Re: Epistemology 201: The Science of Science

From: Albert Wagner (albertwagner_at_cox.net)
Date: 03/11/05 

Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 11:58:16 -0600

Wolf Kirchmeir wrote:
> Albert Wagner wrote:
>
>> Wolf Kirchmeir wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>>> [snip elaboration of the above]
>>>
>>> Why should there be an "overarching view of Nature"? That's not the
>>> domain of theory. Your demand for "centre, cohesivenes, overarching
>>> view of Nature" seems to me to be a demand for myth.
>>
>> Why should there be only knee-jerk reaction by theoreticists to the
>> discoveries of engineers? And why the subsequent rush to patch what is
>> essentially a very ugly and disjointed Standard Theory?
>
>
> What discoveries of engineers? The one field of engieering discovery
> whose history I know better than most people (but still not very well,
> it's an avocation not a profession) is that of the steam engine. The
> engineers built them, the scientists analysed them, the analyses of the
> scientists were used by the engineers to build better machines. Often,
> scientist and engineer were the same person: science and engineering are
> at bottom different attitudes to a problem. And the whole of
> thermodynamics came about because the scientists needed a theory to
> explain their data well enough that they could predict the performance
> of the steam engines built by the engineers. It was a very klugy thing
> until Kelvin and others invented statistical mechanics so they could
> build mathematical models that worked.

No problem. As you pointed out engineers (or scientists
functioning as engineers) invented the steam engine and most
other engines and motors in use today. Neither relativity nor QM
was required to either invent, build or enhance them.

>> If you see no important difference between an ugly Frankenstein
>> monster sewed together from unmatched pieces and the transcendent
>> beauty of the natural human body, then my remarks have no audience in
>> you.
>>
>> If you see no difference between a beautiful and elegant algorithm and
>> collection of kludges and patches, then my remarks have no audience in
>> you.
>>
>> The Cosmos is a whole and arose from a whole. Any theory claiming to
>> describe it in holistic terms, rather than simply name and measure the
>> parts, ad hoc, must be as beautiful, whole, centered and cohesive as
>> Nature itself.
>
> That's a religious attitude, not a scientific one.

False. It not only has nothing to do with supporting religion;
It, in fact, attacks the religion of materialism, reductionism
and instrumentalism.

What it has most to do with, is evolution of the Mind; the whole
purpose of the mind in evolutionary terms is the building of
better and better models of reality, so that prediction is based
on reality, not mathematical abstractions nor illusions. Knowing
the truth about reality has much more survival value than
coincidentally predictive mathematical theories, modified after
the fact to accommodate what scientists/engineers discover.

> More precisely, "The
> Cosmos is a whole and arose from a whole" is an expression of faith. I
> have a good deal of sympathy with it. I detect Emersonian
> transcendentalism in it, and the Romantics. And a good dose of Steiner,
> too, come to think of it. Keats said "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, --
> that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know." If you haven't
> taken the time to read Wordsworth and the other Romantics, you'd
> probably find them congenial. Try William Blake, too - he's usually
> called a pre-Romantic, but IMO he's the real thing, and Wordsworth,
> Keats, and the others weren't nearly as toughminded and consistent as he
> was. Unlike them he knew and wasn't afraid of the dark side. Emerson did
> too: He said, "There is a crack in everything that God has made." But
> those who invoke Emerson nowadays produce a wishy-washy watered down
> version of his ideas; not that many of them know he is the source.

Thank you for the mini-tutorial. BTW, my daughter's Masters and
PhD theses were on William Blake, so I have a leg up there.

>
> But science isn't religion.

But poorly done and interpreted, it spawns religion, e.g
materialism and reductionism. (Not to mention anti-theism)

> Scientists do like beauty, too, but if they
> can't get it, well, what works is good enough until something better
> comes along.

If they were in fact open to something better and less vigorous
in their religious defense of the status quo, then what you say
might be believable. As is evident by the pseudo-scientists and
pseudo-mathematikers on this NG, it is not.

> The reason science has become what you call "naming and
> measuring of parts" (a somewhat question begging characterisation of the
> enterprise) is that what you want science to do can't be done. Probably
> because we are merely human, after all (and that's more of a religious
> than a scientific reason.)

Of course it can be done. But it is a project that was discarded
in favor of an instrumentalist approach to theories. Now Science
dances to the tune of mathematicians, i.e. the tail is wagging
the dog. Instrumentalism in the design of theories is a great
evil, in that it avoids empirical falsification and allows
theories to grow so bloated and unwieldy that it becomes almost
impossible, politically, to back up and take another fork in the
road. It removes from science the proper goal of discovery of
Nature and places it in servitude to mathematical theorists,
frantically attempting to support a crumbling and misleading theory.

>
>> That you do not understand this says that you, like Bob, value only
>> predictive ability in a theory and are unconcerned that a predictive
>> theory may also be beautiful and elegant in it's simplicity. The fact
>> that it is not so, is the primary reason that it is rejected by so many.
>
> Firstly, I do like elegant and simple theories. But I've noticed that
> "elegant and simple" usually is a nice way of saying "simple enough that
> I can understand it."

I don't think that it is 'usual', but it does often happen.
Rather than discard such criticisms out of hand, though, why not
explore the deeper roots of the criticism, e.g. the evolutionary
drive of all living things to build better models of Nature?

I encountered a similar phenomenon in programming, what is called
today something like 'agile programming', where, after the heat
of creation, in haste to capture a thought on paper, a clumsy and
awkward implementation of a brilliant idea is 'collapsed' or
'condensed' in a recursive procedure of rewrites into a simpler
and more elegant implementation. The 'simplicity' of the result
is deceptive, in that it captures a great deal of complexity, in
a tiny, beautiful and elegant algorithm. Furthermore, the
process of 'collapse' is guaranteed to result in a generalization
that has considerably more utility than was originally intended.

>
> Secondly, you're assuming I don't understand your p.o.v because I don't
> use it in critiquing science, and if anything reject it as a valid
> critique. I claim that it's because I understand it that I don't use it
> as you do.
>
> To paraphrase Wilde: "A theory is rarely beautiful and never simple."

Oscar Wilde? What did he know of scientific theories?

>
>>> Myths do have explanatory power, but it's not the same kind of
>>> explanation as theory provides. "Myths provide meaning. Theories
>>> enable prediction." (I'm quoting somebody, but I can't recall who.)
>>>
>>> IOW, "explanation" is a word with several meanings.
>>
>> Wolf, you, of all people, should be extremely cautious in lecturing
>> others on word use.
>
>
> I wasn't lecturing - why do you persist in reading reminders or comments
> as lectures? Do you really need IMOs and AFAIKs etc littering these posts?
>
> Anyhow, I'd like your comment on my observation that what you apparently
> want as an explanation is a myth - a "significant story that gives
> meaning and purpose to life."

You are not even wrong. You are totally off track. I already
have a religion, or if you prefer a Myth, that offers a
'significant story that gives meaning and purpose to life' and it
is in no way dependent on scientific explanations of anything.

> Your desire to have science fulfill the
> role of religion is IMO a sign that traditional religions have failed to
> meet your need for a story that expresses your faith. (And I use IMO to
> signal that this is a tentative inference based on (necessarily)
> incomplete information.)

Your statement above erroneously assumes your premise. As I said
before, you are so far off track that you are not even wrong. 

-- 
"I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based
on the field concept, i. e., on continuous structures. In that
case nothing remains of my entire castle in the air,
gravitation theory included, [and of] the rest of modern physics."
	-- Albert Einstein in a 1954 letter to Michele Besso.

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