 Good evening. Welcome. I'm happy to see you here. And I'm especially delighted about this special session of the MIT Communications Forum. I'm David Thorburn, Professor of Literature and Director of the Forum, beginning in January for the 20th year. And it is a kind of pleasure for me to introduce our moderator this evening, Seth Mnuchin, who is the Associate Director of the Forum. And my expectation is will be my successor. I think he's been doing wonderful work, and I'm very excited about his presence as Associate Director of the Forum. Perhaps I can introduce the entire event by mentioning that something like 15 years ago, I gave a talk to a rather elite group in Aspen, Colorado called the Broadcasters Convention. And they were elite, very wealthy broadcasters, people from all the major networks. And I was the only professor in any humanistic discipline at this event. So I introduced myself by saying how pleased I was to be there and how especially happy I was that they were inviting a humanist. And I heard strange grumbling in the audience, didn't understand, and I gave my speech, but I thought I was very good, but they didn't seem to respond very effectively. Later, a friend of mine who'd been in the audience told me I'd lost them at the beginning because they thought humanist meant human being. I hope our audience doesn't make that error. Seth. Thank you. Thank you very much, David. And thank you all for coming out. I'm just going to stand up for the introduction, so no one mistakes me as being part of this incredibly illustrious panel. The format for the evening, we're going to talk among ourselves for roughly the first hour and then take questions from all of you for the second hour. A reminder, which I will remind you of again when we begin the questions, please just identify yourself when you ask questions. This is being recorded and an audio recording and a video recording will eventually be online. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce the four panelists here tonight. James Carroll, who is to my immediate left, is an historian, novelist, and journalist. His many works of fiction and nonfiction include an American Requiem, which won the National Book Award, and Constantine Sword, now an acclaimed documentary. He writes frequently about Catholicism in the modern world and, in fact, has a book coming out in a couple of weeks, is that right? Called Christ Actually the Son of God for the Secular Age. Putting us all to shame, he also just published a novel several months ago called Warburg in July. And in addition to all that, he's a prize-winning columnist for the Boston Globe and a distinguished scholar in residence at Suffolk University in Boston. Rebecca Newburger Goldstein, who is to Jim's left, is a philosopher and novelist and the author of 10 books, including, most recently, 36 arguments for the existence of God, a work of fiction, and Plato at the Googleplex, Why Philosophy Won't Go Away. She was named the World Economics Forum. She was named, too, the World Economics Forum Global Council of Values and was also named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association in 2011. So what better person to help represent the humanities? She's the recipient of numerous awards for her scholarship in fiction, including a MacArthur Fellowship. Alan Leitman, who was part of the reason why we're all here today, which I'll explain in a moment, is a physicist, novelist, and essayist. In astrophysics, he's made fundamental contributions to gravitation theory, the behavior of black holes, and radiation process as an extreme environment. His 1993 novel, Einstein's Dream, was an international best seller, and in 2000, his book, The Diagnosis, was a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. He is currently a professor of the practice in humanities at MIT and teaches with me in the graduate program in science writing. Robert Weinberg, at the end of the table, is one of the world's leading molecular biologists. And the person who discovered the first gene known to cause cancer. His work focuses on the molecular and genetic mechanisms that lead to the formation of human tumors. And his recent work has examined how human cancer cells metastasize. In 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Science, which is the nation's highest scientific honor. He also is here at MIT as a professor of biology and a founding member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. So the genesis for this conversation here was actually a communications forum that was held last spring that Alan participated in. It was called Science in Fiction, along with a novelist named Hanya Yanagihara. And during the question and answer period, Alan and the head of the literature program here, Mary Fuller, began talking about some of the differences in sciences and the humanities. And Mary and Alan and I all thought that this would be a great topic to explore further. So we're going to start just with some brief opening statements from all four panelists, and then we will be off and running. So, Jim, you can start. Good evening, folks. It's a great pleasure for me to be here, not least because I take the honor of being invited to address a weighty question, but I'm also quite grateful to be on the panel with these three folks, four, including Seth, but three to my left, to my esteem and regard having encountered them powerfully in important ways for myself over the years as friends. So it's a special privilege. I expect to learn a lot. I remind myself now of Admiral Stockdale. You may remember Admiral Stockdale, who ran for vice president with Ross Perot. And at the vice president's debate, he began by saying, who am I? And what am I doing here? He also said when he was asked a question, I think it was about Medicare. I'm out of ammunition on that one. His greatest distinction at that point was he was a hero of captivity during the Vietnam War, a man who really was a hero in his youth. And alas, in his later years, got caught looking ridiculous. I hope that's not what happens to me here tonight. I wondered how I could identify myself to, in effect, have a credential to be in this conversation. What occurred to me to say simply is that I'm a Christian humanist. And I'd like to just put on the table for our conversation two figures who've been extremely important in my own intellectual life. One is Peter Abelard, whom you may remember as an early 12th century philosopher, theologian. It's a distinction that wouldn't have meant much to him. He was a scholar in Paris and was engaged in an enterprise that evolved eventually into the University of Paris. He's most well known because of his affair with Eloise, which got him castrated, banished, silenced, and basically removed from a position of real influence in the life of Christendom. The point about Abelard for me is that he was an anti-Crusader at the point when the Crusades were defining not just the politics of Europe, nascent, newly born Europe, defining the politics of Europe, but also the ideology of Europe. And Abelard was a dissenter from the ideology that took hold of the European mind in important ways. But the most important thing about him in a way was what he was part of initiating. So he was a Latin scholar who was benefiting from the arrival in Europe of the Greek classics translated by the Iberian Peninsula translators, Muslim and Jewish and Christian, but mainly Muslim and Jewish. And you know this story well. Rebecca's an expert on it. The way in which the arrival of Aristotle in the mind of Latin Europe enabled a kind of recovery, not from Plato, but from Neoplatonism, which had been a deadly, stultifying ideology in the mind of Europe and the Christian world as it evolved into Christendom. And the arrival of those great texts, especially Aristotle, transformed the mind of Europe as it was coming to be and initiated, what I recognize at least, as a tradition of Christian humanism, a real embrace of basic human value. And the second and great figure in track with Abelard was Thomas Aquinas a century later. So the 13th century by then, text of Aristotle, much more broadly available, really defining Thomas Aquinas' thought. Our subject is knowledge and how the knowledge in the humanities might differ. Does it differ from knowledge in the sciences? And for me, Aquinas is the perfect touchstone for the beginning of our conversation. Because, again, for him, that distinction, the humanities and the sciences, wouldn't have meant much to him. It was all knowledge. And the thing that really struck me when I began to think about this was the Summa Theologica, Aquinas' great work, which, and this was an era when you could still attempt to summarize all that is known. So in that work, he's summarizing all that is known about theology. But what was striking to me was the subtitle of that work was the nature and limits of human knowledge. So it's a work, Summa Theologica, that is summarizing all that we know about God. But the subtitle is the nature and limits of human knowledge. So to talk about God is to talk about human knowledge. That's what's interesting to me. And I want to just make five quick points about knowledge for our discussion. I probably will be the only person to make this offer this frame of reference, because it's effectively the frame of reference of a believer, of someone for whom the discussion of knowledge is incomplete if it somehow doesn't grapple with the question of God. Although, Rebecca knows more about the proofs of God than anybody else I know. Although, with Aquinas, he only had five proofs of God. The point number one, I know what Aquinas calls sensory knowledge. Point number two, I know that I know, which is human knowledge. Dogs know, but humans know that they know, which is the beginning of self-consciousness. Consciousness can explain everything, which is the principle of science, as I understand it, except itself, which is the principle of the limits of science, as I understand them. I know that I know includes, I know that I do not know. So the limit of knowledge is essential to knowledge. And in Aquinas, that leads to his thinking about the via negativa, the way to know is to begin with what is not known. And the only things we can know for certain about God is that we do not know God. So not knowing is a form of knowing. And finally, for him, the crucial thing is that the experience I know, moving to I know that I know, moving to I know that I know and that what I do not know leads to the experience of being known. I know that I know that I am known. There's a pre-rational primordial assumption of being known. And knowledge points to that knower. So all knowing has an analogical character that moves inevitably toward, as I see it, the one who knows. The purpose of knowing, and this is my final point, as Aquinas said, is not knowing, but love. Where does knowing aim to go? It aims to go to love. Love takes off, takes up, he said, where knowledge leads off. All right, thank you. And of course, here, if someone's here and wants to close that door out to the hall, that'd be great. OK, Rebecca. Well, actually, Ellen and I decided to switch. You're going to switch, OK? So Ellen, I mentioned to Rebecca that I might ruffle her feathers, so she said I should go first. So I can respond. I'm happy to see all of you here. The topic tonight is very dear to my heart. I'll be brief and get directly to the point. I think that both the sciences and the humanities are seeking understanding and truth. But those truths are different, in my view. In science, the truth is the external, inanimate, disembodied world of atoms and stars and neurons. In the humanities, the truth ultimately lies in human beings, our natures, our society, our values, our motivations, our actions. These are profound differences, and I think they need to lead to many other differences. One difference is in the nature of proof. The mind of a human being, the human mind, is far more complex than any physical system that we know of, any other physical system. Even neuroscientists who study the brain haven't yet begun to approach the complexity at the level needed to understand thought, consciousness, self-awareness, aesthetic judgment, motivation, and Professor Weinberg can correct me later here. Because human beings are ambiguous and full of contradictions, the humanities cannot prove things about history or literature or philosophy in the same way that a physicist can prove that a drop ball falls a distance proportional to the square of the time of the falling. Or the way that a biologist can prove that the way that a nerve cell communicates with another nerve cell is by releasing dopamine or acetylcholine. There's a sense of rightness and wrongness with the scientific theory. You can prove that Einstein's theory is superior to Newton's theory. It's far more accurate and accounting for all gravitational phenomena. You can't prove that Jeremy Bentham's theory of utilitarianism is more or less correct than John Locke's social contract theory. That doesn't mean that Bentham and Locke are not brilliant and stimulating thinkers. Of course they are. A closely related idea is the repeatability of phenomena in science versus the singular nature of events in the humanities. The humanities often deal with people and events living in a particular era or a particular social milieu. And it's impossible to exactly repeat the conditions to test an apothesis. In science, with the exception of cosmology, experiments can be repeated thousands of times because the conditions of the experiment can be recreated in the laboratory. Apothesis testing is far more definitive in science because of this aspect of repeatability. In fact, many humanists would not describe their work as apothesis testing at all. Ambiguity is more important in the humanities. In fact, scientists hate ambiguity. Scientists want clear, crisp answers to their questions. A swinging pendulum is not ambiguous. You can measure the length of its swing, the length of time for a swing precisely, as a function of the length of the string. You can write down an equation that accurately predicts the position of the pendulum at a future time. By contrast, you can't predict the actions of a human being in a particular situation unless it's a very simple situation and you cannot predict the actions of a nation of human beings. That ambiguity in human actions, which is always a good sign of a good character in literature, is a result of the essential complexity and unpredictability of the human mind and the inability to isolate all of the forces that affect human behavior. That doesn't mean that there aren't many interesting, important questions in the humanities. Certainly, there are. It's just that these questions often do not have unique and definitive answers as questions do in the sciences. And I wanted to end just by saying, and I hope Rebecca's been a little stirred up here. I just wanted to end by saying that personally, I am very happy to be living in a world that has both certainty and ambiguity. When I'm flying in an airplane, sitting in a 500 ton machine that's thousands of feet up in the air, I am very happy for the certainty of physics and aerodynamics. But when I'm meeting a new friend or debating a moral issue or analyzing the social forces on my favorite novelist, I find that the ambiguity and the subtlety and the multiple points of view engage me far more than would a single and sterile answer. All right, thank you, Ellen. So I guess the question is, Rebecca, did he stir you up there? I'm not ruffled enough. Well, it's a great pleasure to be here. And this is, again, for me, an issue that really resonates with me. I started out college in physics, and I, in fact, got all the way through and applied to graduate school in physics. But I was taking a class in quantum mechanics. And I kept asking my professor, how do we interpret this? And he was of that school, the answer. What I was asking was, what is reality like according to this theory? And his answer, to me, was basically various variations on shut up and calculate. And finally, he said to me, why don't you go talk to the philosophers? They asked this kind of meaningless question. And so I did and ended up going to graduate school in philosophy, studying philosophy of physics. And then somewhere along the line also began to write novels. So I feel like the sciences, the humanities, and the arts are, I have an equal stake in all of them and passionately love all of them. But I think an awful lot about the difference between the sciences and the humanities, and in particular one humanity, one of the humanities, philosophy, which I think is rather different from the other humanities. And I mostly, I'm going to head that way in my comments. There are two kinds of questions that we wrestle with in order to try to make sense of our lives, make sense of everything. There are questions of what is, and there are questions of what matters. And it's not as if these questions are completely separate from each other. They have connections with one another. For example, we can ask whether it matters that we know what is. Why should that really matter that we know what is? But we do. We come into this universe and we want to know the ontological furniture. What kind of world is this? And which is also a question of what are we? Sometime, it didn't really begin in the Greek world. The roots are in the Greek world. But sometime around the 16th, 17th century, we came up with an amazing conglomeration of different cognitive techniques that have helped us discover what is. And that conglomeration of a priori mathematics and observation, theory, and intuition is called science. Science is our best means of telling us what is. Because what science did develop, it's not just intuition or a priori reason or observation. Science developed this technique of getting reality, getting nature to answer us back when we're getting it wrong. This is incredible that we came up with this. And I very much credit Galileo for this, one of my heroes. Even though he was such a plateness, was Galileo, that in one of his letters he said that if my critics weren't so stupid, I could persuade them through pure a priori reason. But because they're so stupid, I have to perform experiments. So we can be very happy that Galileo's critics were so stupid. Because this is an amazing thing. We come at our intuitions are very, very faulty, even the most basic of our intuitions about space, time, causality, identity. And we have developed this way of setting things up so that when we reality gets a chance to correct it. So you think simultaneity is absolute, do you? It seems perfectly intuitively obvious to you. Does it? Well, we'll just see about that in relativity theory. All sorts of ways in which our intuitions have been shown to be false. So when it comes to what is, science all the way. Of course, I've just given a philosophical argument in favor of that. So that science in and of itself often has to depend on philosophical arguments. I've just given, I haven't really given the argument, but I'm implying scientific realism. That's a philosophical position. It takes an argument. OK. So what are the humanities good for? Well, in addition to just knowing what is that world that we're in, there's this whole inner world of subjectivity that is extremely important to us as human beings. It matters to us. It matters to us to know what kind of world we live in, objectively, and also this inner world that each of us individually inhabit, the world as it is for us, colored with our memories, our emotions, our aptitudes, our intuitions, individually variable. That's all very, very interesting to us. And I think for the most part, the humanities are an exploration of that inwardness as it's informed by culture and other factors. And it varies from individual to individual. We're interested in that, and we learn a lot about human nature by studying this. We enrich our own. Maybe that's a better way of putting it. We enrich our own inner world through this study of humanities. Philosophy, I think, is very different. That philosophy, the academy is set up in such a way so that every field has to belong to either the sciences, the social sciences, or the humanities. Philosophy certainly isn't a science. It's not experimental. It doesn't probe reality in the way that science is. It doesn't get reality to answer us back in the way that sciences do. It's not a social scientist science, so by default it's a humanities. But it doesn't really fit in there with the humanities. It is not an exploration of inner subjectivity. My bumper sticker answer to what philosophy is, is that it is a discipline, a technique, that tries to maximize coherence, that tries to maximize our various intuitions. It tries to maximize the coherence between the scientific image of the world that our latest science gives us and other intuitions that we need in order to live coherent lives. It also tries to maximize our moral coherence. There are certain intuitions we have, moral intuitions come very naturally to us. In fact, it's very, very hard to live one's life without being committed to those, certainly as they apply to ourselves and our kin, probably the results of natural selection, what evolution has yielded to us. But it's very hard to give these things up. And philosophy tries to see what other things are implied by these intuitions. So it's a, in general, a way of trying to make us more coherent, maximally coherent, trying to, actually I'm gonna quote a philosopher here, Wilfred Sellers, a 20th century philosopher. He wrote a very good article. It was very helpful to me when I was battling whether or not, agonizing whether or not to go on in physics or in philosophy, he wrote something called philosophy and the scientific image of man. What he said is the aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. So this maxim, I'm bringing it all together. Remember, philosophy does have a technique. It's called the argument. That's how we, we don't have experiments. It's an argument. What does an argument do? An argument is something that explores consequences, tries to reconcile various aspects, just goes from maximum consistency, maximum coherence. And that's somewhat different from the exploration of inwardness of the other humanities. I'm gonna end there. Did I ruffle your feathers? Not at all. All right, thank you. And Bob, we'll move on to you. Well, I, I, for better or worse, am a practitioner of a much more pedestrian discipline. Biology doesn't have any major laws. Biology doesn't have the pretensions of having profundities associated with it. Biologists like myself are just cartographers. We're, we're travel guides and we're trying to figure out what's been going on, on this planet for the last three and a half billion years. Trying to peel away onion layer by onion layer, all of the rather arbitrary decisions that were made during the course of evolution. The Rube-Goldberg-like contraptions that were cobbled together with greater or lesser success and that ultimately ended up with the life forms that we now have on the planet. And these solutions that were arrived at were not preordained by any fundamental laws of physics. They just happened. There were contingencies. If a meteor had not landed somewhere in the Yucatan 55 million years ago, it could be that the dinosaurs would still be supreme and we mammals wouldn't be here at all. There was no law of the universe that dictated that we intelligent beings would work on, would walk on two legs and have two hands and maybe even two eyes. It just happened that way. Jim Carroll, as I've discussed on the occasion, also to the extent he puts on the historian's hat, also deals with contingencies like, for example, what would early Christianity have been like? Had the temple in Jerusalem not been destroyed in the year 70 and the Bar Kokhba Revolution not taken place in the year 130, these kind of historical accidents of real history are very much the same as the historical accidents that defined the way life has evolved on Earth. And they humble one. And they make one understand ultimately that people like myself must describe what happened, try to understand what happened and be humbled by the fact that life on this planet is infinitely complex and that we could spend the next 20,000 years if we wish to do so, describing the different life forms that have arisen and trying to make sense of all this when maybe there isn't any sense. So I will not try any profanities here but simply say that I'm just a travel guide. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Bob. So to start things off, it struck me as I was listening to you all that we've divided this up into sciences and the humanities. And it seems like there are potentially at least these two other areas that were possibly assuming belong in one or the other and that's the arts and the social sciences. And I think part of the initial discussion that arose last spring was some of the tension between literary theory and producing literature to sort of simplify it in that way. So, Alan, I'll start with you. How do you see, do you see the social sciences as being part of the sciences and do you see the arts as being the creation of art and literature and music as being part of the traditional humanities? Well, I don't think that you can lump all the social sciences together the same way Rebecca said that philosophy was not quite one of the humanities. I mean, if you take economics for example, which I think is considered a social science. Yeah, well at MIT it is. Yeah. Well, there's a huge range of styles and methods of doing economics and some of it is very mathematical and the economists just do computer models and they have mathematical models and they test their models and everything stays on the computer. And that is... That mimics the sciences. That mimics the sciences as long as there's some way that they can do experiments to test the models. So would a difference there be that they're not reproducible in the way that a traditional science experiment would be because you can't go back and run different economic models on the world? You can't run different economic models on the world. You can run different economic models on a given set of starting assumptions that might have a random element, a Monte Carlo element in it. And then of course then there are... There's the other extreme men of economics that deals very much with populations and might have a lot of similarities to sociology. Right. So I think that there's just too big a range of branches and styles of the social sciences. So I think the social sciences can act like, or we're calling the sciences or the physical sciences or they can act more like the humanities. Rebecca, I think you have something to say about that. Oh, well, you know, there are all different approaches in the physical sciences as well. I mean, the way an experimentalist and a theoretical physicist operate are very, very different. And the way a biologist and a physicist or a chemist, I mean, there are differences within the physical sciences as well. I mean, the social sciences, well, yeah, I consider them sciences. They are trying to test things and they run tests and they're trying to, it's social groups that they're trying to test or in the case of psychology, individuals, but they are running tests and trying to correct their intuitions. And so, you know, I consider them to be sciences. I mean, the advance in the behavioral sciences and psychology over our lifetime has just been amazing. I do not consider psychology a science when I was an undergraduate. It's now very cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, effective and cognitive neuroscience. I mean, it's, this is user sciences. But economics, there's still a lot of haziness because we're dealing with psychology and there is a psychology of large groups and there's a lot of uncertainty because of the complexity of the systems there. So, you know, but I think that they are, yeah, they are going that way. The methodology is empirical, it's testing and they've made a tremendous amount of progress. But the DRS is something about the arts. Well, we can come back to that. Yeah, yeah. No, that's great. Yeah, Jim. Well, I'd like to ask a kind of dumb question, really, which is, even though the distinction between the sciences and the humanities is useful in many ways in terms of enabling us to sort out the enterprises involved in each, isn't it also important to pay attention to the way in which it's a destructive dichotomy? Sends us down a kind of dead-end road, maybe in both instances. Wouldn't we be better off if we were more comfortable with a more inclusive category of knowing or knowledge? I mean, in a way, that was the point of my starting point which was to go back to the time before there were these distinctions in the intellectual enterprise. And for me, the issue is what we mean by knowing. And because I think that we know, whether in the sciences or in the humanities, exactly in the same way, which is that in the phrase that Alan was just using, we create models. We create experiments. We create narratives. We create images. The intellect is a function of the imagination. And one of our problems is we imagine that the intellect and the imagination are separate faculties of the human person. And the next thing you know, art and artists are expected to occupy a separate category of being where the disciplines of hardcore intellectual enterprise don't apply. So that feeling justifies everything without being submitted to the discipline of thought, which is the end of art. So, and if we pay attention to the way in which narrative art, for example, the simple creation of a story, what Rebecca does when she writes a novel, has to be submitted to every bit as rigorous a set of disciplines as the most structured experiment that Robert conducts in his laboratory. Because they're both bound by the same rules of knowing, which goes back to a sense of this enterprise that predates the deadly enlightenment dichotomy between rationality and emotional life, between, well, as it comes down to us, between the sciences and the humanities, between the hard sciences and the soft humanities, which are denigrated by definition of the contrast with the more rigorous sciences. Well, I think it's, and we can circle around back to this, but I think possibly, or at least one of the ways that I conceive of the difference there is that while writing a novel or a poem or producing a piece of art requires attention to both the discipline and discipline, there aren't the same rules across the board that there would be in conducting a scientific experiment. So you could have four people writing novels who all are adhering to very different notions of what it means to produce that, but let's maybe come back to that. Bob, one thing I wanted to ask you about, because I know Alan's feelings on the subject, is your feelings about ambiguity in results. One of the things that really generated some of the excitement or some of the attention in the spring was Alan's statement. I think that scientists don't like ambiguity. I think you said it makes them uncomfortable. Maybe you just said they don't like it. And so I was- He said it again. Right, yes, right. And so I'm curious about, in your own work, how you feel about ambiguity, which, and I'm sure you must get that in results all the time. All the time, yes. Well, I feel I deprecated my discipline by saying it was only a higher form of stamp collecting. Because the fact that- I thought you were a travel guide, yes. But the fact of the matter is, in order to make various descriptors of how life is cobbled together, one needs to use very rigorous logic, one needs reproducible results, and one can say, I can say in an unambiguous fashion, that we hate ambiguity. That is to say, we are only comfortable and we only sleep well at night when we think we found out something that we can assert is unambiguously true, and that other people can find to be true. It may not be a profound result in terms of the whole history of life on the planet or in terms of curing cancer, but for that little particle of observation and conclusion we make, that it will stand the test of time and it will still be true 10, 20, and 30 years from now. It may be elaborated upon, but its trueness is not in any way contingent on the way that certain people might interpret what we have found. And so to the extent Alan said that scientists hate ambiguity, he properly characterized us. And so do you and Alan, you can jump in there too, if you'd like. Do you feel like that limits the questions that you ask? Definitely. That we ask? Yeah. Yes, it does in the following sense, that if somebody in my laboratory proposes to do an experiment and I ask them, what kind of result are you gonna get and they forecast a range of possible results, I say, well, which of those results will lead you to an unambiguous conclusion? We'll allow you to say solidly, this is true or this is not true. And if they can't propose a eventual avenue that will lead them to some unambiguous conclusion, and I'm not talking about conclusions about the whole history of life on the planet, but even the structure of a small molecule, if they can't converge on some unambiguous result, I'll look at them and be a little bit dismissive, at least in my physiognomy as far as how seriously I should take them and their proposed trajectory. So, does that mean that, I guess what I wanna ask is, does that mean that there are questions that might lead you to results that could lead to different avenues that would give you unambiguous answers? Yes. That you're not asking because some of the intermediate steps along the way would have more ambiguity in them. Could well be, but people have to make a living. And when I say that, I don't mean to trivialize my craft, but the fact of the matter is, they will say about this person or that person, well, he claimed this and he claimed that and he's claimed three other things and nobody can really reproduce that work. Maybe he's right, maybe he's wrong. That's not a credible scientist, a credible biologist. Now, it could be that the absolutely unambiguous results that he or she converges on may be trivial and totally uninteresting, but at least they're solid. Right. That person also doesn't command a lot of respect. If all they do is to gather up the Trivial, Solid Information. Obscurancy of life on this planet and there are many of those. Rekha, did you want to? Yeah. Well, I'm sorry, I've been on book tour and I'm just totally losing my voice. One place in which I find tremendous amount of ambiguity among scientists is in their description of what it is that they're doing when they're doing science. And so, for example, the answers you've given, the answer I often get from scientists is a sort of Carl Popperian view is of that when I'm not, in fact, I've had it objected when I say that science discovers what is. A strict Popperian will say, and many scientists are strict Popperians, will say, no, we've only discovered what isn't. What we're trying to do in science is to falsify. It's conjecture and refutation. Nothing is going to stand up to the test of time. That is the definition of science. It's falsifiable. For me, this Popperianism is amusing because it makes no sense. Well, it's interesting but there is ambiguity. All I want to say is that there is sort of ambiguity in terms of what it is that one's actually doing and one one's doing science. So I'm just reading actually Stephen Hawking's latest book, The Grand Design. I'm guessing that Stephen Hawking is not reading your latest book because what did he say in 2011, philosophy is dead. Right, philosophy is dead. And then he, so that's actually in this book and it's maybe second or third page. And then he proceeds to do philosophy, philosophy of science, to say what it is that science is doing. He has a kind of neocontian view but not only is he doing philosophy there but he is doing it not very well. He contradicts himself. Sometimes he talks as if he's a scientific realist. Sometimes he talks as if he's not a scientific realist. But there is complete ambiguity when it comes to what is it that one is actually doing when one's doing science because in fact science itself can answer that question. You're already going into the realm of philosophy of science when you do that and that is full of ambiguity. So although in what's interesting to me is I can get people who are collaborating on their work. They all agree on the science, their collaborators and they completely disagree on what it is that they're doing when they're doing science. Are they describing reality? Is it just a model? That's not science. No, it's not. It's philosophy. That's exactly my point. Professor Weinberg finds a gene that causes cancer and he's able to manipulate it. At some point in the future they might be a drug or a method of using that to cure cancer. If you ask him to say what he's doing and he has a bunch of different explanations and somebody else may have a different set of explanations about what he's doing, those explanations of what he's doing is not science. The thing that he did as science but the discussion of what it is is philosophy. That's what's my point. Well, this really makes me wanna make my point again which is that distinction is there's something problematic about that distinction. Because I don't think- About the distinction between the philosophy of science and science? Well, yes, or as I take Rebecca's way of putting it, the distinction between those who ask what is it mean and I think if you assign those questions to separate projects and separate people and separate enterprises and separate systems of funding, separate academic distinctions, there's something inhuman is happening. That's my intuition. I can't say more than raise this question. We can all think of, as I hear Robert describe his commitment to the question what is, I hear also in the way you pose it, a firm commitment to the question, what does it mean? You may not put that forward as your question but I hear that in your, and you're the kind of scientist who asks what is as a way of asking what does it mean? I won't deny that but I won't move back from the first step which is, is there any kind of objective reality? If you, let's say I'm a cartographer, let's call that a science and I describe the shape of the continents and the shape of the continents is the consequence of a whole series of contingencies, geological contingencies over the last four and a half billion years. Are these, are the maps of the world, are they real? Are they only artifacts of our perception? And in the same sense is my description of the structure of a gene or the structure of a cell or a protein. Is that a reality or is it just a matter of my own subjective interpretation? And I'm very reluctant to embrace the second idea, the second alternative. That it's your subjective interpretation. Yes. Why are those, why can't it be a reality in being your subjective perception? Why do we need this, it sounds almost platonic to me, this radical divide between what's real and what we perceive? So the map of Spain is not Spain where there's an old saying that main lobsterman or fond of saying to people from away like me when they help us off a rock. You can't get there. The chart is not to see, the chart is not to see. The travel, you're a travel guide who makes maps. The map is not the geography, but in a way it is because once we enter the geography, we perceive it, it's reality according to the map we have in our brain. But interpretation in other words is the way we human beings interact with what's real. But I distance myself from embracing this whole subjectivity because I have the illusion that certain truths that people like me find now will be found by totally unrelated people, people coming from different backgrounds using different instruments and different scientific strategies, 10, 20 and 100 years from now. That's the pretentious world I live in. And if I didn't think that, I wouldn't want to be doing this because I wouldn't want to make everything that we discover contingent on what happens to be the ideological favorite view of biology this year or next year. Right, and it seems like there are potentially two different things that are being discussed here. One is this dichotomy between asking questions of what is and what does it mean and then there's the issue of perception and how our individual and human perception affects all of our knowledge and everything that affects both of those questions. And it seems like you don't need to get into the issues of perception to look at what is and what does it mean as two sort of fundamentally different questions that lead to two fundamentally different fields. Well again, going back to the abstract question of what do we mean by knowing and I take it my philosophical ground, my assumption, which is pre-rational, I can't prove it, is that we know by imagining, we know by creating what Aquinas calls a phantasm of reality and the phantasm stands between us and the reality. There's a mediation that's going on and that mediation is the place of meaning and while Robert, surely the experiments you're conducting now can be repeated in another time in another culture, but I would argue without a lot of authority that the meaning necessarily will be different. The fact of the perception in the experiment may be identical, if you've done it right, it will be, but what it means to those scientists will be different from what it means to you and I don't think you get knowledge until you match the fact of the object known with the knower and the knower is always conditioned. Again, I'm stuck with Aquinas. Aquinas is wonderful aphorism. All knowledge comes to the receiver in the mode of the receiver, not in the mode of what's known. So you started your anecdote by going to a professor and asking about interpretation. You said, I can't give you the exact quote, maybe you remember it, how do I interpret this? And that was the moment of the end of communication with the professor who vanished you to philosophy, but interpretation is the issue. Interpretation in your work has to be the issue, Robert. Well, I think Rebecca has something to say. Well, I mean, actually what I wanted out of physics was to tell me what is, right? What kind of world are we living in? And he wasn't willing to use at least quantum mechanics in those days in that way. It's different now, actually, but... So you were looking for what is and not what does it mean? And he... Yeah, just because it mattered to me to know what is, right? So I mean, yes, these things are, you know, it's human. And I totally agree with you, you know, the false dichotomy between imagination and intellect between intellect and emotion, this is false and certainly any kind of dichotomy in terms of valuation, which one is more important than the other. But what knowledge is, what a philosopher defines knowledge of, is justified true belief, right? And, but the way different questions can be justified using different means. It's interesting to me that you keep going back to Aquinas, because of course Aquinas is pre-scientific. I mean, he was trying to, he was working within the Aristotelian system. This was Aristotle. It was a purely speculative system. It was using certain intuitions and carrying them forward. But it was not science and it was not trying to probe reality to answer us back, to correct any of our intuitions. It's amazing, we landed on this technique. I mean, Aristotelianism, with its teleology had a lot of years going and we didn't really get anywhere. And then, you know, man, we wedded together mathematics, observation, certain of our observations, we can abstract certain aspects of it. Galileo called those the primary qualities and translate them into mathematical language. The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics, right? Galileo said. And then, because his critics were so stupid, testing. I mean, that is the key thing. Thank God for stupid critics. The stupid critics, right? Let's hear it for stupidity. So not all questions can be submitted to this methodology. And you know, and these questions about what it means to be human. And these are not questions that can be submitted. It's amazing, we came up with this technique. We've gotten as far as, we're doing string theory. That's amazing that with these hunter-gatherer brains, we managed to do this. It pays off. Yeah, it pays off. We didn't come up with it by accident. It pays off. Bob, did you have a second one? It's taken us far. Well, I just wanted to say one thing. And keep in mind that when the things that I do, I'm talking about my discipline, I have the hope or the pretense that other people 10, 20, and 50 years from now will find the same thing. But there's even a more pretentious and ambitious thought there. And that is if somebody were to come down from Mars and had the tools of investigation that we did, we do, but had obviously a quite different kind of brain than we do, this entity, whatever it would be, would also converge on the same set of conclusions about the reality of the physical world. And in that sense, if that pretension is correct of mine, for example, then the whole intervention of the human mind becomes almost a historical artifact of how one led found something rather than an important constituent of its reality. But that's not a pretension of yours. It's a pretension of science. Yes, right. Or at least, as we call it sometimes, the hard sciences. Right, yeah. Let me just put in a word of defense for Aquinas here. Without Aquinas, no Galileo. And I'd say without Plato, no Galileo. Galileo was drenched in the Timaeus, which was the one dialogue of Plato that actually was taught in the Timaeus. Well, I wouldn't say only Aquinas, but what I mean by that is Aquinas lifts up the absolute importance of what he calls sensory knowledge, which is a rescue from Plato, for whom knowledge is essentially abstraction. If we really want to get into philosophy, we could say without anything that happened in the past, the futures, we know it wouldn't exist. But that's probably a whole other forum. Alan, there's one thing before I open up that I want to make sure I ask you about. And that's when you are engaged in these two different practices in physics and in writing fiction. Do you go into that with not fundamentally different questions that you're asking, but is the drive that leads you to create and to explore and investigate and produce in these two dramatically different fields, does that feel like it comes from the same place? In 30 seconds or less, please. Well, the creative moment, which is one of the main motivations is it's like a drug. That feels to me exactly the same. And so how would you describe the creative moment in physics? Well, I'll describe it when you've been struggling with the problem and you suddenly see it in a different way, you have a different perspective and you see the solution to the problem. And in that moment where you have this experience, you're totally free of your ego. Your ego comes in strongly later on, maybe when you're deciding where you should publish the results and so on. But in that moment where you're finding out something new that you didn't know before, maybe that no one knew before, it's an ego-free state. It's a state that's where you don't know where you are or you don't know what time it is. You're just understanding something and it's a very beautiful experience and I think I've had that, I've been lucky enough to have it a few times in science. Do you experience the same thing when you're creating fiction? Yes. And so at what point does it come? It sounds like it comes at the end of the process, almost or near the end of the process when you're looking at a problem in physics. Well, I think you have to have a prepared mind in either, in any of these disciplines, to have this creative experience. I did a survey about 10 years ago of great discoveries in science in the 20th century in all different fields and I found- Can you book the discoveries? Yes. And I found that in no cases were the great discoveries made by amateurs. There were some cases where scientists found things unexpectedly, but in all cases, the scientists had done their homework. They had developed the craft of the tool of the trade, they had the knowledge, they knew where the frontier was and that's what I mean by the prepared mind. Right. I think we're gonna open it up to questions. I will take the, I might grab things back during this, but for the moment we're gonna open up to questions. I would love to start with Mary Fuller who, as I mentioned before, was a big part of that while here. Thanks so much, Seth, and thanks to the panelists and especially Alan for putting this together. It's really a pleasure to get to continue this conversation a little bit more expansively. I wanna say two things and I guess the first one is that I feel like this is a discussion that I feel is perhaps not getting as much traction as it might because we're operating at a very high level of abstraction and not defining terms very well. So if you take a term like ambiguity, I think that perhaps it's being used in the sense of vagueness. I think about it rather differently from the perspective of literature. I think of ambiguity as something where there are multiple, a set of values that are possible simultaneously and that it's a device or a situation that one could describe in very rigorous ways and then has particular affordances. Do you mean there are multiple sets of values? That there may be multiple values that are possible that one can't decide between. You know, and this is the kind of thing that people in literature sort of study and characterize and are interested in. And I'll just say one word about ambiguity. The reason that this came into the discussion, I think, between Allen and myself was that a colleague here in material science said to me, you know, the humanities are valuable because they teach our students to deal with ambiguity and you can't be a good scientist unless you can reckon with it. Now I should have asked him to characterize more exactly what he meant by ambiguity. But unfortunately he didn't and he's not here so I can't speak for him. But another thing that struck me is that, you know, the sciences and the humanities, I think in this discussion are being characterized in what to me is a somewhat peculiar way. I would characterize them differently. It's such a big question, right? But if you take the pendulum as representing science, right, and the sort of, you know, something like Descartes saying what do I know as the humanities, then you get things that are very, very different. But to me it's interesting to think about the things that are in the middle of the spectrum that are something more like cartography or a history of the universe. And I was struck, Allen, that you sort of bracketed cosmology as not being one of the sciences that you were gonna talk about. Because there are many things that one wants to know about what is, that involve the past that are not repeatable and that do fall within the domain of science and perhaps that's why I find cosmology and planetary science so intellectually congenial. You know, because they're like the work that I do, which is fairly historical. But even if I put on the non-historical hat, I would say that, for instance, an aesthetic object is one of the things it is. And a lot of my practice is to describe that object in ways that are fairly empirical. Not to sort of just sit down and start having ideas about it often, I don't know how to have ideas until I describe it, until I characterize it very accurately. Now that's completely unlike setting up a pendulum and making a repeatable experiment. But when I have made a rigorous description of the aesthetic object and then I might form a hypothesis about it, the way that I test that hypothesis is to say, how much of this, how many of these connections, how many of the things that exist in this poem become more meaningful if on this hypothesis? Right, and so, you know, I'm not, that's not science. But it's, that's what I think of as a humanities, that's the humanities that I practice. It's not a humanities of sort of what is inside my head, right, it is a humanities of my encounter with the object that's outside me. And I think that a historian would probably say something fairly similar. So if we set, you know, perhaps versions of field science or historical science, let's call it next to other versions that the humanities like history, we might be having a different conversation. Mary, I actually have a question for you. So would you describe what you do as fundamentally looking backward in the sense that you're looking at what is already there? And so is that possibly one useful way to make a distinction that in science we're trying to describe the world as it might be in terms of we want something to be reproducible throughout the future? And in the humanities, we're looking at things that have already happened and only things that have already happened. Well, I'm not sure that everybody would agree with that description of the humanities. Probably true. Well, you're not sure that everyone would give you the description of the humanities as? As being about the past. Okay, well, so then I'm open to hearing other ideas. But is, I mean, does anyone on the panel have a notion of the humanities as something other than an interpretation of reality as we have already known it? Sure, as well, the humanities. I mean, art is being produced, even as we speak. And, you know, it's often there is a, you know, the humanities are dealing with that as well. I'm really interested in what you say about ambiguity because, I mean, actually in my two hats is working as a philosopher and working as a novelist. I think about, if you scientists don't like ambiguity, analytic philosophers detest it, right? It is, we make a fetish out of clarity. Maybe because we're dealing with such murky issues and so it's so very important to be as clear as you possibly can. And it's interesting to me when I'm writing a novel how, and it's hard, actually, because the part of me that detests ambiguity has to be laid to rest a little bit. When you're creating a work, you know, when you're creating art, there is an intentional ambiguity, or porousness maybe, actually. You can't fill in all the details because what you're trying to do, it seems to me, is to create a deep and rich experience and some unknown people out there, right? And that they have to somehow be able to move into what you've created there, this matrix that you've created there with their own experiences, their own subjectivity and create their own experiences. And so there has to be this porousness and openness so that they can move in. So it's a thing, it's knowing what to provide and what to leave out. When I was a very new novelist, I would often be horrified to hear what a reader would make of my work. And it's like, oh, I loved your book. It was all about blah, blah, blah. No, what? No, it wasn't about that at all. How could you possibly? Last thing I was thinking of, I was coming from the sciences and philosophy where you're trying to lay things out. And then I realized, well, no, this is in fact what you have to do. It's if they're able to move in and create their own experience, even though it's nothing that I thought about, that's one of the major differences between being a scientist or philosopher and being an artist. So I think that sort of cultivated, intentional ambiguity is part of being a writer. That actually might be a sort of better way to describe what I was getting at, which is thinking of the humanities as an interpretive discipline as opposed to an empirical discipline. Chris, introduce yourself. Sure, thank you. My name is Chris Peterson. I work in teaching research here. So we've heard a pretty consistent definition of the sciences tonight, which I tried to position somewhere in this space of creating progressively more stable and coherent descriptions of some external world. But I don't know that we've heard a great definition of the humanities or specifically the human character that's inside the humanities and what that means. And maybe the most consistent thing I've heard articulated by the various people on the panel is this thing about ambiguity, whatever that means, although it seemed to mean a lot about unpredictability, and there's been something about humanity being codified with unpredictability, at least in the Christian tradition that James Carroll's been talking about since at least the time of the fall, right? So you've got interactions with natural actors like humans and snakes and unpredictable things happens and that's what gives you a fundamentally human character. But we also used to give all sorts of essentially human agency to non-human actors like the sea in the sun because we didn't yet understand what they did, but as soon as science has come in and made them predictable, we now view those unproblematically as within the domain of science. And if that's the case, is human just another word for what science cannot yet predict? And if that's true, how useful is it as a meaningful conceptual category? Who wants to tackle that? You may have stumped the panel. Well, I would offer a simple thought about it. What is a human being that's embedded in part of what you said? And I would suggest that human being is an image-making creature. And I would see that describing both the enterprise of science and the enterprise of what we're calling the humanities here, image-making creatures. And I, speaking certainly as no scientist, but I understand science as a process of image-making. And I don't accept the distinction you just made between the interpretive discipline and the empirical discipline because I'm arguing that the empirical discipline has to be interpretive. And we interpret by virtue of the images we make or the stories we tell. The narratives we create. Experiences chaotic and without order. The imagination is the human faculty of creating or imposing order. We put a beginning, a middle, and an end on chaotic experience. We create a narrative, a story, and it has meaning for us. And I see that as the enterprise of the laboratory as much as of the poet's workbench. Jim, aren't you? And let me just finally say, this activity is inevitably ambiguous because an image is never actually and fully identical with the thing it images. So there's a built-in ambiguity to this enterprise whether it's humanities or science. Sorry, Robert. Well, aren't you really saying that humanities is about the human mind and soul and the vagaries that flow from that whereas science is about the outside world that exists independent of what kind of soul and mind we have. It's there. Whereas humanities is exploring everything that flows from our own internal human idiosyncrasies. So the humanities are also responding to the outside world every bit as much so that when you get a great novel, War and Peace, about the invasion of Russia, it's very much the outside world that is the subject of the novel. It's certainly that the interior experience of those who undergo that invasion is central, but it's very much the world at large that's being responded to. Our internal experience is always, you know, partly a response to the outside world. Because we're embodied beings. Yeah. But in fact, you know, I mean, the humanities are about what it's like to be a human, what it is like to have a human life, including that, you know, the subjectivity, the inner world, which is partly a response to one's own character, but also an interaction with events that are going on, and including interaction with what we're finding out about science. Alan and I both like to write novels that are about discovering scientific truths and what that means in a human life. But it is, I mean, to live a human life is to occupy the spheres of meaning and mattering. We occupy different mattering laps, right? Different things matter to us. And this is actually this idea of a mattering map was an idea that I came up with in a novel. Tried to make it pretty precise. And then many decades later, I discovered that it had taken on a life of its own, including a scientific life of its own, that it's been used in behavioral economics. So if you Google mattering map, you will get so many hits, many more hits than you'll get if you Google me, even though it was my term, because it has been adapted, although it was proposed in a novel, it's actually been adapted as a theoretical construct in behavioral economics. So, but anyway, I mean, it is this thing, you know, it's a world of mattering. It's a human world and an exploration of that, including our interactions with the external world, including the world as it's described by science, because that matters to us. That's part of our interpretation of what it means to be human. But Bob, I wanna circle back really quickly to something you said when you were talking about Martians coming down and having the same tools that we did, they would get the same results. And it seems like one distinction here is that even if Martians came down and had literature and then experienced Russia and they still might not produce war and peace. In fact, they probably would not produce war and peace. Is that sort of what we're talking about here in terms of? Yeah, and I would say that war and peace, it was the war of 1812, was it not that was being described, was also one of the multiple things that flows out of the soul and the vagaries of the human mind out of the soul and mind of Napoleon and of the Tsar and of the Russian people and of the French people and all the entire flow of European history. And all of those things are secondary tertiary and quaternary consequences of the human experience, but not of any fixed truths of the physical world. As opposed to what you're up to, is that what you mean? I'm not saying what I'm up to is any better, but it is different. Yes. Hi, my name is Chris Meyer and I think my question follows on the previous question fairly consequently. First of all, props to the destructive dichotomy. And I think we are perhaps overestimating the dichotomy and a couple of reasons why I followed by a question. Ambiguity seems to me ineluctably present in both realms, right? We have Gödel's theorem that tells us we either have contradictions or incompletions. We have the uncertainty principle. We have Stuart Cosman's work that says you cannot pre-state the configuration of a complex system. So science has proven in many levels that we cannot know everything. And perhaps it's just that people who like to explore ambiguity are doing things we call humanists and people who like to avoid ambiguity are making their living, as Bob pointed out, doing the things where those ambiguities don't affect our ability to keep the airplane up. So they share that tolerance for ambiguity, although they may deal with it in different ways. And keep in mind that people like me don't pretend we can know everything. All we pretend is that we can know a finite number of things with great solidity and lack of ambiguity. And you have a different objective from somebody who's exploring the human. Our objectives are almost irrelevant. Okay. So here's my question is, it's been, since we stumbled on this method, the scientific method, it's been a lot easier to make a laboratory for the physical sciences than for social science or humanism. You could imagine a continent with thousands of Truman Show domes in it and testing different people in the same dome, perhaps, but it's not practical or hasn't been. But here we live in a time where quantified self is happening, where all kinds of individual data is appearing, where we have the power to deal with that data, where we've learned to do agent-based models of the create emergent properties in societies, including models of civil violence, which can't today predict the war of 1812 but seem to predict the extinction of the Anasazi Indians. Can you imagine that it's just that our study of what we think of as the human condition is way behind because we don't have the laboratories. And we are developing better laboratories to do experiments. And of course, recent evidence suggests that a lot of scientific experiments don't have the replicability we thought they did. But where we can do experiments, test for replicability and expand the ability to understand human beings in a more scientific way. That's my question. I mean, does that question get into a moral issue of what you can actually do to humans to find results? I mean, you couldn't do a Truman Show scenario. Unless you consider Facebook experiments on people. To be inhumane? Yeah, right. You don't have to have active experiments on people to learn things from information about behavior at the individual level. I think that experiments on people independent of whether they're humane or inhumane are intrinsically flawed because the complexity of the human mind and its various manifestations is so enormous that we have no idea how to begin to reduce. Isn't that what we said about the mind of God before Galileo? Well, it could be the case that 100 years from now we will be able to speak more about the variability and the multiple independent variables of the human mind with greater precision. But now it's vastly beyond our ability even to discuss it in any intelligent way. And so I hear with amusement the notion that if only we had better tools and better laboratories we could reduce the human mind and its workings to some kind of predictable processes because I don't believe it. Yeah, but there are many people who would make the argument that the advance of the behavioral sciences is already shedding light on the typical subjects of the humanities that evolutionary psychology is offering arguments about how we evolved our moral systems. There's evolutionary aesthetics, there's even neuro aesthetics that is giving, studying what the brain is doing, which parts of the brain are being excited in fMRI machines when one is undergoing various different kinds of aesthetic experiences. I mean, so there are in fact scientists, especially in evolutionary psychology who would claim, look, we really do have light to shed on the humanities, on the typical subjects of the humanities. And it's really been people in the humanities who have kind of resisted this. Are you gonna colonize? It's not enough that you're taking up all the real estate on these campuses, you're gonna colonize us as well with your big data and your scientific theories. So I do think there is still room for this kind of interpretive harmonics that the humanities cultivates, that it's a different kind of discipline. But there definitely is communication between the sciences and humanities. And I think that's really good. I think there should be more. I think the advances in the behavioral sciences do have something to shed. So I'm like, we don't have to do any nefarious experimenting. Well, some nefarious experimenting. Thanks. Yeah. Hi, my name's Joseph Searing. I'm a researcher here. In my brief academic travels so far, I've come to perceive what I would call a troubled relationship between the academy and activism. And my guess would be that that has something to do with, of course, varying by field, a different understanding of the nature of objectivity. And I'm wondering if any of you would like to comment on that or shoot me down or have any other ideas. Well, tell us what you mean by activism. That's a complicated question. I think general. Is there a specific scenario that you're, is there a situation that you're thinking of referring to? Not one specific. I think I'm considering most within the emerging parts of sociology and gender studies and race studies, a tendency to be more politically and socially active as well as developing new knowledge. I find some disagreement with that principle from other approaches and fields. I guess one question to ask is to what extent are different kinds of activism driven by pre-existing ideological preconceptions rather than by some pretense of objectively analyzing the situation and saying that this situation dictates one thing or another. And in fact, activism is indeed the perception of activism is strongly tainted by the notion that many activists, for better or worse, really come to the solution of a problem, carrying already a large amount of ideological baggage even before they became, as it were, activists. I mean, certainly on the issue of global warming, there has been activism among scientists and the scientists have stood up and wanted to have offered their expertise. Not ideological expertise, but scientific. And it's a kind of activism. And I don't know if that's what you have in mind, but it's founded on objectivity. Jim? Well, I'm glad you brought that up, Rebecca, because it does strike me that I mystified myself that the activism of scientists who have helped us understand the threat of global warming has been so limited. The testimony of scientists is powerful, but there's nothing equivalent to the profound embrace of activism that we saw among scientists at a crucial moment in the Cold War. Here, the Union of Concerned Scientists 45 years ago, the scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain who began actually to carry the banner, they were the leading activists in raising questions about the arms race, arms reduction, the entire arms reduction regime, a lot of it, a lot of the activist impulses centered among scientists here was, I would argue, and I think a ready case can be made, that was the single most important fact that enabled the Cold War to turn. And it was scientists on both sides of the Iron Curtain who shed their shyness about activism and became radical activists. I don't know, is that in the background of the question you're asking? Yes, I think so. Alan, did you have a thought there on it? Did you have a thought, or were you just... You don't need to have a thought. I'm not trying to put you on the spot. No, I'll leave the time to the audience. Okay. Yeah. My name is David Rush. I'm a retired professor at Tufts. Spent my life as an epidemiologist and a scientist. There were two things that I'd like to comment on. One was the sense of revelation that Alan Lightman described because that's exactly how it worked for me. I had about one good idea a year and I was some years I missed, but you know, and I didn't go into the laboratory sciences because when I was taking quantitative analysis, I had to scrape my preparations off the floor and I just figured I would do something different. So I became an epidemiologist. I used statistics, I used... I have to deal with human populations. I have to deal with multivariate situations. And there are two stages of that revelation. One is what question am I interested in? And the second stage is how can I answer that question? And I would challenge Dr. Weinberg, Professor Weinberg, say how you choose your questions in my own field. I see so many pieces of stupid research where obvious answered questions are re-answered over and over and over again because they're obvious and they're easy. But I think you and the Martian might have very different experiences generating the questions. I suspect he wouldn't work on the same problems you do, although you might have gotten the same answers if you had proposed the same questions. I don't doubt for a moment that your work is replicable, but why do you do your work? What is it that makes you want to answer the question you asked if it's not something to say about cancer? That's very activist from my point of view. Well, keep in mind, I didn't say that the... Let's not ascribe to me something I didn't say. I didn't say that the Martian would necessarily be interested in examining the same issue or question that I had. What I did say is if they happened to examine the same question, they would converge on the same answer. However, addressing your point more directly, for me, the greatest difficulty and the greatest challenge in training young scientists is to impart and instill in them a taste for what is interesting and conceptually consequential and has ramifications for much work of others and what is trivial and simply data gathering for its own sake. And there is a great distinction there and to my mind, to the extent that I have the pretense or the hope of training really good young scientists who are creative and innovative, it is impressing on them the critical importance of constantly asking themselves, why am I doing this? Is this an important question or is this one which gives me satisfaction for the sole reason that I'm just gathering more and more almost uninterpretable information? So, of course... I agree with you completely. I think that creative element, though, is not one that one can describe quite as securely as the result that arises from answering the question. You're absolutely right. Okay, so we're of one mind. It's clear that the person missing on this panel is the Martian who would have been able to answer a lot of these questions, yes. Thanks a lot to all of you for being here. I'm Daniel Gross, I'm a journalist. So we've talked a lot about we've tried to grapple with the nature of knowledge. We haven't spoken much about the transmission of knowledge in concrete terms and maybe a way to pose that in a less abstract way is what did we learn from Shakespeare or some literary figure? And now does that compare to what we learned from Darwin's say? And just a really quick anecdote to maybe push back on the notion that science can be transmitted in an uncomplicated way. I knew a student of biology who learned the structure of cells with diagrams and on the exam he received a picture of a cell and none of the students were able to identify the mitochondria or the nuclei because they had learned with images and had never encountered what is. Does anyone wanna tackle Shakespeare versus Darwin? I mean, if it's true that a great work of art, Shakespeare produced many of them, is going to vary with each reader because they bring their own subjectivity to merge with what Shakespeare has created. And it's funny, because I was just today at the gym talking to somebody about King Lear and we had very, very different experiences. We'd both recently- Typical gym discussion. Exactly, right, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Yes. And so, because of what both of us are going through right now in our lives, we both had turned to King Lear, but we're going through something different and so we were reading different things. We were reading two different plays. But what we can study is Shakespeare's techniques. I mean, how he was able to do this. What did we learn from Shakespeare? Well, we learned how to create these amazing works of art and the kinds of techniques that he used, the kind of openness and porousness and ambiguity that he cultivates so that all of these hundreds of years later, two people can sit in the gym and find themselves there, find answers there. But they're not going to be the same because they're not the same experiences in the way that when I read Newton, I know what he was saying, or when I read a mathematical proof, you know, the Euclid. I know what he was saying there, that kind of precision. And so... Although, take on the origin of species, it seems very possible that two people in a gym in Cambridge could have a conversation about that and it could mean very different things to the two of them. Yeah, but the ultimate salient points or distilled from the origin of species would ultimately converge if you pushed the logic to its extreme to a relatively small number of reasonably well articulated principles. It's not as if the conclusions from Darwin would or should be shaped by one's personal experience as a human being. But you could read on the origin of species and come away from that with a different sense of wonder at the universe and not any more sophisticated understanding. You could come away not actually understanding any of the specifics of what Darwin was talking about in terms of evolutionary theory and still have it be a very profound experience. Yep, that's a literal experience. Right, right, of a scientific work. We might read it very, very differently because in his day to say what he was saying to be expunging design from the universe was a very different experience than it is for us in the 21st century. It was a radical and anti-many of the firm beliefs. So it was certainly a different experience but the aspects of the theory, to understand the theories, to understand what Darwin was saying, what he was asserting and the grounds on which he was saying it. Yeah. I'm Josh Coles from the Oxford Internet Institute. Just like I said, it's my first MIT event I've been to and it set the bar pretty high for the level of insight and conversation which has come out of it, so thank you very much. There's a fallacy of the over inquisitive child who asks their science teacher who invented electricity to get in the sense that obviously electricity was discovered but that sort of fallacious question gets the point of the difference between what is knowable and what is kind of usable, although there's a kind of an interesting relationship there I think. So I suppose my perhaps equally simple question to you is was science, by which I mean the scientific method invented or discovered? And it's a bit of a trick question because I think the answer is probably that it was invented. I think probably all of you would agree that's the case. So I think because of that it sort of suggests to me that we maybe can't choose what we find and indeed the scientific method is constructed to make sure that we can't choose what we find but we can choose what we look for and maybe to put it a bit more pertently but more succinctly we can't choose what we find but we can choose what we find and there's a reason we pour billions of dollars into cancer research but in order to bruise knees for example, so I think that maybe that decision making is our human agency over the scientific process. So I think maybe the point I put out there is that the reality is that there's a lot of reality out there but the act of shining the search light is our active interpretation. It's not technically interpretation but the process of discovery is a very powerful process which we as humans and scientists do control. No, nobody would quarrel with you if you say that what we end up finding represents a subset of what can be found in the objective outside universe and that what we end up finding is in no small part dictated by what we've looked for and what we've looked for is in no small part dictated by the culture around us including the political and the scientific culture but still I would maintain that if a scientist discovers something and it's rigidly demonstrated that independent of how he got or how she got to that point the truth of what he or she discovered will still be robust and survive the test of time. Now anything. Well, I just wanted to respond to your comment that about the development of the scientific method and you said was it discovered or invented and I think you said it was invented. I think the scientific method was found as a process of natural selection. Intellectual natural selection it's a method that in Rebecca's language a method of inquiry that allows us to ask questions and in a such a way that nature will answer and those answers have allowed us to develop antibiotics. They've allowed us to design cell phones and iPhones. They've improved the quality of life. They pay off. So we found the scientific method over time because it's a method of inquiry and of being in the world that allows us to improve our quality of life. So I don't think that it's, I think that one can apply the same logic and argument to its development as we do to other things that develop on natural selection. Yeah, you know, David Deutsch in, he has a new book out, The Beginning of Infinity and he argues there that any intelligence in the universe would eventually come on our scientific methods that we don't have to worry, you know, in all of the science fiction that there is this kind of, you know, Martian, you know, who comes and has a completely different way of knowing. So he argues there that, you know, this thing that we evolved, amazing, that it is the way to know what is and any intelligence in the universe would have come on the very same one. I think if you... I don't know if that's true, but it's very well argued. If you sincerely believe that it was kind of a cultural artifact, a scientific method, then I would challenge you to propose an alternative to the scientific method. No, I think it survived the test of time. I mean, just a very brief break. I've just finished a project, looking at the impact of big data on the social sciences. Can we talk a little more slowly? Sorry, yeah, looking at the impact of big data on the social sciences. And that's, for me, it's provoked some of these questions in you because the sort of the general sense behind it is that this is the, we'll have n equals all, we'll have all the data in the world, we need not ask any more questions, but of course, that's very much a fallacy as well. I think we do still need questions and we'll still be the ones to ask them. But I think that's absolutely right about the scientific method. I think it's the one, it's maybe the least worst option that we have so far. Yes, over here. My name is Peter Walsh. I have had in my career several experiences of working with scientists in a way which allowed me to see the sausage making of science. And some of this, although I did not realize this at the time, some of the science I was observing being stuffed into casing was important, it was a cutting edge science which is considered important today. What I concluded from that experience was that the process of making science, at least from my observation, was much closer to a novel than it was to a controlled experiment. In other words, enormous amount of plot, drama, twists, suspense, ambiguity, contradictions, twists and turns. Are you talking about the story of that? It's not a safe controlled process. And so my question is, have we made to some extent kind of a plaster state of science by kind of ignoring the little messy parts like Newton's alchemy and Galileo's astrology and so forth? Are we making it too simplified to really appreciate what science is about? And just a clarifying question, are you referring to the process of science so the way science is done in a laboratory or are you referring to the process of finding questions? I'm saying that without running too far off all the libel laws, there was a lot of personal stuff going on with the process of science. And there was a lot of people being upset, anger, communicating in different ways, refusing to listen to each other, refusing to believe each other, not coming together, making accusations, political accusations, you know, a mess of stuff. I often say the trouble with science is it's done by human beings. Right. I figure it out. I often say maybe once a week the trouble with science is it's done by human beings. Already twice tonight. Yes, I've said it twice tonight. And the question to my mind is not whether it's done by human beings or to put another experience, another saying the reason why academic disputes such as those in science are so nasty and bitter is that the stakes are so low. And the question to me is not whether science occasionally has personalities and egomanias in it. The issue for me, and I think the issue for us tonight is, are the end results of the process as messy and dirty and sausage making as it is? Are the end results, are they something worthy of admiration and are they robust and will they stand the test of time independent of the egomaniacs who created them? I don't mean to be pejorative of that process. You're perfectly privileged to be pejorative. That is my intention. Because I know lots of scientists who fit well your description. And the intention of my question is to say, this watching this process was fascinating to me and watching how it worked is fascinating to me. And to me, the messiness of it was, and the way the messiness was kind of globbed together like lumps of clay basically was an essential part of science. It wasn't an accidental part of science. It wasn't a negative part of science. I think we understand what you're saying. What's that? I think we understand what you're saying. The only reason I'm cutting you off is because we don't have much time and we have some more questions. But I think, it seems like that's an argument for more histories of science. It is to some extent. Describing the process. But I think we're clear. So thank you very much. Yeah. So I have, I'm an undergraduate here studying. Just identify yourself. Oh, I'm Yuri Olensky. I'm an undergraduate here studying physics. The only one in the room, maybe. And so I have sort of a two-part question. The first one is that, so in science there's like a clear sense of progress in the sense that you are sort of climbing a ladder. You have, like you learn truths like that are objectively true. And as you accumulate more of these facts, some of them might turn out to be not true under different situations. But ideally when you publish a scientific paper you're specific enough that you say under these conditions what I'm saying is true. And that's just a fact. And then maybe like best example probably or the easiest one is like Newton. What he said is still true under the conditions that he assumed and we can still use his laws. We have additional ones because we've probed further. But we've made objective progress. Is there such a thing in the humanities because you do have a lot of like social conditions on what the humanities are and something that someone argued 10,000 years ago. There's no reason that I see that it's less valid today. Whereas we can objectively say, science has made progress because we have a larger like more gigabytes of information. And then the second question, I just will get them both out quickly maybe. The second question is there's I've heard a lot and I've seen a lot of humanities people use data methods and mathematical analysis, statistical methods and sort of pull from the sciences to help with what they're studying. But are there examples in I guess especially physics but anywhere where actually the humanities have facilitated in a direct way what scientists have done. And I'd like to avoid you know politics or like you know humanists have argued that science is a good thing so it got funding but something used directly by scientists to aid in the scientific process. Yeah. Yeah, I've argued very strongly in various publications that philosophy makes progress. And in fact, because one of the things that philosophy is trying to do is to expand our coherence and that we, it's a constant effort to unearth, unexamine presuppositions and to question them. Presuppositions that are so constitutive of our thinking that they're completely invisible. And that, and it also makes progress because science makes progress and philosophy is always trying to use the results of science and to reconcile them with other of our intuition, some of which have to go. And so I mean right now for example it's a very huge question whether or not the results in neuroscience mean that we have to give up very fundamental views about free will, personal agency, accountability. And this is philosophy making progress, piggybacking on science but it is, nobody's a Cartesian dualist anymore for example. I mean that was a very robust view before we had made progress in science. But also, I mean and this is a huge argument, philosophical arguments have helped us make moral progress and unearthing various inconsistencies in our moral point of view. And so Plato for example had a really good argument as to why slavery was wrong for Greeks, right? But that argument was then worked on and universalized and slowly we get a universal argument against slavery that it's not just wrong to enslave Greeks but humans in general. So there's that kind of progress and it really is progress that proceeds by way of arguments. Anyway, that's a long argument that I would make, yeah. To pick out that slavery point, so is there like some kind of argument that it's not possible to make another argument that slavery is actually okay? Yeah, you know, there's that sense of revelation that aha, when you see that certain ethical commitments that you've already made entail others, right? And so that's a kind of growth expansion of coherence. So you can give up the initial intuitions or you have to live with the consequences and apply them. But in every place in which slavery was abolished, it was never re-institute, except for actually one example of Napoleon and Haiti, but in general these advances are kind of discoveries. They're kind of aha, I'm committed to this. I have to expand my commitments, I'm inconsistent. And that's the way it's been going on ever since Socrates was plying his trade in the Athenian Agora. He upset a lot of people by asking them to account consistently for their points of view and they rewarded him with a brimming cup of hemlock. Rebecca, I just wanna move on because we have only a couple of minutes and we have, I think we're only gonna have time for one more question, I'm sorry. So Josh, can you identify yourself and ask your question? Hi, I'm Josh Sokol. I'm a student in the graduate program for science writing here at MIT. So I've noticed Alan very cleverly dealing with some of the thornier questions of the nature of science by using what I think is a constructive empiricist argument about what science is. So we can avoid the question of whether science is explaining, they're dealing with truth or knowledge or what is actually there in reality by instead saying that science provides a useful set of explanations, a useful set of heuristics for learning. And that's convincing to me and I think that that's logically sound. And in the interest of, given that this is the last question, of tying together things with as need of both as I can manage, is there a way to say that science in the empiricist sense is about heuristics that work and that are demonstrably effective when compared to other methods? Not about the nature of reality, but rather that science works because it works and that humanity also has similar processes that are obviously applied and although they cannot be as rigorously defined, they're still clearly useful and informative ways to look at the world in humans. In 30 seconds or less. Well, I think that the discussions about what reality is are really not scientific. I think that ultimately science works because it's able to make predictions about experiments, the results of experiments that are outside of our bodies. So I agree with your characterization that it works because it works. And any further characterizations of it, I think drift into the philosophical realm. So you wouldn't say that we know that there are fermions and bosons, neurons, genes. You're not committed to those existence? Well, when you say we know them, I think that our theories of them, our equations about them, allow to make predictions about the world outside of us. Testability. Testability. Yeah, but it doesn't expand our ontology beyond our experiences. Well, I think that's another discipline. Two things before we end. One, I had wanted to bring up Girdle because I thought that that would be a very nice way to address some issues, including math, which didn't come up at all. But the idea that there can be something that is true but not provable in mathematics is a fascinating underlying question. For those of you who don't know, Rebecca's written a book on Girdle. But Jim, I actually have one last question for you before we end, and we've been talking a lot about sort of progress in a scientific sense. And as a novelist, when you look back over the history of novels and fiction writing, do you see what's happening as progress? Well, I think progress, forgive me, is an ambiguous idea. And, but a useful one also. And I would just say the novel is a modern form. And it presumes certain human characteristics that have come into flower in modernity, especially individual freedom and the importance of the individual and the importance of experience. As a non-scientist, I take the basic meaning of the scientific method to be experience Trump's dogma. And in the scientific method as elaborated here, experience is testable and able to be not just argued, but demonstrated. But if experience, and I think every novel subject in some way or other is experience Trump's dogma or ideology or ideas, the young man who addressed us a few minutes ago asked us to abstract from politics. That's the element that's been missing from this discussion, you can't abstract from politics. Because the Enlightenment, in addition to being an intellectual revolution, was a political revolution. And at bottom it was about the coming into power of individuals. And that's the ground of science and it's the ground of contemporary literary art. Because it requires, as George Orwell said, the free play of the mind, which was impossible in the dictatorship of dogmatism, however defined. It's true, it's political, it's also religious. Orwell's quote was, the novel is a Protestant art form requiring the free play of the mind. No Catholic can be a good novelist. Or if he is, he's a bad Catholic. So which one are you? I'm a bad Catholic. So I wanna thank our panel and again remind everyone that we will not only be having a reception right outside, we will also have books for sale. At the beginning I was so impressed by the fact that Jim had just published a novel in July that I changed the title of his book to Warburg in July. It's actually Warburg in Rome. I realize as soon as I said it. But please join me in giving a very, very warm thanks to the panel. And please buy books also.