(The above phrase is lifted from John L. Casti)
The less you've thought about it, the more likely you are to believe in Reality. Thinking more about it wont necessarily relieve you of that belief, but it will certainly burden it with qualifications.
Science seems to many to be the clear path to understanding Reality. Not only is its (initial) presentation unambiguous and free of unseemly appeals to mysticism, but it works. It allows for startlingly accurate predictions and agreements with experience. However, with some scrutiny science soon looses much of its appeal in the rigorous search for truth. I wont mention in this post just how much Quantum Physics and Relativity smack of mysticism (and it'll be another post besides those to discuss just how unemperical String Theory is), but allow me to expose the circular nature of arguing for Science's hegemony in the reality generation game by citing its predictive ability:
The Scientific Method:
-Observe a phenomena
-Develop a model to explain that phenomena
-Design an experiment to test if your model (theory) will predict the phenomena you observed
-If your experiment gives you the results you were looking for, your theory is supported.
(that should already start sounding circular)
-If one develops a theory and it disagrees with observation completely - the theory is discarded, but if it disagrees slightly, the theory will often be modified. The modifications are intended to allow the theory to more closely approximate the previous measurements, if they dovetail with what we already think we know, great - if they don't, then we'll change what we think we know to fit the new theory and return to step 3 above.
So, we design Science to agree with observation, modify our preexisting "Science" (which is ever-changing) to agree with observation, and then commend it for its ability to agree with observation. Circle complete.
Science is beautiful, powerful, useful, and many other -fuls. It's arguably the best reality generation game in town (and it's likely that it'll be a philosopher of science who is making that argument). But none of those mean it will allow one to grasp "Reality". (I suppose that to defend that I should discuss "Reality" - stay tuned)
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So I spent about 30 minutes typing up a response to this post and the goddamn website erased it. I'm going to see if I can figure out how to post this before I type it all up again.
ReplyDeleteOk, so that worked. Sorry about getting pissy. Great blog by the way, Dan. Looks like the beginning of some pretty interesting stuff. Here's my 2 cents worth on science:
ReplyDeleteYour circular description of science is largely correct, though it fails to recognize the fact that science can sometimes be unexpectedly robust. A scientific model can be constructed to describe a particular observation, say statistical mechanics, and by simply replacing the temperature with the inverse of imaginary time, it will turn out to also effectively describe the phenomena of quantum field theory! This robustness is, I think, not as circular.
On a separate note, I would like to spend a minute to address what I've come to recognize as the fundamental limitation (and strength) of science: it relies completely on reason. This is a limitation because reason in turn relies on the existence of logical units. In math you have numbers and operations as your fundamental units, in physics your have things like positions in space, momenta, masses, etc. In using these concepts to describe Reality, we inherently assume that Reality is composed of a countable set of "things", and that these "things" are completely described by whatever list of attributes we give them. Unfortunately for us the Universe is simply not composed of "things". The reductionist crusade to pinpoint the most fundamental units of matter has run into the brick wall of quantum uncertainty, as it well should have. There are no fundamental particles on a macroscopic scale, why in the hell should the Universe be any different on a microscopic scale? To think so is akin to the old geocentric viewpoint, that the entire Universe revolves around us and that the Sun and stars were put there purely for our benefit.
Of course, modern science has shown us that in many respects the world really does seem to be composed of only a handful of different types of fundamental particles, and they construct an amazingly effect model of the Universe. Here we must keep in mind the valuable lesson we've learned from Quantum Field Theory: when you get down to the nitty-gritty, electrons, protons, and all fundamental particles exist only approximately.
-Luke (brother of Jens)
Luke,
ReplyDeleteI agree that science has a robustness to it that is rarely if ever equalled by other intellectual endeavors, and that the unexpected explanatory power produced by mathematical modeling makes it difficult to not suspect that there are deeper truths being hinted at. So, when I criticize the circularity of the reasoning of the Empericist's argument for science I mean to only specifically that argument, not the whole endeavor of scientific inquiry.
Your mention of scales is interesting. I have wondered how much of my (our?) philosophical difficulties stem from applying macroscopic/anthropomorphic/geocentric conceptual frameworks to microscopic or cosmological problems.
one never knows where to begin with these things.
ReplyDelete------------------------------------------------
first, excuse the form these remarks take.
i take my lead from john cage, who said, ‘traditionally, information no matter how stuffy (e.g. the sutras and shastras of India) was transmitted in poetry. It was easier to grasp that way.’
And from bucky fuller, who said, ‘if you don’t think it’s poetry, go ahead and call it ventilated prose.’
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reality=things are the way they seem
objects seem to have a life of their own.
as if their identity as ‘table’ or ‘tree’ had nothing to do with me.
true or false?
is the identity of a thing inherent in it? is identity an arbitrary label? or otherwise?
i assert identity is a convention whose ‘truth’ is functional.
no ‘thing’ exists independently.
nothing has a life of its own.
identity is defined in relation to other things.
and thus no thing is real
except emptiness
not emptiness as nothingness
rather ‘empty of fixed identity’
and hence, endless potential
like space, which while not a ‘thing’
still allows for all things
the buddha of compassion said to Shakyamuni’s sharpest disciple:
“form is empty, emptiness is form.
form is no other than emptiness.
emptiness is no other than form.”