Looking Beyond the Veil

In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee the Younger says that every big religion or ideology starts as esoteric mysticism with profound, transformative insight that’s understood only by a handful, which gives its followers immense spiritual power. The ones that get huge do it by dumbing down the core insight into something accessible to the masses, who lack the early adopters’ rare intellect and intense devotion, so the mass version also lacks the initial core of genuine insight.

Mathematical science has followed this same course. The core of it, the pursuit of the sacred Truth, was at first followed by a narrow minority of esoteric intellectuals. When science was young, this took them to some wild and mystical places. Maybe you’ve heard of Isaac Newton’s alchemy research and his extremely heretical theology work. That sort of thing was pretty common. The 17th century’s second-most important advance in mathematics, after Newton’s invention of calculus, was the idea of coordinate geometry, or Cartesian coordinates. This originated in Rene Descartes’ The Geometry, the appendix to his Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences, which is better known for its philosophy on the nature of the self (“I think, therefore I am”), proofs of the existence of God, and his thought experiment about being deceived by an omnipotent demon. One of these might be a coincidence, but two is a pattern.

This wasn’t just mathematicians. Many of the early scientists published their work with occult symbology which has to be seen to be believed:

Science unveiling Nature. Engraving by Jan Luyken, for a 1681 work of zoological anatomy by Gerard Blasius. Here Science is removing the Veil of Isis, a longstanding mystic symbol of the unknowability of Nature’s ways, which Plutarch attributes to the ancient Egyptians. In the Age of Enlightenment, Dutch scientists like Blasius repurposed it as a symbol of their triumph. Note the astrological symbols of the classical planets, and the angel dissecting a beast.

Artemis unveiling herself. Engraving by Romein de Hooghe, for “Dissections and Discoveries of Living Animals” by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the first microbiologist. Isis was often identified with the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus.

Over the centuries, science has gone from triumph to triumph. Scientific materialism is the spiritually dominant cosmology across most of the world and in every first-rate power center. A vast network of institutions and uncountable billions of dollars are directed to its practice. Yet the mass version, sometimes denigrated as “scientism”, has filed off the interesting bits that make science useful. I’m grateful for the work of people who have catalogued the problems with scientism, but here I’m trying to describe the core of science, the pursuit of the sacred Truth through experiment and analysis. This is still pursued only by a relatively narrow minority of intellectuals who tend to be off-puttingly esoteric, introspective, utopian, and frequently—if quietly—outright mystical.

Since World War I, society has vastly, vastly expanded the number of people who can write “scientist” on their resumes, but we haven’t much expanded the number of people who are carrying forward the project of Francis Bacon. Today most scientists are careerists who don’t really understand all the arcana of experimental design and statistical analysis and so on, and anyway they care more about grants and professorships than about revealing Nature’s most intimate secrets.

A ship passes the Pillars of Hercules, symbolizing the edge of the known world, into a vast ocean depicted with a pair of open eyes. Engraving by Simon de Passe, for Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum. The Latin tag is a quotation from the Book of Daniel’s apocalyptic prophecies, and translates as “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”

There are still esoteric weirdos mixed in there, the ones who will run to and fro in order to increase knowledge rather than to increase their h-index, and who will reshape their own minds to that purpose. But I can’t even call them the “real scientists” anymore, because in practice “scientist” now refers to a bureaucratic job title like “accountant” or “public relations”, not a discipline devoted to the sacred charge of increasing knowledge. Practitioners of the sacred discipline can recognize each other—faking the signs is difficult, and bureaucratically unrewarding—but there’s no word to distinguish them from scientists because doing so would undermine society’s story of what “science” is. 

Efforts to fund and train practitioners of this discipline en masse failed, because esoteric disciplines simply can’t be trained en masse. Some people induct themselves via deep study of the masters’ texts, and some are inducted via longterm apprenticeships.

Let me try to clarify what I’m talking about here. What’s important isn’t that master scientists must be praying to Artemis and going deep into occult pagan symbolism. That stuff is one way of expressing the thing, but it’s not the thing itself.

It will help to contrast the scientist’s mindset with the engineer’s mindset, which was best expressed by Rudyard Kipling. “The careful text-books measure / (Let all who build beware!) / The load, the shock, the pressure / Material can bear.” In the engineer’s world, right action is a matter of diligent troubleshooting, careful application of known rules, and rigorous testing. A scientist’s spirit reaches for the heavens, but an engineer’s spirit settles “under the earthline”. Their sacred charge is the prosperity and safety of society. Kipling’s poems captured the engineers’ mindset so well, he was asked to design the Ritual of the Calling of an Engineer, whose Iron Ring is worn by Canadian engineers to this day. Of course any good scientist has a streak of the engineer, and any good engineer has a streak of the scientist, but they remain very different mindsets. “Oh, veiled and secret Power / Whose paths we seek in vain / Be with us in our hour / Of overthrow and pain”. Not at all like Leeuwenhoek and Blasius gloating about unveiling the secret Power.

The scientist’s sacred charge is not anything so worldly as prosperity or safety. Like mathematicians and philosophers, they are seekers of Truth—not necessarily of hidden Truths, but once you’ve learned the known Truths, the hidden Truths are what’s left. Their mission is intensely personal, and intensely transcendent. The knowledge may indeed be useful, but the burning need to know comes first. One of the first mysteries of science is that, if you prioritize mere utility above Truth, you will lose both.

Unfortunately, these days those anointed by the institutions often lack any sense of these higher duties, as well as the skills to fulfill those duties. Medicine is one of many places where this is visible. Most doctors have trouble with very basic concepts in statistics, like understanding conditional probability when interpreting diagnostic tests where the rate of false positives is on par with the rate of true positives, such as breast cancer screenings. Much has been made of this by partisans of Bayes’ rule, but I first heard of it from my dad, who was talking about the difficulty of his work teaching this stuff to medical students. Among medical researchers the situation is somewhat better, but not much.

And to be clear, my dad is not some esoteric mystic writing paeans to the glory of Nature. He is a competent technician whose main contribution to the great human quest for Truth consisted of calling out bullshit statistics from stooges of the drug companies, which he fit in around the edges of his actual job treating patients. I’ve often heard him say, “When you start medical school, your friends will ask you about their health problems and you'll just have to say ‘I don't know.’ But when you finish medical school, why, now you get to tell them ‘We don't know.’” He has not looked beyond the Veil of Isis to behold the secret Power, and his job does not require him to pretend that he has. The careful textbooks measure.

My point is that most research scientists do not even reach this level. By merely understanding what statistical tests mean and when they do or do not indicate knowledge of reality, rather than treating them as rote incantations to apply until you get the result you want, he has surpassed not just most practicing doctors, but also the collective judgment of the research establishment. The heirs of Bacon and Leeuwenhoek are not in the driver’s seat, here.

Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science. Sculpture by Louis-Ernest Barrias, 1899. She wears a scarab as a reference to the Egyptian origin of the Veil of Isis.

This, plus the superpower of actually reading the damn paper—another technique which he struggles mightily to instill in young doctors—was enough for him to correctly identify bullshit arguments even when they were enshrined in official American Heart Association guidelines and driving tens of billions of dollars of annual drug sales. Even today the most fruitful scientists, the ones who successfully look behind the veil, tend to be much weirder people than my dad ever was, even during his wild and crazy youth. (This isn’t the place to get into it, but his stories of the hippie days are almost as wild as my mom’s.) 

Today’s scientists would rather project the image of a lab-coated avatar of respectability than the wild-haired genius with powder burns on his face and ink stains on his fingertips. Oppenheimer was perhaps the last of the greats who deliberately performed the mystical Faustian archetype, flamboyantly naming the capstone of his career after the Christian Trinity and quoting his own translation of the Bhagavad Gita. Nevertheless, the underlying level of homebrew mysticism among scientists and mathematicians hasn’t changed as much as we’d like to think since the days when they’d put a many-breasted pagan goddess at the front of their books.

Space exploration has its origin in early 20th century scientists searching for man’s role in the cosmos, before it was also picked up by engineers who want to build a really sick rocket and statesmen who want to nuke the Moon. Half a century later, the Voyager probes were sent outside the Solar System, carrying the famous Golden Records with cultural information about humanity in case they are someday recovered by alien life, prepared under the direction of Carl Sagan; the Records include an electroencephalogram scan of the brainwaves of Ann Druyan, the creative director of the Golden Record project, recorded while she was meditating on falling head over heels in love with Sagan. The pair announced their engagement two days after the launch of Voyager 1, and soon co-created the Cosmos TV series about humanity’s place in the universe. To this day, many of the largest spaceflight projects are driven by men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos pursuing the manifest destiny of making humanity a “multiplanetary species”.

In mathematics, Terry Tao is honest enough, and his position is secure enough, that he can talk openly about doing research while writhing on the floor in an altered state of consciousness:

“For some problems, actual physical sensation can actually be useful. Many mathematicians, you will find, they wave their hands, or gesture somehow when thinking about a problem. … There was one time when I was trying to understand a very complicated geometric transformation in my head involving-- I was rotating a lot of spheres at the same time. And the way I actually ended up visualizing this was actually lying down on the floor, closing my eyes, and rolling around. And I was staying at my aunt's place at the time. And she found me rolling on the floor with my eyes closed. And she asked me what I was doing. And I said, I was thinking about a math problem, and she didn't believe me.”

Few are public about it, but a substantial fraction of the best scientists and mathematicians are doing something that’s approximately as weird as Tao. And it’s not just random noise introduced by overtuned creative geniuses with plenty of spare energy. As in Tao’s case, it’s often a load-bearing part of how they do their best work. On rare occasions, they’ll explicitly tell the public what they’re doing. Sometimes they’ll leave little hints and allusions to their weirder beliefs and practices, or describe the tip of the iceberg that they think they can get away with. (I’ve wondered what other stuff Tao might not want to share with the internet.) Very often they’ll deliberately keep the weird shit to themselves and maybe their close friends, because who wants to deal with the hassle. This stuff can be passed down in master-apprentice relationships, but not in the careful textbooks, which is a big part of why so many of the great scientists and mathematicians were trained personally by the last generation’s greatest.

It’s a huge missed opportunity that all our self-styled mystics are fucking around with jhanas and machine elves and eliminating suffering, and none are trying to reverse-engineer our most advanced sphere-rotation psychotech. If they could codify even a few fragments of the leading researchers’ esoteric mental practices, math and science would accelerate, perhaps as much as when the gedankenexperiment was codified.