Feb 2 2024

Upon beginning to read :

https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-International-Handbook-of-Ignorance-Studies/Gross-McGoey/p/book/9780367608149#

Understanding and applying Innovation Studies are crucial to the work of our UTDallas ArtSciLab, but only recently Ignorance studies came to my attention.

As a physicist I expected quantum mechanics and electromagnetic interferences to be on the agenda, but is on the side. See at the end of this blog 3 definitions of ignorance.

In addition I am part of groups of people with weak Apophenia who think it is not ignorant to study CSS or Coincidences, Serendipities and Serendipities.

Michael Simpson in his final article lists the functions and or types of ignorance:

Emotion regulation and regret-avoidance
Suspense and surprise maximization
Performance-Enhancement
Strategic ignorance
Enabling impartiality and fairness
Information management and data exclusion.

The concept of smart villages I think also captures part of the reasoning- we don’t have the time to study everything so lets focus on knowledge that allows social innovation over technological innovation.

In 1995 I wrote in Leonardo reviews the article further down this blog.

https://www.trans-techresearch.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/LRQ-2.01.pdf

A Role for the Sublime in ArtScience? Is the Sublime Important in Science Today? Sundar Sarukkai [1] in his accompanying LRQ Editorial states: “One can thus hopefully see why the sublime in principle is problematical for science since there is firstly no immediate attempt to grasp the sublimely real but only an ideal of it.” He refers to Kant’s notion of the Sublime as: “There is a simple idea, following Kant that captures this essence of the sublime, namely, the inability to grasp a concept in all its fullness.” Sarukkai goes on to unpack how Science has dealt with parts of the world that are “un-presentable” through the use of mathematics; these approaches have allowed Science to deal with various types of challenges to positivistic modeling of the world such as notions of indeterminacy, unpredictability, complementarity, uncertainty and incompleteness.

I personally feel ignorance studies ignores the bloggy complex network of what is/could be known and oversimplifies portential ignorance studies.

https://www.trans-techresearch.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/LRQ-2.01.pdf

He notes: “The mathematics of infinity is prosaic and is reduced to everydayness through mathematical practice?“ Michael Punt [2] in his introductory editorial, on the other hand, argues for the importance of the Sublime in Science: “The mutual interaction of the material (and rational) and the unknown and sublime was crucial to the scientific imaginary and, despite the interdictions of the establishment…”; he points out that in the 19th century for instance, there was a close coupling of science and the occult. Elsewhere I have written how Linda Henderson has charted the concepts of the ether and higher dimensional reality as powerful cultural imaginaries that have crisscrossed sciences and the arts. These concepts are reappearing in recent decades in string theory, dark energy and other appeals to deep unifying factors in the structure and evolution of space, but also in the science fiction literature that has created the concepts of cyberspace, as we know them. The context is however different than it was in the nineteenth century, and today there are few links between contemporary science and the occult (though many scientists are religious). What is certain is that some ‘travelling concepts’ circulate between the fields of arts and sciences for centuries. It seems to be that if we expand Sarukkai’s argument on the “un-presentable” to the un-observables and the un-knowables there is a role for the Sublime in today’s science. And within this is the ecstatic nature of the sublime confronted with a reality that cannot be grasped in its fullness that gives the thrill of discovery an emotional equivalent of the concept of the Sublime as it has fed the arts and the sciences; the Sublime can be a deeply human way of confronting the question of the comprehensibility of the world. The Thrill of Discovery: Making the Un-Observable Observable During my scientific career I have been lucky to work on projects that have made scientific discoveries. This may seem usual for a scientist, but in fact most scientific work does not result in scientific discoveries of significance, and the emotional connection between personal investment and scientific discovery is often remote. Today’s hunt at CERN for the Higg’s Boson is the work of thousands of individuals over decades, many of whom will be dead before the discoveries are confirmed. The thrill will be vicarious at best and often posthumous. The project that I worked on that I want to single out is the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer Satellite project [3]. Conceived by my thesis advisor Stuart Bowyer, the purpose of the project was to make the first astronomical map of the sky in the extreme-ultraviolet band of the spectrum of light. This light, between x-rays and the ultraviolet is a daunting area of astronomy, technologically challenging and theoretically forbidding. Indeed in some astronomy textbooks of the time this band was called the “un-observable ultraviolet” because the most common elements in the universe, hydrogen and helium, absorbs this kind of light almost completely. Our colleagues, one of whom eventually won a Nobel Prize, argued that the project should be cancelled because it was a waste of taxpayer’s money; there would be nothing to see. The project was maintained by NASA, and the instruments and satellite mission operations were carried out by a team at the University of California, Berkeley where I led the instrument development and observatory operation teams. The project involved hundreds of people over 15 years. We attended the rocket launch at Cape Kennedy, returning to our laboratory to start receiving the images once the satellite was in orbit. I well remember the day that we were to give the first commands to turn on the cameras on the telescopes. The team in Berkeley, perhaps 50 scientists, engineers, administrative staff and students gath- xv Editorial Roger F. Malina Executive Editor, Leonardo Publications ered in the conference room to watch the turning on of the telescopes. We sat on the floor waiting for the first images; perhaps the technology would fail; perhaps the unobservable ultraviolet was indeed un-observable. As the data began to stream onto the screen we were momentarily silent, and then, as the first star appeared in the image there was a collective euphoria and for a moment I experienced a scientific sublime. The world was potentially knowable and through our technology the un-observable had become observable. Michael Punt in his Editorial points out in his discussion of deep history that “such externalism means that materials and artifacts are always implicated in our cognitive architecture rather than being simply outputs of our internal cognitive processes. Thinking through objects rather than thinking about objects becomes the description of the cognitive processes.” As a scientist we indeed think the world through objects; through our scientific instruments the un-observable becomes observable. Sarukkai discusses the use of mathematics in science, and the concept of imaginary numbers as one form of the sublime un-presentable in Science. Indeed Eugene Wigner [4] is often quoted for his remark on the “un-reasonable effectiveness of mathematics”. It seems to me there is a double mystery. Accompanying the effectiveness of mathematics is the un-reasonable effectiveness of instruments. As I have argued elsewhere, the human body is very badly designed to understand the universe it lives in. Human cognition and human senses have evolved as part of evolutionary selection, and these requirements are very different than those needed to understand the key processes in the world around us. Yet in spite of this, through the use of mathematics and instruments, contemporary science has developed a ‘robust’ system of explanations with prediction power that models many of aspects of the world. As Sarukkai points out science does not seek to capture the real but rather to mimic the real: “Every scientist should presumably know that the idealizations that are used in models – such as point mass objects, ideal frictionless gases – are not the ‘real’ but yet the strength of science lies in continuing to deal with these ideal objects ‘asif’ they were real. That is, in science, nobody is really concerned about the strict match between the object and its representation or between the concept and its presentability!” I cannot but agree, particularly as an instrumentalist scientist rather than a theorist that we can declare success when the universe becomes ‘presentable’; but surely in that gap between the presentable and the world itself there remains a source for the Sublime. Un-Presentables; Un-Knowables Sarukkai defines the Sublime as “different from, and more than, the beautiful. Sublime best captures the sense of being overwhelmed, whether ‘positively’ or ‘negatively’. This leads to a feeling that there is something more to an experience than what is expressed or grasped at that point.” Above I have argued that indeed the process of making the un-observable observable is one scientific strategy for the Sublime. I would like to add two other concepts to the presentable (or ‘modelisable’). First is the idea of the ‘unknowable’ where un-observables are in principle not observable. One area of the un-knowable appears in quantum mechanics and as Sarukkai points out modern science has accommodated itself to non-deterministic mechanics not only in quantum mechanics but also in the science of complexity. Scientific notions of causality have been expanded with the fact of quantum entanglement, but also of the way that initial conditions play crucial roles in chaotic systems. Scientists today have little problem dealing with the un-knowables of quantum mechanics. Certain separable ontological categories in our daily life, such as position and velocity, become ontologically overlapping through the Heisenberg Principle. It is just not possible to know to arbitrary accuracy the simultaneous values of two quantum-coupled quantities. Some un-knowables still pose problems still. Arthur Miller for instance points out that: “Actually, quantum mechanics does have trouble with un-observables. Feynman had a point when he wrote that we still don’t understand something as ‘simple’ as the double-slit diffraction experiment using light or electrons.” (Arthur Miller, Private Communication, 28 May 2012) The discovery of the finite speed of light also creates fundamental un-knowables. The ‘light cone’ defines the space-time envelope of causally related events. Even though we are in an infinite universe, the finite speed of light means that what is happening in parts of the universe that are further away than the light travel age of the universe, these events are unknowable. Similarly, events that are occurring inside the horizon of a black hole, these events are not only un-observable to outside observers but un-knowable to them. xvi Editorial Roger F. Malina Executive Editor, Leonardo Publications It seems to me that these un-knowables in science become another reservoir for the scientific Sublime that can also be explored by artists. Un-Presentables; Un-Translateables Finally, it seems to me that a key issue in the un-presentables discussed by Sarukkai is the underlying epistemological reliance on human languages, written and visual and aural. I think that this goes beyond the inability to describe certain ideas. Human cognitive systems develop within maturing individuals in interaction with their environment and with other humans. These languages thus are derived to be able to describe objects and events that humans encounter as they mature and live. Human language co-evolved with the human brain as it is confronted with experiences, dangerous or wonderful; human language is finely tuned to certain parts of the world. Science is dealing with a different world. Most data we acquire on the world as scientists is not acquired directly through the human senses, but mediated via vast panoplies of scientific instruments. To know about the infinitely large, the infinitively small, the intrinsically complex, the human senses are badly adapted and therefore so is human language, and scientific language takes decades to stabilise. In quantum mechanics we invent language, such as ‘charm’, to describe observable properties of nature. In astrophysics we call matter that we detect, but cannot see with light, ‘dark matter’ even though it is of an unknown nature. We observe that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, so we attribute this to a ‘dark energy’, also of an unknown nature. It seems to me that an underlying problem of un-presentability is the un-translateability of a world observed with instruments into a language derived from human sensory experience. It is in this gap between the world of science and the world of art that it seems to me the tools of the artist and writer may be able to create awareness of a larger connection. In those moments “[t]his leads to a feeling that there is something more to an experience than what is expressed or grasped at that point”. These thrills of connection to a larger reality, together with the thrill of discovery, could be wellsprings of the Sublime in ArtScience today. Some Examples In closing I would like to mention three works that seem to tackle the problem of un-presentability and un-translatability. In both of these works I experienced both awe and fear, not as a technological sublime, but an acute awareness of phenomena beyond my senses. i) Multimodal Representation of a Hydrogen Atom At the Allosphere at the University of California Santa Barbara, a team with physicist Luca Peliti, artists JoAnn Kuchera-Morin and Lance Putnam have created a visualization and sonification as a Multimodal Representation of the Quantum Mechanics of the Hydrogen Atom: This work interactively visualizes and sonifies the wave function of an electron of a single hydrogen atom. The atomic orbitals are modeled as solutions to the time-dependent Schrödinger equation with a spherically symmetric potential given by Coulomb’s law of electrostatic force. Different orbitals of the electron can be combined in superposition to observe dynamic behaviors such as photon emission and absorption. The interactive component of the simulation allows one to fly through the atom with a probe that emits “stream particles” that follow along the largest changes in the probability current and gradient of the electron. The electron probability amplitude is sonified by scanning through groups of stream particles in the space. The pitch can be adjusted by the rate at which a particular set of stream particles is scanned across [5]. This work is outside of the regime of scientific illustration but clearly seeks to create an immersive experience that one can ‘fly’ through, that has sensual and emotional power. ii) Softday: Marbh Chrios ‘Marbh Chrios’ means Dead Zones. In 2008 Robert Diaz showed that the number of ‘dead zones’-areas of seafloor with too little oxygen for most marine life had increased by a third between 1995 and 2007. It is currently estimated that there are 20 such ‘dead zones’ in Ireland and two were identified in the study at both Killybeg’s Harbour and Donegal Bay. Geologic evidence shows that dead zones are not a naturally recurring event in marine ecosystems; dead zones were once rare, now they are commonplace and increasing, which poses a serious threat to indigenous marine habitats and the human food chain. The artists collective Softday [6], as part of the Leonardo Lovely Weather Project [7], examined the available data from the Irish dead zones and work collaboratively with three distinct partners, local traditional musicians from An Charraig/ xvii Editorial Roger F. Malina Executive Editor, Leonardo Publications Amhainn a’Ghlinne (Cairdeas na bhFidiléirí) in Donegal, Met Éireann (the Irish Meteorological Service) and The Marine Institute of Ireland, to address the relationship of climate and culture to sound. Softday translated scientific/environmental data into abstract ‘live’ sonifications and vocalisations. The computer generated music composition that the Donegal Youth Orchestra and the Softday Céilí Band performed, was based on eight years of related marine and meteorological data. iii) Scientific and Sonic Perceptions of the African Sahel Scientist Paul Adderley and Musician Michael Young have created sonifications of soil materials that were sampled from the West African Sahel at a village called Tiwa located in the lacustrine plain of Lake Chad in Northern Nigeria: This region has experienced extremes of flooding and drought throughout history that may have displaced the human population. The village has dwellings constructed from mud-brick and thatch, surrounded by fields. Samples were taken from a pit dug close to the village. This area is subject to intense land management and receives cultural debris washed-in by seasonal rains. The materials were sampled intact with the spatial organisation of the soil maintained through processing and examination in the laboratory. The soils were found to span a 10,000 year period that includes the onset of human settlement in the Lake Chad plain c. 4000 years ago. By considering a landscape that is both extreme and has long-standing cultural activity, a narrative is developed. To borrow Barthes’s terminology, the data from scientific analysis provide functions to the narrative; they are indices to the landscape and to human conditions. These data also connote actions that may be anthropogenic or environmental (such as changes in land management, house building, flooding and desertification). A narrative emerges from the exploration of these data, in which a sequence of actions is deduced from functional descriptions of physical objects, which are in turn offered for evaluation and exploration in sonic and visual forms [8]. The resulting work aggregates scientific data into perceptually holistic musical scapes that give the viewer a sense of human activity over a 10,000 year period, a piece of deep history that relies not on documents or even human artifacts but rather the inter-connection of human communities and the ecologies and climate variability they are embedded in and the traces they leave in soil. The Two Kingdoms To pursue my translation analogy I would like to close with a quote from Kierkegaard, which it seems to me, gives an inkling of the problem of translation not between the world and scientific models, but also between the world known by the scientist and the world of the artist. Kierkegaard sets up that moment of “disclosure” that would be perhaps be a modest beginning for the Sublime in ArtScience today: “If I imagined two kingdoms bordering each other, one of which I know rather well and the other not at all, and if however much I desired it I was not allowed to enter the unknown kingdom, I would still be able to form some idea of it. I would go to the border of the kingdom known to me and follow it all the way, and in doing so I would by my movements describe the outline of that unknown land and thus have a general idea of it, although I had never set foot in it. And if this was a labor that occupied me very much, if I was unflaggingly scrupulous, it presumably would sometimes happen that if I stood with sadness at the border of my kingdom and gazed longingly into that unknown country that was so near and yet so far, I would be granted an occasional disclosure” [9]. It seems to me that the astronomer confronted with the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy and the artist trying to make sensible the very real but incommensurable phenomena of quantum mechanics find themselves in a connected search for a Sublime, for those moments of an inkling of a perhaps aweful larger context that we only glimpse partially. For the scientist the potential horror in the Sublime would be the incomprehensibility, unpresentability, of the world; perhaps for the artist the reverse? My colleague Wolf Rainer points out [10]: “Wittgenstein in his Tractatus seems to echo Kierkegaard’s parable of the 2 kingdoms when he said that “to think the border or limit of something already implies a kind of knowledge of it, at least in your thoughts about it. For language expressions implies the drawing of borders. He also held that most of such philosophical questions are not false, but merely nonsensical from a language philosopher’s view. It’s our incomprehension of the logic of language which produces nonsensical answers”. xviii Editorial Roger F. Malina Executive Editor, Leonardo Publications The Sublime is perhaps a deeply human way of dealing with the possible incomprehensibility of the world, of being in the world; and as Sarukkai states, there is an underlying relation between the Sublime and Morality. Here perhaps ArtScience practice (see for instance the “Trust me, I’m an artist: towards an ethics of art/science collaboration performances” [11]) provides one translation tool to introduce questions of ethics at the foundation of scientific thinking itself. Acknowledgements I want to thank Arthur Miller and Wolf Rainer for comments. References [1] Sarukkai, S. (2012) ‘Science and the Sublime’, Leonardo Reviews Quarterly, 2(01), pp. xi-xiii. [2] Punt, M. (2012) ‘Science, History and the Sublime’, Leonardo Reviews Quarterly, 2(01), pp. xiii-x. [3] http://heasarc.nasa.gov/docs/euve/euve.html [4] Eugene Wigner, http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/ MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html [5] http://www.allosphere.ucsb.edu/research.php [6] http://www.softday.ie/ [7] http://www.olats.org/fcm/artclimat/donegal2010/ SoftdaySTaylorMFernstrom.php#EN [8] Adderley and Young: http://mutamorphosis. org/2007/category/eco-sonifications/page/2/ [9] S. Kierkeqaard: http://chandonnet.m.free. fr/DIMITRI/Kierkegaard%20-%20The%20 Essential%20Kierkegaard.pdf [10] Wolf Rainer, private communication, 29 May 2012: “Wittgenstein in his Tractatus seems to echo Kierkegaard’s parable of the 2 kingdoms when he said that “to think the border or limit of something already implies a kind of knowledge of it, at least in your thoughts about it. For language expressions implies the drawing of borders. He also held that most of such philosophical questions are not false, but merely nonsensical from a language philosopher’s view. It’s our incomprehension of the logic of language which produces nonsensical answers. Thus, once the scientist puts his operational thinking cap on and works through the methodological steps that can produce answers, he is on his way. If he can avoid being unduly fettered by the shackles which limit his cognition, language and overproductive imagination (Kant’s ‘produktive Einbildungskraft’), his search may actually give him a feeling of the ‘sublime’, and that word today may just be the sleeper of the once vigorous aesthetic discourse of the 18th century trying to distinguish between things in nature which produce feelings for which separate categories were deemed necessary.” [11] Anna Dumitriu and Bobbie Farsides: “Trust me, I’m an artist: towards an ethics of art/science collaboration”: http://www.artscienceethics.com/

Three definitions of ignorance

From : https://sites.nd.edu/nazli-turan/2020/12/13/three-definitions-of-ignorance/

December 13 , 2020

Nazli Turan

The history of ignorance is moving hand-to-hand with the history of knowledge as emphasized in Verburgt’s recent paper, The History of Knowledge and The Future History of Ignorance: “(…) the history of knowledge does not just expand the boundaries of the history of science but investigates the boundaries between different forms of science, different forms of knowledge, and different forms of not knowing, in all possible combinations.”(Verburgt, 2020, p. 18).

As Hayek once iterated, knowledge and ignorance are relative concepts, and going further, they are weirdly interchangeable and even convertible. Living in the era in which knowledge is the most valuable endowment, the matters on who will hold, direct, and distribute knowledge largely occupy the minds of administrative officers, scholars, corporate owners, and citizens. Does lack of knowledge imply a kind of ignorance? To some extent, yes, but the contemporary definition of ignorance prompts a bigger picture. Although the modern connotation of ignorance went unnoticed until a very sharp uprising against tobacco industry in 2008, three different versions of ignorance worth to discuss before expounding on recent and future directions of ignorance.

As a very brief introduction, the first definition of ignorance focuses on individual’s awareness of their own knowledge storage. It is almost applicable to everyone who is new to a subject or a field. The second approach points out cognitive limitations that can only drive us to a certain point where we cannot go further. Lack of education would be one cause of this ignorance, although those individuals do not effortlessly accept that. The third definition emphasizes on intentionally tarnished knowledge orienting masses many and conflicting pathways. Manuela Fernández Pinto identifies this ignorance as being artificial or manufactured and therefore it is not related to the individual’s cognitive or educational state. It is an integral part of social structure while its relations to politics are not always at the surface (Pinto 2015, p. 295). The acceleration of this new type of ignorance stems from the abrupt separation of scientific community from the public during the Cold War period. While scientific rationality encapsulated itself in ivory towers, the public had grown the suspicion of democracy after the Bomb and it was really confused with the statistical interpretation of knowledge as an implication of the Double Truth Doctrine. As a result, the public equipped with trust issues towards experts (referring to interactionist account of trust) with mounting skepticism. This type of skepticism and doubt have turned into a strategy at the hands of corporations.

Agnotology is the study of calculated and manufactured ignorance and scientific misrepresentations. One distinguished scholar who confronted the perpetrators of the manufactured ignorance with the public was Robert N. Proctor. He was initially working on lung cancer and its potential causes. From 1920s to 1950s, the causes of lung cancer were attributed to asphalt dust from roads, industrial air pollution or the global influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 along with smoking (Proctor, 2012, p. 87). Proctor provided four lines of evidence showing that tobacco is the main factor of lung cancer. He revealed that the systematic ignorance was prompted by tobacco firms arranging polls and promoting propaganda films. As reported by Proctor, “Anne Duffin at the Tobacco Institute was happy to report that the film had reduced by 17.8% the number of people agreeing that ‘Cigarette smoking cause [s] lung cancer’ (from 74.9% to 57.1%) (Proctor, 2012, p.89). Those companies even hired a PR firm whose slogan being ‘doubt is our product’. The firms targeted scientific uncertainty as it is understood by non-experts that a kind of weakness of any scientific study. Various forms of uncertainty are buried in nature in the form of probability while it is very complicated to explain this to someone outside of natural sciences. The tobacco industry utilized friendly scientists who can go astray from truth and scientific method since they know data mining and statistics are open to manipulation. The industry that heavily fortified with scientists attacked any unfriendly research on causes of lung cancer. Besides, many hundreds of experts testified for the industry on the court (Proctor, 2012, p.91). Ignorance stipulated across the public has nothing to do with personal capabilities or wisdom, but it flashes light on systematic and structural compositions around corporations’ will. As in the discussed example, the industry is not targeting a specified type of citizen but rather, it is generating conditions for reengineering natural state of civilization by promoting denialism in the short term and by fostering entrepreneurial attempts for geoengineering and pharma in the long term. Ignorance in the post truth era is creating echo chambers of tales that whisper experts are not that reliable while industries can put experts on the stage to show the public that experts are already on board with them. The public is hearing conflicting scientific theories (mask vs. no mask, climate change vs. no change) all the time and naming or assigning some as conspiracy theories. Truth is eroded as such the cognitive participation in democracy transferred from experts to citizens tasking them to decide on the validity of scientific inquiry while feeding them with falsified information or simply, ignorance. However, consciously produced ignorance cannot be brainwashed (referring to Kitcher’s weakness in well-ordered science definition discussed in Mirowski’s lectures).

The reflection of current picture in agnotology is not very optimistic, yet we can finally cheer out for the ending of our ignorance of ignorance in the sense of the third definition (Verburgt, 2020, p.18). Knowledge is now so valuable that there is no way to distribute it before pipelining through corporations. The public is involved to heated scientific debates with their twisted truth alas the wind is blowing as corporations want.

References

Mirowski, P. (2020). HPS 93772 Politics of Science Panopto lectures.. Agnotology, University of Notre Dame.

Mirowski, P. (2020). HPS 93772 Politics of Science Panopto lectures. Kitcher on democracy, University of Notre Dame.

Mirowski, P. (2020). HPS 93772 Politics of Science Panopto lectures. Neoliberalism 2 – Ignorance, University of Notre Dame.

Pinto, M. F. (2015). Tensions in agnotology: Normativity in the studies of commercially driven ignorance. Social Studies of Science, 45(2), 294–315. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312714565491

Proctor, R. N. (2012). The history of the discovery of the cigarette—lung cancer link: Evidentiary traditions, corporate denial, global toll. Tobacco Control, 21(2), 87–91. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41515996

Verburgt, L. M. (2020). The History of Knowledge and the Future History of Ignorance. KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge, 4(1), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1086/708341

Why Ignorance is Useful Bliss For the ArtSciLab Smart Village

Three definitions of ignorance

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