On Science, Engineering, and Feeling
Every community into which I’ve entered views itself as the protagonist in its own story: the musicians, the scientists, the mathematicians, the poets, the engineers. Each has a focus (itself) and the periphery (everyone else and how they’re living, what they’re doing). They can all be important, but they can’t all be “most important” in an absolute sense, even if they certainly can be from their “first-person” viewpoints. This observation informs my practice of not taking any one thing too seriously or as being valuable at the wholly depleting expense of other things. This includes myself, of course!
Certain combinations of interests and abilities seem to co-occur infrequently within the white, Western population in which I’ve spent almost all of my twenty-eight years. I make no claim as to why this is. I also wonder whether there are cultures in which this is not the case. In other words, I wonder whether the palette of an individual’s interests is strongly determined by societal forces.
When people learn of my interests and abilities, the default way of seeing them is as being disconnected. I myself do see them as distinct, and much of the skill and knowledge I have in each does not generalize to others. But in my lived experience they are also inseparable. The structure of a coin is such that we say it has two sides. At the same time, we also say it is one coin. There is no contradiction. By this comparison I highlight the difference between our lives and what language says about them — whether that language is poetry or music or statistics or biophysics…
I don’t know how this impression arose, but in my own experience, it seems that people in Western culture tend to view feeling and rational thought as being, in their ideal forms, completely independent of one another. Cognitive science, at least in the early 21st century, says that there is some independence of feeling and conscious thought, but most of the time there is a great deal of dependence. I also think that, at a practical level, aspiring to treat our feelings and thoughts as completely independent is a grave mistake. The reason why that I emphasize for present purposes is that feeling is an inevitable dimension of human existence. We are embodied beings, and one of the functions of the body is to sense, to feel. If we deny the validity of the inevitable consequences of embodied existence, we disengage from them. This is a problem because they still exert enormous power over our lives. We are simply more likely to be unaware of them and their influence over our actions. And we are unlikely to see that there is anything unwholesome going on (not least, toward ourselves), even when our actions are caused by all of the various derivatives of desire and aversion, which arise from physical phenomena in the body: what we call fear, greed, hatred, insecurity, jealousy, malice,…
It is a fundamental assumption here that these physical states do not promote the health and happiness of human beings. I will not cite various research that confirms this assumption. One reason I don’t is that many human beings are willing to accept even all sorts of opinions with no factual evidence for those opinions. My claim surely then merits the same luxury. It is also a fundamental assumption that, if human existence is to have a goal, at minimum it ought to be the health and happiness of all human beings. Again, we can think of many people who have fundamentally disagreed with this. Those who would be inclusive of all humankind must remember that this viewpoint is a real stance and not a given. It is certainly not a given from past or present human activity.
I will now narrow the scope of examination to my own paying occupation, which derives from space exploration. I help produce devices that, in part, enable spacecraft to function accurately and reliably. Until writing this piece, I have tried to compartmentalize my visceral and analytical modes of perception, and reasoning — not in lived experience, but in outward appearance and behaviour. Do you see this as a contradiction? If so, what is that reaction about? Where else does its source manifest in our lives?
By ‘visceral’ I mean the sensed and felt aspects of living in a human body. Much of this experience is unpleasant. But if we discipline our lives and attention, we can shape this experience into enthusiasm, verve, satisfaction, pursuit of excellence, contentment, kindness, compassion, self-affirmation, and affirmation of others. The activity of loving — ourselves, our lives, the Earth, from which we derive all our material benefits, and other human beings — does not manifest as a zero-sum game in which one thing exists entirely at the expense of another. It, by its nature, cannot. In loving, neither giver nor recipient can be depleted; otherwise, in one situation, there is nothing to give to. In the other, we are the ones depleted. The dynamical system of giving and taking such that the giver and the taker continue to be sustained is what it means to be in true relationship.
If this sounds like airy-fairy philosophy only, consider the company. A company that is sustainable and can continue moving toward its aspirations is one that gives to its employees, its environment, and its society as well as takes. Perhaps there are times when the movement of the company toward a goal requires temporarily unsustainable demands of time or energy from its employees. Then somehow, the company has to give commensurately to restore balance.
I could write so many equations, both elementary and nontrivial, that express this concept of balance. An example: 5 + -5 = 0. Another example: -(dy/dx) = az *(dz/dx), aka the equation saying that momentum is conserved. I could write so many poems about it. Paint so many paintings. Build any number of devices that manifest this concept. In fact, I have done each of these things in small quantity. The reaction wheel that the company I work for produces requires its spinning element to be mechanically balanced.
What I stand for in technical fields is balance and respect for and integration of feeling in the activities of analysis, reasoning, and decision making. I do not stand for sentimentality or feeling that gets in the way of solving problems and bringing about outcomes of health and happiness. Loving is not coddling. It is not catering to every want, need, or errant feeling. Loving is creating balance toward thriving. I stand for not aspiring to play zero-sum games in our businesses, whereby one player/business seeks to steal all the market share or other resources out from another, because…money and champagne and prostitutes…at least for the people at the top. Or whatever it is that people think deliberately beating another company into oblivion will convert to for their personal gain. People outside the space industry, take heed, because businesses drive space exploration. NASA and other government space organizations are nothing without private industry (though the division does become blurry). While not all space execs are all about material excesses, some of them might very well be about ego-excesses, such as pursuing a project at the expense of their employees, environment, or other stakeholders, NOT for the well being of humankind as a whole, but just so that they can say that they put their name/brand on something.
Let there be natural law among engineering and space companies, guided by human feeling as well as the formalisms of mathematics and physics. Let those companies survive that contribute to the health and happiness of human beings, while taking in (by necessity, evolving) equilibrium with the environment and the human population. Let no company make it its goal to kill other companies. All that effort, all that greed and ego — it’s a waste; companies that fail to meet real human needs sustainably will eventually lose market share and dissolve all on their own. Think of what the aggressor company could have done with all of those killing resources, instead!
I say, take care of the Earth and each other because we absolutely need the Earth and need one another for survival, health, and happiness. For creating an existence for human beings that is as rich as we can make it. To the extent that certain feeling can help mathematicians, scientists, and engineers use the tools of their crafts to get us closer to this reality — to get them to care about it, in the first place, perhaps — let that feeling be legitimized and expressed within and between people working in these fields. For example, let generosity and cooperation between businesses have a place in corporate interactions if it helps build a diverse market where lots of different players doing different things can thrive. My opinion is that such feeling does not encompass the petty zero-sum-game competitiveness and drive to ego satisfaction that so many people in business demonstrate. By the same token, I don’t need to be right about this or try to actively work against such people in order to prove I’m right. It’s their bet to make, and if I’m right, it’s their loss. I’d rather use precious life to work actively toward individual and collective growth than toward cutting others down.