Interdisciplinarity

[Disclaimer: I didn't really plan this out beforehand; it's just a movement of ideas, beginning a with a particular thing. I didn't expect it to end up where it did, but I can't say I'm surprised.]

Context: Deleuze & Badiou, plus E.O. Wilson's claim that sociobiology is the "anti-discipline" of the social sciences. Wilson thinks that disciplines ultimately lose power to subsuming reductionist disciplines which can better explain the phenomena in question. He argues that this overcoming, though not really the historical norm, is an inevitable historical end because the all processes ultimately emerge from the same physical laws and causal mechanisms, even if articulated in complex and novel ways.

The problem, of course, is no computer (or by extension, model) can encompass all of reality at once. Practically, because of the difficulty of gathering sufficient data (and this may itself be completely insurmountable), and logically, because the computer would be in the universe but not able to completely represent itself (without generating a paradoxical/impossible infinite recursion).

Disciplines emerge somewhat haphazardly, and probably maintain a great deal of institutional inertia which rigidifies boundaries between them. But even in a system without these commitments, disciplines would have to grow horizontally in the "middle" of the vertical hierarchy, then make connections with their neighbors secondarily. Practically, it's easier to observe and systematize the study of phenomena at a given level than it is to determine all the underlying causal factors for those phenomena.

The (historically real, probably inevitable in the long run) temporal limitations on human life create severe problems for interdisciplinary studies--more so than for knowledge in general. Single fields constantly differentiate into smaller fields whose contents individuals can master. Exploration in these fields tend to take for granted certain concepts ("black boxes!") from areas of disciplinary past or interdisciplinary spillover which enable their particular work.

The intellectual with an interdisciplinary urge faces an irresolvable vertigo (within metaphorical space organizing disciplines along an up-down axis probably corresponding sort of to a big-small axis--more on this later?). "Understanding" any point in this mental space, even "only" to the level made possible by current human knowledge, requires understanding a cone of influence (expanding horizontally as vertical distance increases). Causal factors ripple up and down this cone, altering the status of its (arbitrary) nexus. The paradox: to understand anything, for any duration of time, one must understand (almost) everything -- an infinite set of factors increases with vertical distance and time.

Cannot this despairing interdisciplinary thinker attempt to make reasonable simplifications of the relevant factors? One returns to the problem at a second order: the near impossibility of knowing which simplifications optimize the explanation at hand without knowing what each simplification excludes and what each includes. Even with huge simplifications, one simply cannot come close to knowing enough to really understand... anything. There's simply not enough time to keep place with the relevant progress of every discipline; but if your knowledge within a particular discipline is outdated or inaccurate or oversimplified to too great a degree, the entire vertical chain of understanding falls apart because of this weak link.

Reassuring but maddening is the contemplation of the body of human knowledge, as a whole, in the abstract. Its tempting to think that an entity able to consciously process this cosmos would be able to produce fantastic insights at every level. To some extent, one can think of the collective unconscious as performing precisely that process; thus learning more things and producing more linkages provides a perspective which leaves most important things out; but other people know those things, and their knowledge might be linked with some of the things you know about. We know in the abstract that the links are being made.

But even more exciting is the idea that all these links coexist in closer proximity than ever before within the internet. And with the internet's accelerating moves towards integrating humans and human knowledge... who knows what truths may emerge from a proliferation of
linkages simply unavailable to any one human being? Theories of culture/society as brain lacked credibility because of the gaps in the transmission of information and because of the relative salience of the individual subject as perceiver; the internet is resolving these issues by increasing the proximity of ideas and the speed with which they move and relate.

Internet consciousness should thus provide some hope for the intellectual unable to comprehensively understand the currently available mental universe--the process of creatively generating new linkages in parallel with many others like you may yield an entity which can understand.

Vicarious enlightenment.