"Never Act as Though Any Single Perspective Can Comprehend the Whole..." More from Joseph Weizenbaum

I will, in what follows, try to maintain the position that there is nothing wrong with viewing man as an information processor (or indeed as anything else) nor with attempting to understand him from that perspective, providing, however that we never act as though any single perspective can comprehend the whole man.  Seeing man as an information-processing system does not in itself dehumanize him, and may very well contribute to his humanity in that it may lead him to a deeper understanding of one specific aspect of his human nature.  It could, for example, be enormously important for man's understanding his spirituality to know the limits of the explanatory power of an information - processing theory of man,.  In order for us to know those limits, the theory would, of course, have to be worked out in considerable detail.

Before we discuss what an information -processing theory of man might look like,  I must say more about theories and especially about their relations to models.  A theory is first of all a text,  hence a concatenation of the symbols of some alphabet.  But it is a symbolic construction in a deeper sense as well  the very therms that a theory employs are symbols which,  to paraphrase Abraham Kaplan,  grope for their denotation in the real world or else cease to be symbolic...

I am going to break in here and call your attention to the remark of Stephen Hawking I pointed out the other day in which he called for excusing his branch of physics from the most basic requirements of physics, for it to be exempted from exactly this search for the "denotation,"  that is demonstrating correspondence of his symbols, to an actual entity represented in the real world, the physical world, the world that science has as its only legitimate subject matter.  He even called for his "universes" to be exempted from logic, the means by which such denotation could be found.   The extremely bizarre call for physics to be exempted from its only legitimate subject matter was done, not only with the tacit acceptance by the materialist-naturalist-physicalist - you can safely read "atheists" - who took his book to its bosom, but, in the case of the physicists or scientists among them,  without objection to him also demanding an exemption from what is supposed to be, according to them, the entire and only real reality AS PROVED BY THE METHODS AND PROCEDURES OF SCIENCE .   Demanding that one perspective, the one in which they obtain their fame and living, can comprehend the whole of an entity far larger than the one Weizenbaum addresses in this passage, the real UNIVERSAL set, in which people, in the materialist sense, as physical objects,  are merely elements.   As of now, I'm unaware of a formal demand from elite physicists from an exemption of that sort, at least not one which is articulated as such.

For Sean Carroll and the others, it has to be asked how they can maintain that religious people, the ones who make no fundamentalist pretenses to the subject of their belief being knowledge in the sense of scientific knowledge,  are illegitimate in holding the supernatural, defined as non-material, non-physical, not held to be subject to the limitations of the physical universe,  is real when they accept the call to do the same thing for their beliefs about physical reality,  releasing their beliefs about the physical universe from the properties of the physical universe?    It should be asked how long physics and cosmology, which has been taken on a quest to kill off God by atheism,  can hope to maintain the reason for their repute and renown with that kind of stuff being said by the most famous among them.

Continuing:

... The words "grope for" are Kaplan's, and are a happy choice - for to say that terms of symbols "find" their denotation in the real world would deny, or at least obscure, the fact that the symbolic terms of a theory can never be finally grounded in reality.

Breaking in again,  perhaps it is the frustration of looking for entities, "other universes" etc. and failing to find evidence that they are at all grounded in reality that leads Hawking to seek the exemption for his branch of "science" from the most basic requirement that it be about physical reality and held together by a logically coherent case that what he imagines has some correspondence to physical reality.   That attempt NOT being seen as an enormous scandal within physics, especially in its openly materialist faction, is, frankly, disgustingly hypocritical.  The demand would seem to attempt to bypass the sad fact that their theory can never be grounded in reality, moving to a place in which its preeminence is derived, exactly, from its being exempt from having ANY ground in reality.

Again:

Definitions that define words in terms of other words leave those other words to be defined.  In science generally, symbols are often defined in terms of operations.  In physics, for example, mass is, informally speaking, that property of an object which determines its motion during collision with other objects.  (If two objects moving at identical velocities come to rest when brought into head-on collision, it is said that they have the same mass)  This definition of mass permits us to design experiments involving certain operations whose outcomes "measure" the mass of objects.  Momentum is defined as the product of the mass of an object and its velocity (mv), acceleration as the rate of change of velocity with time (a = dv/dt), and finally force as the product of mass and acceleration (f = ma).  In a way it is wrong to say that force is "defined" by the equation f = ma.  A more suitable definition given in some physics texts is that force is an influence capable of producing a change in the motion of a body.  The difference between the two senses of "definition" alluded to here illustrates that so-called operational definitions of a theory's terms provide a basis for the design of experiments and the discovery of general laws,  but that these laws may then serve as implicit definitions of the terms occurring in them.  These and still other problematic aspects of definition imply that all theoretic terms, hence all theories, must always be characterized by a certain openness.  No term of a theory can ever be fully and finally understood.  Indeed, to once more paraphrase Kaplan,  it may not be possible to fix the content of a single concept or term in a sufficiently rich theory (about, say, human cognition) without assessing the truth of the whole theory.   This fact is of the greatest importance for any assessment of the whole theory.  This fact is of the greatest importance for any assessment of computer models of complex phenomena. 

A theory is, of course, not merely any grammatically correct text that uses a set of terms somehow symbolically related to reality.  It is a systematic aggregate of statements of laws.  Its content, its very value as theory, lies at least as much in the structure of the interconnections that relate its laws to one another,  as in the laws themselves.  (Students sometimes prepare themselves for examinations in physics by memorizing lists of equations.   They may well pass their examinations with the aid of such feats of memory,  but it can hardly be said that they know physics, that, in other words, they command a theory.)  A theory, at least a good one, is thus not merely a kind of data bank in which one can "look up" what would happen under such and sch conditions.  It is rather more like a map (an analogy Kaplan also makes) of a partially explored territory.  Its function is often heuristic,  that is, to guide the explorer in further discovery.  The way theories make a difference in the world is thus not that they answer questions, but that they guide and stimulate intelligent search.  And (again) there is no single "correct" map of a territory.  An aerial photograph of an area serves a different heuristic function, say. for a land use planner, than does a demographic map of the same area.  One use of a theory, then, is that it prepares the conceptual categories within which the theoretician and the practitioner will ask his questions and design his experiments.

Perhaps I should apologize for using this passage to profile my enormous problem with what Hawking said and its embrace by Sean Carroll and others, clearly motivated at least as much from their hatred of religion as for any scientific purpose.   But what Weizenbaum pointed out about the relationship of science to the physical universe it was invented to study, in terms of theory "groping for" its denotation,  perhaps finds its most stunning illustration in the demand for an exemption from its exigencies by today's most celebrated physicist and cosmologist.