Metamodern View of Science

What is Metamodern Science

Johannes Jager:

"To find this way, we urgently need to reorient ourselves, to (re)construct a science beyond the age of machines. This reconstruction will be radical, from the philosophical ground up. Nothing right now is quite the way it seems — or as it should be, for that matter.

And so, as metamodern scientists, we begin by asking: what is the map, and what is the territory? Because modernity’s biggest mistake was to mistake the former for the latter.

To reverse this, we have to remember that all our knowledge ultimately flows from our personal experience (and that of our peers and ancestors). Our philosophies, theories, laws, and models, in contrast, are only idealized abstractions. They are the product, not the foundation of our knowing.

The act of throwing a ball is more real than whatever law of gravitation you may use to calculate its trajectory. Your pain from bumping your toe is more real than Hume’s claim that cause and effect are just constant conjunction. Your self-awareness at that very moment is more real than whatever mechanistic worldview telling you that subjectivity and consciousness are an illusion.

Metamodern science is radically empirical, and also radically pragmatic and perspectivist: humans simply cannot get a God’s eye view of the world. In fact, no limited intelligence can. Any knowledge we generate is utterly human knowledge, forged by our particular drives, needs, and capabilities. No other knowledge is attainable. No other knowledge, in fact, makes any sense to us at all.

Our knowledge may be biased, distorted, and forever incomplete. Yet, it is far from arbitrary. It arises transjectively, through interactions between the subject and its objects. It emerges through our active exploration of the world. Meaning and knowledge are created through our actions.

We impose our concepts on the world. We realize what is relevant for us. No other understanding is possible. This is not a bug, but a feature of how we get to know the world: scientific knowledge is what robustly enables us to act in coherent ways, to be at home in our universe.

And science is still by far the best guide we have to find our way around. But the world is a large and confusing place. Few of our problems are well-defined. And, unfortunately, cues to solve these problems are scarce, ambiguous, and often misleading. This is the true meaning of complexity.

Our knowledge of such a world will forever be tentative. The best we can hope for is for it to improve and adapt together with our explorations. What we can know is always imperfect. To know it all, to be in full control, therefore, ought not to be our aim.

Instead of a theory of everything, we want the best knowledge we can actually get. We want our piecewise approximations to reality to be adequate for human beings. But the machine view is blocking our view.

Because the world is so much more than a mere assemblage of cogs and gears, more than a bundle of algorithmic computations. We will always inhabit a small island of knowledge in a vast sea of the unknown.

Relevant phenomena occur at all scales and levels of organization. The laptop I am writing this on, my family with me in my house: these are much more real than a quark, or Pythagoras’ theorem, for that matter! If your worldview cannot account for that, then there is something wrong with your worldview, not with my family.

The postmodernists are right: there is a flaw in the modernist map and we’d better get a better one.

As metamodern scientists, in fact, we need a whole new stack of maps. A single perspective won’t do! Reality supports many accounts of itself. Our aim is not to combine all these maps into one. Instead, we strive to understand what each one is good for, and how the maps relate to each other.

The world is a multilayered place, and it is in constant flux. Nothing ever stays exactly the same. Metamodern science fully acknowledges this. Process and emergence are at its core. How did stars arise from the void? How did life originate from dead matter? How did mind arise in life?

We must face these fundamental questions, tackle them head on, not explain them away. We must avoid the temptation of mechanicist and panpsychist escapism: either your consciousness is an illusion, or rocks are conscious too! None of this makes any sense to the metamodern scientist. We want to understand how true consciousness emerges through evolution.

This requires us to embrace the full complexity of the life, neuro, and social sciences, transcending disciplinary boundaries. We must ask what makes organisms, and the ecological and social systems that contain them, so different from the lifeless world of mechanisms. We must focus on relations, and on context. We must reconsider our questions and our answers. Just taking things apart and studying their components in isolation no longer does the job.

Metamodern science focuses on dynamic organization: now things interact, not just what they are made of. It pushes its own boundaries, seeks out new differences that make a difference. What it does not do is impose artificial limits on our freedom to investigate. It welcomes the unknown, focuses on the question, not the answer."

(https://www.whatisemerging.com/opinions/toward-a-metamodern-science)

Characteristics

Zachary Stein:

" Here I offer a partial and augmented version of Freinacht’s characterization of what philosophers must embrace under the emerging conditions of metamodern society (Freinacht, 2017 pp. 364-366):

METAMODERN VIEW OF SCIENCE

 To respect science as an indispensable form of knowing.

 To see that science is always contextual and truth always tentative; that reality always holds deeper truths. All that we think is real will one day melt away as snow in the sun.

 To understand that different sciences and paradigms are simultaneously true; that many of their apparent contradictions are superficial and based on misperceptions or failures of translation or integration.

 To see that there are substantial insights and relevant knowledge in all stages of human and societal development, including tribal life, polytheism, traditional theology, modern industrialism and postmodern critique. In another book, I call this the evolution of “metamemes”.

 To celebrate and embody non-linearity in all non-mechanical matters, such as society and culture. Non-linearity, in its simplest definition, means that the output of a system is not proportional to its input.  To harbor a case sensitive suspicion against mechanical models and linear causation.

 To have “a systems view” of life, to see that things form parts of self-organizing bottomup systems: from sub-atomic units to atomic particles to molecules to cells to organisms.

 To see that things are alive and self-organizing because they are falling apart, that life is always a whirlwind of destruction: The only way to create and maintain an ordered pattern is to create a corresponding disorder. These are the principles of autopoiesis: entropy (that things degrade and fall apart) and “negative entropy” (the falling apart is what makes life possible).

 To accept that all humans and other organisms have a connecting, overarching worldview, a great story or grand narrative (a religion, in what is often interpreted as being the literal sense of the word: something that connects all things) and therefore accept the necessity of a grande histoire, an overarching story about the world. The metamodernist has her own unapologetically held grand narrative, synthesizing her available understanding. But it is held lightly, as one recognizes that it is always partly fictional — a protosynthesis.

 To take ontological questions very seriously, i.e. to let questions about “what is really real” guide us in science and politics. This is called the ontological turn."

(http://integral-review.org/issues/vol_14_no_1_stein_love_in_a_time_between_worlds.pdf)

More information

See also: The Metamodern View of Reality