Subjectivity vs Objectivity

Enhancing the Quality of Knowing through Integration of East-West metaphors (Part #17)

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Western-style science has developed through an emphasis on objectivity. The limitations of this assumption for science have been widely reported in the case of the role of the observer in fundamental physics. But these exceptions to objectivity have essentially been marginalized to ensure that the role of the observer is minimized wherever possible. An interesting discussion of the relationship is provided by Max Deutscher (Subjecting and Objecting, 1983)

It is possible that eastern-style science may offer subtler ways of handling this relationship; 'science' may be reframed more inclusively as 'psience' to encompass challenges of differential comprehension and cultural variation. Ironically they have the same pronunciation. Hermann Hesse's Nobel Prize winning Glass Bead Game usefully contrasts, as a complementarity of playing styles, what are effectively the western and eastern approaches to the game of globalizing knowledge:

'In the formal Game the player sought to compose out of the objective content of every game, out of the mathematical, linguistic, musical, and other elements, as dense, coherent, and formally perfect a unity and harmony as possible. In the psychological Game, on the other hand, the object was to create unity and harmony, cosmic roundedness and perfection, not so much in the choice, arrangement, interweaving, association, and contrast of the content as in the meditation which followed every stage of the Game....The Game encompasses the player after the completion of meditation as the surface of a sphere encompasses its center, and leaves him with the feeling that he has extracted from the universe of accident and confusion a totally symmetric and harmonious cosmos, and absorbed it into himself.' (p. 197, 1943, 1969) [NB: there are numerous web-based initiatives, of highly variable quality, to emulate the Game]

The received wisdom amongst western researchers is that reasoning operates according to rational, logical, formal rules. However Philip Johnson-Laird (1998) has demonstrated that although people can reason in this way, they do not usually do so. Instead they take various short cuts in the light of mental models that they have constructed and that make people vulnerable to falsity or counterfactual alternatives -- that people generate with great regularity, according to his collaborator Ruth Byrne. Although these alternatives may be at the root of creativity, she argues that what we seem to find more difficult is creating counterfactual alternatives that are unlike the ones that everyone else creates.

The I Ching (like the Kama Sutra) provides an interesting coding system to structure inquiry into the range of possible relationships between knower and known, between the worker and the field. Its 64 hexagrams may in fact be used to represent 64 possible variants of the subjectivity/objectivity relationship -- from extremes of objectivity (yang) to extremes of subjectivity (yin) -- and the nature of the transformations between them.

Such an inquiry could be extremely valuable to reframe the extremes of polarization associated with attitudes to property and especially territory, whether in physical or knowledge space. This would be highly relevant to recognition of the attitude of indigenous peoples to their land and to the embedding of their cultural knowledge in the environment -- and relating the variants of this understanding to the objective extremes of western-style property rights. An attempt at such an exploration has been made elsewhere (see Discovering Richer Patterns of Comprehension to Reframe Polarization, 1998). It is somewhat ironic that it is precisely such cognitive reframing that may be vital to more fruitful approaches to the vexatious issues of intellectual copyright -- currently constrained by the simplest of polarizations, based on excluded-middle logic, and embodied in law.

Integration of subjective dimensions may help to reframe many 'external' social issues in terms of their psychological roots -- consistent with the emphases of many eastern and indigenous belief systems. Understanding of seemingly external collective issues, such as disease, unemployment, insecurity, malnutrition and injustice, may be explored in the light of individual psychological coherence, boredom, vulnerability, malnourishment and prejudice respectively (see discussion) and of Buddhist notions of dependent co-arising (see). This may be especially fruitful in identifying alternatives for remedial action -- if the focus is on personal moment-by-moment significance, rather than safely projected onto western-style psychological studies without any temporal focus or personal self-reference. A major initiative in this respect is the work of R G H Siu on Panetics (1994), following his taoistic investigation of science (1974). There is also the intriguing possibility that the associated patterns of 'values' and 'virtues' (so extensively articulated in eastern belief systems) may in fact encode attitudinal control 'mechanisms' (and traps) for the effective navigation of knowledge spaces (Techniques of navigation: virtues and vices, 1998)

There is a relationship between comprehensive integrative insight and 'global' (as discussed above), much explored within eastern cultures, that might be contrasted with western-style scientific exploration. It might be summarized by Maria M. Colavito (The New Theogony, 1992) in her discussion of two models of creation in culture as the Models of the One and of the Zero. The One functions by division, the Zero by addition:

"The model of creation by the One is the aural model. This model produces mythology, geometry, alchemy, polytheism, music, mysticism and enlightenment through revelation. The model of creation by Zero is the literary model, It is responsible for theology, algebra, biology, monotheism, visual art, asceticism and knowledge through the appropriation of data. Humanity needs both models. Our modern culture has focused on the skills necessary to produce only the latter model. A simple journey through history reveals that this struggle between these two world views is not new." (p. 19)

Commenting on this, Antonio de Nicolas (1989), sees this as the problem: the One does not know by its own skills. It is only in the model of the Zero that knowledge comes forth with its language of substances. Now the question arises what is the function of the One? Creation, of course. And how does this take place? From the Rg Veda, through the Gita, the "skills" of the One as model are the skills to open the heart and consequently the frontal lobes, to be able to make decisions for oneself and the culture in every situation. On the other hand, the skills of the Zero model, develop the neocortex only and close the entrance to the frontal lobes: wise decisions are difficult and the best solution is the "monoculture" or as it is called the uniform global culture.

The contrast might be caricatured by that between the knowledge associated with a coherent 'sense of place' and that associated with the need to travel the globe in order to be a global traveller -- adding zeros to frequent flyer mileage! It is the former insight which offers the collective self-discipline for the containment of overpopulation; it is the latter which guarantees further population explosion and unsustainable growth. In the former case the search for identity is always elsewhere, requiring progress in terms of the arrow metaphor. In the latter case identity is defined by interlocking (great) cycles defining asphere -- whose circumferences may each be composed of a sequence of many individual arrows. This raises the question of the relevance of eastern insights into 'non-action' with respect to challenges to modern society (see discussion). How is the coherence of a sense of place to be understood?

There is the intriguing possibility that the complexity and subtlety of explanation of objective phenomena may be severely constrained by the capacity of human cognitive capacity. The development of science may, to a significant degree, be about the development of that capacity through use of externalities as challenges that require better explanations. But as artefacts of the human mind this tool kit of meaningful patterns is necessarily limited and every effort is made to use one of these tools on new phenomena before making any effort to develop new ones. To some degree, therefore, understanding of cosmology or fundamental physics may be as much about what forms human knowledge can credibly take -- hence the value of metaphor and 're-reading'. The satisfactory quality of any explanation may be due to some kind of 'fit' with human cognitive organization. In an important sense the properties attributed to astrophysical or nuclear phenomena may derive their structure from innate cognitive abilities concerning acceptable patterns through which things can be meaningfully organized. Science in this sense is as much about eliciting a subjective sense of organization as discovering organization of objective phenomena. The intimacy of these relationships may prove more amenable to eastern-style science.

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