Science and Hyperobiects: How to See the Hidden Elephant

Anne Shingleton's "The Fallen Mastodon;" an absolute masterpiece. Only a great artist could see a mastodon in a mass of rock of the Apuane Mountains, in Italy. And yet the mastodon is there. It takes a creative mind to see through the exterior of reality and detect the hyperobjects around us. This image illustrates the post below, reposted from my blog on ecosystems, “The Proud Holobionts.” I think it may also be interesting for the readers of the Seneca Effect blog in view of an earlier post of mine on the limits of science.

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Understanding the Climate Elephant

A post about hyperobjects and holobionts

Reposted from “The Proud Holobionts,” Jan 4, 2024

Image created by Dall-E

The story of the blind men and the elephant is part of the Buddhist tradition and may go back to the 5th century BCE. It tells us how a group of blind men tried to understand what an elephant is. The one who touched the trunk thought it was a snake. The one who touched a leg thought of a tree trunk. Others thought it was a stick, a spear, a fan, or a wall. And none of them could figure out what kind of beast they were facing.

The story has a deep meaning that goes straight to the core of our current difficulties in understanding the climate problem and not just that. The British philosopher Tim Morton called "hyperobjects," entities so large and complex that we can’t perceive them in their entirety. One of these is the Earth's climate, part of the even larger entity we call “ecosystem.” It is vast, complex, intricate, and its existence spans billions of years. Facing it, we are like the blind men and the elephant. Even though some scientists spend their whole lives studying Earth’s climate, they may not do much better than becoming experts on a single hair of the tail of the great beast.

The poverty of the debate about Earth’s climate in the media reflects the difficulties we have with understanding it. Everyone brings their own little piece of truth, gleaned as best they can from social media, YouTube, or heard from an acquaintance. On the one side, hot weather, cold weather, snow, or drought are always the fault of climate change, even though we don’t know exactly how. On the other, abstruse details come up: alpine trails in the Middle Ages, how Greenland was without ice at the time of Erik the Red, and even Hannibal's elephants appear (weren’t we discussing elephants?) as proof that climate science is all wrong. At the end of the day, the debate is reduced either to a profession of faith in "Science" (the one with a capital "S," as represented by fashionable TV experts) or to an equally fideistic (but going in reverse) syllogism that says, more or less, “since scientists cheated us on COVID, it follows that they are also cheating us on climate.”

Hyperobjects defy our comfortable way of thinking about science; they mock the idea of the “scientific method.” It is said that Galileo settled the question about how gravity works by dropping two balls of different weight from the top of the Pisa tower and observing that they reached the ground together. But can you drop Earth’s climate from a tower? The problem is that we are locked into an obsolete Galilean paradigm about science. It says that everything can be studied by experiments in controlled conditions that will generate repeatable and verifiable results. But only some very limited subsystems of the universe can be studied in a laboratory. Even fewer of them can generate simple yes/no outcomes: those we call “linear;” part of the field of engineering. The rest of the universe falls into the category of “complex systems,” which includes the most interesting ones: life, intelligence, ecosystems, climate, and many more. These systems cannot be reproduced in a laboratory; some of them may not even be accessible to our instruments, except in part, just like a 3D image of an elephant is not accessible to a blind person.

Yet, it would not be impossible to understand what an elephant is, even for a group of blind men. What they would need to do is to share their knowledge and, in that way, they could build a “model” of the beast they face. Models never generate absolute “yes or no” answers, they never produce perfect predictions, they follow no rigid “laws,” and they need to be continuously tuned to keep describing the real world. But the model could tell the blind men that they are facing a specimen of the Proboscidea taxon, even though it may not be clear whether it is a Loxodonta Africana or an Elephas Maximus. It would be enough to avoid being trampled down. Approximate models are always better than no model at all.

It is what we do with climate. It is such a hugely complex system that we can’t force it into the framework of the physics or chemistry of simpler systems. But we can build integrated, data-based models that tell us something about the way it works. No model is perfect, but one thing is clear: the climate elephant can react catastrophically to perturbations. In particular, it can overheat sufficiently to generate mass extinctions. It has happened more than once in the past; it could happen again as a result of human perturbations. We are at risk of extinction; that’s not something you can dismiss so easily.

Unfortunately, as long as we stick to the old scientific paradigm, the result will be similar to one of the versions of the story about the elephant of the blind men: a nasty brawl where blows fall at random on everyone involved. We can’t avoid this outcome until we start practicing the peaceful way of cooperation of holobionts, as we are. Otherwise, we will be trampled to death by the huge beast we refused to understand.

And here is the Goddess herself; she does understand elephants, just like everything else in the ecosphere. She is a holobiont, too!