A new philosophy of Science
On this page I elaborate on some of the implications of the ideas outlined in my “Theism and the logic of evolution” article for the philosophy of science.
Perhaps the most important aspect of this approach is that it treats ideas (or mental objects) on an equal footing with physical objects and phenomena. Ideas therefore do not live in a world that is separate and superior or aloof from the empirical world. Instead, ideas themselves are just as empirical as the physical objects they designate. They are constructed from interactions of neuro-transmitters, ion channels and electric impulses traveling down the spines of axons and must be subjected to the same laws as everything else. From a memetic perspective our theories are objects that are special only in that we use them as tools to understand other objects. But in all ways the theories themselves must obey the same rules as everything else. A truly general science must include itself within its scope.
Perhaps the greatest obstacle to accepting this approach is the long standing Western cultural delusion of having access to “knowledge.” We insist on believing that through our world of thought we have access to “truth“. Our thinking faculty and our (purportedly unique and “magical”) consciousness apparently allow us to perceive “facts“.
I believe that “truth” and “fact” are purely psychological features of our world view. The only notion that has a well defined, objective meaning is the notion of “belief.” This is easily seen by pointing out that there is not a single “fact” that has stood the test of time. Even analytic statements such as “All bachelors are un-married.” are not as static and unmoved as commonly thought. These are definitions of terms, of notions and words. But these only have a meaning in a brain capable of understanding them. Such brains have not been around for most of the existence of the universe. Moreover even if they had been, there were long periods in the history of life on Earth when sexual reproduction did not exist, not to mention monogamous species to whom the notion of a marriage ritual could apply in the first place.
The fact that our (human) thought is often trapped within the meanings that words and notions have for us prevents us from seeing that these notions exist only within the confines of our nervous tissue and our limited lifespan, whether as individuals or as species. The special relationship between the notions of “bachelor” and of “unmarried man” seems solid and unshakable only because we have chosen to ignore, for the purpose of terminological analysis, the fact that the meanings and relevance of the notions of “bachelor”, “marriage” and “man” are fragile and ultimately conditioned by a biological and social context in continuous flux. Selective ignorance for purposes of analysis is what I refer to in the article mentioned above as the uniquely human skill of abstraction, a skill which we humans have evolved over time as an adaptation. Just as it has evolved, it will probably continue to evolve, and the monolithic and permanent aspect of the statement will inevitably turn out to be only an illusion.
I therefore must come to the same conclusion as the French mathematician René Thom: “Ce qui limite le vrai n’est pas le faux mais l’insignifiant” or “The limits of truth are set not by falsehood but by irrelevance.” The relevance of terms in any definition or other semantic or analytic truth, and thereby the definition itself, has a scope limited in space and time, as the world is in continuous flux.
After this short discussion of semantic truth, I now come to scientific truth.
For over two thousand years challenging the idea that our world is Euclidean was the surest way to discredit oneself and commit professional suicide. That the Universe is Euclidean was a “fact”, it was pure, inalterable “truth”. Today we know better, and it is likely that in the future we will know even better. Truth is always eventually exposed as what it really is: belief, in spite of the fact that each time this happens we humans prefer to tell ourselves that we made a mistake in this one case rather than admit that “truth” and “fact” themselves are delusions.
In my view, “belief” is the currency of rational thought.
Consequently, science should be seen as a set of beliefs which are temporarily consistent with observations. In this view, therefore, there is no such thing as scientific “truth”. At best, science may be seen as a coherent set of rational beliefs.
At the end of the article mentioned above I made reference to a new, non deductive logic, where truth does not emanate from some “axioms” and then propagate to other statements known as theorems. I proposed the idea of truth propagating in more diffuse networks possibly containing loops, without a clear tree structure. I was not aware that this approach already exists, and it has given birth to a large and fertile body of work in a field known as belief networks, or Bayesian networks.
But science aims to be a representation of the physical world. Even though we often tend to see it as a description of the world itself, it only encapsulates our understanding of it. But if science is a large belief network, then what may be said about the physical world itself? Is it likely that the world is very different from the way we understand it? I would conjecture that in fact it is very close.
There are some indications that the physical world itself functions according to the rules of belief propagation as well. For historical reasons, however, in physics, the term “belief” is replaced with “information”. We do not have a “physics of belief” but a “physics of information.” When they interact, objects exchange information (among other things like energy and momentum). This is most clearly formulated in Frieden’s remarkable work, “Science from Fisher information“.
My philosophical approach therefore views the world of ideas and the world of objects as two belief (or information flow) networks working in parallel and interacting through the touch points known as “sensory information” or its more refined form, “experimental data”.
Science itself is thereby no longer disconnected from the physical universe and outside or aloof from it, living in a platonic world of ideas. Ideas exist but they are far from platonic. They are living, evolving along with us and with the Universe. Science is therefore part of the physical world, just another information flow network, like everything else.
