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Science is a process to find objective truths. It relies upon consistency, if a counterexample is found to a theory that theory is considered incorrect. New the

Science is a process to find objective truths. It relies upon consistency, if a counterexample is found to a theory that theory is considered incorrect. New theories must match all existing data. Einstein's theory of General Relativity is a good example of this; it replaces Newtonian gravitation in extreme circumstances but provides the exact same results in the limit around everyday energies. Science cannot create objective understanding of purely subjective systems. The issues surrounding consciousness and qualia are of this sort, while everyone experiences their reality they are inherently outside the domain of objective truth. The closest science can get is to consider them as "emergent phenomena" and give up on explaining the issue.

coldtea 9y ago
>Science is a process to find objective truths. There are no "objective truths" (that's metaphysics). Science is a process to find which models/hypotheses make more accurate predictions and have more explanatory power. >It relies upon consistency, if a counterexample is found to a theory that theory is considered incorrect. New theories must match all existing data. That (a popular but naive epistemology) doesn't hold with how scientific process actually works. New theories can have counterexamples or be unable to match all existing data and still be successful in providing a handier model for more phenomena. Theories might even be inconsistent with other theories (e.g. QM and relativity) and still co-exist and successfully grow while searching for a unification factor (whether that's successful or not). New theories can succeed (and historically have been known to) even when not accounting for all existing known facts predicted by earlier ones. In other words, more explanatory power doesn't necessarily mean a complete superset. The intersection might not cover 100%. And that's just for hard sciences. For soft sciences, from economics to social sciences, it's even fuzzier.
- aalleavitch 9y ago
  I'd say it's more accurate to say that science doesn't arrive at objective truths so much as shared truths. It arrives at truths that as many scientists as possible can agree upon. Consensus, after all, is the highest state a scientific theory can aspire to.
  - akvadrako 9y ago
    Consensus has nothing to do with science, which can be done by a sole individual completely separate from society. You can follow the scientific method just fine and discover new phenomena and nobody might believe you, but you still did science.
    - whatshisface 9y ago
      Getting consensus involved in the philosophy of science is usually done as a direct assault on the idealst's question of, "what if this is all just your elaborate hallucination?" When I'm asked that I just say, "begone, dream-foulers." Then all of the idealists in the universe disppear.
- whatshisface 9y ago
  I think saying that science doesn't arrive at objective truths means defining "objective" to be a word that nobody would ever use. Give me a number, and I can put that many nines after the decimal place of percent-certianty in my result. For each nine, I have to run my experiment longer. Infinity nines -> complete certainty. So, in practice, when we're choosing between fact and fiction, what we're really doing is putting our theories into a bucket and letting them duke it out until there's only one voice left telling us how many struts our bridge needs to be built with. The beauty of science is that whatever poetry, rousing manifesto, or brilliant connections you want to pit it against, you can always look at them and order up exactly as many nines as it takes to beat them. The certainty of science is finite, but unbounded: so it's the best we've got. >Theories might even be inconsistent with other theories [...] There's a nice philosophy-of-science trick you can do if you want QM and GR at the same time. Just look at the error bars on the experiments that support the two theories, and propagate them down into error bars on the theories themselves. That leads to theories being statements of knowledge over appropriate ranges (and to appropriate precisions), making them "true" in an absolute sense. (If you do this with Newton's classical mechanics, you will realize that QM was not an overturning but an allowed-for refinement.)
  - Emma_Goldman 9y ago
    I think the person who you are responding to took objection at a philosophical level, namely, it's simply not the case, however robust the scientific results, that you have direct access to the 'pure nature of the world in itself'. That is a conceit of the correspondence theory of truth that hasn't been thought credible since the linguistic turn. There is no thought independent of the language we use to represent the world, and that language is rooted in and conditioned by history. Hence Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Of course, that doesn't practically undermine the value of scientific investigation.
    - whatshisface 9y ago
      >There is no thought independent of the language we use to represent the world This is debatable[0]. Presumably, people without language can still think, and even if you believe that they invent an internal language to think with you are placing language into a tool-role, where it can be created and destroyed in service of a higher goal (thought). However, that still leaves the problems with correspondence unexplained: but hopefully I can convince you that they are not too bad. I'll sketch it for you: Coordinate systems are all equally good by the measure of how well their predictions work. They're obviously constructions - but that doesn't itself imply that the models that use them are constructions, any more than the wrappers burgers come in makes their meat paper. (I mean, the models might be constructions too, but it's not the use of arbitrary coordinate systems that makes them so.) Specific expressions of models are all equally good by the "correspondence" measure as well: anyone with even a grade-school math education should be able to recognize A=BCD and I=JK,K=QP as distinct in the literal sense but identical in some higher one. So, once again, it's obvious that we are looking at different ways of expressing the same thing; a thing which hasn't yet been proven not to exist, even though no way of expressing it can by itself be more than just "a different way." So, one step above algebra and two steps above specific calculations, there's the concepts. From a scientific perspective unless you think the brain is supernatural it's really to be expected that ideas are no more than symbols. BUT: for the same reasons as the two cases above, it has yet to be shown that the concepts are not themselves dancing around a still higher truth, each (effectively true) idea differing only in the baggage of being human; that silly but fun phrase referring to how we like symbols but are presumably using them to mean something. [0]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/#ObjLOT https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/#ObjLOT
goialoq 9y ago
"emergent phenomena" isn't quite the term for this. An emergent phenomenon is simply a phenomenon that arises form the interaction of components, and so can't be explained purely by reduction to components. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
mannykannot 9y ago
Emergent phenomena are not inherently unexplainable or beyond science - evolution is an example.
asddkk 9y ago
The problem is the frame of reference of "subjective." For example, few would question whether or not coat color on cats is an explainable phenomenon, although it varies. So, why isn't qualia similar? Subjective experience is a property of a biological system, so it would seem that the claim that subjective experience is not scientifically explainable at some level would be a claim that biology is not explainable. I agree with your sentiment at some level, in that I think the explainability of certain things is at least open to question, or should be questioned, but I think the subjective/objective distinction is misleading or misguided because from some frame of reference, subjective is objective. The bigger issue maybe, that the article touches on, is the problem of emergence. One definition of emergence is basically that the complexity at one scale of analysis becomes so extreme that you have to move to another scale of analysis. I.e., emergence is associated with unavoidable information loss, where what is random at one scale is nonrandom at another, but predicting from one scale to another is impossible. It's kind of a measurement horizon, to borrow a cosmological metaphor: your measurements at one scale become so complex to model as a system at some point that you have to simply remeasure at a different scale. I think this is a more immediate pressing problem with science, that there may be some kind of information-theoretic limits to explainability across scale in complex systems. It's something that the reductionistic push kind of misses: just because something is physically reducible, and logically necessary, it's not necessarily informatically reducible, and logically knowable a priori (to borrow from the philosopher Kripke).

coldtea 9y ago

>Science is a process to find objective truths. There are no "objective truths" (that's metaphysics). Science is a process to find which models/hypotheses make more accurate predictions and have more explanatory power. >It relies upon consistency, if a counterexample is found to a theory that theory is considered incorrect. New theories must match all existing data. That (a popular but naive epistemology) doesn't hold with how scientific process actually works. New theories can have counterexamples or be unable to match all existing data and still be successful in providing a handier model for more phenomena. Theories might even be inconsistent with other theories (e.g. QM and relativity) and still co-exist and successfully grow while searching for a unification factor (whether that's successful or not). New theories can succeed (and historically have been known to) even when not accounting for all existing known facts predicted by earlier ones. In other words, more explanatory power doesn't necessarily mean a complete superset. The intersection might not cover 100%. And that's just for hard sciences. For soft sciences, from economics to social sciences, it's even fuzzier.

aalleavitch 9y ago
I'd say it's more accurate to say that science doesn't arrive at objective truths so much as shared truths. It arrives at truths that as many scientists as possible can agree upon. Consensus, after all, is the highest state a scientific theory can aspire to.
- akvadrako 9y ago
  Consensus has nothing to do with science, which can be done by a sole individual completely separate from society. You can follow the scientific method just fine and discover new phenomena and nobody might believe you, but you still did science.
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    Getting consensus involved in the philosophy of science is usually done as a direct assault on the idealst's question of, "what if this is all just your elaborate hallucination?" When I'm asked that I just say, "begone, dream-foulers." Then all of the idealists in the universe disppear.
whatshisface 9y ago
I think saying that science doesn't arrive at objective truths means defining "objective" to be a word that nobody would ever use. Give me a number, and I can put that many nines after the decimal place of percent-certianty in my result. For each nine, I have to run my experiment longer. Infinity nines -> complete certainty. So, in practice, when we're choosing between fact and fiction, what we're really doing is putting our theories into a bucket and letting them duke it out until there's only one voice left telling us how many struts our bridge needs to be built with. The beauty of science is that whatever poetry, rousing manifesto, or brilliant connections you want to pit it against, you can always look at them and order up exactly as many nines as it takes to beat them. The certainty of science is finite, but unbounded: so it's the best we've got. >Theories might even be inconsistent with other theories [...] There's a nice philosophy-of-science trick you can do if you want QM and GR at the same time. Just look at the error bars on the experiments that support the two theories, and propagate them down into error bars on the theories themselves. That leads to theories being statements of knowledge over appropriate ranges (and to appropriate precisions), making them "true" in an absolute sense. (If you do this with Newton's classical mechanics, you will realize that QM was not an overturning but an allowed-for refinement.)
- Emma_Goldman 9y ago
  I think the person who you are responding to took objection at a philosophical level, namely, it's simply not the case, however robust the scientific results, that you have direct access to the 'pure nature of the world in itself'. That is a conceit of the correspondence theory of truth that hasn't been thought credible since the linguistic turn. There is no thought independent of the language we use to represent the world, and that language is rooted in and conditioned by history. Hence Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Of course, that doesn't practically undermine the value of scientific investigation.
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    >There is no thought independent of the language we use to represent the world This is debatable[0]. Presumably, people without language can still think, and even if you believe that they invent an internal language to think with you are placing language into a tool-role, where it can be created and destroyed in service of a higher goal (thought). However, that still leaves the problems with correspondence unexplained: but hopefully I can convince you that they are not too bad. I'll sketch it for you: Coordinate systems are all equally good by the measure of how well their predictions work. They're obviously constructions - but that doesn't itself imply that the models that use them are constructions, any more than the wrappers burgers come in makes their meat paper. (I mean, the models might be constructions too, but it's not the use of arbitrary coordinate systems that makes them so.) Specific expressions of models are all equally good by the "correspondence" measure as well: anyone with even a grade-school math education should be able to recognize A=BCD and I=JK,K=QP as distinct in the literal sense but identical in some higher one. So, once again, it's obvious that we are looking at different ways of expressing the same thing; a thing which hasn't yet been proven not to exist, even though no way of expressing it can by itself be more than just "a different way." So, one step above algebra and two steps above specific calculations, there's the concepts. From a scientific perspective unless you think the brain is supernatural it's really to be expected that ideas are no more than symbols. BUT: for the same reasons as the two cases above, it has yet to be shown that the concepts are not themselves dancing around a still higher truth, each (effectively true) idea differing only in the baggage of being human; that silly but fun phrase referring to how we like symbols but are presumably using them to mean something. [0]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/#ObjLOT https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/#ObjLOT

goialoq 9y ago

"emergent phenomena" isn't quite the term for this. An emergent phenomenon is simply a phenomenon that arises form the interaction of components, and so can't be explained purely by reduction to components. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

mannykannot 9y ago

Emergent phenomena are not inherently unexplainable or beyond science - evolution is an example.

asddkk 9y ago

The problem is the frame of reference of "subjective." For example, few would question whether or not coat color on cats is an explainable phenomenon, although it varies. So, why isn't qualia similar? Subjective experience is a property of a biological system, so it would seem that the claim that subjective experience is not scientifically explainable at some level would be a claim that biology is not explainable. I agree with your sentiment at some level, in that I think the explainability of certain things is at least open to question, or should be questioned, but I think the subjective/objective distinction is misleading or misguided because from some frame of reference, subjective is objective. The bigger issue maybe, that the article touches on, is the problem of emergence. One definition of emergence is basically that the complexity at one scale of analysis becomes so extreme that you have to move to another scale of analysis. I.e., emergence is associated with unavoidable information loss, where what is random at one scale is nonrandom at another, but predicting from one scale to another is impossible. It's kind of a measurement horizon, to borrow a cosmological metaphor: your measurements at one scale become so complex to model as a system at some point that you have to simply remeasure at a different scale. I think this is a more immediate pressing problem with science, that there may be some kind of information-theoretic limits to explainability across scale in complex systems. It's something that the reductionistic push kind of misses: just because something is physically reducible, and logically necessary, it's not necessarily informatically reducible, and logically knowable a priori (to borrow from the philosopher Kripke).