We pride ourselves on being rational animals, but when we look closely we manifestly are not. But, in spite of our assumptions to the contrary, our irrationality is more of a strength than a weakness. Indeed our irrationality is essential. The time has come to stop being apologetic for it.

Because, although we assume that we live in a rational world, when we look closely we manifestly do not. Our minds have evolved in response to that reality. Our problems arise when we pretend that reality is rational, or as Penrose puts it, ‘computable’, and that our minds ought to be rational in order to model it properly.

Looked at this way, the rationality into which not only computers but all the machines and systems of rules we can ever construct are irrevocably locked is making our problems much, much worse. Because, while we use machines and systems more and more to model reality, they are in fact incapable of doing this with the reliability and accuracy which is what we believe to be their unique strength.

It is hard to imagine a better setting in which to model this clash (between art and science is one way of putting it) than general practice. Battling through a busy surgery, saving lives with both hands, as we say, every patient having more and more problems however deeply we look and every problem having more and more layers of complexity, it is as obvious as anything could be that we are doing something which is beyond computation. Bits of it are, of course, but the whole thing, never.

But this truth is very far from obvious to the outsider. The outsider is enthralled by the power and the sophistication of his new modelling tools and he knows that every aspect of our work that he looks at could be done better by using them. He sees it as only a matter of time before our entire role will be reduced to a formula and every situation we deal with will have a single, correct answer.

In the past this was a theoretical question of no practical importance, but now the tools are with us to make it a very practical question indeed. The new tools have forced a confrontation with the problem and the cracks are opening wide. Say ‘Ah’.

The failure of the architects of the Millennium Thames footbridge to predict that it would wobble dangerously when people walked across might perhaps have lessened the confidence, but there is little sign that it has. Here was a carefully-planned structure, made of materials whose physical properties are known with great precision, which was presumably designed using the most sophisticated computer simulations available, by people who knew exactly what they were trying to prevent - a wobble when people walked across it. And in spite of all this they got their answer completely wrong. The bridge was closed for an indefinite period one day after its opening.

At the same time in another part of London the Department of Health was pressing on with its program of audits, protocols and information systems with the promise that it will eliminate error in the unimaginably greater complexity of the health provision of the entire nation. Hubris entirely undiminished.

It may be true to say that every bridge failure, every aircraft crash ought to be preventable. Though even that is questionable and in the case of boats at sea it is generally accepted that freak waves, with massively-tall, vertical, breaking faces will occur capable of sinking a boat of almost any size. Such monsters are described as non-negotiable Human things are different. Not just quantitatively but qualitatively. Not just in extent but in kind. Every death is not preventable in medicine. Good deaths are amongst our most tangible successes.

Our generation has experienced a change in view comparable to the ones which led to the Copernican revolution, the Darwinian revolution, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

We have started using new tools which have brought a revelation that something doesn’t fit. The record we are so diligently assembling simply doesn’t make sense. Because it is being composed of corrupted data being compiled in a corrupted way. And, just as might be expected, the first people to see the problem are generalists working on the front line whose job it is to make the thing work as a whole.

The corruption runs deep. Our age is characterised by a quite extraordinary dominance of the executive over the people who actually do things. The Cambrian explosion of doctor-regulating bodies at the end of the 20th Century speaks of desperation, a fad, a cult, a playground craze. But the even more extraordinary thing is that the people who actually do things largely acquiesce. Even in our proudly democratic culture we display the ‘serf mentality’ which Vaclav Havel bemoaned as a characteristic of the Russian people.

We seem no longer to trust the evidence of our own eyes, of our own judgement. Technical hubris has brought with it nemesis for the personal aspects of life. We have experienced a massive loss of confidence in our human abilities. Everywhere these abilities have been replaced by system. The popular perception of computers is that they have destroyed people’s jobs, but it is much worse than that. They have usurped and humbled our humanity and left us with little reason for being here. And we are being told that this change is inevitable; it is progress; it is the future. Worse than that; we are telling ourselves these things. We are abdicating our birthright, and we are doing it willingly, with a smile.

And the whole thing is based on a misunderstanding, a false belief that the world can be sorted out for good; a gigantic simultaneous equation solved for the millennium. The end of history. The end of science. Aren’t we clever…

The new understanding is that life is not a simultaneous equation, however much logic tells us it ought to be. It has no single solution, however intricate and beautiful we believe that solution could be.

Our lives have opened out into two parallel and utterly disparate paths. We are moving forward in two ways which cannot be formally reconciled. Structure and freedom, the fixed and the fuzzy, the professional and the amateur, the modern and the post modern. Two by two they walk along. The specialist and the generalist, the game and the life, the virtual and the reality, the ‘them’ and the ‘us’. Somehow we need to link these paired hands with the magic of balance and respect. And that can only be done with the vital ingredient mystery which classical science denies. And it has to be done without denying classical science.

It seems a ridiculous idea. As ridiculous as matter being made of waves and particles but never of both at once. But that mystery is something which classical science tells us is true.

So try this ridiculous idea for size: Perhaps, at last, rigid, classical thinking has reached the end of its two and a half thousand year tenure. Perhaps our new confrontation with the profound mystery of reality is going to force nothing less than an historic accommodation with romantic philosophy, from which classical philosophy diverged in ancient Greece.

If new ideas do not seem ridiculous, they seem dangerous. The Inquisitors who forced Galileo to recant his discoveries probably feared chaos would descend, that the dark ages would return, if their orthodoxy was overturned. But the Earth stubbornly continued on its course around the Sun, refusing to remain at the centre of the universe as the inquisitors would have preferred. Chaos did not descend, and instead mankind moved on to a higher understanding.

Today science is our defence against the mysticism, mumbo-jumbo and pseudo-science which are such paradoxical features of our supposedly scientific age. Medicine provides particularly clear examples of this phenomenon. But although it might easily appear that doubting the computability of nature is playing into the hands of this dangerous anti-science and threatening chaos, in fact it is nothing of the kind. Nor did the acceptance of the bizarre uncertainty of quantum mechanics represent a capitulation to irrationality. Truth, stranger indeed than fiction, cannot for ever be denied. What’s more, moving on to a more sophisticated understanding is the legitimate way to spike the guns of those who reject the whole of science because they find the present orthodoxy leaves undeniable parts of their experience unexplained.

*

Just before I started my study leave. Christopher Everett lent me a book written by a second world war fighter pilot, Richard Hillary, who was shot down during the Battle of Britain. It was written, quite clearly as a kind of therapy, during his recovery from a long succession of plastic surgery operations for terrible burns to his face suffered while escaping from his blazing cockpit. It was called The Last Enemy and enjoyed great popularity in the post-war years. Another classic.

The following passage described an incident when Hillary and a fellow pilot who had been up at Oxford with him were alone in a railway compartment. They were travelling south to fetch two new Spitfires for their squadron, which was based at Montrose in Scotland. The friend, Peter, whom the author paints as an extraordinarily admirable young man, certainly the hero of the book, who was killed a few days later, reluctantly tried to put into words his private reasons for believing in the war: