Re: [A-List] How "scientific" is science?

[paul illich <paul_illich@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sabri wrote:

>[snip]
>> 'Science' in the abstract is merely a process of open-ended
>> inquiry guided by a 'prime directive' of self-correction.
>
>Dear Tony,
>
>Let us dissect the above a bit:
>
>> 'Science' in the abstract is merely a process of open-ended
>> inquiry
>
>The first question I would like to ask is "an inquiry of what?"
>'Religion' in the abstract is merely a process of open-ended
>inquiry as well, is it not?
>
>> guided by a 'prime directive' of self-correction.
>
[snip]

I would not accept the seperation of the pursuit of open-
ended inquiry from it's methods, though I think that "a
'prime directive' of self-correction" is only part of
what the 'scientific method' consists in.

There are a number of philosophical and rational tools
of logical that are regarded as fundamental to the notion
of science, and of 'objective' analysis. It is these
that rule other forms of knowledge out of order in
unearthing data about how the universe ticks. If you
accept rules such as Occam's Razor, for example, as
tools for ensuring that our data collection is followed
by adequate analysis, then many religious forms of
knowledge will find their tenets, precepts and thoughts
about process and about super-natural entities simply
are rendered irrelevant - by which I don't mean that
they are necessarily wrong (though in some areas I'd say
that they are provably so), merely that logic and
rational analysis are not relevant to belief.

Occam's Razor is just one tool among many, but is a
key one: if you have, say, five explanations for a
set of observed results, then, lacking other data,
you would opt to deem as most likely that which begs the
least questions. Note that this tool is about likelihood
and probability, not 'ultimate truth'. Thus, if I see
a light in the sky that I can't identify, there may be
the following 'theories' to explain it:

1] it is the arch-angel Gabriel, or similar;

2] it is a metal machine from Aldebaran full of little
   green men who have come all that way to probe our
   digective tracts via our back passage, over and over
   for reasons we, erm..., can't comprehend;

3] it is ball lightning;

4] it is a weather balloon;

5] it is an optical illsion;

6] it is an hallucination, cos I shouldn't have eaten that
   damn worm lurkin' at the bottom of that darn bottle;

5] it is, literally, an Unidentified Flying Object, in
   that it flew, was an object (or appeared to be) and
   I, um..., couldn't ID it..

The first two are the 'explanations' that our culture
would dictate the uneductaed opt for - the first, we
dropped from the trendy parts of our pop culture around
three centuries back, the second is current. They beg so
many questions I hardly know where to start.

All the others are plausible to those who have an education,
and having decided which is begging the least questions
would give a direction for further enquiry. What things might
you look for to see if one of these might be the 'true'
'explanation'? Hallucination? get drug tested and have a brain
scan... Optical Illusion? check out weather conditions, and
have a look at your car windscreen with a torch at various
angles in the dark... Weather Balloon / ball lightning?
talk to the local met office... Naturally, we shie away from
the last option, as we like to feel we 'know' something and are
often fearful if we don't 'know', though often this is the
option that is most likely.

Which brings me to this -

Chris wrote:

[snip]
> No, it is not QED. The proponents of the hiv theory
> cannot support their claims. It is for them to prove
> their positive assertion not for me to disprove a
> negative.
[snip]

This ignores a philosophical point that I accept,
though others in the philosophy of science seem to
dislike it, which is Karl Popper's ideas about
falsification. Falsification is an aspect of the
tools of logic as applied to the sciences, just as
Occam's Razor is. This suggests that you can NEVER
prove anything is so, merely ask 'what might prove
that this is NOT so?'. If you have a theory you
look for an experiment, not done before, or done in
different disciplines without your knowledge and with
diffeent ends, that will have consequences that it
could not have if your theory is false. If you find
the consequence is there your theory has withstood
a test - but is not proven to be true, only shown
to have some coherence. Should the consequence not
be shown to be true, then your theory is false.

That is to say, Chris, that you cannot prove a
positive assertion. The ball is precisely in your
court. You wanna play, you show your hand.

Regarding HIV, most of the theories I have heard
that deny it is a virus, and that that virus kills
indirectly throught he destruction of the immune
system, and that it was first seen, with any (retro-
spective) confidence, in the West in an airline pilot
that, as I recall, died in the seventies or very early
eighties... have not convinved me that they offer a
more likely explanation than the virus theory, indeed
they usually seem less likely. This does not, of course,
mean they are wrong, and it is possible that the virus
theory is wrong, but at present no-one has said anything
remotely convincing (to me) about alternative explanations.

Science excavates facts and then applies theories to those
facts in order to suggest a process that has other
predictive consequences. Frequently, as scientists need
funding, these predictive consequences become meaningful
through the development from theory to technics, as in
the semi- and super-conductor. In these cases, we have
machines we know work, based on ideas from quantum mechanics,
that are highly counter-intuitive (on a ley level, and higher,
as is suggested by the responses to QT from Einstein ["God
does not play dice with the world"] and Schrodinger [or
Schrodinger's Cat fame]), but are implied by the mathematics.
the technic advances in computer technology were ultimately
based in the accceptance of these theories, thus in effect
proving the reasonableness of the theory - though not actually
proving the theory to be true, they did falsify some aspects
of the Newtonian paradigm, followed for three hundred years
as the most viable theory.

Math, as implied above, is a key tool to sciences claim
to a special place in the hierarchy of knowledge. The
rules of math appear applicable to all aspects of the physical
world about us. Newtonian and Cartesian science (shown in
the early twentieth century to be a special case, not a
general case) were based upon relatively linear math. The
math was pretty deterministic, and much technological
advance that was based upon it obviously worked that the
Victorians got pretty arrogant about it. This of course is
amongst the reasons that Einstein and Schrodinger were
disconcerted, and why Popper was vilified for suggesting
the truths of science, whilst higher truths in many ways,
were not ultimate truths.

To see how math and science (in the Victorian model)
might clash, without looking at QT (which causes brainache),
you can look to economics (the 'dismal science') and at
fluid dynamics. Both exemplify the play of complexity and
chaos. They are not deterministic in the Newtonian manner,
and thus are more difficult - they do however offer
statistic patterns, and so have predictive value. In
both economics and fluid dynamics this is related to the
three-body problem, recognised increasingly as a real
problem for math and thus science even by Newton. Here,
we can take an equation with two elements and predict
outcomes correctly til the cows come home. Add just one
more element and complexity and chaos emerge. In both
economics and FD millions of elements interact. The only
way to say anything meaningful is to use statistical
methods and/or to use simplified models. The former can
not say X will occur, merely state a probability that X will
occur; the latter is simply going to make you wrong.
Economists simplfy the math using small numbers of actors
in their models, or by invoking 'contimuums', whereby you
may have two variable elements in the equation, but you
fix the third as nominally infinite. You can see that this
results in nonsense if you label the continuum with a
real world correlate. eg, perhaps the model assumes a
continuum of producers, or of consumers - where in the
real world will you find an infinite undifferentiated
plane of either? Nowhere, that's where. Thus, results
are useless, except in so far as you can convince other
actos in the markt that they have great meaning, so they
buy or they sell those shares. Economist are thus hucksters
selling snake oil, sometimes! However, statistical correclation,
though less sexy than hard and fast answers, offers useable
conclusions based on probability. This underpins much of
modern scientific endeavour.

This is to say, we have a world view today that the Greek
Heraclitus, 3000 years ago, or Immanuel Kant, 200 years
ago would recognize, even if most ordinary people then
and now would struggle. The base of objective reality is
unknowable. All is flux. But statistical information
firms the ground even if we never can 'know'. It is this
that differentiates between intelligent design and
darwinian theory, so that despite the attempt by the
church to conflate the two as equally meaningful, as all
scientists today are forced to admit that 'truth' evades
them, the two ways of approaching what we DO know are
fundamentally different.

Religion as open-ended inquiry, cannot with any honesty
suggest that the truths it unearths take it any nearer the
unknowable ground of all being or further from it, as its
methods are not fixed to any known math or logic from which
we have derived working physical machinery, whereas 'science',
whatever the failings of some scientists as individuals (who
may claim ultimate truth is what they deal in, which it isn't,
or that ID and a belief in a deity is a rationalizable part
of science, which it isn't), can and does have a direction -
it, century by century, grain of sand by grain of sand, is,
on average, peeling more layers off the onion of the universe's
secrets than it adds when it stumbles into the odd blind alley.

The fact that it can never reach a firm core where there are
no more questions, and all is certain, is neither here nor there,
and nothing to be defensive about.

Paul
Boston>London

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