Synthesis …

Three Cultures

Richard Schutte

10 min readMay 21, 2020

synthesis

/ˈsɪnθɪsɪs/

the combination of components or elements to form a connected whole

“To develop a complete mind: study the science of art; study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realise that everything connects to everything else”…
— Leonardo da Vinci : 1452–1519

Charles Darwin [1] an English naturalist, geologist and biologist published in 1859 his book — On the Origin of Species [2] — which by the 1870s had been widely accepted by the scientific community and a majority of the educated public as new knowledge — a theory for the evolution of species.

Until that time the word Science(s) were largely viewed as reliable, official knowledge — for example — theology and philosophy were forms of Science.

However, by the 1870s a fracture began to emerge between the rational and experimental enquiry into nature — a redefined version of the Sciences — and — the Literary and Artistic production — the Arts [3].

The breakthroughs in the nature of new knowledge via astronomy, energy, physics, geology and evolutionary biology gave this “new” form Science the currency via its utility and prestige to challenge the established paradigm.

This reconstituted form Science had now justified its right to control natural resources — social (e.g. education), economic and political — and reshape Nations to embrace the opportunities presented by the Industrial Revolution[4].

By 1880 this distinction was further augmented when Thomas Huxley[5] — an English biologist and anthropologist and a follower of Charles Darwin — colloquially known as “Darwins bulldog” — gave a lecture at the new Birmingham Science College on the theme “Science and Culture”[6].

“in 1952, F.A. Hayek wrote what became The Counter-Revolution of Science. The idea is that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a new conception of science was born, which reversed a previous understanding. Science was not a process of discovery by research but a codified end state known and understood only by an elite. This elite would impose its view on everyone else. Hayek called this “the abuse of reason” because genuine reason defers to uncertainty and discovery while scientism as an ideology is arrogant and imagines it knows what is unknown”…
— The Intellectual Roots of Techno-Primitivism: https://brownstone.org/articles/the-intellectual-roots-of-techno-primitivism/

His lecture claimed the right of Sciences over Culture and he illustrated this through the practical tangible economic, industrial utility value and benefits of Science.

For well trained people to judge what was true and false he argued they should learn the Sciences and embrace the Scientific Method[7].

He specifically mentioned English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold[8] as the spokesperson for the alternative — a literary culture.

Arnold vehemently responed to Huxley and in an 1882 essay on the questionable value of such scientific training unless one was to seek a career as a professional Scientist.

To cultivate a critical spirit — the aim of culture & education — he believed we had to educate the young in the principles of criticism, through Literature and the Arts.

Despite this counter narrative, the emergent utilitarian powers of this new form of Science were so compelling it gave rise to a scientific naturalism[9] where all other forms of knowledge such as Theology and Philosophy began to be increasingly subordinated.

Clocks and Clouds …

richardschutte.medium.com

“ For one of the things which almost everybody thought had been established by the Newtonian revolution was the following staggering proposition:
“All clouds are clocks-even the most cloudy of clouds” …
- Karl Popper

It culminated in a 1905 manifesto , a book titled Modern Utopia[10] by English writer HG Wells[11] where a voluntary order of nobility known as The Samurai oversaw a “kinetic” world — a powerful vision for a future anchored in a Scientific Technocracy[12] .

A world where technologists and scientists ruled.

Where modernity was reliant on scientific culture.

The underlying ideological divisions between the Sciences and the Arts came to the surface once again during the mid 20th Century following a lecture by English novelist, physical chemist — CP Snow[13].

The two cultures and the scientific revolution[14] was delivered as the Rede Lecture at Cambridge University in May 1959.

The two cultures being the “natural scientists” and the “literary intellectuals”.

Given his unique background as a a scientist and also a novelist Snow argued there was a “gulf of mutual incomprehension” between these two cultures with each group standing for different values.

“If scientists have the future in their bones, then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist”…

It was a “call for action” for Scientists to apply themselves to solving the big problems of our world.

He argued that the application of Science and Technology provided our best hope for meeting our human needs and bridge the “gulf of ignorance” from groups such as the “literary intellectuals” who where “natural luddites”.

Just like when Matthew Arnold in 1882 responded to Thomas Huxley, another Cambridge scholar, the literary critic Frank Leavis, delivered a Lecture launching a vicious attack on Snow’s thesis.

It was these matters of reputation — Snow’s standing as a cultural authority as much as the content — that Leavis addressed[15].

“In our interconnected world, we must learn to feel enlarged, not threatened, by difference — that is what I have argued.”
— Jonathan Sacks

The emergence of Cybernetics

At around the same time as this discussion of the Two Cultures was occurring in the UK, a group of people from a diverse range of backgrounds were coming together in the United States.

The Josiah Macy, Jr. Philanthropic Foundation sponsored a series of conferences[16] between 1946 and 1953, aiming to bring together an interdisciplinary community of scholars and researchers who would collaborate to lay the foundations for a new type of Science known as Cybernetics[17].

Cybernetics being a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems — their structures, constraints and possibilities.

American mathematician and philsopher Prof. Norbert Wiener [18] in 1948 defined cybernetics as :

“the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine.”
- In other words, it is the scientific study of how humans, animals and machines control and communicate with each other.

These conferences represented a landmark breakthrough in how we make sense of our complex and interdependent world and it was really symbolic of the broader innovation occurring in Information Theory and Computer Science— the dawn of the Knowledge Age [19].

“Sometimes, great discoveries aren’t about finding something no one has seen before — but about finding a different way to see what is in front of everyones eyes”…[20]
— Francois Chollet

A step beyond the binary classical approach of simply looking at the Two Cultures separately.

A shift to a state of Quantum Entanglement [21] & Complexity[22].
A new form of scientific study of the control and communication in living systems and computational machines.
A new way of thinking of causal chains and how the feedback loops taking place in these systems change the system itself[23].
A new field and domain where new terms were introduced in systems and complexity thinking and the emergent information and computational sciences [24].
Ideas as applicable to biological living systems, economy, innovation, computational machines and cognition[25].

The concepts that emerged have come to influence and shape the thinking in many fields, including biology, neurology, sociology, ecology, economics, politics, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and computer science.

In Wiener’s 1950 book — The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society [26]— he specifically explored the limits of communication within and among individuals, ways in which Humans & Machines could cooperate with the potential to amplify Human Power — a 1950s prescient version of Collective Intelligence [27]— Humans and Ai — and ways in which these machines could relieve the banality of some day to day work in favour of pursuing Knowledge Work and the Arts.

He also highlighted the risks that these Machines could pose to Society if such technology were dehumanising[28] or subordinating.

Importantly, he outlined the importance of Sensesemaking[29] and Collective Sensemaking[30] — how these Information Systems, Communication and Control are inextricably linked.

A quote:

Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. The needs and the complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our libraries and textbooks, are obliged to meet the needs of this process or fail in their purpose. To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.

In so many ways this quote was prescient in predicting the significant advances to occur in Cognition (Simplicity Theory), Neuroscience (Free Energy Principle), decision making under uncertainty (OODA Loop, Theory of Reflexivity), Theoretical Evolutionary Biology (The Adjacent Possible) and Intelligence (Embodied, Ai etc…) that were to occur over the next half century as the concepts of Cybernetics were to applied to the nature of Reality and how living systems evolve and navigate the Complexity and Uncertainty (minimise Entropy) of our World.

A shift from a reductionist form of being to one that recognised our agency and interdependencies.
A shift to Liquid Brains[31] and the Knowledge Age…

In 1962 the great grand son of Thomas Huxley , English Philosopher and Writer Aldous Huxley was interviewed and shared his aspirations on bringing the cultures of the East & West together, and the more immediate debate in the West fuelled by CP Snow’s Lecture — the division between the Arts & Science — the Two Cultures.

A quote from the interview: —

“I feel that he has rather over simplified the situation… He speaks as though there was nothing between the Bloomsbury Drawing Room and the pure physics conversation of the Dons at Cambridge College — but there are lots of things in between — the historians , sociologists, the anthropologists who are in a Scientific way trying to think of Human Affairs —and in this sense there is a bridge between the 2 Cultures”[32]….

A similar observation to contemporary American Evolutionary Biologist and President and Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute — Prof. David Krakauer [33] who describes this new form of discovery (an Expression of Reality) sitting between the Incompressible Randomness and the Compressible Regularity of our Reality.