Part II: Explaining reason
and science
We are supposed to be living in a scientific world. However, there are
still many people that, while affected in their life by science and
technology, are still ignorant of the main features of science.
Many of its features are readily accessible from official sources such
as this.
Some of the main characters of science
Let us sum up some of the main principles of science, that is
the
scientific approach to the truth and the search for the truth.
Accuracy :
every concept
involved should be as clear and well-defined as possible. The role of
this criteria is to prevent risks for the reasoning to end up to false
conclusions. To say this in other words, we can see this as the task of
either being exact, or at least ensuring that the approximations made
(not always quantitative, but also conceptual) will be small
enough to not wrong the conclusion, as far as we are expecting
this conclusion to be close to the truth on the issue being
studied. If the issue in question is naturally clear and simple, the
risk of wrong approximations may not raise up. However, on harder
issues, it may become a major problem, thus requiring a lot of work and
intelligence to be resolved. This may be because of the harder
complexity of the issue, and/or because the right concepts by which a
given aspect of reality would need to be analyzed for being properly
understood, are not given in advance, and still need to be discovered,
ifever it is indeed possible to discover any relevant concepts.
Logical Positivism
: the truths
that science normally searches for, can be roughly split into
2 kinds
(though, in practice, many will be mixtures of them).
- Those that come as necessary consequences of conceptual
accuracy.
Namely, the ideal case of these, are the mathematical theorems. More
generally, is the work of developing and refining concepts, drawing the
precise consequences and connections between concepts, so as to bring
conceptual materials which make it possible to express and develop the
other sort of truths:
- Those that give information on the real world, which we can
observe. This is roughly the principle of empiricism (to infer what
will happen, as a continuation of what already happened), but should be
distinguished from a naive form of empiricism, by the careful details,
accuracy and conceptual depth in which it is proceeded. Indeed, anyway,
all the
perception we can have from the world (except possibly by
introspection or supernatural means; we shall discuss this
issue
later), is made of the (extremely large) information transmitted to our
mind from our senses through our nerves.
Therefore, the object of scientific research and knowledge outside pure
mathematics, is to
point out logical structures connecting the available
information (as either personnally observed
or collectively recorded like the one in a library),
which can inform us on the question: in the gigantic mathematical set
of all "arbitrary" series of perceptions (such as the set of all 28N possible
files of N bytes), what is the (eventually very
indirect) expression of the classification that can
distinguish those most likely to be the ones we shall
perceive, as opposed to which ones are impossible (or unlikely).
The conceptual
reconstruction of reality
: the means at our disposal (our senses) do not give us any direct
perception of reality, but this does not mean that reality
remains unknown. On the contrary, the scientific reseach as we
just described, gives us means to build up an
effective
understanding of reality, or at least, of the aspects of reality that
are of concern to us. This is operated by the work of formulating these
logical expressions (discovered as those which best distinguish the
most probable series of perceptions, from the impossible or
most
unlikely ones), in their clearest, best understandable form. Indeed,
such a clearest understanding (expression) of these logical structures
requires to
distinguish there a number of key intermediate concepts. And these key
intermediate concepts are what plays
the role of
the elements of reality as we can understand it. They are the image
(translation, approximation), which we can form in our minds, of
elements of reality which are outside it. (Example: when looking at the
Titan
pictures, there are many intermediate concepts involved for
the interpretation of this perception, representing different elements
of reality).
Non-essentialism
: the
way things behave, or the role they play, is not always a matter of
what their deep nature is, or whether things indeed have a deeper
nature or not. Indeed, consider a situation when something would have
an essence or deep nature of a deeper level than what is being
considered at a given step of understanding. Then, of two things one:
either this deeper nature has observable effects on the behavior of
this thing, in which case the observation of this external behavior can
provide information on this deeper nature, so that, somehow, this
deeper nature is observable (and the information from these
observations can provide us with a scientific understanding of what it
looks like, even if it is not a full understanding). Or it does not
(getting rid of its consideration provides the best available
approximations of its behavior). In this case, such considerations of
deeper nature, insofar as they could not help making more accurate
expectations, are
irrelevant to the understanding of these things, as if they were not an
element of the reality of this world, but of another world disconnected
from this one.
In other words, the understanding of something, is mainly not a matter
of "what this thing is", but of how it behaves, what role it plays,
which way it connects to other things around.
Pragmatism
: scientists
must adapt their research methods to the specific contexts of
what
they want to study, for which the most effective research methods are
not always the same from a subject to another, because different
aspects of reality cannot always connect in the same way to our
experience.
Also, naming
some extensive list of principles of rationality, would usually be
irrelevant: scientificity is not about applying an exact list of
principles fixed in advance, but about developing and training a more
extensive form of commonsense. The work of the scientist cannot be
replaced by machines. Machines can help the scientist by operating the
repetitive application of some already well-established
principles, but the work of scientists wll always be necessary for
providing a wider understanding of large conceptual systems, and
leading research projects. This ability is highly dependent on natural
skills
and personal experience in scientific research and understanding. Most
scientists did not
(or not much) follow any course on the scientific method in the way
philosophers imagine, but spend much more effort, either
studying mathematics
(proofs...) to train their thinking ability and gather some
mathematical concepts that may be useful to them later, or gathering a
wide range of specific information on their domain of study.
For example, some fields of research have the possibility of
making experiments, for observations to be more extensive and
provide more complete information on the reality that is
considered; while this is not (or less) possible in other fields like
astronomy where stars and galaxies can only be observed and not be
subjects of any experiment.
Plato's cave, rationality levels, and non-essentialism issues.
Many people already heard about the
Allegory of the cave, (as it is often taught in high
school philosophy classes). Let us recall it in short [quotation from
Wikipedia]
"Socrates
describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall
of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch
shadows projected on the wall by things passing in front of a fire
behind them, and begin to ascribe forms to these shadows. According to
Socrates, the shadows are as close as the prisoners get to viewing
reality. He then explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is
freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the
wall are not constitutive of reality at all, as he can perceive the
true form of reality rather than the mere shadows seen by the prisoners."
The story further explains how hard it is to try to free the prisoners,
who considered the shadows they saw to be the reality, and first have a
hard time adapting to the real things and getting familiar to them.
This allegory can be seen as an image of what science could finally
accomplish, the way it could go beyond immediate experience and
understand the deep structures underlying the things we can
see,
through the understanding of many other concepts far away from those
naturally appearing and useful to everyday life.
Especially, Math and Physics are absolutely amazing, in how far deep
they could reach in their respective domains of study. Unfortunately,
and just as this allegory says, most of these subjects, and how
wonderful they are, cannot be easily explained to the lay people.
Another solution, instead of trying to free someone from his chains, is
to try to show him an image of the real things by projecting their
shadow on the wall he can see. This is the work of science
popularization: not a real presentation of things as they can really be
understood, but sorts of metaphors roughly explaining how they look
like in a way or another.
Some people in search of truth, when looking at these shadows of
science that science popularization is, may complain that these shadows
are not clear, will find inconsistencies there, and will want
to
criticize these images as not satisfying, not being the ulimate
explanations. Somehow they are right that these shadows are not the
ultimate explanation, but when complaining so, they are
missing
the fact that this these popularized presentation are not the
full account of the currently established scientific understanding
either. Another usual wrong complaint is to make the mistake of
essentialism (missing
the reason for the non-essentialism of science that we explained
above). These misunderstanding problems can lead to dramatic
consequences where some people may come to dedicate their life to
trying to put forward alternative views in opposition to established
science. This issue will be further developed later.
However, there is no absolute separation between teaching and
popularization (between getting freed to understand the depth of
things, or only seeing their shadow). No absolute separation, but still
a difference (distance) between them, that can eventually be very big.
How can this be, you may ask, while all scientific understanding is
operated by the same fundamental kind of rational ability of the human
mind in its normal state, the same which is operated by lay people and
lead them to so many mistakes ?
First, we can note that it does not matter how surprising or illogical
this may sound: anyway it is a fact, so that denying it just based on
its oddness, would lead nowhere.
Then, it can be understood as a non-essentialist truth: it does not
matter what science is made of; what matters is the role it plays. The
role played by science cannot be properly reduced to the
question
of what it is made of. It is the same kind of people in themselves,
that can as well be prisoners only looking at shadows on the wall, or
going out from the cave. Science plays the role of a
way out of the cave, and this is all the best that ought to be expected
from a vision of the truth on the world we live in.
So, how can it be, and what does its difference from the basic
use of reason consist of ?
One of the main answers, is that it is a matter of complexity. Ordinary
reason
is enough to correctly solve simple problems of everyday life
with
sufficient accuracy or reliability for practical purposes, but it fails
when faced with more complex or faraway problems, where the
conceptual approximations made by an ordinary mind are not
right, and inaccuracies are either too big or too numerous, so that
they happen to add up into major mistakes in the conclusions. Also,
some necessary key concepts for the understanding of some issues, may
be completely missed by people who are not familiar with them. Some key
concepts require a lot of work to be learned, going through a lot of
preliminaries.
So, here again, the very concept of rationality needs to be understood
in a non-essentialist sense: it makes no sense to qualify a person as
either rational or irrational in the absolute, but only as a
description of the role
played by this mind relatively to the purpose of
understanding a given problem or domain of reality.
The same person can happen to be rational towards some issues, and
irrational towards other issues.
We previously saw another example how something's behavior can be very
dissimilar with its deep nature: the case of spirituality with its
essentialist conception of altruism, understood as an intrinsic quality
of a person. Spiritual people are missing the fact that, in order to be
really useful to others (rather than keeping one's altruism with
oneself and then down to the grave), a real effective altruism needs to
be understood as an extrinsic quality, made of the effective ways in
which someone interacts with the rest of the world, and what
consequences on others these actions finally produce.
Let us give some more details on the non-essentialism of science, with
the case of how it goes for physics.
There is are a diversity of sciences which study different aspects of
reality. This is possible as these different aspects of reality can be
considered and understood more or less independently from each other
(each can be somehow neglected in the study of others), even though
they are aspects of the same global reality, and therefore also have
connections between them. Physics is one of them; but it is itself
divided into a number of theories describing each a different aspect of
the physical universe. These theories can be understood more or less
independently from each other.
Among these theories, some describe deeper aspects of
reality (a deeper essence of things) than others.
For example, quantum physics is deeper than classical physics and
chemistry, as it provides a common
foundation explanaining both and how they
can both
describe aspects of the same reality. General relativity is deeper than
Newton's law of gravitation. So, if we want to approach the
understanding of the (relatively more) ultimate nature of the physical
universe, then the deeper theories are those we should focus on. But if
we want to understand some specific phenomena of concern to us, it
often happens for less deep theories to be much more relevant,
because they provide useful approximations that greatly simplify the
problems and provide more direct and understandable solutions.
For example, the mass of the proton has been at last computed
to a
reasonable approximation, out of the known more fundamental laws (which
had been understood well before already), by a supercomputer in year
2008. This hardness to obtain such a basic result as the mass
of
the proton out of the known more fundamental laws that determine
it, suggests how desperate it may be to pretend that
the
understanding of any significant practical aspect of reality,
should be best obtained by deducing it from any supposedly most
ultimate first principles.
So, the point of the scientific approach is not to be for or against
the research of more fundamental principles underlying given phenomena
to better understand them: indeed, such a research has been
successfully proceeded many times by science much better than by any
other philosophy. But it is about carefully adapting the orientation of
the research on any subject, either towards deeper explanations or not,
depending on what happens to be fruitful for the given purpose.
As a result of this non-essentialism, it is often said that science
rejected metaphysics. In a way this is true, however it is not the
whole story. What is true is that scientists rejected most of the works
that philosophers had done on the issue, either because it was
irrational (we shall explain further what is irrationality), or because
it was irrelevant to their
work (because of the non-essentialism of science vs. the traditional
essentialism of metaphysics). But this does not mean science
would have no access to any metaphysical truth. The problem is
that, usually, scientists focus on scientific truths, that is, accurate
and verifiable truths, rather than fuzzy truths, so that they don't
want to "waste their time" discussing on fuzzy ideas and explaining
things in fuzzy terms. The result is that they kept their knowledge for
themselves and hardly ever cared properly explaining it to philosophers
and/or to the public. Also, as they are at ease with complex ideas,
they don't see the point to try explaining them in simpler terms.
Science is knowledge, as opposed to faith
Another way to characterize science, is to define it as knowledge.
And, there are two opposites of knowledge, which are faith and
ignorance.
But, this definition requires a clarification, to not mistake
the
meaning the word "faith" here, with some other meanings often
given by religions. Indeed, religions usually define "faith" to mean
either hope, trust in God, belief in
afterlife, adhesion to some specific doctrine, or any
mixture between these.
Here, for this definition of science, the involved meanings of the
words are:
knowledge = justified belief = clarified belief
faith = unjustified belief = unclarified belief
Indeed, the very concept of unjustified belief is more or less based on
its lack of clarification. This is because a
belief normally consists in holding a claim as justified.
If someone fully understood the fact that his belief is not justified
(including with his personal, unsharable experience),
then this understanding "should" drive him to stop doing as if it was
justified, thus stop believing in the claim and start considering it as
a mere hypothesis waiting for future evidence for or against it later.
In other words, scientific inquiry can be described as being neither
satisfied
with an absence of belief (ignorance) nor with a presence of
unclarified belief, but only with a work of examination of things which
may lead to clarified beliefs. This may require to review a number of
hypothesis without believing them at first, until, eventually, some may
turn out to be justified.
This does not mean that a scientist has no faith or philosophy of life
(indeed, there are too many issues in life, and it is not humanly
possible to carefully check every belief that one needs to follow). But
this means that the scientific work is a work that must care to be
unaffected by one's possible faiths. This can be done because the
scientific work is a specialized work, dealing every time with a
precise question that can be solved independently from the rest of
ideas that cannot be clarified yet.
Precisely, the point is not always to ensure that some given conclusion
is free of assumption, but the point is to clarify which are
the
assumptions that a conclusion is based on. So, if a conclusion B
depends on an assumption A, then the "real conclusion" of the work is
that (A => B).
This makes it possible for other researchers, to either know
that
B is true in the case they first knew that A is true based on
other justifications, or ignore the work at pointless (without
"disagreeing with it") if they consider A to be false or unlikely.
Such a work of clarifying all the assumptions that a
conclusion
depends on (while only neglecting the mention of the assumptions that
can't be subject to a "reasonable doubt"), can be a very hard work
where mistakes may happen. But well, this is precisely why science is
often a work to be reserved to professionals (another reason is the
fact that each work may require many premises for drawing a conclusion,
and only professionals may be familiar with the available body of
knowledge which can supply for needed premises, and thus orient the
kind of work that may be relevant).
There is not, or at least there should not be, such a thing as a "faith
in reason".
Reason is the ability and efficiency of work towards a distinction of
which belief is justified and which is not, as well as to develop works
that have more chances to reach the point of providing clear, justified
knowledge.
Whenever it succeeds to provide clear evidence for something, there is
no point anymore to see there any "faith in reason", because it no more
depends on any faith, but it presents full justifications for the
conclusions. Of course, it depends on the assumption that one is not
completely foolish as to mistakenly see clear evidences where there
would be none; but well, there has to be some limits to such a thing as
Descartes' thought experiment of an "hyperbolic doubt", which leads
nowhere (imagine if you started to doubt your ability to check whether
2+2=4).
What about the time when a question has not been solved yet ?
Indeed we can see a faith in the motivation to do the
research: a
hope, a belief, not yet fully justified, in the idea that the
scientific search has a chance to succeed, that some knowledge can be
obtained on the considered subject. This belief is not yet justified,
because, well indeed, by definition of a discovery, it cannot be
predicted. So, it is not always a knowledge, but it may also be a
personal creed, which humanly stimulates the process of scientific
research, but must not be mistaken for an axiom that could serve by
itself to justify any claim in the scientific reasoning itself.
This can better be understood by presenting it the other way round: the
opposite belief, claiming some specific issue to be rationally
unknowable, is usually not justified either.
Of course, there are exceptions: some knowledge could be obtained
showing the (either absolute or most probable) impossibility to resolve
some problems. It is for example absolutely impossibile to:
- find an algebraic solution to the generic 5th degree
equation or to the 3-body problem of Newtonian mechanics;
- decide the Gödel's arithmetical formula of a given
axiomatic system (expressing "this claim is not provable")
inside
the formalism of the same system;
- Prove or refute the Continuum hypothesis in the ZF
set theory;
- travel or transfer information faster than the speed of
light c
through technological means (to get information from not predicable
events happening elsewhere,
other than the mere case of classical or quantum correlation, which
does not itself give means for instant communication).
Other expectations of knowledge can be unreasonable too, such
as
- knowing the lost contents of the famous destroyed
Biblioteca Alexandria;
- giving significantly reliable predictions of the output of
quantum randomness devices away from the probability predictions of
quantum theory
- detecting traces of life from the Andromeda galaxy during
the next century.
But, after all, we can now accept as empirically justified, the claim
that reason is very powerful to discover many things in our universe,
because we could observe and verify its success during the last
centuries, and there is no reason to believe that it would suddenly
stop now.
In fact, the character of logical positivism which we
presented
(the second kind, characterizing the scientific information on the
world), is very often the essential criteria (principle) after which to
clarify whether a question, claim or theory is decidable by
reason
(or at least subject to scientific enquiry and possible progress
of knowledge), and also whether it is of any importance
(indeed
this "frequent or approximate equivalence" between logical positivism,
scientific decidability and effective importance, is itself a logical
remark).
More empirical and other justifications can be found (we shall present
some in Part III), of some claims (and attitudes of many
scientists) on the respective statuses of science and religion, and
what an awful source of mistakes the religions most famous in the
West often turn out to be.
Still, there are some unfortunate remaining forms of faith in
many
scientists (which fortunately are not actually mistaken with scientific
knowlege... at least not too much). Most of this can be
understood
as a reaction against religious claims (once observed how wrong on so
many other issues, are the religions and other propagandists making
such opposite claims):
- The faith in the possibility to unify the known laws of
physics (general relativity + standard model + dark matter +
dark
energy), finding out the right quantum "theory of everything" (TOE)
during the next few decades, and/or that it would indeed be
the
ultimate knowledge of fundamental importance for mankind, solving the
main philosophical problems. Well, this can be fine as a personal
motivation for research, and be motivated by the real wonderful
successes of fundamental physics up to the 1970's, but considering how
far are our particle accelerators from reaching the Planck energy, and
the huge difficulties of making any testable predictions of
candidate ultimate theories, this does not look like the most reliable
creed on Earth... (I personnally have no opinion on this question in
the long term).
- The faith in ontological materialism (that there would be
no true
paranormal phenomena, that the mind would be a material phenomenon
emerging from biological processes as we currently understand
them), or, as it is likely equivalent to based on the existing
knowledge in physics (we shall explain in Part III), the faith that the
quantum measurement issues are not the place for the
mind-matter
interaction: that they would be "not a problem" (accepting,
for
example, the Everett's interpretation as a solution), or that
the
future theory of everything can solve them by
replacing the
quantum randomness by some determination (this is not the
project
of current candidate TOE, which remain quantum theories preserving the
measurement randomness and paradoxes as such).
- An opinion held not by a scientist but by a philosopher,
that
"God is dead" as if the public opinion had to obey to the last
philosopher's argument...
Understanding infinity, the lessons from
metamathematics
We shall now present an important clue for metaphysics, from the work
of mathematicians.
More precisely, the works on metamathematics, also called foundations of mathematics
or mathematical logic.
This is a branch of mathematics whose purpose is to study the universe
of all mathematics itself.
It plays the role of a
philosophy for mathematics, but still it is a part of mathematics
itself, made of definitions and theorems about systems built from the
same kind of mathematical objects (elements, sets, maps...) as
any
other branch of mathematics.
Thus, it can be expressed inside the same framework (set
theory),
forming a sort of big loop of foundations, where the framework of
mathematics (set theory) is involved both as a framework and as an
object of study (but these are 2 copies of set theory, that should be
treated as if it were 2 different theories).
Usually, mathematicians in this field (just like most scientists in any
field) only care of developing this as a field of mathematics with very
difficult theorems and proofs (which show the undecidability
of some claims in
the formalism of some given theory), but not to share their knowledge
to a larger public by looking for the simplest form of their
ideas
and expressing them in ordinary philosophical words that could be more
easily understood. This can be also explained by the risk for
any
scientific idea shared to be public, to be misunderstood by them; and
this forms a vicious circle with the presence of people who spread
misinterpretations of scientific ideas which they did not properly
understand themselves, which is an unscientific practice.
However, I will try to simply explain here a few hints of
metamathematics and how it gives clues to metaphysics. I beg other
mathematicians to forgive this attempt which is not a standard
scientific one, especially as such a philosophical (rather than purely
mathematical) presentation, is neither an ordinary practice of
mathematicians, nor the object of any well-established consensus.
The universe of mathematics is usually considered to be fixed, absolute
and eternal. Indeed, for most practical purposes, it can be assumed as
such.
However if we dig into its foundations we can discover that, somehow,
it is not and cannot be exactly so. Rather, it develops along time. But
this time in which the mathematical universe develops, is not our time.
This is its own time, the abstract time of the mathematical universe,
which is
unrelated with our time.
Let us try to describe this time of mathematics, and how it flows.
Every mathematical work is assumed to be operated inside some fixed
theory, which the language of study of a supposedly fixed world of
mathematical objects. Familiar examples are geometry (whose objects are
points, lines, values of distances, circles...), arithmetic (whose
objects are
the natural numbers), or set theory itself on which any other
theory can be founded.
This world of objects is supposedly fixed, even though it is but one
among an infinite range of possible worlds of objects for the given
theory, and a particular choice of a world in this range cannot be
formally specified (every possible specification is very complex,
always making a wrong choice, and non-algorithmic so that it always
depends on another preexisting universe...). Some people would
call this assumption of
fixation of a particular world in such conditions to be nonsense,
however this is the only way of doing mathematics, so that we have to
do with it, taking such a choice in an abstract mathematical
sense, not in the sense of anything we could effectively do as humans.
Now, once this world is fixed, we have 2 sorts of things. On the one
hand we have a world of objects, and on the other hand we have a world
of formulas that we can write for describing it. These formulas should
make sense by taking an interpretation inside the world of objects.
Then, an important remark should be made: the formulas do not belong to
the world of objects that they are talking about. Rather, they are
outside it. This leads to a very important consequence: the world of
objects being studied, does not contain everything about the
understanding of the same world.
Let us now examine what is outside it. There are formulas.
The set of all formulas we may wish to write can be taken for
themselves by any means. However, insofar as we wish them to make sense
by taking values
among objects, there appears a time order between formulas, that is the
order along which these formulas can get their values.
Take for example, the formula xy+x=3.
In order for it to make sense, the variables x and y must take a value
first. Then,
xy takes a
value, obtained by multiplying the values of x and y. Then, xy+x takes a value
out of the previous ones, and finally,
the whole formula (xy+x=3)
takes a truth value (true or false). But this truth value depends on
those of the variables x and y, which are called the free variables of
this formula.
We can also write closed
formulas, whose truth value is "absolute",
not depending on any free variable.
For example there is the closed formula "for all x there exists y such
that xy+x=3"
(which is false in the world of real numbers), whose truth value "is
calculated from" the truth values taken by the initial formula for all
possible values of its variable, and therefore "comes after them".
Note how the vocabulary of time has been introduced in the above
description. Let us go further.
Some theories include objects that represent formulas. So their world
of objects contains an infinite set of elements playing the role of all
possible
formulas of the same theory. However, the well-know
Truth Undefinability theorem
says there is no possible expression of a formula F(x) which
gives
to every object x representing a closed formula X, the same truth value
as X would take when written in the theory and interpreted in
the
same world.
The proof of this theorem roughly consists in showing that such a
formula F would give means to express another formula claiming to be
itself false, which would be a contradiction.
Still, there does exist a general formula that defines the truth of any
given formula in any given world. But in order to apply, it needs to be
interpreted in a larger world of objects than the one in which we want
it to interpret those formulas. Another world containing not only the
objects of the first world, but also other objects built out
of
it, those which make up all details of how the formulas must be
interpreted there.
So: we first had a world of objects, but in order to make sense of all
formulas as applied there, we need another world larger than the first
one. Let us express this in the vocabulary of time.
The world of objects being studied is the past (in the
universe of mathematics). The formulas we are currently
interpreting there, are the
present. The larger world containing all interpretations
of formulas, is the next state of the past as it will become
once the infinite set of interpretations of
all formulas (in
the way they are currently interpretable to our past
world of
objects), will become past.
Note that if we only wanted to define the interpretation of a given
finite list of formulas instead of the whole of them, it would not
require such a change of world, as... the same formulas could be used
as an interpretation of themselves. What requires to switch to another
world, is when we want an infinity of formulas to be interpreted by
only one.
Let us go even further. But the following will be a less accurate
account of the situation, than what was just presented above, so I must
apologize for the more approximative character of the below.
These two worlds we mentioned, cannot be described by the same theory.
A different theory must be formalized to express each of them,
respectively T and T'. By applying the same reasoning as above while
defining formula F to mean the provability, this leads to the
Gödel's incompleteness theorem, which shows that the
claim of
"T has no contradiction" is not provable inside the formalism of T, but
it is only provable in the formalism of T' (because as seen by T', the
formalism of T is describing an existing world, thus
all formulas
of T make sense in a consistent way).
Let U be the world of objects of T. Then the world U' of T'
in which all formulas of T can be interpret by a single
formula, is, very roughly
the powerset P(U) of U, that is, the set of all subsets of U.
(Sorry, this is not right, the real details of what it is are
quite more complex than this, but...)
Most of mathematics and all of physics can be rather well
expressed in a mathematical universe containing the set of real
numbers. This is to say, it contains the set N of natural numbers and
its powerset P(N). To remain comfortable, let us say that this universe
handles them as sets and is therefore itself superior to it, thus, is
equivalent to P(P(N)).
But the current standard axiomatic system of set theory (named ZF), not
only accepts P(N) as a set, but the whole infinite series
P(P(.....P(N)...)) also. And it even goes further after this, to more
infinite sequences of higher and higher powersets. Then, you
may
ask: up to what point does it go ?
The answer is that this question cannot be answered, because, from the
way ZF is formalized, it turns out that the hierarchy of powersets that
it requires of its universe, goes very far beyond any possible
imagination or description.
The nature of the mind
The understanding of the mathematical time can give us clues about the
nature of the mind.
Once again I want to be apologize for the following concepts and
reasoning which lacks the normal scientific rigor, however, a fuzzy
reasoning that can give a first approximation of the truth, can be
better than no idea at all, or than leaving the way to completely false
ideas.
First, we can get a "reasonable argument" that the mind
is not a
machine, in the following way: if the mind was a machine,
then the
metamathematician would be a machine too, because, after all, the
metamathematican's mind is of the same nature. Therefore, the truths he
could discover (under conditions that would prevent him from
mistake) would be contained in those that some fixed formal axiomatic
system of mathematics would provide. But, what formal system could this
be ?
As we said, most of the useful mathematics and all physics can be done
in a "quite limited" mathematical world: P(P(N)) or the like. Working
inside P(P(N)) would provide no proof of consistency of an
axiomatic system for any bigger sort of mathematical world.
So, if the metamathematician's mind was a mere fruit of a natural
evolution that adapted human mind to the understanding of the everyday
world in order to survive there, then, the ability of finding truths
that were formal consequences from the system P(P(N)) would have
largely sufficed.
But the truth is that, unlike the system P(P(N)), the metamathematician
can come to be strongly convinced of the non-contradition of much
stronger axiom systems. His mind's proving ability is therefore not
limited to the formal proving power of P(P(N)).
We might consider that, after all, why not admit that he would
be contained in a stronger system than this.
Why not the one of all the series P(P(.....P(N)...)) ?
But, as we said, the currently standard set theory (ZF) is still much,
much stronger than this.
No a priori "reasonable" formal system fixed in advance, could be
expected to prove the consistency of such a theory.
The remaining question is thus: is it really possible for the
metamathematician to do better than the machine by discovering a
reliable evidence of the consistency of ZF ?
This question is not a mathematical one in a strict sense, because,
precisely, such an evidence cannot be a formal proof, and therefore
cannot
be admitted as a proof in the standard practice of mathematics which
requires the proofs to be formal ones in a given system. This is why,
specialists in this field are normally not dealing with such a
question, so that some philosophers looking at the situation, are
abandoned to an impression that the consistency of ZF is just a
convenient assumption with no justification ever discovered.
However, personally I did consider this question, and found out that it
has a solution.
But I found that this justification of the consistency of ZF
is
very, very tough. You should not trust the naive appearance of
intuitive truth of the replacement scheme, because this intuition is
based on a misunderstanding of the exact difference between sets and
classes,
and thus, as such, would keep a trace of the risk from the "set of all
sets" to lead to contradiction.
Now here is the clue (for the few specialists, or any other
mathematician bold enough to discover such ideas), how
to philosophically prove the consistency of ZF: take the proof of the
equivalence of the replacement scheme with the reflection principle,
and reinterpret and readapt it to form a
philosophical
proof from scratch, of the existence of a universe satisfying ZF.
Ifever you can manage
to
figure out this philosophical proof, then it will really give you a
strong feeling how better than a machine you are.
(Still there seems to remains a gap in this philosophical proof: the
validity of the powerset axiom remains unclear... sorry I'm not sure if
there is any solution to this)
Now that we saw how superior is the mind to any formal system, and
therefore to any physical system, let us try to figure it out a bit
further.
A spiritual text presented the following idea:
"There is the part of you that thinks and the part that hears the
thoughts. The thinking part is your mind; the part that hears the
thoughts is your spiritual-self".
This is an interesting idea, because of the similarity with the
structure of metamathematics that we presented earlier. This suggest us
to make a parallel between both, and provide an understanding of the
mind as inspired from this analogy - even though they are fundamentally
of different nature.
The mind is analogous with the world of objects, while the
spirit is analogous to the formulas that are making sense by
taking values in the world of objects. The spirit is what is moving the
mind at the present time. It can only do it based on the current
structure of the mind which is embedded in the brain and thus receives
the effects from the senses; and does it in a way that, usually, could
not be exactly predicted until it actually happens (in analogy with the
truth undefinability theorem). Not even God can reliably predict our
exact behavior in advance, because... our future decisions do not exist
yet.
But this action of the spirit at every given time,
then adds
up itself as a part of the mind of the next time. Thus the mind
progressively extends in time.
In other words, we have a succession, along time, of the states of the
mind: let us denote them as a succession M0, M1,
M2... every
fraction of a second (although there may be no truth of how
much
time are the intervals, because... this is a fuzzy description); and
corresponding states of the spirit, S0, S1, S2...
Thus S0 is the state of the spirit as it observes and feels M0. Then S0
adds up to M0 together with external sensations to form M1, and M1 is
observed by the spirit, providing the feeling (move) S1, and so on.
But, considering that the state of the spirit at every time is
continuously added up to the mind at the next times, we can as well say
that the spirit and the mind are not 2 different things, but 2
different aspects of the same thing. This mind-spirit, thus, is just
what we personnally are (not a physical object). In such a view,
we could say there is no essential mystery of any
deeper self in us
that we may have forgotten, because we do continuously perceive all
what we deeply are anyway.
(Of course, our self-understanding remains far from perfect
and
able of progression, just like higher levels in the hierarchy of sets
brings more information on natural numbers as formulable in the
language of arithmetics: namely, the information that set theories of
lower levels had no contradiction). Well, I admit this argument is not
clear,
and remains debatable. However, why care ? What matters is less what we
deeply are, than how we do behave in practice. And this behavior of the
mind has to be tested against observation. In the next sections we
shall develop a number of observations on real situations, that can be
made independently of any assumption on the nature of the mind.
And it will turn out that, well, this model we just presented fits
not bad.
To say it in other words: we can understand the spirit as the life of
the mind, that
drives the mind to continuously transcend itself, which is the way it
normally grows and evolves.
The mind is currently embedded in the brain and works in close
interaction with
the brain. This whole mind-spirit, or living mind, is immaterial and
eternal, and leaves the body altogether when the body dies.
The eternity of the mind can be explained as follows.
The existence of the mind at every given time is based on the fact it
will turn out to be perceived inside the past of a later time, just
like every mathematical object in a mathematical world, owes
its
full existence
to the presence and meaning of a formula
whose meaning expresses its existence (or is at
least affected by it), and that comes after it.
Indeed, the NDE testimonies do not speak about the end of all thought
outside the body, but about a new freedom and way of thinking, freed
from the brain.
This immaterial character of the mind, transcending any mathematical
system and able to find deep intuitions about infinity, does not
however mean any effective possession of the infinity. Only intuitions
somehow expressible in finite, limited terms, are normally accessible
to us in this life. For example I'd be surprised if anyone could
reliably guess the trillionth decimal of pi, while some
supercomputers might do it.
Of course, rational thinking is but one function (style of work) of the
mind among other functions, which include other ways of thinking
(imagination, artistic sense, empathy...), sensations, feelings,
morality sense, free choice and so on.
The MBTI personality types
Let's be much more practical now for describing the mind. Principles on
the nature of the mind do not explain the diversities between the minds
of different people. All people are different, physically and mentally.
However, to find some order in this diversity, there is a
famous
method of classification, called MBTI, which basically classifies
people into 16 types, defined from 4 binary data. Of course this is not
an exact division: not all people precisely fit into any exact type, as
there are as well people who are in between several types (for each of
the 4 parameters, a person may fall on intermediate positions
between the two extremes). Still, it can be relevant to many
situations, especially for its correlation with the kind of job that
fits every person. (A friend of mine reported he can understand and
predict many things in behaviors and relationships around him, just by
classifying them in these types).
Here are the 4 parameters:
I/E : Introvert / Extravert
N/S : iNtuitive / Sensitive (mode of perception: intuitive = global /
sensitive = attention on details)
N= imagination, think of the future, think global / S = live in the
present experience
F/T: Feeling / Thinking (mode of judgement)
This duality has many aspects, for example:
T: search for flaws in an argument
F: search for points of agreement in an argument
Some feelers can't understand that not all people are feelers. As
they don't like thinking, they assume that other people's thinking is
an illness which is the cause of their unhappiness. Some feelers may
even assume that
anyone's claim of better knowing some subject, could only an expression
of pride, desire
to feel superior.
The truth is that, thinkers usually don't give a shit
about comparing themselves to others (even though, of course, there can
be exceptions).
J/P : Judging / Perceiving (J= on the rules and plans / P = flexible,
disordered, anticonformist)
Some spiritual people may make confusions between these different
polarities, especially presenting a worldview as if N=F=P, in
opposition with S=T=J. Especially they pretend that rationality divides
people by nature, while spirituality would be the way for all to become
one. Or when they pretend that the intuitions and breaking of
convention at the basis of scientific breakthough, would be something
else above rational logic, thus placing spiritual teachings above
reason.
These assumptions are false, as shown by the diversity between people,
and expressed by this typology: intuition is not opposed to
logic:
scientists use their intuition naturally, and never needed any
assistance from whatever spiritual teaching to explain them that they
should seek an intuition beyond logic for their research to progress.
To those who pretend to unify everything by rejecting reason, accusing
reason of being a cause of division, I want to reply: Can you make the
difference between oneness and confusion ?
Some spiritual people pretend to teach the global, universal
truth
(N); and that this truth should be searched for by focusing on
immediate perception and the present moment (S). Following the MBTI
typology, this is a
self-contradiction. They might reply to this: all is in all, so the
whole universe can be found in the present moment. Yes but for the same
reason that all is in all, why could not universal truths be found in
rational thoughts ? Indeed they can (especially maths&physics).
Socrates is usually classified as INTP. Indeed, Plato's
philosophy and
its mention of an access to the superior world of Ideas, is all about
the INTP
character: his Ideas are global, eternal (all the opposite of immediate
perception), and rational. Note that he never pretended
Philosophy
to be accessible to any large number of people, but only a small
minority. At least he did not pretend that all people should become the
same and come to the same Truth. He saw it right that everyone does
what he does best: that the INTP (or at least some of them) search for
the Truth, while other people just stay and manage their own other
works.
(This remark should not be mistaken for any general agreement
with Plato's philosophy).
Here are some quote from diverse Web sites:
A Young-Earth
Creationist Christian wrote the following (here I only copy
of the most important sentences):
"I am a Christian and a
technologist.
I am alone and unwelcome
in the American churches.
Anybody can walk into
almost any
church on Sunday morning and immediately see that there are more women
than men, often more than twice as many...
Anybody can walk into
any scientific
or technology conference or science department in a secular university
and find more men than women. What is in large numbers is the
preponderance of atheists and non-religious practitioners, usually in
far greater proportion than the population at large in America.
The American churches
are hostile to
kind of people who become scientists and technologists. We can come,
but only by pretending or acting like somebody other than God made us
to be. It's like trying to evangelize Africans by telling them to
bleach their skin.
It really has nothing to
do with
gender at all, except that there is a significant gender discrimination
in one MBTI dimension, and that one dimension also selects technology
and science on the one hand, and the Christian religion as practiced in
America on the other.
Feelers tend to
criticize Thinkers
for being uncaring, while Thinkers tend to criticize Feelers for
hypocrisy. It's not that the Thinkers don't care about people, but they
value truth and justice over affirmation. Everybody really wants truth
to prevail -- especially when lies result in harm to themselves -- and
most people are willing to ``live and let live,'' to allow other people
the enjoyment of their own lives. This is especially so when people
recognize that the tables could be turned, that they could be the
recipients of comparable disaffirmation.
The conflict comes when
the truth is
disaffirming. People often need to know that they are part of the
problem, so they can act to correct their participation in it. However,
it is unpleasant to receive such criticism, and Feelers empathize with
that unpleasantness. Thinkers, on the other hand, consider the truth
more important than the fleeting discomfort. This is the fundamental
difference between Thinkers and Feelers. Thinkers value the truth over
affirmation, and Feelers value affirmation over the truth.
Science and technology,
on the other
hand, is about truth. Affirmation is irrelevant and generally
counter-productive. The scientific method thrives on disaffirming the
presuppositions of the status quo, and trying out new disruptive ideas.
Technology works the same way, but focuses on new products rather than
the laws of nature. Many of these new ideas don't work, but enough do
succeed to make our culture the most prosperous in all of history. As a
result, the vast majority of scientists and technologists are Thinkers.
Again the labor marketplace reflects the reality of the work being done
there.
There is a secondary
social
consequence of this particular distinction. Science drives technology,
and technology drives the creation of wealth in this country and the
world in general. Wealth in turn drives the power structure. This gives
the Thinkers an unfortunate but significant boost in public stature
over Feelers. Thinkers can afford to disaffirm the Feelers, because it
is the Thinkers in the position of power, not the Feelers. The Thinkers
themselves are less concerned with affirmation, but the Feelers mostly
don't understand that, so they continue to lavish affirmation on the
Thinkers in a subtle form of obeisance and homage.
Except in the arts and
the churches.
Successful artists and preachers tend to be Feelers. Preachers
especially survive best by affirming their congregation.
Movies are a widely
patronized art
form. Their economic success is highly dependent on the tastes and
whims of the public. There are a few movies that glorify science, but a
much larger proportion of them paint the scientists and the
industrialists as villains.
Science requires a
Thinker
perspective to succeed; most of the religious institutions survive by
affirmation, a Feeler value. This is a recent distinction resulting
mostly from the Feeler takeover of the churches. Science has always
been a Thinker activity.
there is nonetheless a
very clear and
increasingly hardened division between the technologists on the one
side, and the nontechnical domains (religion and the arts) on the
other. Both parties are aware of the divide and both pay token homage
dismay over it, but both sides continue to act in ways that solidify
the division.
The Two Cultures coexist
in one
society with very little overlap. Mostly they look on the other side
with disdain... Mostly the two cultures refuse to have anything to do
with each other. Perhaps ``refuse'' is too strong a word. The
scientists warily accept people of religious persuasion, provided that
they leave their religion at home. Similarly the churches eagerly
invite the scientists to their meetings, again provided they leave
their scientific thinking at home.
The divide between
C.P.Snow's Two
Cultures is nowhere more obvious than in the churches. American
churches are unashamedly and completely contained within one of those
cultures. The church is operated by and for the exclusive benefit of
Feelers. Thinkers need not apply. They won't tell you, but they expect
Thinkers to leave their brain at the door.
The churches I grew up
in (and
continue to patronize) emphasize as part of their doctrine, that there
is such a thing as absolute Truth and that God abhors lies. Then they
turn around and insist that their ``Christianity is a relationship, not
a religion,'' and (almost proudly) that ``the church is full of
hypocrites, and if you find one that isn't, don't join it, because
you'll spoil it.''
Thinkers are not
hypocrites. The
highest Thinker value is to tell the truth, even when it is
uncomfortable. It is Feelers who are hypocrites, who value
``relationship'' (meaning affirmation) over truth, and are thus willing
to hide the uncomfortable truth and to live a lie for the sake of
pleasantry.
What this means is that
the churches
are implicitly (and often explicitly) promoting Feeler values and
deprecating Thinker values. This is not just the conservative
Bible-oriented churches, but all of them. Even more so the more
``liberal'' churches who make no claim to adhering to Bible absolutes.
Absolutes are a Thinker value, but even the self-proclaimed abolutists
give it second place after ``relationships'' (the Feeler value).
As a consequence, the
Feelers feel
affirmed in the churches, and the Thinkers are not. The proportion of
women in the churches matches the proportion of women Feelers.
``Dan'' is another
technologist
married to a Feeler, but he has been successfully morphed into a Feeler
by the church. He still insists that he tests out as a Thinker, but his
religious conversation is about relationships. He tries to engage
unbeliever Thinkers, but they brush him off with devastating put-downs
like ``Everything you've given me as to why you believe is based on
either emotion or credulity of unsubstantiated ancient texts... None of
this even begins to prove that Jesus loves me.'' The educated Thinker
needs truth and reason, not love and relationships.
People have started
noticing the
gender disparity in church. The Thinkers out there in the real world
couldn't care less. It's not their problem. But the men in the churches
feel outnumbered. Where are the guys? So they start new ministries to
attract men into the churches, and to keep them there once they come.
Thus was born the ``Men's Movement.''
The guys in the Men's
Movement (MM)
don't have a clue. They are all Feelers themselves, so they do not
understand that all the guys who don't come have very different values
than they themselves do. All of the MM stuff is about ``showing your
inner feelings,'' in other words, becoming Feelers. Some of them try to
bring in ``manly'' activity such as physical exertion, going fast,
making loud noises and breaking things, but its focus is still on
relationships and feelings, not truth and justice. "
Now, smaller excerpts from any other sites.
About peace making:
"The Israeli-Palestinian
conflict is represented
in a realistic and well-known videogame, PeaceMaker.(...) Results
indicate that the players' decision making personality is related to
their performance in PeaceMaker. Players of thinking personality were
more successful at reaching a conflict resolution in the game compared
to the players with feeling personality, suggesting that those that are
more assertive and impersonal, rather than affective and personal, are
more successful in conflict resolution. Furthermore, this distinction
is particularly important when the players' religions are those involved in the conflict."
As for the connections between MBTI and professions (example
of a table
of the main professions per type):
STJ includes: Management, Administration, Law enforcement
ESTJ: The Bureaucrat
Like
ESFJs, ESTJs value continuity and order. They have outstanding
organizational skills, and are meticulousand detail-oriented. Unlike
ESFJs, ESTJs are followers and joiners; they are happiest when they
belong to organizations, the larger and more mind-numbing the better.
ESFJs often have an abnormal obsession with being normal at all costs.
"In US, overall cultural
values favor ESTJ type"
Highest Average Annual
Household Income
(From highest to lowest)
1. ENTJ (84,434)
2. ESTJ (76,238)
3. ESFJ (74,882)
Highest Education Level:
1. ENTJ (4.12)
2. INTJ (3.93)
3. ESTJ (3.83)
4. ISTJ (3.78)
Highest Percentage Married
(From highest to lowest)
1. ESFJ (53%)
2. ISTJ (51%)
3. ENTJ (51%)
4. ESTJ (50%)
Scientific or technical fields: INTP,INTJ, ENTP
(+ ISTP includes Computer Programming)
Teaching, education: EFJ, IFJ, EFP, (and eventually ESTJ, ISFP)
INFP: teacher, professor.., Clergy / Religious Workers
Religion: FJ, ENFP
Problem: (as spiritual people often complain) it is commonly assumed
that the educational system is about teaching thinking skills to the
young generation; and, among other things, to show them what is
science. But the truth is that the personality types of teachers are
nearly all F, that is, feeling value, the opposite of thinking value.
This can be explained by the fact that Thinkers usually don't like to
deal with pupils.
Also, among teachers there is more J than T, and more E than I, while
many scientists are INTP.
We shall further develop the issues about the school system and its
discrepancy with science later.
The INTP type is also called "Architect" in some naming of the
types, as this is another possible favorite profession for this type
outside science.
INTPs live
in the world of theoretical possibilities. They see everything
in terms of how it could be improved, or what it could be turned into.
They live primarily inside their own minds, having the ability to
analyze
difficult problems, identify patterns, and come up with logical
explanations.
They seek clarity in everything, and are therefore driven to build
knowledge.
They are the "absent-minded professors", who highly value intelligence
and the
ability to apply logic to theories to find solutions. They typically
are so strongly driven to turn problems into logical explanations, that
they live much of their lives within their own heads, and may not place
as much
importance or value on the external world. Their natural drive to turn
theories into concrete understanding may turn into a feeling of
personal
responsibility to solve theoretical problems, and help society move
towards a
higher understanding.
INTPs value
knowledge above all else. Their minds are constantly working
to generate new theories, or to prove or disprove existing theories.
They
approach problems and theories with enthusiasm and skepticism, ignoring
existing rules and opinions and defining their own approach to the
resolution. They seek patterns
and logical explanations for anything that interests them. They're
usually
extremely bright, and able to be objectively critical in their
analysis.
They hate
to work on routine things - they would
much prefer to build complex theoretical solutions, and leave the
implementation
of the system to others. They are intensely interested in theory, and
will
put forth tremendous amounts of time and energy into finding a solution
to
a problem with has piqued their interest.
INTPs do not like to
lead or control people. They're very tolerant and
flexible in most situations, unless one of their firmly held beliefs
has been
violated or challenged, in which case they may take a very rigid
stance.
The INTP is likely to be very shy when it comes to meeting new people.
On the
other hand, the INTP is very self-confident and gregarious around
people
they know well, or when discussing theories which they fully
understand.
The INTP has no
understanding or value for decisions made on the basis of
personal subjectivity or feelings. They strive constantly to achieve
logical conclusions to problems, and don't understand the importance or
relevance of applying subjective emotional considerations to decisions.
For
this reason, INTPs are usually not in-tune with how people are feeling,
and are not naturally well-equiped to meet the emotional needs of
others.
The INTP may have a
problem with self-aggrandizement and social rebellion,
which will interfere with their creative potential. ...
If the INTP is not able to find a place for themself which supports the
use of their strongest
abilities, they may become generally negative and cynical. If the INTP
has not developed their Sensing side sufficiently, they may become
unaware
of their environment, and exhibit weakness in performing
maintenance-type
tasks, such as bill-paying and dressing appropriately.
For the INTP, it is
extremely important that ideas and facts are expressed
correctly and succinctly. They are likely to express
themselves in what they believe to be absolute truths. Sometimes, their
well thought-out understanding of an idea is not easily understandable
by others, but the INTP is not naturally likely to tailor the truth so
as to explain
it in an understandable way to others. The INTP may be prone to
abandoning a project once they have figured it out,
moving on to the next thing.
It's important that the INTP place
importance on expressing their developed theories in understandable
ways.
In the end, an amazing discovery means nothing if you are the only
person
who understands it.
The INTP is usually
very independent, unconventional, and original. They
are not likely to place much value on traditional goals such as
popularity and security. They are strongly ingenious, and have
unconventional thought patterns
which allows them to analyze ideas in new ways. Consequently, a lot of
scientific breakthroughs in the world have been made by the INTP.
The INTP is at his
best when he can work on his theories independently.
When given an environment which supports his creative genius and
possible eccentricity, the INTP can accomplish truly remarkable things.
These are the pioneers of new thoughts in our society.
They prize autonomy in themselves and others. They generally
balk at attempts by others to convince them to change.
They also tend to be impatient with the bureaucracy, rigid hierarchies,
and the politics
prevalent in many professions. INTPs have little regard for titles and
badges, which they often consider to be unjustified. INTPs usually come
to distrust authority as hindering the uptake of novel ideas and the
search for knowledge.
INTPs accept ideas based on merit, rather than tradition or
authority.
They have little patience for social customs that seem illogical or
that serve as obstacles for pursuing ideas and knowledge. INTPs prefer
to work informally with others as equals.
they can demonstrate remarkable skill in explaining complex
ideas to
others in simple terms, especially in writing. On the other hand, their
ability to grasp complexity may also lead them
to provide overly detailed explanations of simple ideas, and listeners
may judge that the INTP makes things more difficult than they are
required to be. To the INTP, however, this is incomprehensible; they
feel they are merely presenting the all the relevant information or
attempting to crystallise the concept most clearly
INTPs are driven to fully understand a discussion from all
relevant
angles. Their impatience with seemingly indefensible ideas can make
them particularly devastating at debate.[2]
When INTPs feel insulted, they may respond with sudden, cutting
criticism. After such an incident, INTPs are likely to be as bewildered
as the recipient. They have broken the rules of debate
and exposed their raw emotions. To INTPs, this is the
crux of the problem: improperly handled emotions, INTPs believe, can
only harm.[12]
While INTPs experience emotions as an important part of their internal
lives, and sometimes share their emotions with others, INTPs
nevertheless believe that emotions must not play a role in logical
discussions, or be expressed in a way that would put themselves at
disadvantage.
[INTP] are rare - maybe one percent of the population -
and show
the greatest precision in thought and speech of all the types. They
tend to see distinctions and inconsistencies instantaneously, and can
detect contradictions no matter when or where they were made. It is
difficult for an [INTP] to listen to nonsense, even in a
casual
conversation, without pointing out the speaker's error. And in any
serious discussion or debate [INTP]s are devastating, their
skill in
framing arguments giving them an enormous advantage. [INTP]s
regard
all discussions as a search for understanding, and believe their
function is to eliminate inconsistencies, which can make communication
with them an uncomfortable experience for many. Authority
derived from office, credential, or celebrity does not
impress them. [INTP]s are interested only in what make sense,
and
thus only statements that are consistent and coherent carry any weight
with them.
Have very high standards for performance, which they apply to
themselves
The problems that INTPs have with regards to fitting into our
world are not
usually related to platonic friendships. Usually, the INTP has trouble
finding and
maintaining a love relationship. The INTP usually has relatively simple
needs and
expectations from their mates, and they're surprised and confused to
find that their
mates have more complex demands. They don't understand their mate's
needs,
and may feel inadequate to meeting them. They get very uncomfortable
with
a situation as they perceive
that they are expected to do something that is unknown to them. They
back away
from the relationship. They generally mask their fear and discomfort by
reducing the importance of the relationship to themselves and others,
or by putting the failure off onto the ridiculous expectations of their
ex-mate.
Outside of a relationship, they feel more unloved and
unappreciated, but are afraid to commit to a relationship because they
fear
rejection and hurt.
See also: Grigory Perelman, The man who refused a
million dollars (extreme example that rational intelligence can be very
far from greed, unlike what many Spiritual teachings pretend):
Perelman’s widespread popularity is easy to explain.
His having proved
the Poincaré conjecture clearly has nothing to do with it.
Most
Russians have no idea what that is. What they like is
Perelman’s
stubborn refusal to take the money. The money is being pressed on him,
but he still won’t take it. Even now, in this most
materialistic of
post-Soviet times when everyone seems to be screaming in your ear: earn
money, get rich, spend it, get all you can out of life! “I
don’t need
anything, I have everything I need,” Perelman explained to
journalists
through the closed door of his apartment. Yet the neighbors say
Perelman lives not just modestly, but poorly.
“He is exceedingly punctilious. Sometimes he would
see violations of
moral codes where, in fact, there were none.” The
mathematical
community considers that Perelman solved the problem, but he says that
Hamilton deserves the prize. We, his contemporaries, feel sure that a
million dollars is the equivalent of happiness in life and that one
shouldn’t refuse such presents. But Perelman has a different
opinion.
Do you catch his meaning? He simply has other criteria concerning what
is moral and what isn’t, what is correct and what
isn’t. It seems that
he doesn’t just see “violations of moral codes
where there are none”,
but sees more than all of us put together. Perhaps that is what helped
him solve the “unsolvable” problem. What
are all the
temptations of the world to him compared with that knowledge?
living with his mother in a humble flat in St Petersburg,
co-existing
on her £30-a-month pension, because he has been unemployed
since
December.
Keirsey defines what the four types want as follows:
SJ - Helpmate
SP - Playmate
NF - Soulmate
NT - Mindmate
But this is not an absolute:
"I find this
classification cliched and a bit forced. As we grow older,
we all develop (or at least are forced to develop) our weaker
functions (...) As to mating, I would be the happiest to have a
playmate, a soulmate, a mindmate, and a helpmate in one person "
More about religion:
"The character that the
Bible teaches must be attained is that of the
INFJs personality. By asking a reform of character, it is actually
asking for a change from one type to another type.
Upon my departure
form Christianity, my closest ministry friend, a very devout Christian,
came to me in hopes of changing my mind. I tried to explain to him my
stance by logic, but he wasn't getting what I was saying. I explained
to him that I believed Christianity was taylored to the INFJs, just as
philosophy to the INTPs and Music to the ISTP. I made him take the test
and he indeed came out INFJ."
"I come from a Southern
Baptist
background and experienced the same "out of place" feeling that you
speak of, but in my case the denomination is absolutely dominated by
SJ's and mostly extroverted ones."
"I thought the Christian
culture down south would be ExFJ based, if anything."
"It
is very difficult to change personality, if at all possible, hence it
is very difficult to follow Christianity to the letter of the word - if
at all possible."
"
An INTP has three
likely ways of relating to religion. They can
outright deny it as irrational. They can accept it as a philosophy and
analyze it. Or they can accept the experience of others which might
include the collective experience of a tradition.
An INTP can’t
rely
on their own experience. Even if they had a potentially spiritual
experience, they’d be reluctant to trust it. This would be
true of NTs
in general."
"
Another result, and
this is just my opinion,
is that there is no one to question the teachings, direction and
whatnot of the church because the thinking types (like INTP's) have all
left and become agnostics! Those who stay are not listened to. After
all how can an anyone be a good christain if he or she isn't oozing
with emotion?"
"The
data demonstrated that higher dogmatism scores are most clearly
associated with sensing rather than intuition. Higher dogmatism scores
are also associated with extraversion rather than introversion, and
with judging rather than perceiving. No significant difference in
dogmatism scores were found between thinking and feeling. "
"Pastors with
personaiïty types that were similar to the personality type of
the congregation were shown to
be more effective at providing support and guidance in a manner that
the congregation appreciated. Congregationd members react best to
religious guidance that is in keeping with their dominant personality
type Kelsey (1982) described how children born into families that were
of an opposite dominant personality type were treated as "black sheep"."
"
My hunch
is that those who attend church regularly are more likely to be ESFJ
than are atheists"
"ENFJ
- Extroverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging - "The Religion Teacher": Hard
to figure out. Apparently their main skill is speaking in front of
gigantic crowds charismatically, causing everyone to adore them. They
will always promise great things for everyone in the future.
INFJ
- Introverted iNtuitive Feeling Judging - "The Mystic" - prophets,
monks, Jesus Christ: Wow, even more difficult to figure out than ENFJs
due to their introversion. They are very private and spiritual, so the
only thing you will be able to figure out about them is that they have
strong opinions and strange values about obscure issues."
And some jokes:
"
INFJ: "Messiah" Characterized by the burning
desire to change the world, which desperately needs everyone to be NF."
"How
unfair can life get ? Many INFJs here on this board are staunch
defenders of the position that people should be accepted as they are
(and we'll give you the MBTI theory of what any type is theoretically
like, in case you don't know it already ), and here we get accused of
wanting everyone to be NFs. There is no justice in this world
- aww you INFJ's are so
sensitive... cmon lighten up!! it's just a joke! "
and
here
(follow the link for the whole page with a list of preferred religions
per type, to be taken with humor):
"
Not
only can the MBTI pick the perfect job and the perfect mate for you,
scientifically performing vital tasks that used to be a matter of brute
trial and error, it can offer critical guidance in other areas of your
life as well. One such area which has not been sufficiently explored
until now is the matter of choosing the right religion for you.
...
The result of
the present state of affairs is that millions languish in religions
that don't suit them, like square pegs in round holes. Similarly,
churches are filled with dozens of people who don't fit in and just
make trouble.
As a Myers Briggs type
expert I am here to fill in
this important void and publish a guide that will revolutionise society
and contribute to human happiness by helping people avoid wasting years
of their lives in religions that aren't right for them"
Irrationality and fallacious characters of doctrines
Let us now present a panorama of the main categories of obstacles on
the search for truth, than can lead to errors and
misconceptions. We shall call irrationalities
such wrong ways of searching for the truth where more reliable ways
exist; or such weaknesses of doctrines, insofar as their
supporters fail to recognize these weaknesses as such and to
lower the strength of their belief accordingly.
This list contains redundancies
(different aspects of the same things) (and might not be complete
though the items are general enough to include almost anything).
- The F character of MBTI, by which people would judge claims
according to how they feel it (how optimistic, affirming or fair to
people it sounds - while forgetting that feelings are often subjective,
thus leading different people to draw different conclusions), rather
than purely truth criteria. The F people can be nice in some ways, and
useful in their own jobs, but they need to admit that it is not their
job and ability to seek and discern most cases of general
truths, those concerning the large-scale structural problems and
solutions for society.
- Someone's insufficient intelligence (either from nature or
from lack of training and experience in rational practice) to
proceed the understanding on a subject (in other words, the subject is
too complex for this person to be able to properly understand it). Some
particular cases of this problem can be solved through computer
assistance.
- The insufficient amount of observational data, against which
to check the claims; this can include an ignorance of relevant
observation, or lack of effort in its systematic
gathering; or, on a personal level, the ignorance of already
established knowledge, or of other people's experience.
- Hidden assumptions, often operated by focusing the
attention on another step of an argument. This can include the act of
considering a subject in the terms of a given conceptual framework or
classification of possibilities, without proper justifications for the
relevance of this conceptual framework for the field being studied.
- Vague concepts, that seem meaningful (informative) while in
fact they are not (leaving the way open to any possibility or
interpretation).
- Confusion (wrong identification) between concepts, or any use of
vague concepts, that give the impression some claim would be a
logically necessary conclusion from given premises, while in
fact it is not once the argument is examined more accurately.
Example: fuzzy ideas on
what the essence of things should be, and confusion between this
essence and behavior (an unability to understand interactions in their
complexity, leading to a focus on essences of elements as a substitute
for it), so as to either make wrong expectation of behavior based on
assumed essences, or misjudge the essence based on observation (ex:
claiming that those who did wrong things in the name of a religion were
not faithful followers of that religion; accusing someone
of having had wrong intentions if he did something wrong or
reached a different conclusion).
- Failure to notice that the given view has internal contradictions or
discrepancies with known observational evidence (that would give the
chance to notice that the view is wrong, thus that previous reasonings
that led to it must contain mistakes, thus to search for where
the mistakes could have occured). Apart from a lack of
intelligence, this may proceed through a misconception or values system
that draws the attention away from the deductive path that would show
the contradiction.
- Unfalsifiability : when a set of (non logically necessary) claims
about the world (or Universe) is developed, while the course
of
events going on in some logically conceivable alternative world where
they would be false (a reality unaffected by
such kinds of determinations, not containg the things
described), fails to give the chance for the evidence of
facts, to put an end to the perpetuation of beliefs
in these claims. Causes of unfalsifiability can range from
being "not
even wrong", i.e. failing to satisfy logical
positivism (it provides no clear logical
distinction between likely and unlikely/impossible
observations), to
different ways of ignoring any contrary evidence, that may
occur in unscientific environments.
An unfalsifiable worldwiew should be discredited as being both
irrelevant (if not even wrong, providing no information of interest
about life), and deserving the highest suspicion (that its presence
there, preserved and propagated by people, is merely due to its
unfalsifiability with no hint for its truth).
- A variant or particular case of unfalsifiability, is the case of
Pareidolia, or clustering illusion: finding interpretations (meaning)
in past data that gives an illusion of explanation, while no such
explanation is true.
For example, to claim something to be the cause of another thing,
while the real causality goes another way, or the conjunction of events
may be a mere coincidence.
Doctrines can develop based on such things. This is especially
convenient when the data is fixed once for all (ex: Bible codes), but
can also apply to an open range of observations, being perpetually
reinterpreted, modified or developed to fit any new data
that may come, always invariably claiming to be the Ultimate Truth and
the only possible source of any truth, while not progressing in the
reliability of predictions or discernement among opposing
views on verifiable issues (and regularly turning out to be among the
worst for these).
To make a digital comparison, pareidolia would be like claiming to
compress a specific file by giving a dedicated compressing algorithm,
where the sum of spaces taken by the algorithm and the compressed file
is finally larger than the initial file. This goes unnoticed through
underestimates of how complex is the interpretation, and
how arbitrary are the "hidden causes" presented as explaining
every particular situation.
See also Wikipedia: List
of cognitive biases
Philosophers have a mania of arguing about differences between Popper's
falsificationist conception of science and logical positivism, and that
neither of these can resist to stand as any absolute and ultimate
criteria for scientificity; that both should be replaced by still some
other philosophy, or eventually that no general criteria for
scientificity can ever resist. But the truth is that, unlike
philosophers, scientists don't give a shit about such debates which
they see as unsignificant, irrelevant and "metaphysical" (=
meaningless) : it does not change anything to the scientific practice,
which is about studying specific theories that may fit with
the
specific data of observations in our universe. They are not concerned
about making a general theory of the set all possible theories and
their connection with the set of all possible universes satisfying any
other theory with their respective observational data at any given
time, for defining any general measure of comparison of
scientificity levels of every possible theory in every possible
universe given every conceivable set of data at every time :-p
Examples of false reasonings
An example of irrational thought: claiming that conversion to
Christianity (or any other religion) is a matter of free choice and how
sincerely one searches for God.
This does not explain anything as it present an arbitrary set
of data (who converts) as explained by another, as complex, arbitrary
set of data (who is sincerely searching for God), while no examples of
people sincerely searching for God but not converting to that religion,
can ever force the claimant to admit his error (since, for whoever did
not convert, it is always possible to accuse him of not having
sincerely searched for God)
We already saw some examples of unfalsifiable spiritual claims in Part
I.
Let us see more examples of wrong reasonings.
The base principle of empiricism, also called inductive reasoning, is
to infer some claims as being generally true out of their verification
on observed cases.
For example, if we could see many ravens and found they were all black,
we infer that all ravens are be black.
But this observation is progressive, so that
The observation of a black
raven contributes to confirm that all ravens are black
Then, we can notice that an equivalent expression for "all ravens are
black" is its contrapositive "all what is not black is not a raven". As
this formulation has a similar form (A =>B) as the previous one,
the same reasoning should be valid on it. The use of inductive
reasoning to support this claim, is thus, for example
The observation of a white
goat contributes to confirm that all ravens are black
(or, more generally, the observation
of anything neither black nor a raven)
Now, spiritual people reading this might make fun of such a reasoning,
seeing it as a mere crazy invention of people who think too much. Then,
they would make the use of such an example to feed the same usual
argument they usually raise with so many other examples, to argue that
the use of human reason is invalid and misleads us, and that we should
depart from it and convert to some spiritual ways, and rely on God (or
any form of spiritual enlightenment) as the only reliable source of
truth. Their argument is:
The observation of a
human error, contributes to confirm that the only reliable truth
is from God
(or: from "accomplished meditators" according to Buddhism, or any such
equivalent in any other religion). But, how strong is this argument ?
In fact, if we analyze in more
details the reasons why the first case of inductive reasoning
(observation of a black raven) is "more valid" than the second one
(with a white goat), and apply these reasons to the third case,
then this third case turns out to be no more valid than the
second one.
More generally, spiritual people like to claim that "reason has
limits". What does it mean ?
It is certainly true that science cannot solve every question. However,
the existence of problems that science cannot solve (and we don't know
which ones), which is arguably true, does not contradict the facts that:
1) The field of truths that reason can discover, is
potentially infinite
2) The success of science for finding truths and its technological
applications,
is the living
evidence that reason can success in finding a wide range of reliable
truths very
helpful to mankind,
3) Scientific truths often happen to reach a maturity
(once
they are extensively confirmed, and mathematical theorems once proven).
where they are extremely reliable, while this reliability has nothing
to
do with any divine or other supernatural origin.
And ifever a mathematical proof might be suspected of containing a
failure, there is now an available final solution to this risk: to check
the proof with computer assistance (with a proof checking
software if the proof is already completely formalized, or otherwise
automated
theorem proving software with inputs of intermediate results to leave
the computer a part of the formalization work). Computers are the only
infallible beings under hand, that can provide us with absolutely
reliable truths.
4) As far as I know, despite the much larger number of
people who explored spiritual paths, there has never been any evidence
for the discovery of any general
truth
from any "mysterious" origin of any decent
reliability, and that reason (in which I include common sense
and
any clear ordinary perception) could not at that time discover
and ensure as
well.
Only local truths,
with very limited interest (to the personal life of the people
involved) could be obtained in "mysterious" ways; while more
far-reaching
claims made by "inspired" people, as I know of, were generally
obviously wrong (or at best meaningless), full of ridiculous nonsense
(full of the flaws of spiritual teachings such as we already
mentioned, and more aspects will be developed later).
Ony a few global truths that are known in a sort of "not rational" way,
are the couple of intuitions about the mind-matter duality and the
existence of afterlife; but this is very poor information, that is
given in a natural way, without effort, with no usefulness of any
elaborate special searching method (except that, to those who did not
spontaneously perceive this intuition, there is a chance to
try
to share it by a few arguments).
A few more global truth may be revealed during NDEs, but, as far as I
know, they are very simple and limited too. This
claim is not a blind faith or dogma, as factual evidence that
"revelations" never went much further than this, will be presented
later (part III).
As says a recent proverb
: Insanity = to keep trying the same thing and expecting it
to produce different result. In this sense, spiritual people
are insane, insofar as they still pretend that the only way to change
the world should be to keep following spiritual paths to "change
oneself", while this has already been tried by billions of people, with
no result yet (except a "change" in their personal life, which they
took with them in their tomb); while science did change the world to a
much larger extend with much smaller efforts.
5) More essential truths of fundamental importance for
mankind are accessible to reason and just waiting for our initiative to
make use of reason to reach them and let mankind benefit of them (we
shall see examples later)
6) The abstract existence of problems that reason cannot
solve, which is arguably true, does not inform us on which they are;
there needs to be specific reasons for reliably
classify as
such some specific examples (out of reach of a progress of
knowledge by rational
means), but suchproblems are usually unimportant; most often, the only
way to try to discover whether or not reason
can bring knowledge to a given problem, is... to try.
7) Anyone who puts forward the claim that human reason has
limits and may be fallible, as if
it was an argument against it, is in fact dealing with nothing more
than the limits of his personal
rational abilities (and the usual ones of the fellow believers of the
religion he tries to promote), which are very limited indeed, and which
are anyway all the means he has for seeking any truth
whatsoever (no matter if he pretends otherwise); such
limits are widely transcended by the rational abilities of many
other people.
In other words, putting forward "Reason has limits"
as an argument against the use of reason, would be as
stupid as :
- if the existence of optical illusions and the impossiblity to see
through walls were a good reason for destroying our eyes and becoming
blind;
- if the
impossibity for transportation vehicles to go faster than light, was a
good reason for going by foot, in case this might go faster.
A mathematician wrote the following joke, in a text
on mathematical logics (and repeated it with slightly
different words in another
text). This is a variation of a logical enigma that, in
French, is usually expressed as being about the "Baghdad
Cuckolds", where every man is the only one to not know whether
he is himself a cuckold, but must kill his wife at midnight
ifever he discovers it. In English, the same logical enigma is rather
expressed in other
words.
The Houston cuckolds.
They are only two, V. and W., they know everything concerning the
other, and the fact that at least one among them is betrayed ; in fact
there is only one cuckold, W. So W. knows that there is one
cuckold, he knows that it is not V., but he draws no consequence,
because he is. . . a bit slow. On the other hand, V. is very smart and
made his PhD on the Baghdad cuckold ; he thinks "Gosh, if I
were not a cuckold, W. would have concluded that it’s him and
killed his wife". Therefore V. slays his innocent spouse ; morality,
too much epistemic logic can damage your health.
This joke is interesting by the way it presents a
concentration of several real sources of troubles:
- The wrong assumption that all people's rational abilities are the same
- The wrong assumption that all accessible truths of importance have
been already accessed
- It may be profitable to be stupid, while it may be harmful to be
clever
- An intelligent person may be a victim of the stupidity of someone
else, especially if he is not aware of the difference of rationality
levels between them.
All these troubles contribute to different aspects of the world's
problems, in ways that we shall develop later.
In particular, they occur with Spirituality, in the
following ways:
- Their democratic vision of the truth, that it should be accessible to
everyone, so that nobody can claim to understand the truth better than
what a large public came to believe in, or that there would be no
chance for more intelligent works to be ever more useful to
the
world than stupid ones.
- Their argument of the form "If there was any evidence against [my
religion], it would be known" as a justification to not look at any
evidence against their religion ever presented to them; their blind
assumption that apologists on their side have always been
infallible beings (from their divine inspiration, but then rejecting
any contrary example as irrelevant because Christians are mere humans
making human errors that their holy Gospel is not responsible for)
while people on the other side would have always been mistaken (just
because they were humans); for example, to hold the story of Christian
martyrs (that can as well have been distorted and not properly reported
in context; the historical debate, including that the reason
for
killing Christians was not religious but their refusal of paying taxes,
and atrocities
made by Christians against non-Christians, can go far) as
evidence for
the truth of the Gospel, as if being put in front of a death penalty
should have suddenly made Christians infallible beings in theological
matters - what can we say about Muslim terrorists then.
- To present their religion as true just based on the fact that it
changed their life and brought them happiness, ignoring that this
"advantage" can as well be the advantage of ignorance.
- To judge the virtue of their spirituality on the
mere basis
on what happiness it brought to them, ignoring how harmful to others
their own spiritual behavior may have been.
More remarks and explanations about Christianity or other
spiritualities will be developed in Part III.
Intelligence levels
Let us describe and explain in some more details the practical
experience of how things are going on in science, what
misunderstandings often occur about the nature of scientific
understanding and its distance with the minds of less scientific
people, and the troubles that this misunderstanding often creates
during attempts of debates.
I will focus the description on my observations about maths
and
physics. I think most of this also applies to other sciences as well,
though I'm not sure to what precise extent.
As I already mentioned, I observed the worlds of knowledge in
mathematics and physics to be extremely vast and wonderful, It's such a
pity that not more people can understand and enjoy it. There are 2
causes for this trouble. One is institutional (the teaching system does
not properly show the way), which we shall explain
later. The
other is natural: different people have different intelligence levels,
and also different sorts of intelligence, oriented to different fields
of interest (and for the economy to work, it is indeed necessary to
have a diversity of people with the different fields of interest that
correspond with the different sorts of issues that need to be
addressed).
Now, once said that the issue of intelligence level is but one aspect
of the big picture among others, we should not miss what it really
contains.
As scientists are normally Thinkers rather than Feelers, it is not in
their normal concern to deal with issues of personal comparison, and
how intelligence levels can vary between people, despite the
crucial importance of intelligence for the progress of scientific
knowledge.
Moreover, intelligence is not something that can easily be measured and
compared between people. Indeed, the very purpose of scientific
research, which is somehow the very heart (value, raison
d'être)
of intelligence, is to make discoveries and provide new understandings.
As the point of a discovery is that it should be new rather
than
any automatic consquence of what was already known, done or classified
before, it hardly makes any sense to compare them together, to say that
the one is better than the other. It can even be argued that it would
not be good to have all people with the highest skills, because such
people would naturally come to compete for making the same kinds of
discoveries, those of the hardest kinds of problems and pioneering the
most far-reaching fields of knowledge, while so many basic necessary
issues for the society would be left behind with nobody to deal with
them, because they would be "not interesting enough" to
deserve
attention from the top thinkers.
There is a popular tool for lay people to try to measure and compare
their intelligence: the IQ test.
A cricitism of this test was posted to the INTP forum:
"IQ
tests are supposed to test your overall "potential". But I have found
that they ask knowledge based questions too, which really do not test
potential. Most INTP's don't like the test because time is factored
into your score. The pressure makes us not perform to our full
potential.
The
tests online are also all bullshit. Don't bother taking them. The only
online one even close to being "hard" is the one on the mensa website."
In other words, the IQ test can be used for somehow comparing
intelligences among some majority of average people, but they
cannot properly measure high levels of intelligence in the sense of
what makes the true dignity of intelligence: its ability to discover
the truth in this or that hard, complex issues, that humanity is facing
(or not).
Now, without assistance from such fake "objective" tools, what can we
say about intelligence levels ?
From my experience, it turns out that the discrepancy of intelligence
levels
between different people, both between scientists and non-scientists
and among scientists of a given domain
(maths or physics), is litterally tremendous, much more than many
people from
the outside usually imagine. Well, somehow they know. Precisely, they
know that science is "not for them", then reject it as an alien thing,
something for strange, odd people.
I have the experience that a large majority of people are so far from
any decent use of reason with respect to a number of non-trivial
issues, especially if they are sticked to wrong views by some
sentimental or ideological influence, that the properly rational
understanding of these subjects is hopelessly out of reach for
them.
Normally, among the small minority of civilized, maturely rational
people, there is no such problem, because they have the wisdom to
know their own limits, and have no problem to admit the
possibilty
for someone else to master a given subject better than oneself. For
example, I have no problem with the fact that some scientists can be
much more clever than myself. When I hear people speak about a very
high-level theory which I have no clue of, I can admit the
possibility of its making sense from the way they tell about it. I
consider this admirable even if it
is "not for me" (sometimes because I cannot dedicate enough time for
it, sometimes because it is really so hard as compared with my
abilities).
Other times I happened to read some of such high-level works;
and
while there was not much of it I could really follow, it already made
me feel amazed at how high these concepts are. Examples of amazing
things I could have a glimpse of but I could not really understand:
- In physics: quantum field theory and supersymmetry
- In logics: I could already master some good points, but there are
still quite higher things like "forcing", which I could not reach
- In algebraic topologiy: Milnor's work, K-theory...
Globally, despite the fuzziness of the subject, and if we
consider intelligence in terms of global efficiency for properly
dealing with complex
realities (thus, integrating the effects of natural intelligence,
training, knowing the relevant information, and some wisdom or chance
to know how to use intelligence in
the best way), I think we can say without exaggeration that:
- The average of scientists (as well as some other people, like
businessmen and other highly skilled professionals) is at least 10
times more intelligent than the global average of the population
- The few top scientists can be at least 10 times more intelligent than
the average of scientists.
(with all possible intermediate levels between these, without any
special separation of any group from others)
Don't misunderstand the claim here: this hierarchy only
concerns a
specific measure of comparison, which is about a specific type of human
ability among others, the ability of discerning the truth on difficult,
complex issues. Even this very concept is ambiguous as each person can
have varying abilities between issues to understand (the same
person can be clever in one field and ignorant in other fields); and
diverse other kinds of human activities have their own worthy values
too, such as art (see the different MBTI types that gives an sketch of
the possible diversity of human abilities). So many diverse human
abilities are necessary and complementary to form an harmonious world.
When debates go wrong
The problem comes when not maturely rational people enter (or
worse, invade) the scene of the debate. That is, people who
don't
have the wisdom and/or ability to discern and acknowledge:
1) their own limits, i.e. their irrationality (as explained above in
the "irrationality" section), their unability to properly
understand a given problem which they want to judge
2) that some other people may be more qualified and able to access (or
have already accessed) the truth on that subject
Especially, some people have a prejudice that they have the right to
judge ideas as true
according to how "simple" they seem. While it is true
that an
understanding which is not "clear" is usually not a full, accurate
and satisfying understanding, and a clear and unifying view is usually
a better success if only
it is a true one, this forgets that:
- The truth has no duty to satisfy this criteria just to please us. Its
duty is to be true, no more, no less.
- More complex truths can be mastered by some more clever people as
clearly as less complex ones
- The similarity to everyday habbits and concepts that a
majority of
people are familar with, is no true criteria for simplicity either;
very different concepts from the everyday ones, can be developed and
become familiar, and thus
simple, for scientists as well.
Generally, I have an experience of tries of debate with "normal
people" on complex issues, either political or religious; and I
observed that they are far from the necessary intelligence level
for having a chance to properly understand and reach a reliable
conclusion these subjects; still, they
can't tolerate to not stand as judges for these subjects (or,
at
least, to not have as much "right" to do so as anyone else). Therefore,
they cannot either tolerate any claim by someone else to know the
subject better than them: they would see such a claim as automatically
hubristic and insulting (no matter that this may be the mere truth,
since they cannot tolerate such a possibilty anyway).
Still, they would usually not be visibly dogmatic or refusing rational
debate (as such an attitude would be too easy to defeat and thus would
be quickly resolved). Instead, they would often be requesting a
"rational argument" why they would be wrong, and why the other would be
right. The problem is that the elements of understanding
possessed
by the one who knows the subject better and that the other
is missing, and that would be necessary for making things
clear,
may happen to be too complex and subtle to be explained and
shared
in such a way and such a short enough amount of effort to be affordable
by both sides and with decent enough chances of success. The result of
the situation, is that the one who knows the subject, and who knows the
debate to be hopeless, will be likely to give up.
And he may be right to do so, because anyway, no matter whether or not
he keeps trying to explain the situation, the other will have no chance
to understand it, but will keep the impression that the other has "no
rational argument" for the defense of his position.
Indeed, what's the point to keep working on a debate if the goal
(to let the other understand one's point) turns out to be hopeless
anyway ?
So, it may be a mere fact, observed by the rational person, that that
there is no solution to the satisfaction of the ignorants, that is, to
let them understand the truth as easily as
they are requesting with their low intelligence level or other
circumstances. Then, the problem
develops when the ignorants are accusing him of pride, dogmatism or
other foolishness, because, no matter how sincere they are or whatever
anyone tries, they have no available means to interpret his attitude
otherwise.
So, the rational person will have to notice how unfair and hopeless is
the debate (even though nobody ever willingly decided to make it so),
and that the only expectable result of keeping tries at understanding
each other, will instead be to exchange insults and
negative judgements to each other ever and ever again. The
next
"problem" is that few are the rational people that may be fond of
investing a lot of efforts in an activity that consists in navigating
in a desperate mess of errors, and whose only expectable fruits wlll be
to exchange a lot of insults and negative judgements with someone : to
be perpetually despised for the "fault" of lucidity, and to have to
fight back in a way that will fatally have to be disaffirming to the
other (who strongly believes to be on the right track and invest all
his person there).
As the rational person cannot fail to notice that the other's
irrationality is a major hindrance to the chance for the debate to
progress, making it hopeless, how could he pretend otherwise, as if the
other (or the course of the debate) was on the right track ? To be
honest, he can hardly fail to mention the real nature of this obstacle,
that is, the other's irrationality. But, the irrational person will
fatally perceive this as an insult and an ad hominem argument, and will
misinterpret the attitude of the rational person as a dogmatic,
hubristic and insulting attitude with no rational basis. And
indeed, there are good reasons for the rational person to be angry or
arsch in such a situation. What else should he do ? Say amen
to a
process of pseudo-debate that will necessarily leave the irrational
participants reinforce their own errors and mock the rational
view
as stupid and undefensible ? Anyway, as this foolishness cannot be stop
anyway, the least evil solution can be for the rational person to just
drop off and leave the irrational people without him in their errors,
in order to keep his energy for more serious matters; and getting angry
can be a good way to reach that point. And if the irrational people
will interpret this angriness as a sign of irrationality, and use
it to reinforce themselves in their view, then... it's their
problem anyway.
Some people consider that a way to protest against the conditions of a
vote, that they see as not really democratic, is to boycott it. I won't
try to argue on this solution (which I'd rather be skeptical of, while
it may depend on cases); but I observe a similar situation
concerning debates in irrational circles: it is a fact
that rational people may have to boycott some sorts of
"debates"
when that do not let a chance for the truth to be understood and
accepted.
Example of a situation I once experienced in a web forum:
1) I write an introduction to my ideas, and refer to my site for the
necessary details
2) As these necessary details are very long, and the serious
participants need time to read them to have a chance to know what it is
about, thus these serious people are not writing any reply in a first
time
3) Instead, reactions are coming from stupid people who decide to judge
the ideas without caring to read what it is about
4) I can't help from writing a reply, mentioning how stupid is this
reply
5) The dispute goes on, while the people keep replying in a way that
totally ignores what my ideas really are but imagine something else
instead (some favorite stupid cliché). They assumed that
there
would be nothing worth understanding about my ideas outside the usual
caricature from their imagination. Because they did not expect
the
presence of any deep idea worth understanding (otherwise they would be
taking their time reading it, instead of reacting so quickly).
6) The way the debate goes on with exchange of insults, disconnected
from any deep idea, really gives the impression to everybody,
that
this is the whole debate going on, and that there is no more
idea worth reading and caring to understand than what is being
written and exchanged in the replies, before drawing conclusions.
In similar lines, Bertrand Russel (mathematicien and philosopher),
wrote "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are
always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubt".
(But, while this is a possible phenomenon that can cause troubles, it
cannot be used as a reliable criteria for wisdom either.)
Also, many people are interested with ideas they can easily
understand (which are already familiar to them), but won't bother
studying and understanding (and thus will naturally reject) any new
idea that require any thinking effort - except, of course, if it is in
their curriculum and requested for their exam.
The result of this situation, is that, in a world full of irrational
people, the misfortune of being sane enough to know a subject better
than those people and to be aware of this situation, turns out to be
condemned by these people as a sin (of hubris) that needs to
be cured; and if someone does not "want" to "cure"
this sin
(just like if someone would "refuse" to stay "open" the possibility
that 2+2=5), then it is condemned as a mortal sin.
Thus:
In a sane environment, that is, surrounded with peer maturely rational
people, a rational person is free to live in peace and debate with
others according to his
deep nature, that is, in a rational, civilized, open-minded way,
participating to opportunities of constructive, rational
debate
whenever the opportunity appears (which may not be very often because
of the hyperspecialization by which, not
many researchers can
have a lot of peers working on close enough subject for having
any
common interests and ideas worth exchanging).
This is the famous Ivory Tower of Science, which is the necessary means
to ensure to scientists a peaceful and constructive intellectual life
where the quest for truth has its full opportunities of progression,
protected from any harrassment from the unstoppable Forces of
Irrationality that reign in many places outside it.
On the other side, in these much more widespread and very popular other
places
dominated by the Forces of Irrationality, the expression
"critical
mind" is defined to mean "questioning the dogma of 2+2=4";
"open-mindedness" means an enthousiam in examining large treaties of
hundreds of pages developing wordviews where 2+2 may be equal to 5, 9
or 13 (this is no exaggeration: I did read one blogger wanting to offer
a new arithmetic rule where (-1).(-1)=-1 just to save
us from the need to bother with complex numbers); and many more
paradigm shifts are explored, such as visions of a
future when mankind would have finally discovered that the Earth was
flat at the center of the Universe, or where pink elephants would
routinely fly and thus become the main transportation
means for the Third Millenium.
Such thought environments would be dangerous for the intellectual life
of the true scientists, quickly transforming them into hardcore
intolerant, hubristic dogmatists. But, as most of them don't naturally
like to be any intolerant, hubristic dogmatists, this
will naturally lead them to settle and keep developing their
intellectual life in the safer, more peaceful environment of
this
fine and magnificent Ivory Tower of Science, moreover made quite more
interesting by the abundance of magnificent intellectual treasures that
their predecessors had the chance to discover, gather and expose there.
Let's illustrate some aspect of the situation through a metaphor.
Imagine a mountain guide who has a large experience visiting a mountain
region. He knows well all the paths in this region, all the best ways
to reach the different summits, with the difficuties and risks in each
path. He knows that many of summits in this mountain are quite hard to
reach, and require a lot of skills, strength and training. He also has
experience in guiding there many strong and healthy tourists who are
used to running climbing a lot, as they already made running and
climbing visits to other mountains, and are now willing to pay a first
visit to this one.
Then, imagine a paralyzed, epileptic person who ususally cannot manage
to properly go to the toilet by himself, who hears this guide talk
about these mountains, paths and summits, and does not believe what the
guide is telling about his experience of the mountain. So, he replies
to the guide by this request: "If you are really a good guide knowing
the mountain and how to go reach the summits as you say,
prove me that the mountain is really as you describe ! Bring
me
there !".
Then, what do you think this guide should do in reply ? Should he take
this man and try to carry him on his back, up to these difficult
summits ? Twenty meters further, the man will have an epilectic crisis,
that will make him kick the guide and fall down on the floor,
then accuse him of having taken him to the wrong direction
because
the summits were not reached yet.
Thus, the guide will have to give up and refuse trying anything more;
so that the epileptic man will accuse the guide of telling lies and not
really knowing the mountain, for lack of any credible means to figure
out how things could be otherwise.
So: science is about crossing large distances in the world of knowledge
without error. This world has many paths, and each scientist only knows
a small region as compared to the whole set of what has already been
explored, which would be too big for a single person to completely
visit (though some can visit more of it than others). It can
happen to commit errors on the way, first for students, then still
sometimes for reasearchers (fewer, or only because larger distances are
crossed); then, others people may care to track any error that may have
occured, in order to correct them until, hopefully, a path will be
found and checked without error. As long as someone is good enough to
manage well and not make more than a few errors on the way, others will
be willing to help to track and correct these
few errors that
could be made, in hope to reach a conclusion that will be hopefully
sure, without error (even if there remains a small risk of presence of
a remaining error : the point is that any remaining error would
hopefully be detected and then fixed thanks to some next wise person
that will check the way once more.
But, if there is just hardly anything right in the way someone goes, or
if someone can only make a much smaller way than the one necessary to
reach some chosen goal, then others will give up trying to help,
because there would be anyway no hope to reach a decent result
(a
fully correct way to the chosen goal).
You could sum up this by considering the world of
knowledge
as a sort of capitalist world where only those who already have, will
receive the assistance of others to get more. This may be felt as
regrettable, but the truth does not care about efforts and justice. To
reach a reasonably reliable knowledge about a large complex problem,
reducing the number of errors that the conclusion is based on, would be
worthless. The only meaningful effort is for the purpose of completely
eliminating them all. As long as the fulfilment of this goal cannot
reasonably be expected, there is no reason trying to start debating and
pointing out this or that error either.
Still, there can be other sorts of hope and purpose learning and doing
rational work. Beginners need to start with simple problems,
to
work on perfecting themselves and eliminating all their errors on
simple, short paths, before risking themselves on longer, harder paths.
Let me explain how it feels like, for a rational person, to be faced
with fallacious doctrines full of errors and nonsense, and having to
deal with them through an obligation to try to explain things
and
convince some supporters of these fallacious doctrines. It feels like
being jailed in place full of a very bad smell, with no
hope to
get rid of this smell. Then, guess what: it is everything for
making someone angry. And people around insisting that "What problem do
you have with this smell ? this is a very good smell !" will not help.
In such conditions, the irrational people have an easy game misleading
themselves, by dismissing the view of the rational person as an
expression of a bad character. They would be missing the fact
that, if their view is rejected as utter nonsense, it is not
the
fault of the lucid person who noticed that it is utter nonsense, but
the fault of the promoters of nonsense who are bringing their
nonsense, which is an insult to truth and reason. It is (somehow) their
fault if they are claiming nonsense and bringing ignorance, chaos and
misunderstanding to the world; it
is not the fault of the truth if their nonsense is nonsense. If they
don't want to be condemned, mocked or ignored by rational people, it's
just up to them to
stop promoting nonsense and defending the indefensible. If only they
stopped promoting nonsense, then this would release rational people
from the necessity to get angry and to oppose them in this way, so that
there would not be such disputes anymore.
So: irrational people may complain that rational people seem to have
"no reason" in support of their position, as eventual tries of
explanations could not be satisfyingly "convincing", as
intelligence is personal and cannot always be shared that way.
If the irrational person says something and asks an answer from the
rational person, the rational person will naturally be tempted to reply
by saying the truth on the considered point as he sees it. The problem
is that this element of truth will not be convincing, because many
other elements of understanding are missing in the irrational person to
let him understand this reply and be aware of its justifications. So he
won't be able to accept this reply as a rational one, but will
interpret it as nonsense, dogmatic, unclear, or of any other
irrational character(s). But, what else could the rational person do,
to have a chance of being accepted ? Pretend that things are otherwise,
and enter a long strategy of adapting to the mind of the irrational
person to lead him to a conclusion while remaining acceptable to him ?
Such strategic developments of how to convince an irrational person who
cannot directly understand the truth, by not directly telling it, are
the art of liars: how to navigate errors and irrationality towards a
given conclusion.
Instead, the interest of rational truth-seekers is to focus on
the
truth (its proper understanding and justifications) and nothing
else. They are not
interested to navigate in the psychology of irrationality.
Managing desperate cases of people lost in a labyrinth of errors,
and/or who don't have the abilities to follow the proper understanding
of some chosen aspect of reality in the way it really is, is
not a
normal interest of rational truth-seekers. Rather, it is
something disgusting for them, because it is a desperate hell
of nonsense and ignorance, an accident and a plague of nature
which should rather not exist in the first place, and from which it is
so hard to escape.
The rise of crackpots
So, it happens for many people to develop irrational views on
scientific subjects, in a way cut off from science, and hopelessly
unable of dialogue with scientists. For these people, all
things
looks as if their position was the only possibly rational one, while
the scientific one was irrational. Their vision of the current state of
science is reduced to some shadow of it, some popularized version of
some pieces of information and conclusions that science could
obtain.
They properly noticed that what they heard from science was not
satisfying (because indeed it is not the full understanding of it).
Then, they assume that it is a defect of science (as they have no means
to interpret it otherwise), and they will dedicate their efforts to
"solve the defects" in science, by reasoning on these defects and
developing their own ideas and interpretations. So, they
develop
ideas that seem to them clearer than the (incomplete) account of
science as they could see it. And they think that, in this way, they
are making scientific discoveries beyond the knowledge of actual
scientists. So they dedicate a lot of time to write their "theories",
and try to let them known, sending them to as many scientists as they
can, expecting from them careful attention and
approbation,
and accusing scientists of dogmatism and close-mindedness whenever this
does not happen (that is, necessarily always).
In some scientific forum in French, there was such a discussion, when
an astrophysicist quickly rejected a crackpot's view, then was accused
of dogmatism in return. He then explained:
"By
being so brief in my negative comment, I may have seemed arrogant or
contemptuous, which is no way the case. But please understand that
professional scientists receive, several times a week, whole files of
amateur scientists (fine activity in itself) that claim, by two
handfuls of Newtonian equations, to question one century of fundamental
physics (relativity, quantum mechanics). And they think that the
scientific "establishment" is thick-headed by not answering or by not
being interested in what they do. It's very easy: let them send their
theories to international scientific journals with referees, where
their articles will be read, discussed, criticized or accepted ! I
don't deny the existence of biases in the judgement of "peers"; I found
lamentable the attitude of the medical establishment towards the
"water memory" by J. Benveniste. But in "hard" sciences, the
criteria of judgement are more objective."
Another
example of a scientist commenting about harrassments by crackpots
In a way, the act of writing such stupid views and trying to let them
known, can be seen as spam. Because it is just wasteful,
misleading and/or bothering people, while claiming to be
otherwise. And even if such a qualification as "spam" could be seen
abusive if considered as a work of only one person developing and
sending wrong ideas to a few other people, it becomes very real once
many people are doing the same. Indeed, if one accepted to bother being
polite and caring for one person's foolishness putting forward a
foolish idea, where should the limit be put when the same or similar
foolishness is practiced by thousands ? One life would never suffice to
reply to them one by one. This behaves
like spam, therefore it has to be treated, that is,
ignored, as such.
But, unfortunately it is a fact that many people (an overwhelming
majority of "people who care about the truth") are irrational : that
cannot stop judging subjects that are important to them while they
don't have the means to properly understand them. Thus, they will
dedicate their life to promoting their "truth" about these subjects,
and therefore bothering (persecuting) with their errors,
whatever
other (official) voice that they would see talking about the same
subject. Under such a persecution, reason and truth would have no
chance to survive.
What made it possible for reason and science to work and make
a
real progress to a scientific understanding of the world, was the
presence, in a way of another, of a huge antispam system protecting the
minds of scientists from the harassment of unreason.
One of the main usual antispam solutions has been to flee the common
subjects of interest to irrational people, and take refuge far away, in
more or less hyperspecialized subjects that don't attract such
interest, so that they won't come there to bother.
Another solution is the peer review process, that we shall discuss
later. There is also the solution of the administrative and
professional selectivity, where scientists will only talk with
collegues that have been previously selected by some institutions for
their scientific abilities. But this solution is not always reliable,
as we shall see later.
These methods cannot always stop all harrassment. Indeed:
For each idea or theory that first happened to be rejected as crackpot
but finally turned out to be true, there are hundreds or even thousands
of other crackpot ideas that it is right to reject as crackpot because
this is what they really are, in a more or less obvious way from a
scientist's viewpoint, which lay people may not be able to understand.
But you may not be familiar with this overwhelming presence of crackpot
ideas that were rejected by scientists for very good reasons,
because... precisely this made them unworth of being recorded in
history.
Scientists cannot afford to pay a lot of attention to fringe ideas, or
to give them a right a right of speech in their working space.
Censoring crackpot ideas out of their working space, rather than paying
much attention to them or trying to debunk them, is a matter of
survival for the chances of their work to ever be "free" and productive
for the development of scientific knowledge. Cleansing their working
space from any BS, is a normal "intellectual hygiene" practice that
they need to follow, and which they expect fellow "worthy debaters" to
respect as well.
It is right for them, when they see BS, to censor and ignore it rather
that try to debunk it, because they consider the debunking work to be a
pure waste of time, for 4 excellent reasons:
1) For any sane other rational person (scientist), the fact this
"alternative" idea is BS, is self-evident and does not need any
explanation
2) For the others, unable to see it by themselves (which may as well
include over 99% of humans on this planet), no work of debunking,
however clear and true, will ever suffice, because they are stupid and
irrational anyway, and won't be able to discern the validity of any
genuine argument that may be presented to them, but would lead them to
mistake the scientist who would dare sacrificing his time trying to
explain his reasons and debunking BS, for a stupid irrational and
dogmatic person, which would be a very unfortunate illusion that the
scientist wishes to limit by the method of silence.
3) The explanations why it is BS, may be much too complex and too hard
to explain in any reasonable amount of time. These crackpot authors are
just scientifically illiterate, so that it is up to them to go to study
and understand science if they can, or find another job otherwise, but
scientists cannot help.
4) Once a crackpot author would be debunked, he will automatically be
replaced by another crackpot author with a "completely different" idea
that will feel unconcerned with the previous debunking, so that the
debunking work was vain and the problem comes back to the same point it
started with.
So, what would happen if they paid attention to alternative "theories"
and gave them a right of speech in their working space ?
Then, their working space would be full of hundreds of BS for one
truth, so that the voice of truth would have no chance to be heard
anymore, and their quest for truth would be doomed to remain sterile.
There could never have been a progress of scientific knowledge in such
conditions.
So, the practice
of systematically ignoring irrational ideas by stopping to read them
after a few lines that smell like bullshit, and not replying, can turn
out to be necessary, as a matter of survival for reason and its
dedication to more effective truth research and applications.
Typical Examples of cranky claims
1) "I discovered a new
idea !"
Let's describe the situation by another metaphor.
Imagine a child on a beach, or some handicaped person that cannot go
far, but remained all his life on the same segment of a beach. One day
he discovers a shell there (metaphor for some idea). He is amazed: he
never saw such a thing. Then he decides to dedicate the rest of his
life claiming to anyone, up to trying to call the U.S. president about
it : "See what I found ! Isn't this wonderful ? Maybe it is worth
millions ! Maybe the secrets of the oceans can be found there !" and so
on. This is understandable, isn't it ? One has only one life, and hopes
that it makes sense. If the tip of one's life seems to be the
discovery of this shell, then it would be so awful if it had no value.
But while , before examination, it might not be absolutely impossible,
for this new shell to be special and a potential source of a
breakthrough, the
problem is
that geologists
already examined
millions of
shells a
priori comparable
to that
one worldwide,
among the billions
of shells
one can find; that
some of
them proved
to be very
interesting but
there is no hint why
precisely this one just
would have something special;
moreover, an expert's eye may have already found this out very quickly,
much more quickly than this chile who spent a lot of time focusing on
it, so that the accusation of not having properly checked it before
dismissing it, may just be untrue.
Otherwise, the specific circumstances that led this child to find this
shell and try to tell everybody about it, are not a relevant hind for
its worthiness. Each specialist or research team, according to their
research projects, have their own ways to orient and select the places
to explore; these methods may have qualities and defects, but are
probably better than a search at random or depending on the presence of
such a person there to find it and have nothing else to make a sense of
their life with. Namely, they have their submarines and travels to
faraway places, that amateurs could not access, and that could lead to
the most successful finding.
Moreover, about his new idea, the crackpot will claim: "I proved that
this idea is
possible". But what he only proved in fact, is that he does not have
the
necessary knowledge to understand why it is not.
Still, from this "proof of possibility" he is strongly certain his idea
is worthy of consideration and has a chance to be true. The problem is
that, the certainty of the "maybe" is a certainty that may be
relatively absolute, but this cannot prevent it from possibly being
absolutely relative.
But it is not possible to provide him in reply the necessary knowledge
to show him why his idea cannot hold. This can require a whole
study of a lot of things. Several years of study are usually
required to become a scientist. While this use of time in academia is
not always as efficient as it could (we shall discuss this later),
anyway a few minutes or even hours of explanations has hardly any
chance to suffice to replace it, when hard subjects are involved
that are usually reserved for higher study levels.
So, if he wants to understand why his idea is not possible, it's up to
him to start studying the subject. This may take him months or even
years, but that's his problem and duty if he wants to be serious about
finding out what his idea is really worth. It is not the duty of
scientists to pretend that the idea is right by ignoring what they
know, if no other attitude can ever seem fair from that
person's
viewpoint in such conditions.
2) A crank can dismiss
requests calling him to go to learn already established knowledge,
because:
-
he thinks he already studied the subject... but based on the wrong
litterature. Usually, this is a litterature of popularization, rather
than of science itself, and the person missed the fact that this is
very different, and that popularization works are very
insufficient, far from the real understanding of the
established
scientific knowledge.
That may
be written by
- True
scientists who tried to popularize their knowledge but made unfortunate
conceptual approximations there, by a partial, incomplete try at
explaining their thoughts, trying to be intuitive by basing their
explanations on everyday intuition or only explaing a few aspects of
things, rather than making a deep work of explaining things cleanly and
completely from the start with all the precisely relevant concepts
(example: the famous Einstein's book on relativity).
- Incompetent
popularizers
- People
trying to put forward their own ideology through inaccurate accounts of
the current scientific knowledge.
-
He may assume that he already knows what he needs from current science,
that is "the ideas", while the deeper study of the mathematical
contents would be irrelevant complications and technical details far
from "the ideas"; this attitude can be wrong and cut him off from true
knowledge.
-
He may think that it is not his job to see how his ideas should be
mathematically formulated or connected with the main body of scientific
knowledge, so that he expects someone else to take his ideas and
operate the work of formalizing them and connecting them to current
knowledge; the problem is that when a scientist knows that the current
body of knowledge already shows that this idea is invalid or worthless,
the author will never tolerate this reply.
-
Otherwise, if he can't study the subject for a reason or another...
maybe what he really needs is a brain transplant to give him the
missing elements of understanding ? Then sorry, this cannot be obtained
by mere arguing.
3) The claim that one's
own ideas are clearer than others'.
The problem is that, by nature, everyone always feels one's own ideas
as clearer than others', because otherwise... one's
opinion
would have already changed.
4) Some crackpots make abusive accumulations of quotations or
other grandiloquent references of thinkers of high reputation in a way
or another. And just because he is quoting them and approving them, he
thinks this puts him on their sides, protected by their autority or
reputation: he thinks he is right and everbody must agree, just because
he places himself on the side of someone that is reputed and that, he
thinks nobody can criticize either. But there are 2 problems here:
First, not all "reputed thinkers" agree, thus not all are necessarily
right. Some can have based their reputation on the public's credulity
and stupidity, while their teaching was wrong. Referring to such people
and quoting them, does not ensure to be on the right track.
Second, the claim of being on the side of a "thinker" that one refers
to, can be abusive; this famous thinker (usually already dead) is not
here able to confirm or dismiss the interpretation of his words, and to
generally approve or disapprove the whole position held by the people
who quote them.
But... for those who like quotations, who think that they are right
because they make a lot of quotations, while my ideas here would be
wrong because I seem isolated and in disagreement with big thinkers
that I don't enough refer to, here are some for the same idea by two
famous scientists:
"Only two
things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure
about the former." Albert Einstein
"It has been
said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching
for evidence which could support this." ;
"Many people would
sooner die than think; In fact, they do so."
"Men
fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin --
more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary,
destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege,
established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the
pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the
light of the world, and the chief glory of man."
Bertrand Russel
Now, let me explain my own attitude: when I make quotations, even from
famous people, I don't mean that it must be true just because they say
so. It's just a matter of illustration, that I'm not the only one
claiming something, someone else already had that idea or observed that
thing. I don't mean to use it as an authority. I may quote a claim by
someone but disagree with him on other issues. So I don't mean to avoid
responsibility for a claim just by quoting someone that says
it.
A famous list of typical cranky claims has been written by the
physicist John Baez, the "crackpot
index". Examples from this list:
2 points for every
statement that is clearly vacuous.
5 points for each word in
all capital letters (except for those
with defective keyboards).
10 points for each claim
that quantum mechanics is fundamentally
misguided (without good evidence).
10 points for pointing out
that you have gone to school, as if this
were evidence of sanity.
10 points for offering
prize money to anyone who proves and/or
finds any flaws in your theory.
10 points for each
statement along the lines of "I'm not good at
math, but my theory is conceptually right, so all I need is for someone
to express it in terms of equations".
10 points for arguing that
a current well-established theory
is "only a theory", as if this were somehow a point against it.
10 points for arguing that
while a current well-established theory
predicts phenomena correctly, it doesn't explain "why" they occur, or
fails to provide a "mechanism".
10 points for claiming that your work is on the cutting
edge of a "paradigm shift".
20 points for
talking about how great your theory is, but never actually explaining
it
This reminds me spiritual teachings that spend their time
repeating
about the importance of their divine guidance, direct access to Reality
or to the Ultimate Truth that would solve every problem, but not
explaining what it is, is there any realiable way to it (or to obey it)
and which one, and why would it change things in the announced way,
with effective examples of fruits or truths that ever resulted or
could be discovered from it (some claim to be witnesses of
some
sorts of miracles or other wonderful fruits; this will be discussed
later)
50 points for claiming you
have a revolutionary theory but
giving no concrete testable predictions.
Let's end with a last example :
The claim that a subject is not scientifically resolved yet but
still a subject of controversy, while in fact it is not
(or much
less), because, either:
- it is in fact clear; but the explanation of how clear it
is,
cannot be easily explained to the public, who keeps the illusion that a
problem or inconsistency remains (example: is light a wave or
a
particle ? - the relativistic paradoxes...); or:
- There are disagreeing people, but only one side of the
opposition
is truly scientific, while the other side keeps denying the evidence by
ignoring it or having some other irrational attitude (examples:
evolution vs "creation science"; climatologists vs climato-skeptics);
and naive people cannot make the difference. As nothing can stop a
number of crackpots or propagandists from telling nonsense on a
subject, and from "looking serious", nothing can ever stop a possible
false impression of a scientific controversy on any subject, from the
viewpoint of a public that cannot tell the difference between
true
science and malicious propaganda against it.
The risk for a science to be fake or of low
quality
So a problem with cranky views is that they can eventually grow big and
develop all appearances of science - thus, can also be called
pseudo-science.
When a public debate happens between scientists representing
thea
scientific view, and an opposed pseudoscientific view such as
creationism or climato-skepticism, a naive public unfamiliar with the
subtleties of science and with the existing body of knowledge, watching
the debate, may be efficiently mislead into giving more credit to the
pseudoscientific view: it can seem more rational (open-minded,
critical-minded, rationally justified...) than the scientific view
itself. This is because of the ignorance of the public, which make it
naturally closer to the pseudoscientific view also based on
ignorance.
Indeed, the pseudoscientific view is precisely developed in
such
a way as to make the best illusion of scientificity from an ignorant
viewpoint. Being based on ignorance, convincing the ignorants is the
only purpose of the pseudoscientific view, and therefore it can be the
best at it; while the scientific view is not free to say what is most
convincing to the public, because of its duty to only say the
truth. This duty is a possible source of "weakness" in debates, that
may bring discredit to it in public opinion.
Is there any chance for the public to become wiser in discerning
science from pseudo-science ? Somehow yes, by informing them on some of
the subtleties of sciences, in contrast with the currently most usual
complete unawareness on this issue. Still, I strongly doubt the
possiblity for such an awarness to reach any satisfying degree of
reliability. This is because, in order to really make a wise and
reliable discernment, the public would need to become scientists
themselves (thus, mastering the existing body of knowledge and gifted
with intelligent critical thinking abilities), which they are not.
The difference between reason and irrationality is real and objective,
but this is so only from an abstract viewpoint that
would integrate all elements of understanding of all
participants.
The problem is that such a viewpoint is not the one usually accessed in
practice by a third party that cannot read the minds of the
participants but only has access to the words exchanged in the debate.
Usually, debates are quite limited in time, and thus in number of
words, maybe an hour or a few. The words that can be exchanged there
are usually limited and very poor compared to the full views that
participants had developed years long before, and which they can base
their claims on. So, the third party observing the debate without all
this experience, will have very poor means to understand the depths of
the issues, and can be as well driven to the wrong conclusion.
We can even say that, somehow the situation is rather symmetrical: the
irrational person is somehow "rational" in himself. Because
irrationality is not an essence, but a discrepancy of a view or a way
of searching for the truth, with what the outside reality is, and with
the methods that would be required to discover it. The
irrational's view would be rational if it happened the same a world
that would be conformed to it, and if there were in human mind some
possible foolishess processes that could produce these claims actually
supported by the rational person, without them being true. The problem
is: how realistic would such a world be ? In fact, many people do not
care how mad such worldviews can be. Especially, some trends of
fundamentalist Christianity have no problem to explain away any
opposite view as a work of a sort of almighty Devil that can fool
everybody (except oneself) to any tremendous extents.
Thus, much of the characters of the opposition between rationality and
irrationality as we described them, if taken as criteria to try to
distinguish who is rational and who is not, while they can work in some
easy cases, may turn out to be insufficient in more tricky ones, if
tried by people who don't have the necessary knowledge and intelligence.
For example, if the problem is that the irrational person does not
understand the other view and does not make proper efforts for it, we
can notice that the rational person would behave the same: he won't
take much effort to know a lot of the other side, because he already
has very good reasons why it would be pointless, just like it is
pointless to go and read a book that aims to prove that 2+2=5, to find
out whether that proof can be correct or not. So, it can be rational to
ignore the details of the other view. Thus, for the other side... it
can be very "rational in itself" to ignore the rational view as well.
It is "rational in itself" but not rational in reality, because
rationality is not an essence, but an extrinsic property of a view or
an attitude: the property of fitting with the outside world.
You may ask : in such conditions, how can the rational person really
know that he is rational ?
Well... this is a long story.
A lot of intelligence and careful work can be necessary to
reach
true reliabiliy. This is precisely why science is not a work for
amateurs nor for everybody.
Those who don't have the necessary skills and experience in this field,
can be completely lost.
This is the case of many philosophers, who considered the question
whether there is a criteria to distinguish what is scientific and what
is not. Some relatively simple criteria may work in relatively simple
cases. This is how Karl Popper noticed that scientific knowledge about
our universe is often characterized by its falsifiability (the logical
possibility for a given theory to be refuted by facts), while many
irrational (pseudoscientific) views did not have this character. So, he
proposed to take
this a criteria.
But then another philosopher, Paul Feyerabend, discovered that this
does clearly not apply to all cases. He then concluded that, in the
presence of an emergence of scientific consensus (about what is
scientifically valid or not) that he could not explain after any simple
and obvious criteria, that this consensus would be nothing more than an
unjustified social phenomenon, a sort of democratic choice of belief
among scientists or something like this.
But he is missing the fact that this relativity
(undefinability,
subjectivity) of reason and science, may be all what philosophers
traditionally have access to, but it is only a superficial one. For
scientists, really involved in the depths of the debates and arguments,
things may be clear and conclusions may be reliable.
Then, in practice, how is it possible to find out whether a work is
rational or not ?
The now widespread solution is peer review: the author should
send
it to a journal, that will forward it more or less at random to a
reviewer, that is someone with the necessary skills and
knowledg
in the concerned field of research, for being able to properly
examine the article and criticize it in relevant ways.
This aims to ensure an assessment that will not be influenced by the
diplomas or reputation of the author of the article. Then, the
reputation and academic position of scientists will be based on their
production of works that would have been objectively recognized and
published in such ways.
So, this method aims to be objective through anonimity procedures. It
does not depend on the reputation and position of the author. Still, to
make sense, it cannot be completely anonymous and impersonal, as it has
to select its reviewers among scientists known for their skills and
competence in that field. It cannot rely on incompetent, lay people
chosen at random from the street, for doing the review, even if these
would have convictions to express on the subject.
But for all this to work, it requires to assume that this selection of
competent scientists for doing the review, was the right one. This
selection was based on their reputation, which came from the previous
acceptation of their own articles in peer review journals. So: if peer
reviewers in a given scientific field were competent and properly
rational during one generation, then there are high chances for this
fortunate situation to be preserved to the next generation in that
field.
But, what if they were not ? Then, there are high risks for this
unfortunate situation to last long too.
Thus, the success of the peer review system for ensuring a high
rationality level in some successful scientific field, does not mean
that doing the same in other fields could ever suffice to ensure
rationality levels to be similarly high there too.
And this risk is real. I will further mention specific
examples of
fields of study where (in my opinion) full rationality is currently not
in force, but irrational ideologies dominate instead, making
it quite
hard and desperate for true rationality standards to ever come
up as
long as institutional continuity is preserved.
The peer-review system is but an example of a more general
natural process that preserves the level of rationality or crankiness
in a field, and that roughly consists in the fact that similar-minded
people naturally forms groups, while dissimilar or disagreeing people
naturally reject each other.
Be it with or without a peer-review system, a crackpot practice
that grows big (a field of so-called knowledge that develops
irrationally) takes the name of pseudoscience.
Still, such a difference between rational and irrational states
of diverse fields, should not be taken in any essentialist
sense either. There are possible intermediate situations, with
doctrines that are somehow true but not with the depth, completeness or
accuracy that could be reached with higher professionalism. Also,
situations can be mixed, letting some more rational views be developed
aside less rational ones as a diversity of schools in the same fields.
As the Wikipedia article defines it, the name "pseudoscience"
is
usually restricted to irrational movements that wrongly claim to be
scientific. However, I consider this criteria of whether a doctrine
claims to follow the scientific method or to reject it, to be
irrelevant. Instead, I'd include any movement that speaks about "truth"
and "knowledge", thus including most religions. Indeed, even inside a
given religion, some movements claim their religion to be rationally
justified and in agreement with reason, while others claim to reject
reason in the name of the same religion, and not much practical
difference can be found between these two opposite trends. Anyway, both
are ignoring the fact that much of the claims of their religion is in
the reach of scientific inquiry (logical and/or observational), and
refutable by it, as we shall develop later.
Now, while the rationality level of an individual view inside
a
given field of knowledge where scientific rationality is in
force,
can easily be assessed by peer review, it leaves unclear the question
how to assess the rationality level of a whole field that includes the
readily available "peers". This problem can turn out to be very tough.
Indeed it is very tough in the case of the conflict between
parapsychology and the so-called "scientific skepticism", that we shall
present later in more details.
Still, once big, there are some other possible hints to assess
the
rationality level of a discipline, even though they are not always
reliable, such as:
- How fruitful it is ? could it discover any important and useful
solutions for mankind, such as new technologies ?
- Does it progress towards more accurate
knowledge and clearer evidence to support it ?
- Does it progress towards consensus on everyspecific issue (a
consensus may be towards either a conclusion or an acknowledgement that
the issue is not resolved yet), or on the contrary, does it face
long-lasting divisions between communities of belief that disagree on
common questions (that may range from deep conceptions to the
very existence of fixed crucial factual observations), that
can
only be limited by some form of dictatorship ?
For example, in physics, there is only one theory of gravitation
accepted as our established understanding of gravitation, that is
general relativity; the classical Newton's theory of gravitation is
still used as an approximation in many practical cases, without this
being a disagreement. But every big religion has faced divisions into
disagreeing movements: Judaism gave birth to Christianity and Islam;
Christianity faced a proliferation of heresies at its birth, and
divided into many denominations; Islam divides into Sunni, Shia, Sufism
and others, as well as a diversity of national and individual
interpretations and practices; their
dispersion was limited, at least by the common acceptance of a
Holy Book that cannot be modified and that all must take as
their
ultimate truth reference for being a member of the group; and sometimes
also by some hierarchical structure with a leader defining what
everyone must think. How can a view be the absolute and
reliable
Truth, if it is just similar with other variations that also claim to
be the Truth by similar methods ? How can it claim to be of importance
if it does not bring any observable and undeniable benefits to mankind ?
In science, there is no leader; after a theory was discovered, it is
usually rewritten, reexplained and developed by different authors, to
no more depend on the specific approach and presentation made
by the discoverer, while naturally
(rather than dogmatically) keeping agreement with the previous
discoveries (except of
course if the information initially suffered of being inaccurate, but
corrections are then accepted and do not give rise to long-standing
disagreements).
For example, astronomers and geologist naturally came to agree on the
age of the Earth from
different methods.
There has never been
several
coexisting ideologies which were altogether undeniable ways to truth or
progress, and in clear conflict against each other.
(This is expectable, as the Universe is a consistent whole with many
aspects but no contradictions; so the genuine understandings of its
parts should not contradict each other either).
The only thing anyhow close to being an exception I can think
about, is Gandhi's non-violence method for the independance of India -
but this is a very simple principle, not disagreeing with science by
itself, not an elaborate or mystical research, what it opposed to was
colonialism and not science; and its links to most other
aspects of the religious culture of India, are not, in
principle,
necessary.
Nowadays the only clear and undeniable way to truth and/or fruitful
practice for mankind, is science; possible benefits of any religion are
balanced by drawbacks observed by others. Drawbacks of science
can
be observed but few people would be ready to live without any modern
technology (ok, some do, let them do so).
Some philosophies or religions in ancient history could have been the
way to truth and progress for their time while "differing" from our
modern science, just because they were better than the rest of what
dominated their time, and they did not have the opportunity of
interaction with modern science.
Some forms of traditional medecine may be good while possibly
"disagreeing" with modern conventional medecine, but to this can be
argued that modern conventional medecine is not up to the same
scientific standards as most other natural sciences (we'll come back to
this later). And there is not even a clear disagreeing either, as the
claims of disagreement are made by "skeptic" groups who do not really
represent science.
But there has never been inside science any long-standing opposing
parties with each their progresses and sets of clear visible fruits.
On the other hand, you can see disagreements between science and
religion. The question of whether science and religions do agree, is
neither a matter of
- whether scientists think there is a God (as there is no
obligation
for God to agree with any existing religion, nor to have ensured that
we got the right one - which anyway would not support any
specific religion, since many religions are there and can't all be from
God),
- whether religious zealots say that
(have a strong faith that) they are agreement with, or supported by,
science (of course
they could hardly decide to explicitly oppose science without
discrediting themselves), or on the other hand, whether they have a
strong faith that science would be a mere religion or conjecture -
projecting on science the flaws of the blind faith principles they are
themselves following, as they can't understand science and reason in
the first place.
- whether our European pioneers of science were Christians
(most
cultivated people in Europe were Christian anyway, and how could
non-Christian scientists be heard when the Church was almighty
? it can be argued that the scientific progress
initiated by
the Greeks and others was interrupted by Christianity in the
Middle Ages; and that the tries of compatibility argumentations by the
pioneers of science were forced by the cultural conditioning of that
time which had installed religion as the only source of credibility);
- whether someone can be scientist and religious at the same
time
(one can be rational when dealing with scientific work, and then switch
off one's intellectual skills to commit a lot of nonsense when it comes
to religious issues, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; just like one can be
an expert in one field and a nut in another field);
- that pareidolies can be found between ancient religious
texts
and modern scientific discoveries (which, like so many other fallacies
they claim here and there, only proves that these religions
make
their followers dumb, unable to properly understand science
and to
objectively talk about it)
but a matter of:
- How
discussions do turn out when scientists
and religious people are debating together. Because
rationality and effective truth seeking, are not a matter of claim on a
few trivial points, but a matter of living way of thinking.
Only live debates can reveal such incompatibilities.
- Has religion (its methods or teachings beyond mere
basic natural intuitions) ever been of any help in the quest for truth,
in comparison with some hypothetical scenario where the same people
would have lived without their religion, i.e. had this religion been
absent from their surrounding.
- Is there any other scientific evidence supporting or
refuting the claims of a given religion.
Among the different articles claiming for the harmony between science
and religion, I rarely saw any attempt to argue for such hints of
compatibility. The only such link (arguable) I heard of, was
between Eastern religions (I forgot the details), and
quantum
physics, as Bohr, Shrödinger and other quantum physicists
could
suggest. See
here a historical report on the links between modern science and
Eastern religions, written from a Buddhist viewpoint. But
Eastern relgions can be criticized too, as will be developed in Part
III.
Let's just notice something: among the people who actively promote the
thesis of an harmony between Science and Christianity, there
are
many more non-scientist christians, than non-christian scientists (and
the same for every other religion).
Guess why.
(When I say "scientist", I mean someone who actively practices science,
not just someone who believes in the existences of Big Bang,
black
holes, galaxies, atoms and electromagnetic waves, and the revolution of
the Earth around the Sun in one year, and who uses computers and mobile
phones; when I say "Christian" I mean
someone in whose life faith plays a significant role, such as they
spend time reading the Bible, praying and/or attending
churches,
not just someone who believes in the existences of
God, afterlife
and an historical Jesus, and who visits churches
for tourism,
concerts, baptism, Christmas, weddings and funerals).
Why is it that, despite the dire lack of popularity of science (people
more often value for example Christianity than science in a moral
scale; manier people value religion as "higher" than science, and
manier people are christians than scientists in the above sense),
- Claims of compatibility with science, usually completed by
claims of
superiority over science, have often been made by
people of any religion
but
- only as a belief developed from inside their faith, based
on
superficial historical accounts and/or a misunderstanding (biased
account) of science, rather than from science itself ;
- much more for trying to make their faith sound
respectable,
keeping
and trying to attract into their faith people who trust science by
giving it a sort of scientific confirmation, rather than for promoting
scientific activities among their religious peers ;
- they could hardly convince anyone outside their own
religion about it, maybe except a few philosophers;
- Since modern times (about the mid 19th century ?),
no
religious
apologist (maybe except extreme Postmodernists) anymore
claimed there would be no truth in science;
while, despite the widespread popularity and practice of religions,
- Since modern times, no scientist anymore tried to argue for
the
compatibility of science with any given religion for trying to
credibilize
scientific knowledge, such as defending the big bang theory to a
Christian public by arguing
for its compatibility with the story of Genesis or by pointing
out any biblical approval for the use of reason, even when
the promotion of science is their only concern;
- Hardly any religion ever tried to argue for its
compatibility with
any other religion to make it sound credible (the
few exceptions I
know of are those whose sacred texts include those from
another
religion, claiming for compatibility with it, like the "Jews for Jesus"
trying to convert Jews to Christianity but debunked by other Jews; New
Agers unseriously pretending to be compatible with all other religions
together);
- Every religion has been dismissed by many people, including many scientists
and members
of other religions, as having no truth in it
?
It's of course because science turned out to be the only decent and
self-sufficient source of credibility under hand. And, in itself, it
does not support any religion.
But, these remarks were only drawn from superficial observations on
public opinion. How truly reliable is science, finally ? I just
recently saw a thread
on an article showing a form of credibility of scientific procedures
in the sense that criticism is at work, away from any conservatism. But
another thread referenced another
article
indicating that, precisely, some scientific fields like psychology and
medecine suffer from an overabundance of insufficiently verified
breakthroughs, and therefore should be taken with caution.
Of course, each religion, while possibly agreeing that science
has its own field of validity, sees itself higher than it. But these
claims are always based on the creeds of that religion, and only valid
from its own viewpoint. You may ask, how is it possible to develop a
purely rational viewpoint on these questions then ? We shall come back
to this in Part III.
The case of Nottale's Scale Relativity "theory"
We shall now illustrate and complete the previous remarks by presenting
a concrete example of a situation that may be considered typical and
unsurprising for scientists but challenges some naive expectations of
many other people about how science works.
The one field of scientific research that may be the most
highly valued by popular scientific magazines, philosophers of
science and many other popular commenters, as well as "worked on" by
a majority of crackpot scientists (a much larger proportion of
them than of true scientists), is the quest for a "theory of
everything" of physics, that would "explain the deep nature of
things" by unifying and explain both theories of fundamental physics
from which most known physical phenomena are considered to be closely
or remotely derived, that is, general relativity, and the famous
Standard Model of particle physics in the framework of quantum field
theory.
So, there is a large public which is thirsty and excited of reading any
news on what's going on in this area, wishing the problem to be solved,
maybe expecting the world to be quickly somehow
enlightened
and transformed with a revelation of the mind of God as a result of
such a discovery (according to Hawking's conclusion of his Brief
History of Time), disregarding the fact that they didn't understand in
the first place these two established theories that are to be explained
in this way.
Still, somehow incomfortable between their ignorance of this
established physics knowledge and their unability and/or laziness or
lack of time to really learn it, they are quite fond of
"popularized science" books which will give them the
impression to
understand it - no matter how illusory this impression may be.
One day, both dreams came true in one book that quickly became a
best-seller in France: "La relativité dans tous ses
états" (Relativity in all its states). The
author, Laurent
Nottale, is an astrophysicist entitled with one of the highest
official scientific positions in the French public science
system
: "Directeur de recherche" in CNRS (national center of scientific
research)
Or, this title may sound more honorable than it really is, as there are
between 4,000 and 4,500 other French scientists of all fields with this
same title. But the public did not pay attention to this. They did not
care how many other scientists with this title there were, and they
even did not know any other scientist with this title. Of
course,
they must have heard of other scientists with this title, but did not
pay attention to this. This is because there was no reason to point out
the fact a scientist was a "directeur de recherche" except for the case
of Laurent Nottale, because Nottale was the only one of them who made
any really interesting discoveries, and about whom it is
really
important to point out this title, in order to show how
scientifically credible his claims must me.
Roughly, the first half of his book was to give a popularized
presentation of modern physics, and the second half was to introduce
the principles of his own theory, "Relativité
d'échelle"
(Scale Relativity, that will be abreviated as RE). He explained the
fundamental principles of his
own theory, as consisting of :
1) "Taking away the differentiability hypothesis" (on which,
according to Nottale, mainstream physics was currently based),
thus allowing for a "fractal space-time";
2) Introducing a "principle of scale relativity" (or extension of
application of the relativity principle), after those of Special and
General relativity (which may be described as being respectively
about relativities of speed and acceleration);
3) Deducing consequences, by drawing a parallel between the role of
speed in special relativity and the role of scale in scale relativity.
One of the first "consequences" was that, just as speeds are
bounded by the limit value c (speed of light), so there would be limit
values of scale too, from a lower extreme (the Planck scale),
to a
higher extreme (the cosmological constant). Another consequence, would
be to explain the quantum behavior of particles as following
"geodesics in a fractal space-time". Another consequence would have
been to explain the distribution of planetary orbits as following a
quantification rule like electrons in atoms. And many other claims of
explanations, from particle physics with its physical constants, to
evolutionary processes.
In other words, it would all be a continuation and new extension of
Einstein's works and discoveries. Anyway, what is sure is that,
consequently, this work also provided its author for a new
extension of Einstein's popularity too.
Along the several years of his popularity, serveral articles praising
his discoveries appeared in all the 4 main French popular science
magazines.
One article was to present a list of the 4 main
competing theories of everything (or research programs towards a theory
of everything): String theory, loop quantum gravity,
Connes'noncommutative
geometry, and Nottale's scale relativity.
Pour la science
(the French
edition of the Scientific
American) published in 1997 an article by Nottale, titled "Are we
in a black hole ?", and in july 2003 gave 8 pages to be written by
Nottale claiming for experimental confirmations of his theory, after
another popular science magazine published similar claims by another
member of his team in 2002.
One of the most prestigious French higher educational institutions, is
Ecole Normale Supérieure (there are 3 of them, I'm speaking
about the most famous one, "rue d'Ulm" in Paris): entry is
admitted from an extremely selective contest after a 2-3 years
of
very intensive training after high school; students already receive a
quite good salary from the state for studying,
and are then
easily accepted to research or teaching positions. The famous Bourbaki
group (collective author of a large compendium of modern mathematics in
the middle of the 20th century) is from there; but this school includes
a large diversity of fields from science to litterature and
philosophy.
This school had its famous regular seminar on the philosophy of
science, called "Pensée des sciences". The exact litteral
translation of this title would be "Thought of sciences". Is this clear
? How can we explain this title ? We may try to better understand it by
looking for something else to replace "sciences" there. Uh, what can it
be ? It probably needs to remain a sort of profession. So, what
profession can we imagine to put there instead of sciences ? Well,
sorry I would not like to offend any profession. So, I will take here,
at random, the profession of scavenging, and I want to ask forgiveness
from all scavengers if this choice may sound downgrading to them, as
this is not my puropose here. So, we can understand that seminar's
title by replacing "sciences" by "scravenging": this would be about
making the difference between garbage collecting
on the one hand, and the philosophy
of garbage collecting on the other hand, in the sense that
the latter would be spiritually higher than the former.
So, the purpose of philosophers coming to this "pensée des
sciences" seminar, is to come and look at sciences from above, in order
to provide them for a meaning.
And what happened, is that Nottale was an honorary member of that
seminar. He held there several presentations of his views, was
a
good friend of the organizers and highly considered by them.
His popularity extended all over the web. If you made a web search on
"relativité" at that time, you would have got manier entries
about scale relativity (even among the first entries) than about
Einstein's special and general relativity theories. (I felt concerned
about this because I had made a page about special relativity). A large
number of Web sites, groups or seminars of science vulgarisation
(especially clubs of astronomy), litterature reviews or
philosophy
of science. had en entry about scale relativity.
The problem is, his popularity among amateurs of science, did
not
extend to professional physicists. These usually did not mention him if
they had a Web site. His research team remained quite small, as hardly
any other physicist joined it. He had a few articles published in
peer-reviewed journals, but he often faced rejection of his articles
too.
Of course, discussions had happened between him and other physicists.
These discussions usually came to dead ends: either aporia, or harsch
judgements with an impossibility to talk any further, suspecting that
Nottale's ideas just had no meaning and no value, or could not be
verified. But, as I could know of (and I made large web searches at
that time), nothing from these discussions was ever
written
down and published anywhere.
By lack of peer physicists, Nottale tried to extend his team by
accepting and leading Master or PhD students, but still had big
troubles doing so. Some came, but most of them quickly gave up and went
away for another subject, either because they quicky noticed that scale
relativity made no sense and nothing could decently be made out of it,
and/or for fear of not being accepted after this for a scientific job
anywhere else if they worked on it then.
In front of this situation which I perceived as a form of collective
foolishness, I took a very bold decision: I started writing down a
harsch (and even mocking) criticism of Nottale and his scale
relativity, to publish on my web site.
Across all the web, I was (and I always remained) the only author
criticizing Nottale's scale relativity in the form of Web pages (all
other cases of online criticisms I know of were mere
messages
in newsgroups and web forums).
It was a very hard and painful task. It was made especially hard
by Nottale's writing style. This style, which made virtually
desperate any attempt to criticize him, consisted in the fact that, in
a first approximation, he did not seem to write anything clear and
precise that could ever be an object of a possible agreement or
disagreement. In other words, his claims were usually not even wrong.
Namely, much of his writings were but an endless play of
introductions to themselves. It was so hard to identify there any
well-defined claim that could be argued about, and the explanations of
what was wrong with that, were beyong the reach of an expression in the
usual language of popularized science. It required to explain in
details how some usual introductory or popularized ways of expressing
the known laws of physics, were not faithful to the deep theoretical
meaning of these laws as professional physicists are normally
familiar with, and that these subtle misunderstandings are responsible
for the fact that Nottale's claims make an illusion of sense (seem
quite plausible and meaningful) for amateur physicists, but turn out to
make no more sense when considered from a professional physicist's
viewpoint.
So I spent quite a time developing a first version of this
criticism, which was then widely visited as it appeared (and still
appears now) among the first links (first results page) on keywords
"Nottale" or "relativité d'échelle".
For example, I explained that the apparent similarities
between
both "relativity principles" for special and general
relativity,
as presented by Einstein in his famous book (relativity of speed and of
acceleration), only hold
for a popularized and introductory viewpoint on these theories, while
it would be quite odd to try keeping such a parallel in the effective
contents of these theories as any
specific cases of a mathematically well-defined general concept of a
relativity principle. Thus, just calling for a "new extension
of the same principle" to something else, can hardly mean
anything
in itself (while Nottale just assumed that a call for this must suffice
to be making sense, without any further justification).
I reviewed many Web
sites mentioning scale relativity and wrote to their authors
to
tell them about my criticism. I reviewed all possible online
discussions that may have meaningful contents about scale relativity,
and referenced them, to form a quite complete and
exhaustive (including all sides of the debate) online list of
references
of opinions on the subject, much more than those given by Nottale and
the other site promoting scale relativity themselves at that time.
And I got a diversity of reactions (but Nottale himself never wrote me,
as he never wrote himself in online forums either, while he must have
known about my criticism).
One of the things I heard or got in reply to my criticism, from people
who closely knew him and his work, was that Nottale was a very humble
person who did not make any big claim, but doing an honest pioneering
of a research work that was far from complete, so that it would be
wrong to expect from him any clear and solid conclusion; and he is
therefore not responsible for his exaggerated popularity. Much more
clarification work for his ideas would have to be done first.
But the problem here is the discrepancy between his unofficial claim of
humility in private discussions with physicists, and the hubristic
claims that he and his supporters publish in the
media and online forums, and that remained
uncontradicted by any
of their other public claims.
One reader of "La relativité dans tous ses états"
wrote
on a Web site that this book is only must be reserved for advanced
physicists. When I asked him why, he explained that, as a beginner, he
has not the necessary background to properly understand it and do
anything with the claims contained there. However my critisism of this
book had been dismissed by one of Nottale's fans by claiming, that, of
course, it is normal that as a book of popularization, it
should
not expected to provide any solid contents based on which the theory
can properly be evaluated; thus he advised me to stop reading any book
of popularization.
Problem: if it is neither good for beginners nor for advanced readers,
how could this book ever be a best-seller as it was ?
Then, there is a "more advanced book" that one should read instead; I
read the first chapters that were available online and I found there
the same flaws.
For example, the "formulas" there were nonsense, as the symbols did not
have any well-defined meaning, and there were no clear rules what to do
of them.
Still, some defenders argued that this observation was not right,
either because I would be ignorant of the concepts and the meaning of
the formalism, or because anyway other mainstream accepted theories
suffer similar weakness.
Indeed, it is well-known that Quantum Field Theory (the framework of
particle physics) is very ill-defined mathematically, based on formulas
that do not make any direct sense but have to be "interpreted" through
a large series of tricks transforming the initial formulas into other
formulas that finally give better computable results. This
requires some quite strange tricks, such as letting the
physical
constants that appeared in the initial formula,
become variables depending on the size of
the pixels
into which the physical space is approximated.
However, such an argument cannot stand because, what really matters to
physicists is a kind of intuition they develop about their formulas,
that goes beyond the strict and immediate consideration of mathematical
rigor for its definiteness, and that can assess whether some
deeper meaning for it can still exist "out there".
And, while such an intuitive meaning does exist for the formulas of
quantum field theory, no start of a meaning can be found for those of
scale relativity.
Another reaction was, who am I, mere math PhD, to make such a harsch
criticism of a scientist with such a high grade as Nottale ?
Someone (that seemed to be working on the philosophy of mathematics in
Ecole Normale Supérieure) wrote me that I seemed jealous of
Nottale's findings, and that at least he made an honorable effort (good
try) towards the ultimate mysteries of the universe, while I was a
failed scientific thinker looking for recognition while
I could
not make anything like this. I replied to him that, well, there is no
one goal absolutely the best, and that other jobs such as garbage
collecting can be honorable too. Indeed, the very task I was just
doing, to dismiss Nottale's claims and try to clean up the public media
of this nonsense, can be seen as a sort of intellectual garbage
collecting, that may seem quite a dirty task, but for the intellectual
hygiene of society there needs someone to do it too.
In online forums I read messages of someone who dedicates much of his
life in many forums to promote the existence of the paranormal as well
as every possible crackpot science idea he can find under the sun, who
reported to have written to Nottale in hope to receive from him support
for his ideas, and then being shocked at Nottale's reply, which was a
for him a devastating revelation that Nottale is a very materialistic
person denying the existence of any paranormal phenomena.
Someone wrote me that Nottale had the bad practice to take for
his own credit all results from his collaborators.
Wikipedia articles were made about Nottale and scale relativity. I
tried my best to put a stop to this foolishness, by tring to make
corrections, and, in the discussion page, replying on every
pseudo-argument made by the main author of this wikipedia article (who
was not a scientist but an amateur of science popularization, crazily
enthousiastic of Nottale). It was an awful, exhausting fight. He
reverted away my corrections of the article a number of times. It was
desperate to try to convince him, as there was no possible cure for the
strength and pride of his ignorance. This Wikipedia article was a shame
of an article for Wikipedia, because any non-ridiculous introduction to
scale relativity would have to follow Nottale's way of introducing his
ideas, based on a disastrous misinterpretation of the situation of
mainstream physics. So, there was logically no way under the sun for a
Wikipedia article on the subject to ever seem "neutral" as the official
Wikipedia policy requires.
He said that Nottale has credentials as he did publish in peer-reviewed
journals, while I do not have any such credentials. So he challenged me
to make a scientific publication criticizing scale relativity in a
peer-reviewed journal. Then, I asked someone for advice about this
challenge, and got the reply that it was rather hopeless, both because
Nottale has a high scientific position which I don't have
(only
highly reputed authors could afford to do it, but they usually don't).
Moreover, scientific articles must usually be about positive results,
while, just explaining that BS is BS, which was already clear for most
scientists anyway, is not a genuine form of scientific progress.
In fact, as was noted in other discussions, when looking more closely
at Nottale's publications , it appears that no true
peer-reviewed
credentials for scale relativity articles can be found:
- Nottale had
publications accepted in scientific journals but most of them
are not about
scale relativity. As for those on scale relativity, they cannot be used
as a credit to it because
- Many did not have any such credentials: they were either
mere
preprints or made in contexts like symposiums that do not consititute a
peer-review credential;
- Some were published in journals of astronomy where referees don't
always have the necessary background in physics
- Some were published in the journal "Chaos, Solitons and Fractals"
whose editor-in-chief of that time, El Naschie, is a famous crank with
similar ideas too (unknown to the French public). According to
RationalWiki,
"Several bloggers removed their
posts about El Naschie and Chaos, Solitons and Fractals, apparently in the face of
legal threats from the El Naschie's representatives"
So, we are in a legal system that somehow practices sensorship against
genuine scientific review, not letting scientists a full right to
criticize cracks. This is serious.
Also, the author of the wikipedia article argued that my criticism
seemed weak: according to my own words, it seemed that I did not really
check what Nottale's ideas were worth, nor did I really understand what
they were about, but I only made vague suspicions against
them, so
that my harsch conclusions were not based on any serious justifications.
From this, I took a serious, painful decision: I went on to sacrifice
one more month of my life to rewrite and develop all my arguments
against scale relativity, so as to make them much clearer and remove
this impression of weakness or uncertainty.
I noticed that Nottale published an article in the journal
"Commentaire" (and put it
on his web site) precisely to criticize the peer-review system, based
on the observation that his own articles about scale relativity were
often rejected by reviewers, which he interpreted as an expression of
conservatism of physicists who remain sticked to their dogmas and are
not open to new ideas.
In fact, Nottale also once wrote the following about his
life :
"Once I had this
idea, I did not think (I was not yet in CNRS): 'Hey, I'll announce this
as a research orientation in my CNRS application ! I will work
on it'.
I would never have done such a thing. I did not write in my CNRS
activity reports, before the end of the 1980s,
that I worked on that. I did that in parallel, as if it were my leisure
time… I know it was not publishable. I knew I could not make
a carreer
or even simply have a position, if I mentioned such researches. If
I announced I worked on this path, I'd have killed all
possibility to
have a research position, despite my 13 articles in referee
journals, my state doctorate, etc. Then, for ten years, I kept that as
a background task, and it is, indeed when I was recognized for my work
on lenses (the Digital prize and other rewards), that I wad
nominated
research director in CNRS, and I said myself :
'Now I take the risk'."
I kept referencing all possible comments found on the web about scale
relativity.
One PhD was made under Nottale's direction. The result of this thesis
was refuting a fundamental formula which was used everywhere in scale
relativity calculations. The thesis report mentioned something like
"The originality of this thesis is that the student happened to
disagree with his director, and was approved there by the jury". This
student was consequently rejected by Nottale after this.
One newsgroup participant reported to have been shocked at
hearing a radio interview of a highly ranked specialist of general
relativity, where an auditor asked for his opinion about scale
relativity, and as a reply he "swept away the theory in one sentence,
saying there was no ground in Nottale's books". This listnener's
helpless report and comment, expressed his deep disappointment about
that reputed physicist, who in this way appeared quite
intolerant
and conservative against new ideas in physics. But others disagreed
with this view, defending this physicist against Nottale.
Other examples of comments:
"Let's
be serious, Nottale's theory interests only one person in the world,
Nottale. I never heard any notable scientist of any nationality, that
mentions him".
"As there are hundreds
of thousands
of young researchers in the world looking for a big scoop to be famous,
ready for anything to publish and get a position, I guess if there was
any small probability to draw anything from these fractal theories
there would be many articles on hep-th. But it seems to be a
complete silence. The problem of string theory is that it is very
difficult (...), but telling anything about fractals, quantum chaos or
the butterfly effect, would be in anyone's reach, and cranks don't miss
this"
"I doubt any but Nottale
know what he did"
"The name of Nottale
tells you
something ? he is professor in CNRS and Centrale [an engineer school],
I think, he wrote brilliant books on relativity, brilliant books that,
after analysis, turned out to be devoid of meaning. And these books
have been sold like little breads"
The physicist in the newsgroup (mentioned above), reported to
have
taken a lot of time reading Nottale's articles (much more than I did
myself), without succeeding to find any sense in them, nor anybody to
give any explanations on their meaning (the only ones who replied were
ignorant enthousiastic supporters of scale relativity who did not
understand the articles themselves and thus could not give any
explanations). He also tried to check whether, among all claims made by
scale relativists to have had their predictions confirmed by
experience, he could really find any such a prediction to have
really been published before the experimental confirmation came out,
and could not find any.
Then I replied him to check my criticism, to which he
then replied:
"Excellent, really
excellent. The
criticism really translates what I observed and the feeling I had when
reading Nottale's articles. But it goes clearly deeper
(...)"
At only one place online, some more detailed arguments against
scale relativty were expressed.
This was by the forum messages written by the
moderators and
a few more participants of a famous forum of science popularization.
And I want to write here a translated quotation of some of
their arguments, Some arguments were about
high concepts
of theoretical physics, which have no place here. So I will focus here
on simpler ones, in order to show what can be a normal, rational
argumentation and ultimate refutation, made by scientists against a
popular theory written by a highly ranked scientist, that has been a
best-seller of scientific popularization for a long time, praised by
many philosophers of science and many other book commenters, and
seemingly uncriticized by anyone else (they did not refer to my own
analysis):
"Despite
several hours of discussions with [Nottale], I could never understand
the fundamental principle by which he obtained quantum effects..."
"However, one thing is sure : though one magazine recently made its
headlines with 4 scientists implied with these
"théories",
no theoretical physicists believes any least bit in [scale
relativity].. the first 3 are serious attempts, but the latter is mere
"calculational poetry" and it is nonsense to compare it to the others."
"The problem with his
theory is that
it predicts everything, and if we asked for it, it could even make
coffee. It could have been a good idea, it did not work, the author
insisted, it became a parascientific delirium."
"The scientific work
does not consist
in proving that all fuzzy claims are false. It's up to a new theory to
prove itself valid. Nottale was unable to do so. If scientists had to
spend their time proving that smoky theories are such, they could do it
full-time !
"All his seminars I saw were fuzzy, without any proof"
[in reply to a RE supporter's message "I wish to bring him on the right
track by reacting on some quotations about RE that seem very far from
the scientific debate":]
"The main reason may be
that RE is precisely quite far from science..."
"The problem of scale
relativity is that it is NOT a theory. It is at best
a modern poem. Scale relativity does not give any possibility to be
falsified, and according to its author, it explains everything from the
electron's mass to planetary orbits. But when you look a little at the
mathematical framework behind the theory, there is STRICTLY nothing
solid (...) Nottale is a good communicator and know to sell himself"
"like the bogdanov (...)
they know
how to use the media to make up an image of themselves in the public,
by lack of a professional recognition. Nottale published more in wide
public journals than publications (...) he gets predictions out of his
hat while hiding technical problems at the foundation of his
"theory"(...) it is not sane and goes away from the scientific method.
All scientists with whom I could talk say it's [worthless]" (the French
word here says "anything").
and here is the concluding message by a moderator:
"What a caustic humor !
But I still find
terribly amusing to
see that you don't notice the ridicule of your pseudo-defense
of
RE : among those 7 preprints, only one was published... I restricted my
search to the theoretical physics part of arxiv, letting down
the
astro part.
Absurd theories don't
deserve to spend time on them because they immediately appear so if one
has a minimum of knowledge.
I agree that at least RE may seem from far away a minimum serious. I
will conclude with some remarks but have no more time to waste with RE.
I know Nottale rather
well and had
many chances to see him and discuss his case. We (...) had no private
talks, but he seemed very nice to me. I have strictly nothing against
him personally.
However, he seems to mainly be a sweet dreamer and a bit
megalo-parano.
As for the value
attached by
the community to RE, two-three weeks ago was organized in
Paris a
huge international conference in the honor of Einstein and
the 100 years of relativity, as well as the famous
other
articles of 1905.
As you can see on the
site of the conference (http://einstein2005.obspm.fr/index.html)
very many researchers
participated and many high researchers in relativity / fundamental
physics were there.
Was Nottale there? Was
there anyone
to mention RE?
Absolutely not. However, many ideas and speculative theories were
presented, especially in the parallel session on "the structure of
space-time".
And you want to know in
all that what seems to me the clearest sign of the absence of value of
RE as a
candidate fondamental theory ? It simply is the fact that the
laboratory that organized this conference is LUTH where
precisely Nottale works, who was neither in the organizing comittee,
nor among participants. I repeat, I strictly have nothing against
Nottale, but there are times when a
scientist must stay a minimum serious."
So I referenced these discussions in my site, making them much more
readily accessible to anyone searching for information on scale
relativity. I also browsed very many Web sites that spoke about scale
relativity, to mention the work I had done. This resulted in a rapid
decrease of Nottale's popularity.
Long later, I got a thankful message from a physics faculty member
who mentioned that, some years before, he had to check about
scale
relativity for taking a decision whether to accept a paper
from one of
Nottale's PhD students in the reports of a "Young Researchers"
meetings. He thought that he should not but could not convince about it
the other members of the committee. So the paper was accepted. He
regreted to not have seen my argumentation at that time, which may have
changed the decision (but it did not exist yet anyway, so it could not
have happened).
Of course I have written to the popular scientific magazines to mention
my argumentation. None of them ever published any mention about it, and
they even did not write me a private reply.
The only reply I got was from Pour la science, at the time in between
the two versions of my argumentation, as a justification for them to
not publish any mention of a criticism of scale relativity:
"Indeed,
we only publish articles already appeared in prime international
peer-reviewed journals, so I suggest you to submit your article to one
of them"
and in the next reply
"Dear
Sir, PLS is not the best place for a debate of specialists.
For
this there are specialized journals. Let me just ensure you one point:
the publication of a popularization article by Nottale in our columns
does not suffice to give his theory a Gospel value, it would be giving
too much importance to our journal. Our readers know it, and know that
scale relativity is controversial. We also know it, as illustrated by
our pluralist policy".
The only effect was probably a negative one: since that time, (if I
didn't miss something) none of these magazines ever published
an article about scale
relativity anymore.
The work was done. The garbage was swept away from most of the public
space.
A few of the Web sites that had referenced scale relativity before
referred to me, but that's all, and all this quicky vanished along the
years.
Problem: while I did save a lot of time of many people who no more had
to waste their energy studying this nonsense, I hardly got any
reputation from it. Okay, it was basically not a self-interest work,
but still, how to qualify such a long and tedious work for mankind,
useful in the public sphere, that does not even bring any
moral recognition to its author ?
And, less than a recognition, all what I earned from my selfless work
of public information against nonsense, was to get the presence of two
web pages full of very dirty personal attacks against me, and
immediately accessible by google, by a foolish defender of that
"theory" which I criticized, and another crackpot author. The
problem is, people who wish to check what kind of person I am, reading
these pages, may not take the necessary time to check how
absurd
these attacks are, and how mad and devoid of any credibility are the
authors of these pages, to conclude how irrelevant are these pages.
Such an absurdly selfless enterprise may be called foolishness by some.
Now, just consider: if it might have seemed strange at first sight that
Nottale's hubristic claims and reputation as a new Einstein could
really be so false but still develop across a large public and seem to
stand as a scientific reference, never contradicted and even less
carefully refuted "with rational arguments" by any scientist except the
foolish myself, the reason for this paradox is now clear.
This reason, is that the care to explain the truth is soooooooooooo
wasteful of energy, eating many weeks of hard, relatively stupid work,
from a precious intelligent life, and does not bring any sort of
advantage to its author, but on the contrary, will likely be harmful to
his reputation. How the hell can you honestly expect any sane rational
person to dedicate himself to this task ?
In other words:
Scientists cannot be held responsible for the popularity of irrational
ideas outside their own community, even when these ideas are spread,
praised and trusted in the name of science by popular scientific
magazines. Even a story of a new Einstein with high academic
positions, is not a sufficient evidence of scientific
credibility.
The publication of ideas in scientific magazines does not suffice
either, not because of any conspiracy by hidden powers, but simply
because the editorial policy of scientific magazines is to write what
the public likes to buy and read.
The risk for the public to mistake science for what it is not, is
basically caused by some irresistible public's need to buy,
praise
and trust BS rather than genuine science. It is NOT a scientific
problem, nor a problem with the scientific community which remains
unconcerned with this collective foolishness.
It is NOT the responsibility of scientist to care for and ensure the
correctness of public information, nor to proceed to any fight against
any possible widespread nonsense, either by "argumentation" or by any
other means that would go against
the public's irresistible
need to believe nonsense. Because the force of the public's
need
to believe nonsense may remain stronger than any attempt of correction
by scientists anyway, and put the scientists who dare contradicting
this trend, in danger of public bullying instead of a thanks.
A sort of new maturity from the part of the public, to have a
more
serious look at the scientific consensus, would be needed. But still a
new solution can be developed, as will be explained later (part IV).
Another aspect of the problem, is the failure of the institutions that
do not have the necessary flexibility to fire a scientist that
turns out to dedicate himself to crackpot productions which were not
mentioned when he was recruited, in order to let a chance to this
position by more serious scientists instead. But you can guess how hard
it would be to take such an exceptional, illegal decision (as
recruitments to CNRS cannot be cancelled) for a public institution
ruled by democratically elected representatives, to
fire the
man that the overwhelming majory of people beleive to be the one new
Einstein author of the most amazing (or, the only interesting)
discovery of nowaday's science.
Let's complete the story of the reputation of scale
relativity, what remained of it after this.
A number of unserious web sites of science popularization or human
sciences, including a site of book reviews, are still positively
referencing Nottale and his scale relativity at this time.
A number of cranks are doing it too, for example one of them speaks
about "The Tao of Pansystems": "The Einstein's Relativity and L
Nottale's scale relativity are all a
special case of Panrelativity.".
Another says (in French): "As for the physicist Laurent Nottale, he
could confirm the validity of Kalachakra space particles, following an
intuition of the Dalai-lama who associates them to the new paradigm of
physics".
The last academic work on scale relativity outside Nottale's team, is a
work of philosophy and sociology of science, focused on bibliometric
considerations, that is, the study of how many publications by Nottale
could be accepted in peer review journals, and how many other
scientists happened to get interested in it after this. I tried to
write to him as well as a few other faculty members in the institution
where he was working, and never got any reply. So the object of this is
a work is to observe how a new theory away from the mainstream research
subjects remains ignored. This is supposed to illustrate the
conservatism and inertia of the scientific community which is not open
to new ideas. So, philosophers imagine that they are making sense of
what is happening in science, by looking at it from the outside. But
the reality is that they are remaining completely blind to the very
object of their study, because, how can they draw any sane conclusion
about the conservatism of the scientific community from
a sociological measurement of the scarcity of references to
Nottale's ideas, if they have no clue of the fact that, for anyone who
knows about physics, there are indeed strong reasons to reject this
thing that is not even worthy of being called a theory,
because,
indeed, it hardly has anything to do with science ?
Let's mention now a loud non-reaction on the issue. Once in this work,
I wrote to a French skeptic organization that might
be the
most respectable one in France ("French association
for
scientific information" = AFIS), as the aim of its publications is to
generally criticize all possible forms of pseudo-science around, with
not as much focus on the paranormal issues which interest more
the
more caricatural branches of French skepticism
(Zététique).
I hoped they would be interested with my criticism work, because it is
their very purpose to be the voice opposing the public beliefs in
pseudo-sciences.
They were not, as their reply to me just claimed that Nottale is a
normal researcher in lack of collaborators.
Visibly, nobody really understand physics among them, so that nobody
there can grasp the sense of opposing something that mascarades as a
physics theory by playing on the misinterpretation of physics by the
public.
In fact, their ignorance of physics clearly appears in the childish way
in which they pretended, in one of their articles, that the known law
of physics exclude the possibility for paranormal phenomena.
This is not an isolated case
Other crackpot theorists have high scientific ranks in the
institutions and are taken seriously by some scientific or popular
media, though they remain isolated on the intellectual ground. To just
mention two clear cases:
One example was Maurice Allais, economics Nobel laureate who melt with physics and claimed to refute Special Relativity theory.
Another example is Gabriel Chardin, French physicist in the CEA (Atomic Energy Commission)
with crazy ideas about antimatter (with an idea that antimatter would
have negative mass and be gravitationally repulsive, which is just
ridiculous nonsense for most other physicists) and a few
other things.
Conclusions
Finally, let's see what such adventures can teach us about religious
and spiritual issues:
We mentioned what a desperate task it would already be to try making any
"convincing" explanations about whether a "theory" makes any sense or
not, to some cultivated but not expert public (cultivated
enough to
get interested with physics popularization), which should already be
quite more intelligent than the overall public which religions are
proudly wide open to. This happens in the context of a scientific world
with an already established quite good understanding of the laws of
physics. So, the deep
truth on the issue at stakes, is already rather well-known.
And this established knowledge on a relatively modest question (the
understanding of the mere physical world, which is, in principle, quite
"simpler" than the spiritual one), was not enough to put a stop to the
fame of a absurd doctrine across a relatively informed public.
In such conditions, how the hell can any sane rational person, expect
the overall, less intelligent population of the world, to
behave so
much wiser when it comes to discerning the truth about the
more
obscure spiritual realities (much harder to perceive, much harder to
understand, as in its way to transcend all physical realities, it may
as well be beyond all possible human understanding), that the basic,
chaotic natural communication and convincing processes across
society would have any chance to do it right, while no start of a
reliable foundation for the understanding of these realities ever
existed yet ?
The academic institutions
So, we explained that the consensus among scientists in a field
(especially in hard sciences) is generally the most reliable sign of
truth (among all available means of inquiry in the same world at the
same time) as concerns their research subjects. This is already
interesting, but leaves many questions unanswered, because many
important questions are not currently the subject of any serious
official research.
Note that the trust expressed here towards the scientific
consensus, is basically not a trust towards institutions, but a trust
towards the global behavior of some community of people, based on how
reason works, disregarding the admistrative structure that currently
hires them. Hopefully there are many cases when official institutional
positions properly reflect serious scientific findings, but there can
be exceptions too. This can either be because
- the established official community working on the subject
is not made of really
qualified people (or: their training and the conditions of academic
recognition they must follow does not push them to the right research
direction), or
- the issue (subject of claims by an
institution) is not
directly the research subject of any established scientific community,
but an aspect of the political forces and paradigms which determine the
behavior of these institutions.
Instances of 1. will be listed in the below section. Now let us
present an important instance of 2, the question: how should
education be organized and which knowledge or skills should be
taught at every level, from the curriculum contents to the practical
management (admission requirements, schedules, pedagogical tools, types
of interaction between students and
faculty, obligations, exams and the administrative roles of exams and
diplomas for the pursuit of the curriculum and the insertion in the
rest of
society).
The situation depends on countries. It is better in some
countries than in others, but the appreciation may depend on
viewpoints, types of students, possible diversity among institutions of
each country, and goals and criteria for comparison.
For example, the scientific teaching level has been quite higher in the
Soviet Union and some Asian countries, than in most of Western European
and U.S. countries at the same years and ages of secondary and high
school. Such a higher level may fit some of the best students, but be
very hard to others.
There are also a diversity of teaching systems between European
countries, and marginally some very different systems from the norm.
Still, in average, the dominant situation is quite awful, in a way that
can roughly be described as a dire lack of freedom for pupils and
students, where the rules to follow are, for most pupils, far
from
the most favorable circumstance to their development and
fulfilment of any kind (even when restricting the considered potential
alternatives to those implementable with the same budget).
The situation in this field is quite paradoxical because the
teaching and academic management activities, especially in higher
education, are an essential component of the official duty of a large
majority of scientists, and are so crucial to the life and career of
the next generation of scientists, but they happen to be
so wrongly
done in some ways, because the full question of the global design of
how academic institutions should work and what tasks should
scientists be hired for, was not actually developed as a
genuine research subject.
In fact, the academic system as a whole is not a decided
well-thought
conception of scientists (but only, if I don't mistake, a thought of
the
Enlightenment philosophers modeled after the practices of religious
academies and finally fixed by decisions of states,
with no significant design update since then), and its role has
never been to properly share
and show what science really is. Its main role was to be a
democratically and administratively stable way of managing a
population, the overwhelming majority of which has no chance to really
understand science anyway; to provide them with diplomas, hopefully
(but not always reasonably) likely to let them chances to find a job
(especially among public institutions themselves, to reliably avoid any
questioning from the reality of a free market).
Only little hints of real science were reflected there. Scientists have
been the servants of this system, mainly because they hardly had any
other option to keep their jobs.
In this context, many individual scientists do notice the problem,
sometimes speak and write about it (unless some obligation of political
correctness linked with their job prevents it), and eventually try to
do something about it, but overall they remain rather powerless against
it.
Examples:
"Dead
Lectures" (how the practical form of learning by "live
lectures" is made obsolete by technology)
"The Role
of the
Professor" (which would consist in renewing of the
curriculum contents: cleaning, restructuring and updating it to
existing knowledge, serving as an intermediate between teachers and
researchers; this role is actually neglected by the institutions, in
favor of these latter 2 disconnected activities)
Research
and teaching, article and long discussion on what is going
wrong in the academic system; for example "in almost every field there are
way too many students per prof"
In the same
blog, ("spaces" article):
"Over and over I have found
people who reject the notion of mathematics
being a universal language, and who discard it as insufficient for
reality. They are dead wrong to do so of course, but since I've
encountered this attitude over and over again, I want to dedicate some
paragraphs to what I believe is the origin of this divide.
At
the very beginning is, of course, school education. Unfortunately,
what's called mathematics in school has little to do with mathematics.
It should more aptly be called calculation."
Homeschooling
physicist
"we
are not using any US public-school textbooks in those areas: science
textbooks below the high-school level are often factually wrong. Even
at the high-school level, many are disasters (check out the reviews
from the Textbook League). And history texts for US public schools
tend to be utterly boring and bloodless: how they manage to transmute
the reality of history – heroes and villains, nobility and
murder most
foul – into stunningly unappetizing pabulum is a great
mystery."
"the
most important point that is distinctive about our approach is the
emphasis on teaching significant content about science and history as
early and as fully as possible. This would be very hard in the public
schools because of the “urge to test.”"
More
texts on homeschooling
More
texts on education
For example:
Teaching
Science the Harry Potter Way
Changing
education paradigms
François Taddei (French biologist, founder of wiser-u):
"When my son was 6, he went to
class like all children, his teacher told me: "This child is charming,
but... he asks questions." Since that day, I ask myself questions on
the educational system".
"If your job looks like
chess, prepare to change your job"
Albert Einstein (who was INTP, and quite a bad pupil):
"It is a miracle that curiosity
survives formal education."
On
graduate school and teaching: "The unfortunate thing is that
the lack of value assigned to teaching
seems very systemic, to the point of being embedded in the culture"
- "High school has
managed to convince many students that physics is a
dogmatic, memorization-centered subject. As a result, they
don’t have
the skills necessary to solve real physics problems, because all that
they have learned to do is to pattern-match and to plug-and-chug"
A famous example was the French mathematician Evariste
Galois. He made some
pioneering work in group theory (fixing the name "group"), as well
as a whole field of algebra now named after him:
Galois theory (about algebraic equations). He died in 1832 at the age
of 20 as a final result of his unsustainable troubles
with the world and the academic system, which happened to make life
quite hard to him as a genius (hard inadequate school work and
troubles to be accepted and find recognition).
A possible way to describe the problem is in terms of MBTI typology.
We previously mentioned that types are correlated with profession, and
in particular, that the types of Teachers are preferably EFJ, and a few
more types around it. But another question to consider, that hardly
anyone asks, is to wonder what is the right type for a very peculiar
job: what must be the personality type of the Pupil ? Now you can take
it as an exercise to check
the MBTI test (or from any other source) and guess the right
answers which the Pupil should give to each of the four
questions, to describe the right personality type a good Pupil should
have.
Are you done ?
Of course, the right answers come to form a unique type quite
straightforwardly. Then you can go and check the
description of this type, which will confirm
that this is indeed the correct type qualifying one to be a
good Pupil.
Now, remember a big claim of the school system, is that it does
everything to provide fair chances for all young people to succeed in
society, without any discrimination.
Traditionally (at least in France), this paranoid concern
for absolute fairness and equality of chances for all people,
has
been focused towards the exclusive ideal of breaking social
boundaries by trying to cancel all possible correlation between
people's careers (social positions, incomes) and those of their
parents. To try to reach this goal, a lot of money has been invested in
education, together with a very big focus on the care to "treat all
pupils equally" by putting them together in the same classrooms and
providing them the same lessons
So, teenagers are jailed in schools to protect them from all possible
influence of their parents (their respective social ranks,
their cultures that might contaminate them), so that none will be
"unfairly" favored as compared to others.
But it remained a big failure, as the
correlation (social boundaries) remained.
Our education ministers
failed to notice that, if cancelling the correlation between the
careers of children and their parents was really the purpose,
then
a much cheaper and more reliable solution was available: to
use a lottery system for distributing diplomas.
More seriously, the basic situation is that there is a diversity of
needs, interests and abilities between people who are diversely fitted
for the many possible jobs needed by the economy to properly function,
so that not all pupils need to do the same thing and follow the same
curriculum for preparing to the jobs that best fit them. In such
conditions, treating them all the same induces a hidden discrimination
according to "how normal" every pupil is.
More specifically,
this norm that school requires people to conform to and after
which they are selected to succeed, is not an average
(middle way) between all types of people, but it is a specific end of
the spectrum: the system discriminates people according to how good
ISTJ (or secondarily ESTJ, INTJ) they can be. School makes
these types, first feel much better than others, then succeed best.
Do you wonder why social boundaries remain ? Well, if MBTI types are
given by nature (possibly genetically inherited), it is no mystery. The
same with intelligence, which school requires to stay just in the
middle, as too intelligent people cannot fit with the low level
curriculum in force. But even if they are not natural but
given by education, this is no better: making everybody ISTJ with a
limited intelligence and a life spoiled by wasting the
precious youth years doing stupid school work, is no good solution for
a sane economy which requires a diversity of skills for a diversity of
jobs.
For example, what's the point of forcing pupils to obey a time
schedule ? Why should it be better for the ones to spend the first hour
of the day learning this subject, and the next hour that other subject,
while it should be different for those who have been artificially
grouped with other pupils at the beginning of the year ? Why should it
be different from a day to the next ? Why is it so important to start
lessons every day at the same time, rather than to learn any other time
of the day, regardless of how tired they may be ? Why should a lesson
be stopped after exactly the same amount of time fixed in advance to
switch to the next lesson, regardless of whether the issue was
completed or not ? Why should every pupil hear exactly the same lesson
at the same rythm as the next pupil, regardless of his troubles or
easiness to understand it, and regardless of his curiosity to think
about a detail or desire to ask any question ? Why should it be the
same schedule from a week to the next ? How many jobs on Earth
after school teachers (and somehow doctors), need to be
structured in
this precise way ?
By the
way, what are the jobs for ISTJ ? Their list of prefered
jobs includes: Inspector, administrator, manager, accountant,
school
director, police officer and prison guard. ESTJ become
managers and organizers. Things that can indeed
be useful for society, but quite far from scientific research anyway.
After being the ones feeling at school like at home and succeeding,
they will work to ensure that everything remains the same.
Another problem with school, is the insane system of relationships
between pupils induced by this common pot: why nerds are
unpopular.
See also this
analysis about autism (but autists and many other serious
people such as geniuses, are facing the same problem):
"As for blaming autistic
people's difference for the cruelty we receive,
that removes the accountability of the people who are being cruel to
autistic people. It makes it sound as if autism is to blame for the
harm done to autistic people by others, which makes no more sense than
saying accent and skin color are to blame for racism. When a person is
being discriminated against for a quality, it's not that
quality
that needs changing. Being bullied on the schoolyard is not the fault
of the autistic person for "looking like an easy target", and being
socially ostracized is not the fault of the social aspects or "quirks"
of autism."
Let's go further: geniuses are generally accused of not properly
adapting to the world.
Sorry, what are they required to adapt to ?
They are required to adapt to a system that has is artificially
designed and built up by society for the service of the sort of pupils
that is stupid and reluctant to learn. The very purpose why the school
exist, is to force
them to learn, through mental brute force methods destroying all
possible freedom of thought, to get more knowledge than they would
naturally do if their freedom of thought was respected.
The problem is that there are other types of pupils, (unfortunately a
small minority, therefore with no chance to have their lives respected
in a democracy), such that, if you let them just free, they would
naturally learn much more than what school is teaching them. For them,
school is an obstacle to their thirst of knowledge, so that they
desperately look for the little free time it lets them, to start
satisfying it.
How can this trouble be blamed on these intelligent pupils, how can
they be blamed for their inadaptation to this system precisely designed,
artificially built up and adapted for pretending that the best adapted
pupils are this majority of dumb ones, who would naturally
not learn (to adapt to a world of knowledge) and therefore
need brute force obligations to reach an appearance of intellectual
skills ?
In fact, for the true mentally sane pupils, serious enough to
better learn in free time than at school, the best adaptation method
would be to drop them out of this fools asylum as soon as possible. And
hopefully look for some specialized institution better suited to them.
Then, if you wish the question of how adapted to the real world they
are, to start making sense, there would be, in principle, a rather more
fair measure : to test them directly against the world of job
market, rather than the world of bureaucratic standardized testing.
But, there is one problem: many jobs, in particular scientific jobs,
are provided by public administration and other quite bureaucratic
organizations. As long as recruitments there will be a matter of
diplomas that require to go through the mental torture of
academic nonsense to be obtained, there is little hope for change.
But the domination of the cult of diplomas as a substitute of
knowledge, is widespread. It is widespread among students, who usually
prefer to dedicate all their work for diplomas without being really
curious to anything or asking themself any deeper question on the sense
of their life; and ifever some rare student would dare to think
otherwise, they would be strongly criticized for this by their teachers
and coerced into changing their mind, as any intellectual interest away
from the race for diplomas would be a "waste of time" leading to a
failure of life (as it wastes the chance to get a scientific job).
But diplomas are not the only problem. Indeed, imagine an education
system ready to recruit self-taughts as teachers. But, why would they
even be interested to bother coming to work there ?
Why should the young anticonformist geniuses, even bother to search
for any means to have their skills recognized by this awful system ?
Recognized for what ? For getting the right to work for the repetition of this standardized, awful way of teaching ? This
would be is rather
pointless, and even unbearable for some, not the way to fulfillment.
Let us explain what forces lead school classes and curricula to remain
so boring, devoid of
intelligence and imagination, full of errors, light years away
from the
wonders of true science.
First, it is
hard to figure out any possibility of improvement in the teaching
system: if you
take the whole curriculum as it is, and inside it, take a precise
subject, and wonder how to best present this subject at this level for
students who followed the rest of the curriculum as it is, then
indeed, hardly any better way to do it can be found. Instead,
most
genuine improvements would require a serious research work for a global
redesign of the curriculum, which nobody dares to imagine, undertake or
experiment.
There
are other necessities that must be respected too; be understandable by
most of the students as they come, with the precise knowledge they
previously acquired ; follow the official curriculum so as to let
students "speak the same language" as any other students of the world;
to prepare them to exams, and make their diplomas equivalent to those
of any other institutions.
In such conditions, freedom and innovations in curricula are hopeless.
In such conditions, even INTPs who reached academic positions, cannot
easily bring their INTP souls in their teaching. Indeed, their margin
of freedom is both restricted by they administrators their job depends
on, and the backgrounds and expectations of the Pupils filling
the classes, who cannot accept to be required anything else than to
remain Pupils. Teachers thus fall under the obligation to
satisfy this expectation of Pupils to remain Pupils, focusing
all the energies on distributing as many diplomas as
possible, rather than sharing the light of any meaningful and
interesting science.
The intermediate process between this mass arrival of ISTJ Pupils in
undergraduate level, and the final PhD success
dominated by INTPs, can be compared to the arrival of a high
speed train without brakes, to a series of obstacles ending at a wall,
where each obstacle is designed and installed by an independent agent
made fully responsible of the damage made by his own obstacle.
It is thus a slow but hopeless failure of most Pupils, spread among the
years of study, where each teacher gets a part of the failure, but is
pressed by the different forces, to minimize this part of the failure
by devoiding their lessons of any possibly meaningful and interesting
content, therefore keeping their lessons so dull and boring, and
forwarding a larger remaining part of the necessary failure to
the teachers that will receive this population at the next
level.
Apart from these obstacles, there is also a lack of incentive for
scientists to rethink the teaching curriculum. First is a lack of
institutional incentive, as scientists'career is determined by
the specialized research work to the interest of other working
scientists, not by the production of courses for students. Second, a
lack of personal, intellectual interest.
Indeed, most mathematicians and physicists (I don't know about other
fields)
are usually not interested to think about the contents of undergraduate
teaching in their field, because they see these subjects as "too
simple" for them to think about, and quite boring in comparison with
their own high-level research. Indeed it is boring and tedious, because
it is so many hours just to present "simple" concepts and prove
"simple" results. They went through this boring stuff as students, they
had to accept it as such, and
it was so tedious and boring for them that they don't want to think
about it anymore. They just assume that this is the only way to do at
this level, because this is the way everybody is doing.
They prefer to think about new subjects, and would
not be interested to think again about what they already know, because
they can't consider that the way they learned and to which they
adapted, could have been far from the best possible way and
deserve to be questioned. Anyway they don't expect it to be a chance
for them to develop their
creativity.
We may consider that teaching institutions were necessary long ago,
when there were very few places of knowledge, and poor communications
methods, when there was no other practical way to access knowledge than
being present at the same place with the professor who has this
knowledge. Still, formal teaching is necessary for some parts of
education, such as for most primary school pupils who need more the
presence of adults for focusing on the lesson. The situation is more
variable at higher levels, depending on the diversity of students
characters as well as specific tasks (which only take a part of the
time).
The necessity of formal lessons was already relativized long ago by the
development of libraries, by which it would have been possible for many
students to learn by themselves at negligible cost for society,
by making useless all the expensive fuss of
organizing for them classrooms, schedules and teachers. This negligible
cost would already have even ended the justification to care about
organizing all these exams that preselect which students would best
benefit these classes, and therefore, the fuss of ensuring this
selection to be fair, as if accepting a student to come and try
learning something more than he is supposedly able to learn, was a form
of injust favor given to him. Where is the value of freedom linked to a
sense of self-responsibility here ?
What is this world of fools where some people should be forcefully
denied for their own sake the right to satisfy their curiosity in some
field of knowledge, just for fear they would later come back and make
troubles because they mistook this right to satisfying his
curiosity, with the "right" to later oblige some employer to hire them
for the skill in this field they thought they had ?
What is this world of fools where students are never supposed to be
able to find clues by their own means on the question whether they are
understanding something or not, so that they would all absolutely need
someone else to judge them and forcefully decide in their place whether
they do, and thus whether they should go on learning this or
that ? Where nobody even considered to publish any
self-assessment tool to help students take the responsibility of their
own life, rather than have as now some teachers take the full
decisions over it by some blind formal means ?
Since long, hardly any justification remained for forcing such a lack
of liberty to the whole students population, especially the top
fraction of them. But now the obsolescence of the system is even
clearer with the development of the Internet, which gives everyone
virtually all the best knowledge of the world at home for free. But
this new field of opportunities still has to be developed.
Scientists already started to revolt against publishers of scientific
journals (whose main remaining role in the Internet age is to
take as a direct profit most of the public funding of scientific
libraries), by developing alternative online peer-reviewed journals
with free online access for all. It may be time to make a
similar revolution with education, to provide free online higher
education to all. The problems, of course, are
- How to define any formal status and provide funding for the
work of sharing knowledge in a free and open environment
- the legal and administrative obstacles concerning diplomas,
this symbol giving an "official value" (on the job market) to
the acquisition of knowledge.
It remains a pitiful truth that very few students are really
interested in knowledge, nor willing to take any responsibility on
their own life. All they want is diplomas. So, academic institutions
are there to provide them diplomas disregarding whether the curriculum
makes any scientific sense or not.
The pitiful situation is that every student's social struggle
for exterior signs and administrative acknowledgement of one's
knowledge (intellectual skills), has become for everybody (first for
administration itself, then forcing this on students) a sort of
exclusive concern and values system, serving as a substitute
for the reality of knowledge itself. The administration manufactured,
then forced on all the ideology according to which the hardest a
student socially struggles for the recognition of his skills,
the more knowledge this struggle will create in him. In other words,
all possibility of a natural intelligence is banned and repressed,
while only an artifical form of intelligence, defined as manufactured
by an administrative dictatorship over all details of
students'minds and lives, is tolerated by society as an acceptable form
of intelligence.
In such conditions, the minority of gifted young people
(naturally inclined for knowledge), for whom learning should have been
easy and natural, are often confronted to a system that makes life
artificially harder to them: their natural skills are repressed and
mistaken for a form of hubris, and they are labelled as "ambitious".
Against them, a fighting field is opposed where they are challenged to
waste years of absurd efforts (absurd school classes and homework) as a
precondition to conquer the right to officially become what they
already were from the start. By pretending to provide for the
development of the skills, the school system is (at least for some
students) damaging and endangering it. It is both damaging for
the life (by being hard, time-consuming and stressing), and for the
intelligence (by being of a lower level than could be done in a free
time); and without a happy life, intellectual productivity may be
damaged. This may be seen as a caricatural form of logical positivism
where no
intelligence has the right exist unless it is administratively measured.
Geniuses are accused of being ambitious, and of being
personnally responsible (especially in the eyes of "spiritual people")
for choosing the hassle that is put over them. But it may not really be
their choice: it is not their "fault" if they are naturally clever and
thirsty of knowledge. Their real need, at least for some of them, is
not as much a special expensive treatment, but to be let free
to be what they are (which may have zero cost for society); but it may
be beyond the mental ability of the System, to understand this need and
tolerate them as such. The System "needs" to be the official creator of
everything that happens; and to be respected as such, it is ready
destroy anything that it did not create itself. So it will divert the
geniuses aspiration into a fabricated ambition, requiring a hard
artificial work, to conquer the right to be accepted in a higer class,
that will be a harder artificial work necessary for the ambition to
conquer the right to enter the next grade, and so on. But this endless
strive can turn out to be destrictive of the very creativity and
knowledge that it pretends to create.
Finally, while the System officially praises the genuises it
trains as an elite (and may have positive effects on some of them),
some of these geniuses not at ease with the System, happen to suffer
this treatment as a sort slavery of mental nonsense that destroys their
time, life and creativity. It is a known fact that intellectual
creativity erodes with age. Any harm or obstacle that limits
the time
and opportunity for young geniuses to find fulfilment and
develop knowledge, is a terrible waste.
This situation has been recalled here:
"the human brain has it's best
time in the early to mid twenties. Why do we waste these best
years?"
As we said, the most disgusting thing for (at least some)
clever people, is intellectual mediocrity.
This is both true for young genuises as for tenured scientists. These
are two artifically separated sides of a population that would
otherwise have naturally been one brotherhood, but whose chances to
connect to each other are severely limited by this wall of
adminstrative rule of intellectual mediocrity that is the school and
undergraduate curriculum, separating both sides, and which
repels each member of a side away from the other side.
This explains both the lack of popularity of scientific
studies that many scientists officially deplore, and the proliferation
of crackpots that worsens the separation between scientists and the
public. How can students be expected to run after scientific studies,
if the academic system welcomes them there with the spines of a hard,
tedious and boring work ? How can young geniuses not be tempted to
mistake the scientific community with the mediocre appearance of it
given by the academic system, which somehow really looks like crackpot
? This deprives them of the means to trust the intelligence of
scientists, and thus lead them to believe that their own thought, just
because it goes a little higher than the lessons they are attending,
would be higher than mainstream science too. This is what is leading
some of the young geniuses, who otherwise may have become good
scientists, to become paranoid cranks instead.
This is where the natural need of scientists to take refuge in the
ivory tower of their specialized scientific knowledge (while many
speudo-scientists are much more eager to share their crackpot ideas to
the public) to avoid the hassles of mental nonsense and political
conflicts that reign in the rest of the world, reaches its limits and
weaknesses. This lack of political conciousness among those who may
have been best able to understand society's troubles and invent
possible solutions, is both damaging to many of their own
possible intellectual peers, and to society as a whole. The opposition
of political forces is so naturally flawed between
- The I*TP, introverted independent thinkers interested in
things and ideas rather than in other people, who prefer to flee
political conflicts
- The E**J (extroverted organizers) who like to rule the
lives of other people and find it right to do so
Thus, while they are usually a free and reliable reference of knowledge
inside their precise field of research, geniuses and scientists
may remain a sort of sheep in the hands of businesses and
administration (and sometimes thoughtless intellectual
fashions among their peers, as professional recognition is dictated by
peer-review processes), as for the conception and orientation of the
work they are employed for.
Some research subjects in mathematics that initially developed with no
pupose of practical applications, finally produced unexpected important
ones (such as number theory that led to cryptography). However this is
not a general case; and, while most fields of mathematics (as listed by
the Mathematics Subject Classification) seem connected with
possibilities of applications, some active research subjects can't be
reasonably expected to be useful to mankind in the near future.
This is a general phenomenon that can take different forms. What was
the usefulness of sending men on the Moon ? Some technical usefulness
of the Apollo program exists (technological develoment, some
scientific research...), but this alone would not have justified its
huge cost (such new technologies could have been developed at a lower
cost). The main "usefulness" was to make people dream (and to bring a
bright reputation to the US worldwide). Hopes of clearer kinds of
usefulness such as making it profitable to
colonize the Moon in the short term, have been disappointed.
What is the usefulness of astronomy, except to warn us whether an
asteroid threatens to hit the Earth and kill many of us ? To bring a
knowledge of our place in the cosmos, to feed the imagination of an
educated public curious enough to look after it. The advantage of
astronomy is that it can be popularized in a way that preserves much of
its wonder (and it is cheaper than the Apollo program). In terms of
strict usefulness, just enough space research to send the useful
satellites to observe, localize and communicate everything on Earth
would have sufficed.
What is the usefulness of particle physics ? Progress in fundamental
physics in the first half the 20th century has been tremendously
useful. This usefulness was expectable because the physics underlying
ordinary matter (to specify exactly what can be done with matter for
practical purposes by affordable means) had not been fully
understood before. However, this time has passed, as the laws
of physics
for ordinary matter are rather fully understood; what is not understood
yet of fundamental physics and that is being researched in particle
accelerators, clearly won't be technologically useful in a foreseeable
future (as it can only bring information about the mess of particles
produced in particle collisions from overexpensive,
energetically wasteful particle accelerators; about the Big
Bang; and some pointless details on how cosmic rays can damage
spacecrafts and the health of astronauts). Now, further discoveries in
particle physics can only be useful to feed the dreams of... the small
minority of particle physics that can understand them (as it can't be
popularized in a similarly meaningful way as astronomy).
Some mathematical research subjects are just as useless, only good to
feed the dreams of a few specialists, with the only difference with
particle physics, that the news of any discovery there can't be
popularized at all.
The mismanagement of intellectual resources is particularly striking in
the case of string theory, to which a huge lot of work was dedicated
with hardly any effective result (testable predictions), which led some
to dismiss this theory as not
even wrong (though interesting from a purely abstract
mathematical viewpoint).
This does not exactly make it a pseudo-science like other
pseudo-sciences. Unfortunately the debate has been polluted with some
crackpot claims of opponents to string theory (especially Lee Smolin),
but I guess that a sort of agreement between most physicists would
remain on the following points: that string theory is a
somehow self-consistent mathematical theory, that it has a chance to
fit the real world but we cannot know. It is merely
speculative with no practical prediction as it lets a much too
wide range of possibilities that can't even be reasonably computed to
compare them with the standard model, so that it largely fails in practice (under
the limitations of our human deductive abilities...) to reach
the status it initially promised, that is of a
scientific theory for physics.
On the other hand, other possibly more useful
subjects are neglected, such as
- cleaning up and synthetizing existing knowledge,
to provide students an easier access to a broader and more
meaningful panorama of it, that will make them better scientists or
engineers;
- redesigning their own jobs (modes of funding and
employment), and the methods of sharing knowledge, which are currently
quite wasteful with this way of :
- having to repeat the same lessons at precise schedules
each year, while
- it is the same performance that thousands of professors
are supposed to repeat worldwide from a university to another, with
hardly any innovation effort actually done: this is far from any
optimized use of the creative scientific abilities of
professors, while a simple video broadcast of
- the best lesson of the world on each
subject (just
to be translated in each different language, and eventually to
adapt, against once for all to a list of different skills and profiles
of students), would do better and much cheaper.
- More generally, analysing and designing solutions to
social, economic and political problems: daily troubles, injustices and
destructions of the environment (in ways we shall explain in Part IV).
For example: why is there not more serious attempts at communication
and direct unions between networks or organizations supporting
gifted teenagers in desperate need of opportunities to fulful
their curiosity and develop their skills, and scientists that
feel desperate at the statistics of the decreasing popularity of
scientific studies in official institutions ? Or is there ? Of course
some efforts are made at popularizing science in the media, in
conferences, expositions, or science museums. But this is usually not
done in a serious manner: this is not the full depth of science that is
usually shared in these ways, but rather some oversimplified accounts
or anecdotical aspects of science. The separation between
scientists and those who wish to learn
science, may seem to be reduced through such popularization
works, but no
real decent bridge seems to be currently in place.
Core theories that could be really more interesting, such as the main
foundations of mathematics (set theory, model theory), linear
or abstract algebra, tensors, electromagnetism,
non-euclidean geometries, topology, classical mechanics, gravitation,
special and general relativity, quantum physics, are hardly ever fully
shared in such enviromnments. (I am personally interested to contribute
in communicating these subjects to gifted people who wish to learn them
outside formal academic contexts, so please contact me if you
know about any math&physics education network, either
local or online, for skilled free students at undergraduate level).
List of false or low quality sciences
Let us now review a number of disciplines (communities of people with
some sort of peer recognition) claiming to study a field of knowledge
(focusing on matters of truth - unlike arts which are explicitly more a
matter of taste than of truth), and assess their scientific
value according to the previously explained criteria.
Philosophy
It had its time of glory in the past. In ancient Greece, its status
could sustain a comparison with the scientific disciplines it
coexisted with. Then it faced many centuries of near-absence during the
dark ages of Christian domination. Then it resurrected together with
science and had its glory period in the time of Enlightenment,
where it signed its good new insights of truth in comparison with the
previous status quo of that time, by some valuable practical
accomplishments (usefulness for mankind to be compared with
the technical usefulness of science):
- An initial impulse to the development of science
- Democracy, constitions, separation of powers
- Declaration of human rights, the right of expression
(outside religious dogmas)
- The criticism of religion, a limitation of the
Church's domination, the separation of church and state
- A development of education and university
- More lately: the end of slavery, a criticism of the
political & religious colonialism and of the arrogance
towards other civilizations
However, the situation is now very different, as science made a
tremendous lot of progress since that time, leaving philosophy far
behind. Philosophy didn't make any comparable progress of
methods or knowledge, and thus became a sterile discipline.
Some attempts of reform to remodel philosophy after science
have
been made, such as the development of analytic philosophy by
Bertrand Russel who
also contributed to the new foundations of mathematics (set theory). It
may be acknowledged that analytic philosophy is a bit less irrational
than continental philosophy.
But, apart from a few interesting clues such as his celestial teapot
and other remarks on religion, much of the length of
Russel's philosophy (such as his theory of the mind) remained of poor
value (long developments on pointless details that cannot contribute to
the progress of knowledge in any effective way).
For example, after the good fruits of democracy produced by the
Enlightenment philosophy, what further political revolution did
philosophy bring to mankind ? Well, it brought the Marxist revolution.
Despite its claims, Marxism is not rational. Unlike many true
scientists, philosophers could not naturally understand that, and thus
welcomed Marxism in their field. Only Karl Popper could notice its
discrepancy with science by observing its difference with the
scientific way of testing a theory against experience (falsifiability).
Despite this, the community of so-called "intellectuals" (of
humanities, not scientists) kept holding Marxism as a
rational theory and valid philosophy. Of course if you measure
a philosophy by its convincing power to the masses, then, Marxism is
among the best, just in the same way religions previously were, being
itself a modern religion exploiting the newly fashionable claim of
scientificity. But the success of a convincing power to the
people (even to an unscientific class of self-proclaimed
"intellectuals") hardly has anything to do with truth and
rationality.
Now you don't need anymore to study and examine it in much details to
find evidence for its lack of rationality: just look at its fruits (the
Soviet Union). The combination of its convincing power with its utter
falsity, just means it is at the antipode of reason: it is powerfully misleading.
We shall discuss this more closely in Part IV.
For example, philosophy fails to the criteria of natural
convergence to a consensus on given questions, with many philosophers
presenting opposite views that remain unresolved for a very long time.
Paul
Graham's criticism of philosophy
"When things are hard to
understand, people who suspect
they're nonsense generally keep quiet. There's no way to prove a
text is meaningless. The closest you can get is to show that the
official judges of some class of texts can't distinguish them from
placebos.
And so instead of
denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected
it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is
fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy's claims. It's
supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people
would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.
Because philosophy's
flaws turned away the sort of people who might have corrected them,
they tended to be self-perpetuating. "
(and many other arguments worth reading too)
Richard Feynman made harsch criticisms of philosophy:
"After some discussion as to what
"essential object" meant, the
professor leading the seminar said (...)
"Mr. Feynman, would you
say an electron is an 'essential
object'?"(...). So I began by asking, "Is a brick an essential
object?"
Then the answers came
out. One man stood up and said, "A
brick as an individual, specific brick. That is what Whitehead means by
an essential object."
Another man said, "No,
it isn't the individual brick that is an
essential object; it's the general character that all bricks have in
common - their 'brickiness' - that is the essential object."
Another guy got up and
said, "No, it's not in the bricks themselves.
'Essential object' means the idea in the mind that you get when you
think of bricks."
Another guy got up, and
another, and I tell you I have never heard such
ingenious different ways of looking at a brick before. And, just like
it should in all stories about philosophers, it ended up in complete
chaos."
"philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as
ornithology is to birds"
People say to
me, “Are you
looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No, I’m
not… If it turns out
there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it
—
that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it’s
like an onion
with millions of layers… then that’s the way it
is. But either way
there’s Nature and she’s going to come out the way
She is. So therefore
when we go to investigate we shouldn’t predecide what it is
we’re
looking for only to find out more about it. Now you ask: “Why
do you
try to find out more about it?” If you began your
investigation to get
an answer to some deep philosophical question, you may be wrong. It may
be that you can’t get an answer to that particular question
just by
finding out more about the character of Nature. But that’s
not my
interest in science; my interest in science is to simply find out about
the world and the more I find out the better it is, I like to find
out…
(The Pleasure of Finding Things Out p. 23)
From
this Feynman's text
on science:
"...what science is, is not what
the philosophers have said it is, and certainly not what the teacher
editions say it is. What it is, is a problem which I set for myself
after I said I would give this talk.
After some time, I was
reminded of a little poem:
A centipede was happy
quite, until a toad in fun
Said, "Pray, which leg
comes after which?"
This raised his doubts
to such a pitch
He fell distracted in
the ditch
Not knowing how to run.
All my life, I have been
doing science and known what it was, but what I have come to tell
you--which foot comes after which--I am unable to do, and furthermore,
I am worried by the analogy in the
poem that when I go home
I will no longer be able to do any research."
(forgetting that, in fact, ornithology has been useful to
birds in some ways...)
From this
Feynman's interview:
"Philosophers,
incidentally, say a great deal about what is absolutely necessary for
science, and it is always, so far as one can see, rather naive and
probably wrong. . .
My son is taking a
course in philosophy, and
last night we were looking at something by Spinoza--and there was the
most childish reasoning! There were all these Attributes and
Substances, all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to
laugh. Now, how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher,
and we're laughing at him. It's because there was no excuse for it! In
that same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the
circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by
which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's
propositions and take the contrary propositions and look at the
world--and you can't tell which is right. Sure, people were awed
because he had the courage to take on these great questions, but it
doesn't do any good to have the courage if you can't get anywhere with
the question.
It isn't the philosophy that gets me, it's the
pomposity. If they'd just laugh at themselves! If they'd just say, "I
think it's like this, but Von Leipzig thought it was like that, and he
had a good shot at it too." If they'd explain that this is their best
guess.... But so few of them do; instead, they seize on the possibility
that there may not be any ultimate fundamental particle and say that
you should stop work and ponder with great profundity. "You haven't
thought deeply enough; first let me define the world for you." Well,
I'm going to investigate it without defining it! "
Steven
Weinberg wrote (Chapter "Against Philosophy" of his book
"Dreams of a final theory"):
"The insights of
philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists,
but generally in a negative fashion—by protecting them from
the
preconceptions of other philosophers.(...) without some
guidance from our preconceptions one could do nothing at all. It is
just that philosophical principles have not generally provided us with
the right preconceptions.
Physicists
do of course carry around with them a working philosophy.
For most of us, it is a rough-and-ready realism, a belief in the
objective reality of the ingredients of our scientific theories. But
this has been learned through the experience of scientific research and
rarely from the teachings of philosophers.
This
is not to deny all value to philosophy(...). But we should not expect
[the philosophy of science]
to provide today's scientists with any useful guidance about how to go
about their work or about what they are likely to find.
After a few years' infatuation with philosophy as an undergraduate I
became disenchanted. The insights of the philosophers I studied seemed
murky and inconsequential compared with the dazzling successes of
physics and mathematics. From time to time since then I have tried to
read current work on the philosophy of science. Some of it I found to
be written in a jargon so impenetrable that I can only think that it
aimed at impressing those who confound obscurity with profundity. (...)
But only rarely did it seem to me to
have anything to do with the work of science as I knew it. (...)
I am not alone in this; I know of no one who has participated actively
in the advance of physics in the postwar period whose research has been
significantly helped by the work of philosophers. I raised in the
previous chapter the problem of what Wigner calls the "unreasonable
effectiveness" of mathematics; here I want to take up another equally
puzzling phenomenon, the unreasonable ineffectiveness of philosophy.
Even where philosophical doctrines have in the past been useful to
scientists, they have generally lingered on too long, becoming of more
harm than ever they were of use.(...)
Mechanism had also been propagated beyond the boundaries of science and
survived there to give later trouble to scientists. In the nineteenth
century the heroic tradition of mechanism was incorporated, unhappily,
into the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels and their followers
(...) and for a while dialectical materialism stood in the way of the
acceptance of general relativity in the Soviet Union
(...) We are not likely to know the right
questions until we are close to knowing the answers.(...)
The quark theory was only one step in a continuing process of
reformulation of physical theory in terms that are more and more
fundamental and at the same time farther and farther from everyday
experience.
homeschooling
physicist
"But…
many introductory books on philosophy take the tack that
“philosophy is
not so much a set of answers as a way of asking questions: the
important thing about philosophy is not specific answers, but rather
the philosophical way of thinking”
Yeah – that is
because the answers that philosophers have come up with over the
centuries have been almost uniformly bad!
(...)
Ethics is too important
to be left to the philosophers.
(...)
children
should also be taught not to think
“philosophically,” in the manner of
current and recent academic and professional philosophers. On the
contrary, they should be explicitly told that, for at least the last
two centuries, the philosophical enterprise as carried out by
professional philosophers has been an obvious failure and that the vast
increase in our knowledge of reality during the last several centuries
has been due not to philosophy but to natural science."
In the same site:
Is
philosophy futile -
more
texts on philosophy
Physicists dissing philosophy:
"
Science,
philosophy, and religion all make claims to have a broad, integrated
view of reality. But, the views of reality they arrive at differ
dramatically.
It
would be quite surprising if three such radically different approaches
to confronting reality were to give compatible pictures of reality.
Of course, they do not.
...in
some ways, both the creationists and the postmodernists deserve credit
for seeing something that more sensible, moderate folks try to evade:
in the long-term, science, philosophy, and religion cannot co-exist."
One
philosopher acknowledges and sums up the importance and relevance of
top scientists'harsch criticism of philosophy, so as to take
lessons how to consequently reform the academic
practice of philosophy.But other philosophers prefer to reject such
criticism and keep justifying their flaws anyway.
More debates if you wish :
Weinberg's
"Against Philosophy"
Why
philosophize
Does
philosophy make you a better scientist
Another
discussion
Very
long discussion
which then diverts from the subject
Other philosophers such as Russell try
to justify philsophy's flaws though empty arguments:
A
empty defense that deludes itself into claiming to be meaningful
How pitiful it is to observe how philosophers
are not even able to give a decent answer to a simple question.
They try to justify their unability of
finding decent
answers by claims such as : the value of philosophy would be
to focus on asking
the right questions (or elimnating the wrong questions) and eliminating
some wrong answers (a sort of intellectual garbage collecting). But
these are just blind unjustified belief, as the real
effect
of their work is just the opposite: to multiply and preciously
accumulate wrong questions
and wrong answers (intellectual garbage collectioning).
This reminds me the joke
"How many Microsoft
engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. They just define
darkness as an industry standard." and other "It's not a bug, it's a feature".
Another example:
Talk:Foundations_of_mathematics
"Anyone,
a mathematician especially, who appreciates the “unreasonable
effectiveness of mathematics” and the “unreasonable
ineffectiveness of
philosophy" to scientific endeavors must recognize the dangers of
letting "philosophy of math" ride roughshod over "foundations of math"
and as a last line of defense, of letting "philosophy and foundations
of math" ride roughshod over proper pure and applied maths.
Just
look at the talk page for "philosophy of math"! What a mess. Note that
some of these people actually believe the destiny of science can be
mastered thru verbose semantics, concepts, schema, arguments, etc. The
last time I looked, the language of science was still written in
mathematics. Fortunately, bullshit had not yet taken over in the math
journals.
Specialists in
foundations and/or philosophy of math
often over-estimate the importance of their work to those in other
specialties."
Consider for example how philosophers of maths play the role
of garbage
collectioners of the failed/crackpot mathematical inspirations such
as "Intuitionism"
(= possibly interesting hints not properly clarified) or meaningless
categories (platonism vs. formalism finally unified by the completeness
theorem) that they raise as highly philosophical just because it failed
to be mathematically meaningful and thus does not interest any
reasonable mathematician.
In
reply to the criticism that philosophy is not being useful (though the
Enlightenment philosophy was), philosophers often react by glorifying
themselves of their uselessness, by the straw man argument that, well,
optimized productivity is not the right ultimate value, and thus should
not
be the exclusive purpose of public school curricula.
But, while I
agree that numerical measure of the short-term financial profit should
not be the final and exclusive criteria of value for an intellectual
discipline, the trouble is that philosophers seem to have
no other evidently meaningful
alternative criteria of value either, except the very negation of the
usefulness criteria. Namely, they seem to be raising wastefulness
(uselessness) as their
ultimate value, as if the very fact something brings no fruit, could
serve as an evidence that it must
surely be very spiritual. This reminds me the Shadoks'insights
:
"
I
pump, therefore I am
It is better to pump even if
nothing happens, than risk that something is going worse by
not pumping...
their rocket was
not highly developed, but they had
calculated that it still had 1 chance over 1 million to work. And they
hurried to fail the 999 999 first tests to ensure that the
millionth works."
With wastefulness as their ultimate
value, their work turns out to be universally wasteful, for
whatever
purpose including the development of the mind and critical thinking
itself. The belief they must be good for the spirit or
whatever
undefinable ideal just based on the observation of their worthlessness
for
financial profit, is but a superstition among others. They may of
course reject this criciticism as straw man too, as this description is
not exactly their claim, But it does not matter what they
exactly
claim: this is what they are doing in practice anyway.
How to explain the failure of philosophy ? Well, apart from the
crankiness of its members, an important cause is its
traditional
obsession for essentialism (focusing on the ultimate nature of
everything - well, by the way, this is precisely a usual characteristic
for cranks), to be contrasted with science's non-essentialism that we
described. Science has its own care for essences when needed; it should
just not be an obsession. Philosophy just failed to follow this model.
We might sum up the difference between science and philosophy in this
way:
Science is the practice
of rationality, while philosophy has theories
of rationality. And these theories are usually disconnected from this
practice, because, in fact, there is no better way to understand
rationality, that by practicing it.
But... is this really awful if philosophy is dominated by cranks ?
Well, not necessarily. After all, in order for cranks to stop bothering
scientists, they need to go somewhere else and find another
public. So,
philosophy can be considered useful for its social role of a huge
intellectual bin where cranks can gather, while science on its own side
can stay clean.
OK, philosophy is so diverse that it is also possible to find there a
minority of decent approaches: example.
Remarks on logical positivism and falsificationism
As philosophers can easily notice, there is a flaw in the way Weinberg
takes the example of logical positivism and its unfortunate
consequences for criticizing philosophy. Indeed, logical positivism was
rather made by scientists themselves, precisely as a movement against
philosophy, and was popular among scientists but not among
philosophers, who quickly rejected it. Thus, philosophers cannot be
responsible for these troubles.
Let's explain this issue in more details.
Once understood well, the statement of the principles of science we
made at the start of this Part II, including the "logical positivism"
principle, is not affected by Weinberg's criticism of logical
positivism: the troubles only
come from a caricatural form of logical
positivism not balanced by the
next principle (conceptual
reconstruction of reality).
Let us explain the pseudo-difference between verificationism (as stated
by logical positivists) and Popper's falsificationism, that was later
widely taken as a reference of scientificity.
Once analyzed well, these are more or less two ways of
popularizing the same logical concept. Well, the details of the
formulation of logical positivism can have been imperfect and deserve a
few corrections. But the main difference is not about what
they
really mean, which is the same, but a difference of "how they
feel", how they might be misinterpreted by irrational people.
To the eyes of a large public as well as many philosophers, Marxism and
Psychoanalysis made an impression of being "verified", thus scientific.
But this impression of "verification" was a mere illusion, obtained by
devoiding of meaning the concept of "verification". Then, Karl
Popper discovered that another formulation, "falsificationism", was
better suited and efficient to explain how marxism and Psychoanalysis
are false sciences, by their fundamentally different practice of
verification. This was okay, but then he went to wrong conclusions
by mistaking this difference of usefulness (for
irrational
people to easily notice the lack of scientificity of some ideologies)
for a deep conceptual difference. The result is that he replaced the
initial misinterpretation of the nature of science by another
misinterpretation, that does not carry the same risks but can carry
some too.
As Weinberg said, the main value of philosophy is to warn us
against the errors of other philosophers. So, Popper was good
for warning against Psychoanalysis and Marxism as
pseudo-sciences, while David Stove was
good for warning against some errors made by Popper
and other philosophers (Feyerabend, Kuhn...).
About clarifying scientific concepts
An example of a "philosophical subject" is about noticing
that
modern theories such as relativity and quantum physics, failed to go
through a work of cleaning up their fundamental
concepts and
vocabulary to a comparable extent as classical physics had succeeded
before. So they are still often presented inside the
language, intuition and even mathematical parameters of classical
physics. This conflict between the modern intended theories
and
the classical intuitions and language still used to expressed
them, brings these theories an unfortunate reputation of being
counter-intuitive.
That's right, but: what's the use of making a philosophy about it ?
This is not a problem with philosophy. This is just a task for science
professors to clean up existing knowledge. And this is an
administrative problem to pay attention to this question, by providing
incentives to:
- publish better courses cleaning up each possible subject, once for
all in the world (or several times of course, but each
time time
caring to do better again than previous versions ever done);
- For each subject where such a work was already done by
someone
in the world, take the new view and reform teaching after it.
Unfortunately, while such works exist (as I'm caring myself to do
some), the education system is so conservative that the necessary
changes are not done (because professors are usually so busy repeating
ever and ever again the same old teachings in painful old ways, and are
so "the best in their fields" that they have no time to seriously care
whether a better way might already have been produced by somebody else).
But, in a future time when the cleaning up will have been done, what
will remain of the philosophy whose thesis was to claim that the
cleaning up is not done yet ?
Postmodernism and "science studies"
A community of ideological flaws can be seen between Marxim,
which
dismisses any theory against it (namely, economic liberalism) as a mere
matter of social forces rather than of truth (so as to not bother
taking it seriously), and the postmodernist "science studies".
Everyone should know about the Sokal affair, an episode of the Science Wars:
"The physicist Alan Sokal
submitted the article “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards
a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” proposing
that quantum gravity is a linguistic and social
construct
and that quantum
physics
supports postmodernist criticisms of scientific
objectivity. Social
Text published
the article in
the Spring/Summer “Science Wars” issue in May 1996.
Later, in the May 1996 issue of Lingua Franca, in
the article “A Physicist Experiments With Cultural
Studies”, Prof. Sokal exposed his parody-article,
“Transgressing the Boundaries” as an experiment
testing the intellectual rigor
of an academic journal
that would “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense
if (a) it
sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological
preconceptions”
However Sokal's hoax should not be overestimated,
as it was only directed to a precise movement (postmodernism) that
should not be confused with the whole of philosophy: in this interview, Alan
Sokal said:
"I should make clear that I
don’t think my parody article settles
anything. It doesn’t by itself prove much
– that one
journal was sloppy. So it wasn’t the parody itself that
proved it, it
was the things that I and other people wrote afterward which I believe
showed the sloppiness of the philosophy that a lot of postmodernist
literary theory types were writing. But again, I wasn’t the
first
person to make those criticisms. It was only after the fact that I went
back into the literature and found philosophers had made many of these
criticisms long before me. All I did in a certain sense was to find a
better public relations method than they did."
But he also expresses his skepticism on the possibility for philosophy
of science to fulfill its goal of understanding the scientific method:
"So I
guess you’re right that I’m sceptical that there
can ever
be a
complete over-arching theory simply because science is about
rationality; rationality is always adaptation to unforeseen
circumstances – how can you possibly codify that? But that
doesn’t mean philosophy of science is useless, because all of
these attempts that have failed as final codifications of scientific
method nevertheless contributed something. "
Anti-Science
Phenomenon
"Practitioners
of the social sciences have not learned, in their own disciplines, much
that is operationally indisputable, readily reproducible, and
internationally agreed to; so they cannot easily conceive such a thing
to be possible in any
field. Knowing in their own discipline that
ideology governs
"knowledge" as well as theory, they presume that must
be so in all fields."
Also, the end of the above
quoted Weinberg's chapter "against philosophy" tells about the
relations between science and "science studies" by
sociologists.
Some interesting observations are without problem:
"For instance, Sharon Traweek has
spent years with elementary particle
experimentalists at both the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the
KEK Laboratory in Japan and has described what she had seen from the
perspective of an anthropologist. This kind of big science is a natural
topic for anthropologists and sociologists, because scientists belong
to an anarchic tradition that prizes individual initiative, and yet
they find in today's experiments that they have to work together in
teams of hundreds. As a theorist I have not worked in such a team, but
many of her observations seem to me to have the ring of truth, as for
instance: The physicists see themselves as an elite whose membership is
determined solely by scientific merit. The assumption is that everyone
has a fair start. This is underscored by the rigorously informal dress
code, the similarity of their offices, and the "first naming" practices
in the community. Competitive individualism is considered both just and
effective: the hierarchy is seen as a meritocracy which produces fine
physics. American physicists, however, emphasize that science is not
democratic: decisions about scientific purposes should not be made by
majority rule within the community, nor should there be equal access to
a lab's resources. On both these issues, most Japanese physicists
assume the opposite."
But other aspects present a strong opposition:
"It is simply a logical fallacy
to go from the observation that
science is a social process to the conclusion that the final product,
our scientific theories, is what it is because of the social and
historical forces acting in this process. A party of mountain climbers
may argue over the best path to the peak, and these arguments may be
conditioned by the history and social structure of the expedition, but
in the end either they find a good path to the peak or they do not, and
when they get there they know it. (No one would give a book about
mountain climbing the title Constructing Everest.) I cannot prove that
science is like this, but everything in my experience as a scientist
convinces me that it is. The "negotiations" over changes in scientific
theory go on and on, with scientists changing their minds again and
again in response to calculations and experiments, until finally one
view or another bears an unmistakable mark of objective success. It
certainly feels to me that we are discovering something real in
physics, something that is what it is without any regard to the social
or historical conditions that allowed us to discover it.
Where
then does this radical attack on the objectivity of scientific
knowledge come from? One source I think is the old bugbear of
positivism, this time applied to the study of science itself. If one
refuses to talk about anything that is not directly observed, then
quantum field theories or principles of symmetry or more generally laws
of nature cannot be taken seriously. What philosophers and sociologists
and anthropologists can study is the actual behavior of real
scientists, and this behavior never follows any simple description in
terms of rules of inference. But scientists have the direct experience
of scientific theories as desired yet elusive goals, and they become
convinced of the reality of these theories.
There may be another motivation
for the attack on the realism and
objectivity of science, one that is less high-minded. Imagine if you
will an anthropologist who studies the cargo cult on a Pacific island.
The islanders believe that they can bring back the cargo aircraft that
made them prosperous during World War II by building wooden structures
that imitate radar and radio antennas. It is only human nature that
this anthropologist and other sociologists and anthropologists in
similar circumstances would feel a frisson of superiority, because they
know as their subjects do not that there is no objective reality to
these beliefs—no cargo-laden C-47 will ever be attracted by
the wooden
radars. Would it be surprising if, when anthropologists and
sociologists turned their attention to studying the work of scientists,
they tried to recapture that delicious sense of superiority by denying
the objective reality of the scientists' discoveries?
Relativism is only one aspect of a wider, radical, attack on science
itself. (...) These radical critics of science seem to be having little
or no
effect on the scientists themselves. I do not know of any working
scientist who takes them seriously."
A
delicious self-criticism article by Bruno Latour (worth full
reading), questioning the field of social studies he created himself,
considering how it turned out to lead to conspirationism, denialism,
and endangering our planet by the way it is used by political lobbys
for denying scientific evidence on global warming:
"...I myself have spent
sometimes in the past trying to show the "lack of scientific certainty"
inherent in the construction of facts. I too made it a "primary issue."
But I did not exactly aim at fooling the public by obscuring the
certainty of a closed argument–or did I? After all, I have
been accused of just that sin. Still, I'd like to believe that, on the
contrary, I intended to emancipate the public from a prematurely
naturalized objectified fact. Was I foolishly mistaken? Have things
changed so fast?
In which case the danger
would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological
arguments posturing as matters of fact–as we have learned to
combat so efficiently in the past–but from an excessive
distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases!
While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind
the appearance of objective statements, do we have now to reveal the
real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of
prejudices?
..."
Economics
Economical and politicial sciences emerged out of philosophy,
and made some way towards scientificity by taking
some
inspiration from mathematics and other applied sciences. They are not
as flawed than philosophy, but still keep some of its flaws. For
example, they keep fuzzy logic and long-standing diversities of views
on fixed subjects. This is partly necessary because its object depends
on fuzzy human elements and irreducible complexities, so that the
reductionist approaches of mathematics and physics do not apply.
However this is not a sufficient justification, since another
scientific field (biology and the theory of evolution) could do a
better job in spite of comparable difficulties.
Some people aware of the presence of large flaws in economical
sciences, analyze them as due to giving too much importance
to mathematics (and mathematical modeling). However,
people
coming from exact sciences (pure or applied mathematics, phyics) and
having a look at the mathematical modelling in use by economics, would
observe that the problem with economics is not about doing too much
mathematics, but about misunderstanding mathematics.
Indeed, mathematics does not just consist in writing and
solving
equations. Instead, true mathematics is a way of thinking. It is the
skill of thinking logically, in a consistent and elaborate way.
Mathematical concepts, and other concepts developed by a mathematical
way of thinking, can be expressed as well in formulas or in ordinary
language, depending on subjects or convenience; while illlogical
nonsense can be written in an appearance of formulas just the same.
The art of finding out good approximations and relevant modelizations,
is omnipresent in physics and other sciences; and the art of
modelization itself, in the sense of developing concepts, diversifying
and selecting relevant viewpoints on a given subject, is
present
in pure mathematics too.
Another scientific tool normally used in hard sciences which did not
enter the culture of economists, is computer simulations.
Example of an article presenting the current flaws of economics:
The
Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics
(More references would be welcome; already the wikipedia article on Economics
presents some criticism too).
Other important examples of the domination of nonsense in academic
economics, have been the heavy presence of Marxism as well as
Keynesianism, despite their lack of logical coherence. The disasters
from Marxism are well-known. But Keynesianism also has a share
of
responsibility in nonsense politics too, by the misunderstanding it
induced about the long "crisis" from 1973 to now (reduced growth and
worsening unemployment that), leading to an improper repetition of the
fiscal and monetary measures (fiscal packages) that worked for the
crisis of the 1930's (which was due do deflation then but no
more
now), now harming growth and leading to inevitable upcoming disasters
(bankruptcies) through widening debts (reducing the volumes of
productive capital).
How desperating it was, for someone who thinks logically, to hear, for
example in France during the 1980's, the perpetual repetition of the
same nonsense, claiming (on TV as well as by high
school
economics teachers, as if it was undeniably the only rational
view) that public and domestic overspending woud be the best solution
to every problem and for social justice, while spending restrictions
would be the worst evil that only big bad wolves (capitalists) might
support for obscure reasons.
As with philosophy, the obligations to swallow tons of nonsense
theories for anyone who would consider officially studying economics,
also contributed to turn away from the subject most skilled thinkers
that could have corrected it. Sure, the rationality level there is
better than in philosophy, but most of the top thinkers rather go to
hard sciences rather than economics.
Note also how usually unquestioned are the basic
features of
how democracy, national states, currencies, administrations and
policies should be constituted.
The omnipresence of technologies and other remarkable efficiencies of
science to change many things in our daily life (in contrast with the
vanity of religion) as well as the presence of an economical science
full of mathematical tools, has given many people the false impression
that science somehow dominates the world, despite its much smaller
number of effective
members (scientists) than religions.
In reality, science has never been in power. It cannot do what
nobody wants it to do. Scientists never received the mandate
to
rethink and
reorganize our political and economic systems so as to truly serve the
general interest. Our core political structrures, as well as the root
of decision (some political class vaguely
representing a
rather irrational population through rudimentary voting processes)
hardly has anything to do with science.
People always decided that scientists
should exclusively work at the service of this "liberal" or
"democratic" system, to provide technologies to do what consumers
individually like, and what our
institutions want them to do. These institutions are rather a
conventional construction that emerged long ago and
were preserved
by inertia or slowly evolved for easy corrections and adaptation for
the pupose of
growing and keeping their power in a world where most people are
stupid. The
only choice scientists had, was between serving these institutions or
being jobless and excluded from society.
Then, how can anyone hold
science responsible for the flawed decisions (individually useful but
collectively irresponsible or under control by specific interest
groups) made by a system of
businesses and institions that decides everything and hires scientists,
but that
scientists cannot control in return (and most of them don't even
care as they are just satisfied to build their ivory tower in
a
small corner there) ?
We whall review in Part IV some of the main economic concepts and
features (either already known or not yet) that need to be
understood, and new scientific tools to develop, for mankind to better
solve its current (old or new) and upcoming problems.
Medicine and Psychiatry
Medicine benefited greatly from the development of biological sciences,
but suffers the influence of the pharmaceutical industry's financial
interests, that distorts the research results towards the
highest
possible expenses it can take profit from; and there are so many
substances and questions requiring lots of specific observations, that
it is sometimes hard to check the truth on every question.
While
these aberrations are hardly a secret in general, this lobby's strong
influence on political decisions makes it rather hopeless to restore
fairness in the field inside the present system.
Also the relation with alternative medicine is not clear. Of course, a
lot of caution is necessary in general as many charlatans prosper, but
it is a pity to miss the tools to help select the possibly useful
practices and practitioners. The lack of research in some
methods
may be due to the fact they do not sell any chemicals, and therefore
are not in the industry's interests.
For example, the effects of acupuncture are
still controversial.
The situation is particularly disastrous in the field of psychiatry.
While some serious research in psychiatry can exist, and some patients
may indeed find help (healing some cases of depression or other
troubles) in psychiatric treatments, much of the psychiatric practice
fails to be scientific, simply because psychiatry is not falsifiable,
with its easy game of interpreting any patient's disagreements with its
diagnosis, as pathological (or sometimes, as a mere scientologist
propaganda). This loophole (a belief in people's foolishness that opens
the door to unfalsifiable fanciful ideas) is more or less the same with
psychiatry as with psychoanalysis.
Another example of an antiscientific character of psychiatrists, is
that how fast, in a few minutes, they make definitive judgements about
whether their patient's views are justified or not. In the rest of
science, it may take hours, years or decades of work by many scientists
to debate a difficult question. Even ordinarity people are often lucid
enough to take some time to discuss something before judging, or
acknowledging that they don't know. Psychiatrists, on the other hand,
and just like religious fundamentalists, won't make any effort to try
to understand anything in other people's lives beyond how it sounds to
them in a few minutes, but will never admit the possibility that it may
not suffice for them to judge everything about it without any
discussion.
As anti-psychiatrist
movements
have shown, psychiatric institutional systems are naturally oriented
(as a necessary means for their own preservation and promotion) to see
fools everywhere and to heal none. Rather, they destroy through poison,
many lives that would otherwise not have been so bad.
Some people would dismiss criticism by putting forward some cases of
people who really benefited from psychiatric treatment. Another
argument pushed on someone who had a bad experience suffering from a
absurd treatment from mad psychiatrists who make nonsense diagnosis
(mistaking, for example, any orignal thoughts away from
political correctness, as madness, and ordering devastating
pills
for someone who was in fact sane, or anyway whose problem had nothing
to do with what is assumed), is to justify this madness by :
- claiming that anyway the patient is free and responsible
for have
freely accepted the devastating treatment ordered by the psychiatrist
(no matter if any absurd formal obligations of obedience could
be
set up by a brainless administration; and that the
psychiatrist lied to the patient, refusing to
confront his
diagnosis to the patient's agreement, assuming, disregarding any other
assessment of the patient's intelligence or rationality than the
psychiatrist's intimate conviction, that the patient would be too mad
to understand his problem, supposedly making it necessary to trick him
to make him accept the needed treatment; thus decidedly letting the
patient no chance of an informed consent).
- that if a psychiatrist takes wrong decisions, the patient
just
need to search for another one, because, as is assumed, there must
exist good ones - disregarding that this is but a way to condemn the
patient to have his health damaged again and again by further mad
psychiatrists, because there is no available direct means to know which
one would be sane.
In fact, this "logic" as well as many other details of how many
psychiatrists think and behave, is but an expression of total madness
and absence of common sense.
Indeed, it would be a matter of common sense to realize that the claims
of existence of people who benefited psychiatry, or existence of
psychiatrist that made good orderings, should never been acceptable as
a sufficient reason to "advise" depressed people to visit one and to
follow treatments, because:
- It is too easy to claim to someone weak because of
depression,
that he should follow any advice or treatment by official "experts".
The problem is: who will be responsible if it turns out to be just
nonsense with devastating effects ? Will the patient be held fully
responsible for the harm done to his mental health ? According to the
laws currently in force, nobody but the patient is responsible for
whatever damage made to his mental health (which can be compared to a
form of rape), no matter how mad the psychiatrist's behavior (wrong
diagnosis...) turned out to be, while the psychiatrist will keep his
job and go on harming the lives of hundreds of other people without
ever receiving any feedback from the disaster he is creating. This is
the infalsifiability, total disconnection from the truth.
- The (abstract and general) claim of existence of wise,
reliable psychiatrist, no matter how true, remains devoid of meaning
as long as no nominative list is ever given of who they are. Only a
work of setting up such a list would give this claim a sense. Because
anyone who would claim that such exist, so as to lead people in need to
go and take treatment, must be held fully responsible in case of any
harm that would result from it. To give people a chance to not have
their life destroyed by the claim of existence of good psychiatrists
that would lead them to visit mad ones, a nominative list is required.
This should be set up as a falsifiable claim, that is: ifever a
psychiatrist in the list of good ones turned out to be bad, first it
should be easy for the victim to have his voice heard and recognized
with no requrement of judicial-like hassles that the victim cannot
financial and mentally afford to undertake; second, once this event
recognize, the whole list it is taken from, and the claim of existence
of wise psychiatrists, should be oficially discarded altogether.
What if happy patients were taking the responsibility for
their
testimony and advice for others to visit psychiatrists, by providing
financial insurance from their personal funds, to give reparation to
anyone that their advise would harm ? Such an insurance economy would
help restoring justice, as well as comparing the harm with the good,
and finding out which weights more.
I know that many politially correct people would discard such
requirements as foolish, unrealistic or uncivilized.
But those who would discard such requirements are the mad ones. There
could be no possible civilization without a form of law or practical
means forcing people to take the full and real responsibility for what
they claim expertise in. There would be no possible civilization if
hungry people were routinely invited to restaurants, some of whom serve
food while many others routinely serve poison, with no available means
to make the difference or to complain afterwards.
In the present world, it turns out that even the right of speech inside
hospitals, by patients who suffered wrong treatments, is denied.
This is but a character of totalitarian systems. In fact, it is known
that psychiatrists were happy under the nazi and soviet regimes, to get
any political prisoner to make experiments on; and this is a general
intrinsic character of the psychiatric methods and mentality rather
than a specific accident from the dominating political ideologies of
the respective places and times, as this blind and barbarian behavior
can still be observed in our present Western "civilization" just the
same as a result of the perverse training of psychiatrists oriented by
misinformation from pharmaceutical industries, only hidden
under a
"soft appearance" (many psychiatrists can't just treat their patients
like animals by force but they still think the same and try to do it by
other means anyway).
In a sane and civilized world, it should be a matter of common sense
that even a psychiatrist that would be "wise" with his own patients,
not harming their lives, should rather be stopped as a fool and
condemned as a criminal whenever he would tolerate the testimonies of
his wise actions by his own patients, to serve as an argument to lead
by "nice advice" some other unfortunate depressed people to
follow
damaging treatments of his unwise collegues.
There are currently laws against diffamation, that forbid any public
accusation of some sorts against someone, no matter how true it may be
(without unrealistic obligations of judicial procedures, unaffordable
lawyer expenses and so on).
But precisely, this restriction lets no chance for any
positive
quality of a wise and relable person, to be known and trusted
either by contrast.
Skepticism
In front of the gaps between science and society and the proliferation
of pseudo-sciences in society, and aside other efforts to bridge this
gap (teaching, popularization...), one the main movements to try to
bridge these gap through explanations and promotion of science and
criticism of pseudo-science, is the "Scientific skepticism" movement.
Somehow they did a number of good works.
However, while this
movement claims to represent science, and indeed has a number of
scientists among its members, this representation of science is not
always faithful, their efforts often go to the wrong targets, and they
sometimes deviate from scientific thought and practice too.
Most of their claimed principles of skepticism are usually correct.
Rather, the main problem is that they fail to apply these principles
correctly in practice, on effective issue of the paranormal.
Or,
they prefer to focus on the most ridiculous claims of paranormal in
order to correctly dismiss them, while forgetting the genuine ones.
Such a trouble is expectable, because, as we said, the normal
scientific practice is normally based on dedication and isolation in
the ivory tower of science. So, the lobbying and communication work
done by skeptics, in an environment full of nonsense, and on subjects
where scientific knowledge is not so developed yet, sometimes happens
to deteriorate the rationality level of their claims and practices.
This eventually leads them to some absurd results, associating science
with indefensible attitudes, making their efforts often
counter-productive for their goal of explaining and promoting science
and rationality.
We already mentioned the
scientific illiteracy of some of them.
More aspects of their irrationality, incompetence and
similarities
with what they claim to oppose (religions, sects and pseudo-sciences,
that they resemble because they oppose irrationality in a more
extremist than thoughtful and rational way), will be developed in Part
III.
While rationality is indeed the right self-sufficient root of all
credibility, how ironical it is to see it discredited by clumsy
defenders trying to promote it as a religion, by
a irrational
methods.
The point is that, just as morality which religions vainly pretend to
promote, rationality cannot be propagated through lobbying and
evangelizing practices, because it is not a matter of intention, but
something quite more subtle.
A debate on rationalism
A French man developed Web pages criticizing the skeptic
movement
as well as rationalism itself, as he assumed them to be the same (since
the skeptics are the loudest people claiming themselves rationalists).
But I explained him how different it is. Here is a translation of this
dialogue. My messages are in black, his are in blue.
... I wondered what you
meant by
"Considering rationalism as
an equally reprehensible dogma ..." and looked at your
explanation
[= defining "rationalism" as the belief in a fixed and universal
criteria of scientificity, may it be inductivism or falsificationism,
and a priori excluding the possibility to classify a phenomenon as not
yet understood].
But this use of the word "rationalism" does not suit
me. I
think that although it can be seen as mainly a problem
of terminology, this problem is deeply linked to core issues, that
might be seen as details but they are important
too. It is very important to
put everything clear and position oneself correctly, first to better
approach the truth,
then to avoid being wrongly attacked. For if you want to
oppose people who are in error, it is essential not to be misled by
their mistakes in a way that would play their game, even if meanwhile
you are less mistaken than them.
First, for the vocabulary problem: how to make sense of the
word
"rationalism" and on what basis to motivate this choice of definition?
Your use seems based on sociological considerations, namely: to
accept as a fait accompli, that the meaning of a word is defined by the
majority or dominant use of the word in today's world (what is done in
his name , the practices of those who practice it).
Problem: is the current use of the word authentic or abusive?
Does the
usual practice of the word really fit with its original meaning,
that ment, claimed?
Is there another interesting possibility or even effective
practice already implemented, more consistent with
what the
word was supposed to
mean, than the way this word is often officially used ?
Consider the battle over the use of the title of "blog
zététique" that took
place(*) I don't want to give up the label "rationalist" to
the
official
skeptical movement, for the following
reasons: Claiming oneself rationalist, is definitely not the same as
being rational. There is a huge reality of
rational practice, which is science, and whose actual process
is
usually very different, even opposite, from what I read from you. But
the best description of science is the developed practice of
reason in the form of scientific progress. So why not define
"rationalism" as the promotion and / or participation in the
progress of science and knowledge,
as already done and
can go further? Would not this be a quite different
and more
authentic meaning of this word, than the usual practice
of so-called "rationalist" activist movements ? Furthermore, I
explained in my site how
important aspects of the zetetic movement are similar to
postmodernism, thus opposite to the normal scientific rationality.
Otherwise, sorry if it sounds personal, but I can only classify
my worldview as rationalist, even if I do not put this name
forward. But it is quite different from the skeptics view, so I must
disagree with the skeptics'picture of rationalism, that
I see
as caricatural.
(...)
[Also, the reference of philosophers (Popper as the "rationalist" vs.
Feyerabend as the "irrationalist") is irrelevant, as
philosophers
are quite disconnected from the true understanding of rationality.]
(...)
Regards.
(*) the word "zetetic" was first introduced by Marcelo Truzzi, founder
of CSICOP which was initially a more open-minded movement; but
then this movement and thus the use of the word "zetetic" deviated from
Truzzi's original intents towards more sectarian attitudes and
materialistic dogmas, forcing Truzzi to leave the movement and abandon
the word "Zetetic" to the copyright of SCICOP's new pseudo-scientific
practices and interpretation. The French skeptic movement followed this
trend calling themselves "zététique", and did not
tolerate the use this word according to Truzzi's original
sense by
the group criticizing them. I wrote a quick review of the situation of
the French skeptic movement here
-------------------
Thank you for your letter, and references to your site I found very
interesting.
First I must tell you that you're the first one I
see condemning the "zetetic"
approach while proclaiming
rationalism (or so I understand your position) . For me
rationalism indeed corresponds to extremism of the "zetetic" method that you condemn in
the
"skeptics" (what a mixture of words, moreover misused in my opinion).
For
you it just seems to be a good way to do science, that French
"zetetician" are not doing. In a word, I think we tend to agree, and
condemn
the same things, but not with the same words.
Indeed, I think, perhaps like you, that most of the French "zetetic"
(except a few...) absolutely do not
practice as they claim "the art of doubt" because their own
method
(what I call rationalism and you disagree) does not let
them doubt: by laiming to use universal arguments/protocols (whatever
they are, falsificationism, induction, the famous and so
subjective
"Ockham's razor "...) able to ruthlessly sort, precisely with no doubt,
theories, explanations between "good" and "bad" and between
"scientific" and "unscientific". It is often said that there
is
"a" scientific
method (without ever specifying it, without ever really describe it),
but
I notice that there are just several. They have been several over time,
there will be others, because science is built, improved, refined,
corrects itself, is constantly evolving. And there are also several at
a given moment, because there is not really one better than another.
Some
are more or less suited to the study / discovery of a particular
phenomenon. It's as you know what Feyerabend defended, and it's hard
not to join this quite... realist vision, arguing
that we are far
from the myth of science with its universally objective method as French
"zeteticians" defend.
(I will use here
one last time the term in quotation marks,
recalling that zetetic (in the field of the paranormal) is the
creation of Marcello Truzzi, a true American skeptic, in the right sense of the term,
to say who really knew to doubt and keep from deciding when missing an
argument one way or another.
French
Zetetics considerably usurp the term popularized by Truzzi (in his Zetetician
Scholar) in the United States, and the American
Rationalist (CSI, formerly
CSICOP for example) rather describe themselves as "skeptics" (but do
not
doubt any further in their majority). Zetetics "taught in ancient
times" was a
philosophical school which advocated the permanent doubt, which French
zeteticians are far from.
I even think that
in your
mention of a contradiction [skeptics'claim for democracy in scientific
judgement, in contradiction with their absolute undebatable certainty
and value judgement against the paranormal], you miss another
contradiction: claiming that the study
of the
paranormal would aim to keep crowds in ignorance and
thus under control. Obviously, on the contrary, the study of
something aims to
understand it, and by disseminating this knowledge (whether or
not a new
phenomenon), to free these crowds from mere beliefs, prejudices,
etc.. They simply do not understand "study" when they read it, but
"proselytizing" or "propaganda" for a given belief, without valid
scientific vehicle.
To come back to the
term
"rationalism" that is the subject of your post, I
did not invent the interpretation. It is a term that has an adopted
meaning since some time now, and I do not see myself deciding to invent
another sense, as
French
"zétéciens" corrupt today those of "zetetic" or
even
"skeptic" (I claim myself skeptical in Truzzi's sense and
feel far from their thoughts). I recommend for example, if you have not
already done so, to read the excellent book by Alan F. Extension
Chalmers:
What is this Thing
Called Science? (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend),
Discovery, 1976. The idea is indeed that of the
existence of universal / timeless criteria
for judging theories. One
can understand this ideal, or even say that the French zetetician
misapply it and that you (or others) could do it better
but you understood, for me it is not a matter of
practice or
modalities, but a
principle in which I do not believe. Again Feyerabend provides
many
examples in Against Method. Indeed as you say the idea of applying
"reason" is not the prerogative of rationalism / scientism, but of any
scientific method and, if I may speak bluntly, for me just a
mat
(cream pie) debate on the application of good scientific method.
I'll stop there (...) But I think for the moment that what makes you
claim
"rationalist" must
typically
depend on your position relative to the existence of
test(s) of universal judgement of a theory. It may be
that you are (and apply it better than French zeteticians for example)
or otherwise you are simply a good "skeptic" in the true sense.(...)
----------------
I see the "scientific method" as a style of spirit and research, which
must be developed into multiple forms to adapt to multiple situations,
and
can not be reduced to a specific algorithm.
For me, the notion of "really best method" has no universal meaning,
but should not be dismissed either, but must be understood as something
vague, relative to the specificity of each studied problem and
provisional understanding, and must therefore be reconsidered
continuously
from one situation to another.
In other words, the recognition of hypercomplexity and multifaceted
nature
of the world, should not be mistaken for relativism (a bland uniformity
of values).
Well, again we are in substantial agreement with different words.
>
what
makes you claim
"rationalist" must
typically
depend on your position relative to the existence of
test(s) of universal judgement of a theory
No. Reason for me is a multifaceted general discipline, but
nevertheless differs significantly from a certain practice of
non-reason or intellectual laziness, in fact widespread in some areas
("spiritual" teachings in particular).
A bit like the distinction between human thought and animal thought,
that does not need a clean break in the evolutionary history to be
something real.
The fact that there is no clean and precise wall
(recognizable by an idiot) separating what is rational from what is
not, is
not inconsistent with the clear superiority of the practice of reason
(intelligence) over non-reason (stupidity). See also the beginning
of the introductory text ("Rationality and Realism, What is at
Stake ? by John R. Searle) on
the issue of discernibility between what is rational and what is not.
I hope I was clearer this time ...
Sincerely.
--------------
I think the misunderstanding is on the idea that "rationalism" is a
general term for simply strive for reason, what is rational or
not. It is not. What I am saying is that it is a well-defined school of
philosophy
of science, and therefore we can not use it for something
else. If you want to define your approach as a search of the rational,
and if you want to avoid confusion with this school, you should use
another term.
---------------
I still see no reason to let some specific school of philosophy of
science (which I did not care to study), the copyright on the
use of the word "rationalism" fix there a pathological
meaning,
especially as it does not seem at all to stick with the use of
that
word in that text by John R. Searle.
Now with the wikipedia articles: the French one indeed seems to go in
your way, or perhaps even a third meaning.
However, the introductory paragraph of the English article on
rationalism fits
with the interpretation I said.
-----------------
I don't forget our
discussion.
Maybe we are finally talking about the
same thing but highlighting different aspects: while you insist on
the virtuous use of "reason" as the only way to get to the truth, I
insist
on the fact that this doctrine can be both fuzzy (most people,
whatever their theories about mysterious phenomena will agree with it)
and
very restrictive (the English Wikipedia cites, for example a
definition by Bourke advocating deductive reasoning (which, strictly
applied, is very unfortunate and even inapplicable, because the
deduction
requires the prior development of theories, usually based on
observations - induction - etc. Of course deduction can be replaced by
any other methods or tools of reasoning called
"universal" but each have their flaws). And that is a characteristic of
rationalism that I do not defend: the idea of a method / a universal
tool to compare theories. This is also the paradox of rationalism
to advocate a universal method of reasoning without describing
which one it is (or only a very blurred one such as the application of
" reason" so we can not, as you do during your battles
with "skeptics",
say who is more rational if not by an arbitrary opinion -
a good way to maintain eternal discussions). For this, rationalism
is to me rather a doctrine (there is a universal reasoning
always
valid, but I can not say which one) than a specific method (practice /
technique).
--------------
Have you read my texts ? (...).
I feel not.
I would describe reason as admittedly somehow fuzzy, but
rather hypercomplex.
Namely, for me, because: reason = intelligence.
Restrictive ???????????????
If you are only looking for simplistic definitions of reason, of course
you will only find simplistic definitions.
It is absurd to require stupid definitions of intelligence.
For the reason is the same.
Of course, a wikipedia article is simplifying by encyclopedic necessity.
For me, reason is not something to be defined, but something to be
lived.
From the wikipedia article I only pointed out the introduction, with
which I agree: the primacy of reason over any other approach.
I did not see there the idea that rationalism would be the
belief that reason
would be reducible to a simplistic definition by the automated
application of a tiny single method, I know not where you take
that from,
and I do not expect many people to interpet it so either. Of course
there
may be some small definition proposals in the air, to
describe one aspect or another, but I do not see these as
banners of simplicism that would claim to completely formalize
and end what reason is.
To be honest, this is for me the first time I find someone who makes
such an
amalgam between rationalism and simplicism. I've never seen it
elsewhere.
Even zeteticians, who develop a simplistic and degenerate version of
reason, do not conceive reason as simplistic. For them too,
reason
is to
deploy their thinking as far as they can. The only problem is that this
deployment of reason which they carry out as much as they can according
to the extent of their abilities, is
limited by the narrow shape their own brain.
Please do not blame rationalism for the narrow brain of its
loudest defenders. This is just unrelated.
Ok, a definition, if one is necessary:
Rationalism = claim that scientific-like research (involving
intelligence, with all
its rich subtleties such as deployed in many sciences, not excluding
other subtleties yet to be added to fit with more issues) is generally
more likely to lead to the right discernment of the truth on
most
truth issues, than traditional religious ways like
praying, singing, faith in Jesus or in Islam, nirvana or other
"spiritual" meditation practices, the
obsession of humility, or this or other feelings, reading the
Bible or any other traditional sacred text, or the popular
simplistic, fuzzy, immature sort of thought.
This is my definition of rationalism, which, as far as I know, does not
seem any way at odds with its most common interpretations.
Need I remind you that this position of
rationalism, is far from obvious for many people.
Indeed right now in the world, it seems most people are
opposed
to rationalism as I just defined. They firmly believe that
the only way to
truth is faith in Jesus and baptism of the Holy Spirit, or the Buddhist
meditation, or the like. So if you do not agree with them that
religious practices lead more surely to the truth of a scientific
research, then you're part of the small minority of rationalists on
this earth, whether you like it or not.
-------------------
I have not read your texts more than last time, sorry.
It seems to me that there are misunderstandings of my position in what
you say in your answers:
When I say fuzzy, I
mean it is
not at all accurate, it is too
general (and thus a doctrine rather than a method). You can tell
at length what is the application of science rather than
non-science, but
you still do not specify the idea. For me your definition boils down
to "the application of reason is better" without saying why, how, etc.
.. Because
ultimately
you cannot really define what means "scientific" apart through its
results ("you see, it works better than
the rest" - but why? And is this always true?). Because the border
between science and non-science is not always obvious, and it is better
defined by its methods (absent from a definition of reason) than by a
general
idea. This is not the application
of the use of reason (say, doing science)
that I find simplistic, but its definition (non-existent or vague /
general / subjective). That is why, even if I consider like you,
scientific explanations as more
convincing than mystical
explanations of the world, I do not claim any rationalism. For me what
is important is to
produce
shareable
things, in the sense of verifiable by everyone (so, the
opposite of subjectivity), whether it be in a box "science" or not.
So I agree with the idea that rationalism mainly includes the idea of
"every reason is good," but it does not bring much in itself (ie it is
vague), and the real content that follows is a sort of "soft
dictatorship" that imposes a /several universal method(s) * (which non-science
would not
have) without really defining them (no method specified).
What is all this vagueness for ? I think, for rejecting what a priori
scares rationalists (the mystical, etc..), so as to maintain
this
"great
divide" between science and non-science (formerly non-science = popular
culture, but it is reducing now), between "serious" people and
others. Rationalists want to mark their acquired territory.
* Where do I take this from ? I've already said, the book is a source
of Chalmers, "What is science?".
----------------------
(Not reading, deprives the discussion of chances to progress).
I remember the comparison:
It is impossible to define humans versus animals,
but can
one deny the ability of man to know the world better than
animals ?
It would be wrong to require a stupid definition of intelligence, and
to conclude that intelligence does not exist by lack of a stupid
satisfactory definition.
So, reason is fundamentally different from non-reason, insofar as the
adjective "fundamental" is understood to mean something practical and
contextual, that has NOTHING TO DO with that of "essential" = separate
by profound nature, binary or things like that.
See this very important text I started wroting on
essentialism
On the next remarks: I'm not sure what to answer specifically, or how
it could
change my previous statements, except to specify the following very
important point:
In reply to:
"
Because ultimately you cannot really define
what means "scientific" apart through its results ("you see, it works
better than
the rest" - but why? And is this always true?). Because the border
between science and non-science is not always obvious"
Sorry but I must contradict you there:
Indeed, what brings me to discuss science, is indeed that
at I
was basically an lover and gifted of math and theoretical
physics, and theoretical
reflections on various topics (economics and politics, metaphysics ,
etc.) from childhood, and I thus reached important achievements in
these areas. One of my experiences, was my fervent
evangelical faith that lasted a number of years, followed by
a complete deconversion from which I have done a tremendous work of
restoring order to my understanding of this whole religious adventure.
All this gives me some very extensive and intimate knowledge
of science and reason.
So for me, talking about reason is the opposite of something vague, but
it's a gigantic universe that I know well, and it is only as an
intimate knower of this universe, that I dare to talk about it.
---------------
I do not doubt that you have an opinion on what is reasonable or
meaningful ("scientific" say some, while there are a lot of scientific results or
even methods that are wrong) and what is not (or worse,
if we take the reference of your evangelical experience). I do not
doubt that this opinion is based on considerable experience in these
areas, and you speak knowingly.
However (and
unfortunately), it brings nothing as long as it cannot be shared (hence
the importance of publishing works in science, for example). Saying
"I know very well to discern good from bad", the rational from the
irrational or the unscientific from the scientific, is good for you,
but it is
incommunicable to others as such. There is only scientific knowledge as
a
shared knowledge. To make it communicable requires to communicate
something
repeatable by others (typically via a description of a method to
reproduce
the knowledge you claim to have discovered). And this
communicable, shareable description, still lacks in your
speech that remains
paradoxically subjective on science (from what I've read so far in our
discussion).
Understand me well, I do not blame you for not providing such a
universal description of what science is, or what method should be
applied systematically to arrive at scientific truth, because I think
it is not possible. To say that it is possible, is rationalism.
--------------------
Let's go further:
Indeed I can not verbally communicate intelligence itself, the source
of insights that I developed.
Nevertheless, there are still very significant things I can
produce
and communicate verbally, especially some actual understanding of a
number of
specific topics. So I can communicate something of my reason in the
form of examples, a lot
of discussions and explanations on specific things.
And more specifically, on issues among the most important I could find.
Texts I wrote on the foundations of mathematics, on religion, on a
number of myths that dominate the world, economy, etc..
And I think that, even though it will ever be the magic potion to
discern
for sure what is most rational from what is at fault among all
movements
and all teachings of the present or future world, at least it can make
significant progress.
For even if reason itself is not transmissible, a good overview of a
number of rational thoughts that can give some knowledge and serve as
examples while refuting a number of currently widespread mistakes,
pitfalls and obstacles
to reason, can help inspire people in the right
direction.
My own progress in the exercise of reason, came by practicing it and
seeing what helps to go further and what does not, so that
a success can inspire further success...
Thus, examples of well-conducted reflections can inspire others to
think well.
To come back to the initial subject:
Yes, reason exists, it is a very real thing, even if,
precisely the same
way as many other subtle realities studied by science (dark matter,
etc. etc.), it can be very difficult to capture or characterize.
And it's not because something is difficult to discern or understand,
that it does not exist.
To try to re-explain things:
For me (and I think, for many others too), reason makes sense
only
insofar as it is actually useful to advance the
understanding of reality. Therefore, what for should one claim to
define and communicate
reason in a pure form ? Indeed, reason truly becomes
reason,
only
by its effective work on reality. It would not make sense to transmit
reason separately
from what it can be here for. The problem of zetetic,
which uses
the paranormal as an example, is that, while admittedly, somehow it
would
be good to present reason as applied to something, it is also
necessary to do truly and sincerely, appropriately to the reality of
the object at stakes. Because the real goal should be the object,
reality, and
not reason for itself. For, a reason that would be reduced to
itself or seeked for its own purpose,
disconnected from the reality that it is here to discover, even if some
bits of reality would be used as an exercise, would simply not
be
reason anymore. (This remark does not diminish the rationality of pure
mathematics, which is an effective knowledge of the existing world
of mathematics, even if different from the usual world, rather
than an empty methodology).
To use anything as an excuse or support to communicate reason, is
already a
travesty of reason. The real reason can exist and be transmitted only
by being taken neither as an object in itself, nor even a priority, but
by
treating it fully and honestly as it should always have remained: a
discipline subordinated to the study to its true goal which is
knowledge of reality.
I therefore believe that the true rationalism must renounce trying to
define reason as a definable object, in favor of its
development
as a reality, as a kind of sport that exists only through its practice.
So my main approach is to develop my own exercise of reason, and work
to make it succeed in something. It would be absurd to try out a
characterization of reason without having prior
"evidence", experience of how this can effectively
help the
progress of knowledge. Finally, this "reason" by which I could
finally discover reality, turns out to be
neither simpler,
more fundamental or transsible than its fruits (knowledge).
Thus
it is just natural to me, in my rationalism (= to desire contributing
to the development of reason in the world) to attach as much importance
and care to first exercise reason in myself and then share the
fruit obtained, than models of reasoning that led me there.
Is this clearer?
Some further ideas that came to me afterwards:
One could say that the method is to science what means of transport are
to travel.
Means of transport are required to travel, but they are not the travel.
Putting forward some scientific methods, may be useful
vis-à-vis
people who might currently have no method to progress but say
still and only dream of travelling rather than really travel in the
world of knowledge; who dream of knowledge but have none true and
reliable. Or maybe, who develop some partial knowledge, but mixed with
errors, and remain unable to sort them. Unfortunately, this is
precisely a very common situation across currently widespread
religions and spiritualities.
But the presence of some possible means of transport, does not exclude
other useful ones. Some are genuine, others illusory. How do
we
know? Well that's a big problem, the answer is not always given in
advance ... however, the point is that, fantasy and actual travel are
two separate things, and the abundance of people who seriously
imagine themselves on the moon while they are only there in dream, is a
major problem. And the presence of a serious problem, does not mean
that the mistaken ones would necessarily be "at fault" in any sense
whatsoever, nor that any readily available solution must be here under
hand.
Also, normally the high-level rational discussions are debates
in
which many specific questions can be addressed, but where the
qualifiers of "rational" and other variations of this word, has no
place because it lacks the necessary meaningfulness for the issues
involved (it would sound like the battles of insults among
children, away from the real debate). But there are also hopeless
cases, where one debater is unable of reason; this lack of
rationality turns out to be a major obstacle to any attempt at
dialogue, letting no other option for the other, but to
express
this observation of failure in terms of
irrationality ...
while the other may have a similar impression in the other way round.
Who is really right? Well, hard to say...
Also, I do not see the issue of rationality as a matter of "criterion
for comparing theories". Reason is a dynamic for the
constitution
and development of any theory. Some theories are
rationally
developed, others less. There is no on the one hand, theories enjoying
an independent reality in the world of ideas, then on the other hand, a
rationality falling from the sky that would give them good or bad
marks. Reason was there in the first place to build theories presented,
then it can come back and rework them, review them and modify the old
ideas into new, clarified ideas (that may or may not be rigorously
equivalent to the former version).
But, while a good form of skepticism is part of rationality, we cannot
reduce rationality to it.
Skeptics insist on either rejecting or avoiding judgement for
claims or phenomena that are not clearly proven yet. While it is indeed
necessary to not pretend to know something that cannot be checked,
and we have no "right" to systematically demand or pretend
having
all the needed evidence for the truth on all questions we "need to
know", this is not a satisfactory end of the story.
And, just as science's acknowledgement of it incompleteness did not
prevent it from discovering a very good deal of
knowledge, there
are indeed many answers readily available to reason about the sense of
life, which shall be presented in the next parts.
----------The
next parts are not written yet (mainly headlines and keywords
are)----------
Part
I - Part II - Part III
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