Brain Maps, Icons & Indices, THE END.
"So anyway, like I was saying" is part introduction, part resignation concerning a debate I've addressed obliquely but hope to illustrate a little more bluntly here. But I've resisted roughhandling it so far, this little argument, because roughness begets dichotomous, angsty things I want nothing to do with, no way. I don't want to see this intricate argument turned out and pried apart. And I certainly don't want to see it solved. Some things, particularly this sort of debate, lose to the wastes of resolution what made them meaningful all along: an ability to exist outside strict categorization, to remain unnamed.
But to keep an air of inscrutability about this business, I won't yet address this thing directly. Indirectness and uncertainty -- in fiction, these often lead to revelation of identity and knowledge. There's Box Man, the narrator of Kobo Abe's The Box Man, who lives and moves about Tokyo in a cardboard box he outfitted with one-way windows and little air holes and hooks. A chapter near the end is titled "In His Dream the Box Man Takes His Box Off. Is This the Dream He Had Before He Began Living in a Box or Is It the Dream of His Life After He Left It...?" Ambiguous 'its'...ambiguity abounds. So too in Virginia Woolf's Orlando, where "box" is physical appearance and literature the frame for the contexts Orlando's many guises suggest. That unity can be achieved via opposition and divisibility is the idea that disguise and change make clear, especially in something like Dhalgren, an ode to mutability and who-the-hell-am-I meanderings that arrive by departure from any pretense to a coherent story. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the same people keep appearing as different people, and in this time-bound cycle there's the sense that while individual crusades will fail, the answers each is after are somehow contained in an overarching and messy and glorious thrust toward...who knows. It contains that answer, too.
It's in this light I want to suggest that science relies on metaphor -- whether admittedly or not -- whenever it makes claims about the outcome of experiment. A recent article illustrates this nicely with its suggestion that we'll soon be able to experiment on simulations of bacteria rather than on bacteria itself (itsselves?). The reason? We already know all there is to know about bacteria -- it's a closed system, so modeling it is less complicated than modeling something like the brain, about which much is still unknown. As the article suggests, models are becoming experimental subjects, proving valid at least one instance of the annoying postmodern claim that science really just ends up investigating its own constructs. That aside, what give me hope is the fact that the human brain, the unknown that it is, allows debates like this one to sprawl and mutate and get absolutely no closer to resolution on this coordinated thrust toward who the hell knows. Where it's headed doesn't so much matter, does it?
But to keep an air of inscrutability about this business, I won't yet address this thing directly. Indirectness and uncertainty -- in fiction, these often lead to revelation of identity and knowledge. There's Box Man, the narrator of Kobo Abe's The Box Man, who lives and moves about Tokyo in a cardboard box he outfitted with one-way windows and little air holes and hooks. A chapter near the end is titled "In His Dream the Box Man Takes His Box Off. Is This the Dream He Had Before He Began Living in a Box or Is It the Dream of His Life After He Left It...?" Ambiguous 'its'...ambiguity abounds. So too in Virginia Woolf's Orlando, where "box" is physical appearance and literature the frame for the contexts Orlando's many guises suggest. That unity can be achieved via opposition and divisibility is the idea that disguise and change make clear, especially in something like Dhalgren, an ode to mutability and who-the-hell-am-I meanderings that arrive by departure from any pretense to a coherent story. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the same people keep appearing as different people, and in this time-bound cycle there's the sense that while individual crusades will fail, the answers each is after are somehow contained in an overarching and messy and glorious thrust toward...who knows. It contains that answer, too.
It's in this light I want to suggest that science relies on metaphor -- whether admittedly or not -- whenever it makes claims about the outcome of experiment. A recent article illustrates this nicely with its suggestion that we'll soon be able to experiment on simulations of bacteria rather than on bacteria itself (itsselves?). The reason? We already know all there is to know about bacteria -- it's a closed system, so modeling it is less complicated than modeling something like the brain, about which much is still unknown. As the article suggests, models are becoming experimental subjects, proving valid at least one instance of the annoying postmodern claim that science really just ends up investigating its own constructs. That aside, what give me hope is the fact that the human brain, the unknown that it is, allows debates like this one to sprawl and mutate and get absolutely no closer to resolution on this coordinated thrust toward who the hell knows. Where it's headed doesn't so much matter, does it?
posted by evelyn at 8:17 PM
3 Comments:
Instead of dumbing this down for the layperson by stating it in the most direct language and simple unconvoluted sentences possible, perhaps you could expand on this a little in a manner that befits a more advanced readership.
Oh no! Really, I didn't intend to dumb anything down. Really. In fact, I was trying to do something like the opposite...to avoid giving the impression that there's a simple answer, and that I know the answer. But I'll try to summarize more clearly what I was trying to say: a common (possibly stereotypical) view of science is that it aims to find truths in nature that are just out there to be found, and that over time science gets more precise and closer to those truths. There's another view: that those truths aren't out there, but that science "invents" them by just by looking for them in a certain way. To qualify this, I think a middle ground would be to say that science is a tool that gets more precise. But as a tool, what're our goals for it? How is it being used? And how does being really precise affect accuracy? And by that I mean, we might get really good at taking measurements and storing data, but are we getting better at looking at the *right things? What are the right things anyway?
Perhaps this isn't any more clear, but heck, I don't have the knowledge to be any more clear.
I was just giving you a hard time, kind of being a smart@#$. You have 100000 times the knowledge that I do about science. That side of my brain doesn't work, I can barely add 2 + 2 and get the same answer consistantly.
Your argument borders on a metaphysical line of thought that pretty much parallel Nietszchian theories on the nature of atheism/agnosticism/religiousity and also questions of whether there is really a meaning to life. Can we ever really know all there is to know? can we ever really prove God? Doesn't all science ultimately exist to prove or disprove the existence of the divine? Does science just serve to perpetuate itself by validating it's own existance?
P.S. I found your blog a while ago by doing a search of local skydiving sites, and loved your description of it.
Then you started in on the deep scientific theory and it fascinated me because I do not/can not exist in that world due to a lack of logical thought in my own cortextual processes.
YOU'RE MY LITERARY HERO because your sentence structure is crazy complicated, possibly achieving a world record in use of parenthesis and elliptical structures. I strive towards such convoluted sentence wizardry, but my motives are more along the lines of bugging the hell out of my readers, with whom I have a severe love/hate relationship.
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