Notes on the conceptual revolution

 Percy W. Bridgman, a Harvard scientist who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1946, talked about the advances in science in the early 20^th century as “the conceptual revolution.” This to me is one of the most haunting sentences ever written:

By far the most important consequences of the conceptual revolution brought about in physics by relativity and quantum theory lies not in such details as that meter sticks shorten when they move or simultaneous position and momentum have no meaning, but in the insight that we had not been using our minds properly and that it is important to find out how to do so.

I think he was write when he wrote these words in the 1950s and he’s still right. We haven’t found out to use our minds properly. A.N. Whitehead, another philosopher with a scientific inclination, held similar views.

With Einstein, Bohr and the gang, we had a fundamental change in our concept of the way the universe works. But that revolution in understanding hasn’t been absorbed in the way we think about everything else, including biology, anthropology, art and ethics.

For starters, we haven’t used our minds properly to account for how intelligence — including human intelligence — emerges from physical objects that we call brains. To use more common, but less helpful terms, we haven’t accounted for how consciousness emerges from matter.

Bridgman had an extraordinary intellect. He obviously was interested in ideas outside the field of physics. He played and listened to music.

He argued that it was time to get over the distinction between the sciences and the humanities, except as a way to organize academic departments in universities. The division was a bureaucratic convenience, not a serious way to think.

Bridgman pointed out that both the sciences and the humanities are (1) human enterprises and (2) enterprises of intelligence. We simply have to come to a better understanding of how to use our minds intelligently to get past the superficial differences.

Both activities — sciences and humanities — come from the same place, the same stuff, the same beings.

• Source: Bridgman’s remarks come from "Quo Vadis" in Daedalus, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Science and the Modern World View, Vol. 87, No. 1, Winter, 1958, pp. 85-93. For similar views by A.N. Whitehead, see “The notion of logical adequacy,” May 13, 2022.