On form and mechanism and the real Why (1)
Lately I see a very sharp distinction between form questions and mechanism questions in research. Then of course there are the ‘why does it happen in the first place’ questions but these can be categorized as either form or mechanism questions depending on your take on science (and life in general perhaps). (I will explain - wait a second).
The first kind of questions are descriptive questions asking about the form in which some phenomenon occurs.
“Given that people often misunderstand each other, how exactly does that look like? What happens when they misunderstand each other?” Observe lot’s of people misunderstanding each other, and try to ‘get a grip’ on that phenomenon. Or take your own personal experience as a starting point.
The second kind of question asks for a mechanism. It asks “what is a misunderstanding”. And the answer is then not what it looks like, but what it ‘really’ is. Like the yellow lightball in the sky is ‘really’ a big mass of nuclear fusion, called a sun.
I have the feeling that most people would hold that the first question is a ‘lesser’ form of science. Just see the sun-example: merely describing all the various ways in which this phenomenon might be ‘presenting itself to us’ might be an interesting excercise, but we still wouldn’t know ‘what the sun really is’.
But I seriously doubt that.
Perhaps it depends on the phenomenon. When it comes to suns, we want to know what they ‘really’ are. But when it comes, for instance, to research on the interaction between human beings and the technology that surrounds them, we particularly want to know ‘what it looks like’, what form it takes. This is perhaps because interaction *is* nothing else but a form, and so asking about the *mechanism* behind interaction would be asking the wrong kind of question.
But of course the scientists might disagree. Saying: well, if you *really* want to know about interaction, you would have to know how the brain works, the body, all the physical things in the universe, and how technology works, (what it is), and then you can … well, then you could “calculate” what form the interaction will take.
So the assumption seems to be that once you know the mechanism, there is nothing left to research with respect to the form questions, you can simply let a computer calculate all the possible forms, you put into the computer the starting conditions of some particular situation, and bingo, the form comes out.
But I seriously doubt that.
Now for the why question. Biologists sometimes say: there is no ‘why’, really, things just happen the way they happen ‘because’ this is the way the universe ‘works’. So people are here because they evolved, and they evolved because, well, that’s just what happens. You should understand if you know the mechanism of evolution.
But biologists still tend to talk carelessly as if answering ‘why’ questions. They say: birds have wings *so* as to be able to fly. Or people have eyes *so* as to be able to see far ahead. But that is a very different kind of why. It is a why question that reduces the form question to the ‘mechanism’ question: the mechanism becomes the ‘because’ of the ‘why this form’? Why does the bird look like this? Because he has evolved to fly. Why is a polar bear white? Because he needs to be invisible in the snow. That leaves us still with the real ‘why’ question. The real why question is: why is it so? Why do we exist? If I say I want to be a good person, why do I want to be that? And if I say it is good to take care of those around me, why is that considered to be good? Some people resort to a religion in order to answer these questions. They say that God has decided so.
But I seriously doubt that.
Instead I think that this latter ‘why question’, the more interesting one, is ultimately going to be a form question (and in any case most definitely never a mechanism question). And it will therefore have to be answered by looking very carefully into the form of the phenomenon that you have a why-question about. But I also think that it is not good enough to merely ‘analyse’ forms. You have to actually create them, in order to get a grip on them. That is the nicest things about forms, they can be created, by you, or by me. They are not there, ready to be ‘picked up’ by some detection method. You make them. They It is called form-giving in Dutch, but you might also call it ‘design’. It is not something that God does, or evolution, it is what we do. It is not at all the same as creating mechanisms, because mechanisms cannot be created. Mechanisms can only be ‘implemented’, which is an altogether different thing. Understand me, if you build me a machine, aspects of it might be the implementation of a mechanism, but that doesn’t mean that engineers don’t ‘give form’. I think that the machine might also be an expression of form. Sometimes we don’t see it that way, because we stay ignorant, always asking mechanism-questions all the time. Anyhow, forms, not mechanisms, can be created. You may also call it: giving meaning. Or: making sense. Making sense is just as much generating knowledge as ‘analyzing the underlying mechanism’. I do not see why the latter has more to offer than the former. Instead, the opposite may be true.
But I really have to think about this some more (give some more form to it).
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08 Jan 2010 admin
Dear Jelle,
Allow me to confuse you even more and add an extra category: models. To me the difference between scientists and engineers is about looking for universal laws (mechanisms) and models. A model follows from answering the question “How can we use the things we know to do new things?” The nice thing about working with models is that you use them because they work but you know that they are limited, and a newer better more useful model is around the corner. Or you know that the model works on a certain scale but not on a larger or smaller scale. That’s generally what I like about being an engineer, you know there’s always room for improvement.
Sorry if this comment makes me like one of those people that use other people’s blog to vent their own ideas
Hi Meggie
No, this is very interesting. I am very interested on all questions having to do with representation, and your response is about that too. Models are representations of the world. The scientist is always implicitly seeking to find the “model” that is so correct, that there is nothing left in the real world that is worth explaining. The “correct” model. But the engineer would rightly reply, if I paraphrase you, that models are never (by definition) the “correct”, they are only correct ‘in some useful sense’. Now there are scientists that have engineer-like philosophies, such as social-constructivism or instrumentalism. But that in effect would make these scientists not scientist but more engineers: people that ultimately want to know “in order to…”. There are also a lot of scientists that want to know just for the sake of knowing: knowing how the world really ‘is’. These are realists, at least I wouldn’t know how to be a non-realist and still be interested in pure knowledge only.
Another question though: how would your models relate to the WHY question? Because I have always seen models as something that you ‘derive’ from ‘what is out there’ (they describe as good as possible what is there). So I always saw models as a kind of ‘best description of the mechanism’. But you say: people use models in order to create new things. So models are a tool in design, am I right? Does that mean that in models, as engineers use them, there is already something creative, something that could not have been calculated by a computer on the basis of the available facts? A leap of intuition, a gut-feeling, a creative sparkle, things like that?
In other words, are models, instead of the product of deductive empirical science, more of the kind of things that you “craft”, using your skills and intuition?
Dear Jelle,
Athough I am taking a course in philosphy (from Marli), I am still more of an engineer than a philosopher. In the field that I know best, fluid dynamics, there is a nice sort of interaction between creativity and modelling. Or maybe better, working with the mechanism and improving the model/mechanism by understanding the reality behind it. Fluids are stange things and their behaviour is difficult to predict. We are quite good at predicting how a fluid goes through a pipe but what happens when you start mixing and putting bubbles in, stuff can be very hard to predict. That is why in chemcial industry, you often see multiple installations next to one another, instead of one really big one. Once they have a working design, it is much easier to replicate it, than to put in all the reseacrh and testing that is involved with scaling up. (of course redundancy can also be a factor but then we are getting into too much detail). But of course over the years because we get better at understanding the reality behind it, and the process of scaling up gets easier to predict. But the petrol that goes into your car has been through quite a few process steps that are designed on “engineering rules” and not on pure computational force.
An example from my own life. Most fluid dynamics people have a favourite dimensionless number, and mine is the Reynolds number. If you look this up in wikipedia there is a lengthy technological explanation which is probably hard to follow. To explain it simply; there is a point were a calm (laminary) stream of fluid turns turbulent. If you know the Reynolds number, you can predict this point. Most of the time you don’t need to know this, if you squeeze the garden hose everybody gets wet. However, I thought about it when I first took my baby to the “consultatiebureau” for his check-up. The doctor heard a murmur near the heart. She explained that heart murmurs mostly didn’t mean much in young babies but she still wanted to see him again in a few weeks. Obviously, she had been taught the mechanism “heart murmur, indicates turbulence, mostly caused by some blockage or other restriction”. And on top of that she had learned that babies are mostly an exception where it is more than likely to be a false alarm. But still, the first mechanism is more firmly implanted, so she wanted to see him again. I was slightly worried myself, until I remembered the Reynolds number and the fact that babies of course have smaller arteries and their blood goes at a higher speed. So from natural causes, there is a higher likelihood of turbulence in their blood. Because I knew the reality behind the mechanism, I was less worried than the doctor. So I must admit that I like reality as much as mechanisms.
And as for the big Why, do you expect all the answers from science? Albert Einstein said: Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind.
Hey Meggie,
Wow, thanks for the contribution. Since I now have fluid dynamicists commenting on my weblog I think I will apply for an upgrade in my Blog rating (which I don’t have at all so I can only rise).
In the vocabulary used in cognitive science, the mechanism is what is real, so I would expect you to say in the last sentence: “I must admit that I like reality as much as models”, is that ok for you or do you explicitly mean “mechanisms” as *opposed* to reality? (then we now have 3 levels: reality, mechanisms, and models).
I am almost tempted to ask you about how you can speak so firmly and self-evidently about ‘reality’ at the same time and also hint at a religious aspect in your life.
My background (my upbringing and education), have mainly taught me this ‘model’ of life, the universe and everything: basically there is a big planet, and on this planet life emerged (as a purely physical process, something that happens when random processes put chemicals together in a certain chance event) and then suddenly you got ’stuff’ that was special with respect to the other stuff that was already there (rocks, lava, water) and this stuff is called ‘lifeforms’ because it is stuff that holds pattern that would normally dissipate under the second law of thermodynamics, but strangely enough this ‘life’stuff stayed stable far from T-D-equilibrium becauseit had a membrane, creating an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ for itself and it had the capacity to ‘do’ things in order to be able to create a steady flow of energy in and out, accross the membrane.
And then this stuff (but still, in the end, stuff nonetheless) evolved according to evolutionairy laws (again, purely physical, just ’stuff’, really) and it evolved a brain, that could send signals at great speed such that chemical and mechanical processes could now be by-passed, to create something like ‘information processing’, and the circular loops inside this electrochemical system could hold patterns of activity for longer periods of time when the original embodied context was already long gone, creating something which we call a ‘memory’, and somewhere along that process, in a manner we hardly understand, consciousness arose, and the thing we call ‘knowledge, and understanding’, and ‘ethics’ and ‘good and bad’.
And of course at the same time is is all a very social process where we should not only look at the level of individual living entitities but it evolved also groupwise, using group dynamics (where, for example, like in fluids, a group of calm people can suddenly turn turbulent, perhaps even to be predicted by the very same Reynolds number). So there are of course all these kinds of complex nonlinear dynamical systems processes including chaotic states and dependency on initial conditions and so on and so forth.
Now starting from this story I can quite easily take the leap towards the idea that groups of people, by these social communicative dynamics, will find ’stable states’ in their communication that come to function as values, guiding their lives ‘top down’.
And I also can understand that it would be only natural for people to attach people-like qualities to these guiding forces. This, we call God. So the self-organizing group-wise value forces are taken together and perceived by the individual as a ‘person’-like entity called God (or Buddha, or etc..)
The thing is: I do not connect to this in the way that many people do. Because I can only see the groupwise selforganizing dynamics, but I do not see a personlike metaphysical entity in it. I stop at the chaos-story. That is enough for me. I guess.
But be happy to tell me another story!