J. Mark Inman

A Philosophy of Science:

After reading Deb’s comment on my last post: This Answers, “What is your Quest?” I would like to respond to it in full here:

OK…I’m not the one who can or wants to argue from inside scientific theory. This is the concession I have to make for what follows in terms of the argument of creation from the standpoint of physics. However, I see science as such as begin built upon human experience of the world, not at the fundamental level of revealing any truth beyond human experience at all.

There is an assumption scientists make, that seems to be true, that beginning from experience and inducing meaningful descriptions of these experiences is universal beyond the experience of humans alone. Essentially, this is the idea of Newton, Galileo and Copernicus- that what applies to an apple falling on the ground on earth applies to a rock falling to the ground on a distant planet in a distant galaxy that we will never see. This is not something that can ever be proven to be true, we assume it is true because it seems that it is true and it benefits human understanding of the world around us. So where you assume that it is limited to just the human experience, the scientist assumes otherwise and just accepts this at base level or no science would ever get done at all. And we are curious people.

We can explain only what we can perceive, what our brains and collective knowledge can “come up with” in the way of explanations.

Again, you must look at the assumed truth that what we learn about the world through our experience and reasoning can be applied universally. There is nothing that says you are wrong here, Debs, an assumption is just that, an assumption, but science allowed us to build technologies that allow us to see and perceive more about our universe. While it might be true that we can never hold a mirror to the universe as Baudrillard might say, it is true that we can bring alien experiences onto our level of understanding. For example, it was only a few hundred years ago we treated illnesses of “bile” with leeches, we then developed instruments that allowed us to look at our own cell structure at which point illnesses were known to be caused by bacteria and viruses. More recently, we discovered prions. What this tells us is, that the effective treatments that come about as a result of science actually correspond to something more universal than our own naked eye experience, despite only inducing general theories about the patterns found in our bodies observable by our senses.

The key here is the idea of extrapolation. If a pattern emerges within our senses, we can extrapolate that pattern outside of our senses in such a way we can have predictable results. Thus we are not limited to only our experience, but are given the ability to reason within our experience and extrapolate beyond it.

theories that work for the tasks we want to complete or that explain what our limited senses can see or think. I believe that science can thus come up only with new fictions and that these are useful.

I don’t think there is a true polarity between fiction and non-fiction. Fictionalized stories based on real life events can sometimes be more true than what we call “reality TV” or many documentaries. Perhaps you are saying everything has a fiction element, and I think there is some truth to this for an individual when dealing with experience, but as a collective whole, the scientific community, while not infallible, most certainly has a statistical advantage over other forms of non-fiction in revealing truths.

However, it’s also my view that to believe we can get a handle on what created or destroyed the universe, that we can somehow externally describe “what is” in any “objective” sense is that which most endangers our co-existence with “other” including the earth. I do not see any curiosity as “objective.” I do not accept that any knowledge of the objective will be truly known.

And this is an issue I will have to explore more, and realize my thoughts on this are not quite so solidified, but currently, I think the problem here is more upon how we view the language that describes what is “objective” and what is “other” and what is “knowledge” as opposed to accepting what those things probably are, either a priori or through meaningful correlation. In other words, the problem of objectivity is specifically grammatical in nature and has very little to do with real experience outside of how we project our language problems on reality itself. Of course, logical positivism is so ingrained in our culture that I am not surprised this fallacy exists, but it is akin to believing everything written in a book is forever true because it can’t be erased. In our context: speech grammar requires that we objectify the other to communicate in submission to a subjective context. However, the language of hard science is different than the language of speech. It completely voids the subjective context by introducing subjects as objects in the system or is able to limit the objects to the microcosm of the lab, sans-subject. Granted, there is a human element and we get problems like what is known as “Publication bias” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias) and this creates an inherent subjectivity that is not truly scientific, however, the aggregate of scientific work voids the distinction of subject and object by treating them the same. This accomplished by stating problems and their solutions in a well defined, formal language. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_language).

We have questions and working hypotheses based on concrete concerns. We can know that which is our “objective,” that is, that which we believe helps us function or survive. Theories can answer only the questions they ask. That’s not a criticism of science but a limiting factor in its potential wisdom.

We must here describe the differences between the sciences in more detail than I did earlier. Soft science asks a question about the world, sets up an experiment to collect data about this question and then deduces an answer to the original question to confirm or deny the theory. Soft science has a subject. This is a method with particular flaws because the theory precedes the data collection and can have true effects on the outcome of the experiment. For example, a recent study that was in the news recently from a psychologist who did a study on ESP “proved” there is evidence for ESP based on the statistical anomaly that 53% of test subjects would choose a particular type of photo over a blank screen. Because the hypothesis from the very beginning was “is there ESP, yes or no?” any statistical anomaly will have a yes answer despite the results. The problem with this method is that there is no way to explain the statistical anomaly. Thus the problem of the “objective” in the method of which you speak. However, if the experiment were conducted as a hard science experiment, ESP would be only one possible explanation and the results would be inconclusive and merit more data and no objective would have been reached. So, the wisdom is there, it’s just compartmentalized based on the methods necessary. Since that was a study in psychology, I think that the true answer is a question of the value of psychology as a science as opposed to psychology as a practice.

I see human Being as always “in the middle of” the unfolding, thus also our knowledge. Our view is never from the outside. I think this perspective provides a way for us to avoid “logical” or theoretical arguments over solipsism or scientistic thinking. Both can exist and serve different purposes; however, in the end, both are merely descriptions from a different point of view; both regard a different aspect presence and perhaps a different directedness of concern.

What science is, is something not human at all. It is a total, artificial system that is not specifically anthropocentric, but that humans can recognize and participate in with any other reasoning machine- In fact, computers are constantly participating and making decisions in science and even finding new math theorems. While many people might think that because only humans and their inventions have been doing science, only humans can do science, the true scientist would say, that this is a logical fallacy and recognize it as an argument from final consequences. There is nothing that prevents the dolphin from being a scientist other than the dolphin’s own choice to not care to participate. Perhaps it is the lmited reasoning of the dolphin, or perhaps it is just a cultural divide. The fact is, most humans don’t care to participate in science either and in this way are no different than dolphins and their relation to science, but the sciences are most egalitarian organizations in the known universe as they are available to anything that can reason to choose to reason. While there are politics involved- and politics and science are not usually compatible, and sometimes the process is overbearing, the hoaxes and fallacies are eventually (ideally) discovered and the light shines brighter.

But I don’t want to finish with the light of reason, because it misses your point completely. The light of reason has torched us in the past, why should next time be any different, and you are correct with this warning. But here is the necessary clarification, it is not the dangers of science itself we need to be careful of, it is the dangers of hubris, ignorance and the political and economic interests that drive our culture in relationship to science that will cause these dangers that is the matter of true concern. But this is an anthropological topic, related to people and relationships with technology and power, science is just a method for determining certain truths- the human still can accept or reject this method and at no time can the method be applied to itself without some totalized “objective”. And we must understand that not all truths can be determined this way, either, just the ones we can know within our means and ability to err. But are the ones we can know, all the ones of interest to us? This is unanswered, and was the subject of my post on entropy.

Since we can say that our universe is always increasing in entropy, we can also define the big bang, or the inception of the universe as that point where there was the least amount of entropy in the universe we can call a “zero point”. We say a system has a lot of entropy when there is a lot of unknown information about this system. Since entropy is always increasing, the amount of unknown information about a system is also always increasing. This does not necessarily imply *no information at all at that zero point*, instead it implies, if smooth, that in the moments before the inception of the universe– *potentially unknown information must have been decreasing towards a singularity* (i.e. the lower bound of potentially unknown information in the universe- or what can and can not be determined) of what information is possible to know… i.e. the Hamiltonians of the entire universe. Therefore, a quest for the theory of everything is also the quest for the law of the lower bound of the total potential unknown information in this universe with respect to time. QED

We can further simplify the question to: “is the lower bound of potentially unknown information of the universe knowable to us or elsewhen?”

This is a simple single variable differential equation of unknown information with respect to time. Thus, asking the question, is this question possible to find, or “elsewhen” is specifically important to all physicists and cosmologists because it asks whether the theory of everything is answerable within the realm of science itself.