Graham English

From The Future Of Science:

Kevin Kelly has some fascinating ideas about where science as a practice is going in the next 50 years. Just the topic headings make for crunchy, futurismic reading: compiled negative results, triple blind experiments, combinatorial sweep exploration, and the list goes on.

Kelly’s definitely an integral thinker (transcend and include):

New informational organizations are layered upon the old without displacement, just as in biological evolution. Our brains are good examples. We retain reptilian reflexes deep in our minds (fight or flight) while the more complex structuring of knowledge (how to do statistics) is layered over those primitive networks. In the same way, older methods of knowing (older scientific methods) are not jettisoned; they are simply subsumed by new levels of order and complexity. But the new tools of observation and measurement, and the new technologies of knowing, will alter the character of science, even while it retains the old methods.

He also predicts science will integrate the Upper Left:

Return of the Subjective — Science came into its own when it managed to refuse the subjective and embrace the objective. The repeatability of an experiment by another, perhaps less enthusiastic, observer was instrumental in keeping science rational. But as science plunges into the outer limits of scale — at the largest and smallest ends — and confronts the weirdness of the fundamental principles of matter/energy/information such as that inherent in quantum effects, it may not be able to ignore the role of observer. Existence seems to be a paradox of self-causality, and any science exploring the origins of existence will eventually have to embrace the subjective, without become irrational. The tools for managing paradox are still undeveloped.

Good thing I’ve got at least 50 years to learn what the hell he’s talking about, i.e. Combinatorial Sweep Exploration, Multiple Hypothesis Matrix, and Zillionics. I think I already know what Deep Simulations are.

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Tags: future, Integral, Practice, Science, subjectivity, transcend and include, Upper Left

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 12:55 am and is filed under LifeHacks, Opinion, Prose. You can leave a comment if you follow my Living Room Rules. If not, you can leave a trackback from your own site.