The science paradox

July 20, 2015July 20, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ Leave a comment

Is science defined by scientists or is it the other way round?

Scientists proceed by trying to prove their hypotheses wrong and can be certain only when they know they are wrong: ‘ … we make measurements, we make models and we try and give some answers. The key thing to understand is science is never right. It’s the one discipline where you can be absolutely wrong, you can be shown to be wrong, but it’s just the best we can do given our current knowledge – that’s very important.’ (Interview on BBC Radio 4 Today Programme on 16^th June with the scientist Brian Cox.)

So is science identifiable as the set of scientists who can never know for sure when they are right – and can those scientists be right in saying: ‘science is never right’? For like the barber who shaves everyone who doesn’t shave himself and therefore can and cannot shave himself, these scientists can and cannot be right. But there is a deeper paradox at the heart of science, namely science does and doesn’t owe its presence to the work of scientists – being populated and popularised by scientists who do not know whether their current state of knowledge is right, yet who strive assiduously to prove that it is by doing the opposite.

Mike Laidler

The ‘dark matter’ of science

April 17, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ Leave a comment

There is more to existence than can be captured by that part of it called explanation, because explanation is merely a part of it. Accordingly, there is a dark matter in science that science attributes to the ‘dark matter’ of the universe – the 95% of the ‘known’ universe that remains inexplicable. This inexplicability is currently described as the problem of ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’, as if the problem lies with the facts of nature. However, the problem of explanation does not rest with the facts of nature, for science’s inability to explain is actually explanation’s inability to explain.

Explanation is a selective statement of fact that reveals, upon reflection, a fact about itself – that there are many ways to look at reality, but no way to see it as a whole. And the selectivity in explanation creates the parameters of the inexplicable – in terms of what is necessarily excluded. It doesn’t matter whether this is intentional or unintentional, the result is the same – explanation carries a cost that we accept as a fair trade, a price that we are willing to pay to find out what we want to know. And so long as the knowledge we glean accords with the facts we know about, we are content to claim that the facts can’t be wrong, as if the facts are the source of their explanation, indeed as if knowledge belongs to those facts. Factual knowledge becomes the agency of its own ignorance.

The relative nature of explanation highlights a longstanding problem of what it actually explains, for explanation has to be more than a matter of faith or acceptance, indeed it purports to be more. But the whole basis of explanation sits on a point of faith – that one thing explains another – so the universe owes its explanation to something else – facts that we deem ourselves privileged to know from a position of neutrality. However nothing is altogether neutral, not even the ‘nothingness’ of dark matter, and especially the urge to know. Everything known is relative to a point of reference. We tentatively proceed to commission explanations as ‘objective’ observers of reality, but objectivity is a subtle version of subjectivity, for there can be no objective point of view without a point of view – objectivity owes its existence to a subjective presence.

All knowledge attests to a fact that objectivity tries to preclude – the inexplicable nature of subjectivity in the fact of the known, in the nature of existence itself. Explanation has much to do with what is said to be the fact of the matter, on the premise that it is the ‘objective’ facts that are saying something about themselves. We like to think that the fact of a mental entity sitting in the midst of the universe has no relevance to the place or form of explanation, so we believe that the place of explanation is outside us, thereby giving credibility to explanation – and to make doubly sure that our explanations are not misunderstood as belonging to us, we claim that they belong to science, as if science is out there waiting to explain things for us.

Unfortunately this view of explanation is a myth and its fault lines are evident once we stop keeping faith. The myth is built on a false belief in what causality explains. We believe that everything has a cause and that causes explain how things change. But there is a problem; whereas we can see how this works in reality, in our perceptions of reality, it fails as an explanation of how ‘existence got here’ – that is, in the realities outside our participation as subjective entities, where the explanation of the universe and existence is meant to be found. Our view on causality represents our predilection toward the idea of what comes first – first being a fact of elevated psychological significance in our partial viewpoint on reality.

Explanation doesn’t work as an explanation of existence if explanation implies that everything owes its existence to something else – for the evidence we uncover as a validation of that paradigm merely pushes the problem back one stage, into the realms of dark explanation, currently manifesting as the ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ of science. And the problem gathers momentum with the observation that everything has a definitive cause – as if the change, of which causality is the vehicle, is explained by hitching a ride.

Paradoxically, the energy invested in the elevated status of explanation is the true dark matter awaiting its enlightenment in the realisation that explanation neither explains things for us nor ourselves in the bargain. Science sees the problem otherwise, in terms of a shortage of facts, in terms of the dark matter out there in nature, on the premise that matter is a conversion of energy explicable by the fact that it happens. But how are we to calculate a conversion of energy, such as we are, to exist in the midst of the universe in a form that is animated to explain itself and the rest of existence in the process? Are we not deluding ourselves that existence is inherently explicable because it happens, in the same way that our explanations are intrinsically viable because they ‘explain’.

Mike Laidler

Where is reason?

April 10, 2015April 10, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ 1 Comment

The mind in nature sees something nature cannot – itself. It introduces unique faculties into nature, such as intention, design and reason. Reason is regarded as our ‘highest’ faculty – a fact seen as a part of nature and apart from nature. We observe that the facts we illuminate and explain in nature don’t reason or find things out about themselves; nevertheless, we conclude that everything belongs to something else that causes it to be the way it is. We use our unique faculty of reason to tell ourselves that we are not alone, adducing that our perception of the world as it is, is caused by the world as it is.

Everything has a cause, including causality. Causality is a statement of reason that the mind projects upon the world. We impute powers to causes by identifying with them the fact of change – as if the cause holds the answer – as if nature explains life or the brain explains thought and reason. But causality isn’t the whole story. We create explanations in reason by identifying one fact with another, cause with effect, now said to be ‘the reason’ that the facts have given us. But reason is a fact of mind that is unlike any other fact that other facts ‘alone’ can supply – in the body, brain, nature, number, pattern, process, structure, order or evolution. The mind is a fact in addition, a reality uniquely placed to recognise a change in reality, beginning with itself – a change that is then ‘explained’ by causes acting mindlessly, without will or reason, leading some thinkers to deduce that the mind is an illusion.

Explanation is not all it seems. Causality ‘explains’ one thing in terms of another, and we think that the same applies to our thinking because the mind cannot be fundamental. But reality exceeds explanation – things are simultaneously one thing and another – perception does and does not mirror the world, the molecular world is and is not alive, nature does and does not comprise and compose our intentions. Reason pursues the fact of the ‘must be’, but paradoxical facts defy reason and rob us of the conclusiveness we try to invest in an objective world, nevertheless we proceed to draw conclusions by ignoring their paradoxical nature, and our own – we consider that the mind may be prone to illusion but reason cannot be – so paradox is resolvable by the ‘hard’ facts upon which our reasoning rests because fact is definitive and paradox poses but a temporary contradiction in terms.

In explanation, the terms are everything. We begin by naming things, then proceed to draw connections. We call it reasoning. Reasoning seeks to explain itself by referencing its terms to a world outside, but ‘outsides’ are facts relative to ‘insides’. We project our reasoning onto the world, to find it there – thereby to attribute our reasons to the facts. We distil from our findings the principles that are ‘there to be discovered’ from all our observations, thereby to construe a fact that pre-empts proof – that things are not alone. Proof requires the equation of one thing with another, so our reasons are seen to gain their authority from principles that are bigger than us, in reasons that equate to the facts of an outside world, in facts acting without reason or intention.

Likewise, science is an application of reasoning to a world outside. We see the world as filled with science; but we don’t really find ‘science’ there, except that we create the fact of science in the world. In reality, proof is relative to the mind that considers something proved according to the principles it brings to the equation. Furthermore, because reality is bigger than science, we find that the ‘facts of science’ amount to no more than our interim conclusions. Undaunted, we conclude that science belongs to the outside world, as if our reasoning can now be validated as a fact of science, in facts that can be discovered to speak for themselves. But however conclusive we may find the facts to be, the fact remains that only minds draw conclusions.

No fact does our thinking for us, not even in the brain. Finding the cause of thought in the brain does not explain the change to thought in the nature of a physical world, neither does attributing that change to evolution. Meanwhile, we continue to invest our reasoning in the facts by seeking to confirm a match, thereby to conclude that there is an ultimate conclusiveness to be found ‘out there’, in the facts of the external world. But our humility veils our hubris; for in deducing that the mind also owes its source to those same externals, we give ourselves the authority to claim that there is nothing better to conclude, since the facts must select our conclusions – facts telling us that reason is grounded – confirming the fact of what is there, as if what is the case is better known from the nature of something else, as if reason resolves the paradox of change by proving that things change without really changing.

Believing in Belief

March 29, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ Leave a comment

What is truth? How do we know that we know? Is it all a collection of beliefs? Even science may say one thing today and another tomorrow, so an individual who follows yesterday’s precepts might now seem ridiculous – as if today’s explanations are closer to the truth. Then does that make the truth, even factual truths, belong indefinitely to tomorrow’s understandings?

Then how do we truly know that we know? Should we stick to our senses, or is there more to know? We live and learn, and form opinions based upon experiences that lead to differences of opinion, even among experts. Facts can be inconclusive, but they can’t make our decisions for us in any event. Experiences are far from simple and those we take to be conclusive are usually filtered through tacit decisions about what counts, the primary filter being belief. Our confidence in the facts is really a confidence placed in our tacit beliefs about the facts, certainty playing second fiddle to these beliefs. Hence belief enables us to make decisions when we don’t know any better, the belief supplying the feeling of knowing better.

Knowing anything strikes a balance between the knowing and the knowing otherwise. The balance point is determined by belief. Beliefs fabricate our certainties based upon images of reality. Beliefs are the active mental screen on which those images are projected, together with the elaborated images of our senses. Sometimes we recognise our beliefs, seeing belief as a form of thinking for tidying-up our thinking. But if belief is a power we exert over our own minds, it is also a power exerted over us by the collective mind of our culture. Often we can’t tell the difference or don’t bother to try.

We see as we believe, believing we see as we see. Believing in belief flourishes amidst the urgency to know. In a paradoxical world, belief is the possibility inviting us to entertain impossibilities that just might be true. Not knowing is the only restraint we can exercise, but the exigencies of decision making may not allow us the scope for this luxury. And the various forms of disbelief, non-believing and unbelieving all function as forms of belief serving as alternative social co-ordinates bearing an aura of superior neutrality. Meanwhile the question about what is truth converts into an issue over what may stand as proof – as if proof is the unequivocal imparter of knowledge that remains independent of what we believe.

If it is ‘true’ to say that belief is the last refuge of the individual, then knowing that we believe is the last refuge of our integrity as individuals. Then what of truth? Perhaps belief affords a more pragmatic approach to truth – in accepting that truth is greater than our knowledge, and that the truths we make do with reveal more about our tacit systems of belief than we can ever discover by looking to the facts as absolutes, as decisive matters of fact. But the same applies to the truth about our beliefs, for we cannot find an absolute in their content simply by believing in our beliefs.

Thus it may be true to say that knowledge is power, especially within our various spheres of influence and cultures of belief, including the religious, the political, the economic and the ‘factual’, but who can say that knowledge is truth? Alternatively it might be more prudent to consider a more basic truth about knowledge: knowing that we believe is the safest form of knowledge, believing that we know the most dangerous.

Strong Personality

March 17, 2015 ~ philosophyalive ~ Leave a comment

It is said that science tells us who we are and how we got here, but there is also something about us that tells us what science is and where it is going.

Science teaches us there is something about personality that we overlook in treating it as a personal possession. Personality is not a fact locked-away inside us, or a thing fixed in ‘the self’; it is also a property of nature, culture and the universe at large. But as a property of nature, it changes the nature of nature – the nature of change being a moot point that we tend to overlook both personally and scientifically.

Everything is subject to change: we change, nature diversifies, the universe evolves, and in the process something ‘impossible’ happens – things become more than they were – and the same thing happens to the nature of nature. Likewise, personal existence is embedded in nature yet marks a dramatic shift in the nature of nature. It opens up new boundaries of possibility with planned designs and purposes that defy scientific definitions of what nature is and does.

Personality is a strong force for change, a power in the universe, which we treat as a weak force, mirroring our weaknesses to the extent that we regard it as belonging to us as a property confined to our nature. However the very thing we strive to possess on our terms is the very thing we are bound to lose; whereas personal existence, as a property of the universe, endures in the nature of change as it shapes, transforms, and elevates.

Everything ‘got here’ through powers of change and everything is subject to changes that herald further expansions of power. ‘Impossibilities’ are overcome, evincing the magnitude of change in realities and realisations newly transformed. Staying as we are defines our incompletes and defies nature in a reality we try to make of ourselves and keep for ourselves. Change invites us to become something more, to grow into life by leaving something behind, thereby to gain capacities and faculties we never had – as did nature ‘in itself’.

Mike Laidler