
The extract below is the beginning of one of the best accounts of fundamental scientific discovery: The 7 Percent Solution by Richard Feynman. He was a great physicist, and a fascinating storyteller. I recommend it highly:
The problem was to find the right laws of beta decay. There appeared to be two particles, which were called a tau and a theta. They seemed to have almost exactly the same mass, but one disintegrated into two pions, and the other into three pions. Not only did they seem to have the same mass, but they also had the same lifetime, which is a funny coincidence. So everybody was concerned about this.
At a meeting I went to, it was reported that when these two particles were produced in a cyclotron at different angles and different energies, they were always produced in the same proportions - so many taus compared to so many thetas.
Now; one possibility, of course, was that it was the same particle, which sometimes decayed into two pions, and sometimes into three pions. But nobody would allow that, because there is a law called the parity rule, which is based on the assumption that all the laws of physics are mirror-image-symmetrical, and says that a thing that can go into two pions can't also go into three pions.
At that particular time I was not really quite up to things: I was always a little behind. Everybody seemed to be smart, and I didn't feel I was keeping up. Anyway, I was sharing a room with a guy named Martin Block, an experimenter. And one evening he said to me, "Why are you guys so insistent on this parity rule? Maybe the tau and theta are the same particle. What would be the consequences if the parity rule were wrong?"
I thought a minute and said, "It would mean that nature's laws are different for the right hand and the left hand, that there's a way to define the right hand by physical phenomena. I don't know that that's so terrible, though there must be some bad consequences of that, but I don't know. Why don't you ask the experts tomorrow?"
He said, "No, they won't listen to me. You ask."
So the next day, at the meeting, when we were discussing the tau-theta puzzle, Oppenheimer said, "We need to hear some new, wilder ideas about this problem."
So I got up and said, "I'm asking this question for Martin Block: What would be the consequences if the parity rule was wrong?"
http://psychology.okstate.edu/faculty/jgrice/psyc3214/The7PercentSolution.pdf
I quote this passage here because I'm struck by the highlighted quote by Oppenheimer. At that time, the leading physicists had been grappling with the problem of beta decay, and seemed to have exhausted every possibility. As a respected leader in the field, he was daring them to think differently. "To think outside the box" in today's phrase. He believed (rightly, as it turned out) that the answer to this problem required a radical overhaul of their existing ideas.
So how do you know when a "paradigm shift" is needed to solve a scientific problem? How can you be you sure that this isn't just a cop-out? That you're not just grasping at this straw because you haven't been looking at & thinking about this problem properly?
I've attended a number of symposia at UCL with Iain, his saintly Wife + Party Girl. They have put on an excellent series of talks about Big Questions. At one of them, one of the lecturers was asked about how fundamental a particular problem was for his account of the formation of the Earth or the Solar System. He said that he didn't know how tricky that particular problem would be - but he wasn't too concerned about this. To illustrate this, he gave two examples where it hadn't been possible to predict just how hard particular problems would turn out to be - and therefore how radical the solutions had to be:
When perturbations were observed in the orbit of Uranus, Le Verrier proposed that this was due to its interaction with an, as yet, unobserved planet. He calculated the orbit & position, and it was subsequently observed and named Neptune.
In 1859 Le Verrier tried to repeat his success. He applied his mathematical techniques to the anomalous orbit of Mercury. He suggested that the precession was due to the influence of a small unknown planet, Vulcan. He was wrong. He just couldn't have explained the anomalous shift in the perihelion of Mercury using the techniques available. It turned out that a whole new re-working of the theory of space, time & gravity was required. Einstein provided this, and explained the motion of Mercury.
So, perhaps we can rephrase the original question: Is the current search for the nature of the mind like:
(A) the search for the explanation for the odd orbit of Uranus? We've got all the necessary know-how. We're heading in the right direction. Maybe we need better technology - "You're gonna need a bigger telescope" - but no need to panic. "Keep calm and carry on"
(B) the search for the explanation for the odd orbit of Mercury? In which case, we'll never explain it using the canon of knowledge that we've built up over the last few centuries. We need a paradigm shift. We don't know which bit of the existing "laws" will be safe - and which may have to go - so, you may as well propose any variety of "off the wall" ideas.
I guess that you can only tell with certainty after the event. Usually long after. Nevertheless, we do have to take a stance towards these two attitudes in our pursuit of mind. It influences our inquiry, and determines where we look for evidence. You see, if you think the mind is an (A) type problem - then you'll tend to direct your attention to the latest research from the unis, labs & institutes with the biggest brain-scanners, optogenetics facilities, etc. On the other hand, if you think that the nature of consciousness, the mind etc. are more of a (B) problem ("beyond our ken") then you will tend to be more receptive to wild new ideas ("Eddies in the Space-Time continuum" ;-)
So do we "need to hear some new, wilder ideas about" the nature of the mind? Yes and No. I think that "wilder ideas" have muddied the waters - obscuring the subject, and our view of the question. We do need new ideas - but they don't have to be "wilder". To come up with a reasonable hypothesis about the mind, we don't need to get all spacey. Scientific ideas that are consistent with the known Universe can reveal the nature of the mind. The Laws of Physics don't need to be broken (they can't be!) to explain the mind; they don't even need to be bruised.
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