Knowledge is a process that involves a dialectical cycle: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The last term then serves as a new “thesis,” beginning a new cycle. We see this in formal knowledge processes, like scientific theory-making and testing. A new idea is proposed to explain data or to make up for a deficiency in current theory. This idea is published in a journal, for example, which invites comment and critique (antithesis), which may lead to further refinement and experimental testing. If the idea is accepted by the scientific community (and not disqualified by experiment), the resulting synthesis becomes a new thesis to be eventually challenged.
Ordinary cognition involves a similar cycle. But the brain tends to be more definite in its conclusions than scientific experiment or observation, whose results are always probabilistic; and it tends to be less rigorous about testing ideas. The organism must be able to act decisively on the basis of the information it has, however inadequate. If our perceptions were not definite despite actual uncertainty, we would be paralyzed by doubt and unable to act decisively. Yet, the knowledge cycle is incomplete and less reliable when thesis alone is in play, however confidently asserted.
The inherent need to believe our perceptions and trust our beliefs runs up against the contradictory perceptions and beliefs of others. While objectivity is desirable, the natural tendency is to mistake perception for reality or truth, short-circuiting the epistemic process. And in order to maintain this illusion, we tend to overlook inconsistencies in our own thinking, perhaps to protest that we are being objective while others are not. While there can be dissonance within one’s own thinking, leading to self-scepticism, dissonance with others is nearly guaranteed. Too often, internal dissonance leads not to questioning one’s own views, however, but to retrenchment of them and scepticism in regard those who disagree. Nevertheless, the fact that opinions differ plays an overall positive role in the epistemic cycle, for which others provide the necessary antithesis. Whether spontaneous or forced by others, the recognition of one’s own error or subjective limits enables mind to evolve at once toward humble relativity and greater objectivity.
It can hardly be taken for granted that embodied mind seeks truth. The goal of life is survival long enough to reproduce, not objectivity. In other words, our natural condition as organisms is to see and know what we need to see and know. And this is not simply a matter of selective attention or reduced information flow—an obscuring filter between the mind and an otherwise transparent window on the external world. Simply, there is no window at all!
The epistemic circumstance of the scientist parallels that of the brain, sealed inside the skull, which relies on the input of “remote” receptors to infer the nature of the external world. The scientist similarly relies on instrument readings. Both situations demand radical inference. The brain makes use of unconscious perceptual models, according to the body’s needs. Scientists consciously model observed phenomena, according to society’s needs. The brain’s unconscious perceptual models are reliable to the degree they enable life. By the same token, scientific modelling, like other human practices, should not be regarded for its truth value alone, but also for its ultimate contribution to planetary well-being. Good science supports a human future.
Science and engineering are intrinsically idealizing. The dominance of mathematics (which is pure idealization) means that physical phenomena are idealized in such a way that they can be treated effectively with math. This leads to an analysis of real systems in terms of the idealized parts of a conceptual machine. But the reality of nature never conforms perfectly to the idealization. There are no spherical cows, and nature is not a machine. The discrepancy constitutes a potential antithesis to the oversimplified thesis.
Unlike the individual brain, science is a collective social process. It is a communication among scientists—a (mostly) polite form of argumentation through which ideas are justified to others. In fact, science is a model of social cooperation, transcending political and cultural boundaries. Just as there is an epistemic cycle of knowledge production, so there are larger-scale cycles in science: paradigm shifts, but also alternations of more general undercurrents, themes, and fashions such as positivism and Platonism.
Indeed, the interplay of positing and negating aspects of mind manifests in historical cycles generally. The opposing phases in culture may be characterized broadly as heroic and ironic. These poles form a unity, like those of a magnet, alternating as undercurrents which surface in philosophical, social, political, religious, moral, and artistic movements, as well as in scientific fashions. The limiting nature of any proposition or “positive” system of thought casts a complementing shadow that is the other side of the coin. Every thesis posited defines its own antithesis. Where contradictions cannot be resolved logically—that is, outside of time—they give rise to temporal alternations in the phases of a cycle. The pendulum of history swings back, fashions return; we move in spirals if not circles.
Throughout history, there has been a dialectical relationship between the playful, embroidering, subjective, ironic side of the human spirit and the heroic, serious, goal-oriented, earnest, realist side. The ironic mentality delights in playing within bounds. It understands limits to be arbitrary, relative, intentional. The heroic mentality rejects limits as obstructions to absolute truth and personal freedom, while worshipping limitlessness as a transcendent ideal. The heroic is aspiring, straightforward, straightlaced, straight-lined, passionately simplistic, rectilinear, square, naive, concerned with content over form, and tending toward fascism and militarism in its drive toward monumental ideals and monolithic conceptions. The ironic is witty, sarcastic, curvaceous, ornate, sophisticated, diverse, complex, sceptical, self-indulgent and self-referential, tending toward decadent aimlessness and empty formalism. While each is excessive as an extreme, together they are the creative engine of history.
There are cycles of opening and closing in societies, in individual lives, and in creative processes generally. The tension between idealism and materialism, or between heroic and ironic frames of mind, helps to explain why history appears to stutter. Most of any historical cycle will consist of working out the details of a new regime, scheme, paradigm, or theory. But the cycle will also necessarily include an initial creative ferment and a final stagnation, sandwiching the more conventional middle. When change is too rapid or chaotic, there is nostalgia for the probably not-so-good ol’ days. Instability inspires conservative longing for structure, order, certainty and control—until an excess of those inspires revolt again, beginning a new cycle. Generally, too much of anything breeds contempt—and therefore its opposite—as part of the homeostatic search for balance.
Cycles acted out in real time may reflect the deeper endemic circularity of logical paradox. If space and time themselves are products of the brain, how can the brain be located in the space and time it has created? Self-aware consciousness deems the external world to be an image constructed by the brain, but the brain is part of the world so constructed as an image. The endpoint of an explanatory process is recycled as its beginning. It does not seem possible to resolve such circularity in a synthesis. That is perhaps why there cannot be a logically consistent scientific theory of consciousness, which remains a mystery because we are it.