rigorously by means of our operational definition of reality, whether this point (zo, Zl, Z2, Z3) is part of my present material reality, the intuitive answer here would be 'no'. Indeed, tomorrow at the same time, 3 pm, is in the future and not in the present, and hence it is not real, and hence no part of my present material reality (this is the intuitive reasoning). If we go now to the formal reasoning in our framework, then we can see that the answer to this question depends on the interpretation of relativity theory that we put forward. Indeed, let us first analyze the question in a Newtonian conception of the world to make things clear. Remark that in a Newtonian conception of the world (which has been proved experimentally wrong, so here we are just considering it for the sake of clarity), my present material reality just falls together with 'the present', namely all the points of space that have the same time coordinate June 1, 1996, 3 pm. This means that the entrance of the Empire State building tomorrow 'is not part of my present material

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reality'. The answer is here clear and in this Newtonian conception, my present personal reality is just the collection of all (UO, ul, u2, U3) where Uo = Yo and (Ul' U2, U3) are arbitrary. The world is not Newtonian, this we now know experimentally; but if we put forward an ether theory interpretation of relativity theory (let us refer to such an interpretation as a Lorentz interpretation) the answer again remains the same. In a Lorentz interpretation, my present personal reality coincides with the present reality of the ether, namely all arbitrary points of the ether that are at time Yo, June 1, 1996, 3 pm, and again tomorrow the entrance of the Empire State building is not part of my present material reality. For an Einsteinian interpretation of relativity theory the answer is different. To investigate this I have to ask again the question of whether it would have been possible for me to have made a decision in my past such that I would have been able to make coincide (Yo, Yl, Y2, Y3) with (zo, Zl, Z2, Z3). The answer here is that this is very easy to do, because of the well known, and experimentally verified, effect of 'time dilatation'. Indeed, it would for example be sufficient that I go back some weeks in my past, let us say April 1, 1996, 3 pm, and then decide to step inside a space ship that can move with almost the speed of light, so that the time when I am inside this space ship slows down in such a way, that when I return with the space ship to planet earth, still flying with a speed close to the velocity of light, I arrive in New York at the entrance of the Empire State building with my personal material watch indicating June 1, 1996, 3 pm, while the watch that remained at the entrance of the Empire State building indicates June 2, 1996, 3 pm. Hence in this way I make coincide (Yo, Yl, Y2, Y3) with (zo, Zl, Z2, Z3), which proves that (zo, Zl, Z2, Z3) is part of my present material reality. First I could remark that in practice it is not yet possible to make such a flight with a space ship. But this point is not crucial for our reasoning. It is sufficient that we can do it in principle. We have not yet made this explicit remark, but obviously if we have introduced in our framework an operational definition for reality, then we do not have to interpret such an operational definition in the sense that only operations are allowed that actually, taking into account the present technical possibilities of humanity, can be performed. If we were to advocate such a narrow interpretation, then even in a Newtonian conception of the world, the star Sirius would not exist, because we cannot yet travel to it. What we mean with operational is much wider. It must be possible, taking into account the actual physical knowledge of the world, to conceive of a creation that can be fused with the happening in question, and then this happening pertains to our personal reality.

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(1) Einstein versus Lorentz: has reality four dimensions? We can come now to one of the points that we want to make in this paper, clarifying the time paradox that distinguishes an ether interpretation of relativity (Lorentz) from an Einsteinian interpretation. To see clearly in this question, we must return to the essential aspect of the construction of reality in our framework, namely, the difference between a creation and a happening. We have to give first another example to be able to make clear what we mean. Suppose that I am a painter and I consider again my present material reality, at June 1, 1996, 3 pm, as indicated on my personal material watch. I am in my house in Brussels and let us further specify: the room where I am is my workshop, surrounded by paintings, of which some are finished, and others I am still working on. Clearly all these paintings exist in my present reality, June 1, 1996, 3 pm. Some weeks ago, when I was still working on a painting that now is finished, I could certainly have decided to start to work on another painting, a completely different one, that now does not exist. Even if I could have decided this some weeks ago, everyone will agree that this other painting, that I never started to work on, does not exist now, June 1, 1996, 3 pm. The reason for this conclusion is that the making of a painting is a 'creation' and not a happening. It is not so that there is some 'hidden' space of possible paintings such that my choice of some weeks ago to realize this other painting would have made me to detect it. If this were to be the situation with paintings, then indeed also this painting would exist now, in this hidden space. But with paintings this is not the case. Paintings that are not realized by the painter are potential paintings, but they do not exist. With this example of the paintings we can explain very well the difference between Lorentz and Einstein. For an ether interpretation of relativity the fact that my watch is slowing down while I decide to fly with the space ship nearly at the speed of light and return to the entrance of the Empire State building when my watch is indicating June 1, 1996, 3 pm while the watch that remained at the Empire State building indicates June 2, 1996, 3 pm, is interpreted as a 'creation'. It is seen as if there is a real physical effect of creation on the material functioning of my watch while I travel with the space ship, and this effect of creation is generated by the movement of the space ship through the ether. Hence the fact that I can observe the entrance of the Empire State building tomorrow June 2, 1996, 3 pm, if had decided some weeks ago to start traveling with the space ship, only proves that the entrance of the Empire State building tomorrow is a potentiality. Just like the fact that this painting that I never started to paint could have been here in my workshop in Brussels is a potentiality. This means that as a consequence the

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spot at the entrance of the Empire State building tomorrow is not part of my present reality, just as the possible painting that I did not start to paint is not part of my present reality. If, however, we put forward an Einsteinian interpretation of relativity, then the effect on my watch during the space ship travel is interpreted in a completely different way. There is no physical effect on the material functioning of the watch~ remember that most of the time dilatation takes place not during the accelerations that the space ship undergoes during the trip, but during the long periods of flight with constant velocity nearly at the speed of light~but the flight at a velocity close to the speed of light 'moves' my space ship in the time-space continuum in such a way that time coordinates and space coordinates get mixed. This means that the effect of the space-ship travel is an effect of a voyage through the time-space continuum, which brings me at my personal time of June 1, 1996, 3 pm at the entrance of the Empire State building, where the time is June 2, 1996, 3 pm. Hence the entrance of the Empire State building is a happening, an actuality and not just a potentiality, and it can be fused with my present creation. This means that the happening (zo, Zl , Z2, Z3) of June 2, 1996, 3 pm, entrance of the Empire State building, is an happening that can be fused with my creation of observation of the spot around me at June 1, 1996, 3 pm. Hence it is part of my present material reality. The entrance of the Empire State building at June 2, 1996, 3 pm exists for me today, June 1, 1996, 3 pm. If we advocate an Einsteinian interpretation of relativity theory we have to conclude from the foregoing section that my personal reality is four dimensional. This conclusion will perhaps not amaze those who always have considered the time-space continuum of relativity as representing the new reality. Now that we have defined very clearly, however, what this means, we can start investigating the seemingly paradoxical conclusions that are often brought forward in relation with this insight. (2) The process view confronted with the geometric view

The paradoxical situation that we can now try to resolve is the confrontation of the process view of reality with the geometric view. It is often claimed that an interpretation where reality is considered to be related to the four-dimensional time-space continuum contradicts another view of reality, namely the one where it is considered to be of a processlike nature. By means of our framework we can now understand exactly what these two views imply and see that there is no contradiction. Let us repeat now what in our framework is the meaning of the conclusion that my personal reality is four dimensional. It means that, at a certain specific moment, that I call my 'present', the collection of places

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that exist, and that I could have observed if I had decided to do so in my past, has a four-dimensional structure, well represented mathematically by the four dimensional time-space continuum. This is indeed my present material reality. This does not imply, however, that this reality is not constantly changing. Indeed it is constantly changing. New entities are created in it and other entities disappear, while others are very stable and remain into existence. This in fact is the case in all of the four dimensions of this reality. Again I have to give an example to explain what I mean. We came to the conclusion that now, at June 1, 1996, 3 pm the entrance of the Empire State building exists for me while I am in my house in Brussels. But this is not a statement of derterministic certainty. Indeed, it is quite possible that by some extraordinary chain of events, and without me knowing of these events, that the Empire State building had been destroyed; thus my statement about the existence of the entrance of the Empire State building 'now', although almost certainly true, is not deterministically certain. The reason is again the same, namely that reality is a construction of what I would have been able to experience, if I had decided differently in my past. The knowledge that I have about this reality is complex and depends on the changes that go on continuously in it. What I know from experience is that there do exist material objects, and the Empire State building is one of them, that are rather stable, which means that they remain in existence without changing too much. To these stable objects, material objects but also energetic fields, I can attach the places from where I can observe them. The set of these places has the structure of a four-dimensional continuum. At the same time all these objects are continuously changing and moving in this four-dimensional scenery. Most of the objects that I have used to shape my intuitive model of reality are the material objects that surround us here on the surface of the earth. They are all firmly fixed in the fourth dimension (the dimension indicated by the 0 index, and we should not call it the time dimension) while they move easily in the other three dimensions (those indicated by the 1, 2, and 3 index). Other objects, for example the electromagnetic fields, have a completely different manner of being and changing in this four-dimensional scenery. This means that in our framework there is no contradiction between the four-dimensionality of the set of places and the process-like nature of the world. When we come to the conclusion that the entrance of the Empire State building, tomorrow, June 2, 1996, 3 pm also exists for me now, then our intuition reacts more strongly to this statement, because intuitively we think that this implies that the future exists, and hence is determined and hence no change is possible. This is a wrong conclusion which comes from the fact that during a long period of time we have

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had the intuitive image of a Newtonian present, as being completely determined. We have to be aware of the fact that it is the present, even in the Newtonian sense, which is not determined at all. We can only say that the more stable entities in our present reality are more strongly determined to be there, while the places where they can be are always there, because these places are stable with certainty. (3) The singularity of the reality construction We now come back to the construction of reality in our framework which we have confronted here with the Einsteinian interpretation of relativity theory. Instead of wondering about the existence of the entrance of the Empire State building tomorrow, June 2, 1996, 3 pm, I can also question the existence of my own house at the same place of the timespace continuum. Clearly I can reason analogously and come then to the conclusion that my own house, and the chair where I am sitting while reading the novel, and the novel itself, and the basket of wall nuts beside me, etc ... , all exist in my present reality at June 2, 1996, 3 pm, hence tomorrow. If we put it like that, we are even more sharply confronted with a counter-intuitive aspect of the Einsteinian interpretation of relativity theory. But in our framework, it is a correct statement. We have to add, however, that all these objects that are very close to me now June 1, 1996, 3 pm, indeed also exist in my present reality at June 2, 1996, 3 pm, but the place in reality where I can observe them is of course much further away for me. Indeed, to be able to get there, I have to fly away with a space ship at nearly the velocity of light. We now come to a very peculiar question that will confront us with the singularity of our reality construction. Where do I myself exist? Do I also exist tomorrow June 2, 1996, 3 pm? If the answer to this question is affirmative, we are be confronted with a very paradoxical situation. Because indeed I, and this counts for all of you also, cannot imagine myself to exist at different instants of time. But our framework clarifies this question very easily. It is impossible for me to make some action in my past such that I would be able to observe myself tomorrow June 2, 1996 3 pm. But if I had chosen to flyaway and come back with the space-ship, it would be quite possible for me to observe now, on June 1, 1996, at 3 pm on my personal watch, the inside of my house tomorrow June 2, 1996, 3 pm. As we remarked previously, this proves that the inside of my house tomorrow is part of my personal reality today. But I will not find myself in it. To be able to observe my house tomorrow June 2, 1996, 3 pm, I have had to leave it. Hence, in this situation I will enter my house, being myself still at June 1, 1996, 3 pm, but with my house and all the things in it, being at June 2, 1996, 3 pm. This shows that there is no contradiction.

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11. WHAT ABOUT THE NATURE OF REALITY?

Let us finally investigate what is the meaning of all this for the nature of reality. As we remarked already in our formal analysis of the construction of our personal reality, our most primitive intuition about the nature of reality is that of a situation where there is 'the past', 'the present' and 'the future '. 'Reality' is what 'exists' in 'the present' and is constantly changing, and new things are coming into existence. 'The past' is a collection of what has been real, but does not exist anymore, while 'the future' is the field where the potentialities for possible realities are imagined by us. Let us refer to this intuitive hypothesis about the nature of reality as the 'past-present-future hypothesis '. Further we think that reality consists of 'entities' and 'interactions between these entities, which exist at each instant of time and which change and evolve in time. Among these entities there are the material (or energetic) entities: these we imagine to be present in space at any moment of time, as a kind of 'substance '. We shall refer to this hypothesis as to the 'space contains reality hypothesis '. This is an important part of the intuitive view about the state of affairs around us. Within this intuitive view there are many subtle questions that have occupied scientists and philosophers during the history of mankind. One of the fundamental questions is that of the role of the observer in relation to this intuitive view on reality. We know that all that we know about reality has come to us from our personal experience with this reality. It is also clear that while we experience we also at the same time exert an influence, and sometimes we also create. Within the intuitive view we also imagine reality to be independent of our experiencing it. To put it more directly, reality would also exist if humankind would not be there, and if I would not be here now to experience it. Let us call this belief the 'realist hypothesis '. Newtonian mechanics and its elaborations had delivered at the beginning of the foregoing century a complete theory of the inanimate world, wherein the role of the observer literally could be neglected. The world presented itself as being a huge mechanic clockwork, evolving deterministically according to the equations of Newton. We, the observers, did not have to be taken into account, because the act of observation could be eliminated completely and hence did not have to be described in the theory. This picture was also~independently of its realist aspects~in agreement with the intuitive view: it was a fine and detailed mathematical modeling of this view and we shall refer to it as 'the classical mechanical view'. The 'pastpresent-future hypothesis' and the 'space contains reality hypothesis' are satisfied in this 'classical mechanical view'. Indeed, reality is considered to be a collection of material objects or substances, present at any mo-

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ment of time at some place in a three dimensional Euclidean space, and interacting with each other within this space, by means of interaction fields. Within this Newtonian development many additional and fundamental aspects were added to the intuitive view. For instance, classical mechanics is a deterministic theory: the state of the world at a certain moment, be it past, present or future, is linked in a deterministic way to the state of the world at any earlier moment. Let us call this 'the determinist hypothesis' and remark that no strict belief about determinism was originally incorporated in the intuitive view. The 'classical mechanical view' came into deep problems when Max Planck made the first moves towards quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics showed that the effect of the measurement had to be taken into account in a crucial and non-reducible way for the description of the micro-world; apparently, the old classical determinism was gone for good. (1) Within the creation-discovery view and quantum mechanics, there are no reasons why the 'past-present-future hypothesis' should run into problems. Indeed, we can still consider reality as a process that is ever changing and where the past is just the recollection of how this reality has been, and the future the imagining of possible ways that this reality can become. (2) There is also no problem with the deterministic hypothesis. There is no incompatibility at all between quantum mechanics and a complete deterministic world as a whole, since the probabilities appearing in the quantum theory can be explained as being due to a lack of knowledge about the interaction between the measuring apparatus and the entity during the measurement, and hence are of epistemic nature. (3) The 'space contains reality hypothesis', as we have explained in much detail, is the one that in our opnion has to be abandoned. Reality is not contained within space. Space is a momentaneous crystalization of a theatre for reality where the motions and interactions of the macroscopical material and energetic entities take place. But other entities~like quantum entities for example-'take place' outside space, or~and this would be another way of saying the same thing-within a space that is not the three dimensional Euclidean space. (4) Quantum mechanics is not in contradiction with the 'realist hypothesis '. It is possible to believe that reality exists independently of our observing and measuring it, and also that it would be there if there were no humans to observe and influence it. I3ut, as we have said already, this reality is is not contained within Euclidean space. (5) When we consider relativity theory the situation is very subtle. For an ether interpretation of relativity theory, there is no problem at all,

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since my personal reality remains identical with the three dimensional space that is shared by all other humans, and hence can be considered as 'the present'. If an Einsteinian interpretation of relativity theory is advocated, my personal reality has four dimensions, and the personal realities of my fellow humans on earth also all have four dimensions. The present-past-future hypothesis remains valid for all these personal realities, but it is not possible to fit them together into a single present-pastfuture scheme. This shows that such a scheme is not without problems if we want to give a description of the structure of reality that is not just the union of all the personal realities. We are at present working hard to try and understand in which way these personal realities-all four-dimensional and all changing within a personal past-present-future scheme-can be fitted together inside a structure that would account for a 'reality' which would be independent of all these personal realities. Acknowledgments: I want to thank my friend George Severne who read and commented parts of the article and with whom I also had many interesting discussions about the content. Diederik Aerts, Center Leo Apostel Brussels Free University Brussels, Belgium REFERENCES

[1] Rauch, H. et al., "Test of a single crystal neutron interferometer", Phys. Lett., 47 A, 1974, p. 369. [2] Rauch, H. et al., "Verification of coherent spinor rotations of fermions", Phys. Lett., 54 A, 1975, p. 425. [3] Rauch, H., "Neutron interferometric tests of quantum mechanics", Helv. Phys. Acta, 61, 1988, p. 589. [4] Aerts, D., "An attempt to imagine parts of the reality of the microworld" , in the proceedings of the conference Problems in Quantum Physics; Gdansk '89, World Scientific Publishing Company, Singapore, 1990, p.3. [5] Aerts, D. and Reignier, J., "The spin of a quantum entity and problems of non-locality", in the proceedings of the Symposium on the Foundations of modern Physics 1990, Joensuu, Finland, World Scientific Publishing Company, Singapore, 1990, p. 9.

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[6] Aerts, D. and Reignier, J., "On the problem of non-locality in quantum mechanics", Helv. Phys. Acta, 64, 1991, p. 527. [7] Aerts, D., "A possible explanation for the probabilities of quantum mechanics and a macroscopic situation that violates Bell inequalities" , in: Mittelstaedt, P. et al. (eds.), Recent Developments in Quantum Logic, in Grundlagen der Exacten Naturwissenschaften, vol. 6, Wissenschaftverlag, Bibliographisches Institut, Mannheim, 1983, p. 235. I

[8] Aerts, D., "A possible explanation for the probabilities of quantum mechanics", J. Math. Phys., 21, 1986, p. 202. [9] Aerts, D., "The origin of the non-classical character of the quantum probability model", in: Blanquiere, A. et al. (eds.), Information, Complexity, and Control in Quantum Physics, Springer-Verlag, 1987. [10] Aerts, D., "The construction of reality and its influence on the understanding of quantum structures", Int. 1. Theor. Phys., 31, 1992, p. 1815. [11] Aerts, D., "Quantum structures, separated physical entities and probability", Found. Phys., 24, 1994, p. 1227. [12] Aerts, D., "Quantum structures: an attempt to explain the origin of their appearance in nature", Int. J. Theor. Phys:, 34, 1995, p. 1165. [13] de Broglie, L., "Sur la possibilite de relier les phenom?mes d'interference et de diffraction a la theorie des quanta de lumiere", Comptes Rendus, 183, 1926, p. 447. [14] Bohm, D. and Vigier, J.P., "Model of the causal interpretation of quantum theory in terms of a fluid with irregular fluctuations" , Physical Review, 96, p. 208. [15] Bohm, D., Wholeness and the implicate order, ARK Edition, 1983. [16] Heisenberg, W., "Uber quantentheoretische Umdeuting kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen", Zeitschrijt fur Physik, 33, 1925, p.879. [17] Schrodinger, E., "Quantisiering als Eigenwertproblem", Ann. der Phys., 19, 1926, p. 361. [18] Dirac, P.A.M., The principles of quantum mechanics, Oxford University Press, 1930. [19] von Neumann, J., Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik, Berlin, Springer, 1932. [20] Jauch, J.M., Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Addison Wesley, 1968. [21] Piron, C., Foundations of Quantum Physics, Benjamin, 1976.

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[22] Ludwig, G., Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, (two volumes), Springer-Verlag, New York, Berlin, 1983/5. [23] Randall, C. and Foulis, D., "The operational approach to quantum mechanics", in: Hooker, C.A. (ed.), Physical theory as logicooperational structure, Reidel, 1979. [24] Randall, C. and Foulis, D., "A mathematical language for quantum physics", in: Gruber, C. et al. (eds.), Les Fondements de la Mecanique Quantique, A.V.C.P., case postale 101, 1015 Lausanne, Suisse, 1983. [25] Mittelstaedt, P., Quantum Logic, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1978. [26] Segal, I.E., Ann. Math., 48, 1947, p. 930. [27] Emch, G.G.,Mathematical and conceptual foundations of 20th century physics, North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1984. [28] Feynman, R. and Hibbs, A.R., Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals, McGraw Hill-International Series in the Earth and Planetary Sciences, 1965. [29] Aerts, D., The one and the many, Doctoral Thesis, Brussels Free University, 1981. [30] Aerts, D., "Description of many physical entities without the paradoxes encountered in quantum mechanics", Found. Phys., 12, 1982, p. 1131. [31] Aerts, D., "Classical theories and non classical theories as a special case of a more general theory", J. Math. Phys., 24, 1983, p. 2441. [32] Aerts, D., "Foundations of quantum physics: a general realistic and operational approach", Int. J. Theor. Phys., 38, 1999, p. 289. [33] Coecke, B., "Hidden Measurement Representation for Quantum Entities Described by Finite Dimensional Complex Hilbert Spaces" , Found. Phys., 25, 1995, p. 203. [34] Coecke, B., "Generalization of the Proof on the Existence of Hidden Measurements to Experiments with an Infinite Set of Outcomes" , Found. Phys. Lett., 8, 1995, p. 437. [35] Coecke, B., "New Examples of Hidden Measurement Systems and Outline of a General Scheme", Tatra Mountains Mathematical Publications, 10, 1996, p. 203. [36] Birkhoff, G. and von Neumann, J., 1. Ann. Math., 37, 1936, p.823. [37] Gudder, S.P., Quantum Probability, Academic Press, Harcourt Brave Jovanovitch Publishers, 1988.

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[38] Accardi, L., "On the statistical meaning of the complex numbers in quantum mechanics", Nuovo Cimento, 34, 1982, p. 16l. [39] Pitovski, 1., Quantum Probability-Quantum Logic, Springer Verlag, 1989. [40] Aerts, D. and D'Hooghe, B., "Operator structure of a nonquantum and a non-classical system", Int. J. Theor. Phys., 35, 1996, p. 224l. [41] D'Hooghe, B., "Structure of the algebra of observables in the intermediate situation of the epsilon-model", Int. J. Theor. Phys., 37, 1998, p. 323. [42] Aerts, D. and Van Bogaert, B., A mechanical classical lab oratory situation with a quantum logic structure, Int. J. Theor. Phys., 31, 1992, p. 1839. [43] Aerts, D., Durt, T. and Van Bogaert, B., "A physical example of quantum fuzzy sets, and the classical limit" , in Proceedings of the first International Conference on Fuzzy Sets and their Applications, Tatra Montains Math. Publ. 1, 1992, p. 5. [44] Aerts, D., Durt, T., Grib, A.A., Van Bogaert, B. and Zapatrin, R.R., "Quantum structures in macroscopic reality", Int. J. Theor. Phys., 32, 3, 1993, p. 489. [45] Aerts, D., Durt, T. and Van Bogaert, B., "Quantum probability, the classical limit and non-locality", in: Hyvonen, T. (ed.), Symposium on the Foundations of Modern Physics, World Scientific, Singapore, 1993. [46] Aerts, D. and Durt, T., "Quantum, Classical and Intermediate, an illustrative example", Found. Phys., 24, 1994. [47] Aerts, D. and Durt, T., "Quantum, classical and intermediate: a measurement model", in Montonen C. (ed.), Editions Frontieres, Gives Sur Yvettes, France, 1994. [48] Aerts, D., "The Entity and Modern Physics", in: Castellani, E. (ed.), Interpreting Bodies: Classical and Quantum Objects in Modern Physics, Princeton University Press, Princeton University Press, 1998. [49] Aerts, D. and Coecke, B., "The creation-discovery-view: towards a possible explanation of quantum reality", in: Dalla Chiara, M.L. (ed.), Language, Quantum, Music, Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht, 1999. [50] Aerts, D. and Aerts, S., "The hidden measurement approach and conditional probabilities", in: Ferrero, M. and van der Merwe, A. (eds.), Fundamental Problems in Quantum Physics II, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, 1996.

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[51] Aerts, D., "The hidden measurement formalism: what can be explained and where paradoxes remain?" Int. 1. Theor. Phys., 37, 1998, p. 291. [52] Aerts, D. and Aerts, S., "Applications of quantum statistics in psychological studies of decision processes", Foundations of Science, 1, 1994, p. 85. [53] Schrodinger, E., "Die gegenwartige Situation in der Quantenmechanik", NatuTwissenschaften, 23, 1935, pp. 807, 823 and 844. [54] Valckenborgh, F., "Closure Structures and the Theorem of Decomposition in Classical Components", Tatra Mountains Mathematical Publications, 10, 1997, p. 75. [55] Aerts, D., "How do we have to change quantum mechanics in order to describe separated systems", in: Diner, S. et al. (eds.), The waveparticle Dualism, D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984, p. 419. [56] Aerts, D., "The physical origin of the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox", in: Tarozzi, G. and van der Merwe, A. (eds.), Open Questions in Quantum Physics, D. Reidel Publishing Cy, 1985, p. 33. [57] Aerts, D., "The physical origin of the EPR paradox and how to violate Bell inequalities by macroscopic systems", in: Lahti, P. and Mittelstaedt, P. (eds.), On the Foundations of modem Physics, World Scientific, Singapore, 1985, p. 305. [58] Aerts, D., Coecke, B., Durt T. and Valckenborgh, F., "Quantum, classical and intermediate I; a model on the Poincare Sphere", Tatra Mountains Mathematical Publications, 10, 1997, p. 225. [59] Aerts, D., Coecke, B., Durt, T. and Valckenborgh, F., "Quantum, classical and intermediate II; the vanishing vector space structure" , Tatra Mountains Mathematical Publications, 10, 1997, p. 241. [60] Aerts D., Aerts, S., Durt, T. and Leveque, 0., "Classical and quantum probability in the epsilon model", Int. J. Theor. Phys., 38, p.407. [61] Einstein, A., Ann. Phys., 17, 1905, p. 891. [62] Misner, C.W., Thorne, K.S. and Wheeler, J.A., Gravitation, W.H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco, 1973. [63] Aerts, D., "Framework for possible unification of quantum and relativity theories", Int. J. Theor. Phys., 35, 1996, p. 2431. [64] Aerts, D., "Relativity theory: what is reality?", Found. Phys., 26, 1996, p. 1627.

FRANCISCO VARELA

DASEIN'S BRAIN: PHENOMENOLOGY MEETS COGNITIVE SCIENCE

1. WHY WE NEED A RADICALLY NEW APPROACH

A science of consciousness requires a significant re-framing of the way the question is usually posed within cognitive science and in the AngloAmerican philosophy of mind. We need to turn to a systematic exploration of the only link between mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the structure of human experience itself [31, 32]1. Dasein is a code-word in phenomenology coined by Heidegger to refer precisely to the primacy of lived, immediate experience. Heidegger would certainly turn in his grave to hear that a Dasein is predicated next to "brain", but such is my project 2 . Practically speaking this means taking the long tradition of phenomenology as a science of experience seriously and linking it up skillfully with modern science. Thus my purpose here is to sketch a research direction, neurophenomenology, for the scientific study of consciousness which is radical in the way in which methodological principles are linked to scientific studies. The central idea is to seek a productive marriage between modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thereby placing myself in the lineage of the continental tradition of Phenomenology3. I will claim that no piecemeal empirical correlates, nor purely theoretical principles, will really help us at this stage. This skillful bridge-building is what the subtitle express as naturalized phe1

This paper is a modified version of [31] keeping the main ideas that were presented during my invited lecture in Brussels. I am grateful to the Editors of the 1. Consc. Studies and the Tucson II Conference [32] for letting me do so. 2

lowe this expression to Gordon Globus, and I am grateful to him for sharing it with me. We have already used to title an early gathering with a neurophenomenological inspiration at the Center for Cognitive Studies in San Marino, "Dasein's Brain: Phenomenological and Existential Issues in Cognitive Science", April 15-18, 1990. 3

The use of "neuro" should be taken here as a nom de guerre. It is chosen in explicit contrast to the current usage of "neurophilosophy", which identifies philosophy with anglo-american philosophy of mind. Further, "neuro" refers here to the entire array of scientific correlates which are relevant in cognitive science. But to speak of a neuropsycho-evolutionary-phenomenology is not very handy.

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nome no logy, a growing trend that stands in stark contrast to what most people are familiar with [24]. In order to briefly situate my position, let me present four axes that seem to capture the essential orientations in the current boom of discussion on consciousness. This can be formulated as in politics, as the center, and the extreme right and extreme left. I call the far right the very vocal trend best represented by P.S. Churchland and F. Crick, close to the spontaneous philosophy of a significant percent of my colleagues in neuroscience, and appropriately labeled as neuro-reductionism or eliminativism. As is well-known, this view seeks to solve the hard problem by eliminating the pole of experience in favor of some form of neurobiological account which will do the job of generating it. At the center position I place a variety of positions that can be labeled as functionalistic, and identified as being the most popular ecology of ideas active today with a number of well-developed proposals including, R. Jackendorff's [17] "projective mechanism", B. Baars' [1] "global workspace", D. Dennett's [5] "multiple drafts", W. Calvin "Darwinian machines" [3], or G. Edelman's [10] "neural Darwinism". The basic move in these proposals is quite similar. First start from the modular items of cognitive capacities, (i.e., the "soft" problems). Second, construct a theoretical framework to put them together so that their unity amounts to an account of experience. The strategy to bridge this emergent unity and experience itself varies, but typically it is left vague since the entire approach relies almost entirely on a third-person or externalistic approach to obtain data and to validate the theory. This position seems the most popular one in the current boom literature, and it represents the work of an important segment of researchers in cognitive science. This popularity rests on the acceptance of the reality of experience and mental life while keeping the methods and ideas within the known framework of empirical science. Finally, to the left, I have put the sector that interests me the most, and which can be roughly described as giving an explicit and central role to first-person accounts and to the irreducible nature of experience, while at the same time refusing either a dualistic concession or a pessimistic surrender to the question. As are the other orientations in my sketch, the group gathered here is a motley one, with odd bedfellows such as G. Lakoff and M. Johnson's approach to cognitive semantics, J. Searle's ideas on ontological irreducibility, G. Globus [12] "post-modern" brain, and at the edge, O. Flannagan's [11] "reflective equilibrium", and Chalmers's [4] formulation of the "hard problem" in the study of consciousness.

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What is interesting about this diverse group, within which I place myself, is that even though we share a concern for first-hand experience as basic fact to incorporate in the future of the discipline, the differences are patent in the manner in which this experience is taken into account. The phenomenological approach is grounded in the exploration of experience which is at the center of my proposal. This sufficiently clarifies, I hope, the context for my ideas within the current scene. Now we may move to the heart of the matter, the nature of the circulation between a first person and an external account of human experience, which describes the phenomenological position in fertile dialogue with cognitive science. II. A NEURO-PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH

II. 1. Irreducibility: the Basic Ground The phenomenological approach starts from the irreducible nature of conscious experience. Lived experience is where we start from. Most modern authors are disinclined to focus on the distinction between mental life in some general sense and experience, or manifest some suspicion about its status. From a phenomenological standpoint conscious experience is quite at variance with that of a mental content as it figures in the AngloAmerican philosophy of mind. The tension between these two orientations appears in a rather dramatic fashion in Dennett's book where he concludes with little effort (15 lines in a SSO-page book) that Phenomenology has failed. He remarks: "Like other attempts to strip away interpretation and reveal the basic facts of consciousness to rigorous observation, such as the Impressionistic movements in the arts [sic] and the Introspectionist psychologists of Wundt, Titchener and others, Phenomenology has failed to find a single settled method that everyone could agree upon" [5, p. 44].

This passage is revealing: Dennett mixes apples and oranges by putting Impressionism and Introspectionism in the same bag; he confuses Introspectionism with Phenomenology which it is most definitely not; and he finally draws his conclusion from the absence of some idyllic universal agreement that would validate the whole. We surely would not demand "that everyone could agree" upon, say, Darwinism, to make it a remarkably useful research program. And certainly some people do agree on the established possibility of disciplined examination of human experience. Similarly, although Flannagan [11] claims to make phenomenology into an essential dimension of his inclusive position, however one does

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not find one single reference to what this tradition has accomplished or some of its main exponents! In books that are in many other respects so savant and insightful, this display of unconcern for Phenomenology is a symptom that says a lot about what's amiss in this field.

II. 2. Method: Moving Ahead We need to examine, beyond the spook of subjectivity, into the concrete possibilities of a disciplined examination of experience that is at the very core of the Phenomenological inspiration. To repeat: it is the re-discovery of the primacy of human experience and its direct, lived quality that is Phenomenology's foundational project. This is the sense within which Edmund Husserl inaugurated this thinking in the West, and established a long tradition that is well and alive today not only in Europe but world-wide.

It is fair to say that Phenomenology is, more than anything else, a style of thinking started in the West by Husserl, but it does not exhaust in his personal options and style. I do not want to engage in an account of the diversity and complexity of western Phenomenology (see, e.g., [20, 26]). The contributions of individuals such as Eugen Fink, Maurice MerleauPonty [22], Aaron Gurwitsch to cite only a few, attests to a continuing development of phenomenology. More recently various links with modern cognitive science have been explored (see for instance [9]' [29]' [24], [27]). I mention this explicitly because it has been my observation that most people unfamiliar with the phenomenological movement automatically assume that phenomenology is some sort of dusty continental trip. My position cannot be ascribed to any particular school or sub-lineage but represents my own synthesis of Phenomenology in the light of modern cognitive science and other traditions focusing on human experience. Phenomenology can also be described as a special type of reflection or attitude about our capacity for being conscious. All reflection reveals a variety of mental contents (mental acts) and their correlated orientation or intended contents. A natural or naive attitude takes for granted a number of received claims about both the nature of the experiencer and its intended objects. It was Husserl's hope as well as the basic inspiration behind phenomenological research that a true science of experience would gradually be established that could not only stand on equal footing with the natural sciences, but that could give them a needed ground, since knowledge necessarily emerges from our lived experience. On the one hand experience is suffused with spontaneous pre-understanding, so that it might seem that any "theory" about it is quite

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superfluous. On the other hand this pre-understanding itself must be examined since it is unclear what kind of knowledge it represents. Experience demands specific examination in order to free it from its status as habitual belief. Phenomenology founds its movement towards a fresh look at experience in a specific gesture of reflection or phenomenological reduction (PhR)4. I need now to unfold the bare bones of this attitude or gesture through which the habitual way we have to relate to our lived-world changes. This does not mean to consider a different world but rather to consider the present one otherwise. As we said before, this gesture transforms a naive or unexamined experience into a reflexive or second-order one. Phenomenology correctly insists on this shift from the natural to the phenomenological attitude, since it is only then that the world and my experience appear as open and in need of exploration. The meaning and pragmatics of PhR have taken several variants from this common trunk. It is not my intention to recapitulate them here 5 . The conscious gesture that at the base of PhR can be decomposed into four intertwined moments or aspects: • Attitude: reduction The attitude of reduction is the necessary starting point. It can also be defined by its similarities to doubt: a sudden, transient suspension of beliefs about what is being examined, a putting in abeyance of our habitual discourse about something, a bracketing of the pre-set structuring that constitutes the ubiquitous background of everyday life. Reduction is self-induced (it is an active gesture), and it does seek to be resolved, (dissipating our doubts) since it is here as a source of experience. It is a common mistake to assume that suspending our habitual thinking means stopping our stream of thoughts, which is not possible. The point is to turn the direction of the movement of thinking from its habitual contentoriented direction backwards toward the arising of thoughts themselves. This is no more nor less than the very human capacity for reflexivity, and the life-blood of reduction. To engage in reduction is to cultivate a systematic capacity for reflexiveness thus opening up new possibilities within our habitual mind stream. For instance, right now the reader is very likely making some internal remarks concerning what reduction is, 4

The reader should refrain from the temptation to assimilate this usage of the word 'reduction' to that of 'theoretical reduction' as it appears for instance in the neuroreductionist framework and well articulated in the writings of P. Churchland. The two meanings run completely opposite to one another; it is convenient to append a qualifier. 5

For a recent discussion about the varieties of reduction see: R. Bernet [2, pp. 5-36]. Busserl's own first articulation can be found in [14].

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what it reminds her of, and so on. To mobilize an attitude of reduction would begin by noticing those automatic thought-patterns, take a reflexive distance from them, and focus reflection towards their source. • Intimacy: Intuition The result of reduction is that a field of experience appears both less encumbered and more vividly present, as if the habitual distance separating experiencer and world were dispelled. As William James saw, the immediacy of experience thus appears surrounded by a diversity of horizons to which we can turn our interest. This gain in intimacy with the phenomenon is crucial, for it is the basis of the criteria of truth in phenomenological analysis, the nature of its evidence. If intimacy or immediacy is the beginning of this process, it continues by a cultivation of imaginary variations, considering in the virtual space of mind multiple possibilities of the phenomenon as it appears. These ideal variations are familiar to us from mathematics, but here they are put into the service of whatever becomes the focus of our analysis: perception of three-dimensional form, the structure of nowness, the manifestations of empathy, and so on. It is through these multiple variations that a new stage of understanding arises, an "Aha!" experience which adds a new evidence that carries a force of conviction. This moving intimacy with our experience corresponds well to what is traditionally referred to as intuition, and represents, along with reflection, the two main human capacities that are mobilized and cultivated in PhR. • Description: Invariants To stop at reduction followed by imaginary variations would be to condemn this method to private ascertainment. The next component is as crucial as the preceding ones: the gain in intuitive evidence must be inscribed or translated into communicable items, usually through language or other symbolic inscriptions (think of sketches or formulae). The materialities of these descriptions, however, are also a constitutive part of the PhR and shape our experience as much as the intuition that shapes them. In other words we are not merely talking about an "encoding" into a public record, but rather of an "embodiment" that incarnates and shapes what we experience. I like to refer to these public descriptions as invariants, since it is through "variations" that one finds broad conditions under which an observation can be communicable. This is not so different from what mathematicians have done for centuries: the novelty is to apply it to the contents of consciousness. • Training: stability As with any discipline, sustained training and steady learning are key. A casual inspection of consciousness is a far cry from the disciplined cul-

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tivation of PhR. This point is particularly relevant here, for the attitude of reduction is notoriously fragile. If one does not cultivate the skill to stabilize and deepen one's capacity for attentive bracketing and intuition, as well as skill for illuminating descriptions, no systematic study can mature. This last aspect of the PhR is perhaps the greatest obstacle for the constitution of a research program since it implies a disciplined commitment from a community of researchers (more on this below). Phenomenological Reduction

aspects of method Attitude Intuition Invariants Training

characteristics of resulting examination bracketing, suspending beliefs intimacy, immediate evidence inscriptions, intersubjectivity stability, pragmatics

II. 3. Better Pragmatics are Needed On the whole, my claim is that neurophenomenology is a natural solution that can allow us to move beyond the hard problem in the study of consciousness. It has little to do with some theoretical or conceptual 'extra ingredient', to use Chalmers formula. Instead, it acknowledges a realm of practical ignorance that can be remedied. It is also clear that, like all solutions in science which radically reframe an open problem instead of trying to solve it within its original setting, it has a revolutionary potential, a point to which I shall turn at the end of this article. In other words, instead of finding "extra ingredients" to account for how consciousness emerges from matter and brain, my proposal reframes the question to that of finding meaningful bridges between two irreducible phenomenal domains. In this specific sense neurophenomenology is a potential solution to the hard problem by framing in an entirely different light what "hard" means. I am painfully aware that what I have said here and what is available in published form about reduction as a practice is limited 6 . This is both a symptom and a cause for the relative paucity of recent work bearing on phenomenological approaches to mind. The reader cannot be blamed for not having had more than a passing whiff of what I mean by emphasizing the gesture of reduction, the core of the methodological remedy I am offering here. It is remarkable that this capacity for becoming aware 6

But see the early attempts of Don Ihde [16] to remedy this situation.

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has been paid so little attention as a human pragmatics. It is as if the emphasis for rhythmic movement had led to no development of dance training. A phenomenologically-inspired reflection requires strategies for its development as cognitive practicians have known for some time [35], and as attested in the mindfulness tradition of various Buddhist schools [29]. My only comment concerning this relative poverty of pragmatical elaboration is that it represents an urgent call for research to fill this gaping need. My own contribution concerning the practice of reduction and its training will be presented in a forthcoming joint work [8]. From the standpoint of phenomenology then, experimental psychology and modern cognitive science miss a fundamental dimension of mental phenomena by dismissing an analysis of immediate, direct experience. Husserl went as far stating that even if it took some time, some day the scientific community will "consider the instrument of phenomenological eidetic theory to be no less important, indeed at first probably very much more than mechanical instruments" (one could add today: computers and electronics). In this text he also raises an "analogy of proportionality" between mathematics and modern physics on the one hand, and pure phenomenology and psychology on the other. Clearly this analogy has to be handled with care as any analogy7. But it is useful in this context for it highlights the inescapable need to seek a disciplined approach to include experience in our study of mind and towards a genuine science of consciousness. III. NEUROPHENOMENOLOGICAL CIRCULATION

III.l A Brief Example In this Section, I wish to illustrate more concretely what a neurophenomenological circulation might mean in practice through the case of the experience of nowness. In recent years there has been a number of different studies in which, while remaining well-grounded in the scientific tradition of cognitive neuroscience, the part played by lived experience is progressively more important to the extent that it begins to enter inescapably into the picture apart from any interest in first-person accounts [25]. Clearly, as more sophisticated methods of brain imaging are becoming available, we shall need subjects whose competence in making phenomenological discriminations and descriptions is accrued. This is an important philosophical issue but it is also a pragmatic, empirical need. 7

Cited in E. Marbach [21], p. 254.

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Temporality is inseparable from all experience, and at various horizons of duration from present nowness to an entire life-span. One level of study is precisely the experience of immediate time, the structure of nowness as such or in James' happy phrase "the specious present". This has been a traditional theme in phenomenological studies, describing a basic three-part structure of the present with its constitutive threads into past and future horizons, the so-called protentions and retentions [15], [23]. In fact, these structural invariants are not compatible with the point-continuum representation of linear time we have inherited from physics. But they do link naturally to a body of conclusions in cognitive neuroscience that there is a minimal time required for the emergence of neural events that correlate to a cognitive event [6]. This noncompressible time framework can be analyzed as a manifestation of the long-range neuronal integration in the brain linked to a widespread synchrony [30]. This link illuminates both the nature of phenomenological invariants via a dynamical reconstruction which underlies them, as well as giving to the process of synchrony a tangible experiential content. I have developed this neuro-phenomenological view of temporal nowness in detail elsewhere [32]. The evocation of study cases such as this, tries to provide a concrete background to discuss further the central concern of the neurophenomenological program I am presenting here. On the one hand we have a process of emergence with well defined neurobiological attributes. On the other, a phenomenological description which links directly to our lived experience. To make further progress we need cutting edge techniques and analyses from the scientific side, and very consistent development of phenomenological investigation for the purposes of the research itself. Do I expect the list of structural invariants relevant to human experience to grow ad infinitum? Certainly not. I surmise that the horizon of fundamental topics can be expected to converge towards a corpus of well-integrated knowledge. When and how fast this happens will of course depend on the pace at which a community of researchers committed to this mode of inquiry is constituted and creates further standards of evidence.

III.2 The Working Hypothesis This brings me back to my initial point: only a balanced and disciplined account of both the external and experiential side of an issue can make us move one step closer to bridging the biological mind-experiential mind gap. Let me now be more explicit about my basic working hypothesis for a "circulation" between external and phenomenological analysis:

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The Working Hypothesis of Neurophenomenology Phenomenological accounts of the structure of experience and their counterparts in cognitive science relate to each other through reciprocal constraints.

The key point here is that by emphasizing a co-determination of both accounts one can explore the bridges, challenges, insights and contradictions between them. This means that both domains of phenomena have equal status in demanding a full attention and respect for their specificity. It is quite easy to see how scientific accounts illuminate mental experience, but the reciprocal direction, from experience towards science, is what is typically ignored. What do phenomenological accounts provide? At least two main aspects of the larger picture. First, without them the first-hand quality of experience vanishes, or it becomes a mysterious riddle. Second, structural accounts provide constraints on empirical observations. The study of experience is not a convenient stop on our way to a real explanation, but an active participant in its own right. Clearly in this research program, as in all others worthy of their name, a certain body of evidence is slowly accumulated, while other aspects are more obscure and difficult to seize. The study case mentioned above clearly needs substantially more development, but I hope it is clear how it begins to provide a "stereoscopic" perspective on the various large and local issues where experience and cognitive science become active partners. This demand for a disciplined circulation is both a more precise and a more demanding standard than the "reflective equilibrium" proposed by Flanagan [11] or the "conscious projection" put forth by Velmans [34]. Although there is a similarity in intention to what I am proposing here, they propose no explicit or new methodological grounds for carrying it out these intentions. Still, is this not just a fleshed-up version of the well-known identity theory (or at least a homomorphism) between experience and cognitive neuroscientific accounts? Not really, since I am claiming that the correlates are causally active, and are to be established, not just as a matter of philosophical commitment, but from a methodologically sound examination of experiential invariants. Again, this is a question of pragmatics and learning of a method, not of a priori argumentation or theoretical completeness. What is different in the research strategy proposed by neurophenomenology is that these bridges are not of the "looks like" kind but they are built by mutual constraint and validated from both phenomenal domains where the phenomenal terms stand as explicit terms

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directly linked to experience by a rigorous examination (e.g., reduction, invariance and intersubjective communication).

This makes the whole difference: one obtains an intellectually coherent account of mind and consciousness where the experiential pole enters directly into the formulation of the complete account making direct reference to the nature of our lived experience. In all functionalistic accounts what is missing is not the coherent nature of the explanation but its alienation from human life. Only putting human life back will erase that absence, not some "extra" ingredient or profound "theoretical fix" . Francisco Varela CREA, Ecole Poly technique 1, Rue Descartes Paris 75005 France ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to all my phenomenological seekers-partners in Paris and elsewhere, specially Jean Petitot, Jean-Michel Roy, Natalie Depraz, Evan Thompson and Pierre Vermersch for their essential partnership. REFERENCES

[1] Baars, B., A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1988. [2] Bernet, R., La Vie du Sujet, Presses Universitaire de France, Paris, 1994. [3] Calvin, W., Cerebral Symphony: Seashore Reflections on the Structure of Consciousness, Bantam Books, New York, 1990. [4] Chalmers, D., The Conscious Mind: In search for a fundamental theory, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996. [5] Dennett, D., Consciousness Explained, Little Brown, Boston, 1991. [6] Dennett, D. and Kinsbourne, M., "Time and the observer: The where and when of time in the brain", Beh. Brain Sciences, 15, 1991, pp. 183-247. [7] Depraz, N., Transcendence et Incarnation, J. Vrin, Paris, 1996.

[8] Depraz, N. Varela, F. and Vermersch, P., On Becoming Aware: Exploring Experience with a Method, (forthcoming).

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[9] Dreyfus, H. (ed.), Husserl: Intentionality and Cognitive Science, MIT Press, Cambridge, 19S2. [10] Edelman, G., The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness, Basic Book, New York, 19S9. [11] Flanagan 0., Consciousness Reconsidered, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1992. [12] Globus, G., The Post-Modern Brain, Benjamin, New York, 1995.

[13] Howe, R.B., "Introspection: A reassessment", New Ideas in Psychology, 9, 1991, pp. 24-44. [14] Husserl, E., Erste Philosophie, Vol. II, Hua XV, M. Nijhoff, The Hague, 1959. [15] Husserl, E., Zur Phiinomenologie des Inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1893-1917), Bohm, R. (ed.), M. Nijhoff, The Hague, 1966, (On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), Trans. by J. Brough, Kluwer, Amsterdam, 1991) [16] Ihde, D., Experimental Phenomenology, Open Court, New York, 1977. [17] Jackendorff, R., Consciousness and the Computational Mind, MIT Press, Cambridge, 19S7. [IS] James, W., The Principles of Psychology, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1912/1995. [19] Lyons, W., The Disappearance of Introspection, MIT Press, Cambridge, 19S6. [20] Lyotard, J.-F., La Phenomenologie, Presses Univ. de France, Paris, 1954. [21] Marbach, E., "How to study consciousness phenomenologically or quite a lot comes to mind", J. Brit. Soc. Phenomenol., 19, 19S5, pp. 252-264. [22] Merleau-Ponty, M., La Phenomenologie de la Perception, Gallimard, Paris, 1945.

[23] McInerney, P., Time and Experience, Temple Univ. Press, Philadelphia, 1991. [24] Petitot, J., Varela, F., Pachoud, B. and Roy, J.M. (eds.), Naturalizing Phenomenology: Contemporary Issues on Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999 (in press). [25] Picton, T. and Stuss, D., "Neurobiology of conscious experience", Current Biology, 4, 1994, pp. 256-265.

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[26] Spiegelberg, F., The Phenomenological Movement, 2 vols., Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 2ed, 1962. [27] Gallagher, S., "Mutual enlightment: Recent phenomenology and cognitive science", J. Consc. Studies, 4(3), 1997. [28] Varela, F., Principles of Biological Autonomy, North-Holland, New York, 1979. [29] Varela, F., Thompson, E., and Rosch, E., The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1991. [30] Varela, F., "Resonant cell assemblies: A new approach to cognitive functioning and neuronal synchrony", Biol. Research, 28, 1995, pp. 8195. [31] Varela, F., "Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem", 1. Consc.Studies, 3, 1996, pp. 330-350. [32] Varela, F., "A science of consciousness as if experience mattered" , in: Hameroff, S. et al. (eds.), Towards a Science of Consciousness: The Second Tucson Debates, MIT Press, pp. 31-34. [33] Varela, F., "The Specious Present: The neurophenomenology of time consciousness", in: Petitot, J. et al. (eds), 1999. [34] Velmans, M., The Science of Consciousness, Routledge, London, 1996. [35] Vermersch, P., L'Entretien d'Explicitation, ESF Editeurs, Paris, 1994.

W.H. CALVIN

WHAT CREATIVITY IN SCIENCE AND ART TELL US ABOUT HOW THE BRAIN MUST WORK

1. INTRODUCTION

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers.

James Baldwin

It hasn't been clear how to subdivide our mental lives. We talk confidently of such "entities" as: mind consciousness intelligence expert abilities creativity rationality but consider what happened to other famous categories of the ancient Greeks, once we got more information: physics water mud (earth) aIr fire

I physiology I yellow bile black bile blood phlegm

Given how little we understand about the underpinnings of our mental lives, I tend to look for neural mechanisms that cut across the present categories (as I suspect that they too are woefully inadequate). Still, the traditional words are all we've got, for now. Just don't take them too seriously. And so I want to back into the problem of creativity by giving you two definitions that I like-but they're not of creativity per se, but of what amount to convergent and divergent thinking styles: • An expert is more than just knowledgeable. An expert is someone who knows all the possible mistakes-and how to avoid them. 199

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1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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There's nothing necessarily creative about experts, though a good imagination certainly helps. Experts make extensive use of categorical perception ("It's either this or that!") that can blind them to inbetween possibilities. • Jean Piaget's 1929 description of intelligence as (and I paraphrase) what you use when you don't know what to do. As we heard from John Ziman, basic research is when you don't know exactly what you're doing-though that would also seem to apply to being a fool. Surely, however, we may safely conclude that doing basic research requires intelligence. Personally, I like the way neurobiologist Horace Barlow frames the issue. He says intelligence is all about making a guess that discovers some new underlying order. This idea neatly covers a lot of ground: finding the solution to a problem or the logic of an argument, happening on an appropriate analogy, creating a pleasing harmony or a witty reply or guessing what's likely to happen next. Indeed, we all routinely predict what comes next, even when passively listening to a narrative or a melody. That's why a joke's punch line or a P.D.Q. Bach musical parody brings you up short-you were subconsciously predicting something else and were surprised by the mismatch. So scientists are sometimes experts-but mostly they're like artists, intelligently groping in a creative way. Guessing well, then applying the tools of rat~onality. Creativity implies a shaping-up process, refining the products of imagination with testing against a knowledge base of how the world works. • In art, this is a set of styles, limitations of the media, limitations of the buyers of art, variations that have already been tried, and so on. • In science, we have all those constraints plus another: a regular testing of our creativity against reality. So creativity is more than just imagination. In particular, it has to avoid the problem of premature closure by retaining a certain looseness. Sir Walter Scott made a useful mechanical analogy to clockworks m discussing the creativity of Lord Byron's mental life: The wheels of a machine to play rapidly must not fit with the utmost exactness else the attrition diminishes the Impetus. In particular, we have to effectively manage the shaping-up process for the goal of creating new order, novelties rather than existing categories.

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Radiologists in expert mode, for example, will work their way through a decision tree and then say, "Diagnosis made. Next!" For a scientist in creative mode, that would be premature closure, a failure to explore for novel explanations not currently in the textbooks. Staying in blue-sky mode for a while may be less efficient for standard goals but is more likely to generate useful novelties. This process poses a considerable challenge to the brain researcher. Traditionally, one imagines some sort of cortical reflex, matching up (in an economistlike way) an ensemble of stimuli with • a set of internal states like hunger or fear and • a repertoire of behaviors. But for doing something creative? Variations and random combinations are easy to produce, but are usually nonsense and sometimes dangerous. So we need a detailed theory for how cerebral cortex represents mental images and occasionally recombines them to create something novel. The 19th century American psychologist William James said that it might involve Darwinism. Just as Charles Darwin didn't have any notion of genes, but still got it right in 1838 and 1859, so I think that William James got it right in 1874, even though he lacked a neural mechanism for doing it. We can now say a little more about how Darwinian processes could operate in the brain to shape up mental images, starting with shuffled memories no better than the jumble of our nighttime dreams, but evolving into something of quality, such as a sentence to speak aloud. J ung said that dreaming goes on continuously but you can't see it when you are awake, just as you can't see the stars in the daylight because it is too bright. Mine is a theory for what goes on, hidden from view by the glare of waking mental operations, that produces our peculiarly human type of consciousness with its versatile creativity. It's a theory that can handle Kenneth Craik's 1943 notion of simulating a possible course of action before actually acting. However attractive the top-down strategies proposed in philosophy or artificial intelligence, we know that Darwinism works, given enough time. As Daniel Dennett points out in his new book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Darwinism is really a simple algorithm for generating complex things from simpler things-which, of course, goes against the commonsense notion that complex things require something (someone) even more complex to produce them, a designer. Perhaps the brain has invented something even fancier than Darwinism, but we ought to try Darwinism out for size as a foundation-and then look for shortcuts. It promises to be a way to shape up a grammatically correct sentence

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to speak or a more efficient plan for visiting the essential aisles of the grocery store. The Darwinian process is a way into the Piagettian mess, when you don't know what to do; standard neural decision trees may suffice for overlearned items but something creative is often needed when deciding what to do next. That's where I'm going this morning. First I'll review the essential and desirable elements of Darwinian processes. Then I will venture into brain circuitry that might correspond to them. I'll occasionally use the phrase "Darwin Machine." In 1987 I wrote a commentary in Nature, "The brain as a Darwin Machine," which coined this term for any fullfledged Darwinian process, in analogy to the Turing Machine. 2. THE SIX ES SENTIALS OF A DAR WINIA N PRO C ES S (THE MINIMAL DARWIN MACHINE)

We see Darwinism operating on a millennial time scale as species evolve. But much the same thing happens on a time scale of days to weeks, as the immune system evolves better and better antibody fits to an antigen. Let me try to state the process in more abstract terms, so we can see what's essential and what's peculiar to particular implementations. 1. There is a particular pattern at the heart of the matter. For example, the sequence of DNA bases commonly known as a gene. Or, as Richard Dawkins pointed out, we can have other patterns, which he called memes, such as a musical melody or a rumor. 2. Copies are made of this pattern. Indeed, that which is semi-reliably copied pretty much defines the pattern of interest. In memes, catchy phrases (Beethoven's dit-dit-ditdah) may be more reliably copied than the whole work. 3. Variations occur during copying. Point mutations are only a minor source of variation. Mostly variations arise because of copying errors or recombination. Crossing over is one type of recombination, fertilization is another (and then there are viruses and bacterial conjugation). Culturally, the spread of a rumor often involves variations. 4. Variants compete for a limited territory. For example, bluegrass and crabgrass compete for my back yard. 5. The relative success of variants is influenced by a multifaceted environment. For the grass in my back yard, it's a combination of how much sunlight, how much rain, how regular the watering is, freezing in winter, how

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often the grass is cropped, the nutrients in the soil, etc. Some variants do better with one set of factors, others thrive with another set. This is what Charles Darwin called natural selection. 6. Copying occurs only after a certain amount of differential success.

It isn't just reproduction per se; the issue is where do the new variants come from? Darwinism requires that they come from the more successful of the current population. Childhood mortality is the usual factor: survival until reproductive age is what Darwinism is mostly about, not how long adults live. Mate selection also has differential success and similarly biases the next generation (what Darwin called sexual selection). Those six features seem to be "essential" in that a Darwinian process won't run very well if anyone is missing. Popular usage, of course, may use "Darwinian" to refer to only one of the six essentials, usually the selective survival biased by an environment (5). But even inanimate processes create patterning via selective survival: a shingle beach exists because strong ocean currents have carried away the smaller stones during winter storms. There are indeed pruning processes in the brain, so that only some of the juvenile connections survive into adulthood, but to call this "Darwinian" is to confuse one part with the whole process, carving with more general forms of creativity. Copying competitions have got to be involved in any meaningful use of a term such as "neural Darwinism," not merely selective survival (5) and "reentrance" (6, in some sense). 3. WAY S T 0 S PEE D UP, 0 R S TAB I LIZ E , A DARWINIAN PROCESS

Besides the six essentials, there are another half-dozen candidateswhile the creative Darwinian process will run without them, using Darwinian creativity in a behavioral setting will require some optimization for speed, so that quality is achieved within the time span of thought and action. Accelerating factors are the problem in what the French call1'esprit d'escalier-finally thinking of the right reply, but only after leaving the party. I will not be surprised if some accelerating factors were almost essential in mental Darwinism, simply because of the time windows created by fleeting opportunities.

A. Equivalents of Sex Systematic recombination generates many more variants than do copying errors and the far-rarer point mutations. Sex, in the sense of gamete

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dimorphism (going to the extremes of expensive ova and cheap sperm), was invented about 1.3 billion years ago and greatly accelerated species evolution over the rate promoted by errors, bacterial conjugation, and retroviruses. B. Climate Change Equivalents Adaptations can sometimes "track" climate change, but often climate changes occur abruptly (droughts that last centuries). Fluctuating environments (seasons, climate changes, diseases) change the name of the game, shaping up more complex patterns capable of doing well in several environments. For such jack-of-all-trades selection to occur, the climate must change much faster than efficiency adaptations can track it. C. Fragmentation of Populations Parcellation, as when rising sea level converts one large island into an archipelago, typically speeds evolution. In part, this is because individuals mostly live on the margins of the habitat where selection pressure is greater; in part, because there is no large continental population to buffer change. Archipelagos allow for many parallel experiments. Episodes that recombine the islands (as when sea level temporarily lowers) create winner-take-most tournaments. D. Extinctions and Boom Times Local extinctions (as when an island population becomes too small to sustain itself) speed evolution because they create empty niches. When subsequent pioneers rediscover the unused resources, they go through a series of generations where there is enough food even for the more extreme variations that arise. When the environment again changes, some of those more extreme variants may be able to cope better with the third environment than the narrower range of variants that would reach reproductive age under the regime of a long-occupied niche. E. Deep Ruts and Isolated Hilltops in the Multidimensional Adaptational Landscape Of course, progress isn't inevitable in a Darwinian process. A decelerating factor is a pocket of stability that requires considerable back-andforth rocking in order to escape from it (and most species are trapped in such stabilizing pockets until the climate changes). F. Gene Linkages and Offline Experiments Sometimes traits are linked (malarial resistance and sickle-cell anemia) so you can't have one without the other. And multiple alleles (we're heterozygous for about 20 percent of our genes) suggest inactive versions of genes, perhaps shaped by retroviruses. These too might have speeding and stabilizing equivalents in other Darwinian processes.

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Though involving randomness, Darwinian processes are cumulatively creative, leaving the nonsense behind and saving the slightly more successful. To be creative on the time scale of minutes, the brain is going to need: • neural circuitry to perform all of the copying competitions, • ways for our memories and models of our environments to affect the outcomes of the copying competitions, and • mechanisms for the blue-sky-to-premature-closure management spectrum. The time has corne to attempt to match up the Darwin Machine's six essentials (and hopefully some of the accelerating factors) with what we know of brain circuits and neurophysiology. 3.1. Are Representations the Pattern At Issue? Just as I always think of research as re-search (try again), so memories have long been thought to be re-presentations. What, then, is the pattern of the Darwinian process? The memory trace? We know that long-term memories cannot be spatiotemporal patterns. For one thing, they survive even massive shutdowns of the electrical activity in the brain, as in seizures or coma. But we now have lots of examples of how to convert a spatial pattern into a spatiotemporal one: musical notation, player pianos, phonograph records-even ruts in a washboarded road waiting for a car to corne along and recreate a bouncing spatiotemporal pattern. This is what the Canadian psychologist Donald O. Hebb called the duality of memory: a short-term active version (spatiotemporal) and a long-term spatial-only version similar to a sheet of music or the grooves on a phonograph record. Some of these "cerebral ruts" are as permanent as those in a phonograph groove. They are, essentially, the strengths of the various synapses that predispose the cerebral cortex to produce a repertoire of spatiotemporal patterns, much like the connection strengths in the spinal cord predispose it to produce the spatiotemporal patterns we know as walk, trot, gallop, run, etc. But short-term memories can be either active spatiotemporal patterns (probably what is called "working memory" in the psychology literature) or transient spatial-only patterns, temporary ruts that somewhat overwrite the permanent ruts but fade in a matter of minutes. They're simply the altered synaptic strengths (what is called "facilitation" and "longterm potentiation" in the neurophysiological literature ) left behind by a repetition or two of the characteristic spatiotemporal pattern.

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Washboarded Road Analogy for Hebb's Duality of Memory The memory engram is a long-term spatial pattern like the washboarded road.

PASSIVE MEMORY

The active s patiotem poral pattern is developed from the resonance of t.ires and springs with the interval between ruts in the road.

ACTIVE MEMORY

Indeed, it is the same vibration as earlier helped to create the washboard pattern and serves to deepen the ruts. Figure 1. Washboarded Road Analogy

The representation is unlikely to be a "grandmother's face cell" except in rare instances. Instead, Hebb proposed that the essential pattern for recalling a memory was the re-activation of a particular pattern of neural activity. This Hebbian cell assembly would then be the active spatiotemporal pattern of interest to us, for our Darwinian exercise. Think of those spatiotemporal patterns known as melodies. Grandmother's face cells are like middle C always meaning exactly one thing. 3.2. Copying (Cloning the Cerebral Codes)

But how big is the Hebbian cell assembly? Surely it isn't the activity pattern everywhere in the brain at the time of memorizing the item. It must be some subset. The smallest subset might be called the cerebral code. How do we determine it? Before DNA leapt to prominence, geneticists and molecular biologists were searching for a molecular structure that was capable of being reliably copied during cell division. One of the reasons that the double helix structure was so deeply satisfying when it was discovered in 1953 was

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A cell assembly of neurons can

simultaneous firings are chords

be ma pped onto a musical keyboard , allowing spatiotemporal patterns to be heard as melodies.

Figure 2. Mapping the Cell Assembly

that it provided a way of making a copy, via the complementary pairs of DNA bases. This copying principle paved the way for the understanding of the genetic code a few years later, how those DNA triplets "represented" the amino acids that were sequenced together into proteins. Might discovering what's semi-reliably copied lead us to the relevant Hebbian cell assembly, the cerebral code? Copying hasn't been observed in the brain yet (we don't currently have methods of sufficient spatial and temporal resolution, though we're close). but there are three reasons why I think it's a safe bet. • The strongest argument for the existence of copying is the Darwinian process itself, which is inherently a copying competition biased by a multifaceted environment. It's so elementary a method for shaping up randomness into something fancy that it would be surprising if the brain didn't use it. • Copying is also what's needed for precision ballistic movements such as throwing, those dozens-to-hundreds of clones of the movement-command patterns that are required to hit the launch window. You can cut timing jitter in half by using fourfold redundancy, provided the spatiotemporal noise sources are statistically independent. • Third is what I call the faux fax: intercommunication within the brain needs telecopying of patterns to get a message from left to right brain , from visual cortex to motor cortex, etc. Neocortex seems to have minicolumns spaced about 1/30 mm apart, thanks to a tendency of dendrites to bundles together. There are about 100 neurons in such a minicolumn, and they seem likely to all be interested in similar inputs (the orientation columns of visual cortex are the classic example).

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THE LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS (the Hallelujah Chorus Principle)

-=-='1 n1~~" (r1~( Lr T\ '£!j ~ ~ ~ r

I -

II

To reduce timing j itter by half requires four times as many clocks.

Figure 3. The Law of Large Numbers

0.250 mm

0.500 mm

II

III IV

2 mm

EXCITAT ION every 0 .5 mm

V

VI

WH ITE MATTER Figure 4. Modular Candidates in Neocortical Circuitry

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If layer 4 is the IN box and the deep layers are the OUT box, the superficiallayers are the INTEROFFICE box of the neocortex. The axons of the superficial pyramidal cells are prominent in the corpus callosum and other long corticocortical paths-but also in the intrinsic horizontal connections, those axon collaterals that never leave the superficial layers. They preferentially terminate on other superficial pyramidal neuronsand in a patterned manner, too. Superficial pyramidal cell axons tend to give off terminal clusters about every 0.5 mm. While recurrent inhibition is also seen, the recurrent excitation of the superficial layers of neocortex has this prominent regularity in its spacing (and these layers are full of NMDA receptors and LTP). Since all superficial pyramids in a given area have preferred axon spacings of the same distance, there could be a loop. At first glimpse, it looks like the reverberating circuit that Lorente de No postulated in 1938. Personally, I doubt that's what is going on, because most connection strengths are too weak to generate a nerve impulse. What's more likely is that such neuron pairs will often synchronize their firings. Even harmonic oscillators such as two pendulum clocks on the same shelf will eventually synchronize, but relaxation oscillators can get "in sync" in just a few cycles, even with very weak coupling strengths. If you sing in the chorus, you get in sync with the others by hearing them-usually hearing yourself coming in too late, or starting too early. You, of course, are also influencing them. Even if everyone is a little hard of hearing, everyone soon gets synchronized, thanks to all that feedback. Your position in that chorus is very much like that of a superficial pyramidal neuron in the neocortex, getting excitatory inputs from neighbors on all sides. But a duet turns out to be capable of recruiting a chorus. Suppose now that there is another superficial pyramidal neuron, 0.5 mm equidistant from both Neuron One and Neuron Two. Perhaps it only receives a weak yellow input, so that it isn't actively firing away, signaling yellow. Now, however, Neuron Three is getting inputs from both One and Two. Furthermore, since they are synchronized some of the time, and have the same 0.5 mm travel distance, their impulses always arrive at Three's input synapses at the same time. This is exactly what hi-fi buffs call "sitting in the hot spot," equidistant from both speakers at the apex of an equilateral triangle (move even slightly to either side and the stereo illusion collapses into the nearest speaker, leaving mono sound). At the cortical hot spot, the two synaptic inputs summate-and they've got NMDA channels across the synapse to let both sodium and calcium into the downstream neuron. Repeated synchrony of inputs augments the synaptic strength in such systems.

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GIVEN standard length excitatory axons,

An entrained pair tends to recruit additional cells that are equidistant ...

I I II III II 111 111 1 I entrained

... recurrent excitation between some cell pairs produces entrained firing patterns.

"hot spot" ... and so create a

TRIANGULAR ARRAY

Figure 5. An Offspring from two Synchronized "Parents"

There is a tendency to form a triangular mosaic of often-synchronized neurons that could extend for a few millimeters across the cortical surface. What does this tendency to synchronize have to do with copying spatiotemporal patterns? Happily, it's all a matter of simple geometry, the kind that the ancient Greeks discovered while staring at the tile mosaics of their bathhouse floors (and that many of us have rediscovered in wallpaper patterns). Suppose a Hebbian cell assembly has only four active neurons, firing 12-3-4 like a simple melody. Each of those neurons may have an associated triangular mosaic. Think of a string of Christmas tree lights that flash in unison; now imagine four such strings. That's what looking down on the cortex from above ought to look like, if we had the methods to see individual neurons flash when firing. What's the largest Hebbian cell assembly that wouldn't be redundant? It's a hexagon about 0.5 mm across and containing about 100300 minicolumns of 100 neurons each. Why? Try moving a cell on the outer boundary of such a hexagon and it will wrap, a duplicate appearing within the hexagon. In a manner of speaking, we can talk of the hexagon's spatiotemporal pattern being cloned (actually, it is the individual triangular mosaics that are recruiting followers in adjacent cortex, but this often results in a clone of the elementary no-largerthan-a-hexagon pattern). This hexagon is about the same size as the macrocolumns (the oc-

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TRIANGULAR MOSAIC OF HO~v10LOGC)US POINTS. lIt any in 5ta nt, entraine(;1 point5 will form a 0 .5rnm triangulat~ mos.aic. Sevet~al pamnt pOints. may alsJo be s.ynchn:mize(;1 for b'inding. o

o

o o

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o

Figure 6. Recruiting a Triangular Mosaic of Synchronized Neurons

ular dominance columns, in the case of visual cortex) but it is formed, not by the preferences of the thalamic inputs, but by the intrinsic horizontal connections of the superficial pyramidal neurons. Asking about "What's copied?" really has identified a candidate for a cerebral code.

3.3. Variations Arise (but there's also Error Correction) Because one neuron can become surrounded by six others at 0.5 mm distances, all telling it to fire at a certain time, we have error correction: even if a neuron tries to do something different, it is forced

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HEXAGONAL MOSAIC OF SPATIAL PATTERNS. When the dot matrix enlarges, it becomes apparent that the largest shape that can be IIcloned'1 is a 0.5 mm hexati0n.

Figure 7. Copying a Hebbian Cell Assembly

back to the choral pattern that has become established in its insistent neighbors. That is essentially an error-correction procedure, just what the faux fax needs. And the long-distance corticocortical axon terminals seem to do about what the local ones do: fan out into patches about 0.5 mm apart rather than ending in a point, in the right ballpark for imposing error-correction in a distant site in cortex. The easy way to escape error correction is at the edge of a mosaic, where a hexagon is only bordered by 2-3 neighbors. An even better way is the bottleneck: a "gateway arch" only 1 mm wide, preventing most error correction and spawning variants. Flanking inhibition would be sufficient to create such a gateway; it need not be an anatomical arrangement.

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Point

to

213

ERROR CORRECTION Six homologous points exact conformity when

Figure 8. Error-Correction Procedure

3.4. Competitions Occur in a Limited Workspace Though cortical areas without established hexagonal mosaics may provide empty niches and boomtimes, cortical areas are essentially limited workspaces. In premotor cortex, for example, one can think of three hand movement mosaics competing to decide (via which first reaches a critical number of clones) between making an open hand, a precision grip, or a V-sign. Similar cloning competitions can aid object recognition. 3.5. Current and Memorized Environments Can Bias Competitions To understand why one pattern might make additional copies, extending its mosaic territory, better than another, recall that a given set of passive connectivities must surely support a number of different active spatiotemporal patterns. In the spinal cord, for example, one set of long-term synaptic strengths supports many different gaits of locomotion. Whether you get the spatiotemporal pattern for walking or running is surely a matter of the initial conditions, not the connectivities. The same thing presumably happens in neocortex. A given region might have an underlying connectivity (a resonance or strange attractor) that could support the spatioterriporal patterns (the cerebral

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Deciding to act might be a matter of cloning movement commands (schemas). Movement might not be initiated

'0 .\\l·'JI

V .;"

until one dominates. A competition for cortical territory might occur as overlapping schemas are converted into one or the other, depending in part on fading resonances from earlier occupations. Figure 9. Hand Movement Mosaics

codes) for Apple, Cherry, and Banana. Active inputs can bias these resonances, allowing both the present and remembered environments to infuence the outcome of the cloning competition. 3.6. The Largest Mosaics Produce Most of the Variants

Does the spatiotemporal pattern with the most clones (the largest mosaic) also tend to produce more variants? Yes, in this case, because it will have the largest perimeter, and the perimeter is where error correction can be escaped. 4. SAM P LEA P P L I CAT ION: M A KIN GAD E CIS ION ABOUT AN AMBIGUOUS OBJECT

While I think that divergent thinking is its most important application, let me first illustrate how the neocortical Darwin Machine might work with a convergent thinking problem. Suppose that something whizzes past you and disappears under a chair. You thought that it was round and maybe orange or yellow, but

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Active Pattern

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Passive Con nectivity

The connectivity that generates the spatiotemporal patterns must be able to produce, for different initial conditions dozens of active "melodies," just as the spina l cord generates the

spatiotempora l patterns for the gaits of locomotion . Even when the resonances for Apple, Banana,

and Cherry are all omnipresent, one pattern may

be able to clone more successfu lly

(here Apple is seen encroaching

on both Banana and Cherry) because of extrinsic biases

a rriving fro m other

EMOTIONS DRIVES SENSES Figure 10. Active and Passive Connectivity

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it was moving very quickly and now it's out of sight so you can't get a second look. What was it? How do you guess, when the answer isn't obvious? Your process first needs to find some candidates, then it needs to compare them for reasonableness. Happily, cloning competitions can do that. There's a tentative cerebral code for the object, formed by all the feature detectors that it activated: color, shape, motion, and maybe the sound of it bouncing on the floor. This spatiotemporal pattern starts making clones of itself. Whether it can set up a clone next door depends on the resonances next door, those ruts in the road provided by the pattern of synaptic strengths (the connectivity, as it is called) and by whatever else is going on in the adjacent cortex. If you'd seen such an object many times before, there might be a perfect resonance-but you haven't. Still, the tentative cerebral code has components of Round, Yellow, Fast. Tennis balls have such attributes, and you have a good tennis ball resonance, so the adjacent area pops into the melody for Tennis Ball (a nice feature of chaotic at tractors is that a near fit can be captured, transformed to the characteristic pattern). Cloning with poor resonances leads to dropouts of some components, so perhaps your Tangerine resonance captures a variant in another patch of cortex despite the color not being quite right. 4.1. Mechanisms for the Blue-Sky-to-Premature-Closure Management Spectrum I suspect that the process of managing the cloning competitions, to avoid psychosis or stagnation, is going to require its own meta-level of description (I'm not thinking of a manager in the usual sense of the term but something more like how global weather patterns are strongly influenced by jet streams and El Nino). In psychological terminology, this would be something like personal styles, even personality. Indeed, perhaps management style is a lot of what constitutes superior intelligence. 4.2. Cerebral Codes for Recall vs Recognition Because recall is so much more difficult than mere recognition, we may need to distinguish between different representations for the same thing: a simple representation for recognition, and a fancy one for recall. The cryptographers make a distinction between a document and a hashed summary of that document (something like a checksum but capable of detecting even transposed letters). Such a lOO-byte "message summary" is capable of recognizing a unique document but doesn't contain enough information to reconstruct it; so too, we may have to distin-

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Darwin Machine handles ambiguity, finding candidates and making decision

Felice of inhibition prevente error correction, allowe. variant€> at "gate."

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Figure 1l. Round, Yellow and Fast

guish between simple Hebbian cell assemblies for recognition and more detailed ones for recall. 5. SOME CLOSING REMARKS

Here in the cortical cloning competitions, we see all the essential elements for a proper Darwin Machine. We have: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

a pattern it copies it varies competitions for a workspace are possible multifaceted environments (both current and memorized) can bias the competition, and 6. the next generation is more likely to have variants established from the clones with the biggest territories.

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How big might a local mosaic become? My friend Don Michael suggests that meditation might correspond to creating, via a mantra, a large mosaic. If you maintained it long enough to wipe the slate clean of cares and preoccupations, it might give you a fresh start that can access longterm memory ruts without the interfering overlay of short-term LTP. [Meditation's] exquisite state of unconcerned immersion in oneself is not, unfortunately, of long duration. It is liable to be disturbed from inside. As though sprung from nowhere, moods, feelings, desires, worries and even thoughts incontinently rise up, in a meaningless jumble, and the more far-fetched and preposterous they are, and the less they have to do with that on which one has fixed one's consciousness, the more tenaciously they hang on ... The only successful way of rendering this disturbance inoperative is to keep on breathing, quietly and unconcernedly, to enter into friendly relations with whatever appears on the scene, to accustom oneself to it, to look at it equably and at last grow weary of looking. Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery (1953)

Adapted in part from chapter 5 of Searching For Intelligence in the Science Masters series out in 1996 from Basic Books (Harper Collins) in the USA, various translation editions elsewhere (including China). It expands on my October 1994 Scientific American article. William Calvin University of Washington Medical School, Seattle WA 98195-0001 USA

ADOLF GRUNBAUM

THE HERMENEUTIC VERSUS THE SCIENTIFIC CONCEPTION OF PSYCHOANALYSIS: AN UNSUCCESSFUL EFFORT TO CHART A VIA MEDIA FOR THE HUMAN SCIENCES

1. INTRODUCTION

According to the so-called "hermeneutic" reconstruction of classical psychoanalytic theory, the received scientific conception of the Freudian enterprise gave much too little explanatory weight to so-called "meaning" connections between unconscious motives, on the one hand, and overt symptoms on the other. Thus in a paper on schizophrenia, the German philosopher and professional psychiatrist Karl Jaspers [8, p. 91] wrote: "In Freud's work we are dealing in fact with [a] psychology of meaning, not causal explanation as Freud himself thinks." The father of psychoanalysis, we are told, fell into a "confusion of meaning connections with causal connections." After Jaspers, Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas have elaborated the patronizing claim that Freud basically misunderstood his own theory and therapy. As they put it derogatorily: Freud fell victim to a farreaching "scientistic self-misunderstanding." But it will be a corollary of my paper that it is they, not Freud, who misconstrued the nature of the psychoanalytic enterprise, although the main point of my paper is not exegetical. I can give immediately just one of the reasons for rejecting the use of the multiply ambiguous term "meaning" to characterize the psychoanalytic enterprise. In a 1991 article entitled "Hermeneutics in Psychoanalysis," James Phillips (1991) told us a la Jaspers that Freud made a great "hermeneutic" discovery, which was to uncover hidden "meaning" where no "meaning" was thought to exist before. But clearly, what Freud claimed to have discovered is that behavior, such as slips (or "Fehlleistungen"), which were previously not thought to be psychologically motivated, were caused by specific sorts of unconscious motives after all. In Freud's view, motives were clearly a species of causes. Yet, as the "hermeneutic" European philosophers Karl Jaspers, Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas would have it, victory can be snatched from the jaws of the scientific failings of Freud's theory by abjuring 219

©

1999 Adolf Grunbaum.

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his scientific aspirations as basically misguided. Claiming that Freud himself had "scientistically" misunderstood his own theoretical achievement, they misconstrue it as a semantic accomplishment by trading on the weasel word "meaning." In Freud's account, an overt symptom manifests one or more underlying unconscious causes and gives evidence for its cause(s), so that the "sense" or "meaning" of the symptom is constituted by its latent motivational cause(s). But this notion of "meaning" is different from the one appropriate to the context of communication, in which linguistic symbols acquire semantic meaning by being used intentionally to designate their referents. Clearly, the relation of being a manifestation, which the symptom bears to its hypothesized cause, differs from the semantic relation of designation, which a linguistic symbol bears to its object. This fact is blatantly overlooked in much recent psychoanalytic literature. Thus, in a 1994 Letter-to-the-Editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association [14, p. 1311] Philip Rubovitz-Seitz complained that "Freud portrayed his interpretations as the necessary causal inferences of a natural science, rather than as the construal of meanings employed in the human sciences." The "hermeneutic" reconstruction of psychoanalysis slides illicitly from one of two familiar senses of "meaning" encountered in ordinary discourse to another. When a parent is told by a pediatrician that a child's spots on the skin "mean measles," the "meaning" of the symptom is constituted by one of its causes, much as in the Freudian case. But when a bus driver tells us that three rings of his bell "mean" that the bus is full, these rings-unlike the symptoms of measles or neurotic symptoms-are intended to communicate a certain state of affairs. Thus, the British psychoanalyst Anthony Storr conflates the fathoming of the etiologic "sense" or "meaning" of a symptom with the activity of making semantic sense of a text, declaring absurdly: "Freud was a man of genius whose expertise lay in semantics." And Ricoeur erroneously credits Freud's theory of repression with having provided, malgni lui, a veritable "semantics of desire." Yet the proposed hermeneutic reconstruction of the psychoanalytic enterprise has been embraced with alacrity by a considerable number of psychoanalysts no less than by a fair number of professors in humanities departments at universities. Its psychoanalytic adherents see it as buying absolution for their theory and therapy from the criteria of validation mandatory for causal hypotheses in the empirical sciences, although psychoanalysis is replete with just such hypotheses. This form of escape from accountability also augurs ill for the future of psychoanalysis, because the methods of the hermeneuts have not spawned a single

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new important hypothesis! Instead, their reconstruction is a negativistic ideological battle cry whose disavowal of Freud's scientific aspirations presages the death of his legacy from sheer sterility, at least among those who demand the validation of theories by cogent evidence. Let me mention as a mere aside to the ambiguity of the term "meaning" that the affirmation of the distinction between "meaning" qua motivational cause and semantic meaning is entirely compatible with the sort of causal theory of reference that was developed by Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke, although I hold no brief for that theory. Ricoeur relies on the double-talk as to "meaning" to misdepict Freud's theory of repression as furnishing a so-called "semantics of desire." Then he compounded that misrepresentation by introducing a pseudo-contrast when claiming that the natural scientist and the academic psychologist observes phenomena, whereas the psychoanalyst interprets the productions of patients. Thus, in his book Freud and Philosophy [10, p. 359]' Ricoeur tells us that, contrary to Freud, psychoanalytic theory-which he reduces wantonly to the interpretations given to patients undergoing analysis-is a so-called hermeneutic endeavor as opposed to a natural science. By reducing psychoanalytic theory, which is far-flung and composite, to Freudian therapy, Ricoeur puts aside most of what Freud himself deemed to be his major and lasting contributions. As Freud [4, p. 673] put it: "The future will probably attribute far greater importance to psychoanalysis as the science of the unconscious than as a therapeutic procedure." The noun "hermeneutics", which derives etymologically from Hermes the messenger, was usefully introduced in the 17th century as a name for Biblical exegesis, and was then broadened to refer to textual interpretation generally. Alas, then, at the hands of those continental European philosophers who wanted to rehabilitate the 19th century dichotomy between the natural and the human sciences, the term was extended to label the interpretation of psychological phenomena or mentation as such. Yet obviously, we interpret not only human behavior, thoughts and feelings, but also such physical phenomena as x-ray films, clicks on Geiger counters, tracks in Wilson cloud chambers and geological strata. In daily life, it is an interpretation or hypothesis to say that the table salt I taste at lunch is sodium chloride, just as it is an interpretive hypothesis to infer that a certain eye movement is a flirtatious, sexual gesture. Insofar as merely some kind or other of interpretation is involved, it is trivial and unenlightening to note that there is that kind of similarity between the semantic interpretation of a written text, on the one hand, and the psychoanalyst's motivational interpretation of the patient's speech and

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gestures in the doctor's office as having so-called unconscious "meaning", on the other. Further serious confusion is introduced by the philosophical use of the term "hermeneutics" as follows: Whereas some philosophers apply it, as we have seen, to render opposition to the unity of the natural and human sciences, others use it to endorse such unity as follows [2]: All these sciences are alike hermeneutic, we learn, in the sense of employing Kuhnian paradigms of understanding across-the-board to provide explanations. Thus, Paul Feyerabend, Mary Hesse and Richard Rorty, for instance, welcomed Kuhn's delivery of a hermeneutic unity of science. Yet others, like Karl Popper, saw this hermeneutic sort of unity of science as a descent into irrationalism and intellectual barbarism [18]. The deplorable use of the term "hermeneutics" to render incompatible philosophical positions just compounds the liabilities of the ambiguous and obfuscatory employment of the term "meaning." It is true, but philosophically unavailing to the hermeneutic reconstruction of psychoanalysis, that the challenge of puzzle-solving is presented by each of the following three different kinds of interpretive activities:

(i) Fathoming the psychoanalytically hypothesized unconscious causal factors behind a symptom, dream or slip by means of psychoanalytic interpretation, (ii) elucidating the semantic meaning of a text, (iii) doing detective work to solve a murder. After all, the common challenge of problem-solving in each of these cognitive activities hardly licenses the assimilation of the quest for socalled psychoanalytic meaning to the search for the semantic meaning of a text. Hermeneuts (or hermeneuticians) have tried to invoke the fact that the title of Freud's magnum opus is "The Interpretation of Dreams," or-in German-"Die Traumdeutung." The German word for "meaning" is "Bedeutung." But even in German common sense discourse, that term, as well as its verb "bedeuten," are each used in both the Freudian motivational sense and in the semantic sense, as shown by the following illustrations: (i) There is a German song whose opening words are: "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin" -translated: "I don't know what it means that I am so sad." (And it continues: "Ein Marchen aus alten Zeiten, das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn"translated: "I am obsessed by an ancient fairy tale.") Clearly, the song does not express puzzlement as to the semantic meaning of the term "so sad," which is known all too well. Instead, the song expresses cu-

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riosity as to the motivating psychological cause of the sadness. (ii) The semantic sense occurs when someone asks: "What does the word 'automobile' mean?". An etymological answer might be: "It actually means 'self-mover'." No wonder that C.K. Ogden and LA. Richards wrote a whole book entitled "The Meaning of 'Meaning'." But unfortunately, "hermeneutic" philosophers such as Ricoeur and Habermas have fallaciously misused the following two sets of facts: (i) The interpretation of a text is, at least in the first instance, the construction of a semantic hypothesis as to what it asserts. (ii) By contrast, a very different sort of "interpretation" occurs when the psychoanalyst bases imputations of unconscious motives on the patient's conscious speech, rather than, say, on behavioral indicators like weeping or gestures. In that psychoanalytically interpretive situation, the semantic content of that speech is only an avenue to the analyst's etiologic inferences of causally explanatory motives; for example, the patient's speech may be a deceptive cover for resistance to the disclosure of hidden motives. Thus, Ricoeur misleadingly and fallaciously misdepicted Freud's theory of repression as providing a so-called "semantics of desire" by misassimulating the following two sets of different relations to one another: (i) the way in which the effect of an unconscious cause can manifest it and provide evidence for it, and (ii) the way in which a linguistic symbol represents its referent semantically or designates the attributes of the referent. It is precisely this misassimulation, together with abundant misunderstandings of the natural sciences, that have served Ricoeur and Habermas to manufacture a methodological pseudo-contrast. That pseudo-contrast is between the epistemology of causal hypotheses in the natural sciences, on the one hand, and the psychoanalyst's search for the so-called unconscious meaning of the patient's symptoms and conduct, on the other. In this way, they gave psychoanalytic trappings to the old 19th century false dichotomy between the natural and human sciences. Similarly, in a criticism of my views, the American psychologist and hermeneutic Freudian Matthew Erdelyi offered the following platitudinous irrelevancy to discredit the causal content of psychoanalytic interpretations: "When one establishes the meaning of an unknown word from its context, one does not establish that the context has caused the unknown word." However, this puerile truism enables Erdelyi to overlook that the psychoanalyst generally knows the contextual dictionary meanings of the patient's words very well; instead, the analyst has the difficult task of using the patient's words as merely one avenue to hypothesizing the unconscious causes of the patient's personality dispositions and life history! And it is bathetic to use the term "meaning" to convey the banality that psychoanalysis is concerned with mentation

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and its behavioral manifestations. Similar mischief is wrought by trading on the ambiguity of the term "to signify," as in the following example: Suppose that the sight of a small cat evokes associatively an unconscious thought of a huge menacing tiger. Clearly, in Freud's account, this evocation is a causal process whose relata are mental, whatever the underlying brain process. This process of causal evocation has been misassimulated to linguistic reference by using the semantic term "signification" as follows: It is said that the sight of the little cat unconsciously signifies the tiger, as if that sight functions like a word or English noise, which refers semantically to the tiger. But clearly, even if the person who sees the cat links that sight to the word "cat," such a linkage is hardly tantamount to the unconscious semantic reference of the sight to the ominous tiger. Yet Lacanians tell us that the unconscious is structured like a language. In this way, they may well facilitate a misleading semantic account of an infelicitous statement such as: "To the person who saw the small cat, it unconsciously meant a menacing big tiger." For Freud, the sight of the cat actuated a causal process of evoking the unconscious thought of a huge tiger. As I have indicated above, the common aim of the hermeneuts is to make philosophic capital out of their semantic misemphasis by buying absolution for psychoanalytic motivational hypotheses from the criteria of validation that are applied to causal hypotheses in the empirical sciences. In short, they want to escape critical accountability. Ironically, they cheerfully describe their philosophy as "critical theory" in selfcongratulatory fashion. Yet since Freud's interpretations of the so-called unconscious meanings of symptoms, dreams and slips are obviously offered as explanatory causal hypotheses, they call for scrutiny as such. Hence we must address the following pivotal issue: Just what kind of validation do causal hypotheses require? And what sorts of causal hypotheses are at issue? It is of major importance to realize that the very content of causal hypotheses prescribes what kind of evidence is required to validate them as such. And it is easy to show that the required mode of validation must be the same in the human sciences as in the physical sciences, despite the clear difference in their subject matter. A causal hypothesis of the sort encountered in psychoanalysis asserts that some factor of type X is causally relevant to some sort of occurrence Y. This means that X makes a certain kind of difference to the occurrence of Y in some reference class C. But let me emphasize that claims of mere causal relevance do not necessarily presuppose causal laws. To validate a claim of causal relevance, we must first divide the refer-

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ence class C into two subclasses, the X's and the non-X's. Then we must show that the incidence of Y's among the X's is different from what it is among the non-X's. But it is of cardinal importance to appreciate that this requirement is entirely neutral as to the field of knowledge or subject matter. It applies alike in medicine, psychology, physics, sociology and elsewhere. The belief of the hermeneuts that causality as such is "owned" by the physicists, as it were, is born of ideological special pleading. Alas, just that error was abetted by the pernicious ordinary language philosophy that faded away in the 1960's. It is illustrated, alas, by Stephen Toulmin's writings on psychoanalysis in the 1950's. Once we appreciate, as Freud did (S.E. 1895, 3:135-139),1 the stated ontological neutrality of the relation of causal relevance as between the mental and the physical, it is plain that a person's conscious or unconscious motives are no less causally relevant to her or his action or behavior than a drug overdose is to a person's death or than the blow of a hammer is to the shattering of a window pane. As I have already noted, in Freud's view, motives are clearly a species of theenus cause (S.E. 1909, 10:199 ; 1900, 5: 541-542, 560-561, and 4: 81-82). Stephen Toulmin [19, pp. 138-139] told us, contra Freud, that motivational explanations in psychoanalysis do not qualify as a species of causal explanations. He did so by miscontrasting motives ("reasons") for action and causes for action by relying on ordinary language usage [19, p. 134], which is scientifically inadequate. By means of such question-begging reliance on the parlance of daily life, he believes to have established that "The [purported] success of psychoanalysis ... should re-emphasize the importance of 'reasons for action' as opposed to causes of action" [19, p. 139]. In this way, he believes to have vindicated his initial contention that "troubles arise from thinking of psycho-analysis too much on the analogy of the natural sciences" [19, p. 134]. As I have just shown, all of this is wrong-headed qua purported account of Freud's conceptualizations. In his full-length book on Freud, Ricoeur [10, pp. 359-360] endorses Toulmin's claim that psychoanalytic explanations are not causal, just in virtue of being motivational. As Ricoeur saw it then, in psychoanalysis " ... a motive and a cause are completely different," instead of the former being just a species of the latter. Hence, one must welcome that, under the influence of the late Boston psychoanalyst Michael Sherwood [15], 1

All citations of Freud's writings in English will be from the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. by J. Strachey et al. London: Hogarth Press, 1953-1974,24 volumes. Each reference will use the abbreviation "S.E.," followed by the year of first appearance, volume number, and page(s).

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Ricoeur did have second thoughts in his later work [11, pp. 262-263] and, commendably enough, repudiated the ordinary language approach to Freudian explanations along with the "dichotomy between motive and cause." As I have noted above, the absolution of psychoanalysis from the validational rigors appropriate to its causal hypotheses can also serve to license or abet epistemological non-accountability and escapism. It is therefore not surprising that, at a Pittsburgh meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Toulmin patronizingly told the eminent American psychoanalyst Benjamin B. Rubinstein not to worry, when Rubinstein publicly expressed his epistemological misgivings about psychoanalysis. The ordinary language construal of psychoanalysis was anathema to Rubinstein. It was salutary that he emphatically reiterated his evidential qualms in his contribution to a 1983 Festschrift for me. There Rubinstein [13, p. 187] wrote:

It is the clinical part of psychoanalysis that is really disturbing. It is top-heavy with theory but has only a slim evidential base. I have used the theory of hysteria to illustrate the arbitrariness, because of lack of adequate confirmation, of a great many clinical interpretations. This statement holds also beyond hysteria. Ricoeur [10, p. 358] celebrated the failure of Freud's theory to pass muster qua natural science as a virtue, and even called for a "counterattack" against philosophers like Ernest Nagel who deplore this failure. Thus, there is a basic divergence between the hermeneuts and myself as to both the source and the import of Freud's theoretical shortcomings. As Jaspers, Ricoeur and Habermas would have it, hermeneutic victory can be snatched from the jaws of scientific defeat, once we appreciate that the discovery of so-called meaning or thematic connections between mental states is at the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise. But I aim to show that any such hermeneutic triumph is a Pyrrhic victory by being the kiss of death for psychoanalysis. Fortunately, such well-known psychoanalysts as Charles Brenner [1, p. 4], Marshall Edelson [3, pp. 246251] and Benjamin Rubinstein [12, pp. 104-105] have thoroughly rejected the sterile hermeneutic construal of the psychoanalytic enterprise. The issues raised in this debate go far beyond psychoanalysis. In my view, the proper resolution of the relation between thematic connections that relate mental states, on the one hand, and causal connections between these states, on the other, not only spells a major general moral for the human sciences, including history, but also has instructive counterparts in biology and even in physics. After I elucidate the concept of "meaning connection," one of the key

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lessons for which I shall argue will be essentially the following: Meaning connections between the mental states of a given person by themselves never attest their causal linkage, even if these thematic connections are very strong. Typically, I shall argue, a good deal else is needed to vouch for a causal connection. This precept will emerge, I trust, from my analysis of just how Freud failed in his account of the relations between meaning kinships, on the one hand, and causal linkages, on the other. One important corollary of his miscarriage will be my claim that Freud gave much too much explanatory weight to meaning affinities, rather than much too little weight, as charged by Jaspers and the other hermeneutic critics. But what are the so-called "meaning connections" in this context? And just what are their relations to causal connections? First, I shall consider some paradigmatic illustrations of these connections from psychoanalysis. Yet, as I have already explained, I deplore and regret the use of the term "meaning" as a characterization of these connections, because it is ambiguous and lends itself to misleading use. I myself use it here only because the philosophers I cite have employed it. II. PARADIGMATIC CASES OF "M E A N I N G " - CON N E C T ION S FRO M P S Y C H 0 A N A L Y SIS

Let me now mention some paradigmatic cases of "meaning" -connections from psychoanalysis, which Freud himself linked to causal connections. Case 1. In 1893, he wrote: Breuer's patient [Anna 0.]' to whom I have so often referred, offered an example of a disturbance of speech. For a long period of her illness she spoke only English and could neither speak nor understand German. This symptom was traced back [etiologically] to an event which had happened before the outbreak of her illness. While she was in a state of great anxiety, she had attempted to pray but could find no words. At last a few words of a child's prayer in English occurred to her. When she fell ill later on, only the English language was at her command [footnote omitted]. The determination of the symptom by the psychical trauma is not so transparent in every instance. There is often only what may be described as a 'symbolic' relation between the determining cause and the hysterical symptom. This is especially true of pains. Thus one patient [footnote omitted] suffered from piercing pains between her eyebrows. The reason [cause] was that once when she was a child her grandmother had given her an enquiring, 'piercing' look. The same patient suffered for a time from violent pains in her right heel, for

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which there was no explanation. These pains, it turned out, were connected [etiologically] with an idea that occurred to the patient when she made her first appearance in society. She was overcome with fear that she might not 'find herself on a right footing'. Symbolizations of this kind were employed by many patients for a whole number of so-called neuralgias and pains. It is as though there were an intention to express the mental state by means of a physical one; and linguistic usage affords a bridge by which this can be effected. In this case, however, of what are after all the typical symptoms of hysteria-such as hemi-anaesthesia, restriction of the visual field, epileptiform convulsions, etc. -a psychical mechanism of this sort cannot be demonstrated. On the other hand this can often be done in respect to the hysterogenic zones (S.E. 1893, 3:33-34; emphasis added).

It will be a corollary of my critical scrutiny below that the thematic affinities adduced here by Freud do not warrant at all the etiologic inferences he drew from them. The less so, since the "symbolic" affinities he marshals as support are grossly far-fetched and very tenuous. Case 2. In 1896, Freud used the mere thematic kinship between a patient's experience of disgust and her symptoms of supposedly hysterical vomiting to claim the suitability of the given repressed experience as an explanatory causal determinant of the pertinent symptom [5, pp. 149150]. In particular, he gives the following example: Let us suppose that the symptom under consideration is hysterical vomiting; in that case we shall feel that we have been able to understand its causation (except for a certain [hereditary] residue) if the analysis traces the symptom back [etiologically] to an experience which justifiably produced a high amount of disgust-for instance, the sight of a decomposing dead body. [S.E. 1896, 3:193-194] Thus, on the strength of mere thematic kinship, Freud infers that the repressed disgust was an essential cause of the hysterical vomiting in a person made vulnerable by heredity. And, in due course, our problem will be whether such an etiologic inference from a thematic ("meaning") kinship is sound. The theme of aversion is likewise common to another traumatic experience and a subsequent hysterical symptom in the life of Josef Breuer's famous first patient Anna O. As reported in her case history, she had silently endured traumatic disgust on seeing a dog lapping water from a companion's glass (S.E. 1893,2:6-7; 1893,3:29-30). Later, she almost died of thirst, because of her phobic aversion for drinking water. In Jaspers's parlance, we can say that the shared theme of aversion makes for a "meaning connection" between the original trauma and her later

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symptom. But I myself speak of such episodes instead as exhibiting "thematic kinship or affinity." The main question will be what epistemological and ontological relevance, if any, these thematic kinships between mental events have to causal linkages between them. It will also be relevant that the thematic etiology on which Breuer based his hypnotic therapy of Anna O. was discredited by therapeutic failure. Case 3. Freud's famous 1909 case history of the Rat Man Ernst Lanzer provides a cardinal exemplar of his inferential reliance on a thematic connection. This reliance is not lessened, I emphasize, by the fact that Freud supplies other, temporally intermediate, events between the thematically cognate ones! During the Rat Man's army service, he had become aware of an oriental punishment in which rats are allowed to bore their way into the criminal's anus (S.E. 1909, 10:166). One of the dreadful thoughts with which he was obsessed was that just this rat punishment would victimize both the woman whom he eventually married, and his father, whom he loved and who had actually been dead for years by then. But how does Freud propose to explain those of the patient's obsessions that featured the awful rat theme? As we learn, at the age of three or four, the Rat Man had misbehaved like a rat by biting someone, presumably his nurse. Just as rats themselves are punished for such behavior, so also the naughtylittle boy Rat Man had thereupon been soundly beaten for it by his father, and had therefore borne him a permanent unconscious hatred ever since. Freud then explicitly infers the supposed cause of the rat obsession via the thematic kinship between the patient's own punishment for biting-like-a-rat, on the one hand, and the role of biting rats in the dreaded oriental anal punishment, which is supposedly going to afflict his father, on the other. As Freud reasoned, the patient's latent memory of the cruel paternal punishment for biting had produced repressed hostility toward his father. This antagonism, in turn, had allegedly generated the unconscious wish~and, by the defense mechanism of "reaction-formation," the conscious fear~that the father would undergo the particular monstrous punishment of anal penetration by biting rats. The hypothesized hostile wish that the father would suffer this punishment had been morally unacceptable to the patient's consciousness. Therefore, he had repressed it, and had then supposedly turned it into a conscious obsessive fear of the father's punitive victimization by rats via "reaction-formation." Clearly, without reliance on the thematic affinity between the patient's biting-like-a-rat and the rat-obsessions, the boy's unconscious hatred for the father could not give rise to Freud's etiologic scenario for the patient's obsessions. Thus, Freud interprets the rat-obsessions etiologically as the

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patient's neurotic defense against his own unacceptable wish that his father would suffer the particular punishment of rat penetration. Let us assume the actual occurrence of the punitive childhood scenario. Then the important issue of causation posed by Freud's etiologic inference is not whether the severe paternal punishment for biting produced hatred toward the father; instead, the etiologic issue is whether that particular presumed hatred then became the pathogen of the patient's obsessive fear of the father's victimization by the rat punishment. Therefore, when I address that issue in due course, I shall have to ask the following question: Granting the existence of a causal link between the punitive childhood experience and hatred toward the father, does it at all support the further major etiologic hypothesis that this hatred, in turn, was the intermediate pathogen of the rat obsessions? My answer will be a clear "No"! My last psychoanalytic example will now be drawn from etiologic inferences in the theory of transference. Case 4. Inferences from thematic affinity also playa central, though logically somewhat different role in Freud's theory of the so-called "transference neurosis," a theory that is fundamental to the hypothesized dynamics of psychoanalytic therapy and to Freud's entire theory of psychopathology. These inferences, I claim, will likewise turn out to be fallacious [7, pp. 152-158]. According to this part of psychoanalytic theory, the patient transfers onto his psychoanalyst feelings and thoughts that originally pertained to important figures in her or his earlier life. In this important sense, the phantasies woven around the psychoanalyst by the analysand, and quite generally the latter's conduct toward his doctor, are hypothesized to be thematically recapitulatory of childhood episodes. By thus being recapitulatory, the patient's behavior during treatment can be said to exhibit a thematic kinship to such very early episodes. Therefore, when the analyst interprets these supposed reenactments as recapitulatory, the ensuing interpretations are called "transference interpretations." This much involves a retrodictive inference of thematic affinity. But Freud and his followers have traditionally also drawn the following highly questionable causal inference: Precisely in virtue of being thematically recapitulated in the patient-doctor interaction, the hypothesized earlier scenario in the patient's life can cogently be held to have originally been a pathogenic factor in the patient's affliction. In short, in the case of transference interpretations, the causal inference from thematic affinity takes a somewhat different logical form from the one we encountered in our previous examples. In the earlier examples, such as Anna O.'s hydrophobia, Freud had inferred the existence

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of a direct causal nexus between thematically similar mental events by relying crucially on their thematic similarity. But in the context of his transference interpretations, the thematic reenactment is held to show that the early scenario had originally been pathogenic. Once this etiologic conclusion has been drawn, the patient's thematic reenactment in the treatment-setting is also asserted to be pathogenically recapitulatory, rather than only thematically recapitulatory! Freud extols this dubious reasoning in his 1914 "History of the Psychoanalytic Movement" (S.E. 1914,14:12), where he claims that it furnishes the most unshakable proof for his sexual etiology of the neuroses [den "unerschutterlichsten Beweis" in his German original]. So far, I have outlined representative illustrations of psychoanalytic causal inferences based on thematic or "meaning" kinships. III. THEMATIC KINSHIPS VIS-A-VIS CAUSAL CONNECTIONS

Now we can turn to the following pivotal question: To what extent, if any, do mere thematic kinships bespeak causal connections? As I shall illustrate presently, thematic kinships are not only of various sorts, but are also encountered in varying degrees, ranging from very high to very tenuous. Yet it will be crucial to appreciate the following impending moral: Even when the thematic kinship is indeed of very high degree, it does not itself license the inference of a causal linkage between such thematically kindred events. Thus, let us now consider just a few examples from some fields of inquiry outside psychoanalysis in their bearing on the inferability of causal relatedness among events or states that feature diverse sorts of thematic affinities or isomorphisms. These examples will serve as salutary preparation for appraising Freud's etiologic inferences from thematic affinity as well as of the objections of some of his hermeneutic critics. 1. A tourist looking at an otherwise desolate beach notes that the sand reveals a string of configurations exhibiting the same shapes as the left and right shoes worn by humans. In short, the tourist observes a geometric isomorphism--or "thematic affinity" of shape~between the sand configurations and the shoes. He will then draw the causal inference that a person wearing shoes had actually walked on the beach, and had thereby produced the sandy shapes that we call "footprints." But just what licenses this causal inference? The lesson of this example, I claim, is as follows: The striking geometric kinship between the two shapes does not itself suffice to license the tourist's inference that the foot-like configurations were, in fact, caused

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(or produced) by the impact of human feet on the beach. To draw the inference, the tourist avails himself of a crucial piece of additional information that cannot be known a priori from the mere geometrical kinship: Foot-like beach formations in the sand never or hardly ever result from the mere collocation of sand particles under the action of air, such as some gust of wind. Indeed, the additional evidence is that, with overwhelming probability, in the class of beaches, the incursion of a pedestrian into the beach makes the difference between the absence and presence of the foot-like beach formations. In short, going beyond the mere sameness of shape, the tourist relies on essential empirical evidence for the overwhelming probability that the sameness of shape was not a matter of mere chance, when he or she draws the causal inference that the sandy simulacrum of a human foot is, in fact, actually the trace or mark left by a human foot, and thus a bona fide footprint [5, p. 63]. Let me just remark that one reviewer of my 1984 book The Foundations of Psychoanalysis incomprehendingly ridiculed this telling epistemological point as pedantic talk about the word "footprint"! 2. Two significantly different dreams will now serve to show that reliance on mere thematic connections to draw causal inferences is a snare and a delusion. This moral will, of course, also apply to Freud's particular dream theory as a special case. But for simplicity, I shall deliberately not make any psychoanalytic assumptions in dealing with my two dream specimens. In the first, though not in the second, we shall indeed have license to draw the causal inference that the manifest dream content was shaped thematically by a salient component of the waking experience on the day before. But my point in giving this first dream example will be to contrast it with a second, which is of another kind: In the latter, it is demonstrably fallacious to invoke a thematic connection between the waking experience of the previous day and the manifest dream content as a basis for inferring a causal linkage between them. Let me now turn to the first of the two dream examples. Note that this specimen is hypothetical, since I don't know of anyone who actually had the putative dream. I devised this first example, because it features a bona fide case of both causal relevance and thematic affinity. The dreamer is a woman, whom I shall name Agnes. The night after her first visit to Frank Lloyd Wright's famous house "Falling Water" (in Ohiopyle, Pennsylvania), she dreamt about a house just like it, down to many of the fine details of its interior appointments. It is important that Agnes had never heard of Falling Water until the day of her visit, let alone seen a picture or description of it. It is also crucial that the very first time

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that Agnes's manifest dream content ever contained such a simulacrum was the night after her daytime visit to that Frank Lloyd Wright house. Without these additional facts, the strong thematic affinity between Falling Water and the dream content would not itself legitimate the inference that Agnes's visit to Falling Water was causally relevant to the presence of a simulacrum of that mansion in her dream during the night after the visit. In short, Agnes's visit made a difference to her having that dream. The relation of making a difference is a crucial ingredient of the relation of causal relevance. Thus, in this case of thematic affinity, there is warrant for the causal inference, because of the availability of appropriate additional facts. But now consider a related example of thematic affinity with the opposite inferential moral. 3. Assume that last night, my manifest dream content included the image of a house. In my urban life, I routinely see and inhabit houses daily. Thus, my impressions on the day before this dream featured visual and tactile impressions of at least one dwelling. Indeed, over the years, on the day before a dream, my waking experience always includes seeing some domicile or other, regardless of whether the ensuing manifest dream content then features the image of a house or not! In this case, I claim, seeing a house on the day before does not make any difference to dreaming about a house the night after, because I see houses during the day before whether I then dream about them or not. Evidently, in the latter dream example, when a house is an element of the manifest dream, the presence of a house theme in the prior day's waking experience does not meet the key requirement for being causally relevant to the presence of a house-image in the dream. To put it more precisely, my seeing a house on-the-day-before-a-dream does not divide the class of my-day's-waking-experiences-on-the-prior-days into two subclasses, such that the probabilities (or frequencies) of the appearance of a house in the next dream differ as between the two subclasses. On the other hand, in Agnes's life, just such a division into subclasses by the experience of seeing the Falling Water house does occur, with ensuing different probabilities of dreaming about that house. We see that there is a sharp contrast between my two dream examples: If a house-image occurred in my dream last night, it is a mistake to attribute that image causally to my having seen one or more houses yesterday, although there is undeniably thematic affinity between them. Thus, it is eminently reasonable to conclude that, despite their thematic affinity, the dual presence of the house theme both in yesterday's daytime experience and in last night's dream was a happenstance, rather than a case of causal linkage between them. The major significance of the second dream example for psychoanalytic

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causal inferences turns out to lie in the following fact: As illustrated by the rat theme in the case of Freud's Rat Man, in the typical psychoanalytic etiologic inferences, the thematic affinity is no greater, and often even weaker, than in the second house dream case. In fact, it is fairly easy to weave thematic affinities between almost any two experiences, and the vivid imaginations of psychoanalysts enable them to have a field-day with doing so. My account of the second dream example may be greeted by disbelief, because it might be thought that I have overlooked an important pertinent fact. We might never have dreamt about any house at all, unless we had seen one at some time or other in our lives. Far from having overlooked this necessary condition for house-dreams, I shall now explain why this mere necessary condition is demonstrably not tantamount to the causal relevance of my house-seeing-experience-on-the-day-before-adream to my dreaming-about-a-house-the-night-after. This lack of causal relevance of a mere necessary condition can be seen at once from the following example: Breathing is a necessary condition for being paranoid, but breathing is not causally relevant to being paranoid. If the wife of a paranoiac were to ask a psychiatrist why her husband is paranoid, the doctor would surely not answer, "Because he is a breather." Let us see why not. Breathing is a necessary condition for being paranoid, because a person has to breathe to be alive, and in turn has to be alive to be paranoid. A dead paranoiac is surely not paranoid. What matters is that all living non-paranoiacs breathe no less than all paranoiacs do! Thus, breathing does not affect the incidence of paranoia within the class of living humans, because it does not even divide this class into two subclasses. A fortiori, it does not divide it into two subclasses in which the incidence of paranoia is different. Though breathing is thus a necessary condition for paranoia, it is surely not causally relevant-within the class of living persons-to becoming paranoid. In other words, although breathing does make a difference to being alive or dead, it makes no difference to being paranoid rather than non-paranoid. Thus, in the context of dreams as well, a state of type X may be a necessary condition for the occurrence of some other sort of state Y in a given reference class, although X is not causally relevant to Y within that reference class. As I have illustrated, if X is to be causally relevant to Y in a reference class C, X must partition C into two subclasses in which the probabilities or incidences of Yare different from one another. But let me add parenthetically for the case of house-dreams: In the different reference class of all humans-which includes people who may never get to see a "house" -seeing-a-house may indeed be at least statistically re1-

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evant to dreaming about it. But even that would not necessarily bespeak causal relevance. It is true that, in the case of the second house dream now at issue, which was dreamt by me rather than Agnes, the thematic affinity between the-day's-waking-experience-of-some-house and the next dream about-a-house is clearly much weaker than in the Agnes and Falling Water example. But there is a telling counterexample to the supposition that every case of high thematic affinity also turns out to qualify as an instance of causal relevance: Consider a woman who sees her husband every day of their married life, and whose dreams over the years occasionally feature him undistortedly. Then precisely her inseparability from her husband in waking life shows that her having-been-with-him-as-wellon-the-very-days-before-dreaming-about-him is not causally relevant to the production of that thematic dream-content the night after! Besides, recall my earlier caveat that even in the example of the footprint, which features very strong thematic affinity, the mere presence of a very high degree of such kinship was quite insufficient to validate the causal linkage. Hence it would be a momentous error to believe that causal inferability goes hand-in-hand with a very high degree of thematic kinship. For brevity, I add an instance from evolutionary biology that tells against drawing causal inferences from thematic kinships. As Elliott Sober [16] [17] has pointed out: When species match with respect to what are called ancestral characteristics-which is a certain kind of thematic affinity-this similarity is not cogent evidence for the causal inference that they share a common descent. Yet, in the context of other information, a match in regard to "derived" characteristics-which is another sort of thematic affinity-does qualify as evidence of a shared genealogy. We are now ready to appraise Freud's own causal inferences from thematic connections. As a corollary, we can reach an important verdict on the objections that Freud's hermeneutic critics leveled against him.

IV. A. Fallacious Etiologic Inferences in the Case Histories of the Rat Man and the Wolf Man

As we saw in the case of the Rat Man, Freud appealed to the thematic kinship between the punitive biting episode and the adult rat-obsessions as his basis for inferring an etiologic linkage between them. But, as is now clear, the thematic connection adduced by Freud does not vouch for the etiologic role of the paternal punishment in the pathogenesis of the rat-

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obsessions. Freud simply begs the etiologic question here by trading on thematic affinity. Furthermore, as I have noted elsewhere [6, Section III, pp. 654-657], in the case of his Wolf Man, Freud appealed to a thematic affinity of upright physical posture as a basis for fallaciously inferring an etiologic connection between an 18-month-old child's presumably witnessing a tergo intercourse between his parents and his wolf obsessions in adult life. B. Fallacious Etiologic Inferences in the Theory of Transference

An equally unfavorable epistemic judgment applies to the web of causal inferences that were drawn in Freud's theory of transference, which I have articulated. For argument's sake, let us grant the retrodictive inference that the patient's behavior toward the doctor does actually recapitulate thematically scenarios from the patient's childhood. Then this thematically recapitulatory behavior toward the psychoanalyst does not itself show that the behavior is also pathogenically recapitulatory, because it does not show that the original childhood scenario had been pathogenic at all in the first place. Yet that is precisely what the psychoanalyst infers. How, for example, does the reenactment, during treatment, of a patient's early conflict show that the original conflict had been at all pathogenic in the first place? So much for my appraisal of Freud's own handling of so-called "meaning connections." But what of the hermeneutist objection that Freud gave a "scientistic" twist to these connections? Let me use my answer to this question to draw a general two-fold moral for the human sciences. I have argued that it is always fallacious to infer a causal linkage between thematically kindred events from their mere thematic kinship. Yet it may happen that additional information will sustain such a causal inference in certain cases. Thus, as illustrated by my example of Agnes's dream about the Falling Water mansion, the existence of a strong thematic connection between two mental events, or two series of such events, does not militate against there also being a causal linkage between them. Thus, Freud should surely not be faulted for asserting, in principle, that some mental events can be linked both thematically and causally, though he mistakenly claimed entitlement to infer the causal linkage from the thematic one alone. Yet as I remarked at the outset, the German philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers [8, p. 91] chided Freud: "In Freud's work we are dealing in fact with a psychology of meaning, not causal explanation as Freud himself thinks." But since causal relevance is entirely compatible with

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thematic or so-called "meaning" kinship, Jaspers's objection to Freud here rests on a pseudo-antithesis of "either...or" [5, pp. 69-83]. Thus, there is no merit in Jaspers's indictment of Freud as having incurred a "confusion of meaningful connexions with causal connexions" [8, p. 91]. Nor is there warrant for his claim that Freud's psychoanalysis is being vitiated by "a misunderstanding of itself' [8, p. 80], a patronizing charge echoed later on by Ricoeur and Habermas, as we recall. As against these philosophers, it emerges precisely from my demonstration of Freud's inferential failings that he gave much too much explanatory weight to thematic affinities, rather than too little, as they have charged. Indeed, such mere "meaning connections" tell us nothing about the supposed unconscious motives or causes for symptomformation, dream-genesis and the provenance of Freudian slips. Yet such a motivational account is precisely what psychoanalytic theory claims to offer. V. CONCLUSIONS

I draw a two-fold moral for the human sciences from my stated criticisms of Freud and of his hermeneutic critics: (1) Let us indeed be alert to thematic connections, but do beware of their beguiling causal pitfalls; a fortiori, (2) Narratives replete with mere hermeneutic elucidations of thematic affinities are explanatorily sterile or bankrupt; at best, they have literary and reportorial value, which may be useful as such; at worst, they are mere cock-and-bull-stories lacking both etiologic and therapeutic significance. Patronizing hermeneutic sermons by Jaspers, Habermas and Ricoeur against alleged "scient is tic" misunderstandings of the role of meanings do nothing, in my view, for the fruition of the psychoanalytic enterprise, or for any other explanatory theories of human psychology or of history. What they tend to do, however, is foster ideological hostility to scientific thought in the social sciences and in psychology. As I have argued elsewhere at length [7 ch. 4], after a veritable cornucopia of brilliantly articulated thematic connections in Freud's case history of the Rat Man, a validated etiology of the patient's obsessions remains deeply obscure to this very day, over 80 years later. Similarly for the Wolf Man. But that is not all. To my mind, it speaks volumes that those who espouse the hermeneutic reconstruction of psychoanalysis have not come up with a single new psychoanalytic hypothesis that would demonstrate the fruitfulness of their approach. Theirs is a negativistic ideological battle cry and a blind alley. After a while, it ought to die a well-deserved death from its sheer sterility.

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Often, a new interpretation or reconstruction of a theory, or a new style in philosophy-even when flawed by major errors-nonetheless can be illuminating in some respects. Hence I regret to say that, as I see it, the dichotomous hermeneutic reconstruction of psychoanalysis and of the human or social sciences generally has no redeeming features. The hermeneutic philosophers have tried to force psychoanalysis onto the Procrustean bed of their preconceived philosophic notions about the human sciences. To implement this program, they begged the epistemological questions by simply downgrading those features of the Freudian corpus that did not fit their prior philosophic doctrines. As a normative recipe for the human sciences generally, their program seems to me to darken counsel. Adolf Griinbaum 2510 Cathedral of Learning University of Pittsburgh Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA REFERENCES

[1] Brenner, C., The Mind in Conflict, International Universities Press, New York, 1982. [2] Connolly, J. and Keutner, T. (eds.), Hermeneutics Versus Science?, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1988. [3] Edelson, M., Psychoanalysis: A Theory in Crisis, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988. [4] Freud, S., "Psychoanalysis: Freudian School," in: Encyclopedia Britannica, 14, New York, 1929, pp. 672-674.

[5] Griinbaum, A., The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA., 1984. There are German, Italian and French Translations.

[6] Griinbaum, A., "The Role of the Case Study Method in the Foundations of Psychoanalysis," Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 18, 1988, pp. 623-658. Reprinted from: Nagl, L. and Vetter, H. (eds.), Die Philosophen und Freud, R. Oldenbourg. Verlag, Vienna, Austria, 1988.

[7] Griinbaum, A., Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, International Universities Press, Madison, CT, 1993. [8] Jaspers, K., "Causal and 'Meaningful' Connexions Between Life History and Psychosis," in: Hirsch, S. and Shepard, M. (eds.), The-

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mes and Variations in European Psychiatry, University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, 1974, pp. 80-93.

[9] Phillips, J., "Hermeneutics in Psychoanalysis," Psychoanalysis & Contemporary Thought, 14, 1991, p. 382. [10] Ricoeur, P., Freud and Philosophy, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1970. [11] Ricoeur, P., Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1981. [12] Rubinstein, B., "On the Role of Classificatory Processes in Mental Functioning: Aspects of a Psychoanalytic Theoretical Model," Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Science, 3, 1975, pp. 101-185. [13] Rubinstein, B., "Freud's Early Theories of Hysteria," in: Cohen, R.S. and Laudan, L. (eds.), Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis: Essays in Honor of Adolf Grunbaum, Reidel, Dordrecht and Boston, 1983, pp. 169-190; reprinted 1992. [14] Rubovitz-Seitz, P., Letter-to-the-Editor, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 42, 4, 1994, p. 1311. [15] Sherwood, M., The Logic of Explanation in Psychoanalysis, Academic Press, New York, 1969. [16] Sober, E., "Parsimony, Likelihood, and the Principle of the Common Cause," Philosophy of Science, 54, 1987, pp. 465-469. [17] Sober, E., "The Principle of the Common Cause," in: Fetzer, J. (ed.), Probability and Causality, Reidel, Dordrecht and Boston, 1988, pp. 211-228. [18] Sullivan, R., Book Review of "Hermeneutics Versus Science?", Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 23, 2 (June), 1993. [19] Toulmin, S., "The Logical Status of Psycho-Analysis," in: MacDonald, M. (ed.), Philosophy and Analysis, Philosophical Library, New York, 1954, pp. 132-139. Reprinted from Analysis 9, 1948.

ZYGMUNT BA UMAN

IMMORTALITY, BIOLOGY, COMPUTERS A free man thinks nothing less than of death, and his vzswn zs a meditation not of death, but of life

Baruch Spinoza, Ethics There is a remarkable story, Immortal [1], left by the remarkable Argentinean writer, Jorge Luis Borges. In that story, Joseph Cartaphilus of Smyrna, after a long and arduous voyage had reached the City of the Immortals. Wandering through the labyrinthine palace which was the City, Joseph was overwhelmed first by the impression of breathtaking antiquity, then by the impression of the interminable, of the atrocious, and finally by that of the 'completely senseless'. The palace 'abounded in dead-end corridors, high unattainable windows, portentous doors which led to a cell or pit, incredible inverted stairways whose steps and balustrades hung downwards. Other stairways, clinging airily to the side of the monumental wall, would die without leading anywhere, after making two or three turns in the lofty darkness of the cupolas'. And so on. In this palace built by immortals for the immortals, nothing seemed to make any sense, nothing served any purpose-but, let us note, each detail there was a shadow, a memory of forms conceived in the cities inhabited by mortal beings, and this could express and brandish its absurdity by blatantly defying the ends for which it was originally invented. This must have been a city not of any immortals, but of such immortals, who went first through the experience of being mortal, learned the skills resonant with such an experience, and then, some time later, acquired immortality. At that moment, they still felt need to express their shocking discovery that everything learned before became suddenly useless and devoid of meaning. By now, however, they have abandoned even the palace they built at the moment of discovery; Joseph found them already lying in the shallow pits in the sand: 'from these miserable holes ... naked, grey-skinned, scraggly bearded men emerged ... I was not amazed that they could not speak and that they devoured serpents'. This is not what Joseph, embarking on his expedition to escape his own dreaded death, hoped to find to be the case in the world ruled by the perpetual bliss of eternal life. But now he understood:

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To be immortal is commonplace, except for man, all creatures are immortal for they are ignorant of death, what is divine, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal ... Everything among the mortals has the value of irretrievable and the perilous. Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (and every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, or the faithful presage of others that in the future will repeat it to a vertiginous degree ... Nothing can happen only once, nothing is preciously precarious. Conclusions are as lucid as they are shattering: everything in human life counts because humans are mortal, and know it. Everything human mortals do, makes sense because of that knowledge. Were the death ever defeated, there would be no more sense in all those things they labouriously put together in order to inject some purpose into their absurdly brief life. That human culture we know-arts, politics, the intricate web of human relations, science or technology-was conceived at the site of the tragic yet fateful encounter between the finite span of human physical existence and the infinity of human spiritual life. The crux of the matter is that knowing of one's mortality means at the same time knowing of the possibility of immortality. Hence one cannot be aware of one's mortality without conceiving of the inevitability of death as an affront and indignity; and without thinking of the ways to repair the wrong. To be aware of mortality, means to imagine immortality; to dream of immortality; to work towards immortality-even if, as Borges warns, it is only that dream which fills life with meaning, while immortal life, if ever achieved, would only bring the death of meaning. Perhaps, if asked, Freud would reply that our perpetual drive towards immortality is itself the work of the death instinct ... or one could speak, following Hegel, of the cunning of reason: it consoles the mortals dangling the prospect of immortality-but only by hiding the fact that as long as they remain mortal the prospect of immortality may seem like a consolation ... It is the stern reality of death that makes immortality an attractive proposition, but it is the same reality which makes the dream of eternity an active force, a motive for action. Immortality is, after all, a task-an unnatural condition, which won't come by itself unless cajoled or forced into being. It would take a lot of effort and clever strategy to make the dream come true. Human history was filled to the brim with such efforts, dictated by two basic strategies. The first strategy was collective. Individual humans are mortal; but not those human totalities of which hey are part-to which they 'belong'. The Churc h, the Nation, the Party, the Cause-those, to quote Emile

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Durkheim's memorable phrase, 'beings greater than myself'-they all will live much longer that any of their members, yet they will live longer, perhaps even forever, solely thanks to the each and every member's effort to secure their eternal life at the cost of his own. Thus individual death has been given its meaning: 'it was not in vain'. But the meaning is derivative, and it does not augur preservation of the individual in any form or shape. The concern with individual immortality is dissolved in the task of serving the immortality of the group; with this, the individuality itself is dissolved, which helps the group enormously in its on-going efforts to subordinate individual life-concerns to whatever is declared to be the interest of the group's survival. The tombs of unknown soldiers, adorning every capital of the world, encapsulate the gist of this strategy, aiming at the same time at its continuous allure. The second strategy was individual. Physically, all individuals must die-but some (men described as 'great' for this very reason) may be preserved, as individuals, in the memory of their successors. That other, posthumous life, may in principle last as long as there are humans with memory. But one needs to impress oneself on that memory: through one's deeds, unmistakably individual deeds, deeds no one else accomplished. By and large, though not exclusively, two types of deeds were in competition for this kind of immortality-that is, for claiming the right to stay forever in human memory. The first were accomplishments of rulers and leaders of men-kings, law-givers, generals; the second-the achievements of scribes: philosophers, poets, artists. In the words put by Plato into Socrates' mouth, 'the soul is most like the divine and immortal', and hence 'into the family of gods, unless one is a philosopher ... it is not permitted for any to enter, except the lover of learning' [2]. Unlike the first strategy, the second was singularly unfit for mass consumption. It was linked to the status of individuality as privilege, as the achievement of the uniquely endowed, extraordinarily meritorious or otherwise exceptional. It was such an individuality which offered the pass-key to immortality, but some people could rise to that individuality only because the others, the multitude, 'the mass', never did and never stood a chance. Gaining immortality according to the rules of this strategy, meant standing out of the crowd and above the ordinary (already in Plato the praise of philosophers was underwritten by the contempt and disparagement for those allegedly living by their flesh alone). Their sharp differences notwithstanding, none of the two strategies could emerge unscathed from the modern revolution, which Michel Foucault described as, first and foremost, the entrenchment of the individualizing power, the power that in principle constituted all its objects as individuals, deploying techniques of power which required that the

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individual responsibility for the building and exercising of identities was simultaneously the right and the duty of all, and saw to it that the requirement was met [3]. Modernity was a democratic (populist?) force-in making all humans into individuals de facto or in spe. But the formula of collective immortality called for the suppression of individuality; while the formula of individual immortality made sense only as long as individuality remained the privilege of the few. Democracy was not the sole challenge the ascent of modernity posited to the customary human ways of coping with the dream of immortality. Modern humanism was another. As John Carroll summed it up in his recent reassessment of the humanist legacy, 'it attempted to replace God by man, to put man at the centre of the universe, to deify him. Its ambition was to found a human order on earth ... -an entirely human order'. The new Archimedean point on which the earth, and the universe with it, would turn, was to be human will, aided and abetted by human reason. As it turned out, though, 'the humanist will has atrophied to nothing, so that the lofty and arrogant 'I am' 'has degenerated into that of a chronic invalid watching life from the window of the hospital' [4]. How did it come to pass? 1. DEATH, MODERN AND POSTMODERN

In the Divine order, the harrowing discrepancy between timelessness of thought and temporality of flesh was an indignity, but not a provocation; a cause of sorrow, but not of umbrage. It could even, though not without the imagination stretched to its limit, be imbued with a deeper sense, or eulogised as the source of all meaning. Not so in the new, human order. Here, everything was to serve human plans and desires and all that resisted or defied human reason and will was an abomination. Incommensurability of the intellectual and bodily time-spans, and the biological death responsible for it, became now a challenge to human wit and resolve. In a world founded on the promise of freedom to human creative powers, inevitability of biological death was the most stubborn and sinister of threats poised against the credibility of that promise and so against that world's foundation. In keeping with the ways and means of modern practice, which always tend to split big and difficult to handle issues into a series of smaller and manageable tasks, the awesome and unassailable issue of biological death looming at the far end of life pursuits was in modern times sliceddeconstructed-into a multitude of little tasks and concerns tiling the total span of life. Modernity did not abolish death-we are as mortal today as we were at the dawn of the 'human order' era; but it did bring

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enormous advance in the art of fighting off each and any known cause of death (that is, except the cause of all causes, which is the innate human mortality itself)-and in preventing such causes from occurring. Busy as we are trying to observe all the prescriptions and proscriptions modern medicine offers, we think less, if at all, of the ultimate vanity of this observance. The outcome of the deconstruction is that the invisible enemy, death, vanished from view and from speech; yet the price of deconstruction is life policed from the beginning to the end by the banished enemy's ubiquitous garrisons. Having refused to face up to the incompatibility of modern promise with the brute fact of human mortality, we have indeed become, at least for the time being, 'invalids watching life from hospital windows'. For the time being, or forever? This is, admittedly, a moot problem, and one which I, an outsider to both medical practice and daring biological projects, one who knows of the present and the hoped-for potential of recent bio-technological departures not more than a lay person could or should, have no credentials to consider. I have little if anything to say on the crucial questions on which the answer to the above problem hangs: is the progress of biological understanding and medical know-how likely to step beyond the arresting of the aging process, and go as far as averting the so far unavoidable onset of disintegration of life processes? Is it, in other words, able to perform a qualitative leap from merely prolonging life-that is, from postponing the moment when the otherwise inevitable death is faced-to the demotion of the event of death, from its present status of unavoidable fate, to one of contingency (that is, to achieve practical immortality)? I leave these questions to the specialists. It is a different question I shall ask: in what form are the discoveries in the field of 'practical immortality' likely to be accommodated within the kind of society we are in? And so, what are their likely cultural meaning and consequences? Our 'late modern' (Giddens), 'reflexive modern' (Beck), 'surmodern' (Balandier), or-as I prefer to call it-postmodern society, is marked by the discreditation, ridicule or just abandonment of many ambitions (now denigrated as utopian, or condemned as totalitarian) characteristic of the modern era. Among such forsaken modern dreams is the prospect of doing away with socially generated inequalities, of guaranteeing to every human individual equal chance of access to everything good and desirable that society may offer. Once more, as the early stages of modern revolution, we live in an increasingly polarised society. Throughout the modern period social deprivation tended to be defined as a temporary hiccup in the otherwise smooth and relentless progress towards equality; it was explained away by the not-yet-rectified, but in

at

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principle rectifiable, malfunctioning of the not-sufficiently-rationalised social system. Those out of work and without earnings were seen as the 'reserve army of labour'-meaning that tomorrow, or the day after, they will be certainly called to active service and join the ranks of producers which in principle would include the whole of society. This is no more the case. We speak today of 'structural' unemployment (the term which still, counterfactually, alludes to employment being the norm, and suggests that the present massive lack of employment is an anomaly): those without work are no more 'reserve army of labour'-economic progress does not mean more demand for labour, new investment means less, not more employment, 'rationalization' means cutting work places and jobs. One may say that, at the far end of the spectacular scientific and technological advance, the 'growth' of GNP comes to measure massive production of redundancy and redundant people. These people are kept alive through what the structure of our economy defines, with more than a hint of condemnation all abnormality deserves, as 'secondary transfers'-the dependency that stigmatises them as a burden to the earners, to those actively engaged in economic life, to the 'taxpayers'. Not needed as producers, useless as consumers-they are people which the 'economy', with its logic of needs-arousing and needsgratifying, could do very well without. Their being around and claiming the right to survival is a nuisance for the rest of us; their presence could no more be justified in terms of competitiveness, efficiency or any other criteria legitimised by the ruling economic reason. There is not enough meaningful employment for all those people alive; and not much prospect of ever matching the volume of work against the mass of those who want it and need it to escape the net of 'secondary transfers' and the attached stigma. It would be unwise-perhaps ingenuous, but certainly risky-to exclude the possibility of an intimate connection between the premonition of organic redundancy and the present signs of cultural re-evaluation of new life and long life. We live in the time of demographic scare. During the Sturm und Drang era of modernity high birth rates used to be seen as the sign of the 'health of the nation', and 'more people' meant more wealth and power-both are dreaded today as a menace to consumer bliss and the vexing tax on 'limited resources.' Increasingly, people are recorded on the debit, not the credit, side of economic calculation. It would be indeed strange were there no link between the economic devaluation of human numbers and the in-built redundancy of population, and the ever more pronounced cultural trend toward refusal at will of the right to live to those, who are too weak or insignificant to demand and secure that right. For any serious student of culture it would be naive

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to take at face value the culturally deployed justifications of behavioural patterns-which, as any serious student of culture knows well, serve to hide rather than reveal the true motives and reasons, in order to gloss over the contradictions between praised values and practiced behaviour, and to make palatable what cultural precepts explicitly condemn but the life demands. And so we tend to defend abortion of the not-yet-born in terms of the very humane principle of the right to choose of those born already; or euthanasia of the old in terms of the right to choose death over a kind of life which society have refused to accord meaning. But, as Klaus Dorner reminds us, Die meisten der heute lebenden alten Menschen die sich quantitativ infiationieren und dadurch entwerten, entwerten sich inzwischen auch qualitativ indem sie im FaIle der Pfiegebediirftigkeit nicht mehr leben wollen, weil sie es nicht mehr wert seien, sich von Jiingeren abhiingig zu machen und deren GenuBihrer Jugend zu beeintriichtigen. Daher auch die Anziehungskraft der 'Deutschen Gesellschaft fiir humanes Sterben' fUr alte und chronisch kranke Menschen, die meinen freiwillig sich suizidieren zu miissen [5]. It is a paradox (or perhaps not much of a paradox after all), and irony of history (or perhaps not such an irony after all), that a realistic (at any rate, more realistic than ever before) offer of biological immortality is promised by science at a time when the cultural message is the excess and redundancy of life, and when, accordingly, avoidance, prevention and limitation of life turns into culturally approved and promoted value. Under these circumstances one can expect the offer, if it finally becomes not just realistic but real, to be taken up selectively-and so to become another, possibly the most powerful ever, stratifying and polarising factor. In doing so, the already visible trend to 'privatisation' of everything will only follow, including the chance of survival or living longer. With the technology of organ transplant and replacement, contemporary medical science has acquired already powerful means to prolong life. The very nature of that technology-most of all, though not only, its exorbitant cost-precludes its universal application. Access to longer life is already technologically stratified. One could reasonably expect these stratifying effects to become still more pronounced-once the extension of life crosses the threshold of 'practical immortality'. In a drastic reversal of modern strategy of 'collectivised' survival, biological immortality has every chance of turning into a factor and an attribute of individualisation: the preservation of the 'most deserving'. Like once the right to live forever in human memory, the right to the perpetuity of biological existence would need to be earned (or inherited, for that matter). It is

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more than likely to turn into the most valued and coveted stake in the competition game of individual self-assertion. A closer look at the postmodern cultural stage strongly suggests such a turn of events. For the massive consumption, our culture has a message which, if anything, devalues or dilutes the dream of eternal life; and this through exorcising the horror of death. This effect is achieved through two seemingly opposite, yet in fact supplementary and converging strategies. One is the strategy of hiding the death of those close to oneself from sight and chasing it away from memory: ceding the terminal ill into the care of professionals; confining the old to geriatric ghettos long before they are entrusted to the graveyard, that prototype of all ghettos; shuffling the funerals away from public places; toning down the public display of mourning and grief; psychologising away the torments of bereavement as therapeuting cases and personality problems. On the other hand, though-as George Balandier has reminded us recently, death se banalise par la proliferation des images; elle s'y insinue, surgit, puis s'efface. Autrefois, la mort don nee a voir avait la qualite d'un spectacle edifiant ... aujourd'hui, elle devient un moment mediatique, un evenement qui libere une emotion fugace, vite affaiblie par son 'peu de realite' pour ceux qui l'observent. Cette omni-presence imagiere, par quoi la mort se galvaude, fait fonction d'exorcisme: elle la montre et la dissipe dans un me me mouvement, car il s'agit toujours d'une mort etrangere et lointaine, celIe des autres [6]. Death close to home is concealed; while death as universal human predicament, death of anonymous and 'generalized' others, is put blatantly on display, made into the never-ending street spectacle that, no more being a sacred or carnival event, is but one among many daily life's paraphernalia. So banalized death is made too familiar to be noted and much too familiar to arouse high emotions. It is the 'usual' thing, much too common to be dramatic and certainly too common to be dramatic about. Its horror is exorcised through its omnipresence, made absent through the excess of visibility, made negligible through being ubiquitous, silenced through deafening noise. As death fades away and eventually dies out through banalization, so does the emotional and volitional investment into the craving for its defeat ... It is as if the multitude has been surreptitiously, yet consistently drilled not to desire what it is unlikely to get at any rate; not to covet eternal life when-if-it becomes feasible. Both those eligible for personal immortality and those left behind would agree that only certain kinds of life deserve to be extended forever-though both sides would accept it, one would surmise, for different reasons and inspired by a different life

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experience. The kind of society likely to be built on such consensus is not very difficult, but perhaps too awesome, to imagine-for the time being, that is, the time too close to the naive though exciting ambitions of modern, and practices of postmodern, civilization. 2. IMMOR T ALITY, MODERN AND POSTM ODERN

As we noted before, it was the unique and original work/act that through most of human history led towards the individuality of authorship/actorship and thereby assured, or was hoped to assure, immortality of the individual qua individual-albeit a spiritual one only, woven of memories and commemorative rites. Modernity reinforced and democratised that strategy of individual immortality, once available primarily to princes and philosophers, making it accessible to the growing number of practitioners of ever new trades and professions. Yet the beginning of the distinctly postmodern era coincided with the proclamation of the 'death of the author', from Roland Barthes through Michel Foucault to Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, all the most perceptive observers of the convolutions of contemporary culture and the suppliers of its most influential self-interpretations point out to the anonymity of the self-evolving texts, to which the authors lost their once cherished privileged access, forfeiting on the way their past monopoly of meaning-making and interpretation. The most pensive and philosophically acute postmodern artists, when they struggle to represent the spirit and the tendency of their era in their work and in the techniques with which the works are executed, more than anything else portray and express the absence of the 'original' composers of pop records record what has been already recorded; Andy Warhol paints what has been already painted; Sherrie Levine photographs what has been already photographed; they and many others quote, collate, re-position, re-compose, and above all copy and multiply the already authored icons, floating the question of the authorship and originality and seeing to it that the question cannot be raised again in any meaningful way. Andy Warhol went out of his way to eliminate the 'original' from his own artistic practice. He developed techniques which allowed to create any amount of copies, but made it impossible to select anyone of them as the original or the first. All of us who commit our thoughts to computers instead of handwritten or typed manuscripts, and converse with the screen, endlessly re-writing and re-arranging what we have written, know all too well that each next version makes the past versions non-existent, effacing all traces of the road which led us where we are now. Computer writing puts paid

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to the once holy idea of the 'original version'; the Ph.D. students of the next century will miss badly the favourite topics of this century dissertations: tracing the successive stages of the authors' struggle with their own thoughts back to the 'beginning', to the original act of inspiration, and thus re-telling once more the drama of individual creation. Thus computers cast a gigantic shadow on our inherited image of the writer as author: does not the very name of the software we use to write suggests a processor of words, rather than a composer of ideas, thinker and creator? In his brilliant insight into the cultural consequences of the 'Second Media Age', which began with the introduction of the interfaced computer networks, Internet and virtual reality, Mark Poster points out that words and images 'procreate with indecent rapidity, not arborially, ... as in a centralized factory, but rhyzomically, at any decentred location'. 'The shift to a decentralized network of communications makes senders receivers, producers consumers, rulers ruled (and-let me add-makes the authors into the processors of the increasingly anonymous, parentless material-Z.B.), upsetting the logic of understanding of the first media age'. Indeed, who' "owns" the rights to, and is therefore responsible for, the text of Internet bulletin boards: the author, the system operator, the community of participants?'[7]. Or, let me add, the 'system' itself, which certainly involves all those people, but can be reduced to the will and intentions of neither of them? Property rights and authorial pretensions lose much of their sense, once the information has been set free to move and to multiply, as if of its own accord and by its own momentum, in the no-man's land of the 'cyberspace'. Human operators are not part of that momentum; they trigger processes which they do not direct and hardly ever are able to monitor, let alone to supervise. No one controls the logic of that cultural drive which takes place inside the cyberspace-which is cyberspace. As Jean Baudrillard once said, this medium converses solely with itself ... 'The signs evolve, they concatenate and produce themselves, always one upon the other-so that there is absolutely no basic reference which can sustain them' [8]. The container in which immortality of individual human deeds was stocked for safe keeping was human memory. The urge to make the container even more foolproof, and capacious enough to accommodate the democratisation of individual immortality, must have provided a powerful impetus to the invention and the development of computers as, above all, the 'artificial memory'. But the not fully anticipated outcome of that urge was that humans, alone among the species (and no wonder, that alone-since all other species are 'immortal' by omission, nor by commission: thanks to not being aware of their mortality, not through

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performing the task of self-immortalization), 'is seeking to construct his immortal double, an unprecedented artificial species'. One result was the substitution of the immortality of dead objects for the immortality of living:

In aiming for virtual (technical) immortality and ensuring its exclusive perpetuation by a projection into artifacts, the human species is precisely losing its own immunity and specifity and becoming immortalized as an inhuman species, it is abolishing in itself the mortality of the living in favour of the immortality of the dead [9]. But another was the elevation of those 'dead objects' into a virtual species, with its own laws of evolution, its own promiscuous patterns of procreation, its own mutations, mutants, viruses and immunities, and its own tropisms and mechanisms of assimilation, metabolism and adaptation. No one controls that new species, not even the new species itself: the device invented to put paid to the most harrowing of contingencies has itself become, like all species, contingency incarnate. Programmed to make human immortality secure, it emancipated the fate of immortality from human efforts; it expropriated immortality from human individuals craving to make their individual accomplishments eternally alive. Instead of guaranteeing immortality to the authors, it abolished the authorship of eternal life. Individual immortality of great acts and thoughts went the way of collectivised immortality of the hoi polloi. Also, the immortality of the individuals qua individuals has been now collectivised; entrusted to the vagaries of the species, it feeds itself on the death of the individual. The immortal species of computers proved to be a great equalizer: not because it raised everyone to the ranks reserved once for the 'great men' alone, but because it put paid to the notion of the 'great men' as a race standing a chance of a different kind of immortality than ordinary mortals, such as were always offered immortality-by-proxy through sacrificing their lives at the altar of the species, or of the selected part of the species. With the infinite capacity and insatiable appetite of artificial memory, being recorded is no more the reward of the chosen few, nor necessarily the outcome of one's own enterprise. Now everybody has a chance, and the likelihood, of having one's name and life record preserved forever in the artificial memory of the computers; by the same token, no one has the chance of earning a privileged access to perpetual commemoration. Fame, that premonition of immortality, has been replaced by notoriety, that icon of contingency, infidelity and capriciousness of fate. When everyone can have a share of the limelights, no one stays in the limelights forever, but no one is sunk forever in the darkness either. Death, the

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irrevocable and irreversible event, has been replaced by the disappearance act: the limelights move elsewhere, but they may always turn, and do turn, the other way. The disappeared are temporarily absent; not totally absent, though-they are technically present, safely stored in the warehouse of artificial memory, always ready to be resuscitated without much ado and at any moment. If modernity struggled to de-construct death, in our postmodern times it is the turn of immortality to be de-constructed. But the overall effect is the effacement of the opposition between death and immortality, between the transitory and the durable. Immortality is no more the transcendence of mortality. It is as tickle and erasable as life itself; as irreal as the death transformed into the disappearing act has become: both are amenable to endless resurrection, but none to finality. It was the consciousness of death that breathed life into human history. Behind the boundless inventiveness sedimented in human culture stood the awareness of death, which made the brevity of life into an offence to human dignity-a challenge to human wits which called for transcendence, stretched the imagination, spurred into action. Not knowing of death, animals live in immortality without really trying, the humans must earn, gain, construct their immortality. They have, but only through ceding immortality to an artificial species, living immortality as a virtual reality. With the oppositions between reality and representation, sign and signification, virtual and the 'real' progressively effaced, would not the virtual, technical immortality steal the thunder which immortality as a task, as unfulfilled dream, once held? Is not the new technical, virtual immortality, the immortality-by proxy, a round-about, twisted way back to the 'a priori' immortality, immortality-by ignorance of the non-human (and inhuman!) species? Knowledge of death is the specifically human tragedy. It used to be as well the undrying source of the specifically human greatness, the motive of the finest of human achievements. We do not know whether the greatness will survive the tragedy: we have not tried it yet, we have not been here before. The world we have inhabited so far is bespattered by marks and traces left by our efforts to escape into immortality. Once we have obtained an electronic equivalent of the portrait of Dorian Gray, we may have earned ourselves a world without wrinkles, but also without landscape, history, and purpose. We may well have found our way to Jorge Luis Borges' City of the Immortals.

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UK

REFERENCES

[1] Borges, J.L., Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. by Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1974, pp. 138, 140-1, 144, 146. [2] "Phaedo", In: Great Dialogues of Plato, transl. by W.H.D. Rouse, Mentor Book, New York, 1956, pp. 484, 487. Vishev, LV., Problema lichnogo bessmertia, Nauka, Novosibirsk, 1990, p. 126. quotes a papyrus going back to the 15th Century B.C., expressing already the ideas later to be canonized by Plato: "Their (the writers') servants have gone away, their gravestones are covered with mud, their abodes are forgotten. But their names are spoken about thanks to the books they created; their memory will live forever". It may be guessed that the link between intellectual work and individual immortality-through-public-memory is as old as the invention of writing. [3] Compo Foucault, M., Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman, Routledge, London, 1988, p. 60. [4] Carroll, J., Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture, Fontana, London, 1994, pp. 2-6. [5] Dorner, K., Todliches Mitleid: Zur Frage der Unertraglichkeit der Lebens, Vertrag Jakob van Hoddis, Giitersloh, 1993, p. 129. [6] Balandier, G., Le dedale: Pour en finir avec le XXe siecle, Fayard, Paris, 1994, pp. 110-l. [7] Poster, M., 'A Second Media Age?', Arena Journal, 3, 1994, pp. 76, 8l. [8] Baudrillard, J., "The Evil Demon of Images", Interview with Ted Colless, David Kelly and Alan Cholodenko, in: Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews, ed. by Mike Gane, Routledge, London, 1993, p. 14l. [9] Baudrillard, J., The Illusion of the End, transl. by Chris Turner, Polity, London, 1994, p. 84.

W. BRIAN ARTHUR

THE END OF CERTAINTY IN ECONOMICS

The story of the sciences in the 20th Century is one of a steady loss of certainty. Much of what was real and machine-like and objective and determinate at the start of the century, by mid-century was a phantom, unpredictable, subjective and indeterminate. What had defined science at the start of the century~its power to predict, its clear subject/object distinction~no longer defines it at the end. Science after science has lost its innocence. Science after science has grown up. What then of economics? Is economics a science? Well yes, I believe so. For sure it is a body of well-reasoned knowledge. Yet until the last few years it has maintained its certainty, it has escaped any loss of innocence. And so we must ask: is its object of study, the economy, inherently free of uncertainties and indeterminacies? Or is economics in the process of losing its innocence and thereby joining the other sciences of this century? I believe the latter. In fact, there are indications everywhere these days in economics that the discipline is losing its rigid sense of determinism, that the long dominance of positivist thinking is weakening, and that economics is opening itself to a less mechanistic, more organic approach. In this talk I want to show my own version of this loss of certainty. I want to argue that there are major pockets of uncertainty in the economy. I want to show that the clear subject/object distinction in the economics often blurs. I want to show that the economy is not a gigantic machine, but a construct of its agents. These are not "anomalies" to be feared, they are natural properties of the economy, and if we accept them, we will have a stronger, not a weaker science. Let me start from the beginning. The fundamental ideas in economics stem from the thinking of the 18th century, in particular from the thinking of the English and Scottish Enlightenment. In 1733, at the height of the intoxication of enlightenment thinking, Alexander Pope condensed its essence in one stanza of his Essay on Man: All Nature is but Art unknown to Thee All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see All Discord, Harmony, not understood All partial Evil, universal Good: And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite One truth is clear, "Whatever is, is right."

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In this context "Art" means artifice. It means technique or mechanism. And so, all the intricate wonders we see in nature, says Pope, are in fact a gigantic machine, an artifice like the mechanical automata figures of his time. All that looks unkiltered really has direction behind it. All that looks complex and discordant, like the movements of planets before Kepler's and Newton's times, has a hidden simplicity. All that affects each of God's creations adversely, in some unspoken way works to the good of the whole. Quoting Socrates, "Whatever is, is right." These were not merely the ideas of Pope. They were the ideas that filled the intellectual air when Adam Smith was growing up. Smith went on to enshrine them in The Wealth of Nations, that magnificent work that uncovered the hidden simplicity behind the traffickings of traders and manufactories and butchers and bakers. The economy was indeed Art, and its principles were now unhidden. The selfish interests of the individual were guided as by an invisible hand to the common interest of all. Whatever was, was right. Two centuries later, the philosopher of science, Jacob Bronowski, was to comment glumly that economics never recovered from the fatally rational structure imposed on it in the 18th century. But we inherited more than Smith's rational structure. Deep in some recess of our minds, we inherited the thinking that the economy is but Art, a gigantic machine, that if we merely understood its parts, we could predict the whole. Certainly when I was studying economics in Berkeley 25 years ago, many economists hoped (as I did) that a Grand Unified Theory of economics was possible. From the axioms of rational human behavior, a theory of the consumer could be constructed. From this and a corresponding theory of the firm a consistent microeconomics could be constructed. From this, somehow, an aggregate theory of the economy, macroeconomics, could be constructed. All this would constitute a Grand Unified Theory of the economy. There have always been two embarrassments to this hope of constructing a theory of the economy from its reductionist parts. One is that the economy relies on human beings, not on orderly machine components. Human beings with all their caprices and emotions and foibles. The second embarrassment is technology. Technology destroys the neatness because it keeps the economy changing. Human behavior was finessed in economics by the device of Economic Man, that perfectly rational being who reasons perfectly deductively on well-defined problems. Technology change was not so much finessed as ignored, or treated as exogenous. And so to make an orderly, predictive theory possible, Economic Man (the subject) needs to operate on well-defined Problems (the object). There should be no blurring of agent and problem. The well-defined problems should have well-defined Solutions. And the solutions would

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comprise the building blocks for the next aggregated level of the theory. This approach works. But it runs into difficulties when problems start to involve more than one decision maker and any degree of complication. Then heroic assumptions must be made. Otherwise well-definedness unravels, agent and problem become blurred, and pockets of uncertainty start to bulge. Let me show you what I mean in the context of a typical microeconomic situation in modern economics. (I have chosen it from the mid1980s literature on industrial organization.) Consider this problem: We have a circle that we might think of as a 24 hour clock. A number of firms, say 20 airline companies, have to decide in which time slot of this clock their planes will take off in, for example from La Guardia Airport to go to Washington. Of course the different airlines have different preferences when to take off. They know their preferences and are going to book suitable take-off slots. The choices will be made once and for all. There is a trade off (in every decent economic problem there is always a trade-off) between where they really want to take off versus not being too close to other airlines' choices of their time slots. So, given the airlines' preferences, which time slots will they choose? This is the problem. We might feel uneasy about saying much with certainty here. But I want to show you the modern version of the Enlightenment approach, where we find the Harmony of a solution within the Discord of the situation. This High Modern approach is called rational expectations. I will first spell it out, then shine a bright light of realism on it, so that it starts to unravel and pockets of uncertainty appear. Let's go ahead. In the rational expectations approach, we begin by supposing we know the order in which the airlines will submit their choices. Now imagine airline number 20 reasons like this: knowing where the first 19 airlines are going to be, I will know where I want to be. So regardless of any arbitrary choice of the first 19 airlines, I will know which time-slot to choose. This is an easy problem for me as the 20th. What about airline number 19? Well, airline number 19, when choosing, will know the arbitrarily chosen positions of the previous 18 airlines and can figure what it should do, given that the 20th will choose an optimal position given the positions of the 18 other airlines and 19's choice. What about the 18th? Well, the 18th, knowing where the previous 17 will be, arbitrarily can solve the problem of selecting an optimal placement knowing what the 19th will do, given that the 19th makes his optimal choice, given what the 20th will do as a result of 19's choice. Getting complicated? Yes. But you can work the whole logic in reverse order by backward deduction, or more

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properly by dynamic programming, and deduce how all 20 firms will place themselves. Notice the properties of this procedure. The problem is well defined, by making it sequential and assuming the firms use logical backward deduction. The solution is precise and clean in a mathematical sense. The problem becomes a mathematical one. (Indeed all such problems become mathematical. Economics in turn becomes mathematics.) Another property that we normally have in this kind of problems, is that the individual act comes to good of the whole, that is, partial evil is universal good. It is not quite true in this case, but nevertheless this is a generic property that often holds in economics. But the Solution comes with a lot of fine print. Airlines must know exactly their preferences. Not only that, they must know the preferences of all other airlines. Further they must know that every other airline accurately knows the preferences of every other airline. They also must know that every airline knows that every airline knows the preferences of every other airline, and so on in an infinite regress. Also, each airline must be rational enough to work out the solution. Further, each airline must believe that every other airline is rational and will use perfect rationality to work out the solution. Further, each airline must know in an infinite regress that every other airline is using this rational way to work out the problem, because if one of these airlines messes up, it messes the solution up for every other airline. Further, the optimal placement of each airline using this backward deduction must be unique. If any link of this network of requirements breaks, the solution ceases to exist. In the spirit of being in Belgium, my comment on this is: "C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre." This type of multi-agent choice problem is pervasive in economics. So let us take this solution approach seriously. What if we are airline number 3 and we feel uncertain as to what airline number 17 is going to do? As airline number 3, we might say: I don't think the people of airline number 17 are that super bright, and I'm not sure whether they are going to solve this problem by this rational method. If they don't work it out in this way then I am not sure what my optimal choice would be as the third chooser in the process. This is sufficient to upset the situation. But worse, airline number 3 may communicate its uncertainty to other airlines and they may no longer rely on number 3 or number 17. The entire solution is starting to unravel. In fact the Solution as created is a function of airlines' expectations or predictions of what other airlines are going to do. So the problem is that if I am a representative airline I am trying to figure out what my expectations ought to be-I am trying to predict a world that is created by the expectations of myself and everybody

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else. There is a self-referential loop here. The outcome each airline is trying to predict depends on the predictions it and others might form. In other words, predictions are forming a world those predictions are trying to forecast. Barring some coordinating device, by which an airline can logically determine the predictions of others (such as the tortured solution-reasoning above), there is no logical way it can determine its prediction. There is a logical indeterminacy. So in the economy, people are creating a world that forms from their predictions, but if they try to form these expectations in a perfectly logical deductive way, they get into a self-referential loop. There is a logical hole in standard economic thinking. Our forecasts co-create the world our forecasts are attempting to predict. Without knowing how others might determine their forecasts, mine are indeterminate. There are some cases in economics where it is pretty obvious that everyone can figure out what to do, where something like the above given scheme does work. Otherwise the problem is fundamental. The agents in the economy are in a Magritte world. When our ideas and preferences co-create the world they are trying to forecast, self-reference renders the problem indeterminate. The idea that we can separate the subjects of the economy-the agents who form it-from the object, the economy, is in trouble. Pockets of indeterminism are present everywhere in the economy. And the High Modern form of economic determinism fails. There are two questions we want to ask. One question is: Does it matter? Maybe all of this happens on a set of measure zero, maybe this difficulty is confined to some trivial examples in economics. The second question is: If there is a real difficulty, how should we proceed? I want to show you an argument taken from the field of capital markets, from asset pricing theory. And I want to show you this theory lands in the same trouble as the theory that explained the airlines' choices. The only difference is that this is a theory that matters. In 1991, I was hired by Citibank in Hong Kong as a consultant to develop sophisticated neural-network models to predict prices in foreign exchange markets. My initial reaction as an economist was skepticism. I believed the standard theory, and one of its implications is that there is no way to predict the financial markets. But soon I discovered that traders in the foreign exchange market disagreed. They believe they can predict price movements-at least to the degree they can make money. But first let me quickly outline the standard theory. The standard efficient markets theory says that all information coming in will be used by speculators and investors and anything in that information hinting about the future changes of the price will be used. In other words, by an

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argument very much like the airline argument, that I will show Y01l in a moment, each stock's price is bid to a unique level that dcpeTJ(]s on ttl(: information currently available. Using past patterns of prices to for(:cast. future prices (technical trading), in this view, cannot lead to furtJl(:r profits. Otherwise the information inherent in past prices could he used to make further profits, and by assumption investors have already discounted all information into current prices. So the standard theory says investors use all information available to form expectations. These will determine stocks' prices which on average will uphold these same expectations. Rational expectations again. Thus there is no way to make any money, and the market is efficient. Traders, on the other hand believe that the market is forecastible. They believe they can spot patterns in past prices helpful in prediction-they believe in technical trading. They believe the market is anthropomorphic, that it has a psychology, that it has motives. "The market was nervous yesterday. But it shrugged off the bad news and went on to quiet down." Economists are skeptical of this. I remember hearing one famous economist remark: "If technical trading could make money, there would be a lot of companies and banks getting rich." This puzzled me. Because there are a lot of companies and banks getting rich using many forms of technical trading. The standard theory is wonderfully successful. It has its own logic. This logic is complete and has desirable properties like mathematical uniqueness. But the standard theory must face some unexplained phenomena. It calls these empirical anomalies. (The basic notion is that there is something wrong with these phenomena because they don't fit the theory, rather then that there is something strange with the theory because it doesn't explain these phenomena.) So if there is a crash in the October 1987 stock market and the market loses 23% of its value, this is called a "correction." Yet there is no news in October '87 that calls for this crash. Another anomaly is "bubbles," like the famous Dutch tulip bubble where the prices stay high without any apparent reason. Additionally the volume of market trades is orders of magnitude higher than theory predicts. Several economists (Brock, Lakonishok, and Le Baron notably) have shows that technical trading is indeed profitable statistically. Another puzzle is so-called GARCR behavior, (GARCR means Generalized Auto Regressive Conditional Reteroscedasticity), which means there are periods of high volatility in stock prices interspersed randomly with periods of quiescence. In sum, there are at least half a dozen major statistical anomalies that are not explained in the standard theory. This has led to a great deal of more modern and ingenious theorizing, some using ad-hoc behavioral observation, some more sophisticated theorizing.

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Let me show you now, as in the airline problem, how the standard theory breaks down and leads to pockets of indeterminacy. Suppose investors can put some portion of their money in a single stock that pays a dividend every time period (a day, a year, say) that investors cannot perfectly predict. The investors are buying the stock for this dividend plus any capital appreciation (tomorrow's price), and they face the problem of forecasting these. To make the standard solution work, we assume homogeneous, identical investors-dones-who have identical forecasts of the dividend at the end of the period and identical forecasts about the stock's price in the future. Forecasts that are on average unbiased and are therefore rational expectations. A little economic reasoning then shows today's price is equal to the common expectation of tomorrow's price plus dividend (suitably discounted and weighted). This yields a sequence of equations at each time, and with a pinch or two of conditional-expectation algebra, we can solve these for the expectations of future prices conditioned on current information, and wind up with today's price expressed as a function of expected future dividends. Problem solved. But it is only solved, providing we assume "identical investors who have identical forecasts of the dividend at the end of the period and identical forecasts about the stock's price in the future." But what if we don't? What if we assume investors differ? Let us look at the same exercise assuming our investors agents are not dones-not homogeneous. Note that the standard theory's requirement of identical "information" means not just the same data seen by everyone, but the same interpretation of the data. But imagine yourself in a real setting, like the Hong Kong foreign exchange market. Information then consists of past prices and trading volumes, moves made by the central banks of New Zealand or the bank of Singapore or the central bank of China, rumors, CNN, news, what your friends are doing, what they are telling you by telephone, what somebody's aunt thinks is happening to the market. All of these things compromise actual information and it is reasonable to assume that, even if everybody has identical access to all this information, they would treat this information as a Rorschach inkblot and would interpret it differently. Even if we assume that the people interpreting this information are arbitrarily intelligent (they may be infinitely smart) and they are all perfectly trained in statistics, they will still interpret this data differently because there are many different ways to interpret the same data. So there is no single expectational model. Each individual investor can still come up with an individual forecast of the dividend. But tomorrow's price is determined by this investor's and other investors' individual forecasts of the dividend and of next period's price. And there is no way for

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the individual investor to fathom the forecasts of the others-to figure "what average opinion expects the average opinion to be" (to use Keynes' words). To do so brings on a logical regress. "I think that they might think, but realizing that I think that, they will think this." Unless we assume identical investors, once again our agents are trying to forecast an outcome (future price) that is a function of other agents' forecasts. As before with the airlines problem there is no deductive closure. Expectations become indeterminate, and the theory fails. Worse, expectations become unstable. Imagine a few people think that prices on the market are going to go up. If I believe this and I believe that others believe this, I will revise my expectations upward. But then I may pick up some negative rumor. I will reassess downward, but realizing that others may reassess and that they too realize that others, I may further reassess. Expectations become fugitive, rippling up or down whether trades are made or not. Predictions become unstable. This is the way price bubbles start. If somehow people expect prices to go up, they will forecast that other people will forecast that prices will go up. So they will buy in. A bubble starts. People can see prices go up and their expectations of upward motion fulfilled. Therefore prices may continue to go up. The bubble is self-fulfilling. Similar logic applies to "floors" and "ceilings." If, for example, the price is 894, many investors believe that at 900 there is some sort of membrane, a ceiling, and when the price reaches this ceiling it will bounce back down with a certain probability or it may "break through." My first reaction to hearing about floors and ceilings was one of disbelief. Then I started to realize that many investors may have sell orders at 900, simply because it is a round number. So expectations that the price will fall if it hits 900 are likely to be fulfilled. Ceilings and floors emerge as partially self-fulfilling prophesies, held in place by their being convenient sell and buy places. We are now a long way from homogeneous rational expectations. Under the realistic assumption that traders may interpret the same information differently, expectations become indeterminate and unstable. And they may become mutually self-fulfilling. To summarize all this: if we look at a serious branch of economics, the theory of capital markets, we see the same indeterminacy as we saw in the airline problem. Agents need to form expectations of an outcome that is a function of these expectations. With reasonable heterogeneity of interpretation of "information," there is no deductive closure. The formation of expectations is indeterminate. And yet ... and yet ... in every market, in every day, people do form expectations. How do they do this? If they can not do this deductively, then should we model their behavior in this area? ... In 1988, John Hol-

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land and I decided that we would study situations like this by forming an artificial stock market in the computer and giving the little agentsartificially intelligent computer programs-some means by which they can do the reasoning that is required. This was one of the very earliest artificial, agent-based markets. Later we brought in Richard Palmer who is a physicist, Paul Tayler who is a finance expert and Blake LeBaron who is a financial theorist in economics. When we started, John Holland, the renowned computer scientist who devised the genetic algorithm, could program only in BASIC. And I could only program in BASIC. However, Richard was a sophisticated programmer and we rapidly progressed. We designed our artificial stock market within the machine (first on a Macintosh then a NeXT) and got it working. In this market there was no feed-in from the real stock market. It was an artificial world going on inside the machine. The artificial agents, the little artificial investors, are all buying and selling a "stock" from one another. The computer could display the stock's price and dividend, who is buying and selling, who is making money and who is not, who is in the market and who is out, and so on. The price is formed within the machine by bids and offers. Another little program-a specialist-sets the price to clear the market, as in actual stock markets. The modeling question was: If the agents cannot form their expectations deductively, how are they going to form them? We decided to follow modern cognitive theory about how actual human beings behave in such situations. So we allowed our artificial agents looking at the recent history of the stock's price to posit multiple, individual hypothetical models for forecasting and test these on a continual, ongoing basis. Each of these hypotheses has a prediction associated with it. At any stage each agent uses the most accurate of its hypotheses, and buys or sells accordingly. Our agents learn in two ways: they learn which of their forecasting hypotheses are more accurate, and they continually toss out ones that don't work and replace these using a genetic algorithm. So they are learning to recognize patterns they are collectively creating, and this in turn collectively creates new patterns in the stock price, which they can form fresh hypotheses about. This kind of behavior-bringing in hypotheses, testing them, and occasionally replacing them-is called induction. Our agents use inductive rationality. And this is a much more realistic form of behavior. Alright then. But now the key question is: Does our market converge to the rational expectations equilibrium of the academic theory or does it show some other behavior? What we found to our surprise was that two different regimes emerged. One, which we called the rational expectations regime held sway when we started our agents off with sets

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of predictive hypotheses close to rational expectations. We could plot the parameters of all the predictive hypotheses on a chart, and in this case, over time, we could watch them getting gravitationally pulled into the orbit of the rational expectations solution, forming a "fuzz" around this point, as they made occasional predictive forays away from rational expectations to test different ideas. It is not hard to see why rational expectations prevailed. If the overall mass of predictions is near rational expectations, the price sequence will be near rational expectations, and non-rational expectations forecasts will be negated. So the academic theory was validated. But there was a second regime, which we called the complex regime, and it prevailed in a much wider set of circumstances. We found that if we started our agents with hypotheses a little removed from rational expectations, or alternatively, if we allowed them to come up with hypotheses at a slightly faster rate than before, the behavior of the market changed. Subsets of mutually reinforcing predictions emerged. Imagine we have 100 artificial agents each using 60 different prediction formulas, so that there is a universe of some 6,000 predictors. Some of these predictors that emerge are mutually reinforcing, some are mutually negating. Suppose many predictors arise that say the stock price cycles up and down over time. Such predictors would be mutually negating because they will cause agents to buy in at the bottom of the cycle, and sell at the top of the cycle, mutually negating profits, and therefore eventually disappearing from the population of predictors. But if a subset of predictors emerged by chance that said "the price will rise next period if it has risen in the last three periods," and there were enough of these, they would cause agents to buy, which on average would cause the price to rise, reinforcing such a sub-population. Such subsets could then take off, and become embedded in the population of predictors. This was what indeed happened in the complex regime, endowing it with much richer set of behaviors. Another way to express this is that our artificial traders had discovered forms of technical trading that worked. They were using, with success, predictions based upon past price patterns. And so technical trading was emergent in our artificial stock market. This emergence of subsets of mutually reinforcing elements, strangely enough, is reminiscent of the origin of life, where the emergence of subpopulations of RNA in correct combinations allows them to become mutually enforcing. Another property that emerged in the complex regime was CARCR behavior-periods of high volatility in the stock price followed by periods of quiescence-another property unexplained in the standard model. Row did CARCR become an emergent property? What happens in our artificial market is that every so often some number of investors discover

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a new way to do better in the market. These investors then change their buying and selling behavior. This causes the market to change, even if slightly, causing other investors in turn to change. Avalanches of change sweep through the market, on all scales, large and small. Thus emerge periods of change triggering further change, periods of high volatility, followed by periods when little changes and little needs to be changed, periods of quiescence. This is GAReR behavior. Let me now summarize. What we found in our artificial stock market is that, providing our investors start near the rational-expectations academic solution, this solution prevails. But this is a small set of parameter space. Outside this, in the complex regime, self-reinforcing beliefs and self-reinforcing avalanches of change emerge. A wider theory and a richer "solution" or set of behaviors then appears, consonant with actual market behavior. The rational-expectations theory becomes a special case. In the standard view, which has come down from the Enlightenment, the economy is an object. It is complicated but can be viewed mechanistically. Subject and object-agents and the economy they perform in-can be neatly separated. The view I am giving here is different. It says that the economy itself emerges from our subjective beliefs. These subjective beliefs, taken in aggregate, structure the micro economy. They give rise to the character of financial markets. They direct flows of capital and govern strategic behavior and negotiations. They are the DNA of the economy. These subjective beliefs are a priori or deductively indeterminate in advance. They co-evolve, arise, decay, change, mutually reinforce, and mutually negate. Subject and object can not be neatly separated. And so the economy shows behavior that we can best describe as organic, rather than mechanistic. It is not a well-ordered, gigantic machine. It is organic. At all levels it contains pockets of indeterminacy. It emerges from subjectivity and falls back into subjectivity.

W. Brian Arthur, Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 81501 USA

267 INDEX

E-model, 159 academia, 20, 24 academicism, 22 Aerts, Dirk, 110 aether, 48, 115, 121, 122 affinity symbolic, 228 thematic, 229, 230, 233, 235 algebra, 144 commutative, 149 conditional-expectation, 261 ambiguity, 37, 99 Anna 0., 229, 230 anomalies, 74, 255, 260 Aristotle, 50 asymmetry, 63, 76, 122 attitude, 188, 189 natural, 188 of reduction, 189 autonomy, 19 averSlOn phobic, 228 Balandier, George, 248 Barthes, Roland, 249 basic research, 11 Baudrillard, Jean, 249, 250 beliefs, 49, 67 subjective, 265 suspension of, 189 Berkeley, 51 bias, 22, 203, 213 biology, 241 evolutionary, 64, 65, 235 Birkhoff, 35 G., 51 Bohm, David, 138, 139 Bohr, Niels, 142 Boolean lattice, 148 Borges, Jorge Luis, 241, 252 Bradley, 32

Breuer, 229 Josef, 227 Brouwer, 36 Brussels, 79 approach, 149 Buddhist schools, 192 Cantor, 36 Capra, Fritjof, 29 Carroll, John, 244 Cartwright, Nancy, 41, 52 causal connection, 219, 226, 227 determinant, 228 hypotheses, 224 inference, 232, 234-236 linkage, 229, 231, 232, 236 relevance, 224, 225, 234 causality, 81, 225 cause-effect relationship, 141 Churchland, 48 Paul, 29, 50 circularity, 55, 60, 64, 67 classical mechanics, 135, 177 physics, 82, 96 cognition, 62, 64, 74 cognitive conservatism, 61 conservativism, 67 science, 185, 192 coherence length, 131 commensurability and incommensurability, 53 completeness, 41 complex regime, 264 complexity, 103, 105 conception hermeneutic, 219 Newtonian, 171 conceptual frames, 37, 38

268 scheme, 50 Conceptually Unknown, 96 condition necessary, 234 connection causal, 219 etiologic, 236 meaning, 219, 226 thematic, 226, 236 consciousness, 187, 201 science of, 185 self, 102 constraint, 194 mutual, 194 constructivism, 55 constructivists, 57, 59 continuum, 36, 97 classical, 36 time-space, 174 coordinate, 168 reciprocal, 61 transformation, 114, 120 Copenhagen complementarity, 140 interpretation, 80, 139, 141, 155 Copernicus, 134 covariance, 113, 115, 119 covering law, 159 creation, 136, 154, 166, 167 -aspect, 165 -discovery view, 136, 137, 142, 155 -element, 135 creationists, 66, 70 creativity, 20, 99, 100, 199, 200 crystal silicon, 130, 132 Cusa, Nicholas of, 116, 117 Darwin Machine, 202, 217 Darwin, Charles, 201 Darwinism, 201, 202 mental, 203 neural, 186 Darwinists, 66, 70 dasein, 185 de Broglie, Louis, 79, 109, 138, 142

de Broglie-Bohm interpretation, 142 theory of, 139, 142 death, 242, 244, 248, 251 Derrida Jacques, 249 Descartes, Ren'e, 35 determinant causal, 228 determinism, 100, 178 economic, 259 Dirac, Paul, 143 discourse perspectival, 45 discovery, 13, 136, 152 Dorner, Klaus, 247 dream, 232 manifest content of, 232, 233 of eternity, 242 specimens, 232 theory, 232 Durkheim, Emile, 242 Durlinger, Didier, xiii Eddington, Sir Arthur, 30 Einstein, Albert, 1, 11, 15, 16, 20, 21,26,46,79,80,85,99-101, 103, 107, 116, 120, 127, 142, 158, 163 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen -like correlations, 139 paradox, 158 electromagnetic radiation, 162 Emch, 143 Enlightenment, 255, 265 entity, 145, 160 quantum, 135 epicycles, 134 epistemic authority, 68 domains, 67-69 self-privileging, 66 symmetry, 63 epistemology constructivist, 63, 73 EPR, 158 equality, 245

269 equation Einstein, 127 Maxwell, 163 Newton, 134 Schrodinger, 102 Erdelyi, Matthew, 223 Escher, Maurits, 15 ether, 48, 107, 108, 172 theory, 171 etiologic connection, 236 hypothesis, 230 inference, 223, 228, 230, 231, 235 events, 113, 163 mental,231 space-time, 101 evolution, 93, 102, 204 excellence in pure research, 22 expectations rational, 261, 263 rational, 257 experience, 164 disciplined examination of, 188 human, 185 present, 164 experiment, 87, 96, 146, 151, 155 classical, 157 delayed-choice, 140, 141 detection, 154 Michelson-Morley, 121 neutron, 130 Rauch, 132, 154 walnut cracking, 151 Wheeler's delayed-choice, 154 explanation, 32, 45, 66, 222 causal, 225, 236 fear obsessive, 229 feminist, 76 Feyerabend, Paul, 29, 52 Feynman, Richard, 144 fitness, 62, 67 biological, 62, 65 Darwinian, 65

Foucault, Michel, 243, 249 Foulis, David, 143 foundationalism, 16 frame of reference, 46 Freud, 219, 221, 236 Sigmund, 242 fundamental research, 15, 16 future, 177 Galilei, 35, 39, 40, 46, 51, 114, 116 Galileo, 29, 35, 119 transformation, 162 Geneva, 143 geometric view, 174 Habermas, 223, 226, 237 Jiirgen, 219 happening, 166, 168 energetic, 169 material, 169 periodic, 168 Hawking, Stephen, 102 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 242 Heidegger, M. , 52 Heisenberg, Werner, 142 hermeneutic, 219, 221, 226, 237 circle, 61, 64, 75 hermeneutics, 221, 222 hermeneutist, 236 hermeneuts, 224, 226 Hertz, 51 hidden measurement approach, 148150 hidden variable, 150 theory, 139 hypothesis state-type, 157 theory, 157 human sciences, 224 Husserl, Edmund, 51, 188 hydrophobia, 230 hypothesis determinist, 178 etiologic, 230 semantic, 223

270 working, 193 Idealism, 31 image, 37, 38, 42 mental, 42 scientific, 41 imaginary variations, 190 immortality, 241-243, 247-249, 251, 252 incommensurability, 57, 69, 71 and commensurability, 63 indeterminacy, 261, 262 indexical language, 46, 47 inference, 45 causal, 230 etiologic, 228, 230, 231 retrodictive, 230, 236 instrumentalism, 43 intentionality, 13, 47 interdisciplinarity, 24 interference pattern, 155 intermediate structures, 160 theories, 160 interpretation, 65 Born, 109 Copenhagen, 80, 139 de Broglie-Bohm, 142 Einstein, 172, 173 ether, 172 psychoanalytic, 222 realistic, 142 semantic, 221 transference, 230 interviewer, 136 intuition, 190 invariants, 190 irreducibility, 187 isolated atoms, 144 isomorphic, 147 Jammer, Max, 108 Jaspers, 226, 237 Karl, 219, 236 Jauch, Josef Maria, 143 Jordan, 143

Kant, 38, 50 Immanuel, 99 Kepler, 134 kinship geometric, 231 thematic, 228, 229, 231, 236 Kitcher, Philip, 54 knowledge, 13, 15, 26, 62, 146 lack of, 139, 148 of death, 252 picture, 156 Kolmogorov, 148, 149 Kramers, Hendrik, 142 Kuhn, Thomas, 29, 52 lack of knowledge, 148, 149 language indexial, 46 Latour, Bruno, 55 lattice Boolean, 148 Lebesgue, 35 Levine, Sherrie, 249 light, 87, 107, 125 beam, 140 proppagation, 124 velocity of, 101, 173 localizes, 155 Locke, 33 Lorentz, 46 Hendrik Antoon, 142, 163 transformation, 163 Ludwig, Gunther, 143 Mackey, 143 magnetic field, 133 Magritte, 12, 15, 100, 101 Rene, 26 Maxwell, James Clerck, 107, 162 McTaggart, 32 meaning, 96, 134, 219, 220, 227 connection, 219, 227, 228, 237 semantic, 221, 222 unconscious, 222, 223 measurement act of, 91, 136

271 hidden, 148 universal, 162 measurements, 160 mental image, 42 mIrror semitransparent, 140 Mittelstaedt, Peter, 143 model linear, 13 mechanical, 109 predictive theoretical, 151 modernity, 100, 244, 249 momentum, 169 motives unconscious, 225 multidisciplinarity, 24 Nagel, Ernest, 226 neurophenomenology, 191 program of, 193 working hypothesis of, 194 neutron, 130, 132, 154 interferometer, 130 interferometry, 130 Newton, 35, 41 equation, 134 niche, 204, 213 epistemic, 71 non-locality, 129, 130, 135, 137 non-product state, 139 nowness, 192 temporal, 193 objectivist, 66 observables, 149 observation -aspect, 165 observer, 124, 163 -dependence, 46 role of, 177 ontological basis, 163 ontological neutrality, 225 open publication, 21 operational theory, 144 operationali ty, 144

opinion poll, 136 organization industrial, 257 outcome, 146 paradox, 158 participator, 164 particle, 86, 138, 139 detectors, 130 Pascal, 35 past, 176 Penrose, Roger, 103 person first-, 186 third-, 186 perspective constructivist, 60 phenomena, 141 phenomenological approach, 187 movement, 188 reduction, 191 phenomenology, 185 naturalized, 186 neuro-, 191 Phillips, James, 219 philosophy of mind anglo-american, 185, 187 philosophy of science, 55, 58, 64, 65, 71,76 photon, 141, 154 physics, 129 Piron, Constantin, 143 Planck, Max, 108, 142 Plato, 243 Podolsky, 158 Poincare, Henri, 163 Popper, Karl, 105, 222 position, 169 Poster, Mark, 250 practice of reduction, 192 praxis, 47 preconception pre-scientific, 134 present, 164, 177 experience, 164

272 specious, 193 three-part structure of, 193 primary qualities, 34, 40, 51 probability, 147, 152 calculus classical, 152 classical, 148 model of Kolmogorov, 149 ontological, 150 quantum, 149 theory, 149 process Darwinian, 202 experimental, 147 view, 174 processes cognitive, 67 psychology, 237 experimental, 192 folk, 42 of meaning, 236 pure research, 18 qua, 39 quantum entity, 134, 154, 169 machine, 145-148, 160 mechanics, 129, 130, 133, 135, 136, 142, 155, 160, 161 axioms of, 159 orthodox, 159 optics, 144 paradoxes, 155 potential, 139 probabilities, 153 probability, 149 structures, 144 theory, 133, 148, 149 Randall, Charles, 143 rat -obsessions, 229 penetration, 230 punishment, 229 Rat Man, 229, 235, 237 rationality, 45, 56, 67 inductive, 263

reactor, 130 realists, 57 reality, 129, 137, 151, 170, 171 material, 170 physical, 144, 145 present, 164 reciprocal coordination, 57, 61, 62 determination, 67, 75 recognition, 217 reduction phenomenological, 189 reference frame, 163 reflection, 188 regime complex, 264, 265 rational expectations, 263 relation symbolic, 227 relativism, 59, 63, 69, 76 relativity, 45, 107, 173 Einsteinian, 46 Galilei, 114 general, 101, 126 principle of, 127 special theory, 122 theory, 129, 163, 170, 171 relevance causal, 233, 236 statistical, 235 representation, 35, 50, 51 research academic, 20-22 basic, 11-13, 17, 20, 22, 25, 26 fundamental, 15 new mode of, 23 post-academic, 25 pure, 19,22 Ricoeur, 221, 223, 225, 226, 237 Paul, 219 Rosen, 158 Rubinstein, Benjamin, 226 scheme conceptual, 50 Schrodinger, 155

273 cat paradox, 155 equation, 102. 143 Erwin, 142 . science sociology of, 56 studies, 53, 61, 64, 71 scientific revolutions, 30 Scientific Image, 30, 36 scientism, 43 scientistic self-misunderstanding, 219 Segal, 143 self-organization, 103 self-reference, 259 loop of, 258 Sellars, 32, 34, 38, 41, 48, 51 Wilfrid, 30, 31, 51 semantic ascent, 49 of desire, 221, 223 reference, 224 relation, 220 separated entities, 158 shape, 34, :36 Sherwood, Michael, 225 signification, 224 silicon monocrystalline, 130 sociology of science 56 59 Sommerfeld, Arnold, 109, 142 space, 46, 135, 1:37, 154, 155 -time, 46 Euclidean, 138, 139, 177 specious present, 193 standard model, 143 state, 146, 156, 160 non-product, 1:39 quantum mechanical, 156 Storr, Anthony, 220 structure, 148 classical, 160 mixed quantum-classical , 160 quantum, 160 subject/object distinction, 255 superstition, 45

symmetry, 73 and asymmetry, 63 formal, 60 system, 39 dynamical, 104 material, 114 metaphysical, 50 Ptolemean, 134 unstable, 104 temporal order, 141 temporality, 193 thematic affinities, 237 connection, 229, 232, 237 theorem Gleason, 161 theory -infected, 48 -laden, 48, 60 academic, 263 classical, 148, 149 of capital markets, 262 theory-Iadenness , 64 , 67 Thomson, Joseph John 108 . ' time, 46, 101, 102, 116 -space manifold, 163 arrow of, 104 material, 168 paradox, 172 Toulmin, Stephen, 225 training, 190 transdisciplinarity, 24 transference, 230 interpretations, 230 neurosis, 230 theory of, 236 transformation coordinate, 113 Galilei, 119, 162 group of, 46 Lorentz, 116 truth, 62, 67 uncertainty pockets of, 257

274 vagueness, 33, 37, 43 validation, 224 value, 47 free, 94 sense of, 93 Valery, Paul, 99 van Brakel, 51 J., 50, 51 Varadarajan, 143 vector space, 159 velocity of light, 176 Vico, Giambattista, 16 vIew geometric , 174 neuro-phenomenological, 1 process, 174 Vigier, Jean Pierre, 138 von Neumann, 35, 148 John, 51, 143 Warhol, Andy, 249 waves, 138 weak modularity, 159 Weyl,36 Wheeler, 141 John Archibald, 140 Wittgenstein, 42 Ludwig, 31 Wolf Man, 235, 237 Woolgar, Steven, 55 world, 37, 164 picture, 29, 38, 43 view, 38, 43, 50