Holistic vs reductionist approaches, state of science

So many people today—and even professional scientists—seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering.

—Albert Einstein

And I thought, this is it!

The world is this. There’s no structure, no categories, NO WORDS, no language.. They are all in our heads. There’s nothing but what’s out there, moving and standing in front of me. The holistic approach is so calming. Because it entails acknowledgement of what is out there, rather than to take “what’s out there” apart, reducing it all the way down to the smallest “components”, trying to exert some sort of control over the universe, as if we had any.

Instead seeing everything as they are kind of.. makes you feel like an animal. And that’s exactly the point! You ARE an animal. With all the technological tools you use, all the philosophies you have, all the books you read, all the ways in which you dress.. You’re thrown into this world just like any other animal. And there’s value in recognizing this and looking at the world from this perspective. The days when we lived in caves, feeding ourselves by hunting and gathering. We aren’t fundamentally any different from that.

In order to discover how the universe works, we need to be constantly zooming out, looking at how nature behaves, and zooming back into our theories repeatedly. If you are trapped in a reductionistic approach that attaches man-made words and categories to everything all the time, you will lose touch with the universe, get stuck inside your own had, and the universe will stop talking to you.

It is not till we attempt to bring the theoretical part of our training into contact with the practical that we begin to experience the full effect of what Faraday has called "mental inertia"—not only the difficulty of recognising, among the concrete objects before us, the abstract relation which we have learned from books, but the distracting pain of wrenching the mind away from the symbols to the objects, and from the objects back to the symbols. This however is the price we have to pay for new ideas. When we have overcome these difficulties, and successfully bridged over the gulph between the abstract and the concrete... we have acquired the rudiment of a permanent mental endowment. When, by a repetition of efforts of this kind, we have more fully developed the scientific faculty, the exercise of this faculty in detecting scientific principles in nature, and in directing practice by theory, is no longer irksome, but becomes an unfailing source of enjoyment, to which we return so often, that at last even our careless thoughts begin to run in a scientific channel.

—James Clerk Maxwell, "Introductory Lecture on Experimental Physics," The Scientific Papers of James Clerk Maxwell (1890) Vol.2

The ability to see things holistically (while not losing our man-made reductionistic takes, because they really are the true sources of power we have over nature) is only gained by reading original writings of big scientists, learning their lives, and learning the historical and philosophical background of every single idea in science. So you can take a birds-eye view at that domain, know where you came from, where you’re headed, what tools and ideas you have, what their limitations are etc.

Here’s another quote from Einstein:

The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thoughts are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined. There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. . . . The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type.

—Albert Einstein

Generalism vs specialism & state of science

https://youtu.be/nVbB3C_hs5g?si=zVNPtCBJop8kV2Zv&t=33

I'm usually reluctant to write professional bios on the internet, concerned about seeming like a Rick Sanchez wannabe. Many see mastering diverse fields impossible, asserting the era of polymaths is long gone and that one can only skim the surface. But let them think what they will.

Here’s my argument against them, for those who wanna hear:

In any field, there’s the core principles (paradigms) and there’s the environmental variables upon which these principles apply, and these are to be memorized and are application-specific. You don’t need to know them unless you are working with applications that need them.

If one only knows the principles, he or she won’t lose any creative potential. They might only lose the speed to prototype. (Because they have to look up the env. variables they need)

Now another thing some people say is that there’s a lot of researchers and science is progressing very rapidly and it’s impossible to keep up with what’s happening in a single subspecialty of a single field, let alone multiple fields.. right? No.

99% of what’s published in academia on any field of science is garbage. They don’t add anything to our knowledge and understanding of nature and the systems therein. If you don’t agree, you should improve yourself on history and philosophy of science, read the original memoirs etc and it will become obvious to you too.

So there’s nothing to be followed really. And it’s not like if you don’t read every other paper, you’re gonna miss that important 1%. No! They will gain in popularity over time and if you have ANY connection with the academic world you will be exposed to it.

The decline in quality of academia has A LOT of reasons, some of the most important ones I see are:

1. The corruption in the mindset of almost everyone. People think, because we’re living in 21st century, because we have electricity, water, gas infrastructures, because we have the internet, computers and smartphones, we are exempt from studying carefully what people studied millenia ago. They are looking down on the foundations on which they stand. They are forgetting that all of this technology was made possible by people who respected the foundations and tried their best to make sense of what they had seen.
2. Another reason why people are inclined to abandon the foundations of science is because of how it has become an undebatable choice for labs to purchase equipments instead of making them. What happens is that the ideas are then limited by the capabilities of the equipments, rather than being limited by physics.
3. Academic circles are constantly looking for solid proof of what’s being proposed in disguise of peer review. So much so that the independent, creative, daring ideas are dismissed (because they may lack solid proof) and excluded, and the people are excommunicated. People look down on the methodology, and the methodology to develop new methodologies, which are signs of deep understanding which makes everything else possible. Instead, they only care about methods, which are equivalent to recipes.
4. The predominant thinking in academia now is that important, fundamental discoveries and inventions aren’t being done anymore because of lack of funding, meaning, if we had more expensive instruments we could do better. They say this, while so conveniently disregarding the three points of corruption I mentioned above. In fact, what’s really lacking is creativity and independence, a strong foundation and a deep appreciation of history of philosophy of science.

https://youtu.be/uA_2v0d9Gzs?si=PPNJO2X7_UdqsBwc&t=36

Here’s what LIGO scientist & tenured professor of physics at Caltech has to say about this:

https://youtu.be/-de4jYdGyQM?si=HI1ngQb15-uHVEXe&t=1817

As François Chollet talks about here, the exponential increase in the number of papers published, funding needed etc is merely the representation of how much resource it consumes. The progress itself is not even linear, I would say it’s logarithmic. It’s super slow.

François Chollet: Keras, Deep Learning, and the Progress of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #38

I think Schrödinger’s take on mastering multiple fields in his book “What is life?” (19 is relevant here:

We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge. The very name given to the highest institutions of learning reminds us (universities), that from antiquity to and throughout many centuries the universal aspect has been the only one to be given full credit. But the spread, both in and width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge by during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it. I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true who aim be lost for ever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them -and at the risk of making fools of ourselves. So much for my apology.

I respect Schrödinger’s take. But remember, back then they had no computers, no internet. To even get books and papers they needed physical struggles. The mind was not the bottleneck, the resources were. Now it’s the opposite but people (because so far they haven’t seen otherwise) cannot even imagine one person mastering multiple fields. Once they see a couple of examples, many will follow.