Who has the teeth? The return of reductionism

A few days back, there was a unusual object on my palate as I was chewing. The last bit of a tooth of mine.

That tooth had an unusual cavity. Few years back, it had split vertically and though I requested the dentist to knock it off; she said it could be salvaged and created a filling that completed the side of the tooth which was missing.

The filling had dropped off practically at the beginning of the Corona crisis. Now; without the crutch of that filling, even the bit of the tooth that was remaining has also now come off. Leaving behind a sore gum.

Two days back, I had fixed up a meeting with an architect. But he rung up saying he had a pain in his jaw radiating to his ears and so was going to the doctor. I immediately thought whether it was again a tooth problem -- but; of course, I didn't give him any advice from whatsapp university.

As I have this propensity to search for metaphors and analogies; sometimes where possibly no metaphor may exist, I started wondering about all this.

My thoughts went in two directions. One is about the affects of this pandemic. For all you know; the way this Corona pandemic would unravel would be from various bits and corners that we had not really thought thru. More on this later in this article. But I also started thinking of how we came to be in this situation in the first place.

My favorite itch I scratch is to blame the state of affairs on poor intellectual efforts in my own field i.e. architecture of the built-environment. That surely has played a huge part here. If you take a look at the amount of research papers that are published which could help explain the Corona crisis; there is one kind of research that is glaringly missing: Such research should have come from us architects but there are none.

I am yet to see any paper based on pre-existing data of usage of spaces in the built-environment. There is a good reason for this poverty: We architects have NEVER archived any meaningful, easily retrievable data of the spaces we have created.

Now; of course I know architects are quite convinced that they are Gods but that does not mean they can actually create space. We do uplift spatial opportunities or remove spatial opportunities by playing card-tricks with the built-matter we deposit on the one universal space we are ensconced in. But we don't look it that way.

We use the term "space" in a different manner in common parlance. Examples would be rooms, spaces in cupboards, or spaces in boxes in those cupboards and so on. These man-made spaces are a set of poorly understood and poorly represented fractals. 3D volumes fitting one into the other. None of them are properly represented or archived anywhere.

What architects surely do; is produce a morass of technical drawings. No human can get to that mountain of big-data and work out these spaces in them. Hence, there is absolutely no verifiable, usable information regarding spaces. Important, current topics such as spread of virus, and its correlation to people's usage of those spaces; are simply not possible to be dug into.

This state of affairs has happened for a very laughable reason: Our data representation really has not represented those spaces! We stare at technical drawings which by design is meant to exclude representation of spaces. It is only when a trained person who looks at a drawing, who would detect; rather interpret, these spaces.

The French language has an elegant term for what such drawings contain: Poché -- which stand for the dark marks that represent the built matter on drawings. Spaces? Well, they don't have any clear representations in drawings.

Each building is designed in its own special intellectual silo. It is too huge a task to take all those drawings, interpret them for the spaces they contain and then give them to researchers. If only researchers could find out the spaces where people congregates and which spatial congregation could aid the spread of the virus, etc.-- that would have been quite useful.

But no. We are all hunkering down in our individual houses, hiding our poor intellect, our poor data archiving techniques; hiding from people asking probing questions...and not just hiding from the virus.

But the story does not end there. Science nowadays dramatically fails in explaining complex phenomena.

My understanding is that; in many different areas of human enquiry, we have returned back to an older form of enquiry: That is the use of reductionist theories.

This is happening not just in architecture: You take economics, politics ... in fact any hairy topic that is stickily connected to humanity -- you would find that people are offering convenient "divide-and-rule" explanations and solutions.

In architecture; we happily threw out representation of spaces and retained only those of the built-matter. Why? Spaces are too difficult to be analysed. You cannot "hold" space -- and the pun is quite intended. Even in politics, we cleanly divide the populace into the left and the right -- with no idea of the shades of grey.

The right wing, has themselves started defining a lot more sharply. Today is a historic day in the USA: The new president is now in place -- after a huge drama of the extraction and removal of one bad tooth, for sure.

The stock market is cleanly split into a bull run and a bear hug. There is a bull run going on and I wonder which end of that bull are we headed towards!

Reductionism i.e. the act of reducing a problem into its constituent parts; and solving each part individually was valid in some situations. Maybe 5 centuries back. Those were simpler times, where people indeed were in their own silos of their own villages and towns. But as society progressed, and things started to get stickily interconnected, the causal-loops of one sub-system started interacting with the causal-loops of other sub-systems; like a gigantic machinery with complex interlocked gears; and nobody knowing which way they turn or where are the cranks that drive all those gears.

I think the golden age of intellectual pursuit happened in the fifties and sixties -- those were the times, when there was a dramatic display of the failure of reductionism. The horrid actions of one despot who tried to part the human race the way he parted his hair; was all too evident.

Even the so called solution of dropping a couple of atomic bombs to "cleanly" end the war, did not turn out to be very clean indeed. So, it was but natural that intellectuals actually started researching on complexity theory, fractals, non-zero sum games and such tough topics.

But with the Internet coming in; many people think it is one magic bullet platform. And once again we are asking these "clean" questions in name of disruptive innovations. How about cleanly removing the driver from cars and trucks? (Let the unemployed truck driver now be damned)

How about making an AI driven system the middle man between consumers and buyers? (Never mind that there is a rich Bezos concentrating power cleanly behind the AI system)

How about democratizing news on social media (Never mind that there is a cabal cleanly controlling all that news)...and so on.

The intellects are losing their teeth for sure.

The irony in all this; is that I would not be surprised if now dentistry would play an important role in our future.

The dentists were one of the first one who stopped their work when the pandemic started. This has possibly opened a intricate chain of cause-and-effects which may bloom into reshaping humanity.

People's teeth are rapidly decaying. This will surely hamper digestion, food habits and nutrition. Some kinds of food production would fall on the wayside. All that can lead to a host of other complex problems ... But then, I am again slipping into another reductionist explanation here.

We are indeed in very complex, toothless times!