What is Progress in Science?

Can our models say anything meaningful about the nature of reality? This has been an open question since the birth of modern science. The question is interesting because of the fact that falsified models were and are still useful. But useful for what? To understand this, we need to recognize a clear distinction between models and what is being modeled.

In each moment, we are only aware of our experience. This is the ground truth of our existence. Every other concept is a model. In our everyday life, we model certain aspects of our experience as cups, cars, hands, selves, thoughts, anger, neurons and so on. With the tools and methods of science, we also create models for our experience to explain and transform it.

But when we confuse our models with what is being modeled, things can get really absurd. Only when we take our models to be the reality itself, we can make statement such as “consciousness is an illusion” or “consciousness is a latecomer in the universe”.

Of course, the most popular contemporary assumption is that there is an inanimate world outside of consciousness which somehow creates our experience. But, do we have any reason or necessity to assume this based on the success of our models?

One argument is that, for most of the history of science, people didn’t even include experience in their models. We must take the assumptions in their models to be the reality because those models resulted in a remarkable progress. But, progress in what? Understanding the reality outside and independent of experience better and better?

As many people observed throughout history, even if we play along with the assumption of the world outside of experience, how can we know we have the true understanding of reality? We can’t and so it doesn’t make sense to say that we’re getting closer to truth or we’re getting it less wrong. Because this assumes that we already know the truth somehow, so we can evaluate how far we are from it.

Or if we think that the nature of reality cannot be known ultimately, we might say that progress in science implies that we are able to solve our current problems and replace them with better problems. But, then what do we mean by solving a problem?

Let’s take an example. When we eradicate a viral disease, we rightly see that as a significant accomplishment. Why? Because it alleviates so much suffering. So, it transforms our experience for the better. Does that mean that the concept of a virus capture some aspects of reality outside and independent of experience? No, because we don’t have any way to access such a world even if exists. We are only aware of how our experience has changed as a result of explanations based on concepts imagined by us.

Or let’s take another example from physics. When the general relativity had an initial and seemingly decisive support from the Eddington experiment, we didn’t make a sudden progress in understanding the world outside and independent of experience. But we have since been able to change our experience for the better thanks to the products of this new model.

David Deutsch’s taught-provoking book The Beginning of Infinity has one of the most concise subtitles that I know: Explanations That Transform the World. I agree that progress in science means coming up with explanations that transform the world. But, the world is made of experience. So, more precisely, we can say this. Science is a constellation of Explanations That Transform our Experience.

But this observation still does not answer the very first question I posed in this post. Can science -or more broadly any other conceptual framework- say anything about the nature of reality? If we assume that there is only experience, then at least in principle science can give us all the relevant useful knowledge we want. But is reality identical to moving from one experience to another? It does not seem so.

Consciousness is by definition the condition where experience appears, transforms and disappears. Construction of mental models to explain our experience is itself an another experience in consciousness. When there is no experience, can we conclude that consciousness also ceases to exist? I do not think we have any reason to assume this. To me, seeing each experience as a modification of consciousness is the only coherent way to reason about it.

So, we have a dilemma. Building models to explain consciousness is an experience and thus a modification of consciousness. But if we want to understand consciousness itself, we need to be in a condition before any experience appears. We can be in this condition but not at the same time with our mental models. So, it seems there is a strong sign that understanding the nature of consciousness and thus reality cannot be captured by concepts.