Stage One: Storytelling
A group of shepherds were sitting on the side of a tall mountain one night, watching a thunderstorm roll by on the plains below. They were not in any risk, so they were able to relax to the distant rumbles of thunder and flashes of lightning.
Around the group, one by one, each shepherd told their story as to what thunder and lightning was and where it all came from. The stories were fanciful and generally short, and most of the shepherds shared in the tail, trying to make little corrections to each other’s story with a friendly openness. Although, two of the shepherds quietly listened.
When the shepherds finished telling their stories and a quiet settled over the group, one of the quiet shepherds cleared his throat and began to slowly deliver a story about thunder and lightning. He was an exquisite storyteller; having listened closely to their stories, he was certain to include elements from each version to flame the pride of the men sitting there. However, he was also certain to interject elements into the story that subtly suggested that his clan was the dominant clan of the area. Most of the shepherds did not pick up on these elements, as they were consumed with the delivery of the storyteller and their own pride about being at least a little right. This storyteller was the first sophist, and when he was done the group praised him for his wisdom and settled down to being quiet again.
A short while passed before the last man stirred to an apparent memory, and he too slowly began a story about thunder and lightning. He said that he had heard this story from his grandfather who, in turn, heard the story from an old blind woman that was traveling through the mountains on the back of a goat. He did this to give his story a broader context than that of the sophist. He too was an outstanding storyteller who had listened closely to the stories of all the other shepherds, but he did not concern himself with appealing to their vanity by overtly including elements of their stories into his. What he did instead, was craft his story around the emotions behind their stories; their fears and hopes, as well as the ego and arrogance of the sophist. In the end, his story about thunder and lightning made everyone feel equal to one another and connected to their environment. It gave them comfort, confidence, and peace of mind. This was the first philosopher, and when he was finished no one said a word. No one gave him praise for his story or storytelling abilities, they simply smiled quietly to their own thoughts as they watched the storm go by.
The sophist, however, sat quietly and plotted his revenge. He knew it was done and settled for that night, but he vowed to be better prepared for the next time. From this point on, for thousands of years, the stories became more and more intricate and complex as the battle between sophists and philosophers escalated and evolved.
Stage Two: Logic
Storytelling had evolved to be so complex that each city/state had its own sub-story that was a functioning part of the overall larger story. Each sub-story was structured so as to give the people of that city/state a sense of dominance and superiority to all the others. This situation made it easy for the politicians to maintain an environment of constant war and conflict. Suffice to say, the sophists had taken over. Not because they were smarter or more clever, but simply because they outnumbered the philosophers by no small margin. It was greed that compelled storytellers to take the easy route and become a sophist.
From this environment, a man named Socrates had taken principles from the new field of mathematics and applied them to how the stories were structured. He took umbrage to the fact that the stories the sophists told, and their interpretations of them, were pure fantasy and changed frequently to suit their needs. There was no continuity, no consistency, or “logic” to them. His first conclusion was that it was impossible to know whether anything about such stories were true, so it was best to assume nothing at all and to rely completely on logic. He devised and taught a means to examine stories for sound logic.
(It is important to understand that the Socratic Method is not a means to discover the Truth, but only a way to test Logic. For example: let’s say there were six apples on a table and you asked someone how many apples there were. They reply that 2+2=4. This is a very logical statement, however, it is not true in this situation. To this you might say that logic is what tells us that the answer is wrong because of the observable fact of the six apples. Yes, you are right. Except most of the stories of life do not deal in observable facts. Which is why, by this example, it is very important to remember that Truth and Logic are not the same thing.)
The older people, set in their ways, and making a living off of the constant war, scoffed at the teachings of Socrates. The younger people, tired of being ordered around by the whims of politicians, had taken to his teachings. This cost Socrates his life, but planted the seed of Logic in how people structured the stories that guided their lives and held society together. Plato, a student of Socrates, was the first philosopher to try and build a logical story in his mind that unified the people on a large scale, taking away all the crazy sub-stories by creating a single, all encompassing “Good”. Aristotle, a student of Plato, decided that the best way to build a logical story is not from the top down, like Plato, but directly from our experiences of the world around us; or, from the ground up. Separately, both approaches fell far short of being effective. Together, however, having a broad story to hold us together while we explore the universe and modify that story with the facts we find, was a stroke of genius that was going to have to wait to be discovered.
Instead, over the centuries, as evolution never sleeps, sophists and philosophers continued to battle it out. The stories that were told included more and more complicated and complex logistic gymnastics. Tomes of logically accurate arguments were written down, for only the hardiest (and most sadistic) of scholars to read and ruminate over. The sophists continued to use increasingly complex logical arguments to pull the story to their own needs; wrapped around them like a shawl. In response, the philosophers continued to use increasingly complex logical arguments to restate over and over again, in as many various ways as the sophists were pursuing, that we do not know anything for sure… we are all individually responsible for what we choose to believe.
Aside from this battle purely of the mind, the alchemists and barbers, the sophist followers of the Aristotelian perspective, busied themselves trying to turn lead into gold and curing people of their diseases with leeches and mercury. In the end, modern science could only get underway when they had learned how to confront sophistry on their own terms; from their own perspective. The result of that battle, for the followers of Aristotle, is the Scientific Method.
Stage 3: Modeling
No, Science is not the third stage… modeling is. Science is the pursuit of facts. Philosophy is the pursuit of context. Mathematical modeling takes a few facts, gleaned from science, and sticks them into a complex formula to build a story out of them. That, ultimately, is philosophy.
The easiest examples of this are the spaghetti lines we see on the TV screen when the weather person tries to forecast the path of a hurricane. Each line is a different model. Each line is a different story, just like the shepherds sitting on the mountain. The sophist would take all those lines and average them down to a single line, with little tweaks here and there for their own benefit, and insisting that they were the only ones who could accurately do such a thing. The philosopher would suggest a “cone of probability”, the kind we see today, and to encourage everyone to prepare for themselves based on their own experience.
So much of our modern lives and our scientific awareness of our world and universe is based on modeling. From predicting the weather, to economics, and even cosmology. We technically do not know whether Black Holes exist or not. No one has ever seen one. They are predicted by a complex mathematical model, but that is only a story until proven scientifically… which means “observed” directly. Some would argue that they must exist because we see the effects of them. This argument causes Plato to try and crawl out of the ground to scream, “you cannot know the truth from the shadow it casts!!”
At every level, in every instance of the myriad of models being used by our civilization today, there is a war being waged between the sophists and the philosophers. Climate change, banking and investment instruments, and parallel universes. Do Wormholes, Super Massive Red Giant stars, and Parallel Universes really exist? Before you answer that, remember that, until a couple years ago, every scientist firmly believed that comets were made of ice. Then, they tried to land a probe on one and it bounced across the surface because the ice clamps they put on it could not grip the solid rock that was reality. What if this was also the case with Black Holes? We have the scientists out at the Large Hadron Collider working away based on a certain model of physics. What if that model was not exactly true? Maybe not in the early stages, like the spaghetti lines of hurricane prediction all follow the same path early on, but maybe further on down the line they diverge drastically. Their models assure them that they will not create a Black Hole, but what if there are no Black Holes and they are about to accidentally create what really exists? We certainly know how such errors occur in the banking industry. Everything seems fine according to the modeled plan,.. until it isn’t. Which is what is so scary about Artificial Intelligence?.. AI is nothing more than a computer model of human intellect.
Not that I mind all the theories and stories being told. It is as it has always been, and this here is just the ruminations of a crazy bald guy. Although, what bothers me is how many people who consider themselves professionals assert that their theories are actually facts. That is the sign of a religious zealot, or a sophist, and it is dangerous. Ultimately, I am of the opinion that science needs to become a religion, but not based on the stories it tells. Science should become an existential religion of open mindedness, and base itself around the solemn ritual of the Scientific Method. I doubt it will ever be as simple as that, for there will always be a battle between the Sophists and the Philosophers.
Maciolekism 