54. Modernism as Aliveness to Change 🔗

We need a verb meaning “doing science” in elemental, non-institutional, non-bureaucratic sense. Something like “investigating”

Not “research” since that’s overloaded with methodological baggage from professionalized publication-oriented science.

Small-s, no exclamation point.

Investigating has the right energy but points to something more like detective work. Something you do when there’s already a body in the library.

Sciencing in the Matt Damon sense (“science the shit out of it”) is too instrumental.

Connotations needed:

Open-ended trial and error
Conscientiousness
Flow
Patience
Empiricism
Phenomenological bias
Instrument-making
Tracking/stalking/hunting
Increasing precision
Element of play, but serious
Uncertainty
But not much risk
Pre-social
Pre-textual
Pre-mathematical

I’ve been in this state for a while. It feels like larping 17th century early science. I’m literally fiddling with pendulum clocks and simple telescopes like Galileo. It’s a whole mood.

It needs a mansion and money to do right. Or a secure position in the clergy.

I get now why so many early age-of-science pioneers were clergymen. It’s the perfect situation. All the resources of a powerful institution behind you, and it supplies basic needs and expects only poverty and piety.

There’s a sense of being out of time and no pressure to get anything done by a certain time. The opposite of a publish-perish treadmill. “If it’s going to take 50 years it will take 50 years” headspace.

And no, not tinkering/making/hacking. That’s engineering.

I’m doing bits of engineering, but it’s means, not the end. I’m not in a mood to build stuff for its own sake. Building stuff to do this verb. Like prosthetic-powered mindfulness. A kind of transhumanism actually, but for seeing/measuring powers, not doing powers.

A definition popped into my head late last as I was falling asleep: “Modernism is aliveness to change.”

Science is kinda the art of being modern. Modernism comprehends and embraces change without theorizing it into a progress narrative.

In my headcanon, “moderning” captures what I’m after, but it would be confusing to use here. Moderning as a kind of outward-oriented living in the present, rather than inner/spiritual. Not the historical era of 1920s, but the presentist sensibility.

Trying to be modern is a pretty simple idea. It just means living in the present as opposed to the past, future, or adjacent possible. It means aliveness to change because the present is the fastest changing temporality. Past, future, adjacent possible change much more slowly.

Metaphor: in a moving train, if you’ve ever peeked through the gap in the vestibule connecting cars, you see the track sleepers running rapidly below your feet. That’s the present. If you look out of the window, ahead or behind, that’s future and past. Sideways=adjacent possible.

Aliveness to change beyond your immediate person is pretty hard, hence instruments. You can’t just meditate on it like it’s your own breath.

If you wanted to actually see the sleepers on the tracks whizzing by under your feet, it’s not trivial.

Keeping up with twitter feed is aliveness to change

Trying to photograph Jupiter by stacking frames of a short movie (my next astrophotography project) is like keeping up with the raw Jupiter-twitter feed.

I’m not seriously looking for a verb btw, though thanks for the suggestions. Looking for a verb is merely the Macguffin powering this theory of science as modernism as aliveness to change.

Somehow “science” got wrapped up in the identity performance of “intelligent” as a career.

Sure, intelligence makes you particularly good at this in a way that can be parlayed into fame and wealth etc., but the fit with intelligence is almost the least interesting thing about it. Some fairly stupid people have wonderfully scientific sensibilities and ways of seeing.

Learning is definitely part of it for a lot of people, but probably not for me. I’m a bad learner and it’s not a motivator for me. tweet^[1]

I wrote this post in 2010 (riffing on the work of artist Amy Lin) on a concept I called “the ancient eye” that gets more at the sense I’m after here. Paradoxically moderning is about developing this ancient eye. Amy Lin and the Ancient Eye

Yeah testing is part of it too, in the sense of testing the boundaries of your own experience, rather than bureaucratic falsification or verification. tweet^[2]

Sure, Galileo tested Aristotelean realities when he turned a telescope skyward, but THAT test was not the point. It was just an effect. The real test was of the boundary of the experience of seeing. With an instrument.

“Oh that’s NOT a point of light, it’s a striped ball”

Some accounts of early science make it seem almost like Galileo’s heresies were about him choosing to fight church orthodoxy. No that was just a side effect. If you wanted to fight the church in medieval Europe you’d do something more direct, like nailing 99 theses to a door.

Yeah experiments too... another elemental concept that’s somehow gotten bureaucratized into NSF-Approved Hypothesis-Testing Methodology. But yeah. tweet^[3]

Note to self: do not use words as thread macguffins. Derails thread into isntthisjustism.

Grokking in the original Heinlein sense comes pretty close. Insight but into something outside of yourself. Except as the result of steady, patient effort. A gradual dawning of a light via a systematic uncovering of a path rather than a sudden enlightenment.

‘Study’ is probably the best simple English word if you don’t want to get too weird. tweet^[4]

Paulo Coelho’s Alchemist gets at an aspect of the scientific sensibility that is often lost in modern views. That sense of a gradually dawning, cleansing, purifying light as you get closer to the essence of a thing. I especially like the alchemy connotation.

It’s no accident that early scientists were often also astrologers and occultists. Not only is that acceptable within the scope of the verb I’m circling, it’s necessary. Superstition is inseparable from this kind of questing and not only not a threat to it, but possibly an aid.

If you see a strong distinction between science and superstition that must be policed to keep the former “pure” and “uncorrupted” you’re paradoxically being superstitious about the essence of science. Overanxious policing of science/superstition boundary is bureaucratism.

The Hindi/Sanskrit word saadhna is another useful one with no English equivalent. Learning/study as a mindful spiritual quest. It’s often applied to learning the fine arts. The alchemist’s pursuit was saadhna. Sciencing as a developmental journey similar to learning music.

And this is why I need a mansion. To do science, one must have money, and a mansion of one’s own.