11.2: Reality, Science and Revolutions in Our Thinking

Along the way to this goal, however, we must not only figure out who ‘we’ are, we must try to get a handle on reality in general, and in particular what ‘nature,’ understood as the larger biological world that includes us, is like and how we come to know what it is like. There are things that really exist, outside of ourselves—I think all of us must acknowledge this, as a fact of our own existence. There is, ‘really,’ a real world out there, one that we can see and hear and touch and smell. We know that something exists that is independent of our own private thoughts about it, and we humans share the knowledge of the existence of a common reality ‘out there’ in such a way that we can talk to one another about it, arrange to meet one another at certain times and places within it, and so on. All other living organisms share with us the ability to have knowledge of the existence of the fundamental reality, to the extent that all of us beings need to understand ‘how things are’ with that reality, in order to be able to deal with it so as to stay alive. All organisms have ways of sensing those aspects of reality that are important to them; we humans have our own types of sense organs that allow us to sense what is important to us. We also have brains that enable us to synthesize this information and take appropriate action, as do many other animals.

Long ago in our history, however, some of us humans started to look more closely at the world around us, to observe how parts of it seemed to behave by watching and listening and touching that reality, sometimes even poking around with it, and even measuring and recording things, and trying to explain how things happened and predict what was likely to happen next. Thus we started practicing ‘science,’ in many forms in many different cultures around the world—the wellsprings of science being the curiosity that propels one to seek out how things are, really, in the world, combined with the spirit of empiricism, the inner demand to come as close as possible to this knowledge through direct interaction with one’s own senses, with as little as possible need for taking anyone else’s word about how they are.

Because we humans are very social beings, however, we began sharing the things we were learning about the nature of our reality, building on what had been recorded by those that came before, and sometimes the common opinion about what’s true of our underlying reality needed to be corrected when new information, empirically gathered, came to light. Shared beliefs are ‘sticky’ things—they can enlarge our understanding of the world, but they can also hold back our ability to incorporate new knowledge because of the powerful resonance created by everybody-believing-the-same-thing-together. The trade-off between these two consequences of our social nature has led to several recognized ‘revolutions’ in the history of science, times when the general outline of what is taken for reality—our beliefs about ‘how things are’—has needed to shift significantly, first among scientists and eventually among the general public, changing from one pattern of understanding to another. In the Western world, for example, the Copernican Revolution changed the collective understanding of ‘how things are’ from belief in a geocentric universe to belief in a solar system in which the Earth is the third planet from the sun, and once the ‘new’ way of looking at the heavens was adopted—once this paradigm shift was made, in the words of Thomas Kuhn (1962)—many things that just didn’t fit into the older way of thinking were seen for the first time, including new stars, sunspots and comets. We now seem to be on the verge of another major shift of paradigm as a result of continuing progress in science, and whether or not it is successfully achieved may well determine whether or not our human species, as well as the many others that evolved with us, will continue to exist into the future. The inertia of our old, shared, but simply habitual ways of thinking and acting has become a major obstacle to our making the necessary shift in our thinking and acting. Fortunately, the way social forces maintain and reinforce that inertia is also something that certain branches of academic endeavor now are grappling with; unfortunately, however, several recently worsening developments are working to undermine our ability to learn from science what we need to know about our reality, ranging from the tendency of certain scientists to allow their research to be influenced by the needs of the industries they serve—thus contributing to a growing skepticism about the integrity of ‘science’ in certain other quarters—all the way to financial and political interests overtly generating and propagating deliberate misinformation to keep us in ignorance or fostering< collective denial (Oreskes & Conway, 2010).

In this chapter, we will speak a great deal in the language of science, mostly biological science, because the intention here is to provide an overview of how things are with nature—how it works, what we’re doing to it, and why; and science, if done with integrity, seems to provide the best way we have of figuring all that out. Empirical science is built on the assumption that what I laid out at the start of this chapter is true: that there is areality that we can see and touch and measure; and it is hoped that we can use what is concluded on the basis of careful observations of it to change prevailing beliefs if and when change is discovered to be warranted. We will also speak in the language of philosophy upon occasion. However, and will do so now in order to introduce the term ontology, the philosophical study of being, of what exists and in what way; here we will follow John Searle (1995) in distinguishing two fundamentally different ontological categories, that which exists ‘objectively’ in the physical/biological world, independently of the ways we may represent things to ourselves within our belief systems—i.e. the things that are studied by science—and that which exists subjectivel’ in the form of the shared representations that we humans carry around in our heads, which underlie our ‘social reality,’ to be discussed later in the chapter. The revolution in our way of understanding ‘how things are’—the shift that needs to happen—begins with opening our eyes to the complexity of nature, to the astounding complexity of living organisms and the ecosystems in which they are enmeshed, which our science is only just recently coming to appreciate; it will come full circle when we begin to see ourselves acting within this larger context, including the ways in which we are acting to construct our social reality, and how we might begin to change this humanly created reality so as not to have such a destructive effect on nature, including that part of nature that is ourselves.

In order to deal with the welter of detail that is emerging rapidly, however, given the sheer number of human beings now engaging in science and contributing to our understanding of all that that complexity, we need to learn how to approach it in terms of ‘systems thinking’—a very different way of thinking about how things happen than the simplistic linear model that goes ‘A bumps into B and causes C.’ A system has been defined as ‘a set of things interconnected in such a way that they produce their own pattern of behavior over time,’ and as such it needs to be considered holistically, not thought of as merely an assemblage of separate ‘parts,’ with the recognition that the basic operating unit of a system is the feedback loop (Meadows, 2008). Since our reality is unimaginably complex, its vast number of parts are interconnected through innumerable ongoing interactions, and these are damped down or speeded up by a multitude of feedbacks such that the relationship between any given change in the system and its ensuing effects will usually be anything but linear. This broad sea-change in our thinking will also serve to usher in two more specific changes in our way of seeing the world. The first comes when we step back from our shallow stereotypes and see other beings as the immensely complex living wholes that they are, and the other occurs when we take another step back and start getting a grasp of the larger whole made up of all these innumerable other living beings in ongoing relationships with one another—the Biosphere, the dynamic configuration of all life on this planet. We will begin to see many other living beings as highly intelligent and purposive in their own right, that they are not just ‘things’ or ‘resources’ to do with as we please, and will recognize that we are not only interconnected with them in many biological ways, we are also enmeshed in moral relationships with them. At the same time that we are beginning to cognize the Biosphere’s complexity and that of the myriad living beings we share it with, however, we are also becoming aware of the extent to which our collective human activities have already impacted many of these other beings and the Earth System as a whole, and of how these systems are likely to fare in the future if we continue on along our present course. It is to be hoped that, as we all absorb the many new findings emerging from science, we will decide to reverse course and call off our ‘war against nature.’