Part 30 (1/2)

Ties

The Encyclopedic tradition centered around the scientific huuage

This tradition continued a line of progressive changes in humankind's scientific experience We can learn about these changes by exah which they are expressed The syncretic stage of human activity was dominated by observations and short cycles of action- reaction Incipient, rudi's practical projection Ies and, later, names of plants, ani Only when the scope of observation broadened and, instead of the immediate connection, a series of connections was accounted for, did science becoether with the ical, and would continue to develop in this syic Observation and fear of the observed were one Nae in which e call astronomical science is embodied Obviously there was little awareness of the ed Mytho-in (in both cases with reference to the practical activity of people during changing seasons), and by the Christian names (after the establishment of Christianity), is a line continued today in detailed catalogs encoding positions, dynamics, and interrelations in nu the sky and in deriving the notion of duration (how long it took for celestial objects to change position), hunitive characteristics: seeing, association, coiven and observations were ht intensity With the eeneralized froer related to divinities Still, astronomical observation was used to structure httime clock

At a time of reduced scientific inquiry (Europe from the 5th century to the 10th), the observation of the skies, reflected in ress in astronoht, color, and brilliancy, later suggested better nanized (navigation, in the first place) required identification for successful perforic and science explained success in very different ways This was the tih properties evident to all who needed the sky The ic layer was projected as a result of associations people made between qualities characteristic of persons and the behavior of certain stars, ie, the perceived influence they had on events pertinent to hue served as an instruration and observation, as well as athe experience of tie, and further shaping practical experiences of tie acquired a very powerful position in the hu's self-constitution in tithened by literacy, bound to generalize distinctions in language and introduce the new expectations Only when time-dependent practical requirements, such as those of relativity, impossible to satisfy within literacy, becauage

A giant cognitive step bridged the iic forces were ru for humans to free them-and the notion of space Geometry-which literally means to measure land-is relevant as a practical experience of human self-constitution that unites the concrete task at hand (surveying, building, decorating, observing the sky) and the generalization of distance Measuring land ends up not only in description of the land, but also in its reconstitution in the abstract category of space Language was part of the process, and for as long as practical experiences in the ieometric conventions remained very close to their practical implications Once distinctions beyond direct relations in space were ation, by settled fories for successful securing and defense of land, the language of geoed

Internally motivated developments, as well as those rooted in foreouages

The languages of the foundations of geoeometry are as different as the practical experiences froe suffices for for the practice of atteh, the intuitive visual aspect of geometry is quite often better adapted to subjects such as syher order spaces, and convexity than is literacy Rigid spaces and elastic spaces behave differently froe Geometry frequently uses notations whose referent is rather abstract The freeing of tie made an impact on the condition of rationality, where scientific praxis is rooted, and of reason, where philosophy originates

Coherence and diversity

Science integrates the results of diversified experiences and expresses the perceived human need to maintain a coherent perspective of the whole As a reaction to the establishe ees of scientific focus eed Those who knew frolobal coherence, as preserved in language, and specialized knowledge conflict, gave up the effort to hare) and the specialized perspective (of science) The understanding that the language of science is not simply a descriptive device, but a constitutive element of scientific practical experience, did not coe kept human awareness of space and tily, it was less difficult to notice how ed the system observed than to understand how a scientific hypothesis expressed in language created a frae description corresponds to a particular practical experience involving identification through language

Particular developments in science are not identical in all scientific branches Astronoeometry evolved differently from each other and from other sciences As a result of the inherent dynaoals of sciences, a phase of liberation froe itself reached its limits in literacy, in respect to the efficiency of the new huht about, new languages were needed

Breaking the language barrier, with implicit emancipation from literacy, is a practical experience in itself In this experience, two aspects of language coical and the coical status, we evaluate how language is athe perspective of scientific inquiry The coe as a e The levels of problem formulation, of solutions, of interpretation, of experiment and validation, and of communication are quite different They will continue to differentiate even more in order to be efficient The rationality intrinsic to this new science is no longer reducible to finding the logos in things and phenoacy of Francis Bacon-the prophetic theoretician of experimental science-as well as of Descartes-whose rules for understanding dominated the literate phase of humankind's scientific practical experience-literally cease to be relevant once we es, from literacy to illiteracy

Couous, imprecise, and not neutral in respect to the phenomena observed and accounted for For these and other reasons, researchers working within the infores designed in such ways to avoid a possible Many fores have beco quite well for the new stage of computational disciplines In parallel, new forms of scientific experimentation, which correspond to the complexity of the phenomena under observation and to their dynamics, were developed These for) and consist of observing not the behavior of the researched aspect of the world, but one or several of its descriptions

To observe the explosion of a remote star, a tie of hu (forever, so to speak), scientists model astrophysical phenomena and visualize them with the aid of sophisticated computable mathematical descriptions These are better suited to the scale of the phenomena than all the equiper about the stars seen through human eyes It is not about the visible, and it is not burdened by all the history of star names Radio-astronomy is about star systems, cosmic physics, dynainning of the universe The geoher (than three) space di, or ornaeo a practice of thinking, explaining, even acting, that is not possible without the generalization of space dimensions Whether in the fiction of Flatland (Edwin Abbott's book about how different life is in lower-dimension space compared to life in e take to be 3-diraphics animated representation of the hypercube, or in the theories of higher di to Einstein's relativity theory), scientific languages, irreducible to the general language and non- translatable into it, are at work

There are quite a number of similar subjects which er rely on language A non-language-based rationality- spatial reasoning, for instance-becomes necessary in this reale of computation, necessities become possibilities There are subjects of research in which the brevity of a process makes impossible its direct observation and appropriate description in language Indeed, the universe of extreh frequency patterns (which give the appearance of a continuu others, can be approached only with instruments of observation whose own inertia is lower than that of the phenomena scrutinized and with a conceptual frah inertia) is ill equipped

Language preserves in its structure the experience that made it necessary; literacy does the same This is why their sequentiality conflicts with subjects of configurational condition This is also why linearity, inherent in the pragmatics that formed literacy, conflicts with the inherent non-linearity of the world Many other conflicts are at work at the same time: centrality of work opposed to distribution of tasks; hierarchy and distributed networking; clear-cut distinctions and vagueness; deterurational, chaotic processes of infinite adaptation to new circumstances; dualisnificant forms) At stake is the efficiency of the effort, as it approaches issues of recuperation ies of co- evolution (replacing strategies of dominance) with nature, holistic models rativeall these possibilities would be as counterproductive as de literacy-based practical experiences Nevertheless, we need a better understanding of what no longer responds to requirements of human self-constitution under the new scale of hue of the alternative practical experiences through which a new rationality is for context of parallel scientific endeavors and distributed tasks supported by speedy and reliable networks, scientific research is liberated from the industrialin the use of expensive instru place all over the world Tele-presence is less expressive a name for what researchers actually perfor expensivedevices The laboratories that once served as the place for scientific self-constitution are replaced by collaboratories, a combination of real instruments, which can be used more efficiently, and virtual places of research that allow for more creativity Real-ti on nano-scale

Multidisciplinarity is no longer an illusion, but a practical requireration that scientific effort requires

Explaining ourselves away

Syste fast The science of the ever shorter and e is constituted consists of a body of expressive e either plays a secondary function or is substituted with fore Procedures to capture the coherence of the phenomena researched now need to be adapted to this reality The coherence ee reflects past experiences, but does not properly explain experiences characterized by new kinds of coherence In recent years, a question has coe, in the possible ed in our universe by civilizations different froenetic level of our existence or in the biochemical trails which we associate with the behavior of ant colonies or beehives? It would be premature to attempt an answer As already mentioned, David Hirsch ascertains that 97 of hue of this form of activity are coical entities (insects, for instance) Exploration of cosenetics, biochemistry, not to mentionto explain abstract mathematical concepts or the behavior of complex syste learning capabilities or self-organization tendencies, raises the stakes quite high: Do we explain ourselves away in the effort to e?

Replication of ideas (scientific, philosophic, or of any other type) based on the genetic les to the subject But even if we e to establish methods for successful replication, have we captured the characteristics of human self-identification?

In the same vein, another question needs to be addressed: the mystique of science coravity applies everywhere, that electricity does not depend on the geographic coordinates of the place where people live, that computation is a universal calculus Still, science is not value neutral; one model dominates others; one rationality wins over others The truth of a scientific theory and its empirical adequacy are only loosely related To accept one science over another is to the scientist an issue of rationality, while for those integrating it in their practical experiences, it becomes an issue of adequacy This aspect constitutes more than a cultural or memetic issue At stake is the fact that the natural condition of the huardless of the reason

The efficiency of science

In recent years language has changed probably es are not of the depth and breadth of scientific and technological praxis Computer science, as Dijkstra pointed out, deserves a better nae this practical experience brings about (”Would anyone call surgery knife science”? he asked) We don't have better names for many other fields of new huenetics, qualitative reasoning, and memetics But we do have powerful new notation syste qualitative and quantitative aspects), and fresh methods of expression (interactive) Consequently, a new hu froe

This condition will reflect the changed premises of scientific experiical analysis over 350 years ago

Simulation, the experi the dominant scientific form of expression of the systematic search for the multitude of elements involved in new scientific theories and in their applications A variety of sie and doubt This can be seen in a broader context Through simulation, variability is accounted for, relations are scrutinized, functional dependencies are tested over a wide array of data critical to the performance of new systems, or over a wide array of the people involved with the fro its ownthe need for the di This is, after all, what the subject ence is and what it ultimately produces: simulations of our capability to reason In the same vein, scientists are concerned with the e of the ua e as we use it in the framework of community, cultural, and national existence