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As I explained in the first episode of this story arc “Playing with New Thinking”,
scientific activity doesn't begin with observation, as commonly thought.
It begins with expectations of making sense of selected observations with
particular general presumptions or world- views. I'll call these presumptions ‘Key
Presumptions’ after James Hutton's 18th century proposal that the present is the key to the past.
Traditionally these expectations of making sense have been called
metaphysics. Meta meaning beyond, or after physics, because it's concerned with a
critical evaluation of physics. Metaphysical keys set the cognitive
framing which selects observations, and constrains one's thinking about the
possible interpretations of them, to a manageable size. The selected observations are then
considered to be evidence. With a different presumption, a different metaphysical key,
the set of possible interpretations for observations will be different.
The evidence will be different with each key. The possibility of different keys is
what allows for what is called, in popular discussions after Thomas Kuhn, paradigm shifts.
In this episode we'll be playing with Key Thinking. An awareness of plasma behavior reveals
Hutton's Key to be temporal provincialism. How long a time span will demarcate the present.
Plasma events appear to follow a power law distribution. Many small, lower energy
events that happen often, and a few large higher energy events that happen rarely.
A global event, say an ultra-energetic solar flare with catastrophic consequences that occurs only once in a
thousand years, will not be included in a mere century-long definition of the present.
That temporal provincialism will be especially emphasized if there are
political and psychological incentives to preserve, or to rebel against a domineering
organization, or a tradition that justifies itself with myths that have no representations in the present.
A present that includes rare high energy processes will raise doubts about the
accepted interpretations of observations. The accepted theories, the expansion of
the worldview that underlies the theories to include larger, faster and
more intricate possibilities, will overturn them. The geological record, a key
interpretation of otherwise ambiguous observations, will be shredded by
processes that disrupt atomic decay rates, and that may deposit geological
strata in multiple distorted layers at once. The collapse of long time, a related key
interpretation will open up evolutionary thinking to such ideas as fast, stepwise speciation.
A present that includes high energy plasma events, will also provide
naturalist interpretations for a large quantity of evidence from prehistory
that heretofore has been dismissed as unintelligible. For example, petroglyphs around the world
depict 80 some similar forms. If they depicted sunrises and hunting and
thunderstorms, they would be explained by our present theories and we would think
no more about them. But they depict alien things: squatter figures, duck-headed
humanoid figures, strange geometric figures, and so on. A common speculation for their origin is
that the ancient artists were hallucinating. But why would ancient artists around the
world have similar hallucinations, and only during a similar era of prehistory?
Whatever forms the petroglyphs represent haven't been seen since. Until today.
They appear as instabilities and pulse power discharges in plasma laboratories.
When the photographs of the instabilities are enlarged to a similar
size, they overlay the petroglyph image almost exactly. With our new instruments we know that
the magnetospheres, sheaths in plasma terms, of Earth and the other planets are
laced with electrical circuits. Many are connected to the Sun.
Flares can bump up the power in them to cause magnetic storms and auroras and
power grid blackouts. Infrequent flares with an order or more greater magnitude of power, which have
been observed on other Sun-like stars, could cause breakdown discharges similar
to the pulse power ones in labs, but on a planet- sized scale. The instabilities would appear in the
sky and last for days. The collateral damage to the planet and its creatures
would discourage artists from documenting the events with texts or
paintings, and suggests the more permanent technique of pecking the images into rocks.
But Hutton's key doesn't allow such possibilities, so the evidence is
excluded from allowable selections of observations. Here's another example.
Myths around the world tell similar stories with similar themes and
characters. If they told of sunrises and hunting and thunderstorms, they would be
explained by our present theories and we would think no more about them.
But they tell alien stories. Sky gods waging wars, warrior heroes hurling thunderbolts, dragons.
A common speculation for their origin is that the ancient storytellers were
hallucinating, but why would ancient storytellers around the world have
similar hallucinations, and only during a similar era of prehistory? Whatever events the stories are telling
haven't been seen since. Until today. They appear as instabilities in pulse
power discharges in plasma laboratories. The twisting and pulsing plasma
discharges that last only several nanoseconds at a laboratory scale, could
last for days or weeks at a planetary scale. The evolving forms would be dramatic for
small soft creatures like humans caught up in them. If the witnesses had no scientific
discursive prose with which to describe their experiences, but only
anthropomorphic, dramatic poetry, they would make mythic poems to memorialize the events.
Before Irving Langmuir began experimenting with plasma, it was called radiant matter.
Langmuir borrowed the term ‘plasma’ because the behavior of radiant matter reminded
him of living processes. Scaled up to auroral dimensions, plasma discharges would appear as giant
luminous living creatures, fighting dragons and each other in the sky.
The events among the sky gods would be especially impressive if they were
accompanied by thunderbolts hurled to the ground, and by upheavals in the earth.
But Hutton’s key doesn't allow such possibilities, so the evidence is excluded
from allowable selections of observations. There are many similarities between
petroglyph images and mythic themes: Axis Mundi figures and myths, columnar
forms and ladders to heaven, concentric wheels and so on. The similarities of images suggest a
similarity of phenomena. Plasma discharge instabilities. This opens the possibilities of the past
to the idea that prehistoric people in the age of myth-making, may have
experienced upheavals of the earth. Entire cities may have been destroyed by
blasts from heaven; plasma discharges from space, as the ancient people testified. They may
have witnessed mountains, melting like wax; and rivers of fire, carving valleys;
and seas overflowing entire regions. That's what the ancient writings say
they witnessed. We should respect what people say about their origins, even if we don't understand it.
With the key of plasma behavior, the range of allowable evidence is larger and more inclusive.
Petroglyphs and myths become explainable as manifestations of a physical phenomenon:
planetary scale plasma discharges. But caution is warranted. We think in
metaphors by noticing similarities among experiences, and carrying the logic of
the source experiences over to the similar experiences. However, metaphors not only
highlight similarities, they also hide dissimilarities. It's easy to overlook
the dissimilarities, to mistake the similarities for identities, and to
conclude that we know it all. This applies not only to myth and plasma, but also to gravity and planets.
That gap in the metaphor between similar and identical, constitutes an essential
epistemic uncertainty in what we call knowledge. If that uncertainty is imbued with
trauma-induced terror, it will generate a compulsion to believe, or to disbelieve,
that we know more, or don't, and with greater confidence than is justified.
We tend to turn our attention away from the question of how we know, with its
essential uncertainty and often unconscious metaphysical keys,
and to place an unquestioning belief in what we claim to know. A more appropriate criterion for
metaphors than truth with its implication of universality and absoluteness, is aptness.
The similarities must be tested and the domains of aptness discovered.
For example, the metaphor of gravity theory, carried over from Newton's
alleged experience of a falling apple, becomes inapt when used to explain galactic motions.
On the other hand, the metaphor of plasma instabilities may be apt for explaining
hitherto unexplainable commonalities between petroglyphs and myths.
Awareness of plasma behavior not only reconfigures what we think we know about
today's events, but also illuminates a prehistory that has been shrouded by the
inertia of our prior beliefs and blind spots. This turns the uniformitarian metaphysics on its head:
the past may be the key to the present. Ancient glyphs and myths may be a key to
unlocking a presentist prejudice. A criterion of aptness for science,
instead of truth, recognizes its provisionality and counteracts the tendency to believe in theories as if
they were religious dogmas. My interest here is not so much in what those events, memorialized in petroglyphs
and myths, might have been or on how they might be explained, but in how we think about
them. We perceive orderly patterns that suggest the possibility of
intelligibility, of composing a coherent narrative that will make sense of them.
How could those patterns of evidence be interpreted so as to fit in with, or
modify, as many of other observations as possible? How many of the other
observations could be, or should be, re-selected and reinterpreted with different metaphysical keys?
Could the new interpretations enable us to do things; to invent new processes and
to build new gadgets; and to create new values that would improve our lives?
The next and final episode will bring this entire story arc to bear on our
daily lives today. We should never think that we've arrived at a final thought. We
should never stop asking, ‘what else could it be?’ We should never take ourselves and our
thinking too seriously. We should never stop playing with thinking.
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