AW! Epistles
From Karl 9
Abstract
Monday, 18 July 2005
“Marx prophesied that the capitalist system was on its lazzies over a hundred years ago. It still survives, stronger than ever. So, Marxism failed, like Christianity in its prime prediction, even though much of its analysis remains valid in my opinion. Christ prophesied that the kingdom of god would come 2000 years ago and it still has not, yet believers still believe. Both of these theologies have explanations for their failures that convince the believers, but are not falsifiable and so are not scientific.”
You are right that Marxism became a religion, but it is not evident that capitalism is stronger than ever. It all depends on one’s point of view. Indeed, a small social elite is becoming richer and powerful, so it is clearly of great success for them, but, as an economic “system”, if one can use that word about laissez-faire capitalism, it is evidently failing with increasingly large numbers of people falling into poverty and unsustainable practices just to survive. I guess that it has been a total failure for them. Every capitalist country would be bankrupt, if it were not for interventionalist state policies (including trade tarrifs and subsidies) and the propagation of a war machine, destabilising and destroying competitors in order to provide a cheap labour force, and all are in debt, most have massive trade deficits and pay for this by printing and borrowing money against government bonds and future market resources. The “system” is on the point of collapse and, because of its short-term focus on cycles of crisis and profit over sustainability, it almost certainly will result in massive envirnomental degradation, global warfare for scant resources, and may well lead to the extinction of humanity. In my opinion, this is a sign of failure in an economic system. There is also the creation of the virtual market of virtual products through the computer and the Internet, which is something that Marx simply could not have predicted. It added an new dimension which allowed an escape from global impaction. Also, and this is an important thing that I have yet to read in Marxist literature, Marx did not account for his own theory in his theory. It is arguable that the invention of Marxism has an impact on the development of capitalism and changed the course of its history. My point is that, by publishing his theory, Marx effectively warned the capitalists and they were able to prepare themselves against the possibility of a workers revolution (something they otherwise would not have suspected, given their typical contempt for ordinary people). It could be argued that the whole of the twentieth century is the political history of the struggle for and against Marxism. After all, the fascists in Spain and Italy rose to power against the communists, Hitler’s rise to power was only possible because the European states and the Church feared the communists more than the Nazis, and later day American history is story of the war against communism and the cold war construction of the industrial war machine (which they are forced to continue against the new shadow enemy). In fact, it is this struggle that created the very arms trade that has saved American and European capitalism from collapse. It seems to me that the capitalists and fascists have certainly taken Marx much, much more seriously than the workers ever did. Their efforts against it have been tireless. It seems to me that, even though there are many flaws in Marxism, it really did not have a chance to even get off the ground due to all the efforts to undermine it. If the same effort had been made against Darwin’s theory then we would all be suffering the truimph of creationism.
That all might be true, but the fact remains that Marx’s main prediction was false, and capitalism remains stronger than ever. If it is on the point of collapse, that is what Marxists have always claimed, but it has not done so far.
“I do not disgree here, either, but US political economics had a major role in the whole kaboodle from the start. Left to itself, it should have failed anyway, according to Marx, because it was a backward country, but it might have succeeded, who knows, without the intervening dictatorship.”
In my view, the central failing of Marxism was its lack of a developed theory of democratic decision making. There were some democratic forms of Marxism in south and central america, especially the notable and moderate democratically elected socialist government of Chile prior to Pinoche, but these were all destroyed by US backed military coups that set up right wing military dictatorships. So we will never know how they would have fared if they were left to their own devices. Of course, they may well have lead to massive economic problems, that Chilean socialist government certainly did, but it is hardly the case that we have seen glorious economic success under capitalism. We seem to lurch from economic depression to depression, punctuated by those all so profitable brief periods of economic boom. The crisis-profit cycle is a standard profit making tactic of capitalist economics. In the Soviet Union and Cuba, communism was perpetually deferred and a centralised state under charismatic dictatorships prevented any possibility of worker controlled industry. I also think that a central failing of Marxism (due to Lenin, rather than Marx) is the belief that communism could occur through violent revolution. In my view, as soon as violence is involved then it inevitably leads to dictatorship and a police state, which ultimately lacks the diversity, flexibility, and openness that is necessary for intelligent decision-making and experimentation. In my view, communism is only possible as a development of fully participatory democracy and the central problem for any Marxist theory is how to democratise the political economy of an industrialised state.
Revolution was supposed to have been necessary because the bourgeoisie controlled the apparatus of the state, and so there could never have been a democratically elected communism. Chile proves the point, with Pinochet representing the large Chilean middle class. Any democratic left wing government faced intervention from the US. The nicest way of intervening is to use money, as they did in Europe, and Japan. The cases like Chile and Iraq are the nasty ways of doing it reserved for helpless countries with copper or oil resources, or whatever, and no defensive ones to talk of.
“You have explained evolution. It is so commonon sensical that the only reason it was not realized centuries before it was is the baneful influence of Christianity with its jealous God.”
Possibly. But I think that the ability for naturalists to travel around the world and see different animals and plants, especially on islands, might well have had something to do with it.
“It makes predictions that are, now especially, testable by protein and DNA analysis, and the DNA explains why it happens.”
This is a little far fetched. Not only are lab experiments on “evolution” controversial and not widely accepted, but DNA only explains the principle of mutation, but it does not explain natural selection. Genotypes might well explain random variation, but natural selection operates on phenotypes in an environment by “testing” whether the random variation is an advantage or disadvantage. The mapping of the genotype and phenotype is a central problem within contemporary genetics, which is confined to working on lab animals, and there is yet to be any real indication that the scientists understand what is going on in these controlled situations, yet alone in the messy, complicated environment of the natural world. There are some cases of variation of insects and plants that have been attributed to industrial pollution, but the time-scales required for natural selection to generate a new species are just too large for the theory of evolution to provide predictions.
Your argument about the relationship of genotype and phenotype is getting less true now that the genotypes of many species are know and are being tested against their phenotypes. But you are right that the hypothesis is hard to test directly because of the timescales involved, so speciation has not been observed in a laboratory. However, new species can arise by hybridisation, common in plants, but now seen in animals. So, your argument echoes the Christian one that evolution is not true until it is seen making a new species, even if the signifcant steps on the way have been shown to happen, and the living world has no better explanation.
“But I agree that it is based on truth being coherent as well as correspondent.”
Well, I agree that its claim to truth-status is based on its coherence. It is open to question whether it corresponds to reality.
“GM must be nearly capable of making a new species, the ultimate test of evolutionary genetic theory, with the prospect of armies of non-human soldiers cloned from some GM species cut from human material but without the fretful brain. Is Bush or Rumsfeld a prototype?”
As a genetic biologist once said to me: you don’t need high tech science to create an army of brainless soldiers that are prepared to follow orders without question. People have been doing that for thousands of years. But, and this is my concern, would it follow from the production of such a new species that the scientists knew what they were doing? My argument is that, with large scale efforts and trial and error, human beings are able to bring things into the world and they do not understand how they did it. Historically, scientific explanations follow technological innovation, not the other way around, as is too often presupposed.
In the past, there was no firm base of scientific learning to serve as an incubator of tchnological discovery. So the observation you have made could only have been expected. I do not think it is so true today. There are some strange people who make discoveries by trial and error based on their noticing what things are needed in everyday life— and good for them— but most modern discovery comes from the scientific base that already exists.
“You are right, if trial and error is itself devoid of logic. I have already argued that science is essentially trial and error systematized, but I do not think anyone tackling any practical problem does not reason in trying to make it work. The various solutions tried, are not merely random ones, even for the creative genius, perhaps especially for them. Heraclitus is supposed, I believe, to have built the first steam engine, a heated sphere containing water with two tangential vents causing it to spin on an axis when the water boiled. Am I to suppose that he accidentally put it together one day.”
As I have argued in my book and our email exchanges, the ongoing work of science occurs within a technological framework. The scientific process that I describe in my book is one in which scientists work, using models and reasoning, methodically, to produce and explain machine performances. I not only did not suggest that it was devoid of logic or reason, merely trial and error, but, in the book, I was highly critical of theorists that suggest that it was. What I said to you was that we could not logically infer the truth of physics’ metaphysical assumptions from its technological success, nor could be logically derive creative innovations, such as the electromagnetic motor, from theory (which was developed after the electromagnetic motor) that is, in fact, an abstraction of the representations developed, used, and refined in the ongoing work of physicists such as Faraday. See chapters 4 and 5 for my discussion of this.
“Your logical leap is more to the point, but it is still logical.”
By definition, a leap in logic is not itself logical, otherwise it would not be a leap. It would be a derivation.
You seem to want science to be logical and illogical at the same time. When I suggested that science had to be logical to succeed, you said it was “not true”, and discoverers had to defy logic or make logical leaps. Despite this you defend science as logical against theoretical critics who say it is devoid of reason. Perhaps yopu are right and it is both. A logical leap must land the leaper on to logical ground, or it truly is illogical, and discovery is what those critics say it is— illogical. The analogy might be one of leaping from tree to tree, like the squirrel, or from parallel bar to bar, like a gymnast, but since you say several times that science is non-linear, it seems to be more of a switch between two values of a non-linear function. By climbing about in space A, you become aware of the nearby space B, that you had not realised was there, but that you could have accessed by the long tortuous “logical” procedure of descending from A to the ground walking along and ascending a different but particular tree that leads to B. If this is what happens, I have to agree it is not logical in itself, but comes about by the process of reasoning. It is gestalt, and can be justified after the event by logic.
“What positive plodding physicists do today I do not know, but then I do not know much about what the wunderkinden at Geneva do either but I find it hard to imagine that supercolliders are being developed by pure trial and error with no logic involved.”
I did not say that they were. My point is that the particle accelerators at Geneva could not be logically derived from theories, but, of course, theories are used in their design. But, more to the point, I think that you need to pay attention to what physicists are doing and how they do it, whether they are plodders or wunderkinden, before you make claims about the nature of physics and whether it achieves objective truth about Nature or not. It is a matter of being empirical, rather than just believing the hype.
OK. It is just that I find it easier to believe convention than to believe your criticisms of it, though I accept that our models of reality have tended to be disposable ones.
“Repetition is called for. No single failure is sufficient because it might have been some carelessness of practice— the experiment went wrong. It has to be suspected initially, and the experiment is repeated, then repeated with changes to the procedure to try to correct any suspected errors. I suppose this is the trial and error you speak of, and it is doubtless intuitive, nothing wrong with that, but is also rational and based on experience. You know what the difficulties are from experience or suspect possible causes. You mentioned the spinning of the cylinders in Morpurgo’s experiment to find free quarks. It stopped the charge drift but the experiment still did not yield any evidence of free quarks. As for logic, I suppose the idea was that the field was too delicate to be stable in a static system and spinning is a form of averaging out small fluctuations that made the field drift. Of course, I don’t know, but all I am arguing is that it is not purely ad hoc but involves experience and reason.”
As I said in the section about Morpurgo’s experiment that you refer to, this this showed that ongoing scientific works was NOT merely trial and error, but involved bounded technically rational judgements in a project that was already situated within a technological framework. I specifically raised this example to show how Pickering has misconstrued experimental work as purely trial and error.
“Aesthetics in science is an interesting problem for someone sympathetic to science to pursue sometime. Machines do not have to be pretty to work.”
It is a common misconception to hold that aesthetics is the philosophy or theory of beauty and is largely concerned with art, etc. Aesthetics is the philosophy or theory of the quality of experience. It could as equally be interested in why a maggot ridden corpse was repulsive, as well as whether and why a painting of a maggot ridden corpse was art. There is considerable interest these days about whether Aristotle’s virtue theory, with its focus on the good life and good character, is an aesthetic theory as well as an ethical one. Is the ethical life to be judged on the quality of the experience of living an ethical life? An aesthetic judgement within science would be a judgement based on the experience of the quality of scientific work. The notion of technical excellence would be as much within the remit of aestheics as whether symmetrical mathematical theories were beautiful or machines were pretty.
“Social convention? Well, I suppose people do want to get their degrees, and it is brave and perhaps stupid to take a stance before you have any independence. I had to adopt forms of analysis that were crap, but, whereas the opinions expressed from this analysis are worthless, the data stand for someone else to analyse properly. It was not stuff that was going to break any mould! Plodding, I guess.”
My point about social convention was that often when an experiment fails, scientists, for want of any better reason, will accept the social consensus of why an experiment failed. There is a social convention of expectations and norms about what should work and what is doomed to failure within any scientific community. This is especially important when vast investments of resources and reputations are at stake. It takes considerable personal resources, including courage, to defy convention. It also allows for short cuts and has considerable advantages in avoiding criticism when one goes with social convention.
“[The neutrino oscillation’s] recent acceptance matches my lack of knowledge of it until recently. From where I stand, it looks like a fudge, but one that will break down if that is all it is. Presumably the three forms of the neutrino in this resonance have different properties, and these can be used to test the hypothesis of the oscillation. Evidently only one of them reacts with chlorine atoms. I don’t know what the Karell 2 detector does that the old ones based on chlorine did not, but presumably it detects more than just one of the hypothetical oscillating forms. And the three forms of neutrino were expected on some other grounds, were they not, so the fudge, or auxiliiary hyothesis if that is what it is, is not purely arbitrary. Presumably there is some theoretical reason for expecting three types of neutrino.”
The idea of a neutrino oscillation is actually quite straightforward. The Standard Model of Elementary Particles presupposes that the three flavours of neutrinos, each corresponding to one of the three leptons (electron, muon, and tau), all have zero mass. Furthermore, the model presupposes that lepton flavour is conserved (if a tau lepton decays into an electron and anti-electron pair then it must also emit a tau neutrino). However, if the neutrinos have non-zero mass, providing that it is a different mass from one another, and lepton flavour is not conserved, then it is theoretically possible that neutrinos can change into lighter ones. Thus the subterranean neutrino detectors will detect one third as many solar electron neutrinos as the standard model predicts because two thirds of them have oscillated into muon and tau neutrinos. Thus the neutrino oscillation hypothesis is proposed to explain this deviation between the model and the machine performances of the liquid-based detectors, such as the Super-Kamiokande solar neutrino detector. This machine is basically a spherical tank of 50 thousand tons of purified water, surrounded by thousands of photo-multiplier tubes, and located 1 km underground. This inner core is surrounded by more water to shield it from neutrons from the surrounding rock. Light sensors surround that to detect charged particles. Assumptions and simplifications are required to derive the cross-section area neutrino interactions with the nuclei of water molecules from the standard model, in order to calculate the theoretically expected neutrino detection rate. Models, assumptions, and simplifications are required in order to estimate the shielding success and the charged particle detection rates. This will be necessary to process and correct the raw data, as well as estimate experimental errors. Assumptions and simplifications regarding the water purity and homogeneity also need to be made in order to make the cross-section area calculation and estimate experimental error. Moreover, models, assumptions, and simplifications are needed in order to interpret the performance of the photo-multiplier tubes. These are based on a theoretical mechanism called the Cherenkov Radiation Effect. Neutrinos cannot be directly detected. The photo-multipliers are designed to detect the light emitted from charged particles moving through the water that are the products of the weak neutrino interactions with the nuclei of the water molecules. The theoretical principle of this mechanism is that when fast moving charged particles move through a dense medium (such as water) they can move faster than the speed of light (which is slowed in a dense medium) and they radiate photons in a cone around the direction of the particle’s trajectory. These photons are detected by the photo-multipliers, which electromagnetically turn these single hits into larger light signals that can be recorded by electronic instruments that calculate time and intensity signals. There are numerous assumptions and simplifications that are required to interpret and calibrate these devices. Furthermore, all the data from the machine is fed into a computer that uses models, assumptions, and simplifications to process it into intelligible information that the physicists can then use models to work out what the hell is going on. In addition, there are two kinds of neutrinos that the physicists expect the detector to detect. The type that interests them are the solar electron neutrinos that, according to standard models of nuclear fusion processes in the core of the Sun, have a small, but (most importantly) non-zero chance of being detected by such a machine as the Super-Kamiokande, and also the higher energy atmospherically produced muon neutrinos from cosmic ray collisions in the atmosphere. These are theoretical expectations and models are used to calculate and differentiate their cross-sections. Models are also used to calculate the expected neutrino background from radioactive decays within the Earth itself. My point is that in the design, construction, operation, and interpretation of machines, such as the Super-Kamiokande, theories, models, assumptions, and simplifications are built into the components of machine and its interpretations on many different levels. And this machine is relatively simple compared to most other machines used in contemporary physics! In real experimental physics (as opposed to the imaginary and abstract experiments of some philosophers of science) it is not simply the case of comparing theory and observation. Theory is used to make observations in the first instances and is also used to interpret them. The real situation of working experiments is one of achieving coherence, rather than correspondence, and, more often than not, scientific realists fundamentally misrepresent the real process of experimentation with their “correspondence” theory of science. Moreover, the failure to achieve coherence between the actual machine performance and the theoretically expected machine performance, in this case the detection of approximately one third as many electron neutrinos as predicted by the Standard Model of Solar Nuclear Physics, is not necessarily a failure of the primary hypothesis used to develop the theory or one the assumptions or simplifications used to derive a model from the theory. Any one of the assumptions or simplifications, or several, used to construct any of the models used to design, build, operate, and interpret the machine could be wrong. It is not simply a matter of falsification. Of course, this failure indicates that something is wrong. The problem is trying to work out which hypotheses were wrong. This problem is called the problem of ancillary hypotheses. There is quite an industry of neutrino detectors exploring the neutrino oscillation and, my point, is that is acceptance will follow its utility in the technological innovation of a whole new generation of machines. If you are interested in learning more about these machines then go to:
http://www.hep.anl.gov/ndk/hypertext/nuindustry.html
This is the most persuasive you have been so far. It all sounds quite absurd, and I am quite ready to believe you, but am not ready yet to accept that it invalidates schoolboy physics that is all done, as J J Thomson did it, with string and sealing wax.
“But however skeptical you are about the entities, the machines do let us see things invisible to us. X-rays do it specifically. You can X-ray a cadaver and then cut it open and find what the X-ray showed was there. You can use them to see inside suitcases at aerodromes, and then open them to check them for revolves or hand-grenades. They are machines, if you like, but ones which can be directly verified for the truth or otherwise of what they present to us.”
Indeed. As I state at several points throughout my book, physicists bring world-changing machine prototypes into the world, which is one of the reasons why I am critical of social construction theories of science. As the surviving denizens of Hiroshima will testify, physicists build powerful machines. The modern world is built on Faraday’s electromagnetic motor. My point is not that I am sceptical about the physicists ability to unleash power. I am sceptical about their ability to understand it before they release it. I argue that the very nature of physics makes it impossible for physicists to understand what they unleash into the world. Theory follows innovation and is tested by its implementation in future innovation. More and more world-changing machines are invented, without knowing how and why they work, let alone what their impact will be on the world.
“Let a man give to me a machine he has made but which I know nothing about. It makes a line on a graph paper when light is shone on it. Let me arrange for the light from a prism to illuminate this machine and it draws a line every time a spectral line of light crosses it. I can see the coloured bands in the spectrum and can verify that the machine responds when the light is on the detector. The apparatus is evidently detecting light by giving some signal that corresponds to the light I can see. I might be able then to use it for many other purposes such as night vision which it would be useless for, if it were not doing what I hypothesised it is doing, and so on, or might find that it responds when I turn the prism until the spectrum has passed over it completely, then see a response. Here is a dilemma such as those you have been posing. Is the apparatus faulty? There is no light I can see, or is there light but it is light I cannot see? It is more than just an explanation of a machine performance because it corresponds with what we see. There is no need to bore you further, for all I am saying is that the scientific explanation of these things is better than the complex of jargon needed to make it into a mere artefact of machine manipulation. It is not just machine performance or modelling because I can often sense for myself what the machine senses. If it is modelling then it is realistic and useful modelling, like models of complex building or the human body, showing where bits are. Even a model relates to reality.”
First of all, you have not explained how this machine works, but, in terms of my jargon, you have merely mapped out the contours of human interventions and machine performances in order to present a constant conjunction of events. As I argued in chapter 2, this is the usual mistake that positivists and scientific realists make about experimentation and how a model relates to reality. They presume that this is the whole story. But, the noting of constant conjunctions is only a starting point for an experimental physicist. Like most traditional philosophers of science, you take the working machine as a given starting point. Who gave it to you? Who was the man? Well, he was a physicist and for him there was a far deeper level of causal explanation at work when he designed and built the machine that he gave to you. If you want to understand physics then put yourself in the shoes of the physicist and try to understand how he understands the machine and how he learnt how to make it. It is not whether a model relates to reality; it is a question of whether the model captures the fundamental mechanisms by which reality occurs. The physicists determines the success of the model by using it to design and build machines; this model did not come out of thin air, it was the result of previous efforts in designing and building machines. It is situated in a material history and when that effort is brought together in one ongoing research project then it I call it the development of a machine-family.
Secondly, you can only “sense what the machine senses” because you have a prior education and technical background. You are already situated as a technological practitioner. Much of your knowledge is tacit, acquired in an unreflective way after decades of technology use, and what seens self-evident about Nature as a result of your technological activities is itself a consequence of the naturalisation of technology through familiarity. This is one of the reasons why I use jargon in my descriptions of the processes of experimentation. It is so it makes it less familar, less self-evident, and strange. The idea is that you think about it afresh; to make you objective and phenomenological about technology. Much of our understanding about how machines work does not, in fact, correspond to what we see. It corresponds to what we think about what causes what we see and how we go about representing these causes. In the case of experimental physics, we rarely see the object of the experiment and thus how we observe and what we claim to have observed is very much bound up our understanding of how the machine works.
Well, again, I am getting to understand you better when you are more explicit about what you are talking about, so your tactic of making me think differently through your novel technical vocabulary is not working for me. My response is just, “Eh?” This explains it better.
“The point is that Nature is real, and gives rise to real phenomena which are experienced. A falsh of gestalt would reveal a use for it.”
I do not doubt this. I do not claim that Nature is not real. Nor do I deny that human beings find many natural phenomena useful. But the difference between your view and mine is that you claim that Nature “gives rise to real phenomena which are experience”, whereas I say that Nature is comprised of real phenomena. You presume a underlying causal reality that is symmetrical for natural entities (such as birds) and artificial entities (such as aircraft). I bring the symmetry of this underlying causal reality into question. In fact, if I am right, it could well be a figment of your immagination. It certainly is not an object of experience. Of course the world is comprised of natural and artificial entities. My critique is regarding the use of the latter to understand the former and I deny the self-evidency of the claim that there is some seemless connection between natural and artificial entities that is somehow self-evident because human beings can make sail boats, build windmills, and make machines. And, as you agree, human beings have been able to do these things long before they understood them in scientific terms. Thus it is clearly questionable whether these scientific terms are necessary in order to build the machines.
OK, but once the theory has been developed, even if it after the first of the machines, it allows better machines to be built by giving an explanation that allows optimisation. I do not know what the Wright brothers knew about the theories of aerodynamics that were being developed when they made their aeroplane, but once they had convinced the skeptics that heavier than air machines could fly, the use of the theory allowed the technology to leap ahead.
“Even so, the older ways must have led to some insights to allow people to progress sufficiently to want a better system of understanding.”
It’s a matter of opinion whether modern science is actually a better system of understanding. But, I accept that it has provided us with more machines.
“Political economy. We should have social limits on what rulers do, whether governments or corporations. Science has no function in social decision making.”
Perhaps scientists should insist on having more say in social decision making, as should we all. They certainly should not simply provide their masters with more and more instruments of power and then wash their hands of responsibility.
The responisble ones do not, and I suspect that they are a lot more than you think. The trouble is the irresponsible ones, the Dr Strangeloves, but how can we get rid of them until we have got rid of the people who pay them to destroy the world for their own greed?
“…the trouble with strikes is that they are rarely political and any hint of politics in one, sets the media against them, and secondly that they are never sufficinetly united, again because of the control of the mass media by corporate moguls and their political puppets. The miners strike in 1984-5 is a case in point. It was set up by Thatcher at a time when she was ready for it, and the miners fell into the trap. Coal stocks were high, and then for the next year, the media raged against them and the police battered them. It is a wonder it lasted so long, but ever since 1926, the general strike, or even strikes of key workers have been feared by our rulers, so that some were always being bought off on the divide and rule principle. It rarely fails. Heath, who I hear has just died, could have bought off the miners in 1974. Joe Gormley was in favour of it, but Scargill stopped it, Heath went to the country and lost. My guess is that Thatcher was determined not to let it happen again.”
Unfortunately for the miners in the mid 80s is that their labour was no longer needed and the British coal mines were being systematically closed. The reason why Thatcher was so heavy handed is that she wanted to make an ideological point about state power over the miners. The police should have refused to inact this policy. It was an anti-democratic act of right wing politics designed to show the unions and workers exactly what would happen to them if they did not tow the line and do what they were told.
“The leading science now is molecular biology. You say you have yet to generalise your analysis of physics to all science, but evidently now we can manipulate the substance of life and see what happens. We are dealing in chain molecules, eggs, cells and cloning and splicing. We are manipulating life not machines even if we are using machines like microscopes to do it. Yet the correspondence principle still pertains. Separating a divided cell and allowing the two to grow independently gives us a pair of clones. It is what we expected— correpondence.”
As a matter of fact, biotechnology and genetics are very hit and miss sciences. In these highly technological sciences, defined almost excusively in terms of techniques, over half of the embryonic cells that are biochemically manipulated die. Over half of the surviving cells fail to fully gestate. Genetically modified plants tend to loose all the modifications within three generations. Cloning experiments have high failure rates. The latest efforts at the University of Texas with the bull (known as eighty-six squared) had a ninety-six percent failure rate before the bull was successfully cloned from frozen cells. Most of the failures died as embryos, but a large proportion lead to monstrosities. It was the same with Dolly the sheep. There was an extremely high failure rate, including over twenty-six aborted monstrosities, before Dolly was born. Cloned animals such as Dolly have developed premature aging and cellular degeneracy. Fertility treatments and artificial insemination techniques are also very hit and miss. It seems to me that these examples show that the scientists do not know what they are doing. In fact, given that they treat living plants and animals (and humans) as if they were complex machines, the failure of these efforts shows how much life resists being mechanised, manipulated, reproduced, and technologised. You should go into a biochemistry lab some time and see what they can and can’t do in reality, rather than what they claim they will be able to do in the funding applications and on the corporate brochures. You claim for correspondence is not based on science. It is based on science fiction.
But we are not gods born with the ability to manipulate life, or anything else. All of it has to be learned, and has to be learned by whatever metaphysical underpinnings you give it. If we are merely manipulating matter like a potter, a painter or a musician, we have to learn how to do it. It seems to me that, if scientists had no underlying concerns about themselves changing reality except like a modeller or an artist does, then they could be less concerned about what machines they produced or monsters they made.
“The eskimos are said to have had a large number of different words for snow. We have words for what we are familiar with. Could physics have been anything other than technological?”
It is actually a myth that eskimos have a large number of different words for snow. And, as I have already said at length, modern physics is inherently technological because it is based on a conceptualisation of Nature as something technological. But, I so not accept that this is necessarily the best way to understand Nature. I advocate a more phenomenological and hermenuetic approach which reads a historical understanding on how we understand Nature, as well as Nature as experienced without explanation. I like to walk up mountains and through woodland to experience Nature, being in its presence, not playing with machines in laboratories in order to understand it in terms of underlying mechanisms.
Quite so, but even this is damaging to Nature when millions of people get the same urge and the means to fulfil it. Maybe science is not the problem but the number of people.
“I agree with you [that adoption is better than fertility treatments], but it is idealistic at the edges. The abusers seem to wheedle their way into every home for deprived children there is, and then they form cells that protect each other.”
It is awful and shameful that this is true. If governments spent a tiny fraction of their military and anti-drug enforcement budgets on stopping child rape then it might be a different story. But, of course, anti-drug policy is about government contracts and controlling the economies of the third world. It is not about protecting children.
“Adelphiasophism does not have the absurd hatred that patriarchal religions have against homosexuality, and that is another way that the problem of overpopulation can be alleviated.”
What is this adelphiasophism? Or is its something that is on your webpages that I should have noticed, but have not, that I should just check out for myself rather than be so lazy and ask you for a summary? I have to admit that, with all the awful, terrible things that are happening in this world, it is all so predictable that Herr Ratzinger, has just about found time to condemn homsexuality and Harry Potter books before going skiing in the Alpes. I think that he was heard to mutter something about African poverty and the G8 on his way to the airport, but, of course, remains silent on child abuse by priests.
You would not like Adelphiasophism because it is a world view based on science, at least in the sense that we should not accept creeds but should test things for their truth.
“Of course, the general public associate homosexuality with pedophilia, though pedophiles are most usually heterosexual ’friends’ of the family, teachers or priests.”
I suspect that we will never know the extent of this hidden crime. It should be top priority for law enforcement and military intelligence.
“Pedophiles should be treated severely,…”
In my view, they should be imprisoned for life in special prisons. It doesn’t matter whether they can control it or it is their nature; they simply should not be permitted liberty. We cannot trust them to be at large. And if they kill their victims then should should be imprisoned for life in the same prisons reserved for extremely violent criminals. I guess then they will probably have very short prison sentences in that case!
I have read of a pedophile several years ago who pleaded to be chemically castrated, but the authorities would not do it. If that works in stopping them from abusing children, then I can see nothing wrong with it. They might be able to live useful lives.
“…but then so should pushers of hard drugs.”
On this I disagree. I think that all drugs should be legalised. But that is another topic…
Legalisation would remove the economic need for drug pushers, but any that remained trying to make unfortunates dependent on them as suppliers should still be treated severely.
“Both destroy the lives of innocent people. Given the chance we all become tyrants!”
That would make a great poster slogan for the liberals (with a picture of New Labour on the left and the Tories on the right.)
“The Montessori schools have a good reputation for young children, but they do not usually need motivating, unless they have been abused and are scared.”
I have to admit that I do not know much about these schools. I shall try to learn more…
“[Children] eventually [in school have] to be led to do some things they do not like. When I was a kid, I remember kids whose parents paid for them to have piano lessons. They hated having to stay in an extra hour two or three trimes a week but, I bet most of them are thankful they did. For my own part, though I enjoyed many of the subjects at school, there were some I hated like Latin, languages generally in fact, and modern history, and I was never fond of school as a whole. Even so, it must have been better than many modern schools where chaos is the king.”
I accept that children will need to learn things that they will find difficult to learn. My point is that, in a democratic society, the children should be involved in the decision making process about what they learn, so should parents, and so should teachers. That way they learn how to be adults in a democratic society.
“…unless someone has an ability at mathematics, perhaps a precocious one, how can we impress on to them the value of, say, integration, differentiation and deteminants? It has to be less compelling than football for most young boys.”
Agreed, but then again, forcing children to learn these things doesn’t impress their value on them either. Personally, I’m more in favour of bribing children in order to persuade them to do things that they do not want to do. But, all physical activity, including football, should be encouraged at school. It is healthy.
“The trouble is that free schools do not seem to have worked that well. But children respond to rules as long as they are perceived to be sensible. In the UK at the moment are some reality programmes about badly behaved kids at home, and mostly it is because they did not have clear rules and their parents are themselves pretty mixed up. The psychologists who advise on these programmes set rules and try to get the parents to apply them, and generally the kids respond. Kids are not savages, pace, Lord of the Flies. They like civilization and respond to it!”
I don’t think that the free schools have been given a fair chance. They are experimental and sometimes one has to accept that mistakes are made and experiments fail before something good emerges. The schools should be allowed to try new things. Diversity is the key because it reduces the harm that mistakes can cause by mixing things together and letting the children’s natural intelligence run its course. It’s not like the traditional education system has been a glowing success and it has had the full state sanction and plenty of resources. Of course, children like rules. They like to know where they stand and feel secure. But, if we aim to teach children how to be democratic citizens then they have to learn how to make decisions and how to negotiate rules. Children should be allowed to participate in the formulation and reform of school rules (as well as the rules at home). They should be included from as early an age as possible in making their own decisions, but, as adults, we have a responsibility to help them make the best decision, but not to impose it unless it is a matter of life or death.
“I quite agree that I am a realist, and can see that you are. That is the point. There are no rewards in pursuing a policy of unrealism.”
Yes, but it does not follow that we both have the same understanding of reality. On the basis of my understanding of reality it may well be the case that your understanding of reality is a figment of your imagination. On the basis of your understanding of reality, I have simply failed to understand reality.
Got to get back to the book now. So, to be continued…
In response to my statement of intent “…the main focus of my criticism of science is the scientific realist interpretation of science as providing knowledge of a mind-independent reality that remains untransformed by our interactions with it”, you replied:
“Certainly it is, but that is your opinion, and one that you accept is unverifiable or unfalsifiable. Moreover, you still think that science is useful, even though it is not what scientists think they are doing. Your criticism therefore gets a bit like some people’s belief in God. It makes you feel better that you know the truth, but it has no practical consequences.”
I really do not know what you mean. Are you saying that it is my opinion that my intention is to criticise scientific realism? That I do not know what my intention is? That my intention is unverifiable or unfalsifable? If so, then you have more in common with the postmoderns than you think. Death of the author, and all that, eh? But, I don’t think that you meant that. Is it my definition of scientific realism that you consider to be my unverifiable, unfalsifiable opinion? That would be odd because it is a common definition of scientific realism. One that scientific realists offer to describe their own position. So you can’t have meant that. So what did you mean? Do you know? Or was it more poor rhetoric? As I have said previously, at length, if the scientific realist claim that objective truth is discovered through experimental physics is not true, the utility of physics as a means of producing machines shows that physicists are engaged in a technoscience that is at the service of political economy, and nothing else. I think that whether physicists know what they are doing has enormous practical importance. If it my claim was true then physicists should stop doing physics immediately, rather than being the unreflective servants of their masters, or at least accept that they are engineers simply in it for the money and status.
Well, I shall have to accept my rhetoric was poor because what I meant is what you have just said, so I was jumping ahead to the criticism itself not commenting just on your statement of intent. I agree that your criticism implies what you say, if it is true, but that is what I am saying is your opinion. I have come to accept that you have a point that I cannot resolve so have to fall back on to those more abstract arguments of aesthetics and parsimony. I am inclined to accept with you that the modern big-science is looking less and less “scientific”, and possibly more and more like what you describe, but I find it ugly to have to think that we can mould reality almost unwittingly into machines in the way you suggest without realising what we are doing. The scientific explanation is all together easier to believe. As for the end of your paragraph, I think it might be true whether or not you are right about science, but since when would enough men refuse money offered to kill and destroy to make any difference to those offering it?
“…I do not really think that physics will ever answer all the questions that can be put to it, even if the scientific view is correct, at least until we become gods. Discovery of the way Nature works might precede godhead or extinction.”
Your imagination is running wild. Let us stick with the facts. You supposedly are in favour of doing that. At present, physicists cannot claim to know the objective truth about Nature and therefore it is questionable whether they can. At present, physicists are developing powerful machine prototypes for by the owners of an industrial technological society that is geared towards turning the majority of the world’s population into slaves for the benfit of a few families and individuals. As you said yourself,
“…whether science is based on scientific realism or machine modelling, I still maintain that what is done is not a decision of the scientists or machine moulders, but is a bribe offered by aggrandizers and governments. They dangle the cash for their indecent proposals, and inevitably volunteers appear willing to prostitute their skills. The change needed is for society only to have decent proposals for science.”
If you are concerned abou social justice then the foundation and function of sciences such as physics should be of paramount importance. Given that you are highly critical of the current political economy then you shouldn’t be merely offering rhetoric in support of the status quo and, hence, being are an apologist for the owners of the means of production of modern science.
I have spent some time in my life involved in political movement but simply discovered that tricksters infiltrate everything. Our rulers have the power and are genrally not idiots! In short, the masses are easily controlled, so inevitably you conclude you are opissing in the wind trying to get them to realise they are being used. It makes no difference whether the tool of the rulers is religion of supposed political parties. The rulers control them but the plebs cannot see it in enough numbers to make any difference, and the reason is that the rulers have even privileged the masses in the west at the expense of the poor everywhere else. So, all I have is rhetoric, but that is all you have too. Our difference is over the use made of science. I think it would be useful if it were used properly, but you see it only as a tool of the exploiters, of no use at all to the people, and worthy only of abandonment.
“You say it is erroneous then repeat it. I quoted what you said which was ’we cannot separate the being for which knowledge is intelligible from the way that knowledge is produced, without making that knowledge completely unintelligible as knowledge’, and your further explanation of it is ’knowledge that is intelligible to a group of human beings, trained and educated in particular ways, within particular societies and cultures, in order for that knowledge to be intelligible as knowledge’, and ’you have to understand the context within which Socrates could make that knowledge claim in order for that claim to be intelligible’. It applies, just as I said it does, to all knowledge, including Rogersism.”
What I said was erroneous was your claim that, “all knowledge that is passed from its originator to others is separated from the way it was produced and so must be unintelligible, according to this precept,” because this sollipcism is simply false. I did not say that “knowledge that is passed from its originator to others is separated from the way it was produced” and so must be unintelligible. You did.
That is what the statements I repeated like, “we cannot separate the being for which knowledge is intelligible from the way that knowledge is produced, without making that knowledge completely unintelligible as knowledge” sounded like to me.
What I said is that, if we are to understand knowledge, we must examine the context in which that knowledge is produced. Otherwise it is abstract and unintelligible. Scientific realists make the error of abstracting scientific knowledge from its technological context of production and hence they fall into all the philosophical problems that their position holds. They are left with unintelligible claims that they ultimately are left with appeals to utility or intuition to support. Alternatively, what I said was that human beings are social beings, that use public language. By emerging ourselves in the same social contexts we can understand each other and thus, participating in an ongoing project, situated in history, such as experimental physics, we come to have specialised meanings and knowledge. An awareness of this shows us that activities such as experimental physics are historically situated and social activities for which scientific discourse (including knowledge claims and theoretical representations) has specific functions and meanings. To separate that discourse and abstract it into a series of facts and theories removes meaning and function from that discourse and misrepresents it. If you are going to quote me, then please do so accurately. Now, as you said, it might well apply to all knowledge, I accept that possibility. Hence, it is even more important that we adopt a critical stance against the abstraction and reification of scientific discourse, whilst they neglect the historical context of production from which such discourse is emergent and fedback into.
Analysis depends upon the notion that there are common elements in things that we can discover. Whether I dig a hole with picks and shovels or with a knife and fork, I shall find the same things in it, rocks, clay and roots. If I found different things with knives and forks from picks and shovels, then you would be right, and that is, presumably what you are getting at in the sense of big science again, with its supercolliders and so on. Maybe there are problems of analysis when the tools put things in the hole that were not originally there and so I accept your criticism that big science might not be as simple to analyse as Nature as small science. Are you, though, extrapolating from your perceptions of big science to the small scall unjustifiably, and so criticising “science” when you are really criticising the modern extensions of it, and their methods and assumptions. You say you have yet to extend your criticism to sciences outside of pure physics. Maybe that is what is needed to be convincing.
“Now, while your ’scientific realists’ do claim to be finding out things about objective reality, the context they take it out of, in your presentation of it, is not a singular one. The point of it is that an actual phenomenon of Nature will be found in different contexts, and its properties would generally have to be consistent from one context to the next.”
As the title of my book, On the Metaphysics of EXPERIMENTAL PHYSICS, might have suggested, it was discussing experimental physics and the aspects of reality that experimental physicists engage with. The context within which experimental physicists operate in in a laboratory, using machines, that are historically situated, is the context that scientific realists neglect and ignore. It is the why that physics is really done that is ignored by many scientific realists. Moreover, I paid considerable focus in my book to phenomena that are only found in the laboratory, such as superfluids, for example, and showed how these entities could only be understood in terms of their technological history.
“It is something you have a lot of difficulty with in your own theory because you have to posit transferability of these phenomena as objects along the ’genetic lines’ of, or— in case the genes cannot ensure it— across the ’boundaries’ between, machine families. This confusions serves as an argument. The ’scientific realist’ explanation is not seriously challenged by all this verbiage.”
Now I am sorry that you found my efforts to be verbage. But that is your problem not mine. It seems to me that you have, once again, simply misunderstood something and then adopted the arrogant position that there must be something wrong with the argument because it has confused you. You make the same criticism of Heidegger. Yet it is obvious from your previous comments that you haven’t really ever bothered to try to engage with Heidegger, in English or German. You also criticise Feyerabend, yet, by your own admission, you haven’t even read any of his books. It seems that for you, prejudice serves as evidence.
I still class myself among normal human beings and not among the superhumans or the gods, so often I have to be satisfied with samples of the works available in the world, or the opinions of others I have found reliable in the past. It is a feature of being human that we do not need to learn everything new, but can learn from others. Anyway, for good or ill, I have to do it, but evidently you do not. It gets to be too easy for you eggheads to cast aside a criticism on the grounds that the critic has misunderstood the pearls flowing from the pen of the god, but it is a poor god that cannot make himself understood, a point I have made before about philosophers, and it is no god but a crook who pretends that his pearls are too pure for anyone else to grasp. The master confuses concepts and mixes metaphors then blames it on to the student. Let is rest until you are willing to clarify it as that this transferability across machine familes by genes or emigration is nebulous, and might be a weakness.
“I accept the criticism that I should have read the book more carefully, but still contend that you were not as thorough as you think in defining your terms, and you will, perhaps, since you do not aim to seem arrogant, allow for the fact that you have devoted several years of your life to this subject, while I am reading it for the first time. that is why I am being sarcastic in speaking of your X-ray intellect.”
I put it to you, that if you do not want to seem to be arrogant, that it might be better to assume that when reading something unfamiliar to you that it is possible that you haven’t understood something that might be clearer on a more careful reading (given that you seemed to have missed an entire section which defined the words episteme and techne, which lead you to have a confused understanding of the adjectives epistemic and techneic) or if you took the trouble to question the author about it rather than insult him. In my opinion, it certainly would be less arrogant to avoid accusing me of defining words in order to suit my purposes and fit square pegs into round holes, as well as misprepresenting my arguments when they raise points that problematise your own position. The reason why I brought up the dictionary (including the Oxford English Dictionary and Etymological Dictionary, both of which are referenced in the footnotes) was to point out that my “jargon” was actually taken from a widely available English dictionary, as well as Aristotle and Plato. The term “alethic modality” (which is defined at the point of usage in my book) is well known to linguists and logicians, and I simply use to to explain how the knowledge produced through physics is alethic knowledge rather than epistemic knowledge (as presumed by traditional philosophers of science). There was nothing underhand or esoteric about this usage. It also seems to me, given that my book is based on a PhD thesis, that my examiners seem to have felt that my terms were sufficiently defined. As did the editor and two academic reviewers for the publisher. X-ray intellect is not necessary to read my book. Reading skills, patience, and an open mind is all that is required.
The people you speak of are all professionals in this field of yours, I presume, and so have spent the best part of their lives getting familiar with these things. I have made my criticisms and suggestions, and you are entitled to reject them, but you might consider whom this shows to be arrogant. I freely admit to arrogance in answering many of the Christians who write to me with their absurd beliefs, but I did not consider myself arrogant towards you, unless it is arrogant to criticise you at all. It is all very well having an X-ray intellect, but not much use if you cannot use it to make a popularisation of your work comprehendable. I am telling you that it is still too technical to be popular, even if it is true. What you need to do is to make it accessible, and the best vehicle for it might be a series of articles in an education journal like the one you are working for in some capacity at present. You might find it difficult simply because it seems too easy to you either out of familiarity or X-ray intellect or both. Shooting a messenger will not make it more understandable to its audience.
