theory building and ethics

by ALEXIS CLANCY

“…Right back inna jungle. On account of the breakdown of ethics. That’s why ethics is important. It’s the grease makes us get along, what separates us from the animals, beasts a burden, beasts a prey. Ethics…”
Johnny Caspar / Miller’s Crossing – Joel and Ethan Coen

With this new openness not just horizons but also in the inner worlds was the semblance of a land rush. Now that objectivity’s absolution had been compromised, foundations of granite had given way to fluxes of unobservable probability.

Essentially, right and wrong died in 1881 (refer to the previous post for details of their demise).

I often cite T.S. Elliot’s modern epic the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock as one of the most solid inspections of these consequences. In this he opens with a Stanza from Dante’s inferno where Virgil shows Dante a particular part of hell reserved for liars. This is all well and good. Then we join J in his own private hell (Let us go then, you and I…) and learn that as ethereal women flit by with renaissance concerns (…speaking of MichaelAngelo), we learn that Prufrock is crippled by the concept of an event – “Do I dare roll the universe into a ball” – which, is in essence, what an event is. All the probabilities in the universe collapse into a minimal spike of nothingness – do we dare instigate this immense event? More to the point, we learn that Prufrock is not a bad man; he is just a man, prone to self pity from time to time, incapacitated not by his place in the universe but by his having a place in the universe. Yet he is in hell. Is he as those commandment breakers in Dante’s renaissance Newtonian Cartesian hell? Not by any means. But, unfortunately for the Modern Man, hell is no longer a moral issue of good and evil.

Which is why revision of and attention to ethics is so important.

Traditional moral values pertaining to right and wrong along with Cartesian partitions of true or false were undermined to the point that there was no de facto creed or code supervising scientific or philosophical endeavour.

This leads me to cite my admiration for those that contributed to the Copenhagen Theory of quantum mechanics, formulated in the latter part of the 1920’s. [I actually find it hard to write about it, such is the passion that excites in me.] I see a group of thinkers standing in the dust of everything that the western mind thought formed its world. And from this dust they fashioned a synthesis what could not be achieved without grit, determination, absolute cooperation, intellectual might and the purest of scientific and philosophical erudition. It was the creation of the first platform. From an ethical concern, it was focused on the creation of a new language so that one to another could formally communicate what one saw when one was beholding and being beheld by the abyss. Without this ethical mortar, personality would have weighed too much in the outcome, bound as each individual’s interaction with the experiment was.

What came of it were not The Laws of Quantum Physics. What came of it were The Postulates, each one with a lifespan to be terminated in a half a heartbeat once the specter of falsehood suggests itself, even in a whisper…

It is not as if they were “right” about everything, but with out them, we would be lost.

But for the 21st century, I believe there is a further ethical concern to be raised with regard to theory building.

David Bohm, who was one of the greatest quantum apostates in the second half of the last century, pointed out in his book “The Implicate Order” that the universe will reflect the thesis. According to Bohm, if the thesis is fragmented, the universe will respond accordingly; if the thesis is one of wholeness, the universe will respond accordingly.

Essentially, you can pretty much prove what ever you like with due diligence, will and persistence. I would not state this as fact but more so as a phenomenon. The truth has many dimensions, lies at the heart of everything and can be approached from a myriad of paths as many as those that care to make the journey.

So for whom and what end do we wish to build our theory?
It’s a question of ethics.

published 28 January 08  /  4 comment(s) with 0 new

 

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