#ibha

My new Frontiers Column is now available in the Fall 2023 EMERGENCE newsletter from the IBHA. Here is the text:

Frontiers – Fall 2023   

Last month I traveled to Poland to attend a conference of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC)—the theme of the conference was Civilizational Security: Clashes of Civilizations, Clashes within Civilizations, and Stable Global Futures—in part to make the case for the role of big history in studying civilization, and, by implication, the role of civilization studies in big history. Since big history aspires to be a form of scientific history this poses immediate problems, as civilizations primarily have been studied by the methods of traditional history and the social sciences, whereas big history, while not neglecting the social sciences, has been primarily oriented around the natural sciences.

I tailored my remarks to the theme of the conference by arguing that civilizational security—a concept introduced by conference organizer Grzegorz Lewicki—demands that we avoid old misunderstandings and familiar cognitive biases by clearing the ground and starting over from first principles. The failures of civilizational understanding that lead to instability and conflict, I argued, ultimately flow from the foundations of our understanding (or misunderstanding). To overcome these failures, and thus to overcome the misunderstandings that have led time and again to catastrophe, may require a novel effort to understand what history and civilization are at the most basic level.

Big history and the study of civilization share, or could share, many core concepts in a newly founded scientific discipline that approached both history and civilization in the scientific spirit, each drawing equally from a scientific method reformulated to be relevant to human experience in time. A newly founded historical discipline in which history and civilization were unified in core concepts might be a distinct kind of history from traditional humanistic history in which the critical study of documents is central, and also distinct from the kind of scientific history in which the empirical evidence of genomics, physical anthropology, palynology, and archaeology are central.

One could argue that traditional humanistic approaches to history are as different from contemporary scientific history as humanistic psychology is from psychodynamic psychology. We have grown accustomed to there being many different schools of thought in psychology—Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, behavioristic, cognitive, and humanistic, inter alia—each with their own distinctive methods, but it strikes us as a bit strange to entertain the same idea in regard to history. To be sure, it is widely recognized that most historians have an implicit philosophy of history, and we can divide historians into schools of thought based on their philosophical presuppositions, but we rarely go so far as to recognize distinct methods of historical inquiry, except insofar as they are the distinct methods of the auxiliary historical disciplines such as Sigillography (the study of seals), palaeography (the study of handwriting), epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), numismatics (the study of coins), and so on.

Nevertheless, we have, at least de facto, humanistic history and scientific history existing side-by-side almost as schools of thought in psychology exist side-by-side, with each learning from the other, but neither fully reducible to the other. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge methodologically distinct forms of historical inquiry that complement each other in this way, but which remain distinct even as they develop in concert. Fundamental conceptual differences do not necessarily hinder the progress of science. Physics cannot (yet) unify quantum theory and gravitation, and light can be described as a wave or a particle depending upon the kind of measurements taken, but physics continues nonetheless.

We all know that many historical accounts of the past disagree. Historians argue endlessly with each other to try to sort out these disagreements, whether by demonstrating the truth of one’s preferred account, or by accepting part of one’s rival’s account and revising one’s own views accordingly. Such disagreements are most familiar in relation to matters of historical fact, although they also intrude as differences of philosophical presuppositions, and, as such, are more recalcitrant to resolution. What I want to suggest here is that there may be different ways of reconstructing the past (and preconstructing the future), distinct from factual and philosophical differences, which different accounts suggest different insights as well as different explanations that complement each other, deepening our understanding, even as they remain distinct disciplines.  

The IBHA newsletter EMERGENCE for summer 2023 is now available, with a new Frontiers column by me.

Frontiers – Summer 2023   

That the distinct thresholds of emergent complexity are approached in fundamentally different ways points to the qualitative differences that make these thresholds distinctive, but also points to a limitation. Big history, in seeking to unify a narrative about the universe around emergent complexity, tries to bring together these disparate methodological approaches to qualitatively distinct areas of knowledge, so that big history acutely feels the limitations that emerge from the fundamentally different methods employed in the study of distinct emergent thresholds.

It would be tempting to say that these methods are all scientific, and so possess a fundamental unity, but this is not the case. The emergence of mind (or, if you prefer, consciousness) has been primarily studied in philosophy as the mind-body problem, where it has an ancient history. And there is no consensus on the relationship that holds, or ought to hold, between the physical sciences and the social sciences. Many philosophers have claimed that the social sciences require a distinct methodology, no less scientific than the method of the natural sciences, but also not the same as the natural sciences.

And where are we to locate mathematics and the humanities within the framework of a science extended to a scope sufficient to address the unifying narrative of big history? Mathematics is non-empirical, so we know that it is not studied by the methods of the natural sciences, but it is also not studied by the methods of the social sciences. Nevertheless, it is the language within which the various sciences can be unified. Ought mathematics, then, to be the basis of all that follows? Should big history be a formal science, with its principles stated as axioms, and its results demonstrated as theorems?

The humanities seem to stand apart from all of this—they are not easily assimilated to the mathematical framework that unifies the other sciences—except for the nagging feeling that the humanities ought to be relevant to the social sciences (or vice versa) in some fundamental way: for example, the languages, literatures, and arts studied by the humanities are the expressions of the individuals and societies studied by the social sciences. Should there not be a scientific interest in relationship between societies and the artifacts that societies produce, even if we do not yet possess a scientific method sufficiently subtle to study this relationship?

Can big history achieve its unification of knowledge according to emergent complexity if it unifies the bodies of knowledge produced by the special sciences, but does not have any unity of method of its own? In asking this question we see that we can make a distinction between big history that is an eclectic curation of scientific knowledge, and big history that is a science that unifies the special sciences within a larger framework and thus gives to the knowledge of the special sciences its own form. Is this the telos that is implicit within the research program of big history? Big history no doubt can integrate bodies of knowledge in a single framework without integrating the methods by which knowledge is constructed, but this would be a superficial kind of epistemic integration—skin deep only, without shared methodological roots.

The idea that all science is either physics or it is stamp collecting has been attributed to Ernest Rutherford, though no secure source testifies to this attribution. Regardless of the source of the idea, it is a powerful expression of the reductivism that has characterized the natural sciences, and physics in particular. Anything that fails to correspond to this narrow reductionist program is to be dismissed as “stamp collecting.” Big history, focused as it is upon emergentism, may be cast in the role of an antithesis to reductionism. The conception of big history as a curator of scientific knowledge to be assembled ad hoc, as it were, conforms to the “stamp collecting” conception of science, belittled by Rutherford (or whoever is the ultimate source of the idea). This would constitute a less than optimal unification of knowledge, but such an effort would still possess value.

However, the possibility of a big history that methodologically unifies the various methods of the special sciences and gives its own order to scientific knowledge based on a unified methodology, suggests a more ambitious program for big history than stamp collecting. Perhaps, if big history follows this ambitious path, one day we will be able to say that all science is big history or it is stamp collecting. Followed to its logical conclusion, the optimal form of big history in which the sciences are methodologically unified would require a root-and-branch rethinking of science. That is a tall order, but also an aspiration that could drive research for the foreseeable future.

The very idea of a methodologically unified science being the source of big history poses large and difficult questions that cannot be evaded. Must a rigorous science be reductive? Would big history, in methodologically unifying science, converge upon reductivism, or can it maintain its emergentist framework? Can big history, or can any scientific methodology, be both reductivist and emergentist at the same time? Must scientific knowledge respect certain limitations, or should it proceed without regard to present boundaries? Can science be expanded to encompass methodological unification, or would unification spell the loss of what has been essential to scientific knowledge? Would a radically scientific reconstruction of big history spell the loss of what has been essential to history?

An unexpected hunting expedition left the tribe’s children without instruction from their elders that day. Forest was delighted to get out of their learning for the day. He loathed being inside, stuck to a seat where he was expected to sit still and listen to some boring adult drone on and on about what berries could kill you and which ones were medicinal. 

Afterall, when was he ever going to need that information? 

With. his parents permission he invited three of his closest friends to join him fishing at the lake adjacent to is home camp. 

The fish that day were plentiful and Forest and his friends were excited to bring home their scaly supper to their parents. 

“I think I got one!” Onal called, yanking his fishing stick back as his line was tugged. 

“Hold fast to it!” Ibha said, her own rod held steadily in her hands. 

“Ah it got away,” Onal said glumly. 

“At least you didn’t fish up a rock,” Ghark called. 

The children roared with laughter. 

Women’s Asian Cup India 2022: FIFA unveils ‘Iva’, the official mascot of U-17 Women’s World Cup

Women’s Asian Cup India 2022: FIFA, the global governing body of football, on 11 October 2021, unveiled the official mascot of the U-17 Women’s World Cup India 2022 ‘Ibha’. Ibha is an Asiatic lioness who represents female power. According to FIFA, Ibha aims to inspire women and girls across India and around the world to realize their potential. However, the tournament will be held in India from…

Infinitistic Reticulate Ontology and the Depths of Nature

During the last three days of March I participated in an online conference held by NoRCEL (Network of Researchers on the Chemical Evolution of Life), “How did it all begin…?” The virtual conference included a presentation by Lowell Gustafson of the IBHA, “The Origins of Life within Big History: Meanings for Humanity.” I gave the final presentation of the event, “How many branches on the tree of life?” I had previously met one of the coordinators of NoRCEL, Sohan Jheeta, in Milan in 2019 when I had participated in the IBHA event organized by Claudio Maccone, and Sohan suggested that I participate in the NoRCEL event. This invitation was a spur for me to think more about the origins of life.

From a big history perspective, this was a salutary development, and it drew my attention to the burgeoning field of origins of life research. Origins of life is unquestionably one of the major thresholds of emergent complexity. Life itself has further grown in complexity as it has evolved, passing several major thresholds of its own, such as the eukaryotic cell, multi-cellular life, and the Cambrian explosion. Also, further emergent complexities arose from and out of life, such as ecological structures (the trophic pyramid, food webs, and ecological succession), eusociality, consciousness, technology, and civilization.

Focusing on any one emergent complexity threshold offers a fascinating window into the depths of nature, and the origins and development of life has much to teach us about complexity. As biological beings ourselves, our very existence is at stake in biology; every strand of DNA in every cell in our body testifies to our integration with the terrestrial biosphere. Biology is a kind of collective autobiography of ourselves and of every other species with which we share the planet, at once both intimately personal and a shared, universal experience.

Here the depths of nature are also the depths of human nature, as everything that we discover about biology is reflexively applicable to ourselves. Carl Sagan famously said that, “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff.” This places the human condition in a cosmological context. Origins of life research places the human condition in a specifically biological context. Each of the special sciences similarly offers us an opportunity to place the human condition within a particular scientific context, highlighting distinctive aspects of the human condition not otherwise apparent, and thus they allow us to see human nature in a wider scope, as part of processes that transcend the individual and define the universe.

The NoRCEL conference provided me with the opportunity to experience a distinctive perspective on the human condition in the context of origins of life research, and it is easy to see how this experience could be iterated and expanded. For example, it would be something of a big history pilgrimage to be able to arrange one’s participation in a sequence of conferences starting with cosmology, passing through planetary science, geology, origins of life, paleontology, botany, zoology, anthropology, technology, civilization, modernity, and finishing with future studies. All of these disciplines are rich in ongoing research that points to unexpected aspects of the world (and thus unexpected aspects of human nature), most of which are known only to specialists within a given discipline. No doubt one would be more than a little overwhelmed by all this, but after the initial epistemic vertigo had passed, I suspect that one would see the whole of big history as being both intimately personal and universally shared, organically growing along with the growth of human experience.

The growth of human knowledge of the human condition is not yet exhausted by the extant sciences. Novel sciences only now coming into being—sciences on the far frontier of human knowledge—and sciences yet to be formulated, are showing and will show the human condition in a new light, offering us striking new insights into what we are, broadening and deepening human knowledge of the human condition.

That new sciences will continue to appear is a function of what I have called reticulate science, meaning that the various sciences are connected together in a loose network, which sometimes branches out into finer specializations, while at other points several special sciences are brought  together in a node in the network and constitute a new interdisciplinary science. These interrelated processes in the development of science keep science (as an institution) growing and continue to contribute to the growth of scientific knowledge even when other factors suggest that science is approaching exhaustion and must soon cease to develop. In a linear growth model, this might be true, but in the reticulate context of science, the growth of scientific knowledge is not linear.

The depths of nature, as well as the organization of our knowledge of nature, should be seen in the same light. Just as the future branches endlessly before us, possible emergent complexities that follow us my branch endlessly, and the emergent complexities upon which we supervene, when pursued into the depths of nature, branch infinitely. We can only hope to investigate a finite subset of all these branching paths, and we ourselves are but one node in this infinite ontological network.

Above I described an aspirational itinerary through the sciences that was essentially linear, and this is because the human mind needs a linear narrative in order to understand whatever it is of the universe that it does understand—the finite portion of the cosmos that is open to us. But our human, all-too-human narratives overlap and intersect in a reticulate space of human meaning, which maps to a finite subset of the infinite ontological network that is reality.

Every science one encounters is an invitation to descend further into the depths of nature to explore further specializations for the distinctive perspective that these offer of the world. A being of greater cognitive capacity than a human being might be able to retain a multiplicity of these branching paths in mind at any one time, and so maintain in a different kind of consciousness a reticulate narrative that comprehends these multiple pathways simultaneously. This is something that human beings can only dimly perceive. Perhaps some distant descendant of humanity will have this capacity and will employ it to great effect. It is our place, as the ancestors to this future descendant, to make this possible in the fullness of time.

These two seriously couldn’t be any more perfect.