Scientific Enlightenment, Div. Two
A.1. The Transition from the Functional to the Structural Perpsective (from Philosophy to Science):

Chapter 1: Lavoisier's Chemical Revolution
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Copyright © 2000, 2004, 2006 by L. C. Chin.



In sofar as we have modeled the evolution of consciousness (from taking the effects of the hidden reality for granted to grasping the hidden reality itself) on the prisoner's liberation process in Plato's allegory of the cave (at least in respect to the upward dimension of this evolution), the moment when consciousness finally begins the full-blown process of grasping this hidden reality is the constitution of the structural perspective on reality, on which "science" as we know it in the modern, Western form is conditioned, just as religiosity in its pristine form is entirely the result of consciousness' being limited to the effects of the hidden reality only. The structural perspective on the biosphere level of reality results in biology, and on the geosphere level below, in chemistry, at first. In both spheres, the consciousness' transition from the functional to the structural perspective leads to the substitution of a corpuscular or atomic mechanical picture for the original animistic picture proper to the functional perspective, such that (1) a new physical reality made up of indivisible, irreducible, immutable material chunks as the ultimately constitutive finally completely replaces the old physical reality founded on an underlying "ethereal" ("streaming", "processual") substratum that is first found in the religious outlooks and still found in the physics of the Presocratics in the West and of the Daoists and Neoconfucians in the East; and (2) a network of metabolism resulting from the interaction of bio-chemical molecules gradually replaces the old notion of life founded on the animation of the body by a fluid, airy "spirit" flowing throughout the flesh. This is the "de-animization" that we have talked about, and which really underlies Max Weber's "de-magification of the world" (Entzauberung der Welt): on this basis the mechanical causation between corpuscles (in science) shall at last completely displace the manipulation of spirits started in primitive religions. Another aspect in the account of the "history of science" (consciousness' journey in the structural perspective) that follows below is the beginning quantitative representation of the reality of everyday perception in all its four dimensions (i.e. up to motion). This is the story of the constitution of classical mechanics, from which, later, a quantitative representation of "field", the Maxwellian electrodynamics, branches out. This aspect, this(quantitative representational) strand of the beginning structural perspective, when further evolved, itself moves into the structural realm of reality in the material sense, revealing the hidden reality of space and time ("space-time") on the one hand (relativity as born from the unification of the two representational strands, the classical mechanics of macroscopic objects in motion and electrodynamics), and merging with the progress of chemistry on the other by uncovering the most microscopic, quantized nature of atomic structures (quantum mechanics as born from the attempt to represent the mechanics both of the electrons and photons and inside the atoms). After all this, the new structural perspective gradually gets rid of the downward dimension within itself ("positivism") of which we have already discussed plenty and on which we do not focus our attention here, and it has now recaptured some of the previous ethereal, animistic reality and the "spiritual" quality associated with it.

At the very beginning of this narrative, however, it is in order to first illuminate what exactly is involved in the consciousness' transition from the functional to the structural perspective, the process of which, though started in many civilizational centers, was really carried over the threshold only in the West. We shall for this purpose before everything else first provide an analytical story of the central moment in this transition in the West, the so-called "chemical revolution" effected by Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, the beginning segment of the history of chemistry, after which the success of this transition in the West will fully contrast with its budding but failure elsewhere.

A. Brief comment on the material philosophy of the Presocratics

Of the geosphere part of the Universe – matter and force – matter is the most conspicuous to receive comprehension by consciousness – and indeed theoretical formulation since antiquity. Matter in its true constituency – from the periodic table down to subatomic particles (protons and neutrons, etc.) and to quarks (and the superstrings?) – was not however understood by the still immature consciousness of the time of classical antiquity. Rather, the surface effects (i.e. functions) of its internal kinetic energetic states -- solidity, liquidity, gaseousness, and the plasma-like rapid oxidation (burning) -- were taken as independent entities in their own right, and thus as elemental constituents of matter -- the structures producing the effects, the molecular mobility of the substances, were left in ignorance. Thus in classical Greece, earth, water, air and fire were the elements (stoicheia), and in China the elements were metal, wood, water, fire, and (muddy) earth – either missing air or taking air (qi) as the ultimate constituent of the five elements (in accordance with the memory of Conservation). But as said, on its other, time-less axis, consciousness has always already been in direct contact with Truth – specifically the laws of thermodynamics. In Classical Greece, as we have already reviewed, the interplay between the immediate intuition of the first law and the naïve comprehension of the “elements” constituted the basic content of the Presocratic "physics" – the first theoretical understanding of matter by consciousness in the West.

We have seen that insofar as the memory of Conservation implies a substratum (an underlying: upokeimenon, thV ousiaV upomenoushV) which remains constant throughout the visible individuations – their coming-into-being and passing-away – some of the Presocratic philosophers were compelled to elevate one of the four commonly supposed elements to the status of that universal substratum itself. For Thales, it was water. For Anaximenes it was air, Heraclitus, fire. Some, e.g. Anaximander, remained devoted to the purity of the memory, and posited the substratum by itself – the Limitless (apeiron). What is specifically to be noted here is that such articulations of "immanent philosophy" (pantheism) as Thales and Anaximenes is like a "theory of everything" but only on the side of matter: no comprehension of force yet; while in the case of, e.g. Empedocles, the Love and Strife in addition to the rounded, equilibrium mixture of the four elements may be considered a first budding of the comprehension of "force" -- some agencies between "matter".

B. The beginning of chemistry in Medieval Europe

In the Western sphere this naïve, functional understanding of matter as the four elements persisted throughout the Middle-Age as the “Aristotelian elements,” usually represented in such diagrammatical manner:


                  hot
  FIRE  ------------------------  AIR
        |                      |
        |                      |
        |                      |
        |                      |
    dry |                      | moist 
        |                      |
        |                      |
        |                      | 
        |                      |
        |                      |
  EARTH ------------------------  WATER
                  cold

The proof of such system was usually given in the example of the burning of wood, as in this exposition in Robert Boyle’s The Sceptical Chymist:

The experiment commonly alleged for the common opinion of the four elements, is that if a green stick be burned in the naked fire, there will first fly away a smoake, which argued AIRE, then will boyle out at the ends a certain liquor, which is supposed WATER, the FIRE dissolves itself by its own light, and that incombustible part it leaves at last, is nothing but the element of EARTH.1

From the late Middle Age to the Enlightenment era, this functional perspective began to transit into the structural viewpoint, and as a consequence the exemplary functional understanding of matter termed Aristotelian was during this time frequently modified until its eventual refutation by Lavoisier.

Paracelsus was the most conspicuous during the period of transition to have modified the Aristotelian elements. He proposed the tria prima to add to the conventional four elements: mercury, sulphur and salt; “and these are the three substances of which the complete body consists. For they form everything that lies in the four elements, they bear them all the forces and faculties of perishable things.”2 Brock's schema for Paracelsus is:


             WATER           FIRE           EARTH
    
          cold    wet      dry   hot      cold  dry
                   |              |              |
              MERCURY        SULPHUR           SALT

principle  fusibility    inflammability  incombustibility
   of:     volatility                     non-volatility

This was a new “theory of composition, which essentially explained gross properties by hypothetical property-bearing constituents.” His interpretation of the destructive distillation of wood thus runs: “Smoke was the volatile portion, mercury; the light and glow of fire demonstrated the presence of sulphur; and the incombustible, non-volatile ash remaining was the salt. Water was included within the mercury principle, which explained the cohesion of bodies.”3

The phlogistonists may be considered the last of the functionalists. But in fact the naïve functional formulation centering around the physical states of matter was already disintegrating under the weight of emergent structural knowledge gained through so much of empirical, chemical (or alchemical) experimentations. In Paracelsus one already notes a tendency toward the structural formulation of the quality of matter, evidenced by the shift of attention away from the physical states to the empirical substances bearing the properties of the physical states. Becher continued with this trend and posited the three forms of earth:

Terra fluida, or mercurious earth, which contributed fluidity, subtility, volatility and metallicity to substances.

Terra pinguis, or fatty earth… which produced oily, sulphureous and combustible properties; and

Terra lapidea or vitreous earth, which was the principle of fusibility.4

The physical quality of matter, while still the pivotal criterion for the constituency of matter, had now been abstracted from the apparent physical states into some hidden entities merely posited whose properties produced the visible qualities (solidity, liquidity, inflammability) on the surface taken independently in the Aristotelian model.

Stahl, the principal figure of the phlogiston school, proceeded to build a system of the composition of matter on the basis of Becher’s. “Like Boyle and Newton, he believed that matter was composed of particles arranged hierarchically in groups or chunks to form ‘mixts’ or compounds. There were four basic types of corpuscle, Becher’s three ‘earths’ and water.”5

Stahl redesignated terra pinguis as “phlogiston” or matter of fire, to explain the phenomenon of combustion – or Redox in general. His system of matter thus runs:

The four elements… combine together by affinity or the cohesion of water to form secondary (chemical) substances. These substances, like gold and silver and many calces (earths) are extremely stable and cannot be simplified… the simplest entities with which the chemists can work,… the elements of modern chemistry. Further combinations among these secondary principles produced mixts such as metals and salts.6

Perhaps it is not accidental that the phenomenon of Redox should have become the focal point around which the chemical revolution – and the transition from functional to structural understanding of matter – revolved. Redox, the transfer of electrons from one atom or molecule to another (oxidation = the loss of elections; reduction = the gaining of electrons), but especially the combination of two atoms or molecules via the gaining of electrons by oxygen, has been the central mechanism on earth by which energy may be released and work done. Oxygen is a very active chemical element and very “snatchy” of electrons. Ever since its abundant appearance 1.5 billion years ago during the oxygen crisis initiated by the cyanobacteria, the Earth has seen more organismic activities on its surface. The combination of a substance with oxygen is always oxidation and releases energy – more energy than with other common chemical elements. Aerobic animal and plant life, powered by the energy released by this special oxidation during cellular respiration in their mitochondria, have been able to do much larger scale of work than earlier, anaerobic life forms. And one special form of animal life, the Homo species, has been utilizing a special form of oxidation called combustion, i.e. oxidation outside the organism’s body which releases even larger amount of energy than respiration, to build supra-organism known as economy or society, i.e. civilization.

The brief popularity that the phlogiston theory enjoyed in the middle of the 1700’s was due largely to its ability to explain qualitatively – but not quantitatively as we shall see – the Redox reaction. Moreover, since in the phlogiston schema fire was objectified as a thing (i.e. independent) rather than understood as an effect (the effect of energy-release from oxidation), this theory did not transcend the functional phase of human consciousness. The redox reactions in question are combustion, calcinations of metals, and respiration. According to Stahl’s phlogiston schema, all flammable bodies contained this earth or matter called phlogiston. In combustion (oxidation) of the charcoal (which, in Stahl’s view, was rich in phlogiston), in its consummation by fire, the phlogiston in it was ejected outside, leaving only a few ashes behind. The modern understanding is that combustion is rapid oxidation: the carbon in the charcoal combines with oxygen in the air – its electrons snatched by oxygen – so rapidly that not only heat energy but light energy as well is given off.

The calcinations of metal, e.g. lead, when the metal was heated, according to the phlogiston understanding, ran:

lead (calx of lead + phlogiston) -----> HEATED -----> calx of lead + phlogiston (freed from lead)

where calx of lead is lead deprived of phlogiston. While the modern understanding is:

lead (2Pb) + O2 (from air) -----> HEATED -----> 2PbO (calx) + deoxygenated air

Stahl could only be more convinced by his formula when he saw that the reaction could be reversed by re-heating the calx with charcoal, which was thus thought to transfer its phlogiston to the calx to re-constitute it as the original metal (reduction).

calx of lead + phlogiston (from charcoal) -----> HEATED -----> lead

where, again, calx of lead is lead deprived of phlogiston. The modern understanding is:

2PbO + C (charcoal) -----> HEATED -----> 2Pb + CO2

where carbon in charcoal combines with the oxygen in calx to form CO2.

Thus Stahl’s phlogiston principle readily explained the widely observed instances of oxidation. “Combustion obviously ceased because a limited amount of air could only absorb a limited amount of phlogiston. When the air became saturated, or ‘phlogisticated air’, combustion ceased.”8 Or combustion may cease because the substance had run out of phlogiston. Respiration was in a sense a combustion internal to the organism, which expelled phlogiston as it breathed just as in calcinations and combustion. The modern understanding of respiration is of course:

C6H12O6 + 6O2 -----> 6CO2 + 6 H2O + ATP

where C6H12O6 = glucose, losing electrons in its hydrogen atoms (oxidized), becoming 6CO2; 6O2 = oxygen from air, gaining the electrons lost (reduced), becoming 6H2O; and ATP = re-phosphorylation of it.

A phlogiston cycle thus existed in nature: combustion expelled from combustible (carbon-rich) substances phlogiston which was taken into plants; animals ate plants to obtain phlogiston, then expelled it during respiration back into the atmosphere.9

Although successful in qualitative terms, the phlogiston theory failed quantitatively since the calx containing no phlogiston weighed more than the metal containing phlogiston. Could the matter of fire weigh negatively? Thus one sees how the objectification of a dependent effect (fire) into an independent entity – which is the essence of the functional perspective – produced an explanation that was the exact inverse of the truer explanation offered by the structural perspective. In the case of slow oxidation (calcinations), the process of absorption (of oxygen) became one of expulsion (of phlogiston).

How to dissolve the illusory homogeneous functional entity into the effect of interactions among the underlying heterogeneous constituents which were the true reality? The dissolution of air into its constituents – to prove that air was not a simple element – would be the decisive step.

C. Lavoisier's chemical revolution: the transition from the functional to the structural perspective in Western consciousness

In the early 1700’s Stephen Hales was able to obtain “air” from heating solid and liquid substances, but he did not consider that the airs obtained might be different and thought only that air could be “fixed” in solids. In the mid 1700’s, Joseph Black, doing experiments on magnesia alba, again found that air was fixed in it and could be “released” when it was heated or treated with acid. In both cases the “fixed air” was CO2. Black discovered that this fixed air could not support combustion and life, and was itself the product of respiration. Then the British chemists started discovering different kinds of air. Cavendish found “inflammable air” (i.e. hydrogen) in 1766. At about the same time as Lavoisier began his revolutionary experiments, i.e. in the 1770’s, Joseph Priestly collected a wide variety of airs: “nitrous air” (nitric oxide), “marine acid air” (hydrogen chloride), “alkaline air” (ammonia), “vitriolic acid air” (sulphur dioxide), “phlogisticated nitrous air” (nitrous oxide), and “dephlogisticated air” (oxygen). As the air was losing its homogeneous simplicity, the French chemist Turgot, in mid 1700s, showed that what he called expansibilité was a property not only of air but of all substances in vaporous state, which itself was achievable for all substances – solid or liquid – given high enough temperature.10

Although Lavoisier was not necessarily aware of many of these discoveries on the British isle, it is evident that the general trend of consciousness in Europe at the time was moving toward the structural perspective, and that Lavoisier himself was driven by the atmosphere to carry the trend to its fruition, by showing first of all that air was not a simple substance.

As frequently the case in the history of science, Lavoisier came to the structural insight first – that the objective, independent status given by the functional perspective to the physical states of matter was merely an illusion on the surface – and only then set out to conduct experiments to confirm the insight. In 1773 the insight had already crystallized:

All bodies in nature present themselves to us in three different states. Some are solid like stones, earth, salt, and metals. Others are fluid like water, mercury, spirits of wine; and others finally are in a third state which I shall call the state of expansion or of vapours, such as water when one heats it above the boiling point. The same body can pass successively through each of these states, and in order to make this phenomenon occur it is necessary only to combine it with a greater or lesser quantity of the matter of fire.11

The insight in form is essentially modern, though the matter of fire indicates that Lavoisier had yet to escape completely the phlogiston tradition.

But he did realize that the process of oxidation under the phlogiston interpretation must be reversed to avoid the quantitative absurdity of negative weight for the matter of fire. The phlogiston involved in calcination and combustion came from the air, and not the metal:

calcination: metal + air (air+phlogiston) ----> HEATED ----> calx (metal+air) + heat/light (phlogiston)

reduction: calx (metal+air) + phlogiston (from charcoal) ---->HEATED ----> metal + air (air in metal regaining phlogiston from charcoal)

Lavoisier deposited a sealed account of this discovery in the archive of the Academy, to be opened in May 1773, in order to ensure the priority of his finding.12

However, since the air released during the heating of calx was fixed air (CO2), Lavoisier erroneously assumed that it was the same fixed air which went into the metal during calcinations and was responsible for combustion in general – i.e. he mistook carbon dioxide for oxygen. This error was cleared up only when he stumbled upon mercury, which, when heated, absorbed oxygen to become the red calx of mercury, which, then, could be further heated without the aid of charcoal and thus to give up the same oxygen absorbed. After another round of misidentification of this air (oxygen) as “pure air”, by 1778 Lavoisier had come to the right conclusion that the principle from atmosphere which united with metals during calcinations was the healthiest and purest part of air, eminently respirable and more suitable than ordinary atmospheric air to support combustion; that the air after calcinations was a sort of mofette incapable of supporting respiration and combustion; that, finally, the atmospheric air was not a simple element [n’est point un être simple], but was composed of two very different substances, the respirable and the non-respirable.13

This eminently respirable constituent of air he named “oxygen” (oxus + gen: acid-former). Apparently, with the downfall of the “elements” Lavoisier was motivated to search for the “fundamentals” in the phenomena of acidity and alkalinity and thought he found the principle for acidity in oxygen. This, evidently, was the continuation of the trend, beginning with Paracelsus, toward abstract formulation of “properties”, which here had shifted from fusibility, fluidity etc, connected with the conventional elements to acidity and alkalinity unconnected with them. A side note.

The decomposition of air thus was experimental confirmation for Lavoisier’s structural insight. By a sort of accident, Lavoisier’s continuing study of combustion led him to the decomposition and synthesis of water – another of the ancient elements turned out to be illusory effect, i.e. a function.

The synthetic nature of water was already hinted at in various earlier experiments, done by British chemists (notably Cavendish), and by Lavoisier himself, of the burning of the “inflammable air” (hydrogen). Combustion of this air always seemed to produce pure water. This fact led Lavoisier to consider the non-elemental nature of water. In 24 June, 1783, in the presence of the king, Lavoisier and several others burned oxygen and hydrogen together to obtain pure water. The following day he read the results to the Academy, concluding that “water is not an element, but is composed of inflammable air and vital air.”14

After this synthesis of water, Lavoisier decided to decompose water back into hydrogen and oxygen to further confirm his conclusion. Thinking that hydrogen had more affinity with oxygen than with any other substance, and that therefore the separation of the two must be sought via oxygen, he heated a cannon, open at both ends, and let water pass through it. The high temperature in the cannon caused the water to evaporate, the oxygen in the water calcinating (oxidizing: combining with) the cannon, the hydrogen exiting the cannon to inflate the balloon attached to the other end. When the cannon was completely oxidized, the decomposition ceased, and water exited the cannon in totality.15 Thus, after a decade or so Lavoisier had experimental confirmation of his structural insight. The Traité Élémentaire de la Chimie which he published in 1789 was the definitive statement of his new structural “paradigm” in respect to the consciousness of matter.

Calling the traditional Greek elements “pure hypothesis”16, Lavoisier saw these previously independently existing fire, earth, water and air as mere effects, manifestations, functions of some underlying molecular movement. The new paradigm was thus: any substance was composed of molecules not completely touching one another. Two forces were acting between them: one, the attractive, which caused the molecules to congeal together, and the substance in such state appeared to us as “earthy”, i.e. solid; the other, the repulsive, was effected by calorique between the molecules. Calorique, whose effect was heat, was a sort of elastic molecules that went between the molecules of the substance to cause the interval between them to increase. When the repulsive force of calorique was strong enough to overcome the attractive force keeping the molecules in place, on the macroscopic level the “solid” appeared to disperse into the gaseous state (état de fluide aérifome), in which the molecules of the substance were rapidly running away from each other: the “airy” state. The liquid, or the watery state, was the transitional phase between the first two kept in place by the third force, pressure. Hence Lavoisier concluded that without the atmospheric pressure ice would evaporate directly without melting intermediately. Insofar as the calorique, the underlying “structure” for heat, was conceived as a sort of molecule, an entity, another century or so was required to allow consciousness to grasp the true reality underlying the phenomenon of heat and to finally erase this last vestige of the functional perspective still lingering in Lavoisier’s essentially structural perspective.17

Now that a different reality (the movement of molecules under the influence of heat) was discovered behind the traditional elements earth, fire, water, and air and as generating these latter as illusion on the surface, the transition from the functional to the structural perspective was complete.18


 THE "ELEMENTS"                      THE "PHYSICAL STATES" OF MATTER
(independently                       (effects of underlying molecular
existing entities)                              mobility)

    AIR        --------> becomes ------->       GAS
    FIRE       --------> becomes ------->       "PLASMA"
    EARTH      --------> becomes ------->       SOLID
    WATER      --------> becomes ------->       LIQUID

Ferdinand Hoefer, writing in the middle of the 1800s, looking back at the functional perspective, described the transition as follows:

The chaux, silican, and argile, etc, were [in the old functional perspective] earths, that is particular modifications of the earth – of what presents itself to us in the solid state… in such a way that all the objects which stand before us would be, in the last analysis, only diverse modifications or allotropic states of air, earth, water and fire…

Lavoisier [however] contended that the same substance could be solid, liquid, or aériforme, in accordance with the conditions in which they were found; that the gaseous state… was only an accident that did not touch upon the nature of the substance itself; that it did not modify its simplicity nor its composition.19

In the structural perspective then, all is reversed: chaux, silican and argile are independent substances in their own right, whereas their earthy, watery, or airy states are only modifications.

Lavoisier imagined that if our planet had been closer to the sun and received greater amount of light (and so heat) from it, then all that was earthy would turn watery and finally airy and would mix with the airy substances already in existence to form the new atmosphere.20 The difference between this final statement of his and the original insight more than fifteen years ago was only the replacement of the matter of fire by the calorique:

Solidity, liquidity, elasticity are three different states of the same material, three particular modifications, through which all substances can pass successively, and which depend only on the degree of heat to which they are exposed, that is the quantity of calorique by which they are penetrated.21

Two centuries after Lavoisier’s inauguration of the structural consciousness of matter, consciousness would move from the elements to the periodic table, to the subatomic structures, and to the superstring’s vibration, discovering that each level on top is merely the effect, function, ripples so to speak generated on the surface by the level of reality beneath.

D. Preview of what is to come

The consciousness of matter started from the level of the geosphere and was more or less concomitant with the Awakening of consciousness (Wachsein: i.e. the symbolic informational closure into which the animal consciousness -- sensory informational closure -- transited completely by 100,000 years BP with the appearance of anatomically modern human). The consciousness of force, on the other hand, did not begin until Newton's formulation of gravity in the 1600's, advancing with the discovery of electromagnetic force in the 1800's, strong nuclear force in the early 1900's, and later of weak nuclear force. In two centuries after Lavoisier, as said, consciousness on the matter side has advanced through the periodic table to the (possible) superstring, where the consciousness of matter and that of force converge. The functional perspective, insofar as it takes the immediate sensory experience (the physical state of matter, consciousness, life) as given, independent and for granted, and does not attempt to penetrate them to discover the truth underlying them, is the naive perspective from which all consciousness must begin. Hence it is not only the perspective of the primitives, but also of laymen in modern time. Hence the transition from the functional to the structural perspective has produced a stratification of the general human consciousness into an elite consciousness that pursues the underlying structures of which the "things" immediately given to the senses are mere effects and emergent properties, and another lay person's consciousness that accepts the things as in-themselves. (Modern laymen's functional perspective, of course, because it is de-sacralized -- "de-animized" -- i.e. secularized under the influence of the structural perspective of the elite, is not the same as the primitives' functional perspective.) There are now, as explained before, the two levels of truth as in Buddhism: the conventional truth (sammuti-sacca) and the ultimate truth (paramattha-sacca). On the level of the ultimate truth the reality of the common-sense, since it is only the effects or shadow of something else, becomes illusion, in the sense that what we have hitherto taken as the whole reality is either a particular limited case of the whole reality the ignorance of which outside the limited case renders our knowledge of the limited case shallow and incorrect, or only the surface of some deeper reality the ignorance of which, again, renders the conclusion drawn about reality from that surface incorrect. In the second instance the elite consciousness of matter has shown the solid and liquid things around us to be effects and emergent properties of atoms combining together which are hardly "things" in the ordinary sense and contain in fact mostly empty space. The "thingness" (such as when the hand can lay on the table without falling through) is, for instance, only the effect of electrical repulsion between the electrons on the outer shells of the atoms making up the hand and the table (the Pauli exclusion principle). The atoms are then the effect of the arrangement of subatomic particles, which themselves are then effects of quarks, all of which are neither "thing" (particles) nor wave, but something indeterminate. The preciseness and determinateness that govern "things" of our ordinary perception are discovered by the elite structural consciousness of the physicist to be mere effects on the macroscopic surface of the accumulation of the indeterminateness and statistical chances on the microscopic level (quantum physics). In the first instance we have first the Ptolemic system of the planets which is formulated from the functional perspective: our senses tell us immediately, when we look up into the sky, that the stars and planets go around us. Copernicus, who represented the transition to structural perspective in astronomy, then showed the earth-centric system of the functional perspective to be mere effect of the heliocentric situation. Newton "explained" the mechanism of this heliocentric situation by demonstrating an underlying force called gravity, which manifested itself all the same in an object falling here on earth. But Einstein then showed gravity to be a mere illusion, the shadow, the effect of the curvature of space-time continuum, and Newton's laws to be a mere limited case of the wider and more fundamental general relativity. In the process the illusory nature of our common-sense understanding of space and time -- though long ago noticed by Zeno because of its inner logical inconsistency -- is discovered and being overcome: by the time of special relativity the absolute constancy of the intervals of space and time and the invariance of matter's volume and mass are shown to be the surface approximation of the new invariant quantities of the speed of light and the space-time interval. The understanding of "conservation" itself proceeds in the manner of the first instance, from the law of inertia to Snell's law of refraction, and from the debate about "living force" to the conception of mechanical energy. And now the unification theory in theoretical physics is finding a way to show the electromagnetic-weak-strong-nuclear force unified by quantum physics and the gravity of general relativity to be all surface effects of something much more fundamental that became invisible because of the low energy state of the current Universe. Above all these of the geosphere, the elite consciousness moves toward the bio-sphere for more cases of the second instance. The phenomenon of life, which was taken by the functional consciousness as independently existing and hence frequently objectified into any of the various vital principles, has now been shown to be the effect of a group of cells or cellular components (the molecules of catalytic enzymes, proteins, RNA, DNA, etc.) interlocked and interacting with one another to produce a catalytic closure that appears to us as "living". Diseases, previously objectified as independent agents in the functional perspective, are shown to be effects of breakdowns within this interlocked interactional network -- thus Virchow's cellular pathology is the moment of transition from the functional to the structural perspective in medicine. Modern neurology is finally revealing how a group of interlocked nerve cells interacting through neurotransmitters manage to produce the effect of an unified sense of self called consciousness: sensory or symbolic informational closure. Lay persons, who miss the path toward structuralization, still dwell in the functional level and accept consciousness as independent, and so they are bound to feel alienated from the reduction of consciousness (and everything else) in the structural perspective and denounce the latter: the situation of the stratification of the general consciousness. Not realizing that they operate on different levels in different perspectives, and no longer aware of the history that led to the transition and stratification, the lay and the educated elite denounce each other. Driven by the original intuition of Conservation against disintegration through time, the lay mind will search for spirituality, in established religions or in New Age eclecticism, all of which are relics from the functional perspective repackaged in the superficial garb of the structural perspective. Enlightenment (the goal of spirituality) has however universally been defined as the escape from illusion -- the liberation of the prisoner in Plato's allegory of the cave -- and illusion as the dwelling in the effect without realizing the unified and unifying foundation for it, and so enlightenment nowadays must be sought in the structures that science has revealed. This is the lesson of this book. We must recount the following "history of science" in this spirit -- in its upward dimension without the downward movement in the degeneration of mind. Unaware of the structures, Plato sought enlightenment in the ideas as the foundation for the effects/ illusions that were things around us; and Hinduism in the universal Atman as the foundation for the various individual selves that were merely effects of the universal self. These traditional philosophies are only enlightenment on the functional level, in the functional perspective: they sought foundation in another function that unified all the disparate functions, whether the Good or the Atman, which, as source, recalled for them the fact of Conservation -- rather than in the true foundation, the structures themselves. Today enlightenment must be scientific enlightenment, realizing that it is only through structures, not ideas or any other functional substratum, that we may escape the illusions that we are born into.

Finally it should be noted that there is always a bridge between the function and the structure, between the functional perspective and the structural perspective. An entity named in the older, functional perspective can always be found in the modern, structural perspective of science.

Those things from the functional perspective of people of older times (like "[life as] soul"; "qi"; "ying and yang"; "Dao"; "Being" etc.) are not that mysterious once they are "translated" into terms in the structural perspective, once their equivalents in the structural perspective are found. For example, "ying and "yang" have already been explained as the result of further extraction by the functional perspective of the common essences running through the states of matter. Moreover, we may ask, in the functional perspective of everyday, macroscopic, visible experience, which "objective" part in the structural perspective of science is that which gets termed "life", "life-principle", or the "soul" (as when a Hindu says something like: "the 'life' [or soul] among all living things is the same"; "but only in one out of 30 billion (or whatever) different body-forms does this 'life' get into the human body-form and acquire the opportunity for enlightenment, for communion with God...")? It is the "phenomenon" or "function" (not the structural components, but their effect, what these structural components do) called (auto-)catalytic closure, i.e. the metabolism of any life forms (but without reference to the structural components themselves -- e.g. NADH, ATP, electron-transport chain in the mitochondrion and all those membrane based mechanisms -- generating it).


Footnotes:

1. William Brock, The Norton History of Chemistry (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1993), 56.
2. Ibid., 48.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 80.
5. Ibid., 81.
6. Ibid.
7. Formulas adapted from Thomas Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 98; and Brock, History of Chemistry, 82.
8. Ibid., 83.
9. Ibid.
10. Hankins, Science and the Enlightenment, 89 – 93.
11. Brock, History of Chemistry, 98.
12. Ibid., 103.
13. Ibid., 106-7; Ferdinand Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie (Paris: ?, 1869), 503.
14. Ibid., 521, translation mine.
15. Ibid., 522-3.
16. A.L. Lavoisier, Traité élémentaire de la Chimie, in Oeuvres de Lavoisier, Vol. 1 (Paris: ?, 1950), 6.
17. Ibid., Chapitre premier.
18. As already noted (Anaximander), "fire" is the effect, "impression", of the energy (photons) released during rapid oxidation and is not plasma (ionized gas). In the following fire is taken to correspond to "plasma" for the sake of needed symmetry.
19. Hoefer, Histoire de la Chimie.
20. Lavoisier, Traité élémentaire, Chapitre II.
21. Ibid., 33-4, translation mine.


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