6.7 Does Science Reveal or only Model Reality?

Some critics of science argue that it can't teach us about "ultimate reality" or show us "thing in themselves", the absolute nature of all things. Instead it can offer only a thin, limited, and truncated view of a wider reality. We can only be aware of our sensations (phenomena), but the objects behind these sensations (the noumena, if they actually exist) will forever be beyond our reach. Some claim that access to the "true nature" of things is only through other means - revelation, mysticism, emotion, faith, social movements, drugs, etc. They claim that their epistemologies teach deeper and more fundamental truths than those imparted by a rational and empirical study of the world. Whether the source is the Holy spirit, religious ecstasy, Nirvana, Enlightenment, LSD experimentation, or Cosmic Consciousness, members of these groups each say they have personal, deep, and moving direct experiences of what they believe is some kind of Truth or "Ultimate Reality". They believe that this reality underlies that everyday common reality which is available to the senses. We can stipulate that reality, itself, is not mind-dependent. But, by definition, our perceptions of it are. For this reason, we are forever separated from the world as it really is, because we are limited to know only our perceptions of it, the phenomena we experience. Though we can never really know "ultimate reality" (whatever that actually means) directly, and are limited to what our experience and perception give us, we can at least know that, somehow, “things in themselves” really do exist “out there”. “Things in themselves” exist wholly outside our experience, and all we can say is that they exist. William Blake wrote,

”If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite".

This is an expression of this transcendental sentiment. No doubt people are having intense and moving spiritual experiences. They are certain they really are in communication with some fundamental essence that escapes us in our normal daily pursuits. For many, these experiences define their being and their humanness. They can feel as real or even more real than any other experience. However, there are several problems with the claims these people make.

First, each of these types of claims can't be shown to be anything other than personal mind-altered experiences. In fact, there is strong evidence that that is exactly what they are. Recent revelations in neuroscience demonstrate that the mind can deceive itself in strange and wonderful ways. This deception can be triggered by drugs, electrical stimulation, sensory deprivation, the power of suggestion, schizophrenia, dissociative disorder, hormonal imbalances, disease, tumors, emotional stress, seizures, brain injury, social influence, and bio-chemical malfunctions. Brain researchers can induce comas, trances, out-of-body experiences, false memories, anger, pain, joy, ecstasy, and a host of other cognitive/emotional experiences that appear utterly real and meaningful to the patient. Neuroscientists have identified brain regions that are responsible for making us feel as if we are in our bodies and that we are separate from the universe around us. If these regions are disrupted, it will result in a sensation of floating outside one’s body, or perhaps a sensation of being one with nature, or the universe, or some higher power. A strong feeling of God's presence, seeing into past lives, interacting with alien races, or experiencing the seeming unity of all things is a psychological/neurological experience - not an objective one. But, these experiences are still valuable to the person having them, and are probably quite important in the evolution and maturing of individual human consciousnesses. Simply naming a human experience doesn't explain it, nor does explaining it make it vanish. But understanding it for the neurological and psychological event that it is helps put it in context and aids in making sense of it in relation to other, similar phenomena that we do understand. Realizing that a person in the throes of religious fervor at a tent revival is participating in mass hysteria instead of actually talking to God is instructive, but it does nothing to reduce or dampen the experience of the participant. It does, however, bring the event back down to Earth.

Second, to say that science doesn't achieve a goal it sets out for itself - showing us the "true reality" - is mostly a straw man argument. The assertion that science even attempts to teach this is certainly not shared by all scientists, and in fact, is not even a dominant view. It is true that Scientific "Realists" do think that there is a reality (i.e., actual "things") underlying what science describes and accesses. But a large majority of scientists (if they were even to consider the question) would probably fall into the camp of scientific "Instrumentalists". The Instrumentalists don't concern themselves with philosophical questions of ontology, "being", and ultimate reality. For them, science is just the tool they employ for obtaining knowledge and explaining how the world works. As Stephen Hawking said,

I don't demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don't know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with litmus paper. All I'm concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements.

So, Hawking was of the Richard Feynman school of "shut up and calculate". Instrumentalists in science do not aim at or seek "truth" in a religious or philosophical sense, but look to it as a tool for providing increasingly accurate descriptions of the world. To them, science studies "phenomena", and does not attempt to deal with "Noumena". The term, "phenomenon", came into its modern philosophical usage through Immanuel Kant, who contrasted it with noumenon (for which he used the term "Ding an sich", or "thing-in-itself"). Noumena, in contrast to phenomena, are not directly accessible to observation. For the purpose of this discussion, the Noumena would correspond to that inaccessible ultimate reality.

Not only for instrumentalists, but for most scientists, all that science can really provide us is a descriptive and explanatory model that successfully makes predictions. We don't ever know if we are describing the way the world actually "is", or if we have just come up with a way that we can understand and think about the world in a way that make sense to us. Werner Heisenberg said:

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

The only thing we can really say about any scientific theory or model is how well it make describes, explains, and predicts. We can't take the next step and say that it *is* the way nature really "is". This is true of all of our theories, and probably even more relevant the more abstract the theory is (for example, theories about quantum physics).

There is a lot of discussion about the seemingly uncanny ability of mathematics to describe and predict events in the world. An article written in 1960 by Eugene Wigner called "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" eloquently presented the question about the relationship between mathematics and the physical world. In it he asked how is it that math is so capable of describing things that don't appear to be mathematical entities? It is possible that because Mathematics is an enterprise the purpose of which is to describe and manipulate many types of logically consistent systems, and because our world is one such system, it should be no surprise that there are certain branches of mathematics that can describe (and predict and explain) phenomena in our world. Is our world logically consistent? Of course - if it were not, it would implode in a giant flash of improbability!

Seriously, when our theories contradict each other (such as is the case with the wave/particle theory of light) it is an invitation to further research, not a threat to reality. These apparent internal contradictions are more likely to indicate our inadequate or incomplete physical models rather than an actual incompatibility of reality with itself. Case in point - when James Faraday saw electric current moving a compass needle at right angles to the current, he didn't question the sanity of the universe, but concluded (correctly) that there were new laws yet to be discovered.

But we also have within mathematics many concepts that do not correspond to any real things in our world. In this view, the domain of concepts which mathematics can address includes and goes beyond the world we find ourselves in. A different response, advocated by physicist Max Tegmark, is that physics is so successfully described by mathematics because the physical world is completely mathematical, isomorphic to a mathematical structure, and that we are simply uncovering this bit by bit. In this interpretation, the various approximations that constitute our current physics theories are successful because simple mathematical structures can provide good approximations of certain aspects of more complex mathematical structures. In other words, our successful theories are not mathematics approximating physics, but mathematics approximating mathematics.

Third, the term "ultimate reality" is not even agreed upon by those who use it. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, those who subscribe to the philosophical principle of "Noumena" think that there are "things-in-themselves" that exist beneath the level of common perception or the "phenomena" of the every day world. They believe that what is observed of the world is only a surface description of some deeper reality that humans, perhaps, can't ever access. This view is, and has been, debated since the time of Kant. To assert that there is some fundamental essence that transcends what we observe is a philosophical exercise that is a matter of taste. By definition it can never be measured, because by being so it transforms into the concrete world of phenomena. But simply to say that it exists is not to prove anything. In other words, to ask what exists beneath the observable might not even be a meaningful question. "Ultimate reality" may be a fantastic concept that doesn't refer to any actual part of our universe. This term is carefully crafted to be unapproachable by scientfic inquiry, thus making argument about it somewhat moot, except for the philosophically inclined. However, there is no prospect for near term resolution of any outstanding differences of opinion on it.

Fourth, it is true that science only reports on what it can study, which is the natural world. It discovers facts, looks for patterns among those facts, establishes connections between phenomena, helps us derive theories, and allows us to make useful, correct predictions. It proves itself again and again as the best way to obtain knowledge about the universe. But, simply because it recognizes and acknowledges limits regarding what it can study does not mean that faith, superstition, magic, or revelation can do better. In fact, they all perform quite terribly in this capacity. At most, their primary power is in deceiving their practitioners into believing things that are not true, as history has shown countless times. Undoubtedly, those who subscribe to these intuitive ways of gaining knowledge "feel" that they have gotten in touch with a deeper reality, but there is a tremendous distance between strongly feeling something to be true and that thing actually being true. Simply experiencing the sensation of certainty does not actually make you certain.

Getting back to the supposed failure of science to get at "ultimate reality", which is not one of its goals in the first place, modern philosophers of science who embrace Scientific Realism argue that the theories of science are not perfectly true but only "approximately true". They don't perfectly reflect reality, but do a fair job of it. Approximate truth, which is sometimes called verisimilitude, is indispensable to contemporary scientific realists. If we say the Earth is spherical, or the sun is 93 million miles away, these are approximations. Strictly speaking, they are false statements because they are not exactly right. Yet they are unarguably approximately correct. The models we use are not intended to be exact replicas of reality, but stylized representations that abstract away irrelevant details, but retain the logical form of the reality being modeled - for example, the Ideal Gas Law which views a gas as a continuous fluid, or the frictionless surface in many first year physics textbooks that removes friction from the discussion so that other forces can be examined. So, we could say that Copernicus' heliocentric model is false in the sense that the planets don't circle the sun in perfect circles, but scientific realists argue that it is approximately true, in a way the Ptolemy's geocentric model was not. It is also approximately true that the earth is flat (at least as far away as the horizon), and that Newtonian mechanics is an approximately true theory (at low velocities).

There have been cases where the accepted theory was a good describer and predictor of phenomena, but was not even approximately close to "truth". Examples are the theories involving phlogiston, caloric, ether, and geocentricism. The old sunrise/sunset model that had the sun moving around the earth (i.e., the Ptolemaic model) was not "approximately true", though sunrises could be predicted to the minute using that model. Scientific theories, like all logical models, sometime fail in the attempt to reflect the logical structure of the reality they refer to, while still succeeding in their ability to describe the phenomena and predict future occurrences of the phenomena. But when a theory describes, predicts, and explains, and the model appears to actually bear a structural similarity to the outside world, we can reliably say that the theory is "probably" right in being an approximation of reality.

Science recognizes that some (many?) of its theories will be completely overturned and replaced with something that is not a refinement of, but a revolutionary replacement of, old theories. This is why we frequently stress that theories are both provisional (subject to change with more evidence), and (at best) only an approximation of the reality they model.

William of Ockham, who gave us the valuable Ockham's Razor, believed that the world was composed of simple unrelated objects on which we impose order through mental abstractions. Wittgenstein echoed this when he wrote that what we call “Laws of Nature” are nothing more than an artificial order imposed by man on nature - they are not given by nature to man. He said, "at the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena." In his view, science works out conceptual schemata or "laws" to describe some aspect of nature. In nature we find loose and unconnected facts. Metaphorically, the schemata resemble a grid we draw on a rough surface which is the "reality" we are attempting to explain. The rough surface contains the “facts” of that reality. Our imposed grid can only approximate the true complexity of the surface. Given a knowledge of how the grid is set up, we can deduce other parts of the grid, but we cannot deduce any surface features. We use experimentation and empirical methods to derive our grids of understanding, and one of several grids may actually fit a surface (these would correspond to competing theories). Occasionally one grid is thrown out and replaced with another, which occurs during scientific revolutions or paradigm shifts. The laws of nature which were supposed to describe the way nature had to work did not really describe nature at all, but just the framework or grid we impose on nature. In fact, laws of nature are just necessary conditions which must exist if our grids are to provide fruitful scientific theories. The grids are not "true", a priori, existing in nature and outside of our arbitrary grid. We never see "the picture" (i.e., reality), but just “the frame” (our language which describes the picture). To Wittgenstein, reality is composed of simple objects thrown together to form a ”state of affairs”; of everything which ”is the case”. All "states of affairs" in the world are totally independent. You cannot infer one state of affairs from another. There is no logical law of cause and effect. To his mind, no causal nexus exists in nature. Cause and effect may be useful to us, but are not provable or even necessary. Induction (accepting the simplest law that can reconcile our experiences) has no logical justification, but a psychological one. In other words, we would go insane without laws of nature.

So, Wittgenstein is saying in a slightly different way that we humans cannot experience "ultimate reality", but only can create a language that "points" to reality. He is highly critical of scientific explanations, saying that not only do they fail to approximate "reality", but that they only have value in supporting each other. Our laws of nature cast the form that any description of the world must take. They tell us nothing about the world. We can infer some things about the world from the fact that it is more easily described by one explanatory system than another. But we are forever separate from direct experience of it.

Not all philosophers agree with Wittgenstein. For example, Francis Bacon, who helped introduce what we now call the scientific method, wrote, "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." He knew that in order to command nature, one must act according to its rules. His statement, "Reality is Absolute", recognizes what is called the "primacy of existence". This means that reality is not subject to wishes, whims, prayers, or miracles. If you want to change the world, you must act according to reality. Nothing else will affect reality. To him, reality was what we dealt with every day, not some abstract ineffable conception.

It should be pointed out that that the best that philosophy, religion, and mysticism were able to do in regard to the task of revealing Ultimate Reality was to divide the world into the Classical Elements of Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Quintessence ("the fifth element"), with a little "Spirit" to complete the mix. This was as far as they could take the project of discovering how the universe was constructed and what its constituent elements were. It was a primitive effort, and it missed the mark by a wide margin. Science has discovered deeper and deeper insights into levels of actual reality. Regardless of whether it exposes some loosely defined "ultimate reality", it does disclose much more about common reality than any competing religion, philosophy, or mysticism ever has. Extending the limitation of human senses with scientific instruments has given the human race what amounts to collective ESP. We can see across the universe and back in time, visualize individual atoms or entire galaxies, listen to the Earth vibrate, examine the surfaces of stars, talk to someone across the world, fly to other planets, and look at creatures swimming at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench. Technology and science have led to the discovery of living cells, molecules, DNA, the true elements of the periodic table, atoms, subatomic particles and every other aspect of reality that no philosophy or religion ever dreamed of. This should be an embarrassment to those who argue that their non-scientific approaches will show us a reality that science missed. They had their opportunity, and all they offered was Classic Elements and a lot of talk about some other ineffable substance called "ultimate reality" that was poorly defined then, and is still as murky as ever, even after several millennia.

If we had left it to these competing epistemological systems, our deepest understanding of reality would be the same as they were in Babylonian times. Science, indeed, may be near the discovery of whatever might be meant by ultimate reality. It is already at the point of dissolving subatomic particles into pure energy - it may well be near the limit of reductionism when the very substance it studies vanishes in a flash of light. It is not armchair philosophy or meditation that will eventually reveal the true nature of reality, but the Large Hadron Collider or one of its descendants.

Science and technology will not help us learn life lessons that make us better people - how to love our wives and families, to approach life with equanimity, to be generous, joyful, peaceful, and kind. These are lessons learned from other sources. But if the questions involve questions of fact, of what "is", the revelatory forms of knowledge will always fall short.