Abstraction and Disembodied Science
An Ode to Abstraction
Growing up with colors and pastels in my hands, I spent a generous amount of years confused by other people qualifying my art as abstract. It was not until I looked at somebody looking at my painting that I understood from their gaze that we were simply not seeing reality with the very same light. It is like looking through a lens that subtly bends light’s path, just enough that we can see the hidden features and activity of an ant. Something hidden from us at a certain scale becomes apparent with a different attention.
Looking at Georgia O'Keeffe paintings provide a similar experience. Though often labeled as abstract, one can also find their way back to the antlers, deer skulls, and flowers that offered parts of their shapes to the artistic study.
What Does This Have to Do with Science?
There is two arrows on the road of abstraction that thinkers engage with, one that encourage a form of disembodied intellectualization, ungrounded knowledge which ignore how to engage with the real world meaningfully, usefully. The other, that bring one closer to oneself and to the world by using almost more-than-real images, freeing the imagination and intuition to uncover new forms of thinking, until a new system of reference can be formulated.
In though experiments, abstraction is a healthy mediator between the observer and the object of attention. It is the deliberate use of imagination within the framework of coherent exploration and inquiry that opens to new contrasts. From Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, to more recently the development of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, thoughts experiments have played a major role in the creation of physics' core concepts and paradigms.
"First, thought experiments can disclose nature’s failure to conform to a previously held set of expectations. Second, they can suggest particular ways in which both expectation and theory must henceforth be revised” (Kuhn, 1977)
When science or philosophy becomes purely an intellectual pursuit about “what works” rather than “what matters,” questions of purpose, value, and responsibility slip out the window. Disembodied approaches often treat the human context as external constraints rather than integral to the formulation and usefulness of scientific theories and technologies.
Disembodied Thinking
What I call here 'disembodied', or ungrounded philosophy is describing an over-analytical fashion that reacts against human- or meaning-centered inquiry by deliberately cutting itself off from embodied, or interpersonal concerns. By treating life, time, consciousness, meaning, values as if they were distractions to be left at the door, the approach ends up floating on excessive abstractions with little real gain for our comprehension of reality.
This impulse partly reacts to the history of science’s conflicts with church and dogmas, and to mid‑20th‑century phenomenology and existentialism that left spiritual matters overly enmeshed with scientific inquiries. The Early Vienna Circle's logical positivism—ultimately self‑refuting—declared any talk of metaphysics, spirit or value as meaningless. By insisting that meaningful statements must reduce to empirical verification, they banished the human dimension from serious discourse.
There are several reasons why disembodied ideas go unnoticed: the primeval influence of philosophical fashion, changing with academic seasons, and the erasure of philosophical training in science programs, leaving physicists ill-equipped in front of ontological leaps. The study of metaphysics offers a mirror to physics; clarifying foundational concepts, exposing hidden value‐choices, engaging dialogue, and re‐grounding abstract models in human scales.
The Erosion of Genuine Engagement with Fundamental Questions
When scientists' speculative metaphysics bleed through the general culture—fueling scientistic or relativistic misuses (yes, I am looking at you many-world interpretation), this unchecked dispersion of ideas under the cover of scientific theories blurs the line between actual science (what the equations and facts say) and interpretations or sometimes even plain opinions.
René Descartes theory of animals as non-sentient machines, for example, represents a disconnected armchair thinking that is made irrelevant by the experience of actual biologists, or any human actually in contact with animals.
When physicists treat certain mathematical entities (e.g. infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, extra spatial dimensions, or an ensemble of unobservable universes) as if they are as ontologically real as electrons, they are embracing metaphysical claims that haven’t been grounded in empirical or conceptual argument. Many-world interpretation claims that every quantum measurement “splits” reality into parallel branches, all equally real. The branching structure is a mathematical artefact of the wavefunction’s unitary evolution—not an empirically accessible ontology—and yet it is often promoted as if that interpretation is written in the equations.
Toward Grounded Practice
Physics can—and sometimes does—slip into bad metaphysics when ungrounded ideas are identified with reality. And in our apprehension of that reality, abstraction offers our imagination a powerful tool, if we remain aware of our context of reference.
I am attracted to cosmology because of its mesmerizing connection with the universe and the very foundation of reality. As humanity is accessing knowledge with ever-greater implications and computational power, my hope is that science with metaphysical discernment evolve into a practice of poetical, ethical and useful impact.
