Einstein's eternal mystery of epistemology explained: the four-stage creative process in art, science, myth, and psychotherapy.(Cover Story)

Abstract

Einstein's eternal mystery of epistemology, how we can understand the world, is explained as a dynamic cycle of human creativity that engages gene expression, new protein synthesis, and brain plasticity. The classical four-stage creative process in the arts and sciences is adapted as a positive model for highly focused short-term psychotherapy wherein people learn to solve their problems in their own way on all levels, from social relationships to the interaction between mind, brain, and gene expression. Psychotherapists would be wise not to buy into the controversial image of being the know-it-all answer-person portrayed by the popular media. Psychotherapists really only know one thing: how to enjoy empowering others to discover and facilitate their own evolving style of creativity with implicit processing heuristics that turn on gene expression, brain plasticity, and mind-body healing in response to the natural challenges, stresses, and traumas of life that crowd the growing edge of our consciousness.

Key Words: art, brain plasticity, consciousness, creativity, dreaming, implicit processing heuristics, math, offline memory trace reactivation and reconstruction theory, psychosocial genomics, ultradian stress, healing response

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On March 30, 1952, the mature Albert Einstein (1993) wrote a letter to his friend Maurice Solovine in which he tried to explain the miracle of how it is possible to comprehend the world.

Now I come to the most interesting point in your letter. You find it strange that I consider the comprehensibility of the worm (to the extent authorized to speak of such a comprehencibility) as a miracle or as an eternal mystery. Well, a priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way. One could (yes one should) expect the world to be subjected to law only to the extent that we order it through our intelligence. Ordering of this kind would be like the alphabetical ordering of the words of a language. By contrast, the kind of order created by Newton's theory of gravitation, for instance is wholly different. Even if the axioms of the theory are proposed by man, the success of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the objective world, and this could not be expected a priori. That is the "miracle" which is being constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.

There lies the weakness of positivists and professional atheists who are elated because they feel that they have not only rid the world of gods but 'bared the miracles.' Oddly enough, we must be satisfied to acknowledge the 'miracle' without there being any legitimate way for us to approach it. I am forced to add that just to keep you from thinking that weakened by age--I have fallen prey to the parsons." (p. 133)

I recently explored the implications of current neuroscience research on the molecular-genomics of memory, learning, positive motivation, and meaning in comprehending the world. I introduced the idea of how art, truth, beauty, and spirit are all connected via a special state of psychobiological arousal that turns on gene expression, protein synthesis, and brain plasticity (growth) in the daily construction and reconstruction of meaning and consciousness (Rossi, 2002, 2004a). I now extend this view to explain what Einstein called the 'miracle" and "eternal mystery" of how is it possible to comprehend the world in a scientific manner. The connecting link is suggested by another letter written about a month later, on May 7, 1952, wherein Einstein tried to explain to Solovine the central unresolved mystery of epistemology with a hand-sketched diagram illustrated in Figure 1.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

As for the epistemological question, you completely misunderstood me; I probably expressed myself badly. I see the matter schematically in this way:

(1) The Es (immediate experiences) are our data.

(2) The axioms from which we draw our conclusions are indicated by A. Psychologically the As depend on the Es. But there is no logical route leading from the Es to the As, but only an intuitive connection (psychological), which is always "re-turning."

(3) Logically, specific statements S, S', S" are deduced from A; these statements can lay claim to exactness.

(4) The As are connected to the Es (verification through experience). Closer examination shows that this procedure also belongs to the extralogical (intuitive sphere), for the relation between the notions show up in S and the immediate experiences are not logical in nature.

But the relation between Ss and Es is (pragmatically) much less certain than the relation between the As and the Es. (Take the notion 'dog' and the corresponding immediate experiences.) If such a relationship could not be set up with a high degree of certainty (though it may be beyond the reach of logic), logical machinery would have no value in the 'comprehension of reality' (example: theology).

What this all boils down to is the eternally problematical connection between the world of ideas and that which can be experienced (immediate experiences of the senses). (Einstein, 1993, p. 138-139)

Einstein's eternally problematical connection of how we can comprehend the world is illustrated in his sketch (Figure 1) by the returning arrow on the left side pointing upward from the statements deduced (S, S', S") and E (immediate experiences) to A (system of axioms). Einstein correctly noted that psychologically the As (axioms) depend on the Es (experiences), but at the present time there is no logical or scientific explanation for the returning arrow he draws from the Ss and Es back to the As. This is where the traditional philosophy of science, epistemology, and logic fails. As Einstein writes, there is an "intuitive connection (psychological), which is always returning" or replaying between the sensory experience of the brain and mind, but the mystery is that there is apparently no logic to it or satisfactory scientific explanation of it.

Einstein's use of terms like "miracle," "mystery," and "intuition" for this returning connection between the world of sensory experience and the logic of the mind remind us of the theologian Rudolph Otto, who formulated the concept of the "numinous" (the sense of fascination, mystery, and tremendous importance) to …