Over the past year one of the tools I’ve been developing is examining any set of information through a lens asking what if the construct being examined was literally anything else?
The idea behind this is to assist in forcing generalization of the information being provided. What would happen if we changed the nouns in a sentence? What would happen if we changed the verbs? Or ignored adjectives?
I find that this cuts right at the heart of a lot of the problems establishing multi-disciplinary approaches to science, the idea that any specific field of study is so unique that it direct comparisons become troublesome. It helps identify ideas which are more shibboleth than substantive difference, and getting past that bounding to the jargon or practices of a field allows much broader range of “quality checks” against other fields of science.
An example of this in the field of neuroscience is the study of things like “action potentials”. Asking the question, what if an “action potential” was being described in any of those other diverse fields, what would it look like results in the answer – it’s just a convolutedly narrow electro-chemical gradient. We have a huge body of evidence which has thoroughly explored the topic of electro-chemical gradients and their properties in fields as diverse climatology to astrobiology, and most of the mystery and magic of them are more tied to the expectations and jargon of the field than any property intrinsic to the cells themselves.
As long as we have inviolable physical constants, and those constants continue to produce consistent predictions across a wide number of fields, then asking how any property or construct, from sociology to economics, is consistent with that consistency makes for a really good smell test, not too dissimilar from working a math problem forward and backward.
There’s a huge schism in science between anthropo-centric study, most of it assuming that the anthropo part is completely distinct from everything else. Most physical sciences, as they have developed trend toward this understanding that there’s a clear generalization of properties regardless of the field of study – we aren’t studying “geology”, we are studying a specific aspect of the general properties which are imparted by those universal physical constants.
This is a growing philosophical disconnect for science, between the magic of humanity, a magic which is too complex for any other science, and all other physical science. It feels like a struggle between single or limited authoritative sources of knowledge (gods, churches, governments, personality cults), and a more “democratic” version of knowledge.
Checking your work through reconstruction is a powerful concept in maths and other sciences, it’s long since time anthropocentric fields were required to do the same.
(I was interrupted 12 times while writing this. Yes I counted. I’ll try to clean it up later)