Unifying the 'Hard' and the 'Soft'

"Even the hardest tempered sword,
against water, is of no avail"

Lao Tsu - Stan Rosenthal Translation chapter 4 excerpt

In my previous post with the help of Lee Smolin I documented some of the the amazing progress we have made in the hardest of the 'hard' sciences known as physics. Finding a unity between seemingly separate and distinct things was shown to be a common theme underlying these great discoveries.

Similar progress has taken place across the sciences in chemistry, biology, neuroscience, medicine, psychology etc..... As we have increased our access to information our knowledge has become more precise within these fields. At the same time these fields have become more distinct and our knowledge base in some ways now contains more separation than ever before. Sub-special fields across disciplines like evolutionary psychololgy, neuro-psychology, and behavioral economics have emerged, and while these fields try to fit one within another they do not ask or answer questions like:

 'what is common across all these fields'? or 'how might we better unify our knowledge under a larger umberlla'?

There are political pressures in fact to take an approach that will widen these knowlege gaps between the 'hard' sciences the 'softer' sciences, not to mention philosophy, and the arts.

Anthropologist Scott Atran  in this article at the huffingtongton post details some of these political pressures.

"In a major speech last month, Eric Cantor, the U.S. House majority leader, proposed outright to defund political and social science."

Here, Atran gives his view on this issue:

"social science is in fact moving the "hard" sciences forward. For example, recent research based on social science modeling of cancer cells as cooperative agents in competition with communities of healthy cells holds the promise of more effective cancer treatment. Those who would defund social science seriously misconstrue the relationship between the wide-ranging freedom of scientific research and its ability to unlock the deeper organizing principles linking seemingly unrelated phenomena."

 Physics had historically been considered a 'hard' science for dealing with the concrete objective facts of the physical world. This afforded more precision and mathematical rigor than the subjective content of a field like psychology. We now know however that the fundamental physical nature of the world is not so concrete afterall. Ironically it also turns out that our least concrete problem has come to be known as the 'hard' problem of consciousness.

Despite the challenges there has been some brilliant work in recent years attempting to identify these deeper organizing principles to help unify the hard and soft sciences. This work has been conducted by a relatively small group of researchers with transdisciplanary backrounds including Robert Logan, Stuart Kaufman, Terrence Deacon, Joseph Brenner, and others. In this post I am going to focus on the work of Joseph Brenner. Much of this work has common to it attempts to unify a theory of information that includes the idea of emergence.

Brenner (heavily influenced by Stefane Lupasco) has developed a new type of logic he calls 'Logic in Reality'. Classical logic depends on distinct true/false propositions. Brenner feels however that the natural world being a contiuous relational process does not fit this model of absolute distinctions. Interestingly Brenner's 'Logic in Realty' formalizes some concepts that have been around for a long time, yet have not been prevalent in modern western science or philosophy. One concept central to Brenner's logic is non-separability as he describes here:

"Non-Separability underlies all other metaphysical and phenomenal dualities , such as cause and effect, determinism and indeterminism, subject and object, continuity and discontinuity, and so on. I thus claim that non-separability at the macroscopic level, like that being explored at the quantum level, provides a principle of organization or structure in macroscopic phenomena that has been neglected in science and philosophy."

Those familiar with eastern philosophies like Taoism and Buddhism will also recognize non-separability as a central theme. Brenner continues outling the core concepts of his 'new' logic here:

" 1) every real complex process is accompanied, logically and functionally, by its opposite or contradiction (principle of dynamic opposition), but only in the sense that when one element is (predominantly) present or actualized, the other is (predominantly) absent or potentialized, alternately and reciprocally, without either ever going to zero; and  

 2) the emergence of a new entity at a higher level of reality or complexity can take place at the point of equilibrium or maximum interaction between the two."

 The principle of dynamic opposition (PDO) is another way of describing the complementary opposition represented in yin/yang diagram from taoist philosophy below. In the diagram the black and white fish complement each other, as it is through thier opposition that the circle is completed. 



Image credit www.clker.com



In addition the black dot in the white fish, and the white dot in the black fish indicate that there is always some yin within yang, or some yang within the yin. This corresponds with Brenners PDO ( ' when one element is (predominantly) present or actualized, the other is (predominantly) absent or potentialized, alternately and reciprocally, without either ever going to zero'.)

The 2nd bullet is also key to Brenners logic and relates to the controversial yet fascinating topic of emergence. Emergence refers to the idea that when parts, or processes come together they take on qualities or properties that could not be predicted by the individual parts on thier own. For example hydrogen and oxygen do not suggest the property of 'wetness' until H2O molecules form. The phase transitions of water in relation to temperature also represent the emrgence of new properties. Whether it is in the  'predominantly actualized' physical world or the 'predominantly potentialized' non-physical world, conflict is an unavoidable non-separable part of nature. When the maximum interaction between opposing processes creates a larger equilibriun new properties emerge. This is how conflict, opposition, and diversity can be shown as necessary conditions and when resolved unity can emerge.


Brenner's logic suggests that non-separability, the principle of dynamic opposition and emergence are more than just interesting metaphors. He feels these concepts underly all change, and that if we are to attempt to bring a naturalized logic, science and philosophy together they must be taken seriously.

A couple weeks ago I responed to a friends facebook post. The post had suggested that we attract into our life like magnet what is in harmony with our dominant thoughts. I expanded on that idea with this comment (which I post here at the risk of being self-referential).

"We absorb, and we reflect, we attract and we repel. What is reflected depends on what is not absorbed. We see a blue shirt as blue because the shirt absorbs all colors other than blue and reflects only blue. The thoughts we project are similarly a reflection of what we fail to absorb. We are attracted to what we project and repelled by what we fail to absorb."

My comment took the real physical phenomena of how we process the reflection of light as information to see color, and turned it into a metaphor for how we recieve, seek  and project mental information. While my metaphor may have contained some insight it was less than rigorous and incomplete.

It is the case that within the visible light spectrum we see color based on what is not abosrbed by objects. The molecular structure of a black shirt will absorb all visible light and reflect none so we see black. We have no choice in this  process, information processing at this level is involuntary and unconscious. The light that is absorbed by the shirt will be converted into heat.  

At the conscious level however new properties emerge. Information processing at the conscious level contains a potential that was unavailable at lower levels. Brenner would say that information in the physical realm is 'predomonently actualized' while cognitive information can be 'predominantly potentialized'. What we fail to cognitively absorb initially and what we project no longer need always be the same. We can reflect on what we initially failed to absorb, and can at least in principle direct our reflection inwardly before projecting outwardly. This process however requires an awareness and acceptance of the principle of dynamic opposition.

Brenner describes his logic (LIR) as being amenable to contradiction and inconsistency:

"LIR has no difficulty in dealing with inconsistency, interpreting it as a natural consequence of the underlying principle of dynamic opposition in physical reality. Many if not most of the problems in the (endless) debate about the nature of change, as pointed out by Mortensen (2008), seem to require a fundamental inconsistency in the world,which LIR naturalizes. LIR, then, is an information system that is not “brittle, like a classical logic system,” in the presence of an inconsistency. Inconsistency in the former is not only not as destructive as in the latter but is also accepted as  an essential part of its ontology."

Reflexively we are attracted to information that confirms the prior knowledge we have already absorbed. When we come  across novel information that contradicts or is inconsistent with our prior beliefs we tend to repel it. This sense of repulsion however may be a clue that our prior knowledge ( which is always incomplete ) is being provided with an opportunity to resolve a contradiction. The degree of interaction between our awareness of what we have absorbed, and our curiosity to unify what remains unresolved will determine what emerges. This process underlies what we receive and what we project.



"Only the soft overcomes the hard,
by yielding, bringing it to peace.
Even where there is no space,
that which has no substance enters in."

Lao Tsu - Stan Rosenthal Translation chapter 43 excerpt