Stranger than fiction

The past year or so has seen me switch allegiances slowly from physics to math. Consequently, I’ve had to acquaint myself with the subtle differences and interrelationships between the two practices. The kind of physics I was intending to do is very mathematical, and conversely the kind of mathematics I hope to do is very physicsy in flavor, so it’s not that the two differ substantially in what they investigate, at least as far as the subfields I’m interested in are concerned. The differences are a little more subtle and mostly concern methodology. What physicists call a “proof” often fails to meet the standards of rigor of mathematicians. Physicists, on the other hand, leave it to the mathematicians to fuss over details that seem to them to be intuitively clear. Historically, physicists have treated math as a tool to properly formulate their ideas and mathematicians have used physics as inspiration for new directions in their study.

More recently, especially with the advent of string theory, physics has begun to provide another input to mathematics: strong evidence for completely unexpected mathematical equivalences that it would have taken centuries to discover purely by mathematicians’ methods. These equivalences or dualities connect ideas that seem very disparate.

This relationship can be construed in analogy to the relationship between philosophical intuitions and philosophy itself, and in particular, between emotion and ethics. Ethics deals, in very large part, with emotionally charged concept—justice, for example. It might be tempting to say that the business of ethics is to inject “reason” and “objectivity” into these concepts, but I don’t think it’s that simple. Certainly, the practice of philosophy helps to expose inconsistencies and clarify assumptions present in popular intuitions on philosophical questions. But to ignore that the intuitions are the very reason we’re studying the philosophical questions we are is to oversimplify matters greatly. We’d hardly care about ethics, for example, if we didn’t feel empathy. That’s not to say that ethics wouldn’t matter if we didn’t feel empathy: it’s just that, if you were reasoning without recourse to our emotional experiences, it would have been nearly impossible to conceive of the fact that other beings might suffer as you do.

Literature, in my book—pun definitely intended—has mastered this fact. Stream of consciousness as a technique comes to mind: because we’re exposed to Leopold Bloom in “Ulysses” at the most intimate level possible—while he’s in the outhouse, for example, or while he’s thinking about his wife’s infidelity—the work of empathy is very nearly done for us, and we come to know a fictional character in a way that we wouldn’t be able to with a real person. This empathy is, of course, easy to generalize to the people in our lives—the beautiful thing about “Ulysses” is that it does the difficult work of imagining that we are in someone else’s mind. By empathizing with Bloom, it becomes easier to empathize with others. This is a perfect example of the kind of knowledge that’s very difficult to obtain by reasoning alone.

Hopefully, the analogy to the relationship between math and physics is a little clearer now: just as the mathematician can use physical ideas as inspiration and motivation for connections that would otherwise be nearly impossible to find, so too does an ethicist use her own emotional experiences to understand which ethical problems are interesting and moreover to make connections between ideas that might otherwise seem unconnected. But her job doesn’t end there: not every intuition is valid and even when an intuition is valid, there might be hidden assumptions about when exactly it is valid. The process of finding these assumptions can also help resolve inconsistencies between conflicting intuitions. It’s the job of the ethicist to process and question these intuitions so that we discover the important ethical understanding to be extracted from them.

The analogy isn’t perfect: physics, the analogue of philosophical intuitions, is its own highly non-trivial field which requires very, very smart minds to generate ideas. By contrast, an ethicist is the source of her own intuitions. What I wanted to highlight, though, is that reason and emotion don’t exist in the kind of opposition that they’re often imagined to be in. Indeed, emotion is the very stuff that ethics cares about. While we can often be carried away by anger or spite or sadness to dangerous conclusions, emotion can conversely give us new perspectives and opens our minds to truths that would otherwise be hard to reach. I think it’s therefore crucially important for philosophers—and the rest of us, since we are all amateur philosophers—to expose themselves to the widest emotional/experiential palette possible. Maybe this isn’t the deepest insight ever, but I hope the math/physics analogy lends new perspective to this ostensibly innocuous and almost banal assertion. Only then will we discover, as physicists did 100 years ago, that the universe works in ways that we couldn’t have ever dreamed of just by sitting in our armchairs.

Eugene Rabinovich is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Friday.