To Truly Understand Coral Disease, We Must Shift Our Perception

In my time in the reef aquarium industry, I have seen much misinformation contradicting published peer-reviewed data. Some of these ideas stem from ignorance – many people haven’t been exposed to contradictory ideas to those pushed by mainstream media and manufacturing in the sector. Another subset of misunderstanding comes from individuals’ perspectives of coral writ large. Many knowledgeable people have difficulty understanding concepts such as holobiont-pathobiont dynamics, the application of ecological principles to the microbiome, and the interaction between a coral microbiome and the larger ecosystem they live in, whether in or ex-situ.

Much of this is because the information science has uncovered about these concepts is relatively foreign to Western conceptualization. To explore this idea, I will briefly analyze Western thought and some of the new directions it has taken in the last several decades that may help people better conceptualize coral disease.

Early Western Thought

Much of early Western thought was divided between rationalism and empiricism. Rationalism was supported by individuals such as Rene Descartes and Baruch Spinoza. The phrase “I think therefore I am” comes from this school of thought. Rationalists believed that knowledge was derived from reason. Reason was generated from the human capacity for consciousness and recognition of external objects. i.e., I am alive; I can observe the world around me, and over time, I can utilize deductive reasoning to determine how the world I live in works. Any form of knowledge could be gained through humans observing an objective outside world and then using logic to make sense of that world.

On the flip side, empiricists believed that knowledge could only be generated from firsthand experience and that humans were born as blank slates built to accumulate experiences. In contrast to rationalists, who posited that an individual could fully understand the world via logic alone, empiricists argued that one must have experiential knowledge of an object to gain helpful information about it. Philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume supported this school of thought.

The core debate between these two concepts was that of reason vs experience.

Eventually, Immanuel Kant came around and made both schools of thought relatively obsolete with his “Copernican Turn”. Kant believed that instead of the external world influencing how we understand it (through logic or experience), our perception of external objects is regulated via the mind/psyche. Our mind is always categorizing external inputs and experiences through an innate humanistic lens. This thought process led to natural conclusions. Kant divided the external world into “phenomena” and “noumena.”

Phenomena are things we can perceive. Noumena are things that exist external to human perception. The concept of noumena is somewhat dense – it exists as a theoretical limit to human knowledge and understanding. One angle of this is that objects may exist as a “thing in itself.” An example of this is an apple. We can define an apple through its shape, taste, and color – all of our sensory experiences – but beyond those subjective experiences, what objectively makes it an apple? There is no way to understand its intrinsic “appleness” without filtering it through our perception. This concept can be applied to more abstract ideas as well. We can try to comprehend how atoms, quarks, etc, influence and may make up the fabric of reality, but we can never directly interact and experience these concepts in much of a tangible way and thus never fully comprehend them.

Kant’s reconceptualization of epistemology (the study of knowledge) and ontology (the study of being) through the Copernican turn paved the wave for many new schools of thought and forever changed philosophy.

Fast Forward to Now

In his 2006 book “After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency,” Quentin Mellissaoux outlined the beginnings of a critique of Kant’s Copernican turn.

He highlights the irony of deeming Kant’s concepts as “Copernican”. Copernicus and Galileo pushed the boundaries of human understanding by proposing and then finding proof for the heliocentric model of the solar system. This laid the foundation of modern science and helped to disenfranchise a human-centered view of the external world.

The irony is that the Copernican turn resolidifies this human-centric perspective by highlighting that the external world is defined entirely via human interpretation and that there are harsh and imposed limits on our understanding of the world/universe because of the human mind.

Mellissaoux borrows a term from Husserl and calls this Kantian conceptualization of subject-object relations “correlationist”. This implicit “correlationism” has become ingrained in Western society. Every aspect of our perception is filtered through an anthropocentric/humanistic lens, from looking at a car and seeing a funny face to applying human disease models to our understanding of coral pathology. This implicit bias significantly limits our pursuit of knowledge and also helps contribute to our impact on the climate as we continue to view the natural world as an object made for us to control, not as a biological system that exists external to us.

In contrast to the Kantian belief of the noumena and human limits to knowledge, speculative realists such as Melissaoux posit that humans can understand systems beyond our perception through various strategies.

Enter Science

The primary strategy we will focus on is scientific pursuit, like how Galileo and Copernicus utilized science to outline how humans were no longer the center of the universe. New advanced tools such as metabarcoding, particle accelerators, and deep space telescopes have allowed us to view pieces of the natural world that otherwise would have been utterly inaccessible. The more we learn about the external world with the continued development of science, the more humanistic interpretations of that world begin to fade. While we may never be able to directly experience black holes, quantum mechanical systems, or microbial interactions firsthand, we can utilize semi-objective tools such as mathematics and science to uncover predictable patterns in these systems.

The more knowledge we uncover about these phenomena, the more we realize how small our place is in this universe and how alien and incomprehensible much of the natural world is to us. Simply put – we don’t know what we don’t know – and at this point in human history, that’s a lot. In part, the realization of how truly beyond us much of the universe can help foster a respect for the natural world, which can begin to break the anthropocentric conceptions we all hold – we can start to respect and view nature as equal, not as something we are superior to.

In short, while most of this article covered a history of philosophy in the West, my point was to flesh out common underpinnings we all have as humans and how those assumptions can be challenged. Much of my research into coral disease has caused me to attempt to shift my perceptions of the natural world against these programmed impulses. Removing a human understanding from a natural system is difficult work, but it must be done to truly comprehend these creatures and their complex biochemical interactions with their environment.