--- Notes on science ---

The laws formulated by science... possess only a Platonic sort of reality. They are more real, if you will, than the facts themselves, because they are more permanent, trustworthy, and pervasive; but at the same time they are, if you will, not real at all, because they are incompatible with immediacy and alien to brute existence.

George Santayana

Science doesn't provide knowledge of reality; it provides models.

A particular danger to researchers is reification, the confusion of concepts with reality. The word isn't the referent. The concept isn't the reality. No matter how accurate a concept is in representing reality, it can never characterize the whole of a real thing.

And that's not a problem. I have heard that, when a child ask, wonderingly of Abraham Lincoln's height, how long his legs were, he answered, "Long enough to reach the ground." Well, our models are not perfect but they're good enough to help us predict how things will happen and understand how things work. That's what models are for.

Science allows us to construct reliable and valid models of a consistent reality that we all can share. Beyond that we can not go, nor do we need to, as long as we do not confuse what is in our heads with what is in the world.

--- Notes on knowledge ---

Thus the faculties of consciousness, of memory, of external sense, and of reason are all equally the gifts of nature. No good reason can be assigned for receiving the testimony of one of them, which is not of equal force with regard to the others.

Thomas Reid

There is a huge difference between Descartes' epistemology and our epistemology. A lot of our epistemology has drifted from philosophy to science - cognitive science. And science has worked out techniques for research that reduce uncertainty and bridges the gap between what we perceive and what is actually "out there".

Some still are suspicious of "faculties of consciousness" like intuition, emotion, and aesthetic judgment but these abilities developed with our race to take care of situations important to our survival and they are as important today as they ever were. We are often called to make "snap judgments" in situations where there is no time for long deliberation and many of our cognitive abilities are there for those situations.

But it is, nevertheless, important that our "faculties of consciousness" and, also our more respected faculties be trained to work well and to work together. Intuition, for instance, with attention and collaboration with reason can be fine tuned to be an effective and reliable tool for assessing situations that are "fuzzy", open to multiple interpretations, or that require a quick, cool summation.

I still run into people who think that memory is like a video recording in which everything that we've done or perceived is stored in our brains (if only we could get to the recordings). That idea has been disproved over and over by cognitive scientists who know that memories are reconstructions from very summary clues stored in our brains. We reconstruct situations every time we remember them and there is much room for error. But the same cognitive scientists have discovered and developed techniques that help us to reduce that error greatly. Rehearsing memories, associating new memories with salient information, and the use of memory systems greatly empower us to remember accurately and reliably.

At the same time replication, triangulation, and good research design allow scientists to certify that the results of their research actually resembles reality enough to understand and predict the workings of nature.

Nevertheless, we should be careful about "what we know". A little humility is called for because we are still once removed from the world. What we perceive will always be processed through our senses and our brain before we consciously apprehend our world. We will always be stuck with mental models of the way things work but, as long as we keep firmly in mind that they are models, that will be good enough.

No, I don't think we can know with absolute certainty what's really "out there", but we can have a consistent and reliable view of how our world works. If it's not "absolute reality", it's our world. We can't go beyond that - or can we.

The major problem is that we are incapable of directly perceiving the universe. Our sensory organs are limited and our brains are material organs that are limited in their programming to certain patterns. They are linear and time bound. Most of the universe, we can't even grasp, but we know that there are things beyond what we can grasp. What we know - our models - require other things. A physicist told me that the universe isn't made of matter - it's made of fields. We can't perceive fields, but they have to be there or else nothing we know would work.

I've had experiences that my brain can't grasp. That's part of shamanism, and there's another way we can go beyond. We're approaching a time when we can construct artificial intelligences that work qualitatively different from our material brains. They can think things that we can't. Can they open up new areas of the universe for us? I guess the question is, "Do we want them to?"

--- Notes on creation and the material world ---

The man who looks only at himself cannot but sink into despair, yet as soon as he opens his eyes to the creation around him, he will know joy.

Baal Shem-Tov

Some days, I feel that I know very well why the ancient gnostics believed that the material world is evil. Packages won't open right. Clothes bind when you're trying to get out of them and there's no use trying to just drop them into a laundry bag. They seem to intentionally catch on the lip of the bag every way they can. Walking on a hot day, clouds seem to be everywhere except between me and the sun. On a cold day I can't get my pack on because my coat catches on the arm straps.

But then I consider how many different parameters have to be within such narrow limits for this planet to support life - how many parameters have  to be within such narrow limits to support existence. Perhaps I protest too much.

The world is a joy to me. There is just to much beauty and pleasure here for me to feel short changed.

I do have somewhat against modern scientists and their staunch adherence to the doctrine of evolution, though, and it's not religious in nature. As far as my religious beliefs are concerned, what is described in the first chapter of Genesis sound precisely like abiogenesis (the development of life from nonliving environments) and evolution. No, I have no problem with the ideas of evolution and abiogenesis on a religious basis. My problem is purely scientific.

Science is empirically based inquiry and no one was around to observe what happened in the development of the current environment. We can speculate but, as long as there are competing theories that fit, we cannot say that we have the answer.

As it is, I know of no good way to distinguish an environment developed by evolutionary forces and one created by a rational creator. Both would lead to beings that almost precisely fit their environments.

I could forgive the naivete of  scientists a few decades ago pointing to the appendix as evidence that mistakes were made. Now we know that the appendix and the tonsils and other "vestigial" organs do, indeed serve real purposes. But scientists still sing the same tired old songs. "But what about (fill in the blanks)?" They were wrong about tonsils. Just because an organ seems to be vestigial now, doesn't mean that it actually has no purpose. Really, the scientists are the last people we want to "never learn."

Science doesn't tell us what-is. In the final analysis, we can never know what-is. We hope and have good reason to believe that what we "know" is in agreement with what is actually out there, but what we know is our mental models of what is out there. The models work, so we can be content with that. But that's what science gives us - models that work, models that allow us to predict with reasonable accuracy what will happen, and models that allow us to be creative with the materials we have to work with. We may want to go further to plumb the depths of reality - to know the bedrock fundamental of our existence and, when we do find answers - yay!- more power to us - but reification is insidious and we should never lose sight of the fact that what we have really found are models of the bedrock fundamentals of our existence.