Intertwined Themes: Science, and Coherence, Integrity, or Harmony

It eventually became clear to me that I really cared about the question "What is this thing, or process, called 'science'?". What distinguishes this mode of thought, or of investigation, that constantly leads to such drastic changes in the way we live? Its power is unquestionable, whether for good or not.

((Digression: I hesitate whether to say science leads to "improvements". Can we agree that science and technology leads to greater power? Greater ability to do what we set out to do? Well, it is reasonable to claim that technology in my own hands always increases my power, or potential happiness, or something like that. But technology in someone else's hands may also, clearly, render me powerless. And I think this only scratches the surface of what is problematic about characterizing as good or bad, the effects of science and technology. A problem with the statement "Technology in my own hands always increases my power." is what I might call "universal human schizophrenia". Technology in the hands of one impulse may enslave other aspects of myself. Using the "power" of chemistry, I may become a drug addict, or I may become, using some other technology, a "victim" of some other addictive or obsessive behavior.

Why do {individuals and communities} so often not do what's "right for them"; especially, why do we "misuse" new powers? What is to be done about it?

The answer might be that we need to achieve integrity or coherence to reduce or eliminate such risks of self-sabotage. Well, that is a tough nut to crack.

It is a very elusive thing, this harmonizing of ones being, which, I consider just another way to view the "achievement of integrity or coherence". This thing, or a generalization of it (so as to also include working out a harmony within a community -- as small as 2 or as large as the world) is perhaps the main thing in the world that excites me.

Some related concepts and problems/questions:

• dance -- most obviously the sort of non-touching dancing that became the fashion when I was growing up. No one is "leading".
• jazz -- obviously a sort of community improvisation and harmonization.
• the concept of the Trinity, which the enlightenment influenced Unitarians found so repugnant, could be seen as a prototype for our simultaneously multiple and unified natures.
• the interplay of democracy and freedom.
• What makes for a high functioning (or conversely low functioning) organizational structure? C.f. the book In Search of Excellence. Why, for instance, is there so much self sabotage in so many companies?
• The "invisible hand" of economic society. Largely the basis of 18th century liberalism, or 20th century libertarianism. I believe there is much truth in the concept, and a good bit of wishful thinking.

   ((One important aspect of Laissez Faire is just the attractive idea, which many people very much need to add to their mental tool kit, that the best thing to do may be to do nothing. Something like the nursery rhyme: "Leave them alone, and they'll come home, dragging their tails behind them." I gathered from Stilwell and the American Experience in China that this was considered by such as Chiang Kai Shek, to be a major piece of "oriental wisdom". I think it is a sort of wisdom -- in the sense, as I said before, that you need to have this in your "mental tool kit", and some people tend to totally miss situations in which doing nothing is the thing to do. In Stilwell... though, Chiang furnished a great example of someone seeming mad with this one idea -- being like the man with only a hammer, to whom the "whole world looks like a nail". The idea of the wisdom of doing nothing, is expressed in Chinese, I think, as Wu Wei))
   What am I trying to say here? Well, the phrase Laissez Faire seems to me to express nothing more, nor less, than Wu Wei. I say the phrase Laissez Faire; I'm aware that it stands for something more complicated. But the attractiveness of that "something more complicated" owes much to that general, very deep, piece of human wisdom: Wu Wei.
    But what do I think about that "more complicated" thing? Too hard a question to attempt to do justice to now (if ever), but one thing I think is that it often does work admirably; and on the other hand it sometimes works very badly, and how well it works can vary radically with circumstances.
• What sort of institutional structures promote the growth of useful knowledge? C.f. Boorstin's The Discoverers, and Transactions of the Royal Philosophical Society, and my notion of Tending the Knowledge Garden.
• Another cut at the previous item: Ideas do not act like solid objects. What is the best economic system for ideas? Questioning the ownership of ideas, and what it should look like. It is, to begin with, a pure governmental construction, whereas ownership of things is modeled on something a bit more natural and organic.
• Changes in the spread, and nature, of community knowledge brought about by the advance of communication technology, from speech, to writing, to printing, to cheaper forms of printing with greater output (such as the cylindrical, steam driven presses that emerged in the 1830s and 40s) to ... to the Internet.
End of the long digression)).

One great irony of which I've recently become aware: Probably the most powerful tendency in 17th-century scientific thought was the admonition to refrain from drawing conclusions from premises via logic -- to refrain from speculative (or to oversimplify it in a popular way: deductive) thinking, and instead consult the "book of nature", and build knowledge from the ground up (or inductively) out of discrete observations (including controlled experiments). The irony is that the crowning achievement of the era was a new piece of speculative apparatus, namely Newton's mathematization of laws of movement of objects. It can be illustrated by the statement some 18th century person made (sorry, I need to research who said it when) that of course there could never be another Newton because there was "only one universe to discover".