Comments on: The limits of science

By: assisted living

assisted living — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 02:39:14 +0000

Great article – I saw your article on Bing! Thanks!

By: alQpr

alQpr — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 06:01:26 +0000

Bart, Your apparent inability to decide whether science cannot (in sentence 1) or can (in sentence 2) explain values can be resolved by noting that (contrary to your identification in sentence1),to explain values is *not* the same as to assign them.

By: J. Reyes

J. Reyes — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 07:20:34 +0000

Thanks, Good post..
This -isms are helpful in giving explanation to the explainable, we just accept some things as it is, like a watch that we don’t have the tech to open, we all know its working, 25 years ago, i dream up about looking at matter as a tube, the harder you look the smaller it becomes, but as I reach the enthropy things gets bigger again. Its like a twisted circular tube that was viewed like the IAEA logo of the ATOM.

By: Bart Jacobs

Bart Jacobs — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:11:31 +0000

Wrong. No amount of progress of science can “explain” what ought to be, i.e. assign value and meaning. It can eventually explain the processes that cause a certain person to accept a certain morale, but that’s not the same thing. To a person deciding whether to defend science against Orwellianism or not (ultimately a value assignment), explaining how his brain works will be of little help to him.

By: alQpr

alQpr — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:18:17 +0000

Of course the “answers” in that list at the start of your post are not necessarily all mutually contradictory. In mathematics a theorem may end with the words “and conversely”, and in a similar vein items 1 and 2 on your list may be just alternative points of view on the same reality (a bit like wave-particle duality and/or Fourier transform views of QM and/or the surface vs interior information content of spacetime). These and all of the others in your list all seem to posit a unitary view of reality (where the “non-material” interacts with the material and so really becomes just another part of it). But that is not the only way of looking at things. From what little I understand of it, Stephen J Gould’s view of “non-overlapping magisteria” seems to me like a (stricter ?) version of Cartesian dualism in which the only point of interaction between the spiritual/moral magisterium and the scientific/physical one is at the point of exercise of human free will. Not that I agree with him though, for I suspect that the spiritual/moral (and artistic/aesthetic) magisteria are just alternative representations of projections of parts of the physical one. I do agree with you that the present practice of science is compatible with any if these “-isms” but suspect that it will eventually provide a more compact and compelling “explanation” of everything that is presently claimed by other “magisteria”.

By: Isaac

Isaac — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 20:04:03 +0000

See NYT article for related musings…http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/reasons-for-reason/?hp. How do we rationally defend our most fundamental epistemic principles?

By: Bart Jacobs

Bart Jacobs — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 09:45:28 +0000

The article seems to suggest that while science does not assume any of the five points of view a priori, its results can tend towards one or the other. Taken to the extreme, the article seems to say that if we accept Occam’s razor, then science can prove there is no God. I think this is incorrect because the concept “God” is not a scientific concept. Using God or intelligent beings in a scientific theory does not in itself improve its predictiveness and its falsifiability. It would only do so if the theory were accompanied by a scientific model of the behavior of the being, at which point there is no point in calling the phenomenon a God or a being. Similarly, one can only scientifically prove there is no God if one reduces God to some scientific model of its behavior. I would suggest that the proper place for God is in discussions of the meaning of life, and the meaning of the universe, which is something science has nothing to say about. Science cannot prove that life has meaning; it also cannot prove that life has no meaning.

By: Michael Schmitt

Michael Schmitt — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 12:25:01 +0000

This is a very nice post – thanks very much for writing it.

As a physicist, the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics does not bother me and does not seem to me to contradict or undermine the principle of simplicity (Occam’s Razor, right?) or materialism. Recent speculations coming from string theory about “The Landscape” and the “Anthropic Explanation of the Fundamental Constants” bother me much more in this regard, since they seem to postulate truths which cannot be tested even in principle. There is no god(s) involved, yet the entities and principles that come up in these speculations are inaccessible to experiment – even a gedankenexperiment. I’m not sure to which of your seven categories these extensions of string theory belong…

By: gunn

gunn — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 02:13:28 +0000

Whether you have noticed, what these models (SUSY, Higgs, etc.) any more don’t work? Logic time has come.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1101.4507

By: Jorge Laris

Jorge Laris — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 23:12:36 +0000

Good Post. science is not perfect, but at list it has proof to work.

“Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a comparison. But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.”
The Evolution of Physics (1938) Einstein