Yesterday we visited MIT's List Visual Arts Center (LVAC) to see part II of the exhibit Sensorium (for part I see Tulula's post, scroll down for the English version.) What is Sensorium? From the LVAC website:
This two-part exhibition organized by the MIT LVAC, explores various ways in which contemporary artists address the influence of technology on the sense. The impact of new technology has reshuffled the established hierarchy of the senses and radically changed people's lives. Remote sensing via telephones and screens are fundamental parts of the daily sensorium
(a Latin term that connotes ancient and often theological debates about mind and body, word and flesh, human and artificial). The art in Sensorium captures the aesthetic attitude of this hybrid moment when modernist segmentation of the senses is giving way to dramatic multi-sensory mixes or transpositions. The artists in this exhibition respond and question the implications of this significant epochal shift.
I much preferred the installations from part I, but I did stumble onto something worth describing for you. It was Natascha Sadr Haghighian's Singing Microscope. Next to it was a booklet where she discusses the meaning of perception and scientific truth within the biological scientists with the science philosopher Evelyn Fox Keller. Very interesting stuff. Some discussion on the blurring boundaries between basic biological sciences and the manipulation of our biological environment. But much of their conversation reflects my own thoughts on evaluating data within the biological sciences and the problems we scientists face in trying to piece together what we call "empirical evidence".
For those interested in the philosophy of data analysis, I've reproduced the booklet below the fold. How do you know what you see is real?
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Thanks for sharing that with us - I really enjoyed reading that. That interview reminds me of something that has always been an issue for me - not and insurmountable one, but a sort of nagging feeling in the back of my mind. I wonder how do we know what we know in science? I think that even though in theory science is based on facts, on experiments and emperical evidence gathered by scientists before us, scientists today have to operate based on faith. If you didn't just accept that that blob you see on your agarose gel is really DNA, you'd have to go back and do all the old experiments to prove to yourself that the material in your tube really came from inside the nucleus of your cells and that ethidium binds to DNA and maybe even more things before you could even do something as simple as do a restriction enzyme digest and analyze the results. You'd never be able to move forward if you didn't just accept that what others have done before you is correct, consistent and true. I never thought about it much when I was doing science (I was too busy, I guess) but when I left the field and could reflect on it from a different angle I realized how much I relied on faith (not in god, just in science and it's absolute truth) when I was at the bench.
Alex asks, "How do you know what you see is real?" which echoes Haghighian's question, "How do you know that what you think you are seeing is there?"
I agree these are interesting and important questions, but I don't think the answers are as mysterious as this booklet implies.
Obviously, we never know anything with absolute certainty. In practice, though, we 'know' something is real based on consistency and predictiveness. It can be reproduced under suitable conditions. It is consistent in its relationiship to and interaction with other things that are already 'known' to be real. Its existence, properties, and/or behavior can be used to successfully predict other things.
When things are inconsistent and predictions fail, it's time to revise what we 'know.' Sometimes we only need to revise a little bit. Other times, we need to revise things that we thought we'd 'known' for a very long time.
To illustrate consider Keller's comment:
The trust comes from making predictions about live bodies based on the observations made on dead ones. When those predictions are consistently correct, one can trust that the organs in a dead body tell us something 'real' about live bodies.
Consistency and predictability help to address betty's point as well. It's true that we rely enormously on established science when we try to do something new. But we should still be alert for inconsistencies that might signal a breakdown in the established science. For example, if our 'known' procedure for isolating DNA somehow gave carbohydrate instead, subsequent observations won't be consistent with expectation. We won't see any bands when we stain our agarose gel with EtBr. Then we can go back and investigate where the breakdown occurred.
I found some parts of this booklet rather silly. For example, Haghighian wrote:
Obviously, you can't see processes when you're looking at structures in a dead cell. But claiming that the processes have "disappeared from our science" is laughable! Try telling that to a biochemist or an enzymologist or a cell biologist or a molecular biologist.
Keller:
Of course there are. That would be a more important point if the only way we ever did science was to look at static representations. Happily, we don't do that.
Sorry, but I see no evidence that our scientific limitations are somehow related to a "certain western tradition." There was no 'western tradition' of being uninterested in cellular processes per se. There was a technical limitation in our ability to observe them. Haghighian acknowledges that several times.