With the development of natural sciences, their concepts and notions can be applied to human sciences. For instance: quantum entanglement can be understood as telepathy, contemporary particle physics as alchemy, etc. It seems as if the natural sciences started to prove certain concepts of human sciences, making them applicable to objective verifications.

It seems only, though. What we witness today with a noticeable degree of astonishment, a convergence of sciences, is not that human sciences are slowly but constantly becoming like natural sciences in their methodologies, but rather that natural sciences slowly turn »back« to their origin, to the universal language of …. What?

Application of one language to another is impossible in principle. The passion of Vienna circle philosophers for one universal science language is still alive, and the quest for the ultimate and single truth that lies at the bottom of reductionism is still highly tempting. We would like it because if true, it would comfort human epistemological striving and thus lower (lowest possible) entropy. But since such reductionism,  following the second thermodynamic law of entropy, inevitably leads (if not counteracted) to death, such striving contradicts itself. Reduction to one scientific method, one reduction that explains everything, brings humanity into the worst possible situation. The highest possible pleasure, nirvana, reveals itself as death.

If it was possible in principle.

Fortunately, it is not.

What is taking place is that the development of sciences leads sciences further up toward philosophy. And we should take philosophy in this context as a Tower of Babel. As a place that is rich and alive, and prosperous exactly because a vast multitude of languages coexist. Languages that cannot be reduced from one to another. In this scientific Tower of Babel, each physical body (each scientific body of knowledge)  lives according to Einstein, residing in its own time/space dimension that is incommensurable to any another.

Thus, the logic of the multiverse is included already in The general theory of relativity. Physics? Yes, Aristotelian physics; so, in fact, philosophy. The sense of particle physics was delivered thousands of years ago, much before the objectivity of particles was proven. And the understanding of particle physics is still delivered daily. The convergence of sciences does not lead to one universal science language but towards acceptance of a plural view on reality, towards the principal human inability to rationalize reality.

Ayn Rand (Rand, 1967) was correct in her objectivism and strict rationality. Only she could not accept that many objectivities exist simultaneously. Each one has its rationality that is almost Aristotelian. It would have been 100% Aristotelian should Gödel’s incompleteness theorem prove the theoretical impossibility of a fully closed system. But such is also a system of human knowledge, never fully closed or objective.

But do we not fall into the trap of subjectivism, a trap of »anything goes, «accepting that universal objectivity is unattainable? No. There is only one Tower of Babel, and there is only one life for each inhabitant of this Tower. When accepting that you are not a privileged holder of one truth, intersubjectivity happens. Intersubjectivity means that one must constantly find a balance with other subjects, one body of knowledge with another.

It is this intersubjectivity that contemporary science is heading towards.

So there is a new maxim: Be intersubjective or die!

Rand, A. (1967). Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. New American Library.

This is the fifth revision of the original posted in October 2010