The Sciences Vs The Humanities Science Vs Humanities
“What” as a pronoun characterizes the focus of discovery within the sciences:
• What exists
• What functions and behaviors do things exhibit
• What’s the relationship between parts and wholes
• What populates the big picture
“How” as an adverb characterizes the focus of discovery within the humanities. The center of action, the actor giving meaning to the verb, emerges as the enduring point of view of the personal self in possession of a unique personal history. In short, “how” describes “what it’s like” to be a self with its own point of view, feelings, values, and judgments. Personal narratives have a short list of major turning points within the personal history of of an evolving self. This evolving self typically narrates the “how” or the “what it’s like to be” of:
• Birth
• Knowing oneself as separate from the world
• Friends & Foes
• Goals
• Sexual awakening, rite of passage (adolescence) into adulthood
• Work, love, marriage, family, home, world
• Letting go of children
• Retirement, old age
• Death
Science and Humanities are the two great modes of consciousness and behavior.
These two faces of reality look across the 180 degrees of line separating the circle of wholeness into the two semi-circles of the facing realities.
The focus of this conversation has been the mirroring of the two realities facing each other: “things-in-themselves (TIS) and consciousness (NI:natural intelligence).
“What” is about the content, nature and workings of existence.
“How” is about the conscious experience of what exists, especially including the existence of the self-referential self.
When “How” and “What” face each other, there is an equation that establishes itself as the connection linking the two half circles together into wholeness.
The “What” and the “How” share an essential attribute: incompleteness. This incompleteness characterizes how they examine “What” and “How” respectively, and also how they perceive each other. They both spin out narratives that have no ending.
It’s an outrageous violation of convention and common sense to say of existence in general that there is no wholeness.
Complexity, however, can be thought about in a way that makes this very suggestion.
The mirroring symmetry of NI looking at TIS is degraded by entropy. In consequence, humans do not see the existence of the world, the “What” of the world completely.
Instead, humans see a sample of TIS. This sample has a compression algorithm that ejects some of the information of TIS.
General existence, acting through entropy, makes the incomplete transfer of information across the line dividing the semi-circles necessary, and it stands as the main premise motivating my initiation of this conversation.
Life will always ask you questions you can neither answer nor avoid. These unanswerable questions elevate life to something more than information. They are the spine of your personal history. They introduce you to three things you must try to make peace with while you live: what you know is incomplete, what you are is incomplete and the world is incomplete.
All three categories are waiting for you to add something, so try to be creative.