Quantum Non-Linearity: Epistemology, Ontology, Creationism and Scientism

Friday, July 12, 2019

Epistemology, Ontology, Creationism and Scientism

Contemporary North American young earthism is a modern construction
coming out of the 1960s. Ken Ham can say what he likes!

I recently got some come back from Joe Smith who first made a starring appearance on my blog here. After some mutually cross words with him there was a calming down period after which the relationship settled down to a more cordial basis. The lesson is: If you want to stand chance of making an initial connection use emotive language.

I think it is fair to say that Joe Smith, when he thinks about creation, has what I would call certain fundamentalist habits mind, but signs are that those exclusivist fundamentalist attitudes (which really mark out a fundamentalist) are not his strong point (I hope). If they were there would be little to be gained in dialogue as hard core fundamentalists, from Mormons through Jehovah's witnesses to Answer in Genesis start from a position of assumed spiritual superiority and have a deep distrust of those who don't acquiesce to the divine authority of their opinions.

Anyway I'm hoping for a fruitful discussion. My reply to Joe's first email can be picked up here: This has been a useful exercise as it has summarised my views on epistemology and directly challenges the fundamentalist "Historical science vs Observational science" canard.

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It is perhaps ironic that I would also use the views I express in my reply to Joe Smith to attack the kind of atheist scientism which has a vested interested in attempting to draw a sharp line of demarcation between formal science and studies deemed to lie outside formal science. This is the so-called demarcation problem: For me it has always been a pseudo problem; all attempts to understand the cosmos entail a tense dialogue between theory and experience, whether we are talking spring extending and test tube precipitating science or sociology; both disciplines use a juxtaposition of experiences and/or observational protocols and imaginative narratives to explain those experiences/observations but with varying degrees of plausibility; for clearly the highly regular world of springs and chemicals is far more systemically accessible than the erratic and complex objects of sociology. Consequently this leads to firmer based science than can ever be hoped for than in much sociology. There is a trade off between the complexity and accessibility of an object of study and its epistemic robustness.

But the suspected underlying motive for those peddling scientism is not unlike that of fundamentalists who (want to?) see the world in the blacks and whites of in-groups and out-groups. The aficionados of scientism seek clear cut criteria distinguishing science and non-science in order to provide a pretext to cast into the outer darkness anything they regard as beyond the intellectual pale and which can then be written off with emotive words such as "irrational" and "superstition" and therefore invalid knowledge.

It is true, however, that in the contention between experience and those narratives which attempt to make sense of experience we find that some conceptions are far less amenable to experiential investigation than others. (e.g. springs vs sociological objects). But you can be sure that as epistemic tractability fades out human stupidity and epistemic arrogance tend to fade in and this epistemic sin recurs with both atheists and theists.

Below are some of my posts on the subject of science and epistemology. As I review these posts I notice that one name keeps popping up: That of Toronto biochemist Larry Moran. So, as far as Quantum Non-Linearity is concerned there seems to be enough prima facie evidence to charge Moran with the sin of scientism. I present the documentary evidence for that prima facie case below.

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/05/atheist-vs-atheist-evangelical-vs.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/03/evolutionary-psychology-under-fire.html
http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-universe-is-not-necessarily.html

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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

Friday, July 12, 2019

Epistemology, Ontology, Creationism and Scientism

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THE IDEAS-EXPERIENCE CONTENTION