Towards Physics, Towards Data Science, and Beyond

Thilo Weber
28. Okt. 2022
16 Min. Lesezeit

The process towards higher order requires us to let go.

Towards the end of writing my master thesis, after having been burning for almost one year to find a proper way to separate digital recordings of eye movements, I was inevitably sliding into a state of depletion. I got sick and nervous, my sleep cycles were getting shorter and less restful, and my back became stiff and painful. It was around that time, in an unproductive mood, while I would best have ended my workday already an hour ago, but instead was googling the professors with whose papers and books I have been spending the days and nights of my last eight months, when I found out that two of those professors, whose works were fundamentally important for my thesis, had actually both just recently died from cancer. These news, maybe affected by my own unhealthy condition, shocked something within me. Science is supposed to bring us health, prosperity, and freedom. But dying from cancer sounds so unhealthy, stressful, and unfree.

How is order coming into this world? This video, dealing with this question, is created by a computer program that downloads and processes random images with keyword ‘face’ from pexels. More details about the creation are given later in this text. The program code can be found here.

I don’t know any details about the concrete circumstances of these two professors, still somehow I drew a connection from them dying from cancer to my own state of depletion at that time: a feeling that there is something out of balance in the predominant way of living in our society. An imbalance between our mind, that gets all our attention, on one side, and on the other side our body — our connection to the earth below, and our soul — our connection to the spiritual spheres above, both largely ignored. And again, this categorization into mind, body, and soul is just another fabrication of the mind. Our mind fragments the world, our society, and our Selves. But to heal means to become whole.

On the other hand, our human mind with its capability to reasonable thinking is also highly responsible for the great amount of freedom that we are enjoying today (as well as for the many interesting and beautiful topics I was given the chance to learn during my studies). There were times in history, when reason was less common, and those were usually darker times.

So in this text I first want to start with a look into the history of modern science and physics in order to honor our mind for bringing light into this world.

In the second part follows a thought experiment, where I try to explore the limitations of the aspiration of understanding and explaining our world by scientific methods. The thought experiment builds on a computer simulation of a well known model from statistical mechanics, the result of which are the two videos in this article.

The third part, then, draws a connection between our conception of the world being dominated by the scientific perspective and our daily lives being dominated by our minds. We should recognize that spending all day long in our bright minds, trying to solve all sorts of problems, actually is becoming a problematic condition itself. When sleeping in an enlightened environment our brain gets continuously stimulated, resulting in a stressful rest. As we know today (again thanks to science) longtime stress is one major cause of cancer and a plethora of other diseases.

Which brings me to the question: how can we use science and our minds to bring us more health instead of being a threat to it? Or in other words, how can we go beyond science?

Physics and our modern conception of the world

There is likely no other discipline of thoughts that shaped and is still shaping our modern conception of the world more profoundly than physics. The Copernican revolution provided irrefutable indications that the universe is governed by its own laws. Tycho Brahe patiently observed the positions of stars and planets in the sky and took notes of them. Johannes Kepler succeeded in describing the patterns in these data with the language of mathematics and was able to formulate simple laws that explained the movements of planets very accurately. The invention of the telescope by Galileo Galilei gave us the archetype of a measurement device, a tool to perceive the world beyond our natural senses, that enables us to verify the mathematical conjectures in before unseen dimensions. The revolution concludes in Isaac Newton’s formulation of the laws of motion, which build a strong foundation of modern physics and science to this day.

On a more fundamental level, those discoveries taught us the powerful position of the observer who observes events and phenomena in the world objectively as they are, without relating them to her or his own existence, free from prejudices and believes. The recognition that we humans are not the center of the world but just a small curiosity in a vast and unified universe, the loss of our self-attributed VIP status in the plan of God, was a shock powerful enough to liberate our society from a rigid hierarchical structure that merely took its legitimacy from religious dogma and the self-righteous interpretation of sacred texts.

Hannah Arendt, in her book The Human Condition, describes the invention of the telescope as the one outstanding event that marks the beginning of a new world order and figuratively speaks of it as the actual discovery of the Archimedian point, a fixed point at which Archimedes wanted to apply his lever in order to move the world:

“Without actually standing where Archimedes wished to stand (dos rnoi pou sto), still bound to the earth through the human condition, we have found a way to act on the earth and within terrestrial nature as though we dispose of it from outside, from the Archimedean point. […] [T]he old dichotomy between earth and sky was abolished and a unification of the universe effected, so that from then on nothing occurring in earthly nature was viewed as a mere earthly happening. All events were considered to be subject to a universally valid law in the fullest sense of the word, which means, among other things, valid beyond the reach of human sense experience (even of the sense experiences made with the help of the finest instruments), valid beyond the reach of human memory and the appearance of mankind on earth, valid even beyond the coming into existence of organic life and the earth herself. All laws of the new astrophysical science are formulated from the Archimedean point, and this point probably lies much farther away from the earth and exerts much more power over her than Archimedes or Galileo ever dared to think.” — Hannah Arendt (1958), pp. 262/263)

From physics towards science

So, the two great discoveries from physics, that mark the beginning of modern science, are, firstly, measurement tools (such as the telescope) that allow to make observations of phenomena otherwise not accessible to our human senses, and, secondly, the usage of mathematics to reduce the acquired data to patterns graspable by the human mind. What was to follow in the coming centuries was an unremitting process of adapting, expanding, generalizing and formalizing these new tools discovered in physics to all the other branches of natural, economic, social, … sciences.

Now, I want to focus on one particular example of such mathematical generalizations that can be found to lie at the heart of a large amount of scientific reasoning today: the concept of energy functions (also called Hamiltonians in the context of physics, or objective, loss or cost function or negative reward, profit, utility or fitness function in many other contexts). Such energy functions are thought of as containing all information required to describe a physical (or in other contexts non-physical) system. Their purpose is to assign a value to all measurable constellations of things and thereby making any two constellations quantitatively comparable to each other. The functions are designed and verified by their ability to match observations and measurements of real world processes.

Further, the discovery of Boltzman’s equation connects the concept of energy functions from physics to a major concept from statistics, the law of large numbers, by stating that states with higher energy have a lower probability to actually occur in reality, whereas states with lower energy are more likely to occur. And that eventually all systems are evolving towards a state of low energy (a so-called equilibrium). This connection leads us to a conception of the world being one big sampling process steadily driving towards states of lower energy, or, equivalently, higher probability. In fact, this is the dominant conception underlying a large part of today’s sciences.

Let’s have a look at three concrete examples (freely chosen according to my personal preferences and interests):

Inevitable life?

A quite amazing (yet still disputed) example from biochemistry is a theory about the inevitable emergence of life by Harold Morowitz and Eric Smith, describing life to be the most efficient transport channel accessing geothermal and solar energy for driving the geosphere of the earth towards configurations of lower chemical potential. Following this argument, the emergence of life actually becomes inevitable (or almost sure) once we have discovered the “right” energy function.

The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory?

Another example from neuroscience is Karl Friston’s free-energy principle that describes the brain as a process that is steadily estimating the state of the environment from sensational inputs and simultaneously acting on the same environment in order to minimize the expected surprise of future sensations deviating from the currently estimated internal representation of the external world. In this view the mechanism of the human brain is explained by an energy function that is constantly being minimized and mainly consists of two parts: Minimizing the first part creates an internal state in the brain that approximates the external world as accurately as possible (given the structural constraints of ones brain); minimizing the second part directs our intention and muscles to act on the external world in a way that minimizes the expected surprise (or uncertainty) of future sensations.

Data science

With the invention of computers the methods for collecting and storing measurements, and subsequently processing the acquired data, have been vastly expanded to all fields of science and society. The generalization of the mathematical tools from physics, such that they can be applied to any arbitrary set of data, has become its own branch of science: data science. Whereas in classical physics and other natural sciences the aspiration is to grasp the true reality in mathematical models, the understanding of such models in data science are, inspired by the brain and neuroscience, rather seen as general purpose structures that only capture patterns present in data as accurate as possible, but never will represent true reality itself. The orientation towards the human brain is also highlighted by the term machine learning used to refer to techniques for training models with datasets and capturing patterns in them. The approaches of data science enabled a new range of technical applications that belonged to the realm of science fiction just a few decades ago, such as, understanding and generation of text, speech and images with computing machines.

Bridge example: inevitable order?

“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” — Quote by Albert Einstein

Another video created with my Ising model application by downloading and processing random images with keyword ‘structure’ from pexels.

If we take off the scientific glasses for a moment, cracks appear in the clean and seemingly complete scientific world view. One such crack is the following: science science conceives the world as developing from high-energy states associated with low probability and high order to lower and lower energy states, i.e., states with higher probability and lower order; yet, when looking around us at a human face, a tree, a cloud in the sky, or when looking inwards at our feelings, our thoughts, our consciousness, we see structures that are constantly growing and decaying and emerging again, always renewing themselves in inconceivable degree of orders, and still every time in a new and unpredictable way.

Detail-oriented scientists would probably refute the existence of such a mismatch between the scientific postulate that the universe steadily tends towards more disorder, as famously stated in the second law of thermodynamics, and our daily experience of order, by noting that the theory allows to derive an “explicit statement […] referring only to a modest object: an isolated body of finite size” — Truesdell, C., Muncaster, R. G. (1980). However, in practice most people are not all that interested in such peculiarities. More often, we like to conclude from our experience that we are able to predict the trajectory of the earth and other planets, that, in a similar manner we should also be able to predict the future development of our economy. And even the success of science itself stems, as the journey of the concept of energy functions exemplifies, exactly from the habit to generalize and adapt theories created for one specific problem in one specific field to other fields and problems. After all, we are speaking here of a “scientific world view” and not of a “scientific view about an isolated body of finite size”.

I want to illustrate this paradox with a small coding example. The example builds on a Monte Carlo simulation of the Ising model. The Ising model was initially developed as a mathematical model of ferromagnetism in statistical mechanics. The model is described by an energy function that consist of two parts: an internal energy, accounting for interactions between neighboring magnetic dipoles, and an external energy, representing an external magnetic field. Since its invention in 1920 it has been generalized and adapted to applications, in chemistry, biology, neuroscience, and computer vision, which makes it itself a classic example of the spreading nature of scientific ideas. Here, I present another “application” of the Ising model, probably not an application in the classical scientific sense, as its results are merely of aesthetic (it produced the two videos in this article) and, as I hope, philosophical value.

My “application” is a toy-simulation for the emergence and decay of order in our world. The internal energy part of the model pushes pixels to adopt the same color as the majority of its neighbors already have. This part represents the scientific view, which sees the world constantly decaying towards more “normal”, less ordered states, ultimately governed by the second law of thermodynamics.

The external energy field is generated by downloading random images from pexels marked with the keyword “face” and preprocessing them into black and white images. This field gets stronger and weaker over time. When it is strong, the samples in the video evolve towards the face in the baseline image. When it gets weaker, the internal energy starts to dominate and the face starts to decay again. When the external field gets stronger again, fed by a freshly downloaded baseline image, a new face emerges from the more uniform and simple shapes.

The big questions are: Will it ever be possible to describe the emergence of order in our world with a scientific model? Or will, as in my example here, structure and order always come into the world from an external field, from a place beyond science?

Beyond science

So far, I have pictured how science in today’s understanding largely consists of, first, making things measurable, then, collecting data, and third, searching a way to describe the structure and evolution in the data as a process that optimizes some sort of energy, cost, reward, etc… function. The GIF example described in the previous section illustrates a serious doubt if this scientific approach, which is implicitly assumed to be the only valid approach by many people today, is really capable of comprehending every facet in life and our world.

The miracle of beginning

If we come back to Hannah Arendt again, she too raises her serious concerns about the conception of society and political economy as a science, in particular, that this discipline of behaviorism inherently leads to a problematic distinction between normal and abnormal, social and asocial, behaviors:

“The unfortunate truth about behaviorism and the validity of its ‘laws’ is that the more people there are, the more likely they are to behave and the less likely to tolerate non-behavior. Statistically, this will be shown in the leveling out of fluctuation. In reality, deeds will have less and less chance to stem the tide of behavior, and events will more and more lose their significance, that is, their capacity to illuminate historical time. Statistical uniformity is by no means a harmless scientific ideal; it is the no longer secret political ideal of a society which, entirely submerged in the routine of everyday living, is at peace with the scientific outlook inherent in its very existence.” — Hannah Arendt (1958), p. 42

For Hannah Arendt, it is exactly the unpredictable events that illuminate human history and the unpredictability of consequences that characterize true human action. She speaks of the miracle of beginning contained in every birth of a new being and in every action, carrying with it a great risk of unpredictable consequences, and at the same time the capacity of breaking the chains of events set in motion by previous actions.

I admire Hannah Arendt’s unparalleled analysis of The Human Condition. It reveals a deep understanding of history and the mechanisms of our society to me. Still, at the end of the book, when, after elaborating in great detail the human activities of labor, work, and action, she concludes with the words that thought, which she has omitted from her reconsiderations throughout the entire book, might be a more active activity that likely would surpass all the other ones, I felt left behind with a certain feeling of void. Maybe, because her book is still an analysis after all?

Beyond analysis

As Jiddu Krishnamurti elaborates in his book The Impossible Question, we are living our lives, from birth to death, in constant conflict. One approach to deal with this conflict is to analyze it until we find the ultimate cause. In our society, we have been trained to analyze everything since centuries. The process of analysis, however, implies a separation between the object and the subject, where the subject is the one piece of our fragmented mind that claims the authority of being the analyzer and to rate and assess all the other pieces. Now, as Krishnamurti explains, this separation, this fragmentation, is actually already a big part of the very conflict itself. Therefore, analyzing the conflict will always create more conflict urging for more analysis, and (as I had the feeling with Hannah Arendt’s book) will never come to a satisfying end. Analysis will always remain in the mode of striving towards something and will inherently never reach complete satisfaction or, let alone, go beyond such a point.

According to Krishnamurti, there is also an alternative to the approach of analysis, namely to immediately recognize a matter’s truth with all our eyes, mind, and heart. If we are able to see the analytical process as a whole at once, with all its structures and mechanisms, its futility, all its related problems, and its impossibility to ever become complete, then our mind may become free from it. This freedom from the urge to analyze releases a large amount of energy (here again, the word energy, but this time no energy function but rather vital energy) that can be directed into a different way of acting, characterized by immediate consciousness. To break the long learned habit of analyzing everything is not easy, and requires a lot of awareness and discipline (discipline in the sense of Krishnamurti referring to a continuous openness to learn rather than to constant adaption). Krishnamurti speaks of an inner revolution, according to him the only revolution that will ever be required.

The analyzing mind of modern science

This analyzing mind of Krishnamurti, with its properties to treat every problem as “an isolated body of finite size” observed and analyzed from a distant “Archimedean point”, strongly reminds me at the scientific approach as described so far. In particular, let’s have a look at Karl Friston’s free energy principle of the human brain again. Friston describes our brain as machine performing optimizations in order to reduce surprise in the future. To me, this description of the brain, on a more abstract level, seems to describe also pretty well the analyzing mind with its mechanisms to assign values to all situations and its continuous strive towards more optimal values.

Could we then turn things around and recognize that if optimization is actually the working principle of our analyzing mind, then science, guided by the very same principles, is mainly the approach of the analyzing mind to understand the world? And when, as in the case of Karl Friston, science is interested in the workings of the mind itself, then we end up in this self-reverential situation where the mind tries to understand itself and — no surprise — ends up in a principle of optimization. Wouldn’t this further imply that the analyzing mind and its habits of fragmentation and optimization is itself governed by the law of large numbers and the second law of thermodynamics and is therefore always leading towards more normality and more disorder, and never towards something creative or more order?

Of course, the concept of science is larger than only analysis. For example, in ancient Greece, one main idea of science was gnothi seauton — know thyself, which is probably closer to Krishnamurti’s description of “immediately recognizing a matter’s truth” than to analysis. Or in India, they speak of the science of yoga, and its purpose is actually largely to liberate our minds from the delusive identification with matter and sensory perceptions. However, I would argue that the common understanding of science today differs clearly from these concepts.

Letting go

Today, we live in a world where scientific and technical solutions are a priori considered to be the only valid approach, no matter what problem is addressed, be it on the level of society or of the individual, and non-technical concepts, for example, the concept of a miracle, as old as humanity itself, don’t seem to be of any use anymore. Of course, this distinction separating into valid and non-valid approaches is already the analyzing mind at work again. The dramatic consequences of this imbalance is especially evident when the analyzing mind itself becomes part of the problem and behaves much like a populist politician who directs everybody’s attention to artificial problems on the outside in order to cover up his own internal failures.

I don’t want to advocate that we should never use our minds at all anymore. Rather we should learn to clearly see it as only one access to the world among many. It is a tool, like a hammer, that we can take out of our tool box when required and then put away again after usage. Walking around with a hammer in your hand the whole day seems to be very inconvenient. And everything starts to look like a nail…

Like there are different tools in a tool box, there are also different accesses to perceive and interact with the world. One access that often receives too little attention today is our body — which brings me back to my own experience of depletion from the introduction. When, after one year of heavy usage of my analyzing mind during my master thesis, I became sick and got back pain for two month, that was probably a sign that it would have been long time to put away my hammer. Today, I recognize that my body sends me more subtle signs already much earlier, on a daily basis. I try to let them receive more attention, which is not always easy. And when I still get sick, I remember my past weeks to see if I have ignored some signs, as is usually the case.

Another access to the world is a spiritual connection, the recognition of the miracle aspect of life. Should we devote a life time to search for order only in the realm of science and our analyzing mind? Or is it maybe reasonable to acknowledge the emergence of order in this world as an incredible miracle, and spend our days rather with cultivating our connection to this supernatural source of order and learn ways to access it?

In order to connect to other accesses we need to let the analytical mind with its demand for exclusive and universal validity go. Again, this is anything but easy, as I know from my own experience. Besides bringing more awareness into my daily life, another strategy of mine is actually this very writing: herewith I gently ask, to the supernatural source of order and to the deep wisdom of my body, that, arriving at the end of this text, may I have said all I have to say about this topic, and after publishing never have to think about it anymore.