Quantum Non-Linearity: Uncommon Descent and Common Decency

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Uncommon Descent and Common Decency

I have been deeply in discussion with the ID theorists on Uncommon Descent. See here, here, here, and here. I have endeavored to keep things as cordial and decent as possible, although a commentator who calls himself KairosFocus on the last link proved to be a bit touchy at first. He has done a lot of work on thermodynamics issues and has some worthy points to grapple with; a subject on which I breezed in confidently and presumed to pronounce. Moreover, given that like other ID theorists his name has been kicked around, this is understandable.

What I do find difficult to handle is the lack of detachment one finds on both sides of the creation/evolution debate, with emotions running high and insults filling the web pages. The reasons for this I think are clear: The atheists have strongly identified themselves with evolution because uncomfortable and tricky questions about the primary ontology of the cosmos (which so easily lead on to God) can then be at least deferred if not cleared off the table altogether. The ID theists on the other hand, with their concept of the direct intervention of what they evasively call ‘intelligence’, are being both affectively non-committal and in-yer-face at the same to time (and of course everyone knows what they are really talking about). They have effectively dragged God off the philosophical back shelf into the foreground and spotlight of scientific polemic, thus challenging many atheists in their own preferred field: and they don’t like it! Sometimes the ID theorists look like chickens running around with targets on their backs! You’ve got to hand it to them; they are courageous!

I don’t particularly want to make enemies of reasonable, fair and intelligent proponents on either side of the debate, but I suppose that’s just too much to ask. Both sides are looking for someone to shoot at and if you have an intermediate position like mine you have to do some pretty nifty diplomatic footwork to miss the bullets from either side.

As a theist I don’t find myself loosing sleep or getting uptight about whatever side of the reasoned argument is prevailing. With no particular vested interest it makes me a pretty cool customer. I personally regard that as a good thing: emotions can cloud one’s judgment and self-awareness. And yet on the other hand, like fuel, it is emotion that keeps one flying high.

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION

“Ideas Versus Experience!" is a slogan expressing the uneasy relation between what we think the world to be and what our actual experience suggests it is. Experience makes or breaks ideas. But the reverse is also true: Well established ideas can influence the recognition, acceptance and even the perception of experience. In short there is a two way dialogue between ideas and experience. Sometimes that dialogue can turn into an argument, even a row.

The success of Science is based on a formalisation of this potentially contentious relationship as it seeks to support or refute theoretical notions by systematically comparing them with experience. In the far less formalized contexts of daily living we probably are using a similar heuristic when we display a tendency to drop ideas that lose the confrontation with experience, and retain those that win. Winning ideas, like the gladiators of the Roman arenas, live to fight another day. This Darwinian slant on the struggle for ideological survival is itself ideology that must, for consistency sake, submit itself to the very process it purports to describe. For example, it should be able to give account of the resilience of traditional theories in the face of contra indicators. And in the extreme, explanation also needs to be given of how conspiracy theorists continue to hold on to a ramifying structure of untested elaborations.

Human theoretical visions are often grand and sweeping, confidently affirming states of affairs that are far beyond immediate sensation. The vast unseen domains covered by our best theories contrasts with the limitations on human perceptual resources, resources that only allow a very sparse experimental sampling of our most ambitious ideas. Even a professional scientist only ever tests a small portion of any theoretical structure. Moreover, our theoretical concepts are ambitious enough to cover unreachable areas like the center of distant stars, sub-atomic dimensions, events long past into history, and very complex inscrutable objects like the human mind and its societies. Thus, science is metaphysical in as much as it has to admit that it covers vast domains inaccessible to testing in practice if not in principle. For the intelligent layman even the keyhole view of the experimental scientist may not be available. So whence comes the authority to affirm ideas that are often so grandiose in their sweep that they make claim to impinge upon the very meaning of life the universe and everything?

The fact is that for most of us the really big ideas diffuse through to us from our societal context, and at most these big ideas are only illuminated here and there, at a very few places, with actual direct experience of the phenomenon they conceptualise. These big ideas float around in the ether-like-media of society in the form of books, lectures, programmes, and the Internet etc, objects that the postmodernist philosophers call "texts".

For someone such as myself the battle to make sense of life was joined as soon as I was aware of mystery. But looking back it is clear to me that I haven't done an honest scientific experiment in the whole of my life. For me the effort to bring sense and integration to the complexity of life boils down to grappling with the many texts of society; These texts carry both big theoretical ideas and raw data from which ideas crystallize. These texts are compared with other texts in the search for coherence and consistency. These texts take the place and role of experiments as one tests theories using texts. These texts are in effect the experience of life. My own modest attempt at grandiose theorising has already been presented to the world. (See this blog "Physics and the Wild Web") and my excuse is that I have simply inherited the theoretical hubris of the human race.

The postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida said, "There is nothing outside the text". I think he was at least right about the primary role texts play in the life of those like myself whose instinct has been to grapple relentlessly with the riddles of life, and to seek out meaning and go where no man has gone before. But one could equally claim, "There is nothing outside the experience". For one might read the "text" of the clouds in the sky as a predictor of impending weather just as one reads socially generated symbolic configurations as the predictor of certain kinds of thought or potential experience. For the text is just as much an experience as more primeval phenomenon like thunder and lightning. Texts are part of our cosmic experience and they imperceptibly grade into the more conventional notion of experience. Where the crossover point is, is difficult to say.

Postmodernism may have got it right about the primary role of the text, but it has made one very serious mistake. Where I would radically differ from the postmodern view is that I believe the mass of social texts, if we allow them, naturally converge upon grand consistent narratives and those narratives are here to stay. And that is because these texts, I submit, are part of a world with an underlying rational integratedness and that integratedness is being revealed to us bit by bit. For revelation it is: Revelation is what we cannot discover unless God chooses that we discover it. My perceptions and reason, limited though they may be, were not self-made, they had to be discovered as gifts. These gifts are given to all of us; one can but trust and use them. Reason is a grace of Revelation. For this reason the hubris of theory making is justified.

Quantum Non-Linearity

Wednesday, April 02, 2008

Uncommon Descent and Common Decency

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION