Science sucks

I’ve long been in the mathematically illiterate camp, and by extension that also makes me a dunce when it comes to science. At restaurants whenever the bill comes you’ll notice that I’ve suddenly become very quiet while I silently pray to the math gods that they’ll inspire someone at the table to figure it out so I don’t have to. I often refer to the paying phase as the worst part of the meal.

I bring my math-phobia up with friends from time to time and they routinely stroke me with things like “science is easy and predictable,” or “math is a skill like any other, you just need to practice.” I guess they’re right in that it’s predictable, but all that methodology seems cumbersome to me. Maybe that’s why I spent four years at college reading philosophy books about absolutely nothing while they toiled away in laboratories solving for q. So imagine my delight when a professor of mine suggested in a phenomenology seminar that there’s something inherently wrong with science.

It was in a Merleau-Ponty seminar on phenomenology where the professor read us a passage from Phenomenology of Perception to the effect of science being only a secondary expression of the world perceived. The prose was flighty and meandering – in true Merleau-Ponty form – so the professor closed the book, and, acknowledging the blank looks on our faces asked us to reflect upon our perceptions of motion. Immediately we rallied around the scientific expression of motion: the equation speed equals distance over time (S=d/t). But how could something so fluid and indivisible accurately be depicted as an inert average of static positions as the equation suggests it is?

This had us all scratching our heads.

The perception of motion, the professor went on, is a pretty neat trick. A car in motion, for example, cannot be perceived simultaneously as being in motion and being a car. That is, when you are able to say “red corvette,” something of its motion is lost. Try it the next time you’re cruising around. Motion is pre-objective. In fact, to say “a moving car” is to imply that motion is a quality of the car and not the pure, non-objective transition we perceive it to be. It’s a sensitive subject among academic circles, so I’ll cover my likely imprecise synopsis above with part of Merleau-Ponty’s take on motion:

The something in transit which we have recognized as necessary to the constitution of a change is to be defined only in terms of the particular manner of its ‘passing’. For example, the bird which flies across my garden is, during the time that it is moving, merely a greyish power of flight and, generally speaking, we shall see that things are defined primarily in terms of their ‘behaviour’ and not in terms of their static ‘properties’. It is not I who recognize, in each of the points and instants passed through, the same bird defined by explicit characteristics, it is the bird in flight which constitutes the unity of its movement, which changes its place, it is this flurry of plumage still here, which is already there in a kind of ubiquity, like the comet with its tail. (full text here)

He’s trying to call attention to how the world presents itself to us. If you grant that science is a second-order expression of how we perceive the world, then it’s still not even up to par with Merleau-Ponty’s contention that our perception comes before first-hand reflection. Confusing? You bet.

This all came up when I read this article from the economist about neuroscience trying to impose itself on economics. In short: MRI’s can supposedly distinguish which parts of the brain are “hot” (emotional) and “cold” (objective), and some chumps at the California Institute of Technology think this knowledge could “transform economics by providing a better understanding of people’s reactions to advertising or their decisions to go on strike.”

Evidence neuroscience may help shed some light on why our brains don’t function purely on economic reason:

One much-cited example is the “ultimatum game”, in which one player proposes a division of a sum of money between himself and a second player. The other player must either accept or reject the offer. If he rejects it, neither gets a penny.

According to standard economic theory, as long as the first player offers the second any money at all, his proposal will be accepted, because the second player prefers something to nothing. In experiments, however, behavioural economists found that the second player often turned down low offers-perhaps, they suggested, to punish the first player for proposing an unfair split.

In MRIS…they found that rejecting a low offer in the ultimatum game tended to be associated with high levels of activity in the dorsal stratium, a part of the brain that neuroscience suggests is involved in reward and punishment decisions…

In other words, the participants weren’t exercising a rational or “cold” objective judgment.

The neuroscience bit caught my eye as in the phenomenology seminar we spent some time talking about neuroscience and what it may contribute to Merleau-Ponty’s take on perception. I can’t remember the details of it, but the basics are such that even if you could pinpoint pain as nothing more than C fiber 151 firing it wouldn’t accurately describe pain. Kind of like how the speed equation doesn’t have much to do with motion. As for the economics application, I’m out of my element. If anything, the article got me thinking about how phenomenology might involve itself with the science of choice.

They couldn’t seem more disparate on face value, but if I come across anything neat I’ll be sure to follow up on it.