Right Reason

Scientism's High Priesthood

In The Huffington Post's "Pseudophysics: The New High Priesthood," Amir Aczel writes about the prevalance of physicists who are taking speculation about the world, like the existence of a multiverse, and preaching them as gospel truth to the public: 

But let's now look at the very vocal minority of theoreticians who, without a shred of experimental evidence to support their claims, are now telling us what, in their view, nature is truly made of. They do it through articles in popular magazines and through too many YouTube videos, but mostly through recent books aimed at the average reader....

But the most irritating book of them all, and the best example of the new pseudophysics, has nothing to do with the multiverse. It is about where our single, known universe might have come from. In his 2012 book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing, the physicist Lawrence M. Krauss informs us that the universe came out of nothing. Sheer nothing. Nada. Zip. How does he know? Every leading theoretical physicist I have posed this question to, including the American Nobel Prize winner Steven Weinberg and the Dutch Nobel Laureate Gerard 't Hooft, have told me definitively that we have no idea where our universe came from: We can't tell what happened before, or even at, the Big Bang. If Krauss' screed is not pseudoscience, I don't know what is. If I am going to believe him, I could just as well subscribe to the medieval "sciences" of alchemy or astrology. Krauss gives no evidence for his carelessly cobbled-together conjecture, but he makes up for it by his aggressive tone. Studying the book carefully, I found that Krauss implies that the source of his hypothesis is a research paper by the cosmologist Alex Vilenkin. At my request, Vilenkin sent me a copy of his article, and -- not surprisingly -- I found that what he says differs markedly from Krauss' conclusion. Vilenkin's universe does not at all start from "nothingness." It begins from a bubble of a preexisting piece of a very condensed kind of spacetime called a "quantum foam..."

There is absolutely nothing wrong with speculation in physics -- and the correct theories are eventually confirmed by experiment and observation. But it is definitely wrong -- misleading and dishonest -- to preach to an unsuspecting public, mostly uninitiated in science, mere hypotheses as if they were confirmed facts. This isn't science, and it isn't honest scientific reporting. Physicists should be the purveyors of facts, not dreams.

Amir Aczel certainly has a point about how physicists like Lawrence M. Krauss have preyed on the public fascination with scientific discovery by teaching them theories with little foundation as if they were gospel, but Aczel doesn't touch on one of the most disappointing elements of the new high priesthood: Their inability to talk philosophically about their subjects. In A Universe From Nothing, Krauss has  no dialogue with the philosophical treatment of nothingness and even goes as far to say that philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas couldn't have reasoned about nothing because they lack modern physics. That would be fine if he showed how they went wrong; yet, it is Krauss making the mistakes: he even assumes that a universe of nothing comes with the laws of quantum mechanics. That certainly isn't nothing. Krauss' arrogant attitudes towards philosophy are repeated across the high priesthood. Neil deGrasse Tyson, a preacher within this high priesthood, has gone as far as to say that philosophy is essentially futile. 

 

Ignorance of philosophy is more than an ignorance of the contributions that Plato, Kant and others have made to our understanding of the world. Ignorance of philosophy is an ignorance of the very underpinnings of what we call 'science' today. Science just didn't come out of nothing fully formed, like Athena coming out from Zeus' brow already clad in armor. Instead, it emerged as a gradual process of philosophers coming to a certain understanding of the world, which was informed by a array of different beliefs like the manifestation of divine revelation in the natural world, empiricism, and even the institutions of the university system. To really understand science, we have to understand how it came to be, and all of those factors are assumed away by the scientism's high priesthood. They would like to reject questions about metaphysics as nonsense, but they are themselves participants is an activity itself contingent upon a certain metaphysical understanding of the world. 

Scientism's high priesthood also results in the public having a warped view about what science actually is. In shows like MythBusters and on Facebook pages like "I Fucking Love Science," we see science simply showcased as a simple process of accumulating data and then getting truth at the end. That perspective blinds the public to the importance of paradigms and the importance of speculation to our understanding of the world. Rather than actually getting people to pay attention to how the sausage is made, it simply creates enthusiasm about those small slices of science which are prima facie fascinating. "Cyanide and Happiness" well lampooned this ascpect of scientism in a single cartoon:

Overall, the high priests of scientism have not only warped the public understanding of science, but they have warped how science should fit in with the other disciplines we use to study the world. As Amir Aczel pointed out, they sell a faulty notion of science to the public in which speculative notions like the multiverse are sold as science. That is not all they do, though, and by refusing to think philosophically about their subjects, scientists like Krauss ignore that science itself is part of a larger tradition of understanding the world, and thereby warp our image of what science should be. 

 

There Are No Such Things as Facts

The maximum extent of the ice sheets during the Pleistocene period.

 

In The Foundations of Scientific Inference and in other places throughout his writings, the philosopher of science, Wesley Salmon, provides a narrative about how scientific induction can make sense out of a varying amount of facts to explain the existence of ice sheets across much of North America. In this narrative, it is the scientific capability to make imaginative inferences from the facts to a theory about glaciers that made the human mind capable of coming to the knowledge about about them. jm

Salmon is wrong, though, in his narrative of why we know that glaciers once covered much of North America. As a defender of induction in science, Salmon gives a story about how we can see pieces of evidence that point to the events of the Ice Ages and that from those pieces of evidence, our confidence becomes greater that a continental ice sheet once extended as far as Illinois. This all fits within his probabilistic explanation of induction and within his thought, it certainly makes sense how more evidence of that event would increase the scientific robustness of a theory. However, that does not change that Salmon fundamentally got the process backwards.

 

Physical objects in the world did not explain themselves to us and people did not gather all of the evidence of the extent of the Laurentide ice sheet and then come to create a theory about Ice Ages from them. Instead, what happened is that the human idea that there was such a thing as Ice Ages came to guide scientists into finding more evidence to corroborate that theory. Facts did not lead to theory; rather theory led to facts.

There are simply no such things as physical entities independent of the ideas held by people that can be labeled “facts.” Indeed, the common-place notion that there are such entities in the world and that all someone has to do to discover the truth is to gather all of these “facts” completely misconstrues the process by which human knowledge grows. That human beings can even look at the world and say there are such things as facts is a product of them holding theories that allow them to categorize the world in such a way as to be able to point towards otherwise epistemologically inert objects and to say that they are “facts.” Thus facts occupy World Two of Karl Popper’s ontology: facts only exist where the mind interacts with the physical world and classifies it according to purely mental objects (i.e. theories) that exist independent of the physical world*.

 

Thus that we are able to see evidence everywhere we look that point towards the existence of the Laurentide ice sheet cannot be understood as simply facts guiding the mind towards adopting a theory. Rather, we are able to see all of that evidence because the human mind holds a certain theory and that theory makes possible the mind to see those physical objects as pointing towards the existence of primordial ice sheets tens of thousands of years ago. 

Facts independent of theory thus don’t exist. All that exist are physical objects that fit well into the classification schemes of theories and some theories that have classification schemes that can be seen as better capturing the real phenomena of the world. Some classification schemes prove to be very capable at predicting how future events can be classified, at which point we can say that they have proved their mettle. And other schemes prove to be incapable of predicting how future events can be classified, at which point we can say that they have been classified. As a result, science is not fitting theories to facts; rather it is the competition of many different systems of classification that bring along with them different understandings of the physical objects out in the world.

 

 

* “In this pluralistic philosophy consists of at least three ontological worlds: the first is the physical world or the world of physical states; the second is the mental world or the world of mental states; and the third is the world of intelligibles, or of ideas in the objective sense; it is the world of possible objects of thought: the world of theories in themselves, and their logical relations; of arguments in themselves and their logical relations; and of problem situations in themselves.” - Karl Popper in “On the Theory of Objective Mind” as published in Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pg. 154. 

Is a Sentence Just Moving Particles?

Saint Augustine in His Cell by Sandro Botticelli

 

What is there to these letters now written upon this screen? They can certainly be described in terms of the characteristics of the particles that form them. They have a certain mathematical shape because of them and they take certain color due to the light that they reflect. If all we are going to do is to describe them by their physical traits based on the movement of particles, then that is where we must end. The letters now written would then be lines that happen to have certain physical properties. However, this does not get us anywhere close to what the letters really are.

The letters are not just lines. They are parts of words, clauses, sentences and even larger paragraphs all of which are organized in an order that cannot be expressed in the reductionist terms of moving particles. This order is not simply the motion of particles because such movement cannot have purpose and so we cannot speak of purpose in such terms.

Yet, the order that the letters form cannot be understood without purpose. Whether it be in the objects that the subject takes within each clause or even the purpose we presume that a similar entity like ourselves created by writing it. These cannot be understood in terms of moving particles and they point to substance in the world that cannot be reduced to moving particles: mind.

Every  time we read a piece of writing, whether it be an article, book or even a humble blog post, we accept that there is more to the world than can simply be expressed in terms of moving particles. We accept that there is more to the writing than the mathematical properties of the lines they form. We accept that the lines express a conscious purpose that can only be expressed in terms of a mental substance and the traits only such substances can take.

There is more to a sentence than just moving particles: there is the non-reductionist order created by a mind within it that it cannot be understood without.