Paradigms of seeing things and beyond: Early notes towards a deeper self
by Azly Rahman
In my column in the US, I once wrote about how we ought to view the issue in Ukraine, using my perspective on the missing Malaysian airline MH370 as an example of theorizing about what we can know. I discussed how knowledge is produced, and in journalism, as it is controlled by the state or the corporate sector, the editing room is a location of the contestation of power regarding knowledge, perception, and consciousness production.
We need to return to the discussion of the philosophical and psychological basis of knowing, the impermanence of knowledge, the post-Newtonian world, and the nature of paradigms.
Impermanence and the Act of Knowing
Changes are the permanence of things we see, feel, and live by. There is never a moment in the blink of the shifting consciousness within us that is not changing. Every thought moves back and forth, as if each thought is an autonomous being inhabiting what we call consciousness, which perhaps has its house in the physical matter sitting atop our neck, known as the head, which embodies the skull that protects the grey matter, the corpus callosum, the mid-brain, and the reptilian brain.
The above is the biological and ideological “state apparatus” of our individual self. We are what we think we are, and no one else can know who we are. What governs us within is our inner sensibility, introspection, and the will to be human: to exercise the skills of problem-solving and to create useful and useless artifacts that define us as a “thinking animal” that possesses language, thought, and communication. These define the activity of the brain in all its glory, showcasing its plasticity to direct action.
We live in an age of complexity, chaos, and multi-dimensionality of experiences and knowledge acquisition, characterized by the dynamics and cybernetics of the world around us. Data is bombarded into our consciousness — this lived experience is crafted autonomously from birth until the moment of death — in a world where we cannot differentiate between information, knowledge, propaganda, truth, post-truth, fake news, and all forms of memes of information we consume, in a world of endless Vygotskian social interactions that this Piagetian self must endure, and lastly, in a world that is increasingly networked.
We have multiple selves: physical, emotional, psychological, psycho-social-cybernetic, and of course, spiritual and soulful, assuming that these last two exist.
We can never comprehend our “true self” except through the act of imagining who we are or by being defined by others as to who we should think we are.
Because truth is a problematic word in itself.
Beyond the Post-Newtonian World
We live in a post-Newtonian world of interconnectedness. The old paradigm of Structural-Functionalism, a child of Logical-Positivism from the late 1800s Vienna Circle, was borne out of a worldview seen through the lens of Mechanism or the universe as heavenly spheres, all in place, humming the sound of Newtonian spheres — “Music of the Newtonian Spheres.” This has long collapsed. The Copernican Revolution forced Galileo to recant his “scientific blasphemy.”
Fields of Social Sciences — from Anthropology to Psychology to later theoretical propositions concerning the “Metaverse” — have become terrains of questionable grand-narrative worldviews, as what the now proverbial Kuhnian Shift has done. Old school. Science moves like the march of the grand horde of Temujin or Tamerlane: the Mongolian invasion of the scientific-cognitive enterprise.
Then came Critical Theory, borne out of the Marxism of Things, a specter that swept through the world of academia, its production house being the prominence of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, which challenged the Vienna Circle of Logical-Positivists.
The universality of organized chaos reigns …
On Paradigms
Paradigms are houses of theoretical holies, cognitive-hypothetical abodes of theories, methodologies, assumptions, premises, and applications of perspectives seen from this and that eye view.
Ways of looking lead to ways of knowing — this is contingent upon the production of perceptions that are testable through the five or seven steps of the scientific process.
Paradigms inform methods that inform the way to arrive at the truth. The scientific method itself is a cultural practice, where the act of investigating and setting up study designs — be they experimental, naturalistic, or whatever in between — is a cultural process of speaking and using the language of “science,” drawn from the practice of science historically from the logical-positivist perspective.
In the period when the Human Sciences started borrowing from the tools and techniques of the Natural Sciences, allowing the former to be accepted as “legitimate science,” much to the annoyance of Pure Scientists, the debate was fierce in the 1900s.
Today, we have the “Social Sciences” as an area of study with its own cultural logic of scientificness — from the language of investigation used to the reporting of it (validity, reliability, triangulation, etc.) — standing tall alongside pure scientists who have come to accept that there is no difference between the intention, act, and institutionalization of studying molecules and the study of human emotions. Both can possess the rigor of science, depending on the method used and the process of validation and falsification that the study undergoes.
Today, every field of study wishes to be regarded as a science. There is also The Church of Scientology!
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Herein lies the evolution of the art and science of looking at things, at phenomena.
We must first observe butterflies!
Dr. Azly Rahman
Dr. Azly Rahman is an educator and author of 10 books and over 500 essays
DR AZLY RAHMAN grew up in Johor Bahru, Malaysia and holds a Columbia University (New York City) doctorate in International Education Development and Masters degrees in six fields of study: Education, International Affairs, Peace Studies, Communication, Creative Non-Fiction, and Fiction Writing. He has written more than 500 analyses/essays on Malaysia. His 35 years of teaching experience in Malaysia and the United States spans over a wide range of subjects, from elementary to graduate education. He is a frequent contributor to scholarly online forums in Malaysia, the USA, Greece, and Montenegro. He writes at Substack and Linkedin
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