A short digression on Identity

Or, a prologue to my Art and Science Manifesto, should I ever write one. By Joe Skulan

That it should seem outlandish to base a musical composition on an old zircon points out the false and unfortunate taxonomy that classifies knowledge according its mode of discovery, and thereby relinquishes whole categories of experience and perception to science and scientists.

The zircon has been studied by scientists, but it is not the property of science, because science has no property. By the same token the age and uniqueness of the zircon are the discoveries of science, but are not "scientific facts" because there are no such things as "scientific facts." Science is a method of discovery, not a body of knowledge. A fact that is discovered through science is no different than a fact that is discovered in any other way.

The method of science is not "The Scientific Method," that silly old chestnut dutifully dragged out in the introductions to science textbooks, and with luck unread or forgotten by any students who go on to practice science. Science is the rigorous application of skeptical empiricism to our perceptions of the world, and to how we explain those perceptions. Scientists, when they are acting as scientists, only accept the existence are things that can be perceived, with or without the aid of technology. As Hume showed, this essentially is an absurd view of the world, one that few if any clear headed scientists actually espouse as more than a tool. Most of what we know about the world, whether we are scientists or not, is not derived from science and in fact would be rejected were it to be judged by the strict standards of skeptical empiricism.

Among this knowledge is the concept of Identity, the notion that this thing is, in and of itself, different from that thing. When two discreet objects differ in some perceivable way, then it is perfectly useful, and scientific, to call them different things. Even if they do not differ in a perceivable way it would still be scientific to assign the two things separate identities, because they occupy different positions in space. But what if we have no knowledge of their position?

Here is a thought experiment: Imagine that you have two molecules of carbon dioxide, each of which consists (as most CO2 molecules do) of one atom of carbon-12 bound to two atoms of oxygen-16. You name one molecule Mary and the other Evan. Each molecule is in its own vial, so you can tell them apart because they have different locations. At any given instant, the molecules also differ from each other in other, transient, ways-- in their velocity, in the angles of the bonds between their atoms, in the shape of the nucleus of each atom, and in the distribution of their electrons. You have fantastically elaborate technology that allows you to record all of these transient changes in each molecule. Now you put Evan and Mary together into another vial which contains no other carbon dioxide molecules, and go home for the night. When you return you open up the container and remove two carbon dioxide molecules. You know that one is Mary and the other is Evan, but how do you tell which is which?

The answer is: you can't. While you were away, each of the molecules collided many trillions of times with the walls of the vial and with other molecules. No matter how well you documented exactly when and where and at what velocity a molecule entered the vial, you cannot predict the its position the next morning, because to do so would require exactly the infinitely precise knowledge of the molecule's velocity and position that is forbidden by quantum theory. And for essentially the same reason you cannot distinguish Mary from Evan based on any of the instantaneous differences between them that you noted at the beginning of the experiment. All knowledge of the separate identities of Mary and Evan have been lost. You will never again know which is which. The concept of Mary and Evan as two distinct molecules with two distinct histories has forever moved beyond the realm of perception, and from the skeptical scientific point of view the question of which is which is more than unanswerable: it is meaningless.

But, of course, the question is not meaningless. One of the molecules is Evan, and the other is Mary, and that you can never know which is which does not change the fact that the molecules have preserved their identity through the experiment. To realize that something once known is gone forever is more than unsettling, more even than horrible; it is the essence of despair. The struggle against this despair is one of the most powerful motivations of scientists, and particularly of historical geologists. The thought that nothing ever is really lost without a trace, that with enough ingenuity we will be able to reconstruct any event no matter how distant in time, is deeply comforting; and all the more comforting if we can discard as meaningless questions that cannot be answered scientifically. However, there are many things that we know about the world that science can never show us, and knowledge of this identity is one of them.

Science cannot present a unified view of the world, only a small subset of knowledge that must be combined with other knowledge if it is to have any coherence. The power of science is that the things it discovers often are difficult to discover, both technically and conceptually. These are new things, and as such can stimulate new combinations of knowledge and perceptions. These combinations can be beautiful. Consider the statement "every breath I take contains a little bit of the breath of every other person who has ever lived." Ignoring people born within the past year, this statement is almost certainly true, and this truth rests on several discoveries of science: the size and density of molecules in air, the behavior of those molecules and the global pattern of circulation and mixing of the earth's atmosphere. But the meaning of what it is to share our breaths is more than science can show, because that significance depends on the identity of the molecules that we inhale. When I take a breath and try to grasp the significance of whose breath I am sharing, the experience hinges on scientific discovery but is completed by my knowledge that some of the very same molecules I am taking in were in the body of someone else. I will never and can never know which molecules, but I know that they are there and that is enough.

The zircon is-- and there really is no better term for it-- a gestalt, an object assembled in the mind into coherence through the combination of perceptions and knowledge, only a small fraction of which are the discoveries of science. The ancient zircon already is a collaboration between science and the imagination. The Rock Concert elevates this collaboration to art.