It got me to reflecting that, generally speaking, we don't "see" air or radio, and fish can't "see" water or x-rays, yet, in both cases these realities surround AND pervade us. Which is simply to use these observations as a motivation in noticing that 'Out there/In here', 'Objective/Subjective', and other visible and invisible dichotomies that most of present day modern classical science is built upon, and much of how we, on a moment-to-moment basis, have come to and continue to practice our daily being and perceiving, are such as a result of how we enact ourselves, consciously and unconsciously.

[I make the distinction between "classical" and "other" enquiries because enquiries like Complexity (a la the Santa Fe Institute) and Quantum Mechanics on the one hand, and Meditation and the exploration of 'Inner States' on the other, are mapping [mapping as a process and as a product] realms where Science's foundational dichotomisations cannot be practised and yet made consistent nor fundamentally resonant (correspondence with) with our widening experiences, descriptions or enactments of the world (universe)).

The nature of this enactment is all around and within us, in our dynamic personal, social and professional cultures. Thomas Kuhn spoke eloquently of "disciplinary matrices" in science, using the concept of an 'eidos', in his writings, an eidos being a system of methods. An eidos, in Kuhn's words, is a disciplinary matrix which defines and describes what a given society takes as its metaphysical assumptions, sensible formulations, meaningful challenges and sanctioned methods in its principal endeavours.

Where it exists a disciplinary matrix is the cognitive part of any organisational structure. It is made up of the criteria of credibility, the logic used in thinking and acting, and the basic ideas by which members of an organisation organise, interpret and share experience. It defines what the organisation takes as its models [the beliefs and assumptions], symbolic generalisations [the sensible formulations], values [as expressed in the meaningful challenges], and exemplars [the sanctioned methods] in its principal endeavours.

Historically Kuhn was talking about science, and in some of his discussions, how alike its practise is to the practise of religion. A little reflection on our parts allows us to also observe that his view is not inconsistent in talking about any population of systems which share similar cognitive facilities, experiential content and common injunctions - whether that population is a pride of lions, a TCP/IP-based storage network, a drug cartel, or a group of wall street arbitrageurs.

It's often said that culture democratizes perception (hence the consensus), sometimes lulling us into thinking that this mainly means that it provides a process and means for individuals to become part of a collective (who enact and practice the culture). Yet more violently and necessarily, culture enforces perception (THE consensus), providing many "curative" forces to ensure that "you 'see' what we 'see' and 'do' what we 'do'" with such feedback as: or else, no tenure, you're insane, you're disconnected, if you do that again or see that again I'll spank you, etc. From the moment of conception and even before, our variegated human "culture" is being injected, projected, enacted and practiced for us, with us and by us until we "get it right" (or are rejected or killed). Fortunately, as in any population, there are the necessary-for-the-population's-existence dynamics of chance, mutation, evolution, resistance, 'cranks', 'idiots', 'genius' and more, and sometimes being one and the same within a single individual (smile).

Current 'science' it seems to me is that set of disciplinary matrices (being the sum total of "How we do things around here with respect to discovering, determining and blessing knowledge {and those who do these things}") that are presently built on and takes as "real" a fundamental and, historically, Aristotelian dichotomy of "in here ain't out there" and vice-versa. Indeed, modern science, except perhaps in Quantum Physics, since about 1932 [Von Neumann, Dirac, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Feynmann et al], doesn't presently generally allow for "suppose it isn't either, neither, all or both".

"Is it a wave or is it a particle?" was first a paradox before it became "it's a field" (the first of several efforts in regarding waves and particles as symptomatic of some'thing' or some'think' else'where'). The place your blog pointed me towards is this: Just as 'is it a wave or is it a particle' is no longer regarded as a fundamental dichotomy that is "true" about the world (except perhaps as a correspondence with our methods and chosen contexts of investigation), might that not suggest that 'The map is not the territory', or, differently expressed, 'Is it the map or is it the territory' might also be distinctions (and hence processes and products) that are also symptomatic of a particular set of choices of some'thing', some'think' or some ways of acting we practise, and therefore as some suggest of the nature (not effects) of those results as "illusory", not in the sense of hallucination, but in the deeper sense of not being fundamental and in the sense that the realm a phenomena is real in and our participative ability to enact ourselves in that realm determine our "reality", and not the other way around. Or as Q'ai Gon,a Jedi master in the Star Wars movie 'Revenge of the Clones' remarks: "Your focus determines your reality". And for some five hundred years 'Science' has been looking with near enough a single focus.

Much of the ground for our Science beliefs and practices, cultural, disciplinary and otherwise, is bound over by our use of and the forms and ways we use and practice langauge. David Finkelstein, former Director of the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and now at M.I.T. Mathematics, says of the various languages of science that, like English, science is also a language. It is constructed of symbols. And the best you can get with symbols is a maximal but incomplete description. A mathematical analysis of subatomic phenomena, for example, is no better qualitatively than any other symbolic analysis, because symbols do not follow the same rules as experience. They follow rules of their own.

In short, the problem is not in the language, the problem is the language. Our problem, according to Finkelstein, is that we cannot understand subatomic phenomena, or any other kind of experience, through the use of symbols alone. As Heisenberg observed: The concepts initially formed by abstraction from particular situations or experiential complexes acquire a life of their own. Or as I like to observe, science [in its various quests to get to the bottom, top of, or arms around everything] has a cultural challenge: it's biased, for various partially understood reasons, towards familiar cultural methods and symbols, and those biases regard experience only on an evidentiary and verification/validation basis. Hence the methods for "in here" lack the cumulative five hundred (500) years of practice "science" has just put into the methods for "out there", and, again, at least in the West since the time of Heraclitus of Ephesus (some 2500 years ago), science has progressively (that's how it's described) put aside and 'forgotten' ('see' what we 'see') methods for "in here" developed in some instances over millenia. There are an increasing number of anomalies being discovered, buried, ignored or otherwise managed that emphasize science can't "have it's cake and eat it too" AND remain faithfully dichotomous. On present course the 21st century frames a space wherein these methods meet and blend, and in doing so reveal themselves as only symptoms of a far deeper craft and calling.

Some say we make the world, I rather think that as you and others have written here, in the flow of this sense, that we enact and practice it; and perhaps, in a reaching out that reaches in, we might learn to forgo the acts of personal, social and, herein, with respect to science and consensus, professional cultures that forget our deep and seemingly universe-spanning selves.

Arthur C. Clarke opined almost sixty years ago, that in the Year 2000 the Nobel Prize for Physics would be awarded for the "Study of Consciousness" He's off by a few years, however, he's right on target in that I presently think that if modern classical science (dichotomous) is to heal itself, inadvertently, mathematicians, physicists and philosophers will be in the vanguard. As Jung's friend, Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Wolfgang Pauli put it almost three quarters of a century ago: "From an inner centre the psyche seems to move outward, in the sense of an extraversion, into the physical world...If these men are correct, then physics is the study of the structure of consciousness."

"What is here is there too."
- The Rig Veda