Quantum Non-Linearity: More Monsters from the Id

Sunday, January 09, 2011

More Monsters from the Id

"The oldest and greatest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and greatest type of fear is fear of the unknown." (H. P. Lovecraft)

This post on Uncommon Descent by Denise O’Leary is interesting; in fact I share her concerns. The post is about some research that appears to support Extra Sensory Perception. This research has “generated a mixture of amusement and scorn”.

We must bear in mind here the effect whereby many null results go unreported against the occasional publishing of positive results, consequently skewing the publicity toward affirmative experiments. But having said that we must also factor in the natural resistance put up by those for whom any suggestion that the world is not quite as they thought is just too much to take; they will be completely unable to detach themselves from their emotional commitments.

In the wrong hands the epistemic rule “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” can be exploited as a pretext to block science: It is conceivable that ESP effects, if they exist, may be too subtle to register strongly with our formal methodological detectors and therefore do not have the intensity to produce extraordinary evidence. Moreover, that the underlying mechanisms for ESP are difficult to conceive can also be used as an epistemic rule to excuse a lack of imaginative effort. Not everything is necessarily an epistemological push-over. Not all ambiguity can be dispelled.

For myself I much prefer to leave white space on the edge of the map rather than either enclose the map in a heavy frame of exclusion or populate the white space with monsters from the id. If there are subtle weak signal “occult effects” out there, some toy town scientists lack a sufficient detachment from their world view to discover those effects. In fact they may be so impassioned as to actively block investigations. Science isn’t safe in their hands.

Toy town science is as unacceptable as toy town fundamentalism; for both, fear of the unknown keeps them in their epistemic play pens. The robust scientific attitude must always be a paradoxical blend of criticism, imagination, dispassion, curiosity, disinterest, commitment, adventurousness, perseverance, moral courage, integrity, and above all epistemic humility: Good science requires both the right intellectual equipment as well as the right personal traits. That these challenging traits have to be cultivated and worked on is one reason why the opinions of human beings are unreliable; because failure here is liable to be replaced with hubris, self delusion and hegemony: Whether it be fundamentalists reporting the latest bizarre miracles or toy town scientists telling us what we can’t believe in or shouldn't even investigate, both have totalizing agendas that they are determined to foist on everyone.

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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

Sunday, January 09, 2011

More Monsters from the Id

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