Nature as She Is: A Science and Philosophy for the 21st Century

By Nathaniel Travis

An in-depth exploration of today's scientific worldview and the truths it may be missing. With charm and clarity, the author elucidates many natural phenomena and what the consensus view of these phenomena has missed. Contrary to popular belief, science and spirituality are not at odds. And contrary to popular depiction, Nature is not a cold, me

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cosmic Drama Publishing
• Release date: Jan 18, 2024
• ISBN: 9798218317829

Book preview

1

Our Faith in Science

The experience of reading a book about trees is very different from the experience of walking through a forest. On this point, I hope we can all agree.

But not only this, the experience of reading two different books about trees will also be different. A book of poetry, after all, is not the same as a book of theory; and two different books of theory are still two different books, which means that they would elicit two different experiences.

Taking this one step further (and as I’m sure many readers can attest), even two different translations of the very same book can nevertheless be quite different. This means, again, that they would lend themselves to two different experiences, and in turn to two different mental impressions—two different effects which would remain after the experiences themselves.

Of course, what I’m describing is a very personal and individual matter, so two different people would also have two different experiences; and even the same person on two different occasions would have two different experiences (different, that is, to some degree). Nevertheless, if we’re talking about the same person and the same occasion, what has been said thus far must apply.

But why do I make these distinctions, and what do they have to do (as the chapter title would suggest) with science? Well, it’s for the simple reason that if we look at what science is, or how it is done, we’ll find that it always involves a codification of experience:

Experience is received. Interpretation is made. Then, results are conveyed.

In a realistic scenario, this sequence would be much more complicated of course. For example, the interpretations made after the initial experiences would influence subsequent experiences, and so the process feeds back on itself. But I mention the above sequence merely to make the point that experience always comes first.

Any person who does science was experiencing long before they were doing it. (Even Einstein, after all, must’ve been crawling around as a baby at some point.) And the human race as a whole was experiencing long before we were doing science, at least any kind of codified science.

Most commonly, scientific results are conveyed through language (be it spoken, written, or some combination of the two) and through mathematics, which could also be called a kind of language. And just as the experience of reading a book about trees is different from the experience of walking through a forest, so too is the experience of reading scientific results different from the experience of the people who produced the results.

But why do I mention this? I mention this because many people today put a great deal of faith into scientific knowledge, and not only that, many people are not aware of the characteristics of this faith—of how, when, and why they use it.

Not that I wish to imply that this application of faith is necessarily a bad thing. Some people may consider faith to be a kind of dirty word, but the reality is that faith, or trust, is an absolutely necessary human faculty, one that everyone uses in some manner. That being said, it is good to be aware, as much as possible, of where we put our faith, otherwise we run the risk of putting it in the wrong places.

So where is faith applied in the case of scientific knowledge?

Well, one place is in trusting people who have a good name or established credentials. It’s possible to trust people and yet take what they say with a grain of salt. But it is also possible to trust people in such a way that whatever they say is taken as an immediate, unquestionable truth. Even if their experience is completely alien to one’s own experience, it is nevertheless possible to wholeheartedly trust them. Not, again, that this is necessarily wrong to do. Name and credentials do, after all, require effort, accomplishment, and the good word of others, not to mention that it’s inefficient to thoroughly question everything one hears. But either way, and all judgment aside, this is one common form of faith.

Another place is in trusting the results of a subject that one is unfamiliar with. For example, one may be highly experienced with, say, island birds, or children with autism, and at the same time highly inexperienced with nuclear reactions. But if one (A) trusts the methodologies in their field and (B) trusts that there is a connection between the methodologies of their field and the other field, then they can (C) trust the results from the other field.

It’s also possible to take such a web of trust one step further and trust that the collective body of results represents a holistic form of truth, perhaps even one that is categorically superior to all others.

Of course, if one thoroughly understands their methodologies and how these methodologies generalize, there may be little need for trust. But I merely want to say that it is possible—in other words, it is within the human faculty—to apply one’s trust in this manner. In other words, it is possible to apply this kind of trust even when one does not understand their methodologies and how they do or do not generalize. It is possible, for example, to trust a methodology itself and then to apply that trust further.

Regardless, though, we should at least acknowledge the fact that the experience of someone studying nuclear reactions is different from the experience of someone not studying nuclear reactions. Codification is an attempt to convey one’s experience, but the experience of that codified experience is different from the original experience.

Finally, I’d like to discuss another possibility (or really, another common phenomenon): namely, how a greater portion of people’s total experience can begin to consist of codified forms of experience, as opposed to non-codified forms of experience. This phenomenon is also not necessarily a bad thing, but given that each codification involves a difference, this shift opens up the possibility of more and more becoming lost in translation.

Organized Science

Now, if I hadn’t explicitly mentioned science, a reader stumbling onto this passage might think I was referring to the kinds of trust that can be found within organized religions. But everything I’ve said applies to organized science just as well.

Though rather than just speaking hypothetically about how this could play out, let’s discuss a concrete example of how this has played out, at least in one particular subject.

2

Scientific Consensus Gone Awry, a Case Study

The subject in question is photorespiration. So what is photorespiration? Well, first, since we’re being careful to distinguish between different forms of experience, we should note that there is a difference between the word, photorespiration, and what this word represents.

The core phenomenon of photorespiration, what the word represents, consists of a set of plant activities and processes. These are related to photosynthesis and to how sunlight, water, gases, and minerals are transformed in a plant’s body as it grows and lives. As best scientists have found, these activities and processes exist in every species of plant, and if they are forcibly deactivated (by knocking out particular genes), the plant cannot grow. One distinguishing feature of photorespiration as opposed to photosynthesis is that the plant produces carbon dioxide as a byproduct, rather than oxygen.

So ignoring for a moment questions like, how exactly is photorespiration related to photosynthesis?, what are its distinguishing characteristics? or "what is it used for?", we could already comment that there is a tangible reality to photorespiration, one that exists in individual plants, and that this tangible reality would exist regardless of whether we as humans had ever assigned a name to it. But also that when a scientist attempts to observe this process, it takes on an additional tangible reality, such as the readouts of a measuring device or the thoughts and feelings of the observing scientist.

With this in mind, let’s return to the word. Photo is Greek for light and respiration comes from the Latin respirare, to breathe out, so the word means to breathe out light. Also, even though as we just discussed what goes on in plants would have a tangible reality to it regardless of whether we ever measured it, or ever spoke about it, the words we create and the names we give do nevertheless create additional tangible realities. A word, for example, can become ink on a page, pixels on a screen, or sound waves in the air.

But importantly, these additional tangible realities do not, at least generally speaking, change the nature of the phenomena which they describe. Our talking about photorespiration, for example, does not change how photorespiration works. It can be worthwhile, then, to distinguish substance realities, the independent happenings of any phenomenon, from the language realities