The Creative Flow State in Science: Entrainment as a Method
The shape arrives before the proof. A theorist works through the incommensurable interval by learning to recognize what persists across media, languages and doubt.
A different sort of thinking
Topological thinking and the quantum paradigm. In observing the ebb and flow of Kuhnian scientific paradigms, we are struck by several overarching phenomena.
One is that although a paradigm seems to come out of nowhere, each arises in the creative imagination of independent humans, widely separated by time and space. We can see the spontaneous emergence of a different sort of thinking, so different that once it is seen it cannot be unseen, so powerful that it overturns centuries of thought.
On some occasions this different manner of seeing the world becomes useful for overturning whole traditions of scientific and philosophical thought and becomes a scientific revolution. Early in these episodes, theorists are flying almost blind, as the shapes they see do not fit the known, approved, accepted, proven science.
We imagine, for instance, the mind of Socrates, who began seeing human interaction through a vastly different lens and immediately acted from this perspective, overturning centuries of customary thought with a few perceptive questions. As we move forward through what is now human history, we can draw a line through those who suddenly saw differently and took action based upon such sight. What we observe then is sharp demarcation, a critically different way of envisioning the world.
The oceanic change
So different are these departures that they meet both stiff superficial resistance while simultaneously sending forth deeper ripples which travel faster and further. It is oceanic in character, sending the surface into chaos and resistance, while at depth there is a benthic sea change which carries an intoxicating idea forward at speed.
These scientific, philosophical and technological revolutions represent complete divergence between one traditional world and another which breaks that tradition. Like evolution, once a break is made, the old version is pinched off as the new one moves forward, the very friction the new ideas cause providing the energy for the change.
We can come to see the structure of scientific revolutions from a combined dynamic, thermodynamic and evolutionary perspective: to see the change in vision, the perceived new geometric shape, which drives the change in human perception. Once that perception is changed, it is as if a critically different mass is reached where the new scientific paradigm crystallizes into a new way of perceiving.
This critical mass is theoretical, happening before the experimental work and research are undertaken which eventually prove the concept. It is this divide between the theoretical and the scientific establishment which drives the incommensurable period Kuhn describes: the period between when these wild new theories create a deep-sea change and the time when the whole ocean is transformed, complete with a new language to articulate it.
Written mostly in the dark
In this set of theories, we have a whole different way of seeing the universe and a whole departure in our understanding of how we as human beings fit into that universe. Here we were, calmly writing yet another book, based upon a set of theories which seemed to be insisting upon a sharply different way of seeing the world.
We happened to be in the midst of a chapter on the character of brain waves and brain structure when new information arrived: not proof, just deeper indications. Theorists cannot waste time concentrating upon proof, for that effectively throws a wrench into the experiential process of creative thinking.
Theorizing requires a state of creative flow known as entrainment, one in which the theorist comprehends the new paradigm with the whole mind and body, knowing that the theories will require long, difficult work of research and experimentation before they can overcome the period of incommensurable darkness.
Back to the day in, day out, hour in, hour out of writing such a book—written mostly in the dark, having to trust the incommensurable muteness of knowing while not knowing. Here is where the ability to trust an unknown process becomes the most important factor.
The shape steps into the room
Theorists see through a glass darkly, perceiving the incomplete mirage of a geometric shape, but willingly trusting the illusion which both drives them forward and eludes their grasp.
For a theory to drive a whole scientific paradigm it must present a shape which holds up against all kinds of false assumptions and misconceptions. The shape must be powerful enough to withstand the pressures against it, one strong enough to finally reach through all the skepticism and doubt and confusion to begin to stand upon its own merits.
So here we ask such a shape to step into the room. This shape has so far survived a whole collection of books and websites which lead here, processes which tried in many ways to prove it wrong, thus surviving a period of inarticulate speculation. The shape survives and now demands to stand on its own.
An unexpected event: a set of loosely interconnected research conclusions, none strong enough to prove anything and all together unable to prove anything, but all pointing steadily at the same shape. Let us revisit the shape and indicate how the shape held throughout, hugely speculative but refusing to go away, remaining stubbornly persistent.
The process that produces the catalog
We return to imagining this shape as we describe how it seems to hold across many disparate and seemingly unrelated media: glimpsed in watery forms, across an imagined fabric of space and time, within musical compositions, in light and electromagnetism, in the nautilus, Fibonacci and Riemann, and finally within the intricately folded dual membrane of the human brain. The galaxy has now carried the same distinction to cosmic scale.
The catalog stops at the brain and the galaxy. The turn after it is about the process that keeps producing the catalog. The underlying shape, on this reading, is prior to the replicator. Geometry sets the capacity. The replicator occupies a capacity that includes its own re-formation. Variation is the medium trying neighboring shapes. Heredity is the subset of those shapes that survive the handing-back. The long argument from light to the galaxy is the record of capacities. Evolution is the record of which capacities learned to copy.
Evolution is the process that runs on that constraint. A replicator is not a substance. It is a shape that a medium can copy. The copy has to survive the handing-back—the same distinction the stream already forced, where the wave travels and the water stays put. What persists is not the parcel. What persists is the relation that can be re-formed in the next parcel.
Membranes, polymers, genomes, scores and proofs: each is a shape stable enough to be read again by the medium that holds it. Where the geometry does not admit the copy, the lineage ends. Where it does, the lineage is the shape repeating. The shape is presented. Whoever chases the proof does that work.