A Short Course in Comprehensive Thinking – Part 32 – Top-Down and Bottom-Up Analytics

Both are necessary aspects of today’s science, but top-down approaches dominated for many years.

Top-down and bottom-up analytics are two different ways to investigate our reality. Today’s practice of science is notable for its top-down reductionist approach, as it breaks systems into pieces, to study them. The bottom-up approach, rather than reductionist, is integrative and studies how those often-small components, often discovered through reductionism, come together in increasingly complex ways and form the systems that top-down approaches break into pieces for analysis. With bottom-up approaches, what are called emergent properties can be seen, which were not evident at lower levels of organization.

The top-down approach is often used by specialists, and the bottom-up approach is used by generalists, who can find patterns that specialists cannot see with their reductionist approach. Both approaches are necessary in the current practice of science, and the increase in multidisciplinary approaches in my lifetime is a welcome development, as it brings together the insights of specialists across numerous disciplines and arrives at new integrative understandings that were previously invisible to specialists. R. Buckminster Fuller argued that the overspecialization of scientists in his time was a ruling-class tactic designed to keep scientists blinded to generalist and comprehensive insights, so that they could not distinguish the forest from the trees and be more easily controlled. The knee-jerk denial of free energy’s possibility is one outcome of the brainwashing that scientists receive.

In The Primate Mind, Frans de Waal and Pier Ferrari discussed how animal-cognition studies suffered from a top-down approach that compared everything to human cognition, which focused on the differences instead of the similarities, and how neuroscience had been neglected in those studies. De Waal spent his career investigating animal, and particularly primate, cognition. Instead of focusing on the gaps between human cognition and that of other primates, de Wall focused on their similarities and understanding primate cognition on its own merits, without the constant comparison to humans. That is a bottom-up approach. His Chimpanzee Politics is a classic in the field, and de Waal doubted that a human could successfully navigate a chimp political system for a day.

De Waal’s work did a lot to not only deflate humanity’s arrogant “speciesism”, but to also gain an appreciation of the consciousness of “lesser” animals. It has been part of a salutary trend in science, and scientists today investigate the cognition and behaviors of plants, which is far richer than previously suspected, which can be read about in many works today, such as The Hidden Life of Trees. Scientists are beginning to understand that plants have many senses that animals do not, and plant consciousness is only beginning to be investigated. There are even scientists with a high appreciation for bacteria and other microscopic life, who do not deny that such organisms possess consciousness of a sort.

De Waal’s work often showed that, as Darwin surmised, human cognition was largely different from that of other animals in degree, not in kind. Obviously, humans are different, with new abilities that arose from our large brains, but they are rooted in the same biological dynamics of other animals. One of my favorite studies over the past generation has been that of chimps and primates, and it could be startling to see how many human behaviors are evident in primates, and chimps and bonobos especially.

In the mystical view, everything is consciousness, but materialistic science will never understand that. In the Fifth Epoch, science will lose its materialism, which is a religion. Science in the Fifth Epoch will bear only a faint resemblance to today’s science, and humanity will be better for it.