The Blind Spot

"(M)athematical physical laws don’t describe reality; they describe idealized objects in models." Nancy Cartwright

I've just finished reading a book called The Blind Spot, in which it's three authors (Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson) explore what they call the "blind spot" of Western science. They start with what they call "The Parable of Temperature."

To paraphrase, scientists invented the thermometer (in the absence of any established theory of temperature) in order to measure this thing called temperature. Of course, long before any thought to measure temperature, everyone already understood the concept of hot and cold. The problem is that hot and cold have meanings that change depending on the individual and the circumstances, but temperature, as measured by a thermometer, is supposedly an exact thing.

This is what scientists felt they needed in order to make progress toward a better understanding about the way the world works. The problem is that a thermometer isn’t the kind of precise tool we've been conditioned to believe it is. Thermometers measure temperature on a scale that is based on the boiling and freezing points of water, and those things vary depending on where the measurements are taken. For example, on a mountain top, water boils at a lower temperature than at sea level. Indeed, it also boils at a different temperature at every elevation in between. 

To work around this challenge, scientists then created controlled environments in which to perform their experiments, laboratories or workshops that offered consistent, replicable conditions which allowed them to develop an abstract theory called classical thermodynamics. They then used this theory – like "pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps" – to define temperature even more abstractly. Now, temperature could be defined in a way that excluded concepts like hot and cold altogether and even allowed for things that are physically impossible, like the idea of “absolute zero" and the mathematical possibility that something could spontaneously reheat itself.

And lost in all of this is the concrete, real, human experience of temperature that each of us feel with our own bodies. This "scientific process" leads scientists to tell us that there is an objective reality that is somehow separate from us. To use another example, we're told that things we have never directly experienced like atoms and light waves are real, while things we experience all the time, like the color red or hot and cold are "just in your head."

It's as if scientists believe that our heads are not part of the world.

We do this all the time in education, especially when it comes to math and science, and that's probably because we are all victims of this Western penchant for abstracting basic concepts in order to study them, then making the mistake of reifying (or thing-ifying) our formulas and controlled environments. Every child engages in mathematics for fun, which is what they are doing when they sort, sequence, and make patterns: that is what math is, concretely. But instead, probably because most of us have learned that our own actual experience with math is inadequate, we rush to force young children to replace this joyful, human activity of sorting, sequencing, and patterning, with the abstractions of numbers and equations. When we do this, we remove it a step away from real, human experience, experience we need in order to make meaning of the abstractions. In doing so, we teach them that their own experience of mathematics is "just in their head" while the abstractions of number, operators, and equations is "real."

The symbol "2" is not a real thing. It is an abstraction of the concrete circumstance of having, say, collected a number of apples greater than one or less than three. The symbol 1/2 is likewise not real. Reality is cutting an apple in half to share with another person. The same thing can be said of most science that tends to thing-ify real world phenomenon by separating them from our actual experience of the world. When we rush to make children read, we do the same thing, forcing them into the abstractions of letters and sentences and paragraphs, while ignoring the real, concrete things, like stories, characters, and ideas, that are the only source of their meaning.

Too often in education, as in science, we rush to the abstractions, mistaking them for something real, when, in fact, it will always be the embodied knowledge of hot and cold that matters most. The color red, the story of adventure, the sharing of an apple, those are the real, concrete things that must be embodied if the rest of it is going to have any meaning at all. And meaning is what is most missing from our world today.

We do not prepare children for life by feeding them abstractions and telling them to ignore what their senses tell them. We do it by setting them free to take the real world in their hands which is the only way it will ever have meaning in their heads and hearts. And this happens when we give them permission to play.

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