The era of Modernity and Progress was a deductive era, seeking the one and only absolutely correct and complete answer to every question ---- a great time to be a determinist, reductionist 'scientist'.
And thus a terribly bad era for historians, be they historians of nature (naturalists) or of humanity. Or indeed, if they are frontline medical clinicians like Dr Martin Henry Dawson, writing up a patient's history in a hospital setting.
Not a time then for them to be offering up an ever growing number of probable reasons possibly contributing to a given situation.
For Modernity and Progress hated diversity or plentitude, only hating probabilities and possibilities even worse : as Einstein opined, "(My) God does not play dice."
Einstein's era was a gassy Era (Zyklon B, if you have it, please), an era of "Terrible Simplicities", certainties, certitudes, normalcy.
Yet to the inductive natural historian (naturalist), out in the field, ever more possibilities and plentitude was their ticket to fame.
Oh to find a yet another tit mouse species (purple-colored even !) when the experts had claimed all tit mouses had been found and all were brown or gray !
Meanwhile the only philosopher type the majority of other philosophers recognized as truly being a philosopher, was sitting behind a desk in the lab.
Hard at work, trying to become famous in their branch of intellectual activity, trying to plenticide all this new plentitude as fast as it was being created.
Ignoring the warning of King Canute.
Seeking to reduce all of Reality down to a single paragraph long "Law of Everything".
Finally explaining the redheaded waitress's elliptic smile yesterday as being the result of the mechanical motion of a certain tiny sub atomic particle, in a distant part of the universe, eleven billion years earlier.
But historians are also fully philosophers : albeit philosophers who 'explain' but do not 'explain and predict specific actions'.
A natural historian will 'explain' why a very modern jet unexpectedly crashed in a lightning storm in a remote jungle airstrip by explaining that the weather is terrible hard to predict very accurately ----- even in big urban centres where expensive weather staff are plentiful, let alone in remote and poor parts of the world.
Most of us, still brainwashed from school, will argue that really is no explanation at all.
But the inductive historians' philosophy does fully explains Reality, as something simply being too vast and too complicated to ever be fully predictable for humanity.
They differ from the deductive philosophers only in not following up their explanations with specific predictions.
They thus fail to the test of being 'scientific' and
philosophers', at least in the self definition of those two as given by the lab-bound deducers.
But being economists in the way that few deductive scientists and philosophers are capable of being, the inducers hold fast to their view.
They insist the evidence shows that predicting future Reality accurately is simply far too expensive.
At least when set against the large amount of our limited waking hours and limited earthly resources (aka limited "money") we must devote to merely staying alive and warm.
By contrast, most our deductive philosophies still predict we will eventually make accurate and yet cheap predictions, if only we keep searching for the ultimate and absolute baseline truths that negate the need for all of today's topline expensive fact gathering and calculating.
(Translation of 'search' : you taxpayers continue to fund me doodling around in my lab.)
That Reality is ultimately 'knowable' in the sense of being predictable is not a fact though --- merely an opinion - and the opinion that predicting Reality is beyond our price range is another.
So we end up with a plentitude of opinions - and in the plenticidal era of Progress and Modernity, one had to be squashed - like a bug....
Showing posts with label natural philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label natural philosophy. Show all posts
Monday, July 27, 2015
Sunday, May 3, 2015
Pushing & Pulling Modernity's Terrible Simplifiers
In the 1880s, the competing successes of both branches of science --- the real world oriented applied and natural history folks and the lab-bound experimental theory-oriented natural philosophy folks - gave Modernity a doubly fierce intensity of purpose.
Fear complemented Hubris inside their minds.
Applied science and technology had produced the better microscopes and telescopes that forced humanity to see the very small and the very big worlds co-existing with the long familiar medium sized human world.
The age of the beginnings of Life, of the Earth and of the Universe were pushed back into unbelievably distant times.
The scale of Universe was revealed to be as big as the scale of the world of microbes, atoms and molecules was revealed to be small.
Modern steamships and trains and electric telegraphs allowed explorers to more easily visit distant cultures ( distant in remote place or distant back in time) and spread that news worldwide instantly.
Now incredibly more cultures, languages, religions, ideas, foods were shown to exist than were imagined just a few years earlier.
That matched the new vast numbers of animal, plant and microbial species being added years to the relatively static total known a few decades earlier.
This plentitude of plentitudes overwhelmed everybody, none more than the elites who has secured their position at the top of each society's foodchain by creating a hegemony of thought.
Even new foods and new musics, let alone new immigrants or new scientific ideas, presented alternative to that hegemony.
Much worse, the mere idea that alternative visions existed, undercut decisively the claim that any one hegemony could be truly hegemonic.
Fortunately, at the very same time, lab scientists were convincing themselves that all the newly apparent surface variety of reality could be reduced to the simple motions of a few fundamental elemental atoms.
And that man could easily rearrange the abundant - boring - atoms of rock, air and water into anything man could imagine as well as thinks as yet undreamed up.
Reductionism would plenticide all the newly discovered plentitude and restore a simple static vertically oriented heirarchy to the elites' unsettled societies....
Fear complemented Hubris inside their minds.
Applied science and technology had produced the better microscopes and telescopes that forced humanity to see the very small and the very big worlds co-existing with the long familiar medium sized human world.
The age of the beginnings of Life, of the Earth and of the Universe were pushed back into unbelievably distant times.
The scale of Universe was revealed to be as big as the scale of the world of microbes, atoms and molecules was revealed to be small.
Modern steamships and trains and electric telegraphs allowed explorers to more easily visit distant cultures ( distant in remote place or distant back in time) and spread that news worldwide instantly.
Now incredibly more cultures, languages, religions, ideas, foods were shown to exist than were imagined just a few years earlier.
That matched the new vast numbers of animal, plant and microbial species being added years to the relatively static total known a few decades earlier.
This plentitude of plentitudes overwhelmed everybody, none more than the elites who has secured their position at the top of each society's foodchain by creating a hegemony of thought.
Even new foods and new musics, let alone new immigrants or new scientific ideas, presented alternative to that hegemony.
Much worse, the mere idea that alternative visions existed, undercut decisively the claim that any one hegemony could be truly hegemonic.
Fortunately, at the very same time, lab scientists were convincing themselves that all the newly apparent surface variety of reality could be reduced to the simple motions of a few fundamental elemental atoms.
And that man could easily rearrange the abundant - boring - atoms of rock, air and water into anything man could imagine as well as thinks as yet undreamed up.
Reductionism would plenticide all the newly discovered plentitude and restore a simple static vertically oriented heirarchy to the elites' unsettled societies....
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Most scientists don't do experiments - but all inventors do
What scientists do experiments ?
I am not being facetious - what sort of scientists do and what sort do not do experiments ?
Because it is usually argued - inaccurately - that being a scientist requires experiments - 'vexing nature to uncover her secrets'.
But heaven help the TV weather lady who solely conducts lab experiments to divine tomorrow's weather.
Astronomy, cosmology, geology ,mathematics on and on - acute observation and trial and error thinking often serves in place of formal physical experiments of the sort we are all tortured with in high school science.
But inventors - those humble chaps and ladies never ever considered to be even amateur scientists - now they do formal experiments - night and day.
Supposedly, doing reductionist experiments separated the real scientist from the older 'outdated' Natural History* tradition of simple acute and prolonged observations of complex chaotic Nature in all her mass and over greatly varying circumstances.
That was now to be left to simple country clergymen occupying their days between sermons, christenings and funerals.
However, no matter how expensive, expeditions to extract ice core samples a mile down in the Greenland ice cap are not conducting experiments anymore than the billions we have spent on space research that simply consists of observing Venus close up.
Massively expensive radio telescopes and massively expensive electron microscopes are still just observing Nature at its biggest and at its smallest - are not experiments.
But pushing sub atomic particles together at high speeds to see what happens is an experiment - and a highly expensive and highly visible one at that.
In reality, doing formal physical experiments is just the tip of a philosophical iceberg.
Believing a few quick simple reductionist experiments will give us a more accurate view of Nature that a prolonged acute observation of her in mass and in varying circumstances assumes - without having the courage to come out and say so - that reality isn't really that complex and chaotic as it seems , on the surface.
Instead, it is all - all - just based on a few simple mechanical motions of a few small objects - amplified unbrokenly ever upward in larger and larger collectivities of these small objects.
Successes for this kind of thinking have been much fewer than usually imagined - most of the real world objects we use everyday were invented or discovered far in advance of the reductionist theories that explain why they work.
One thinks of virtually all of the wonders of our electronic world proceeding their accurate scientific explanation.
So let us not blind ourselves to the enormous amount of useful close examination of Nature that still goes on under the guise of science or engineering or inventing - even in the 21st century ....
* Needlessly I do no subscribe to the extremely limited notion of Nature/Natural History as consisting only of living plants and animals and so does not include the physical world or humanity.
I am not being facetious - what sort of scientists do and what sort do not do experiments ?
Because it is usually argued - inaccurately - that being a scientist requires experiments - 'vexing nature to uncover her secrets'.
But heaven help the TV weather lady who solely conducts lab experiments to divine tomorrow's weather.
Astronomy, cosmology, geology ,mathematics on and on - acute observation and trial and error thinking often serves in place of formal physical experiments of the sort we are all tortured with in high school science.
But inventors - those humble chaps and ladies never ever considered to be even amateur scientists - now they do formal experiments - night and day.
Supposedly, doing reductionist experiments separated the real scientist from the older 'outdated' Natural History* tradition of simple acute and prolonged observations of complex chaotic Nature in all her mass and over greatly varying circumstances.
That was now to be left to simple country clergymen occupying their days between sermons, christenings and funerals.
However, no matter how expensive, expeditions to extract ice core samples a mile down in the Greenland ice cap are not conducting experiments anymore than the billions we have spent on space research that simply consists of observing Venus close up.
Massively expensive radio telescopes and massively expensive electron microscopes are still just observing Nature at its biggest and at its smallest - are not experiments.
But pushing sub atomic particles together at high speeds to see what happens is an experiment - and a highly expensive and highly visible one at that.
In reality, doing formal physical experiments is just the tip of a philosophical iceberg.
Believing a few quick simple reductionist experiments will give us a more accurate view of Nature that a prolonged acute observation of her in mass and in varying circumstances assumes - without having the courage to come out and say so - that reality isn't really that complex and chaotic as it seems , on the surface.
Instead, it is all - all - just based on a few simple mechanical motions of a few small objects - amplified unbrokenly ever upward in larger and larger collectivities of these small objects.
Successes for this kind of thinking have been much fewer than usually imagined - most of the real world objects we use everyday were invented or discovered far in advance of the reductionist theories that explain why they work.
One thinks of virtually all of the wonders of our electronic world proceeding their accurate scientific explanation.
So let us not blind ourselves to the enormous amount of useful close examination of Nature that still goes on under the guise of science or engineering or inventing - even in the 21st century ....
* Needlessly I do no subscribe to the extremely limited notion of Nature/Natural History as consisting only of living plants and animals and so does not include the physical world or humanity.
The 'sixth' extinction was supposed to be the Jews ...
Natural history (also known as pre-modernity and post-modernity) wears muddy boots and does fieldwork, cumulatively demonstrating the existence of 400,000 different species of beetles - so far.
They are always filling up the gene pool.
Natural philosophy (also known as scientism or reductionism or modernity) sits in a laboratory and explains why those 400,000 different forms of beings only appear to exist and why 399,999 of them (or maybe more) don't really need to exist, not in their brave new world of tomorrow.
Their special joy is draining the gene pool ----- one extinction at a time ...
They are always filling up the gene pool.
Natural philosophy (also known as scientism or reductionism or modernity) sits in a laboratory and explains why those 400,000 different forms of beings only appear to exist and why 399,999 of them (or maybe more) don't really need to exist, not in their brave new world of tomorrow.
Their special joy is draining the gene pool ----- one extinction at a time ...
Friday, February 20, 2015
Aristocracy loses link with Nature in move from land capital to intellectual capital
It's past well known that until the passage of the Reform Acts and the Corn Bills, all of Aristocracy's power was firmly based on its near exclusive ownership of land but how did the decline in such land-based power effect how the rest of us viewed Mother Nature versus Man ?
It is worth remembering that under this old system, only the younger sons of land-rich aristocracy got a nearly free pass into even such minor elites as the military, medicine, public service or the university-based church ministry.
But fairly quickly after the passage of these Acts, great and not-so-great families were giving their children their inheritance while they were young - and it wasn't a piece of Pa's farm.
Instead they got 25 years of highly expensive education : tutors, educational toys, books and Grand Tours, prep schools, the best in university education paid for right into post-doc status if need be.
Only the very smartest of the untutored geniuses among the poorer sorts could push their way against this phalanx of the tutored un-genius children of the older aristocracies who came to dominate all the new as well as old professions - particularly in the sciences and amongst the university teachers.
Paralleling this, I argue , we saw a massive lowering of the cultural and political worth of Natural Science , science done by amateurs delving in and living close to Nature.
Instead the professional tenured lab scientist cum Natural Philosopher became the esteemed one : doing mind experiments on a chalkboard or with a few flasks and beakers in a laboratory.
Once cut free of the initimate connection to the land, this aristocracy of the mind lapsed quickly into synthetic autarky, convinced that modern civilized Man no longer needed Mother Nature's bounty.
The atom smashers could make anything and everything out of bog-ordinary atoms of useless rock.
Plenticide the Plentitude of Nature and we'd all be better off.
We've already done the Dodo and the Passenger Pidgeon - why not start work on the Slav, the Roma and the Jew ....
It is worth remembering that under this old system, only the younger sons of land-rich aristocracy got a nearly free pass into even such minor elites as the military, medicine, public service or the university-based church ministry.
But fairly quickly after the passage of these Acts, great and not-so-great families were giving their children their inheritance while they were young - and it wasn't a piece of Pa's farm.
Instead they got 25 years of highly expensive education : tutors, educational toys, books and Grand Tours, prep schools, the best in university education paid for right into post-doc status if need be.
Only the very smartest of the untutored geniuses among the poorer sorts could push their way against this phalanx of the tutored un-genius children of the older aristocracies who came to dominate all the new as well as old professions - particularly in the sciences and amongst the university teachers.
Paralleling this, I argue , we saw a massive lowering of the cultural and political worth of Natural Science , science done by amateurs delving in and living close to Nature.
Instead the professional tenured lab scientist cum Natural Philosopher became the esteemed one : doing mind experiments on a chalkboard or with a few flasks and beakers in a laboratory.
Once cut free of the initimate connection to the land, this aristocracy of the mind lapsed quickly into synthetic autarky, convinced that modern civilized Man no longer needed Mother Nature's bounty.
The atom smashers could make anything and everything out of bog-ordinary atoms of useless rock.
Plenticide the Plentitude of Nature and we'd all be better off.
We've already done the Dodo and the Passenger Pidgeon - why not start work on the Slav, the Roma and the Jew ....
Saturday, December 14, 2013
The purist science...this side of Heaven : fabricating the scientific canopy
As a Christian may I quickly say that I prefer my atheists to lose all of their religion, not just some of it.
Replacing a transcendental God with human gods cum masters of the universe cum lords of the human kind , is to combine the worst aspects of religion and atheism, with all the good bits of both left out.
When scientific discoveries (made out in the field by dirt-on-the-hands science) destroyed what Peter Berger calls the sacred canopy for most people in the western world , theoretically oriented scientists (natural philosophy indoor types rather than the dirt-on-hands natural history types) set about erecting a scientific canopy in its place.
This immediately set up an internecine war within science.
Because, after all , hands-on science had just discovered about how complex, dynamic and intermingled Reality really was, and this was the direct and immediate reason for the decline in the public belief in a simple, predictable, stable cosmos set up by a clockmaker God.
So to immediately claim, without proof , that a few fundamental laws in fundamental physics had been more than enough to create our simple, predictable, stable cosmos together with all human culture, might be thought to take a great deal of chutzpah on the part of the theory boys.
But such is the basic human need to believe that Life and Reality are simple and orderly and purpose-driven , it must be said that the theory boys had all the initial innings.
That is , until 1945 or thereabouts....
Replacing a transcendental God with human gods cum masters of the universe cum lords of the human kind , is to combine the worst aspects of religion and atheism, with all the good bits of both left out.
When scientific discoveries (made out in the field by dirt-on-the-hands science) destroyed what Peter Berger calls the sacred canopy for most people in the western world , theoretically oriented scientists (natural philosophy indoor types rather than the dirt-on-hands natural history types) set about erecting a scientific canopy in its place.
This immediately set up an internecine war within science.
Because, after all , hands-on science had just discovered about how complex, dynamic and intermingled Reality really was, and this was the direct and immediate reason for the decline in the public belief in a simple, predictable, stable cosmos set up by a clockmaker God.
So to immediately claim, without proof , that a few fundamental laws in fundamental physics had been more than enough to create our simple, predictable, stable cosmos together with all human culture, might be thought to take a great deal of chutzpah on the part of the theory boys.
But such is the basic human need to believe that Life and Reality are simple and orderly and purpose-driven , it must be said that the theory boys had all the initial innings.
That is , until 1945 or thereabouts....
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
High School Science : 'Home of the Hubris' , STILL
Science (the resulting name for the 150 year old victory of Natural Philosophy over Natural History) is widely accepted to be primarily pedagogical in nature.
It exists as a subdivision of Philosophy and is designed primarily to do nothing more that to teach students (and the adult laity) formal and informal lessons in metaphysics and ethics, 'Drawn from Nature' as Science understands it.
Natural History has had to retreat to those vast areas of useful if messy , applied technology : areas like engineering, industrial processes and clinical medicine, where much 'trial and error' is required to align classroom theory to the reality at hand.
By contrast, parents can rest assured that all real reality has been carefully airbrushed away from intro University undergraduate science courses, which together with their bigger and older brothers in the High School sciences, continue to supply the world with most of its Popular Hubris.
High School Science continues to be the 'Home of the Half-Filled Glass Science', the place of Panglossian Science, where Mid Victorian Optimism burns as brightly as ever.
High School Science syllabus setters claim that setting real world problems for lessons and exams would be too tough for young people to answer correctly.
'Let them wait till they are adult engineers and doctors to have to struggle to figure out the actual solutions, out in a real world where Ceteris Paribus never applies'.
But of course the vast percentage of students never go on to be professional scientists or engineers and doctors and get a chance to learn to wrestle daily with the difference between idealized high school science theory and messy reality .
Instead they grow up to become voters and politicians, generals and soldiers, CEOs and machine operators.
All of them, as a result of formal education (together with the drip-drip media pronouncements from the High School's fellow travellers, the science journalists, sic ) remain as deluded as 16 year old High School kids.
Deluded into believing that because Newtonian science can more or less successfully predict the paths of a half dozen placid , near-by, large planets that this means it can also predict the paths of smaller and more dangerous objects.
Like darkly invisible, tiny, unpredictable asteroids, or ballistic shells fired off twenty miles away, or incoming raindrops.
My idea of an ideal High School science course would be one where the children know less, for absolutely certain, than they did before they came in, where they fail to correctly answer the exam questions but give it as good a first try as any working engineer might do.
Because out in the real Universe,out beyond Newton and Galileo, there is no real absolute vacuum for objects to move through, and so those objects are always affected by the arbitrarily accumulated (not cross-cancelling) effects of other forces and objects---- and kids today might as well know that from day one.
The real reason why High Schools continue to focus on teaching Newton,Dalton and Darwin, more than a century after they stopped being cutting edge science, is that they impart to the students a hugely self-confident scientific sense of imperialism ; that out there is a world and a universe just waiting to be easily and safely exploited by Man's Science.
In a world where mining company executives continue to hold far more sway than do their environmentally concerned critics, High School Science teachers are going to continue to be compelled to teach self-preening, self-esteem and 'uplift'.
And it won't stop until environmentalists back off attacking mining executives and focus instead on questioning Popular Scientific Hubris at its fount : High School....
It exists as a subdivision of Philosophy and is designed primarily to do nothing more that to teach students (and the adult laity) formal and informal lessons in metaphysics and ethics, 'Drawn from Nature' as Science understands it.
Natural History has had to retreat to those vast areas of useful if messy , applied technology : areas like engineering, industrial processes and clinical medicine, where much 'trial and error' is required to align classroom theory to the reality at hand.
By contrast, parents can rest assured that all real reality has been carefully airbrushed away from intro University undergraduate science courses, which together with their bigger and older brothers in the High School sciences, continue to supply the world with most of its Popular Hubris.
High School Science continues to be the 'Home of the Half-Filled Glass Science', the place of Panglossian Science, where Mid Victorian Optimism burns as brightly as ever.
High School Science syllabus setters claim that setting real world problems for lessons and exams would be too tough for young people to answer correctly.
'Let them wait till they are adult engineers and doctors to have to struggle to figure out the actual solutions, out in a real world where Ceteris Paribus never applies'.
But of course the vast percentage of students never go on to be professional scientists or engineers and doctors and get a chance to learn to wrestle daily with the difference between idealized high school science theory and messy reality .
Instead they grow up to become voters and politicians, generals and soldiers, CEOs and machine operators.
All of them, as a result of formal education (together with the drip-drip media pronouncements from the High School's fellow travellers, the science journalists, sic ) remain as deluded as 16 year old High School kids.
Deluded into believing that because Newtonian science can more or less successfully predict the paths of a half dozen placid , near-by, large planets that this means it can also predict the paths of smaller and more dangerous objects.
Like darkly invisible, tiny, unpredictable asteroids, or ballistic shells fired off twenty miles away, or incoming raindrops.
My idea of an ideal High School science course would be one where the children know less, for absolutely certain, than they did before they came in, where they fail to correctly answer the exam questions but give it as good a first try as any working engineer might do.
Because out in the real Universe,out beyond Newton and Galileo, there is no real absolute vacuum for objects to move through, and so those objects are always affected by the arbitrarily accumulated (not cross-cancelling) effects of other forces and objects---- and kids today might as well know that from day one.
The real reason why High Schools continue to focus on teaching Newton,Dalton and Darwin, more than a century after they stopped being cutting edge science, is that they impart to the students a hugely self-confident scientific sense of imperialism ; that out there is a world and a universe just waiting to be easily and safely exploited by Man's Science.
In a world where mining company executives continue to hold far more sway than do their environmentally concerned critics, High School Science teachers are going to continue to be compelled to teach self-preening, self-esteem and 'uplift'.
And it won't stop until environmentalists back off attacking mining executives and focus instead on questioning Popular Scientific Hubris at its fount : High School....
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