The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Streven proposes a new explanation as to how and why science has advanced over time, that builds upon but is different from the widely accepted explanations proposed by Karl Popper ("science progresses by disproving false theories") and Thomas Kuhn ("science progresses when popular paradigms stop working").
Streven suggests that science adanvaces because scientists (quoting from the OP):
> have no choice. They are constrained by a central regulation that governs science, which he calls the “iron rule of explanation.” The rule is simple: it tells scientists that, “if they are to participate in the scientific enterprise, they must uncover or generate new evidence to argue with”; from there, they must “conduct all disputes with reference to empirical evidence alone.” Compared with the theories proposed by Popper and Kuhn, Strevens’s rule can feel obvious and underpowered. That’s because it isn’t intellectual but procedural. “The iron rule is focused not on what scientists think,” he writes, “but on what arguments they can make in their official communications.” Still, he maintains, it is “the key to science’s success,” because it “channels hope, anger, envy, ambition, resentment—all the fires fuming in the human heart—to one end: the production of empirical evidence.”
There is another theory of how science advances - technology. Historically, the discovery of new technology has advanced science. Whether they be telescopes, microscopes, glass, etc.
Also, much of science derived from mysticism, chemistry -> alchemy, astronomy-astrology, so forth. Many times, new technology allows us to "see" ( production of empirical evidence ) to separate the mystic from the science.
Newton, one of our great scientists was deep into the occult.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton%27s_occult_studie...
But then we take resonance scientifically seriously and we get wireless communication and other technologies that are absolutely magical.
> that there is an objective reality shared by all rational observers.[19][20] […]
> that this objective reality is governed by natural laws;[19][20] […]
> that reality can be discovered by means of systematic observation and experimentation.[19][20] […]
> that Nature has uniformity of laws and most if not all things in nature must have at least a natural cause.[20] […]
[…]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)#Provid...
Not all world views accept these axioms. Some think that what we perceive is an illusion or that the material world is 'evil' (e.g., Manichaeism); some that the forces of Nature are governed by capricious spirits or deities; others still that the natural phenomena do not have innate causal powers themselves but their actions are divinely willed.
No, this is false. Science is simply the process of seeking the best explanations for the observed data. It just turns out that the best explanation is some kind of external objective reality governed by natural laws. But it didn't have to turn out that way, and science certainly does not presuppose that it will or would turn out that it. It just happens that it does turn out that way.
for example, if the laws were not uniform then astrophysicists would have no basis for assuming that the wavelengths of light emitted by a star is evidence for the composition of that star.
Yes, that's true, but that does not mean that uniform laws are an assumption. They are not. They are a conclusion. Uniform laws are the best explanation that anyone has been able to come up with that explains all the observed data. But this was not assumed, and in fact it still isn't. The idea, for example, that physical constants change over time is very much a hypothesis that is given serious consideration. It just turns out that there's no evidence for it.
It was a fairly pervasive idea that God created an orderly universe:
> For when we call the builder the principle of the house, in the idea of such a principle is included that of his art; and it would be included in the idea of the first principle were the builder the first principle of the house. God, Who is the first principle of all things, may be compared to things created as the architect is to things designed.
* https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1027.htm
The painting "God the Geometer" dates back to ca. 1220:
> Science, and particularly geometry and astronomy/astrology, was linked directly to the divine for most medieval scholars. The compass in this 13th century manuscript is a symbol of God's act of Creation. God has created the universe after geometric and harmonic principles, to seek these principles was therefore to seek and worship God.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:God_the_Geometer.jpg
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Architect_of_the_Univers...
Earlier natural philosophers (the word "scientists" was coined in 'only' 1833) looked for order and reason because they assumed it was there to be found.
Sure, but that is not the reason that science accepts uniformity today.
> The idea, for example, that physical constants change over time is very much a hypothesis that is given serious consideration
That's not an alternative to uniform laws, that's the idea that a particular term in the uniform law is variable rather than constant.
No, I'm not.
> It is possible that we exist in a simulation, and if we are, that the creator of that simulation could change the code for that simulation whenever they wanted to.
That's true, though “simulation” and “creator” bear no real weight in that description.
> There is a lot of evidence that this is not actually happening
No, there's not and there cannot be. Because literally any evidence is equally consistent with that as it is with constant physical laws; more consistent, actually, absent a complete model of the actual physical laws supposedly at work.
The very concept of evidence requires assuming that there are constant physical laws governing the production of sense data from something else. Without that, nothing is evidence of anything.
Now, there are lots of other assumptions that get marshalled to justify that assumption as a conclusion (my personal favorite being “God exists and he wouldn't allow me to be deceived the way thay that not being true would entail”), but you can't have evidence for it, because you can't have evidence without it.
Yes, you are :-)
> literally any evidence is equally consistent with that as it is with constant physical laws
No, it isn't. The Kolmogorov complexity of the universe turns out to be very small. That is not consistent with an intelligent agent pushing changes to a simulation in real time.
It's absolutely consistent if the intelligent agent is pushing such changes with Kolmogorov complexity as part of the criterion for selecting which changes to push.
Well, unless by “in real time” you specifically mean “while respecting the subjective experience and record of time for entities within the construct”; if you don't assume consistent laws on some level, nothing stops changes pushed fromm rewriting apparent history within the simulation to be consistent with the new model. If you assume you have an accurate unmodified record of the past observations—you are already assuming consistent laws.
Sure. If an intelligent agent applies a filter that filters out all indications of intelligence, then yes, the observed data is consistent with such an agent. But then the observed data is also consistent with a universe that is controlled by a herd of invisible pink unicorns.
> nothing stops changes pushed fromm rewriting apparent history within the simulation to be consistent with the new model
Congratulations, you have just re-discovered last-thursdayism:
> The idea, for example, that physical constants change over time is very much a hypothesis that is given serious consideration. It just turns out that there's no evidence for it.
In fact the hypothesis that the speed of light changes over time is a component of several heterodox physical theories that have appeared over the years. Whether or not there is evidence for a theory depends entirely on the assumptions used when attempting to explain a phenomenon.
All of which have been rejected for being poor explanations.
> Whether or not there is evidence for a theory depends entirely on the assumptions used when attempting to explain a phenomenon.
That depends on what you mean by "assumptions". Yes, all evidence has to be evaluated against a background theory. That does not mean that the background theory has to be taken as an axiom. The background theory that there is an objective reality governed by laws that are invariant with time and space is not an axiom, it is a hypothesis that has emerged over literally centuries of work as the best current explanation for all the observed data. It is open to question, but if you want to question it you'd better have some damned good evidence.
No, those are the axioms that we use to construct a theory.
> best current explanation
what is "best" is judged according to our fundamental axioms. given different axioms, another theory would be seen as best.
> It is open to question, but if you want to question it you'd better have some damned good evidence.
certainly, but given different fundamental axioms the same evidence leads to a different theory.
No, they aren't.
> what is "best" is judged according to our fundamental axioms
No, it is judged by the community of people who engage in the scientific enterprise.
> given different fundamental axioms the same evidence leads to a different theory
That is certainly true. From different assumptions, different conclusions follow. But the existence of an objective reality is not an axiom, at least not a scientific one. It is an explanation for the observed fact that science is possible in the first place. It is an explanation of the observed fact that there are things that nearly all humans agree on, e.g. the fact that there appear to be lights in the sky, the fact that everyone more or less agrees what the repertoire of lights is (one very bright one, one not-so-bright-one, and lots and lots of much dimmer ones), and that they move with enough regularity that their future positions can be predicted with astonishing accuracy. No axioms are required to make these observations, nor to come up with the explanation that the reason that everyone agrees on all these things is that there are, in point of actual fact, sources of light out there in some objective physical reality.
Scientists disagree with you.
> No, it is judged by the community of people who engage in the scientific enterprise.
That community of people judge theories using the aforementioned axioms.
> No axioms are required to make these observations, nor to come up with the explanation that the reason that everyone agrees on all these things is that there are, in point of actual fact, sources of light out there in some objective physical reality.
You seem to be ignorant of the fact that observations are theory-laden.
"God did it" accounts perfectly for every possible measurement, where any theory at best approximates our results. Yet, we reject that at the outset.
Yes, but it is a very poor explanation.
There are an infinite number of theories that are consistent with the data. But, it turns out, only one that is both consistent with the data and a good explanation.
> Yes, but it is a very poor explanation.
Depends on who you ask:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occasionalism
Which is why natural philosophy / science flourished in some world views more than others:
Well, in the context of this discussion, the appropriate people to ask are scientists. You won't find many peer reviewed scientific papers advancing "God did it" as a serious hypothesis.
What difference does that make? The correct people to ask about this today are the people who are doing science today. The label you choose to attach to those people is irrelevant.
> there are certain metaphysical assumptions that you have to make before you start thinking you can explain the cosmos
Like what?
[1] Demon-Haunted World, C. Sagan. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/The_Dragon_in_My_Garage
Friend, you know some people -- it is a small number even if you are a popular fellow. But let's say, for fun, that you know millions or even billions of living people.
These people, if pressed beyond a superficial level of conformity, would disagree _with one another_ on many points of _dogma_. They would mostly agree to practical compromise with one another and with reality. Doors open, Time passes, flame cooks food, arrows pierce flesh, machines must be repaired with new parts... and let's not fly hijacked aircraft into buildings to defend $ourdeity.
In short, these lots of people don't really agree very much among themselves. And some will kill others if they _believe_ enough. There isn't much uniformity of considered opinion among most people, but there is a good deal of pragmatism in action, if not in _word_.
> certainly more than half of humans who have lived
This argument is a sort of speculative vote by dead parliamentarians. And most of these parliamentarians couldn't even write or do high-school math.
The current living human population is larger than any that we can reasonably assume to have existed before. Let's assume that a parliament of 8 billion Homo sapiens is a sufficient indicator of diversity of superstition and practicality.
Other genus Homo may have been different, but Homo sapiens may _believe_ and or say just about anything. Homo sapiens is a practical animal that functions rather well given the mix of under-utilised rational capacity and noodles inside its head.
But it is clear that nonsense abounds in the human mind.
And for some the best explanation for plants growing is Ceres is happy with your sacrifice:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceres_(mythology)
(Ceres being the root for cereal (crops).)
> that there is an epistemic reality about which all rational observers can know half of the ontic facts
> that this epistemic reality is governed by natural laws which are themselves epistemic
And so on. Crucially, there are no local hidden variable theories which can reproduce what we observe already; there are situations where there cannot possibly have been an objective ontic reality in the laboratory.
Former does not imply the latter.
It is not just tenable, but unavoidable, because GR is, in detail, incompatible with QM. QM has been tested overwhelmingly more thoroughly than GR, and GR doesn't seem to predict any of it.
Hint: you can't.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcqZHYo7ONs
[1] https://plus.maths.org/content/john-conway-discovering-free-...
Also, love the downvotes when you have failed to prove what you set out to. Bell's Inequalities do not rule out a fully determined world.
I recommend that you examine whatever underlying beliefs are forcing you to require determinism! They probably need to be questioned.
And no, I'm not going to watch a 20 minute video to find out what your argument is.
And as for the second point, even if you don't like "objective reality" in there, do you deny that there are natural laws that govern things? (Bell's inequality would be one such law.)
We don't have to lose reality; we could instead lose locality. However, then we also lose most of physical causality and spatial relevance. [0] covers all of the material but takes more than 20min to read. At the end of it, we're left with a very weak theory that has trouble ruling out FTL influences.
On the second point, it doesn't particularly matter whether those natural laws exist; my point was that they're not fully knowable. There's no reason why the universe ought to admit a short legible encoding of its own structure, especially considering that such structure ought not be observable by creatures like us residing in the universe.
Rather than knowing the natural laws, we know predictive models which are good approximations. There is fundamental uncertainty preventing our approximations from sharpening to some arbitrarily fine precision.
The apparent knowability of the universe, until recently, has always been its most astonishing feature. We should not be surprised to find limits on that; nor that we have not yet actually run up against those limits.
But losing one or the other, and not knowing which one, is really uncomfortable. That leaves us with your comment about quantum disproving the first two points... well, I can say that it's not proven yet, but I also can't say that you're wrong.
Paul Feyerabend was a very likeable guy.
Where's the cutoff of real science? Biology? Medicine? Psychology? Politics, economics?
If Medicine is science, we need massive deregulation to allow scientists to practice medicine instead of a singular group.
If psychology is science, there needs to be an effort to validate studies.