This recent Huffington Post article, Science and Reality - Is Science Really Real? by Tony Sobrado, doesn't seem to have attracted any comments*. I suspect there are two reasons for that, 1. the sci-rangers don't recognize the question as carrying the radical challenge to their world view that it does 2. because it doesn't pose the question in a form that would allow them to get their so very valued hate-time in. Here, as Tony Sobrado begins.
We live in a world where science prevails. After all who would argue with it, science has given us computers and planes. On the path to reality many of us might think that science is the kingmaker, presenting the idea that both science and reality is objective and universal - standing outside the mere social affairs of petty human discourse. Science is more than just powerful theories that match empirical data. Scientific theories are far more meaningful and powerful than other representative devices we possess like art because science does not attempt to address reality, science is reality.
Although this is a popular common sense view of science it is also a contentious issue that strikes at the heart of contemporary debates regarding the role of science, philosophy and the ultimate deliberations on reality. This is because science and the pictures of reality that it paints should not be taken for granted by way of unequivocal universality and non-contingency. This point is often completely overlooked. Many treat science and the construction of reality, as universal, timeless and objective negating not just the historical and cultural elements that underpin these practices but also how theories and concepts that once vehemently explained reality now completely fail to do so.
Anyone who has read much of what I wrote will know it's a question I've dealt with quite a bit in addressing the scientism that is ubiquitous on so many allegedly leftish blogs. The question is one that is important for several reasons, among those the intellectual hegemony science practices due mostly to the prestige its utilitarian aspect has. The big money guys wouldn't push STEM education if it wasn't, in the end, about making money by making stuff to sell. Without that utility, science would be, essentially, a hobby.
Oh, but the less angry and hot-headed sci-ranger would say, science is so much more than that, it's the quest for ultimate truth, for a theory of everything about everything. The somewhat more reflective of that minority would, if pressed, admit that was an impossible quest, the intellectual capacity of human beings, even if science does have the key to finding that holy grail, is too finite, our time likely too short (thanks in no small part to science and technology) to ever get there. The dismal prospect is that even what little advance we can make in that direction will die with our species, whatever successors we may have on Earth or whatever our fellow thinkers elsewhere in the cosmos will never be able to know it or use it. Quite a grim prospect for such a would-be idealistic notion, no?
But Sobrado goes far beyond those notions and presents a really important and almost unknown issue for science as the ultimate oracle of reality, the fact that science is not a fixed and never changing truth, that its own history proves that at any given time it contains serious distortions of reality, unknown to those who are using their contemporary science as the oracle they won't admit they mistake it for.
However the initial problem of asserting a timeless and universal reality, instead of a malleable and questionable one, lies in the correspondence between empirically verifiable evidence, and therefore the externally proposed independent reality, and the gap bridged by theories. It is here where the problems begin to unmask themselves and start to question the supremacy of predictive and explanatory power; and even the possibility of a permanently knowable reality. This is because the history of science has a garbage bin of discarded scientific theories that would astound the average layman. So what's the problem with this? Surely science is full or hypothesis and theories that don't work? This is of course true but in the case of discarded theories they once worked as accurately as those that we cherish today in terms of observation, prediction and explanation.
So what can be going on here with reality? In general, scientific realists would advance something like an ascending treasure chest picture of reality. That with each new theoretical framework that is established we get just that bit closer to a true underlying reality. The disposal, progression and evolution of maxims about reality are required in science and we have seen this with Big Bang cosmology - for instance the addition of inflationary theory to account for anomalies like the uniform distribution of cosmic background radiation in the observed universe. When these anomalies arise scientists adapt theories, adding new dimensions to them that can be verified and once this works out as expected we can add them to the picture of reality and we move on like the Higgs Boson. Scientific realism is a treasure chest of grand theories building expansively on previous knowledge, ironing out the creases and getting closer to reality by chopping away at theories that are no longer adequate, no longer required and therefore no longer part of reality.
Which is a good expansion on what I generally refer to as the cemetery of discontinued science, as real a part of science in its day as any ideas that persisted. And as what has been taken into the tent that covers what is "science" for academic, political and social purposes has been expanded to such areas as psychology, sociology, and the other soft sciences which have produced entirely more of that failed, inadequate science than physics and chemistry. With the decision to make biological science address behavior and social interactions under the guise of natural selection, one of the prices paid was to insert the attempt to address topics too vague, fleeting and elusive into what is, in itself, the most vital of real sciences. It is likely that deal with the intellectual devil was bound to happen, but it should never have been allowed to happen without the continual admission that what was being done wasn't as secure as the experimentally verifiable findings of chemistry and physics, the conclusions not subject to a firm guarantee of reliability. But the false prestige of allowing it to pass as equally sound has won, over and over again, to disastrous results that most certainly did not "work".
The problems addressed by Sobrado aren't unknown to even the most solid and most reliable of the physical sciences, though. And it is due to the importance of these issues to those hardest of sciences that we already know that science isn't any such key to ultimate reality. It can't unlock the mystery of its own foundations, it can't elucidate most of our experience, the selling of science as that key is, today, known to be a fraud and a con. Though sci-guys who are peddling their promissory notes of materialism on that basis get away with it as much as some discredited radio or TV investment huckster or hallelujah peddler. Those who buy that bad paper (metaphysical paper, that it is!) so, so want to believe in its value and claim that they are scientifically immune because, you see, they don't believe in anything. Thanks to their superior sciencyness, they KNOW.
So, the question should be far more controversial than it is. I suspect it's because the same people who can be counted on to run up the comment count of the nearly daily post about Tyson vs. Hamm, don't really understand what Sobrado was writing about. And scientists who do understand that aren't eager for the general public to understand what science is and what it isn't, what it can do and what it can't do. Which is an all too human failure that is more typically admitted within the humanities and religion than it is in and about [see also Sagan and Tyson] science. Science would work a lot better if they were honest about it. And it is how science, actually, if unadmittedly works, anyway. Tony Sobrado concludes this way
In a certain sense this is all one has to agree on to be an anti-realist. This then allows the anti-realist to account for the success of any scientific theory throughout history because ultimately scientific realists today must be instrumentalists about all previous theories highly successful and empirically verified theories throughout history. This then puts the realist in a compromising position where now it is they who cascade on the wrong side of likelihood because they (n)ow must essentially argue a form of exceptionalism about the present compared to the past that they cannot also logically guarantee in the future.
* I don't do Facebook so I can't do it.
The "cascading treasure chests" is based on Platonism: the idea that there is a reality behind the reality we experience, and it can be known if we just strip away the intervening layers.
ReplyDeleteAristotle, the father of logic (and science, in a sense) would find this nuts. It's a curious amalgam of Aristotle and Plato, btw, and its probably more Neo-Platonism, if one bothered to examine it carefully.
Sobrado's explanation of how science discards theories is basically Kuhn's idea of paradigms., with a shift in emphasis. I say this to approve Sobrado, not to denigrate him.
And one of the problems with those discarded theories is Godel: his theorem of incompleteness applies here. For every answer one theory provides, it also raises questions a new theory alone can answer; and so it goes, endlessly. Which means, of course (and Godel was a confirmed Platonist, there's the irony) we never reach "ultimate reality." because no theory or paradigm can contain it, or not raise questions that theory/paradigm cannot answer.
Hume, the last great empiricist of the three (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) understood the limits of empirical understanding: we can make simple but obvious statements, like "This stone is heavy." Or we can form opinions, synthesized from observations, which cannot be proven empirically. It's a dead end, philosophically (and scientifically): what we can be certain of in our statements is worthless information, what we can speculate on cannot be proven empirically (scientifically).
I've been thinking about this in terms of computers, which really haven't revolutionized human existence. Now they will, I'm told, because I can wear a bracelet which will tell my house when I'm up so the coffee will start brewing and the radio come on. How this fundamentally changes me as a human being, no one can say. But it's the internet world, so it must be good!
Well, good for the guys selling the bracelets and the software/hardware to turn my coffeepot on (and I'd need a new coffee pot. I use an electric kettle and a Chemex and pour the water myself). So a big win for manufacturing; but for me?
Just as TV was supposed to be a tool of education, according to its inventor, the internet is supposed to have ushered in a brave new world of "interconnectedness". Well, where is it? Human nature remains unchanged, and if anything everyone runs to the group they like and hides there, or snipes at other groups for insufficient allegiance to the ideas of the "right" group.
Same as it ever was.
And, back to Sobrado: yes, the present is always exception, because we are here. Obviously all the past was meant only to lead to us, and our excellence. What else could it have led to? We're here, aren't we? That, of course, is the Richard Dawkins' argument about why Cambridge is so superior to Southeast Asia; more Nobel laureates, you see. The past only exists insofar as it created "now."
And the future? Well, from Dawkins' perch it's guaranteed, so what does he care?
That bracelet sounds like a big pain to me. I suspect that, with time, if the thing worked, it would start telling people when they want to do things instead of the other way round and people who are susceptible to that would figure that the bracelet knew better than they did what they want. The credulity of people about machines that they think can think is incredible.
ReplyDeleteI read that Philo Farnsworth wouldn't have a TV in his house because he disapproved of the programming. I love that name and love that his great insight came from looking at furrows in a field. I can report that I feel somewhat less stupid in the years after I dropped out when the switch to HD came in. Don't even watch movies on the thing, I should pay the disposal fee and get rid of it, I suppose. And I'm thinking of limiting my computer time to a maximum of an hour a day. It's so seductive to keep reading stuff and listening to stuff. I doubt on my death bed I'm going to regret that I didn't spend more hours online.
I picked up Bonhoeffer's "Letters and Papers from Prison;" been meaning to read it for years. The first few paragraphs were so lucid and intelligent, I realized how much time I waste on-line.
ReplyDeleteI still do, but I'm going to cut back and eventually end it. It's a kind of drug, inducing lethargy and thoughtlessness. It's a chance to chat, occasionally; but more often than not it's just a drug, the other other glass teat, as Harlan Ellison named TV so long ago.
The "web" is well named, it is all of those and I've never read more than a fraction of what I should have. Probably worse than a lot because I spent so many hours practicing. It's amazing that so many musicians are actually well read. I'm not.
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