

If you believe in science you're doing it wrong - juddgrass
http://worldofweirdthings.com/2009/10/10/if-you-believe-in-science-youre-doing-it-wrong/

======
drewcrawford
Suppose physics runs its course, and millenia from now we have discovered a
single, elegant equation that solves everything--it traces the whole history
of the universe--all the particles and reactions from the big bang up to the
chair that you're sitting in now.

"Physics is done!" reads the abstract. "We can all go home now."

At the conference where this is all presented, some lone undergrad student
standing in the back asks "Why _this_ equation? Why does _this_ combination of
terms describe the universe, and so many others don't?"

You can try to address this question with religion, or "belief", or Dawkins-
esque philosophy, or you can choose not to address it at all. But you can't
answer it with science. Science has a clear and definite end, and that end
does not give us the "why" of the universe, only the "how". You can say "There
is no why", but that is still an answer to a question that science does not
answer.

Speaking purely subjectively, I don't view the "why" (or its absence) as
unimportant simply because it can't be addressed purely on scientific terms.

~~~
Helianthus16
1) There are a number of physics equations that generalize physical equations
--Lagrangian mechanics. (IANAP, but I have a physicist friend.)

2) It is a misconception that physics can trace the whole history of the
universe, or even any part of it. The Holy Grail Unified Theory is not a full
descriptor of our universe, it is a full descriptor of the _forces_ of our
universe.

3) There's something in your language that makes me feel like you're not
really tackling the question completely. "Speaking purely subjectively" might
be part of it--as if one can speak purely objectively.

Maybe it's just that _no_ system could ever adequately answer that question.
Why anything? Why doesn't the universe not exist? The question itself is
temptingly meaningful, but ultimately empty, since it itself is part of the
universe. I don't even know how to begin constructing the universe's not
existing in my mind.

So it's not a fault of science that it does not answer that question. It at
least has the wisdom not to try.

~~~
drewcrawford
>So it's not a fault of science that it does not answer that question.

Similarly, it's not the question's fault that science cannot answer it.

I say "subjectively" because it is not an objective fact that the question has
value or is meaningful. Clearly, you and many others view it as "empty". I
don't. In that sense the value or utility of the question is subjective.

~~~
Helianthus16
I don't particularly view it as empty, I just think it lies outside the
framework of practicality.

It's like asking about the nature of hobbits. (Actually, this does have
practical provenance in certain circles, but let's try to overlook that for a
bit.) Hobbit qualities can be essentially whatever we want them to be, so
their precise nature only matters insofar as they reflect our desires. We
desire to hold true to Tolkien's vision, so we accept his details as truth and
might extrapolate a bit here and there.

That doesn't mean the question has any bearing on reality.

Similarly, I could ask, why isn't there a force that could destroy our reality
retroactively, eating through space and time a la the Nothing of the Never-
Ending Story?

And the answer is more or less, if it happened, we would know (or rather, not
know anymore) by now. The question assumes that there could be such a thing.

I suppose I view "Why doesn't the universe not exist?" in the same light.

------
tel
My take: the author has a conflation of data and models; a conflation which
serves to totally hide the question at hand: the value and interpretation of
this body of work we call Science.

I'd think most follow epistemologies that allow for the value of data: things
you see, touch, taste, measure, or otherwise experience have an informative
effect upon you and are (so far in human history, I hope and, in absence of
omniscience, believe) consistent.

Science _is not data_ though. It goes one step further and seeks to compress
observation via generation of models. Or to take the other side of the debate,
it seeks to unearth the generating rules of our universe. It thus is a process
of turning informative data into — well — something not too different from
belief. In any case, it seems strongly motivated (to our pattern seeking minds
anyway) by that aforementioned consistency: _something_ seems to be afoot.
Here's how we can find what that is. Then the question is "what does it
mean?".

Though, by Popperian philosophy you're safe right here, right? So long as your
models provide verisimilitude to your experience (ie. accurately predict it)
then they have value — lets not take it any further, now. The question is
avoided by taking an interpretation where it doesn't even exist.

When someone says they believe in science, they're probably coming from a a
certain class of interpretation. They may believe that science is a viable
process to generate verisimilitudinous statements. They may believe that
science is capable of fully divulging the rules which, axiomatically, created
our reality. They may believe that science is the careful interpretation of
the will of Some Kind of Divinity.

And, who knows, perhaps all three of those interpretations are equally valid,
deeply identical, or too blurred by our imprecise understanding and language
(Wittgenstein stood here, I _think_ ). I feel a great deal of desire to side
with this philosophical point of view; and so I'm spending the most energy
being skeptical with it.

\---

Anyway, a lot of really smart people have spent a lot of energy trying to
settle their minds with this question if not answer it. I hardly think you can
do science without somehow coming to peace with _that_. The author doesn't
seem to want to go there though, and that's fair when battling someone who's
really disagreeing _all the way back_ on the consistency of the world bit.
Without that, you can't even have the reductionism that science depends on.

I'm curious to pore through Popper, Hoffstaedter, Gauss (Jaynes too I
suppose), Wittgenstein, and Peirce hoping to see what they all thought about
it, though.

------
jmillikin
Science is a belief because, just like magic, there's no greater force to
appeal to. It's a belief I subscribe to, because it appears to be much more
useful than magic, but it remains a belief.

Think about it: how would you prove that "science" itself is correct? My
answer is "it accurately predicts (and optionally explains) what effect
certain actions will have on the future". But this answer is question-begging;
it assumes that prediction is useful, which is a scientific belief. To a
magical thinker, it seems just as silly as "reciting a paragraph from this
book will protect me from illness" does to us.

Magical thinking is fundamentally based on a distrust of prediction.
Homeopathy has never cured any condition (excluding dehydration), yet magical
thinkers try it because they think it'll work for them. Nobody has ever
survived fasting for over a year, yet every few months there's another story
in the news about somebody who starved to death after deciding to live on
sunshine.

I think the modern world, in which we regularly live to 100 and have literally
walked on the moon, is a result of science -- but I can't prove that. After
all, the concept of "proof" is itself scientific, so it can't be used to argue
against magic.

~~~
naradaellis
I would suggest that you read the article.

------
Helianthus16
Meh. The whole question/controversy is just confusion about the word belief.

Statements in our minds can sometimes be accepted axiomatically--that is, what
you believe to be true about reality. We need a way to comment on reality's
qualities.

In this sense, "belief in science" can roughly be translated as, "belief that
whatever science reveals is true re: our reality."

(It's actually all statistics, which means that we're only _excluding_ things
from admittance into what we accept as true about our reality. Belief in
science, then, is belief that only that which is detectable exists.)

So the article misses the point anyway; science doesn't _grant_ proof, it
grants a process for disproof and allows us to believe in what's left over.

------
naradaellis
Supplementary reading:
<http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/49/2/Religion.htm>

Feynman on The Relation of Science and Religion.

------
edanm
Science explains a lot of things. But Science is limited.

Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, and don't even talk about the
same issues (most of the time). There is a certain amount of faith people have
when doing science, for example answering the "meta" question: Do the rules of
the Universe stay constant? Science has no way of answering that question, nor
should it. It _assumes_ the answer is yes, and takes it from there. Gravity
could stop working tomorrow, and it wouldn't invalidate all of the science
that had gone on.

------
natmaster
... he's seems to be becoming those exact books he flipped through - giving
philosophical (Naturalism) arguments AND conclusions I think a lot of us (at
least me) came to as (or before) teenagers.

And yet, he has yet to realize the nature of science is not to know - because
our senses ARE faulty - but as a practical TOOL to make our lives a little
easier. Seeing a blue sky and then thinking there is a blue sky IS belief, no
matter how many people agree with you, and independent of that belief's
utility.

------
brisance
How did this get upvoted? tldr; author "dismisses" science and argues for
solipsism.

~~~
Groxx
Re: solipsism (start of 4th paragraph):

> _When we step down from their mental ivory towers and really think about it,
> the assertion that science is just a belief or another way of creating
> dogmas is monstrously stupid._

ie, if you _can't_ "know" anything (solipsism), you can only _believe_ in
science. In which case, You're Doing It Wrong™.

------
DanielBMarkham
Meh. He missed the point.

It's not that you can't know anything, and so you can put anything you want in
there. It's that 1) some things are beyond knowing, and 2) all science is
provisional. These two things mean that creatively explaining the unknown has
a rich and critical part in our existence.

He's presenting a false dichotomy. Yes, some folks will use religion to tell
you why the sun comes up, but that doesn't mean all religious belief systems
are invalid.

Religious beliefs are simply shared creative responses to the unknown. In this
sense, they are about as close to the _theory-formation_ part of science as
anything can be. The difference is that theory-formation in science occurs
inside a highly structured system of other theories and rules and
observations, while religious explanations can just be made up by anybody.

I get tired of this "post-modernists think there is nothing solid" nonsense.
Yes, some of them got the title but missed the subtext. But the point of
understanding the provisional nature of science isn't to somehow discredit it,
it's to keep in mind how much more there is to discover. You can be highly-
critical of the political nature of how science is conducted, as I am, and
still be a huge supporter of the practice and continuation of theory and
research. Knowing the difference between the philosophy of science, the
politics of the practice of science, the epistemological nature of science,
and the pattern of scientific revolution? In my opinion, this is when you
first start having a clue about what all these debates about science mean.

We've come a long way since Descartes and his brain in a jar. The conversation
isn't at that point any more.

