[MD] Chaos

[David M]

Hi

I understand that the solution suggested by the philosopher of
science Nick Maxwell is that we need to understand what
we value, what we consequently want to attain that is of value,
and develop theories that recognise what we value and what
we ends we are seeking.

Try this:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002386/

ta
David M

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <PhaedrusWolff at carolina.rr.com>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 8:55 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] Chaos


I'm sure you all have read this, but I thought it worth posting here
anyway;

There was a passage he (Phaedrus) had read and repeated to himself so
many times it survives intact. It begins:
In the temple of science are many mansions -- and various indeed are
they that dwell therein and the motives that have led them there.
Many take to science out of a joyful sense of superior intellectual
power; science is their own special sport to which they look for vivid
experience and the satisfaction of ambition; many others are to be
found in the temple who have offered the products of their brains on
this altar for purely utilitarian purposes. Were an angel of the Lord
to come and drive all the people belonging to these two categories out
of the temple, it would be noticeably emptier but there would still be
some men of both present and past times left inside -- . If the types
we have just expelled were the only types there were, the temple would
never have existed any more than one can have a wood consisting of
nothing but creepers -- those who have found favor with the angel -- 
are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like
each other than the hosts of the rejected.
What has brought them to the temple -- no single answer will cover -- 
escape from everyday life, with its painful crudity and hopeless
dreariness, from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. A finely
tempered nature longs to escape from his noisy cramped surroundings
into the silence of the high mountains where the eye ranges freely
through the still pure air and fondly traces out the restful contours
apparently built for eternity.
The passage is from a 1918 speech by a young German scientist named
Albert Einstein.
Phædrus had finished his first year of University science at the age
of fifteen. His field was already biochemistry, and he intended to
specialize at the interface between the organic and inorganic worlds
now known as molecular biology. He didn't think of this as a career
for his own personal advancement. He was very young and it was a kind
of noble idealistic goal.
The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin
to that of the religious worshipper or lover. The daily effort comes
from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.
If Phædrus had entered science for ambitious or utilitarian purposes
it might never have occurred to him to ask questions about the nature
of a scientific hypothesis as an entity in itself. But he did ask
them, and was unsatisfied with the answers.
The formation of hypotheses is the most mysterious of all the
categories of scientific method. Where they come from, no one knows. A
person is sitting somewhere, minding his own business, and
suddenly...flash!...he understands something he didn't understand
before. Until it's tested the hypothesis isn't truth. For the tests
aren't its source. Its source is somewhere else.
Einstein had said:
Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a
simplified and intelligible picture of the world. He then tries to
some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of
experience, and thus to overcome it -- .He makes this cosmos and its
construction the pivot of his emotional life in order to find in this
way the peace and serenity which he cannot find in the narrow
whirlpool of personal experience -- .The supreme task -- is to arrive
at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built
up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only
intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can
reach them -- .
Intuition? Sympathy? Strange words for the origin of scientific
knowledge.
A lesser scientist than Einstein might have said, "But scientific
knowledge comes from nature. Nature provides the hypotheses." But
Einstein understood that nature does not. Nature provides only
experimental data.
A lesser mind might then have said, "Well then, man provides the
hypotheses." But Einstein denied this too. "Nobody," he said, "who has
really gone into the matter will deny that in practice the world of
phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the
fact that there is no theoretical bridge between phenomena and their
theoretical principles."
Phædrus' break occurred when, as a result of laboratory experience, he
became interested in hypotheses as entities in themselves. He had
noticed again and again in his lab work that what might seem
to be the hardest part of scientific work, thinking up the hypotheses,
was invariably the easiest. The act of formally writing everything
down precisely and clearly seemed to suggest them. As he was testing
hypothesis number one by experimental method a flood of other
hypotheses would come to mind, and as he was testing these, some more
came to mind, and as he was testing these, still more came to mind
until it became painfully evident that as he continued testing
hypotheses and eliminating them or confirming them their number did
not decrease. It actually increased as he went along.
At first he found it amusing. He coined a law intended to have the
humor of a Parkinson's law that "The number of rational hypotheses
that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." It pleased him
never to run out of hypotheses. Even when his experimental work seemed
dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down
and muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another hypothesis
would come along. And it always did. It was only months after he had
coined the law that he began to have some doubts about the humor or
benefits of it.
If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law
is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the
general validity of all scientific method!
If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a
multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster
than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all
hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested,
then the results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire
scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven
knowledge.
About this Einstein had said, "Evolution has shown that at any given
moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always
proved itself absolutely superior to the rest," and let it go at that.
But to Phædrus that was an incredibly weak answer. The phrase "at any
given moment" really shook him. Did Einstein really mean to state that
truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most
basic presumption of all science!
But there it was, the whole history of science, a clear story of
continuously new and changing explanations of old facts. The time
spans of permanence seemed completely random he could see no order in
them. Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for
less than a year. Scientific truth was not dogma, good for eternity,
but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything
else.
He studied scientific truths, then became upset even more by the
apparent cause of their temporal condition. It looked as though the
time spans of scientific truths are an inverse function of the
intensity of scientific effort. Thus the scientific truths of the
twentieth century seem to have a much shorter life-span than those of
the last century because scientific activity is now much greater. If,
in the next century, scientific activity increases tenfold, then the
life expectancy of any scientific truth can be expected to drop to
perhaps one-tenth as long as now. What shortens the life-span of the
existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the
more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth. And what
seems to be causing the number of hypotheses to grow in recent decades
seems to be nothing other than scientific method itself. The more you
look, the more you see. Instead of selecting one truth from a
multitude you are increasing the multit
ude. What this means logically is that as you try to move toward
unchanging truth through the application of scientific method, you
actually do not move toward it at all. You move away from it! It is
your application of scientific method that is causing it to change!
What Phædrus observed on a personal level was a phenomenon, profoundly
characteristic of the history of science, which has been swept under
the carpet for years. The predicted results of scientific enquiry and
the actual results of scientific enquiry are diametrically opposed
here, and no one seems to pay too much attention to the fact. The
purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among
many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what
science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the
opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts,
information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is
leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple,
indeterminate, relative ones. The major producer of the social chaos,
the indeterminacy of thought and values that rational knowledge is
supposed to eliminate, is none other than science itself. And what
Phædrus saw in the isolation of his own laboratory wor
k years ago is now seen everywhere in the technological world today.
Scientifically produced antiscience...chaos.
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