What, Why & How do we Know ?
Ray Monk’s 1999 essay on Wittgenstein’s forgotten lesson – that
“scientism” is a tide against which we are swimming.
(I constantly use the word “scientism” to describe the prevailing problem and wasn’t aware of this source. Stumbled across it in Prospect Magazine, whilst following up the Nagel review below.)
Interesting NY Times science post by George Johnson.
(Hat tip to Rick Ryals on Facebook.)
” … it is almost taken for granted that everything from physics to biology, including the mind, ultimately comes down to four fundamental concepts: matter and energy interacting in an arena of space and time.”
” … maybe decades or millennia from now — here or someplace yet to be imagined — science on Earth, circa 2014, will look like nothing more than a good start.”
concludes Johnson.
In practice it’s a comparative review of two books:
Thomas Nagel’s 2012 “Mind and Cosmos:
Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False” and
Max Tegmark’s 2014 “Our Mathematical Universe:
My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality”
The former gets slated by Pinker, so that’s a good recommendation for me. (Here a review in Prospect Magazine.)
The Building Blog is one I’ve linked to individual posts before, usually when pointed out by BifRiv. Added the home page to my blogroll, but here a current example “Buy a Lighthouse”.
There have been debates before about the validity of “peer review” and alternative publishing authority models – seem to recall some hoo-ha around arxiv.org a few years back. These here are technical articles rather than pure science, but show how systems are manipulated. (Hat tip to BifRiv for the link.)
A phrase coined by Feynman apparently. Mentioned in a post from Scientia Salon, linked on Facebook by David Morey.
Promising, I commented …
“current practice of inflationary cosmology as [un]able to accommodate any experimental result, so, on philosophical grounds, no longer science – cargo cult physics (after Feynman)”
Thank you. And we already know “string theory” isn’t science, not even “theory”, according even to Krauss. Double whammy. If we just re-set science back to somewhere around Copenhagen, there may be some hope.
(If you’re not one of David’s FB friends you’ll need the direct link to the post on Silentia Salon.)
Another IAI talk, from How The Light Gets In at Hay-on-Wye (though can’t tell which year this was recorded).
Not watched it yet, but looks like an addition to the BHA Limits to Logic thread below, daring to suggest reason is more than strict rationality, which it clearly is.
I commented in this thread, since it was one of the talks at How The Light Gets In that I attended (sorry that links a long post covering several talks). Needless to say the scientistic humanists are in panic reaction mode:
Ho hum – re-enter the Higg’s Boson saga as CERN prepares to restart the LHC in Jan 2015.
Something’s missing from the standard model – the Higgs Boson or (shock horror) “something else”. Here’s wishing open minds for CERN scientists (and fewer computer graphics). There is some promise:
Physicists know that this framework, devised in the 1970s, must be a stepping stone to a deeper understanding of the cosmos. But so far, it’s standing up exceptionally well. Searches at the LHC for deviations from this elegant scheme – such as evidence for new, exotic particles – have come to nothing.
Start believing the evidence, please.