Section Three

Experimentation

(Engagement with the Unknown)

Chapter One

The Fluidity of the Object (F.O.T.O.)

Section Three Prologue
Experimentation
 
            Each section of this work begins with an object and a description of the relationship between the observer and that object.  In the first section the object was the problem, the threat, the reason for a call to progressive action.  The purpose of that first section was to clarify that object in order to contrast it against the solution; that being the principal object or purpose of this work.  The second section begins with the introduction of an intermediary object, the hypothesis.  The formulation of a hypothesis is now understood to be an exercise in optimism that defines the relationship of the observer to the problem.  Meditation on this intermediary object is essential to the development of courage, the kind needed to re-engage the problem with a detached intention toward positive change.  Such meditation or focus acts as a bridge over the troubled waters of cynicism, apathy and hopelessness to the frightening new realm of progressive engagement whereby we experience the true object of human existence.  In this third and final section of the Science of Living we have come to the object of progress itself.  It will be described as a system of means and practices that engages one with the problem in a way that is both personally constructive and socially so.  Before I begin however I will once again define the innate relationship between the pursuit and the object.
            Experimentation is a pursuit of knowledge through the application of hypotheses.  With the hypothesis that progress is possible one pursues it now explicitly by means described in this section.  However, the object, progress, as we will discover in the first chapter, has a unique quality that must be accepted before one begins the journey of self-realization.  This quality is most analogous to a twentieth century concept called the uncertainty principle that describes certain surprising aspects of electronic behavior.  I warn the reader not to see the first chapter of this section as a setback, as many have done, for that would run counter to the mediating optimism of science.  If we believe that progress is possible then the uncertainty principle is merely a fact around which, or parallel with, we must travel in order to continue our journey in search of progress, a journey with great precedent.  Experimentation aligned with a mature acceptance of the uncertainty principle can be understood as prudence and prudence aligned with the passionate pursuit of truth can be understood as wisdom.
 
 
Chapter One
The Fluidity of the Object (F.O.T.O.)
 
The Uncertainty Principle
 
            The death of the Western world as an idea, as well as the death of imperialism as a tiresome fact of our existence coincides not accidentally with the death of empiricism.  The demise of the empirical faith, what I might call pure empiricism, what some might someday call naïve empiricism – the belief that practiced logical accumulation of data can lead us to a structural solidity in matters of reality, sociology and philosophy – begins with the discovery of the uncertainty principle.  This principle refers to a very specific phenomenon in nature that has perplexed the whole scientific community and put a halt to a cultural thrust at least 5,000 years old.  In various ways throughout history men and women have endeavored to use scientific principles to expose nature’s purpose by isolating its primary building blocks.  With the birth of atomic physics humanity was beginning to believe it was close to validating this apotheosis.  Because of the mysterious behavior of electrons, the particles that represent our vision into this subatomic world we hit a very formidable wall.  Apparently the range of vision we are given by the wavelengths of electrons allows for some discrepancies concerning the exact location of particles within that field.  In other words, there is a blind-spot and the blind-spot is structural, scientifically understood as a no-man’s land.  Nature seems to have presented us with, what some scientists have feared since the beginning of scientific inquiry, its mystery or infinite complexity in scientific terms.  This paradox has crippled the physical sciences and like all great scientific discoveries has had repercussions in the social, spiritual, philosophical and political realms.  The human network of specialization has been thoroughly affected by science’s very public failure to secure its long-pursued object, nature’s building block.  I am not implying that science has failed as an institution.  It has only failed to those who believe that nature has some primary substance or constant purpose or direction, a notion without scientific evidence but a notion nonetheless that adherents were adhering to and for.  I acknowledge that science has given us a proof of nature’s mysterious infinity.  The transformation of vision into this abstraction is a feat that humanity can be proud of.  By turning to experimental speculation in order to continue their search for structure, using abstract formulas to build bridges into the very dark sub-atomic world, scientists, at least those courageous enough to continue, have developed an explicit faith in their practice as opposed to the implied faith of their assumption that the world was indeed physical.  String theory, a mathematics of proportional paradoxicism, represents this effort.  Because scientists have been forced by the evidence into systemized guesswork, hoping to find some footing into the new unknown, they have had to develop a new spiritual relationship with their subject.  This metaphysical amalgamation of characteristics of the logic-driven faith has brought science closer, I posit, to the truth of its object.
            I am not an expert on sub-atomic physics but I have tried very hard with my limited knowledge to develop an understanding of this profound discovery because it represents the ethos of my society.  This work is a response to a people living within the age of the uncertainty principle.  In the sixteenth century science proved that the earth was not the center of the galaxy, that it in fact revolved around the sun.  Many were so overwhelmed by this cosmological adjustment that they felt it reflected something about the personality of nature.  In other words, they took it personally feeling that this discovery had something to do with God, with purpose, with meaning.  The backlash evidenced a feeling that the discovery itself was responsible for our loss of centrality and singularity and thus our divinity.  The resentment of this discovery had its source in the terror of space and of scale.  The new found largeness of the universe fed into a growing nihilism, a shutting down of emotional investment in life, a refusal to pose hypotheses from a fear of discovery, a fear of the truth.  The same has occurred in the 20th century.  The principle of uncertainty is merely a fact but some have taken it as a sign of futility.  Many have allowed nature’s proven infinity and ‘fluidity’ to terrify them into isolation.
 
The Fluidity of the Object (F.O.T.O.)
 
            What the uncertainty principle represents is merely another example of the Fluidity of the Object (F.O.T.O.), a blurred relationship between human desire and its fulfillment.  It is a reminder of the slight discomfort caused by separation of the spirit from its source.  This is an idea as old as human consciousness but the scientific world had found temporary immunity from it due to an over-zealous belief in the truth-finding capabilities of this institution.  Because of this it will become the new symbol of human naivety, taking religion’s place.  The assumption made was that science could transcend all of the suffering in life by reducing nature to its primary object and therefore could lay claim to the direction or purpose of reality and existence.  The discrepancies found in the atomic world allow nature a window where purpose might be fluid.  In other words the uncertainty principle states, what some scientists feared all along (those with any trace of romance about existence), that nature is perhaps capable of changing purpose or chance that cannot be described by human logic.  A fluidity of purpose might not be understood as the hallmark of intelligence but certainly it is evidence of personality.  The universe is capable of absolutely everything within our imagination and most likely many things outside our ability to imagine.  For an optimist this is very good news compared the cold materialist limitations of old science.  However, to the simple-minded scientist the great search for control over nature has been greatly undermined.  This new confrontation with nature represents the frustration of a desire thousands of years old and that lends itself to nihilism, the hopeless belief that all is meaningless.  This surrender is an example of the danger of putting all one’s eggs in a single basket.  The scientific community was given, and still is given out of inheritance, an inflated responsibility for the cosmological longings of our society.  Institutions become over-emphasized when human beings leave the institutional corruption of one institution with such totality that they toss out the gains with the losses, the baby with the bathwater, and give themselves completely to the seeming omnipotence of the younger institution.  This is the immaturity of humanity.  The scientific community promised, if not explicitly by its rejection of faith, that it could alleviate the ills caused to society by superstition and overzealous religiosity.  The institutional corruption that had infected religion was expected to be the result of a lack of logic and reason, even though the very source of the religious doctrines was just those faculties.  It is not mere coincidence that democracy reappeared during the scientific revolution.  It is also not coincidental, now that democracy is failing to fulfill its aims, that science is finding itself unable to inspire humanity with purpose.  In summary, the empiricism that lends itself to democratic notions of a self supported by reason, when confronted with the uncertainty principle, without any amending notions, tends to nose-dive into a kind of nihilism responsible for the kind of apathy and social neglect that marks our age.
            My purpose for drawing attention to the Fluidity of the Object (F.O.T.O.) is to affirm it as a constant of any research due to nature’s infinite complexity.  Every human organization or ideal whether it be religion, government, sport’s leagues, jazz quartets, bridge clubs, a chess match, a factory line, a homeless shelter, science, philosophy, art or romance pursues an object that cannot be fully captured.  The object represents some ideal form whose pursuit brings forth its fruits.  This is an important preposition to all that follows; it states that the pursuit of this fluid ideal reaps benefits for the community.  And so science, because of the uncertainty principle, has graduated into a mature human organization owing to a new and humble awareness of its limitations.  It can be argued that this has happened to religion and government in cyclical ways throughout history.  Just as individuals experience moments of seeming omnipotence followed, hopefully, by the humble reminder of his/her relative scale human organizations have the same psychological cycles.  If we begin to see these organizations in this way we will have a more realistic expectation about their usefulness and function.  Seeing these structures in this way will help us utilize them with greater efficiency.  Instead of a zealous commitment to one organizational ideal at the expense of the rest we can begin to see them as organs of a larger body known as human community.  If science represents the brain of humanity and government represents the will and religion represents the heart and each of these organs has further specializations, all of which serve some positive function then our vision of human culture becomes inclusive and functional rather than exclusive and confrontational.  Looking at the world this way we can see that ours is a body that attacks itself.  A metaphor for larger humanity, with its contradictory drives, can be found in those individuals that use recreational drugs.  A human being allows the will to disengage the mind and in its stupor the mind convinces the heart to disengage from the world and in its loneliness the heart convinces the will to disengage from its higher nature (God) and so the will in its anger takes more drugs and the cycle escalates toward death.  A human being lost in this cycle believes that none of the competing parts of the self can attain its object and so feels life to be meaningless.  The heart cannot know God completely, the will cannot attain all of its desires, the mind cannot attain perfect understanding of reality and so they work together out of spite and resentment toward their mutual destruction.  However, if a human being is gifted with an inspiration to live he/she finds cooperation between the parts to be essential.  The will must support the mind and the mind must support the heart and the heart must learn to trust the will and vice versa.  The parts of a human being are challenged in times of conflict to sit in silence until unanimity is attained, a unity that ultimately leads to a healthy mind, body and spirit.  In this way each part discovers that its purpose is not to attain its object but to pursue it in patient cooperation with the other parts.  In the same way, in order for human community to flourish it must begin to develop a mutuality of parts.  The arts must develop a beneficial relationship with government, science must develop brotherhood with religion, no single organization can claim superiority because the object of every pursuit is equally unattainable.  And this brings us finally to progress.  It is the major thesis of this work that progress is possible, progress being the achievement of greater human harmony as an object.  And so we can conclude that perfect human harmony is not possible because of the constant state of change.  However, the pursuit of harmony, the faithful and passionate search for higher forms of harmony, and the subsequent understanding that comes from the practice, lends itself to glimpses of perfection, moments of clarity whereby our mind, body and spirit unite, not only with themselves but also with the community and nature.  This experience is what I understand to be the definition of enlightenment.  It is the pursuit of human harmony, via the practice of progressive living to be described in this section, that allows us to attain the only object that is not fluid, the self.  Perfect self-awareness, enlightenment, the absolute experience of inner unity, is the side-product of the pursuit of progress.  Just as nature is obscured by the uncertainty principle due to structural certainties so too will the previous argument be supported by the following principal notions about progress and its fluidity.
 
The Fluidity of Progress
 
            The mechanism that explains the fluidity of progress is much easier to understand than the one responsible for the uncertainty of electrons.  To begin, let us define progress for the purposes of discussion.  Progress is an increase of human harmony or peace.  That harmony depends upon a growth of understanding between individuals and groups, the vehicle of that understanding for the human species has always been and always will be language.  So, the development of progressive language is essential to an increase in human harmony or progress.  This would lead one to believe that human progress looked at against an axis of human history would show continuous growth and unification and there is a minority that assumes this to be true.  However, many more are perplexed and saddened by the grim reality that this is not the case.  Why, then, would this not be the case?  Why, and I call it this for the first time, would this science of progress find that its object is so much more fluid than the object of physical science, that can at least boast its object is shrinking, albeit shrinking into a window of infinite possibilities?  What is keeping language from carrying its message of unity?  Technology is the answer inasmuch as it causes changes to the human environment.  Since human harmony depends so heavily on the relationship of the community to its environment and the environment is constantly changing due to technology, progressive language has a tendency to corrode, it has a shelf-life, it becomes stale, old, ill-equipped to manage the discrepancies of every day life.  This principal relationship between language and the environment is responsible for the great fluidity of the object pursued by progress, human harmony.  By introducing a science of progress, as the title suggests a science of living, I am encouraging a parallel process of research into language that is adaptive and philosophically bound to maintaining the object of human harmony at its highest state of clarity.
            The science of living is a personal approach to the development of language that aids in the understanding of our constantly changing environment.  As technology and our world undergoes an accelerated rate of flux this adaptive relationship to language will become vital to those who long for human harmony and believe that it is all that protects us from the threat of extinction.
 
Summary
 
            The object of every pursuit is fluid since nature exhibits constant movement or change, experienced as time.  However, the pursuit of an object, originating in desire, does yield certain benefits.  The pursuit of human harmony is often outrun by the speed of technological change, as it once was by bureaucratic change, therefore one must develop a deep commitment to self-discovery through the enrichment of one’s language.  With that language one is most capable of forming bridges of compromise between individuals and groups inconflict.  Therefore, the starting point for the science of living is language.  The end point is self-realization concurrent with a connectedness to one’s community and environment.