 Well, hello, and welcome back to module three of Beyond Networks, The Evolution of Living System. We're going to continue our excursion into philosophy at the very beginning of this course. In this module, we're talking about processes, looking at the world from the perspective of its dynamics. And the first part of this module is going to talk about knowledge, how knowledge itself is dynamic, how it changes and what we need to focus on when we realize the processional nature of knowledge. We're going to start from what we built up in the last module, module two on scientific perspectivism. And I'm just going to give the word quickly here again at the beginning to Ron Geary, who, towards the end of his book, concludes that if you look at science itself as a sort of a perspective, perspective is perspective. So scientific perspectivism is itself a perspective, it's reflexive, just like constructivism is itself a social construct. And so this perspective is perspective, I'm going to follow this combination of words a couple of times, projectivist perspective shifts our focus from the product of science, what science with the output is true facts in some sense of the word that we discussed in the last module. To an agent based perspective of doing science or the interaction of the scientist with reality, which involves strategies incentives the motives of scientists and their goals, influence again, what kind of problems we want to tackle, and what kind of questions that we ask, what kind of things we care about. So if you do this, you automatically get a much more dynamic view of science, because it's about interaction, interaction between scientists between perspectives interaction between the scientist and reality. So what we'll do in this module, we will take a process based perspective, focus on the dynamics of scientific inquiry itself of the reality that it studies, and of the knowledge that it creates. So not only will we look at a processional account of reality, but also a processional account of science and it will become clear I hope as we go along with that. I'm going to start explaining what I mean by dynamic knowledge by a metaphor using a metaphor that I've taken from a book that I highly recommend written by a theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, who is a brilliant popularizer of science. In his book, The Island of Knowledge, he talks about the limitations of science and the connection of sort of looking for evidence and facts and science and the search that we all humans are engaged in the search for meaning I was talking about this in the very first lecture. I'm not only interested here with knowledge, but sort of how it connects to wisdom and how to use this knowledge appropriately. A great book, it's about, it uses examples from theoretical physics but explains them very well, even if you're not a physicist. So we could, let me use a beautiful illustration of this idea here, by, you know, this beautiful book Pretty Pictures, it's called by Bantias, Miriam Bantias, and it depicts this island of our knowledge in a sea of ignorance. And I like, so what we're doing when we do science is we sort of start from what we know and we sail out into this ocean across the curiosity straight up there. If we zoom in, we see some sort of areas here. There is a brain town is very important imagination, county thought thoughtful state. I like the criticism would sit sometimes a jungle you have to go through the slippery slope of logical fallacies that plunge you into the learning lake. You can be stranded on offshore on the rocks of overconfidence or be sailing a ship of fools here. A beautiful metaphor of knowledge. And the point is here that knowledge is like this island expanding, you can imagine the island grows it becomes bigger and bigger as we learn. And the important thing is that doesn't make the ocean necessarily smaller the ocean is huge compared to the island. But what it does is it makes the shoreline of the island longer as you grow, you know more, but you also have more contact with the unknown. So in a way, the point of science is not to provide facts or answers. But, you know, if you think about it, the, the best science is the science that creates new questions for every question. It answers, it creates 10 more if you do that if you have a breakthrough like that you will find an entire new field of inquiry. And those are the most remembered and memorable sort of scientific acts of creation. So let us think about then what we don't know this ocean, because this is what we should focus on not what we know, but what we want to know. And I'm going to use a person which who is not, he's a philosopher, he has a bachelor's degree in philosophy as far as I know. He was a politician. Donald Rumsfeld served as the Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush and had the unfortunate task that he did carry out with Gusto to defend the reasons why the US were going to invade the nation of Iraq, despite the lack of evidence for weapons of mass destruction. And so one, during one of those press conferences in 2002, he came out with this brilliant quote, I mean, brilliant in the context of the philosophy of science, not for justifying a war. What he said is there are things we know that we know. We can wonder if there are things we know that we know. What does that mean? Hmm, how do we know it? We talked about that about certainty and all these questions in the last module. But there are known unknowns that is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. Okay, so we know we don't know everything. And also at the borders of knowledge, there are a few things answers to questions that we know we have. So basically this sort of knowledge to known unknown is knowledge for which we don't, for example, questions for which we don't have answers. But, and this is the most interesting part of this quote. And science in general, there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don't know. He was pretending to not know that there were no weapons of mass destruction. But in our context, it means the really interesting things happen when you get into this unknown unknown. When you ask new questions that you could not predict before. That's when you really innovate in science conceptually you break through to to completely new areas of knowledge, and you create new perspectives, of course, in this way by asking new questions. So the general states that we're in a scientist and nobody tells you this when you get into science is this, you realize at some point of your studies you look around and you realize nobody knows anything. And everybody else is relieved. So this cartoon takes Jean-Louis David's wonderful painting, The Death of Socrates. And what I want to illustrate here is that one of the world's oldest philosophical questions is how do we get to know things we don't even know we don't know. And this is the subject of several of Plato's dialogues, but mostly the Mino, where Plato has a boy who doesn't know anything about geometry. And Socrates is teaching this boy how to conduct a geometric proof, not by teaching the boy anything about geometry, but just by asking him questions. And so Plato concluded that the knowledge must have been in the boy before. And so everybody, all we do when we learn is we just remember the knowledge that our immortal souls had before we were born. And we're sort of just rediscovering our knowledge in this life. Obviously, this is no longer a sort of a model of, for epistemology that works very well today. But the question remains, how can we learn anything new, truly new. I was complaining in the last module about how we had settled in what Thomas Kuhn would call normal science, producing a lot of results in areas of science that are already established by what Kuhn called puzzle solving. So we use the methods that are already there, especially if there's something new coming up technologically. Think about single cell transcriptomics, we use it, and we do stuff with it. But that's not revolutionary science, not radical innovation. That's not a new perspective. So to see the world with different eyes, we need to go beyond that. We need to change framing, change perspective, disrupt what we already know. And one way to do this is to refocus from the facts that we have, that your talk during your whole career is one thing that goes wrong with education. We're always excessively focused on the things we know. And that has two problems. One problem is that we overestimate what we know, and we underestimate the unknown. And the second is it distracts us from what's really important, especially when doing science. And that is to ask the right questions. We should be wondering much more about the questions we are asking than the sort of facts that other scientists around us have produced already, which you also need to know. You need those facts to get to new questions, but the major focus should be the unknown. This is the point of a wonderful little book, which is called Ignorance and how it drives science written by a neurobiologist called Stuart Feierstein. Very philosophical little book. And he says, Stuart says, knowledge is a big subject, but ignorance is much bigger. Remember the island in this vast ocean. And it is much more interesting. It takes a metaphor for science, which is, it is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room. That's an old proverb. I think it's from India, especially when there is no cat. That's sometimes what we're doing when we do science. So the important thing is not the black cat itself, but it's the search. This is the question that drives us. So it's Trinity to Neo very early on in the matrix. And this is what's lost in our education. In your life in general, but especially if you become a scientist or an educator, it is questions that should drive us and not the answers because that's where we want to go. We want to ask the right question. If you have the right question, yet the right answer will come. And so by ignorance, we should clarify again, because this is not against knowledge. This is not an argument against knowledge. It just says knowledge is just a stepping stone to get into the unknown. Ignorance in Stuart Feierstein's definition is a particular condition of knowledge. It is the absence of fact of understanding of insight or the absence of clarity about something. Often you have data. That's the last point here. It says it occurs where data don't exist or more often don't make sense. You have data, but you can't interpret them. That's important here in this third point that I skipped. It's not an individual lack of information, but a communal gap in knowledge. It's not what you don't know as a person. That's not so interesting. You can learn that by interacting with others or by reading a book, but it's what we as a community don't know. This is what we're doing when we're stepping out of our frame. When we look at our perspective and compare it to others, we want to explore where those gaps are. And if you know where those gaps are, you already are on the way to a big discovery. Maybe not, but that's what you need to do to get lucky to actually discover something new. So ignorance, and that's very important, is not willful stupidity or a callow indifference to facts or logic. And this is exactly what Stuart Firestein says is so common today among celebrities, politicians, you know, we should all inject ourselves with disinfectant, let the light into our bodies. That's not the sort of ignorance. That's just stupidity. That's just being a moron, not being a scientist. It's not what we mean here. So this ignorance is a much more philosophical ignorance, and we should think about it. We can think about it. There is a whole branch of philosophy. Very few philosophers are actually busy with it, surprisingly, that thinks about what we can and we cannot know. I covered that in my philosophy lecture, but we'll have time here. So basically, you could imagine a slightly different metaphor from the island. You could imagine that knowledge is like a drop falling into a pond, and then the ripples expanding through the pond. And basically, as they expand, your knowledge grows, but also the interface with the outside. I think that's a beautiful and very sort of meditative picture of what we're talking about here. And a wonderful, absolutely wonderful quote by Carl Sagan, also one of the best popularizers, very philosophical, popularizers of science of all time. And this wonderful little book, Varieties of Scientific Experience, very personal, I highly recommend it. He says, look, I mean, if you think about it, if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. It's a terrible thought. You never read in the discussion section of a paper that now we know everything about this problem that's worth knowing. Let's stop, right? No, you write the discussion session of a paper by saying, OK, this research has created all these new questions. So the journey for new knowledge is basically an infinite journey. And a very important process philosopher that I'm going to use a lot in the next few lectures, Nicholas Rescher, he says, the processual nature of knowledge reflects the fact that our thought about the real things of this world presses outward beyond the limit of any restrictive knowledge. As far as we know, there are many more things to learn about the world than we will ever be able to learn as, again, limited human beings with a limited time on in this world. And so, for all practical purposes, the search for knowledge will go on forever. And therefore, we have to consider scientific knowledge. Not as a sort of a set of facts, immutable facts, but as this ever expanding sort of wonderful process. Now that sort of metaphor, I told you to be careful with metaphors. And now I throw them around, you know, like it's the end of the world. So you have to be careful with those, especially that sort of smooth expansion of the ripple. That's not how it works. We're going to talk about how the process of scientific inquiry actually works in a little bit. But before that, in the next lecture, I'm going to have to introduce a bit more. What I mean by process philosophy, what the tradition is, and what the arguments are that process philosophers have and why they think they are important. This is what we're going to do next. For now, I thank you for listening. And I'll see you around.