Science and Truth: The Territory Beyond Causality

When we speak of a concept we must make clear its definition and its domain — the first being the core properties of the thing, the second the range over which the concept applies. Otherwise discussion, or a statement, turns into a vague language game, or into a venting of feeling and will.

Take the word "science," which is constantly misused. We say "X is science" to mark our trust in and approval of some thing or theory, and "X is unscientific" to criticize a statement. "Science" here has been blurred into "real / reasonable," a stand-in for some settled conclusion or credible view.

"Science" is in fact a very recent Western concept, and modern science is usually understood as a particular methodology of knowing. According to Karl Popper, that framework must possess falsifiability: a theory can be called scientific only if it is possible for it to be shown false. There are many supplementary criteria besides — whether the theory rests on observable, measurable evidence from the real world (empiricism), whether it is reproducible, and so on.

From the definition of "science" alone we can see that to call a theory scientific is not to call it truth. The category of truth is far larger than that of science; and according to Popper all scientific theories are conjectures, or rather endless approaches to truth — and it is precisely because a conjecture might be proven false that it can be called a scientific framework of knowledge at all.

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Beyond the domain of science lie ethical judgment, pure logic, metaphysics and ultimate meaning, and truth that resists ordinary frameworks of knowing. Last week, at a lecture on the history of science, the professor asked whether we thought the I Ching was scientific. In fact we can say neither yes nor no, because this already lies outside the domain of "science." Joseph Needham once asked why China's leading ancient civilization had not produced modern science — but the question itself looks at China's technological revolutions from a Western narrative, through a "science" defined by the experiment-based natural science that arose in early-modern Europe, and that is neither fair nor sound. The I Ching is a system of knowing that "science" cannot address; the measure of science cannot weigh love, nor account for the worth of meaning.

Forming the intention, casting the hexagram, laying out the chart, reading it: I Ching divination reasons about a situation and interprets an oracle through six lines. Yin and yang give birth to the ten thousand things; the lines divide into yin and yang, which maps onto binary encoding. Divination is really the use of the sixty-four hexagrams formed from six lines to model the present situation and offer advice that corresponds to it. And it strikes me that casting a hexagram is a process of generating data, and the data generated derives from reality — it carries no new information. In other words, the hexagram is already before our eyes, in the situation we stand in; only because our cultivation is shallow can we not see the reality clearly, and so we need the I Ching as a system for turning the reality we inhabit into a legible "hexagram" with its reading attached. That is why Confucius said, "the benevolent see it and call it benevolence, the wise see it and call it wisdom": the hexagram each person casts is only a reflection of reality. And "the common people use it daily without knowing it": everyone, every day, is reading their situation, interpreting it, and acting on a changing world — that is the study of responding to change, the study of the Changes, which everyone uses without knowing they use it. Hence Xunzi's line that those who are truly good at the Changes do not divine: someone who has truly mastered it knows the present situation and their own heart without casting six lines, and knows what to do.

The Supreme Ultimate gives birth to the two modes (yin and yang); the two modes give birth to the four images (old yang, young yin, young yang, old yin); the four images give birth to the eight trigrams (Qian, Dui, Li, Zhen, Xun, Kan, Gen, Kun); the eight trigrams combine into sixty-four hexagrams, each with six stages. This is the model by which the study of the Changes explains the world. For each hexagram, the corresponding real situation and the way to meet it, the I Ching gives a clear account, and even brings in physical phenomena to explain them — interesting and reasonable; or rather, the sixty-four hexagrams came in the first place from the ancients' explanation of, and experience with, real phenomena.

What I am more curious about is how six-line divination maps reality onto the yarrow stalks to cast a hexagram. How does my present situation, the subjective thought within me, come to be expressed in the apparently random arrangement of the stalks? Carl Jung proposed an "acausal connecting principle" — synchronicity — to explain phenomena science cannot at present explain. He used synchronicity to account for the connection behind non-causal coincidences: related in meaning, and simultaneous (a psychic event and a physical event roughly coinciding in time). Jung held that matter and mind are one at a deeper level, and that this is what produces such events. Back to divination: sincerity makes it work — the hexagram the stalks lay out, the inner thought, and the surrounding situation are connected through a resonance of meaning in the same moment.

Quantum entanglement and the observer paradox in quantum physics have questioned the causality of classical physics; there, observation affects matter, and subject and object are entwined. Pauli and Jung had some fascinating conversations and reached some agreement: both accepted the inspiration of synchronicity, even though synchronicity fails science's tests of falsifiability and repeatable experiment. There is a paradox built in here — science demands stability and repetition, which of themselves produce causality, so the system cannot be used to study what lies outside the law of causality. But that does not prevent synchronicity from possibly being true, a truth about the structure of the world.

Another account of casting the six lines is Yogācāra, the consciousness-only school: at the moment of divination the subconscious already holds the answer, and the hexagram is a manifestation of karma in the eighth consciousness. Yogācāra, too, lies outside the domain of science, yet it has great explanatory power over reality and is logically self-consistent; it, too, may be true. There is no need to cling to materialism. Go and look at the wider territory :)