Science And Poetry

Stuart Kauffman:

In my years at the University of Calgary, I came to know Canadian poet Christian Bok, who, to the amazement of all, published a book of poetry that became a best seller both in Canada and the UK. Prior to that, Christian did his Ph.D work on the long relation between science since Newton and poetry. His is a subtle understanding, mine a more roughshod version of what I learned from him.

Soon after Newton, with the Anglo-Continental West stunned at the success of Newtonian mechanics and celestial mechanics, Alexander Pope would write: “God said let there be Newton and All was Light.” His generation of poets celebrated Newton and the new physics and felt that beauty lay in rendering to metaphor what was true in the scientific world view that was rapidly emerging.

But Newton’s physics is a physics of Actual happenings.
...
This determinism led 18th century scholars and many lay people to abandon the theistic God that acts in the universe, in favor of a deistic God who created the universe to run with Newton’s laws, wound up the clock of the universe, and let it go. The deistic God had no further role in the deterministic unfolding of the universe.

In response, Bok told me, the English Romantics arose in rebellion. Keats wrote of science with its “rule and line,” denuding us of our humanity and, spirituality in face of a deistic God, and wrote with Shelly, Coleridge, and others who were dismayed at science and determined to do battle to regain ground for our deepest humanity.
...
Then in the 1950s, C.P. Snow wrote his famous essay, The Two Cultures, decrying the fact that the then dominant literati and the lesser esteemed scientists lived in two worlds that could not talk to one another.
...
On the dominant view of the mind, the mind is a Turing machine. A Turing machine is utterly definite. Given a position of the reading head, the symbols on the tape, the rules in the machine for moving or not moving on the tape, erasing symbols on the tape depending upon the definite discrete state of the head, and moving to a new state among the discrete states of the head, the Turing machine is an abstraction of Descartes’ animal body as a machine, clockwork in the visions of his day. Our minds are algorithmic. Artificial Intelligence is the offspring of this view. On it, science itself is an algorithmic activity needing no metaphor, the signal case of the fully definite, the mind is nude of rich non-computable allusions, notwithstanding the very interesting connectionist strand in AI.

But is the mind algorithmic? I think not, and think we need poetry to unite the Two Cultures and rediscover our deeper humanity.

I advance two reasons among many.

Click to read the rest.