Keywords

1 Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that Inuit Indigenous Knowledge is, by commonly accepted standards, a scientific system that produces reliable and robust predictions about atmospheric, hydrological, and biological systems and thus is deserving of equal stature to standard model science in Arctic governance decisions.

2 Background

2.1 About Indigenous Knowledge (IK)

IK is a system.

IK is “a systematic way of thinking applied to phenomena across biological, physical, cultural and spiritual systems. It includes insights based on evidence acquired through direct and long-term experiences and extensive and multi-generational observations, lessons and skills. It has developed over millennia and is still developing in a living process, including knowledge acquired today and in the future, and it is passed on from generation to generation.” [1].

IK is integrative.

IK focuses on understanding how systems such as air, water, and humanity work in concert. This is in contrast to the usual practice of Western scientists, which seeks to understand the laws of nature on as finely splintered a level as possible.

IK does not use measurement.

The Inuit people have developed an understanding of nature that uses experience instead of measurement as its fundament. Each participant in the IK process recognizes that the other participants also assign unique meanings to observations. For example, while modern observers consider the night sky at a given place and point in time to be an objective phenomenon, the Inuit do not.

The archaeoastronomer Clive Ruggles explains: “Traditional knowledge of the skies can be very localised, and even personal, as among the Inuit, for whom knowledge of celestial phenomena is ‘in varying degrees, specific to communities, families… When imparting information, elders frequently made it plain that they were speaking for themselves, that their opinions were not necessarily correct in any absolute sense, and that other elders might, and in probability did, have different views.” [2].

The Inuit people use no measuring instruments (compasses, sextants, barometers, etc.) and thus neither take measurements nor use any analog of “objective” data in their scientific system.

2.2 IK Produces Useful, Reliable, and Counterfactually Robust Results

Science is observation- and experiment-based study of the laws of nature. Philosophers explain that the laws of nature are distinguishable from other regularities that the universe happens to be conforming with by being “counterfactually robust,” which is to say that these laws would exist under a wide range of alternative conditions and scenarios [3].

The Arctic provides a dynamic laboratory for testing meteorological and oceanographic predictions. Testing of IK by communities across the Arctic coast for at least 800 years demonstrates that the Inuit are able to make useful predictions based on the laws of nature [4].

Anthropogenic climate change and government regulations have provided additional and ongoing counterfactual robustness testing of IK, since the warming Arctic and government restrictions on hunting and other food security decisions have changed regularities that the region has conformed with for centuries. “For example, shifts in animal migration patterns and shifts in vegetation are occurring as a result of changes in temperatures, salinity levels, precipitation rates, snow coverage, soil integrity (erosion), ice coverage, etc. Such changes require adjustments in gathering, hunting and fishing strategies. Additionally, we face new dangers as we attempt to navigate through storms with increased intensity, rotting ice, timing of sea and/or river ice formation and change in ice thickness.” [5].

The survival of the Inuit people attests that IK is a robust and reliable scientific system which is unsurpassed for making useful collective predictions based on the laws of nature; the Arctic does not grant mulligans.

3 Human Superposition

Quantum systems, unlike classical systems, are systems in which information is incomplete and incompletable. Quantum information is incompletable because, as Niels Bohr explained, reality is too rich to be completely captured from any single perspective; there is room for mutually exclusive perspectives that offer partial, valid perceptions.

A quantum state is an observer’s personal—that is, Bayesian—probabilistic expectation for the outcome of an experiment on a quantum system [6]. This personal probability is subject to continual updating via ongoing experience. A quantum state, thus, exists only as a quantified expression of an observer/experimenter’s personal belief, not as a physical reality. The quantification of belief allows an observer’s personal expectations to be analyzed via mathematical formalism. Quantum states are additive, and superposition refers to the sum total of a set of quantum states.

In the case of IK, each Inuit elder possesses a quantum state, that is to say, has probabilistic beliefs about the Arctic and the planet understood as a single system—a system about which they possess imperfect information. These beliefs are based not only on a lifetime of experience but also on the information about the observations and understanding of their families and friends that are communicated in daily discourse and the experiences of their people going back centuries that are stored and communicated in oral histories.

When the Inuit elders gather to make food security decisions for the coming year, they achieve human superposition; that is, they collectively develop and communicate a prediction on how to achieve food security based on the sum total of the unique perspectives and knowledge bases of each.

Quantum theory can provide us with keen insights into the elders’ decision-making process. Quantum theory, as understood via QBism, says that observers are not incidental to the world but matter as much as electrons and atoms. The physicist Christopher Fuchs explains that “the greatest lesson quantum theory holds for us is that when two pieces of the world come together, they give birth. [Bring two fists together and then open them to imply an explosion.] They give birth to FACTS in a way not so unlike the romantic notion of parenthood: that a child is more than the sum total of her parents, an entity unto herself with untold potential for reshaping the world. Add a new piece to a puzzle not to its beginning or end or edges, but somewhere deep in its middle and all the extant pieces must be rejiggled or recut to make a new, but different, whole. That is the great lesson.” [7].

By recognizing that reality is participatory, not passive, we can infer that the Inuit elders are not merely making predictions, they are also providing their people with a road map of the actions that will help create the future that is predicted.

4 Integrating the Observer into the Observation

In Western, i.e., observer-abstracted science, there is a “tradition of removing the observer from the description in order to guarantee objectivity.” The problem with this approach is that observers attach meaning to data and thus cannot be truly objective.

The computational scientist Russell K. Standish explains that by “explicitly recognising a role for the observer of a system, an observer that attaches meaning to data about the system, contradictions that have plagued the concept of complexity can be resolved.” Standish further explains that “Explicitly acknowledging the role of the observer helps untangle other confused subject areas. … Quantum Mechanics can also be understood as a theory of observation. The success in explaining quantum mechanics, leads one to conjecture that all of physics may be reducible to properties of the observer.” [8].

Explicitly recognizing the role of the observer also opens to door to our understanding IK. In IK, observers are recognized as integral to their personal observations. IK uses disparate perceptions among the elders as the basis for complex food security decisions that incorporate predictions about numerous phenomena, including weather and the migration patterns of various species.

The collective ability of the Inuit elders to make useful predictions for their communities based on the personal observations and beliefs of each elder demonstrates that integrating observers into observations does not result in solipsism. Instead, the mutual recognition of non-definitive perspectives is a basic condition that allows the elders to store and make use of millennia of Arctic observations [9].

Consistent with IK’s observer-integrated approach, these predictions—as well as the hunting and other actions that test the predictions—are made without sextants, barometers, or other devices used to capture and communicate objective data. The sold state physicist N. David Mermin explains that the “term ‘measurement’ plays no fundamental role in” quantum mechanics. Rather, the measurements “that play so central a role in the orthodox theory are just particular examples of actions taken by a user of science, usually with the help of a large piece of apparatus.”

5 Language Reflects IK’s Integrative Approach

The complexity of observer-integrated science explains the ability of the Inuit people to use an oral tradition to preserve, communicate, analyze, and make predictions based on environmental information that has been developed across centuries. Integrating observers into observations requires that the language used be able to accommodate great complexity. IK’s integrative approach to understanding the world is reflected linguistically in the Yup’ik language, which can combine multiple types of information in a single word. For example, there is a Yup’ik name for a certain fish, Imangaq, which is translated into English as “black fish.” The Yup’ik name, however, encodes more information than the English and Latin names for the fish.

English ordinary proper names, names that are potentially generic, such as “black fish,” can and do routinely refer to a singular thought, for example, a specific type of fish. The ordinary proper name identifies the fish; however, it provides no additional information. The Imangaq’s Latin name, its binomial nomenclature, encodes more information because it identifies the specific type of fish and also links it to related species.

The Yup’ik name Imangaq is more complex than binomial nomenclature in the connections that it references, because it connects the fish to its environment—including humans.Footnote 1 Imangaq designates a specific type of fish and also refers to “the education youth gain when taught how to obtain this fish …”

Inuit Indigenous Knowledge embodies a unitary concept of the world as a single system. Although this may, mistakenly, be viewed as an overly simplified view, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger pointed out that when multiple systems engage with each other, “the best possible knowledge of a whole does not necessarily include the best possible knowledge of all its parts, even though they may be entirely separate and therefore virtually capable of being ‘best possibly known,’ i.e., of possessing, each of them, a representative of its own.”

It is because the Inuit people understand the environment—including their role in it—on a non-divisible basis that they are able to store and process observations without measurement, since the very concept of measurement is based on understanding the laws of nature in a fractionated format.

Quantum computers seek to take advantage of the superposition of quantum bits—qubits—to solve calculations far faster that transistor-based computers could be capable since transistors are capable of existing in only a single state at a time. However, since qubits and, thus, quantum computers operate only under rigorously controlled laboratory conditions, quantum computers remain in rudimentary states of development.

With IK, the superposed elders bring to the prediction-making table are beliefs that take into account a sum of information that would take storage technologies and information processing power far beyond current technologies in order to evaluate The Inuit elders make predictions about the Artic environment—and about how humans should behave as part of the system in order to maximize the likelihood of our survival—that far surpass in detail and accuracy the outputs from even the most sophisticated computer-aided environmental modeling of the Arctic.

6 Conclusion

IK is a scientific system that sets the gold standard for making predictions about the effects of human activities in the Arctic. Accordingly, IK should be given at least equal status with other scientific systems in Arctic governance decisions.