The Indeterminacy of Scientific Theories and the End of Deterministic Ideas ^†

Abstract

For the first time in human history, a strategy operationalized in the social system to reward the growth in energy consumption was implemented. This fundamentally questions our urge to expand and thus our self-image. A deterministic worldview based on steering and control was established. We show that this deterministic worldview undermines the ability to be touched and thus our basic moral orientation. A “logic of touch in indeterminacy” is being developed, which is based on a new, logical–physical model of neurobiology and introduces this touchability as a conceptual core element. The proposed new methodology is itself based on simplicity and “scientific touchability.” For this purpose, our own research results were reassessed, and appropriate options for action are presented.

1. Introduction. Materials and Methods

“If we designate as past all those events of which we, at least in principle, can learn something, and as future all events on which we, at least in principle, can still act, then it corresponds to our naive idea to believe that there is only an infinitely brief moment between these two groups of events, which we can call the present point in time. That was also the idea on which Newton had based his mechanics.”

Werner Heisenberg, 1954

What Werner Heisenberg expresses with this statement [1] was already pointed out over two thousand years ago by Heraclitus with just two words: “Everything flows.” To be involved as a mere co-creator in a process of development of living things that takes place without their involvement is just as unimaginable for the majority of people today as it was for most people (including most scientists) in the Middle Ages who thought that the Earth was round and circling around the Sun. The world is finite, and important natural resources will soon be used up. That seems to contradict the basic human urge to expand, and it seems to pose great problems. Energy consumption is forecast to continue to grow over the next few decades. The richest 1 percent of the world’s population damages the climate twice as much as the entire poorer half of humanity put together. The food situation of the world population is deteriorating. After years of growth, the growth of intelligence has stagnated or is even declining in some developed countries [2].

What can a way out look like here? Have not neuroscientists long ago established that our thinking is clearly determined by the laws of nature and that our consciousness is only an illusion created by nature? There is one phenomenon that science has so far overlooked. Because things can still touch us and “get under our skin.” Then, we can open up to something new and thus make ourselves vulnerable. However, that seems to be in the service of something that the inventors of science always had in mind: namely, the connection with something greater, with a renewal. The physicist Erwin Schrödinger analyzed that we pay a very high price for our view of the world today: everyone excludes himself from the world [3]. It is also known that corporations such as Facebook and Google do not disclose their algorithms but use them to consciously control behavior in order to maximize their own profits.

We developed a logic of “touch in indefiniteness” on the basis of a current physical theory of the Erlangen physicist Klaus Mecke (* 1964)—the Erlanger program [4]. To this end, we combined Mecke’s approach with neurobiological findings on the plasticity of the brain [5,6,7,8,9,10,11] and with the authors’ preliminary work [12,13,14].

A core element of the proposed method is to fulfill a “direct touchability.” The aim was to include the subjective dimension into this scientific approach—as proposed by quantum mechanics but also in the very beginning of scientific thinking.

2. Logic of Touch in Indefiniteness

Life is based on dynamics, on basic, simple oscillations (see Figure 1); this begins with the individual cell and continues into complex brains. The brain, too, synchronized itself through the electrical pulsation of millions of neurons in billions of combinations and creates an electromagnetic field that is responsible for the measurable brain waves. These are standing and modulated waves that are generated by electrical potentials and that integrate the activities generated in individual areas of the brain. Different levels overlap until our brain forms an integrating stream of consciousness.

Living beings at their different organizational levels have “knowledge” of points of orientation that mean “indeterminacy” or “freedom” in a way that was previously not understood. We understand “knowledge” here in a comprehensive sense—from the built-in, “implicit knowledge” that is evident in the coordination of structures and mechanisms, which is available to all living beings and is available as “structural information,” up to an explicit knowledge that we as humans have at our disposal. The latter is expressed, for example, in complex differential equations with which we describe the relationships understood in terms of quantum physics (cf. also [12]), but which are transformed into “simple” transformations through the structures of finite geometry. Living beings have direct access to such transformations because they are built on the basis of their operating principles.

The transformations represent realized projections of potentials hidden in an “infinite.” The structures created in this way create new points of orientation that enable living beings to gain a kind of inner knowledge that we call “touch” or “spying.” “Spies” are projections of the future and can be traced back to special projective dynamic properties of quantum-physical superimpositions that affect the system. That sounds complicated, but this process explains the emergence of human values, which also represent aspired but, due to their abstract nature, never attainable system states. They have a non-algorithmic structure that can be traced back to superpositioning.

Even single-cell organisms have the ability to “spy” and thus a sense of “inside” and “outside.” This becomes clear when they position themselves according to various environmental stimuli and so stay in a life-friendly environment. In addition, they create their own states of life on the basis of “inner signals.” The ability to differentiate between “inside” and “outside” is essential for living beings. The German anthropologist Helmuth Plessner (1892–1985) already characterized living beings as “border-realizing beings” who work out and shape their relationship to the environment by means of their physical limits [15]. However, living beings also interact with each other: By being able to “touch” one another, they expand the individual process of embodied orientations and, at the same time, create a changed access to the “inside” and “outside” obtainable information to a larger whole.

Which physical conditions are decisive for this? The “motor” for such a development lies in the ability to convert energy and in the opening up of new development spaces, which physically represent themselves as phase spaces. New attractors emerge, by means of which such systems develop [16].

3. Minimizing Energy Consumption as a Trend-Setting Principle for the Self-Organization of Social Systems

Systems always strive for the state of minimum energy or maximum disorder. This can be seen, for example, in the way color droplets dissolve in water, or in the energetically minimized surfaces of crystals. The “second law of thermodynamics” introduces the concept of entropy. It denotes the number of possible states of a system. Living beings, on the other hand, “resist” a state of minimal energy—this corresponds to the death of the individual. They continuously take in energy from the environment to build up and maintain their structures and relationships. Yet, how is such a thing even imaginable? How can a system suddenly develop a property to “escape” the thermodynamic state of equilibrium?

For this, only one starting point is required, namely, that of the structural reaction of systems on themselves and the transformations made possible by this. This structural property is the fundamental difference between physical systems and organically organized living beings. Cognitive researchers like Arnold Trehub [17] or Elio Conte use hypercomplex algebras to describe such transformation processes. This means that “penetrations” of systems can be represented that have both: a high degree of “mixing” and at the same time “development potential.” Such penetrations realize relationships that follow from a projective finite geometry and that open up the inner perspective of our emotional world to us—up to the genesis of the self.

In the course of evolution, those representatives who minimize their energy consumption have prevailed. This can be seen in the body structure and the movement of living things. Mammals in particular, however, use a significant amount of energy to raise their offspring. We are probably touched by the sight of newborn or young creatures and babies, because this sight creates internally effective future perspectives. In this way, living beings succeed in loosening internal barriers through “touch” and overcoming traditional patterns.

The decisive factor is that this penetration makes it possible to minimize the energy consumption not only of the ego but also of the connected living beings as a whole. All living beings also have a corresponding “knowledge”: namely, the experience of “touching an infinite.” However, it is precisely this “knowledge” that is incompatible with a mechanistic view of the world, since it does not appear in it. In contrast, even well-known biologists such as the former President of the Max Planck Society Hubert Markl (1938–2015) propagated that the Earth should be “subject” so that every “touching” will be nipped in the bud. In biology (“the selfish gene”) and in economics (Homo economicus; the “invisible hand of the market”), corresponding models prevailed.

Due to the mechanistic worldview, our focus of attention is constantly and unconsciously shifting away from human ties and towards an orientation towards material “values”, i.e., the non-penetration or “objectification” of people. It follows that it is better to always take care of your ego first. All this now leads—after decades of practiced practice—to the result that the entire social system evaluates it positively, that it is “good” to accumulate consumption potentials or power structures instead of connection potentials. Consumption and the exercise of power are incarnations of the state of minimal energy, because it is thus always guaranteed to carry out actual consumption with a minimum of effort and thus to increase the entropy of the world. From this it inevitably follows that our currently noticeable loss of human connectedness is actually the cause of the—from a physical point of view—plausible shift in focus of the activity profile towards more ego-centered activities. This includes—physically imperative—the development of a focus on the accumulation and consumption of supplies.

It goes without saying that there is a direct correlation between income/property and energy consumption. For the first time in human history we have a strategy operationalized in the social system to reward the growth in energy consumption or the growth in entropy production. This has never existed in this form in the history of mankind, which has lasted for thousands of years. The communication industries striving for influence and control (Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple) have developed splendidly against this background and will counteract internal changes in the human self-image.

4. Conclusions: The Simplicity of Morally Improving

The riddle of the incarnation seems to lie in taking part in a larger whole through a tangible touch and thus realizing a never-before-seen level of awareness, experienced connection, and possible factual orientation. For Aristotle, the originality and wholeness of knowledge was shown in the fact that in the act of spiritual comprehension (“nous”) the moral faculty (which is shown in the “touchability”) merges with the analytical, scientific faculty (ratio).

We can change our self-image by gradually following the second law of thermodynamics in a different way. Namely, as our actions change the focus from a currently still existing, consumption-oriented coupling to the consumption of resources to a growing feeling of connectedness to other people. That sounds a bit naive at first, but analysts have now recognized that “green growth” in the classic sense of economics is a fiction [18]. Gerald Hüther supports this through the “Academy for Potential Development” [19] that he founded. These approaches can already be seen in the school system [20] and will also spread further in the economy (reorganization of personal responsibility). This shows the simplicity of something morally better. This process will take decades. However, then we will automatically use natural resources more sparingly.

Many, especially younger people, have already developed a feeling for these relationships. The most astonishing conclusion, however, is that from the point of view of an objective description of our thoughts and actions—the subjective states striving towards a “better”—are from an objective point of view “undefined”: we are “seekers”; we are still a long way from here. This is nothing fundamentally new either, but it was already discovered by the founders of science in ancient Greece as one of its foundations. So, today, humanity is on the threshold of an awareness to which all human beings have direct, unmistakable access. Nature has not only given us a corresponding logic but encourages us to live it.