Myth Is the First Draft

ai blog
July 21, 2026

Joel Kowalewski, PhD

The brain that broke time

A beam of light cuts the darkness, illuminating the boy who runs to keep pace. The light beam runner moves and moves fast, until matching the light exactly. He watches the crests and troughs of the light drift into motionless; the frozen light is the bridge between two nowheres in a dark place. He reaches for the nothing beyond his grasp but is returned to somewhere. Sunlight fills the room. He wipes his eyes clear; the sixteen-year-old finds himself in a familiar room, gathers his books and continues with his day. Just a dream among countless dreaming moments typical of the boy. No one would think less of him if the moment was forgotten. But the boy never did forget. As a man, he recounted it decades later and would call it special relativity — the boy did not calculate, nor conduct an experiment. He knew about light masterfully because he had experienced it, encountered it physically. It was of the brain. And while a “frozen light wave” is never experienced, the light was undeniably real.

Later, writing to Jacques Hadamard, Albert Einstein described his mental process as working in images and sensations. Words and logical signs followed later. The imagery was first and the propositions grounded that imagery in the physical world so that all could walk as he had walked.

Einstein would make many unique and remarkable contributions to physics over his life but the discovery process he described is universal. It speaks to human nature, a term both familiar and evasive. We uncontroversially look to the past to find human nature but have had limited success. The inner search for meaning, our human nature, has admittedly always emerged from the mythical or storytelling tradition of the past and is therefore a subject of history and not traditional science, which is a modern invention. Yet immersed in the stories of civilizations past we do not often find ourselves. The 21st century is one seemingly of fracture. Human nature is in question, AI is encroaching; the walls are all around us and no one recalls building any of them.

Einstein was a physicist and a man but his dreams and curiosities were those of a child and a myth-maker. His theories revolutionized space-time, made time a construct shaped by matter and energy. Behind these ideas was fittingly a man without borders in timeless space. For a new generation, he is a memory occupying a distinct time and place, far removed from the story of a brain that broke time and made it space.

His myth shows us time subjectively passing by, leaving a seemingly infinite number of intermediate events between any now and then, but perception deceives us; time folds into the solid, ancestral ground beneath us, making each perceived moment a timeless encounter of humans with similar brains — all thinking and feeling and relating alike. We are all Einstein, and we are much more than this in every moment. Our way has traditionally been twofold: One is figurative, associative, imagistic — the myth-maker — while the other is propositional, where we craft statements with definite terms, standing in logical relations.

Although it is tempting to imagine human nature dividing into these distinct mythical and logical modes, that interpretation fails to capture the continuity of brain processes; the classic imagery of a divided brain has long divided society and people and has contributed significantly to the problems we now face. Complexity science supplies us with a more realistic image of continuous processes that dynamically reconfigure in response to environmental changes. Living systems, and indeed the brains that give rise to consciousness, subjectivity, and intelligence, are directed toward stability. Whether the world we inhabit is desirable remains an open question, but what we cannot deny is its stability, familiarity, and comfort. For most people, stability means myth-making. For others, myth and logic interconvert as two stable configurations. And this conversion from myth to proposition is what I call science. The battles between the two configurations of a single process, between a creative and chaotic existence and a logical, mathematical, and orderly existence, exemplify the major problem before us. We will find a great deal of myth in science and science in myth ahead. But today, we live with the consequences of humanity’s belief in a border that did not exist. That is where our story begins.

The rift is modern

For most of human history there was one mode of existence, not two. The superstition, magic, and mysticism labeled as pre-scientific was the science of its moment, answering — as science still does — to physical commitments. Brains are physical systems with commitments or constraints that are not authored by individuals and are therefore in no way arbitrary projections of a private inner world; the modern mind conjures images of pre-scientific humans casting shadows on walls that science would eventually claim and then destroy. What the contemporary observer gets wrong about mysticism is that it points to something different today than it did in the past. Recall, there is no science back then. The consistent physical tether, however, from the past to present is a brain with an identical prediction task. Metaphysics is simply a modern luxury. No one can truly ponder metaphysics unless the physical is sufficiently described, which it was not at that time. Belief in the primacy of metaphysics would have severely limited humanity’s capacity to make successful predictions in a physical world. In short, the popular interpretation of a primitive metaphysician awaiting science rejects our present day existence as a species.

What the ancient mind was doing was physical organization, or taxonomy, virtually identical to the modern taxonomies of elements, rocks, species, and diseases — bringing each new thing under a familiar physical term drawn from an earlier physical encounter. The stars went into crystalline spheres, the animals into hierarchies, matter into earth, water, air, and fire. Myth and literature were not outside this effort; they were part of it. In Athens, Aristotle’s Poetics dissected tragedy into its parts and ranked them as if animals; in India, Bharata’s Natyashastra codified the drama and set out a full taxonomy of feeling, the rasas, the way a naturalist would organize species into categories based on perceptible patterns. The brain was sorting the unfamiliar under the known without distinction. Taking the organizing imperative of the predictive brain to its extreme, the world of antiquity becomes less uncertain and less mystical, not more: to place a strange thing under a familiar one is to encounter it physically, making the era remarkably natural and one that should be characterized by its pursuit of demystification, much like the science that would emerge centuries later.

A Babylonian astronomer or a humoral physician was not trying to disclose an exotic force or shroud the world in mystery. They were trying to remove the impediments — to use the physical descriptions that proved useful elsewhere. The descriptions strike us as fanciful because we judge them from a privileged position, but they were very much physical and not metaphysical commitments: heat as a substance, disease as an imbalance of fluids, the planets as bodies whose motions were like living organisms. There was simply more uncertainty then about what “physical” would turn out to mean, so what we now sort into the metaphysical and the physical was necessarily intermixed in the past.

Intriguingly, what Carl Sagan later saw as the objectives of science — to be the light in the dark room of antiquity — was the snake eating its own tail. That theme runs through the pre-modern to modern transition and would cause great friction and eventually complete fracture in the post-modernist critiques of science, challenging its authority, asserting that nothing ever progresses, and that there is no objective truth, just arbitrary explanatory frameworks that mostly organize human behavior around private specialized languages and problems of no general consequence. That same critique — emphasizing the complete arbitrariness of our physical descriptions of reality — is identical to our modern-day critique of antiquity. It is the snake eating its own tail, claiming that it exists outside of its own body, so it could not possibly be consuming itself. The easiest resolution would involve reuniting head and tail.

But this is not so easy because something did in fact change over time. For most of human history, taxonomic classification — the arrangement of unknown with respect to known — was purely passive: to know nature was to observe it with the senses and report the experience in physical terms. Then the instruments arrived, and they did what a category cannot. They did not merely organize the given world; they enlarged it. Galileo turned a telescope on the moon in 1609 and the model of perfect celestial sphere became suddenly imperfect; dotted with mountains and craters, the most fitting known, physical category of the cosmos became earth itself. And Hooke put cork under a microscope in 1665 and identified a microscopic world that had been hidden from antiquity. Boyle’s air pump produced the vacuum that philosophers of antiquity had claimed could not exist. Francis Bacon named this perceptual expansion and gave its modern form: nature would no longer be watched but put to the question — held under constraint and forced into surrendering answers. Bacon made the scientist an actor and an actor requires a stage. And that stage would become what we now understand as “experiment.”

Each instrument enlarged the scope of the physical, and each enlargement quietly eliminated the inherited vocabulary — the crystalline spheres, the four elements, the plenum. Those were terms that had organized physical reality for a hundred generations and now fell away, because the world the instruments disclosed did not include them. New physical commitments had to be made and new schemes built to hold them, and a new generation set out for the dark corners of a reality that had abruptly grown larger. That rebellious generation opened the rift. While antiquity spent generations engaged in taxonomic classification, making the world more predictable, as we still do today, the decisive feature of the transition into modernity is that the physical now goes somewhere. It moves and expands, not because humans became more enlightened, but because of technology; in fact, the same instruments that seemingly liberated humans may have trivially upended the organizational dynamics of the past. The scientist, for instance, who used Hooke’s microscope suddenly risked being organized by it. That scientist was not an active participant, as the instrument was the actor in this case. Putting this interpretation aside, however, something definitely did appear to change, and it parceled reality into two apparent territories, mechanics and biology on one side, theology and philosophy on the other.

Although the rift has been embellished, and it is mostly a view from a forced vantage point, sociologist Max Weber, if not directly fixing the vantage point for future generations, did colorfully describe the view in his 1917 lecture Science as a Vocation, giving it substance. We hear about a world at the brink, one characterized by progressive disenchantment brought about by industrialization and its sociopolitical consequences. Only once that line was drawn do myth and science become estranged, giving rise to everything this essay describes — the inability to describe science and myth as a single process, the transformation from myth into science that can stall, and, for the first time, a category for inquiry that wears the form of science without any of its substance. The demarcation problem — what is science? — is the shadow the rift casts. Philosophers who have worked on it — Karl Popper insisted on it, Larry Laudan announced its demise — have never settled it. It is challenging to police an arbitrary border drawn over indivisible terrain. Most of these efforts have, however, failed precisely because they use antiquity and pre-science to develop exclusionary criteria. It is the snake eating its own tail once again.

The obvious objection to historical demarcation efforts, separating science from non-science, is that every frontier was magical before it was rigorous, so today’s fringe may just be tomorrow’s orthodoxy. This vulnerability originates from the assumption that pre-science was mystical. However, I have already argued in this introduction that pre-scientific inquiry was not magic on its way to becoming physics; it was physicalizing — making unauthored, physical commitments: A is like B. If A is a fluid, A has known, physical properties and it could therefore be shown that B is nothing like A. Astronomy is similarly not what astrology matured into; it is what remained when the human projection — fate, temperament, narrative painted on the planets — was anchored elsewhere. What looks like magic becoming science is a change in physical anchors or commitments. At no point has the truly metaphysical ever transitioned into mature science. So, the demarcation problem, even if it is misguided, does seem necessary to this day. An important extension of demarcation is, for instance, the nature of life and consciousness — two topics that tie into AI technology. I have discussed those topics more directly elsewhere. Central to those essays is my belief that a society that cannot demarcate science from non science, life from non-life, and human from machine will be incapable of grounding itself in new myths and traditions. There is no substance in fictions that do not and cannot describe the world we inhabit. A story without substance or grounding — one that is untethered from the physical realities of the present day — can only entertain us.

I began with Einstein as the ideal embodiment: a myth-maker describing the unknown from the known, who then evaluated these myths, communicating them in the language of logic. The latter is not as mysterious as it might seem. It asks: how can I encounter this myth so that I might tell new myths from it? It is a process that is necessarily progressive, driving us into physical reality, rather than away from it, and ultimately helping us tell physically anchored narratives about a future world we would want to and could actually inhabit. If we continue to pursue pure fictions, projecting our belief in a mystical and as-yet-undiscovered metaphysical existence, the future is the one thing that we will never control because it is physically grounded. Since the line has been drawn, and many are no longer sure what scientific work entails, we must dig into our mythical origins until hitting bedrock.

The progressive and the eternal

In 1959 the physicist and novelist C. P. Snow delivered the Rede Lecture and described a Western intellectual life that had broken into two cultures — the sciences and the humanities — no longer able to speak to each other because they were no longer doing the same thing. What Snow was diagnosing as a failure of methods is related to Weber’s disenchantment lecture from 1917. Snow’s first culture enlarged the physical world while the other one interpreted it. Because the modern world measures worth in utility and power — Bacon’s inheritance — the enlarging culture was made the truth-teller, and the interpreting one was moved to the wing of the stage and relabeled culture, entertainment, personal expression.

A real and open question falls out of this, one the essay cannot close. If one mode advances and the other endures, which of them is our nature? The progressive answer is seductive because it moves: we are the animal that builds instruments and enlarges its world, and art is the pleasant residue of a slower past. The other answer runs the opposite way — the enlarging is a recent and powerful technique, but the figurative mode is the older and deeper thing, the bedrock a person stands on, and the reaching-outward is something the bedrock occasionally does. I do not know which is right, and I am not certain the question has a fact of the matter. But we have built our institutions entirely around the first answer and left the second to insist on itself in the register of complaint.

The two answers could coexist while the two cultures kept to their own rooms. They cannot now, because the instrument has finally arrived that operates on the figurative mode itself. A machine that writes the poem and drafts the proof in the same breath collapses the division the telescope opened, and it forces the old question to a point: if what felt most ours — the image, the story, the myth that comes first — can be produced by a scope-expanding instrument, then either that mode was never our nature, or the instrument has learned to counterfeit the one thing instruments were not supposed to touch. The walls no one remembers building are these, the two cultures, and the machine, the AI technologies at the doorstep, is the explosive spark.

Science is not the laboratory

Historical efforts to demarcate science from non-science have often focused on the physical experiment as the ultimate test. As I have mentioned, however experiments did not exist in antiquity. But the work of Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Lucretius, and Thales does roughly translate into thought experiment. What has to be true is that the thing fits into a logical structure anchored in first principles. For early thinkers, no matter how physically grounded their principles were, the physically known lacked explanatory power. Knowledge of the fire, wind, water, and earth does very little heavy lifting. But we can clearly find the seeds of science in pre-modern scientific inquiries and tie this to antiquity in a manner that clarifies how modern science works, applying this lens to demarcate authentic scientific (or scientific-like) inquiries throughout history from the grip of metaphysical speculation.

Thermodynamics is the clearest case, because we understand it fairly well today. Sadi Carnot, in 1824, reasoned about an idealized heat engine with a perfectly reversible cycle — and extracted a limit from it on what any physically realizable engine can do. This transition from imaginary speculation to a physical construct allowed Carnot to deduce the second law of thermodynamics, rendering the imaginary machine that could recycle its fuel and run continuously impossible before the atom had even been discovered.

Thermodynamics was formulated before the microscopic story. It did not need to know that matter was made of molecules; the laws stood on their own, in their own terms, and statistical mechanics would later supply additional taxonomic classifications. It did not certify the result. Carnot actually did his reasoning while believing in caloric, a fluid substance of heat that does not actually exist. His story was physically plausible but incorrect in its details. The logical structure was doing the work. If Socrates could have expanded his physical, experiential references, his biological work would, for instance, not have seemed as antiquated, and we could not easily, and I think wrongly, claim that his or anyone else’s mode of inquiry from antiquity was wholly different from what we do today.

Similarly, Darwin’s argument has no equations in it. It is nevertheless one of the most secure propositional structures we have: organisms vary, variation is heritable, more are born than survive, therefore the distribution shifts. The terms are physically grounded, the inference is valid, the conclusion follows. Darwin invites us into a deeper, physical understanding of the world and it is left to future generations to develop the human myth from the solid ground he exposed. The physical commitments are evidenced by the gaps. It is not the final statement.

Why astrology is not science

Astrology provides a longstanding counterpoint to modern science, as it intuitively describes beliefs and methods that construct truths. Whatever science is, it must clearly deal in truths that do not depend on our beliefs. On closer inspection, however, astrology does invite further thought. If a false term like caloric can sit at the center of good science, what rules anything out? Maybe our initial impression of astrology is wrong. Astrology has been practiced with enormous procedural care for two millennia. Theosophy and the various noetic sciences are also methodical, quantified, and internally consistent. Why aren’t they clearly scientific?

The difference is that caloric, while ultimately wrong, was still about the world, and it was about the world in a specific and traceable way, consistent with my argument that all science involves making unauthored physical commitments. Caloric was an analogy from a physical domain we already had. Heat flows from hot to cold, it appears to be conserved, and it can be contained and transferred. Fluids do that. So the hypothesis was that this case is probably like those other cases — a disciplined extension from a source domain whose behavior was not up to the theorist. Caloric did not involve projecting authored physical or metaphysical properties onto the world. It is an approximation of known to unknown within the physical domain.

Luminiferous aether is a similar case. The now archaic term simplified as ether emerged because light propagates like a wave, and the waves we knew about propagated in media, therefore there must be a medium that light moves through as well. That medium was the ether.

Physical commitments are naturally eliminative. Borrowing analogies from a physical domain inherits commitments that no human authored: Caloric, being a fluid, had to be conserved. Rumford would later show that friction generates heat without apparent limit, suggesting heat or caloric is not conserved. Ether, being a medium, entailed a detectable drift, and Michelson and Morley developed technologies — analogy translators that forcibly “send” our physical commitments into the world for revision — that would have detected the ether it if it had existed. Neither term was refuted by language or clever arguments. Each was refuted by the physics included in the analogy.

By physical commitments, I essentially mean physical grounding, and I take it to be broader than falsifiability, first introduced by the philosopher of science Karl Popper. Popper’s criterion views scientific claims as logical statements; he interpreted the scientist as an individual who makes claims that can be rejected, established as logically false, or falsified. Science proceeds through falsification. Popper’s critics argue that there are many historical examples of “good” science that involve retaining falsified claims. Astrology also makes falsifiable claims, so the astrologer who retains those claims is not clearly different from the scientist. When a scientist anchors the claim, making physical commitments or grounding, they could, in principle, bring it into the world and watch it behave, no matter how abstract and ultimately incorrect those commitments might be in their details. Anchored terms (for example, caloric, ether, or phlogiston) automatically produce falsifiable statements regardless of the author’s beliefs, intents, or desires, because the source domain imposes those constraints by necessity. They are not chosen and are not alterable. Popper’s criterion fails for astrology because individuals can and do dispute the meaning of observed events. What has actually been rejected by a given experiment? However, the scientist truly engaged in scientific work, can retain falsified claims because those claims are expressed within a broader set of physical commitments, some of which a given experiment does not touch. The astrologer defines what is permissible, simulating the methodological rigor of science with untethered terminology. The terms may point to physical things ( celestial events, planets, stars, and human beings are not invented) but the physical properties ascribed to them are authored, imagined, and depend on a human interpreter (e.g. a honey bee does not have the luxury of a monthly horoscope), differentiating astrology and many apparent sciences from science.

This was not always the case. Ancient astrology was not cleanly distinguished from what would later mature into modern astronomy and cosmology. Because the planets, movements of the stars and moons, did have an observable effect on Earth’s seasons and tides, it was physically sensible to extend these influences to humans and living systems as well. Ancient astrologers were, in this sense, developing predictive models for the physical world they inhabited. They did not have the luxury of choosing or imagining that their world was at bedrock metaphysical or magical. When the predictive model failed, it was adjusted by necessity, even if those adjustments were equally unproductive. A predictive model that cannot reliably anticipate physical events, crop yields or the birth and death of kings, offers no direct survival benefits, and it does lose its power with each failure. Those on the inside, the serious practitioners offering astrological readings, would eventually become astronomers. However, something always remains in these transitions, migrating into the mythological tradition; the shell, deprived of its physical grounding, that becomes a cultural artifact. It moves into myth and stays there. We can nevertheless see the continuity between the myth and science here, suggesting the borders are highly amorphous if not entirely absent. The distinction is that while the two borrow a mathematically uniform description, owing to our inability to fully divide brain processes for myth-making and science across time, the constraints on science and myth-making are dissimilar. Notably, we have already seen this constraint-based distinction in my description of physical commitments or physical grounding. A myth is of course a physically grounded narrative. Not even a dream exposes the dreamer to an untethered existence. Brains do as they must do, reconfiguring known physical relationships into possibly unknown or unfamiliar configurations. Dreamer and myth-maker alike “author” these physical commitments and can freely form and break the connections as desired. But the “good” scientist is the individual who recognizes this process, anchoring the myth-making externally and thereby losing control over it. Certainly, the pseudoscientific turn throughout history has involved physical commitments as well, but they are like myths rather than science.

It is about where physical commitments are directed. If they are directed interiorly, the author lacks an outside adjudicator. They make sense of the results. Given one’s belief in a hypothesis, the evidence saves rather than rejects it (e.g. the instrumentation is imprecise or psychical energy collapses in standard experimental conditions, giving us the impression that it does not exist when it does).

Pseudoscience keeps the propositional logic and the methodological rigor — the experiment, the control condition, the statistical apparatus — and quietly removes the physical commitments that connect the internal and external. The ancient astrologer took planets for bodies and learned that planets are not like bodies. But when the language includes field and frequency and there is no physical constraint to give those terms substance, practitioners can conclude that the phenomenon in question is unlike any existing physical example: I actually meant it is “field-like”; there is no suitable language at the scientific frontier.

And once we accept that the supposed metaphysical or magical explanatory frameworks from antiquity were also anchored physically and externally and were attempts to understand reality as modern science does, there is no historical precedent of metaphysical speculation becoming mature scientific work. Phrenology, recognized as pseudoscience today, conflated brain function with craniometry, which was the closest thing to brain measurement. Intriguingly, it is precisely phrenology’s physical commitments that explain why we do not talk about phrenology today. If the physical language is insufficient at some point in time it will always be insufficient, which returns us to the conclusion that pseudoscience can never be science because the phenomenon in question is not adequately grounded as required by science. It must be something else. I have referred to this “something else” as mythology. Myth is intimately related to science and is critically important to how we understand the physical world, but it is not science.

What myth is actually for

Myth does real cognitive work — organizing experience, holding a structure in place before you can state it, letting you reason about something you cannot yet define. The scaffold of every myth emerges from the oral storytelling tradition, mapping almost perfectly to experiment. An experiment is the physical embodiment of an idea. It turns the idea into a drawing on a cave wall, a depiction that is agreeable or disagreeable to an audience.

Science is just more explicit with its intentions. It discloses the myth in physical terms, telling the audience how to orient to it. It is the myth with footnotes. Maxwell developed his account of electromagnetism by building an elaborate mechanical picture incorporating the now fictional construct of a medium for light propagation, the ether. His mechanism of rotating vortices with idler wheels between them was one such obviously physically instantiated myth. Throughout this demonstration he is explicit that it is a scaffold for thinking and not a literal description. Admittedly, certain elements were completely wrong. He then attempted to elaborate the structure of the myth — to critique its structure as a literary critic might — using mathematical equations. In spite of the overall fictional context, Maxwell’s physical commitments, placing the parts in a physically plausible arrangement (e.g. constrained as nature constrains, according to experience) led to two accurate results. His math and physical model anticipated displacement currents in addition to describing light as electromagnetic phenomena. Over time, the mechanical model — what I might call Maxwell’s Myth — did become irrelevant, but these two results carried on.

We can scarcely avoid the inference that light consists of the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena

James Clerk Maxwell

Source

His case illustrates a single myth-making process in the human brain that encompasses scientific work: figurative first, propositional second; with the scaffold or myth discarded, proceed to tell new myths. It’s what Einstein did with the light beam, and again in 1907 with what he called his happiest thought — a man in free fall doesn’t feel his own weight — which was an image before it was the equivalence principle. It’s what Kepler did. He spent his career on the conviction that planetary orbits were spaced by nested Platonic solids, a mystical model that is simply wrong, and it kept him focused on astronomical measurements long enough to extract three laws that have nothing to do with Platonic solids. He never gave up the mysticism; Harmonices Mundi contains the third law and the music of the spheres in the same volume. Newton is the same shape: alchemist by night, groundbreaking physicist and mathematician by day. The present day observer wrongly interprets these as idiosyncrasies. As I mentioned earlier, the predictive models of human brains are physically grounded by necessity; the structural organization of neural cells and the activity of those cells over time do not cleanly separate into mystical speculation and logical rigor. It is a continuous and coherent search for unifying principles to optimally align a living system with its external environment. Science is the recognition and control of this process. It is to do as the brain does, seamlessly navigating the mythical and the logical; the ordered and the chaotic.

The pathology is arrested conversion

The failure, then, is not myth-making itself. It is the myth that never converts and is no longer recognized by society as a myth. Myths are not, in total, records of eternal truths. They are autobiographical tellings that contain truths and nonsense. The burden of each subsequent generation is not comprehensively documenting and adopting old myths; it is the work of developing new autobiographical tellings from the old ones. This progressiveness is essential to science, and we have already seen it firsthand — narrative devices that were introduced and later discarded (caloric, ether, Maxwell’s cogwheel model, etc.). While science does seem to operate like this, there is still a tendency to view myths as universal truths. However, if everything derives from the mythical tradition, an argument that I have grounded in the absence of divisions — “art”, “science”, “myth”, “logic” — in the human brain, why do we detect a difference? Why are we convinced history is filled with fixed and universal truths or that some truths are only accessible to the poet and the artist? The arts and humanities oddly stand against the processes that characterize life and give our experiences form and substance. Since it does us no good to believe in and enforce imaginary borders any longer, arrested conversion of old into new myth is the pathology of our time, giving us the humanities and the sciences, the human and the machine. It is time for new myths.

To tell new myths, however, we need to detect the old myths around us. I have already described science as myth-making under constraints. To be clear, science begins with a dream-like myth, a story about the physical world, but one that is not authentically constrained by it. It is the same space of hope and fear and mythological creatures, the gods and the heroes, of Ancient Greek and Roman myths. It is ordinary myth-making. Next, the scientist tells the physically grounded myth (e.g. they make physical commitments); the scientist — at times, literally — walks into the myth, moving down the path that these physical commitments have established (e.g. Carnot, Maxwell, and Einstein are three examples I have introduced).

Although it is exceedingly challenging, if not entirely misguided, to apply the above criteria to cleanly label certain research disciplines “unscientific,” demarcation is achievable and desired. A mountain is not alive whereas the honey bee is. Mathematics can describe living and non-living systems alike, and yet we clearly recognize, and do make, distinctions. The primary distinction in these cases is that biology is made of “biological stuff” — and that “stuff” imposes distinct physical constraints; that means the math can be quite similar while the trajectories differ over time. Rocks are organizationally as they are because they pursue equilibrium, steadily decaying due to environmental stressors. But life exists far from equilibrium (for example, at the edge of chaos and order), dynamically reconfiguring to resist environmental stressors. This is more formally what I mean by science being about physical commitments. It is the same substrate dependence argument I just outlined for rocks and living systems. Living systems and rocks — science and non-science, science and myth, science and art, or whatever distinction we might be inclined to draw in the 21st century — are stories about different physical commitments or constraints imposed on processes. For living systems, some commitments or constraints are inconsistent with survival. And it stands to reason that this explanation extends far beyond living versus non-living systems, including distinctions within the category of living systems as well like chimpanzee versus human, science versus non-science, and myth versus science. From here, some core questions become accessible to us: At what point has society moved its scientific work into pure myth? Alternatively, when has society rejected true science for old myths that are incompatible with the physical realities of the world it inhabits? It is difficult, if not impossible, to view these as trivial philosophical matters if they are physically grounded, as they now point to survival (e.g. the persistence of brains and the living systems in which they are embedded across time).

This close relationship between myth and science — a difference in constraints operating on the same physical processes of our brains — anticipates that much of what we are calling science today is necessarily hazy. Our answers to the questions above are not simply about identifying universal examples of pseudoscience.That would introduce the very thing I have argued does not exist in the mathematical description of the world — living and non living systems are more alike than we care to imagine.

Subsequently, particular examples of scientific work — omitting entire scientific disciplines for the time being — can be close or identical to traditional myths, characterized by arrested conversion (e.g. when the myth does not transition into the continuous process of building and destroying physical or lived narratives that I am calling “science.”). I have already established that the key distinction in this transition is constraint or physical commitments. The scientist, in order to live myth — that is, to make myth physical — must make good faith commitments (physical commitments).

We must distinguish this from the traditional interpretation of science, where science is about a “scientific method” and the “scientist” certifies their observations as true and scientific because they are anchored in a communally agreed upon protocol, procedure, storytelling or mythological tradition. What we might summarize as justificatory practices. That is inherently problematic, as that is just ordinary myth-making. It is about constructing cultural artifacts (statues of the gods, temples of worship, etc). Method is entirely indifferent to whether terms refer to anything in reality. So methodological rigor cannot lead to physical commitments.

A controlled comparison is applied propositional logic — if X is manipulated, then Y — and the logical form transmits perfectly well when the terms are empty. You can pre-register, correct for multiple comparisons, replicate three times, and publish, with a construct that names nothing of any consequence. The rigor is the only thing that is real here. But the rigor is also not what matters, and its presence is what makes myth undetectable in today’s science.

Jonas and Kording demonstrated this in 2017 by running the standard analytical toolkit of systems neuroscience — lesions, tuning curves, dimensionality reduction, Granger causality — on a MOS 6502 microprocessor running the video game Donkey Kong. Each tool produced clean, publishable results. None recovered how the chip worked. In short, the methods cannot make physical commitments, so we simply get untethered narratives.

There are numerous examples. Every era borrows the most impressive machine in the room and calls it a theory of mind. Freud took the Greek pantheon, gave it clinical vocabulary and a hydraulic-thermodynamic metaphor because thermodynamics was the prestige formalism of his century. We take transformers. In each case the scaffold arrives, and in each case it fails to be discarded, because nothing forces the conversion. It is part of the historical narrative tradition of poets and bards codifying cultural artifacts in highly structured, lyrical forms.

The computer metaphor, emerging in the mid-20th century, looks similar to caloric but it is projective. “Memory as a store,” “buffers,” “encoding and retrieval” appear to be a disciplined analogy from a physical domain — computers exist, physically, and we can watch them work. But the mythological lineage traces back to the mathematician and one of the fathers of computer science, John von Neumann, in his 1945 report on the EDVAC. There he describes the machine’s parts in explicitly neural terms, invoking McCulloch and Pitts, and calls the storage component of computers a memory organ. The von Neumann architecture was named in reference to the human brain. We built a device to implement what we already believed about ourselves, and later interpreted it as independent evidence for that belief, as if we just happened to discover brains in computers.

That loop is closed. Unlike fluids, which had existed with their own behavior in relation to the term “caloric,” freeing it from a similar fate of pathological closure, the computer was engineered to perpetually reinforce folk narratives about ourselves. No constraint. It had the form of physical commitments, which, once again, illustrates the entanglement of myth and science for our own time and that will have significant implications for how we interact with increasingly sophisticated AI technologies in the near future. What meaning do the old myths have — human exceptionalism, anthropocentrism, the scala naturae — if they point to appearances? There is no need to even debate if machines are actually self-aware. Should we quickly exhaust all possible surface-level measures — which dominate our understanding of the human condition — a destructive, pathological myth remains, and it will prevent us from appropriately aligning with and thriving alongside future AI technologies.

There are no disciplines, only piles

My claim is ultimately grounded in the mathematics of physical systems. That forces us to revise our understanding of borders. Living systems, chemical reactions bounded by physical substrates, emerged from non-living chemical reactions over billions of years of iterative exploration. It is difficult to imagine when precisely non-living chemistry made this transition. What is clear is that we would very likely be incapable of visually detecting this transition, definitively labeling pre- and post- examples. Much like speciation, the evolution of one species into a new one, we would expect to find intermediate forms that would be difficult to categorize with a binary label (living there, non-living here). The mathematical, physical description would be virtually identical, with the differences playing out subtly over time due to very minor differences in constraints (boundary conditions), incidental to the mathematical description. Only significant as the math “runs,” moving along an unpredictable path of unique interactions, relationships, and constraints. We get life and non-life, Greek and Roman culture and myth, Incan and Mayan calendars and cosmologies, European folklore, war and peace, and science.

Our common ancestral origins reject the borders around us. Constraints exist. Borders do not. While this points to a new way of thinking about scientific work — one aligned with our storytelling or myth-making brains — it also presents a challenge to what scientific fields or disciplines actually mean in practice and if those categorizations genuinely serve our interests in the future. Are they equally part of the pathology that limits us?

I already described issues with methodological demarcation — because it cannot make physical commitments for the scientist and resembles myth-making without mythical creatures but with comparably untethered entities. Subsequently, I take the scientist to necessarily exist among autobiographical aggregates or piles, resembling an archeologist, excavating the stories; the accumulated history of humans encountering the world at a particular time and place. And the piles grow, stratum upon stratum. Somebody worked on strata, somebody else on volcanism, the literature accumulated, and at some point the accumulated pile acquired a name, “Geology.” And “Biology” was formally coined around the early 19th century by several people independently for work that already existed but the pile grew large enough and it too needed a flag to mark the summit. Psychology’s boundary is more accidental still — Wundt’s laboratory separated it from philosophy and physiology in a process that had as much to do with university politics as with subject matter — whereas the seam between physics and chemistry was arbitrary enough that physical chemistry became necessary.

Geology, then, is neither science nor myth. It is a bibliography. Its terms are anchored rather than foundational: strata and mineral phases bottom out in chemistry and physics even though the field has no axioms of its own, and that anchoring is what its inferences run on. Anchored is enough. Nothing requires each pile to carry its own first principles.

Is neuroscience a science then? Again, it is not clear that the question even makes sense because neuroscience is also a pile, and a pile is heterogeneous. Hodgkin and Huxley’s 1952 account of the action potential anchors the pile: ion concentrations and membrane conductances provide a quantitative structure anchored in electrochemistry. But move up through the strata and someone is imaging the neural basis of self-esteem. Same journals, same funding agency, same label — and no physical tether unifying the strata.

How the anchor gets buried

Piles have their peculiarities, and none of this argues against specialization. It is pathological because the autobiographical search for explanations of the natural world demands a continuous storytelling process, one that moves through specialization without ever becoming specialized. If we imagine the early days of pile building (e.g. the formation of today’s familiar scientific disciplines), we find an individual curious about their “corner” of the world without knowledge of a more general world on the horizon; they stumble into an encounter with rocks by a riverbed — drawn to the shapes, colors, and textures — and begin to ponder why these particular rocks are as they are; this scene unfolds as a web of specialized, autobiographical experiences or events in a brain. The specialization, notably, is a product of contingency or happenstance. In my example, the individual whose actions do not yet fit into any profession becomes a specialist due to their ignorance that there is more general representation of their questions and task, not necessarily because the task and questions demanded or benefited from it.

By “autobiographical” my intent is not to imply anything like “pure fiction” or “pure art” as we understand the phrasing today. My riverbed example is not about an individual seeking an aesthetic experience. It is an individual attempting to define what might be called the first principles of their experience. How does this experience (of differently colored and textured rocks) arise? Once we have some semblance of an answer, that is our physical anchor, and we ground each inquiry, each subsequent story, in those first principles of experience. Eventually, we find fellow travelers along the way, recognizing a set of shared principles explaining our experiences. And historians will call this “Geology.” We gather together and tell stories but our stories steadily bury the first anchor — maybe that anchor becomes many anchors. We soon discover that our own pile has become insufficient to truly answer the questions we seek. So we leave the first pile behind and go looking for other travelers and autobiographical piles. Collectively, historians will refer to this as science and the individuals as scientists.

What we eventually get in the specialist training that defines modern science is the accumulated story layers of a given pile. The trainee is exposed to storytelling traditions, inherited autobiographies, campfire stories, or lyrical histories like Homeric poems. And the pile grows, which can block out the horizon. There is just the pile. Thomas Kuhn noticed this mechanism in textbooks, which fail to disclose the contingency of the work and the tasks at hand as ongoing and unsettled. His interpretation was, however, more relativistic than what I am claiming here — suggesting disciplines (or piles) become closed by developing private and inscrutable languages, contributing to their incommensurability. Kuhn in part was targeting the classical assertion that science was a coherent body of human thought moving toward objective truths by rejecting certain explanations. While it has become difficult to claim that any one person or group can indeed point to absolute truths, the important phrase here is “point to.” Certainly, there are universal and absolute truths but they are hidden in the very processes that allow us to claim that there are none. They are the processes of brains making physical commitments to interpret, understand, and predict a physical world. The truth that science grants is, importantly, the truth of what is not the case. Accordingly, despite all appearances to the contrary, there is always something objectively real and physical that remains accessible to the scientist and non-scientist alike. It just gets buried in the piles and the storytelling layers. So I do want to distance myself from Kuhn, while granting that his observations provide some insight into the failure mode of modern day science and pile-building.

Ludwik Fleck actually made these observations much earlier than Kuhn, emphasizing that our brains constantly converge on identical statements from personal, contingent experiences. He noted that a thought collective develops a thought style, the style determines what counts as a fact, and initiation into the collective is precisely what makes the style invisible to its members. What we call “scientific” work is suddenly not about shared first principles of physically grounded experiences but the principles of pile formation. For example, the riverbed case I began with was search for first principles in the form of “what does this experience mean?” and that would become or can become “what does the experience mean for the geologist?” Alternatively, we can imagine this as “what does this experience mean?” becoming what does it mean to be Greek or Roman? The latter has some merit but it cannot reject the existence of a broader world and the demand that we must all travel its roads. This dynamic — the tension between local and global, closed and open — is the myth-science process I have been outlining.

It is nevertheless sensible to ask if the world is truly better off because of the training and the profession, or do we merely believe it is because they exist? This is a very generic question that strikes at the core of science being about the brain processes of humans, storytelling, and ultimately about our existence in a changing world. Is the scientist (or more generically the educated human being) in today’s society actually suited for the future? Was the messiness of antiquity productive?

The cleanest answer involves revisiting how science worked before all of the labels arrived. My description of science involving physical commitments works. But it is sensible when viewed on a case-by-case basis (Einstein, Carnot, Maxwell). Yet if we move forward in time there is a dilemma. What are “physical commitments” for the individual operating in the heterogeneous and hyper-focused piles of today? The stories are convoluted and persistent, and we have discussed these same concerns from Kuhn and Fleck. Subsequently, it is not clear if we have something like caloric or phlogiston before us or something else entirely — the mythical creature that expresses the collective hopes and fears of a group of people.

What seems to unify historical cases of myth conversion (myth moving into logic and moving into myth, which I call science) ultimately involved an error signal derived from outside. Engineering had collapse. Medicine had mortality. Geology had technology like drills, creating channels to transmit error signals. Geology spent half a century internally rejecting continental drift, until external paleomagnetic and bathymetric data became available. The field was wrong for decades, and the correction came from outside.

Where the only feedback is peer review, the vocabulary is graded by fluent speakers of the vocabulary. And that is how autobiographical piles get fixed and begin to resemble cultural artifacts — stories about how societies have organized themselves to manage uncertainty. Today, we cannot be completely sure if we are making good faith “physical commitments,” are even capable of doing so, or are just building cultural artifacts in our overly complex piles, but we can nevertheless reframe our commitments.

The examples of Maxwell and Carnot worked because there was no peer review, there was not a coherent global profession of science, and much less was known. Scientists from the past were by necessity driven into physical reality as they were still explaining the first principles of physical experience (What is light? What is heat? So, present day physical commitments must admittedly be nuanced. Otherwise, I have, to this point, just provided a few historical cases in this essay that do not inform contemporary science. There is, however, no actual fissure here.

Scientists and thinkers from antiquity to the present day share a storytelling tradition shaped by the physical constraints of brains. If we can no longer easily recognize and test our physical commitments anymore, we are at least in this sense physically grounded. There are subsequently questions and criteria that can still help us strengthen our existing physical anchors while discovering new ones. In keeping with the theme of processes or systems — the implications of an undivided biosphere and an undivided storytelling brain for the 21st century — our modern day commitment is to an orientation — to physically grounding questions or criteria. I have supplied examples in the Explanatory Box schematic.

Explanatory Box: Searching for the physical in 21st century science

My own field of neuroscience represents an additional issue. Many terms in neuroscience can never be meaningfully disputed like caloric or phlogiston. And I am not sure there actually is an error signal. The term “attention” has been disputed for thirty years. Allport asked in 1993 whether the field had been posing the wrong questions. Britt Anderson claimed “There is no such thing as attention” in a 2011 article, arguing that the concept is reified — treated as a cause when it is an effect; an accumulation of observations that has been mistaken for a foundational theory, additional evidence of unruly autobiographical piles. Di Lollo challenged it yet again in 2018, while Hommel and colleagues argued that the term had too many meanings to justify a single label the following year in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. Anderson returned to the same subject again in 2023, indicating that critique about attention has become literary critique, describing the structure of dramas and tragedies and the intentions of poets and playwrights.

These papers are cited — often approvingly, as bracing provocations — and the tasks, the journals, the grants, and the localization studies continue exactly as before. That is not refutation being resisted; it is refutation being absorbed or accommodated because the physical commitments are so vague, if not entirely absent, nothing can truly be in error. Caloric did not have that option as it originated from a physical analogy, and the rule that mapped A to B could be rejected.

However, the deeper concern is not simply about attention in neuroscience. It’s that attention, memory, intelligence, and consciousness are also discrete terms of a single inherited set of observations. The entire taxonomy could be arbitrary and it would be challenging to recognize — not wrong in its details but wrong in the way the four humors were legitimate physical descriptions that did not provide the explanatory power practitioners had imagined.

The humors were studied methodically for centuries, generated a large and internally coherent clinical literature, supported specialist training and professional standing, and produced real observations along the way. Medicine did not fix them. It had to make the entire practice irrelevant and unproductive due to an error signal it could not choose. It could reject humoral explanations only when the term “treatment” was better defined in physical terms (better physical commitments). Importantly, however, that was the result of technological developments like microscopes and antibiotics. What microscopes and antibiotics have in common is that a human does not truly need to understand anything to make use of them. The value is disclosed by merely by possessing and observing through or with them.

Humanity has subsequently benefited tremendously from inventing technologies to generate the error signals that propel science from pure myth. The notion that science has progressed because scientists mounted a clever assault is more exception than rule. Mainly, it entailed demonstrations in which technology (an example of unauthored physical commitments) had been adversarially imposed on the popular description. There was no need to dispute the contents of the room once the lights have been turned on.

These remarks are ultimately directed at how science operates in the brain. The antibiotic was like a block with the red letter “A” on it. We could with no great skill smash blocks together to find physically optimal configurations (what works or does not in the real world), automatically discarding the block labeled H representing “four humors” as not being useful. No human was needed. It was not even an argument specifically targeting humoral theory, and so that case did not operate in the way people imagine science operates: data is scrutinized, cracks emerge, evoking a crisis that necessitates a paradigmatic shift that will be guided by a new generation of scientists. In practice, much of the progression is driven by technology. It is the only distinction that separates us from antiquity. We possess technologies that have created physical commitments for us without requiring any understanding of the unifying principles. We have been capable of making landmark discoveries by, in some sense, playing the child’s game of locally (within our pile) combining the colored blocks to create patterns that temporarily predict or describe physical reality.

Eventually, however, we will lose the error signal, and I think many fields are already losing it: there are no microscopes that can instantly reject humoral theory or the spontaneous generation of microorganisms. There is nothing like antibiotics that can be tested against folk-treatment, immediately rejecting folk science unceremoniously. Those are clear error signals (Is something visible? Does the patient improve? ). Technology has been doing much of the difficult work for us.

All things drift in time, however, and technology is no different. Technology gets folded into the taxonomic classifications, complex mixtures of existing and non existing things layered through autobiographical piles. The technology now on display certifies the often non-physical commitments of the autobiographical piles (e.g. the brain scanner gives “self” and “intelligence” and “attention” the physical grounding that these terms likely lack; if they were one thing, why do these distinct names exist? Why do we study these things? Why are entire careers built on these things? The technology is suddenly complicit.

Grant abstracts must name a cognitive function. Journals need the construct in the title. Press offices want the documentary; the entertaining shadow of scientific work. A result stated in genuinely non-folk terms would likely read as uninterpretable and unfundable. Ironically, the demand that findings be recognizably about mind is what prevents them from being anything other than myth.

None of which is an argument against imagination, or against myth, or for pessimism about what we’ll eventually know. It’s the opposite. What matters is if the process stalls with us stuck telling the same myths, as they will in time deviate from physical reality. We must always be prepared to leave the campsite and venture into the unknown. But I am not sure if large segments of scientific work are up to the task, which is our predicament restated.

The predicament of the 21st century

We now live with the consequences of invented borders that we made more real through our belief in their necessity, and we meet a new wave of AI technologies not as the united front these technologies demand, but as two warring mythologies that disagree on the essential character that human nature should assume for the generations to come. One mythology makes the human primary in response to technology: the traditional figure of the heroic, if not godly, human who transcends the bonds of physical and mechanical existence to restore the rightful order. Although its tone is distinctly agrarian, pre-modern, and nomadic, it ends up rejecting the “back-to-nature” imagery it first evokes; in casting off the physical and mechanical tether it places the human, paradoxically, above nature. The rightful order is not “human, then machine,” but “human, then everything else.”

The rival techno-utopian mythology arrives at the same destination from the other side. Humans transcend physical drudgery and are free to create and understand reality as they choose; benefiting from the unprecedented freedoms of machine life, the only obstacle left is the choice of what shape this new world above the old one should take. Whatever it is, it is definitely positive — and yet no one can articulate why it must be or how it could be realized. Both mythologies, in this sense, fail to qualify as traditional myths, because they are fully unmoored. They are not even embellished representations of physical reality. They are something entirely modern, derived from the luxuries of constantly offloading physical commitments onto machines, which are the only obvious physical entities. We are free to live in the eternal dreamscape of humanity’s shadow. The two rival mythologies organize the contents of the imaginary, so we exist wholly outside nature, as super-normal, supernatural, above-nature and above-reality. And this is not sustainable.

The myths of the past show humans grappling with the realities of physical existence, encoding lessons on civics and responsibility. They drew humans into reality, an ideal orientation toward the physical. Granted, those orientations were guided in part by minority interests — monarchs, the aristocracy — but that alone does not cancel the importance of organizing human behavior with respect to the requirements of physical reality. That is what the myths of antiquity accomplished.

Why such tendencies exist is not itself surprising. Brains are predictive, and prediction seeks to minimize uncertainty; an organized world is a more certain one. And the 21st century is the beneficiary of thousands of years of organization — billions, if we count the lineage of every living organism. Our vantage point, beautiful and poetic as it sometimes is, has also exposed us to endless repetition: optimized, stable, apparently distinct forms that keep resurfacing inside broad unifying categories. The resulting scene is of an over-organized human being with little room left to manage questions of meaning and purpose. All that remains is to organize the organization — to organize even the contents of the imaginary. Pile onto pile. That is the world we now inhabit: imaginers haunted by the unreal, by the impossible life and the hope that it might nevertheless be made real one distant day.

I started with Einstein as the lesson for our moment. A physically grounded storyteller and myth-maker, Einstein did not, in fact, operate in speculative futures — he unified the arts and the sciences, showing that the individual’s humanity is indeed singular, but that its uniqueness is not a wedge driven between an inner and an outer world. His experiences drew him into the organization of physical reality, preserving his singular identity while making the singular universal. And so this myth — the exact symbols I now write — conclude with the young Einstein chasing light once again, in the hope that our hero might help a new generation strengthen its physical roots, ask deep questions, and tell new myths to help us discover our future place and identity in this rapidly changing world. The myth is the first draft. Expect many challenges and uncertainties as the road opens up. Let us find our common ancestral ground, literally walking into the living myths that are accessible to us. Occasionally, memories of some time and place will linger and it will be our great hope to stay there, just like that, forever. But these memories are the reminders of where we have been. As storytellers and myth-makers alike — the old and new Einsteins — we have no need for time. We just keep moving.