*!"Do You Believe in Science?"!*

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Just don't be to widely general looking to a whole measurable purpose of science.

Just consider something like the the movement of celestial bodies in solar system. We now can predict them very accurately, with more precision than ever. We had to switch paradigms several times to get this results, as relativity has an effect on Mercury orbit. Being able to perform these paradigm shift is a strengh of science, not a weakness.

I don't have to talk about purpose of knowing this. Personnaly I don't care much of the exact position of mercury in the sky. GPS would not work without understanding relativity effect, and I imagine GPS has a positive impact on economy, so on our lives. But I know one could argue about that.

The point is : this prove science works very well in this case. And there is many other examples in many different fields. These are observable facts. Of course, you can ignore them if you want.

This does not mean science is all powerfull on every subject. For example, as I already written, science can't prove anything about nature of reality itself.
There is also very little known about how life began on earth, as this is discussed in this thread and others.



Researchers are the very first to ask themselves this question.

Of course sometimes there are scientific mystakes, falsified results, or errors that propagates unchecked because supported by someone considered as very good in his subject.

A typical bad science case is when religious or political considerations take priority over facts. A well know one is Lysenko's work. This has provoqued famines in Soviet Union and China.
Lysenkoism (wikipedia).

I obviously didn't make myself clear; i mean that it may be science's belief that to arrive at truth one must eliminate the subjective, all "values" etc , which is its most powerful and at same time most destructive contribution to society.

Society under science's tutelage has learned to eliminate values and meaning. (........EDIT. Totally wrong, as Strange points out. Increasingly extreme standards of objectivity produce even more unadulterated subjectivity. Action-Reaction )

Last edited by ouinon on 03 Mar 2008, 6:54 am, edited 3 times in total.

I voted yes.

Um...the advances of Newton about classical mechanics? Neils Bohr on quantum mechanics? Einstein on relativity and mass-energy equivalence? Richard Feynman on Quantum Electrodynamics? Darwin on Evolution? Kepler on the orbits? Peter Agre on the aquaporin? Mendel on genetics? etc. These are just arbitrary examples, I could go on for hours. How can you claim that we don't understand the world more than we did 2000 years ago? That's insane.



No it hasn't, that's just the party line of the religious right. If anything, science has taught us that there is more to the world that meets the eye, that we must not accept specious concepts at face value, and humility that we are a mere speck in the cosmos.

I don't know that much beyond what I learned in High School, but theory has changed regarding the atom since Dalton:

Dalton's atom:

Thompson's atom:

The atom is no longer "indivisible".

Rutherford's atom:

Electrosphere is introduced.

Bohr's atom:

Electric valences and energy ~ photons

Heisenberg's atom:

Electron cloud- wave/particle duality and the uncertainty principle.

Atomic Nucleus is divisible (which contradicts Dalton's theory): Subatomic particles

***

These are scientific "truths" aka facts that have changed over time. Dalton was very important, as was Thompson, Rutherford etc for the contribuitions that they made, bbut nodody sees the atom as anymore. It's outdated.

Last edited by SilverProteus on 01 Mar 2008, 11:40 am, edited 1 time in total.

SilverProteus is right as to science's evolution concerning our knowledge of the atom. At one point it was thought to be an elementary particle, though now we know that it is composed of even smaller building blocks.

From wikipedia, on Obselete scientific theory:

For examples.

I don't claim that. I point out that there is no way of knowing whether we have a better understanding of how the world works now than 2000 years ago.

There is nobody who knows everything about the way the world works to tell us if for instance the way we lived pre-agriculture showed a better understanding of how the world works, or not. Or that for instance all discoveries made by removing subjective values from the equation produce results which are so "wrong" that they lead us into disaster. It entirely depends on what you believe about the universe whether you think we understand it more and more with each scientific discovery or not.

Are you sure that it has taught you that?

Society is not under science's tutelage. Science is part of society. It is a powerful part because very efficient, but this is rarely at scientific level that final decision are taken. Just see how science can be ignored by a good part of population, including politicians.

You could say the same sentence with anything.

- Society under religion's tutelage has learned to eliminate values and meaning.
Inquisition, religious war, recent and past fanatism of any major religions.

- Society under politic's tutelage has learned to eliminate values and meaning.
Easy one : communism, facism. Yet people have not learned yet not to let a random guy think in their place.

- Society under economic's tutelage has learned to eliminate values and meaning.
I'm quite sure I don't have to explain you this one.

- Society under media's tutelage has learned to eliminate values and meaning.
You are in France too. Just watch TV at 20h. News are so badly analysed, with only show and emotions (mostly fear) taken into account... That's plain manipulation. (I don't have television.)

- Society under art's tutelage has learned to eliminate values and meaning.
One (not me) could argue this about conceptual art or Le Corbusier architecture.

- Society under philosophy's tutelage has learned to eliminate values and meaning.
Ok, here I'm joking. Philosophy ruling the world has not happened yet. You don't want it to happen! This utopia would surely be the worst item of my list.

The Inquisition is a good example of extreme ideology/set of values.... which believed it was objective....like communism.
As regimes run by groups believing their values are objective are not restricted to the past, and Modern Scientific method is present to some extent in all these countries, i have to accept that science does not inevitably or even consistently entail the elimination or suppression of meaning and value. It may depend on what it's up against,...OR.....

it may be like that pithy saying; " For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction."

The more science eliminates/denies the subjective the more violently it crops up elsewhere in a form eliminating/denying/lacking all objectivity.


I wasn't sure in what way you meant that economics either eliminated or encouraged the existence of value and meaning. And I didn't think that the media or art counted as philosophies/positions/ideological approaches within the meaning of this discussion.

It's all greek to me.

Thank you for your post, Strange. It's really got me thinking about how these movements go in waves, as if in reaction to each other. ( yin-yang , equal & opposite) eg: The Inquisition was launched almost immediately after Columbus's experiment almost/sort of proved the world was round.

Last edited by ouinon on 01 Mar 2008, 5:41 pm, edited 7 times in total.

I have faith in science. It's been pretty successful and accurate most of the time.

What if it were true that the more society pursues pure objectivity ( in the form of modern science) the more ( pursuit of ) unadulterated subjectivity there is?

( like the Tao says "Being and non-being create each other. "and "When people see some things as good other things become bad" and "Long and short define each other"and "High and low depend on each other" etc).

In other words it is like considerations re energy, pollution, etc.

"How much is pure objectivity worth to society? Are we prepared for, or even capable of, dealing with the increase in pure subjectivity that it entails/creates?"

Yes, we certainly understand the Universe more than we did many years ago, but the thing is, with each new discovery and breakthrough many more questions are produced. We, as a scientific species, know more than we did a long time ago, but in the big scheme of things and the universe, we do not know that much more.



Yes, it has. I can admire the beauty of a flower or a blue sky and I am able to appreciate it on an aesthetic level beyond what a scientifically-illiterate person would. To deepen your understanding of the world, in my experience, also deepens your appreciation for it.

You believe that; I don't.

.......PS: Sorry, EDITED, before saw/at same time as, sojournertruth's post, because i thought i was just repeating stuff i'd already said, and better, earlier in thread.

I believe that in pursuing objectivity science increases the pursuit of subjectivity, and the sum total of truth/clarity/understanding about the world may in fact be reduced by this division of forces.

Last edited by ouinon on 02 Mar 2008, 7:30 am, edited 6 times in total.

Well, there are billions more people, so certianly there are more questions being asked. The questions are different, now, too; rather than, 'why is the sky blue,' it's 'what is the fundamental nature of light (particle vs. wave) and how do fluctuations in (sub)subatomic particles affect the behavior of atoms and molecules? The questions have gotten deeper. Furthermore, while any one person may carry the same quantity of knowledge as a person 1000 years ago (and, given the evidence that schooling and mental challenges actually increase a person's IQ and allow them to learn more, that is doubtful), but (again) there are more people and the sum total of human knowledge is larger. In addition, there is recorded knowledge that we can access at will: extra-cranial knowledge, if you will, that increases the knowledge-body still further.

As far as scientific hubris goes, I too find myself more humbled the more I learn. I think that people who want to 'let the mystery be,' are sometimes the ones who actually are more arrogant because if they refuse to look at what is actually there, then they can pretend that it is whatever they want. If you look, you often find out that you were wrong, and you often find more questions than you started with. Scientists look at the world with a sense of openness and wonder - with curiosity. The world-as-it-is is more awesome, by far, than the world-as-imagined because our puny human brains simply don't have imaginations big enough.

How do you know that these questions are "deeper"? That is a value judgement, a question of belief. Higher IQ is no guarantee of better understanding, as far as I am aware.

Before books, etc, people had access to "recorded knowledge" in the environment around them.

A group of europeans visited a tribe in africa a few years ago to ask if some of them would come to France to make a film, and at one point the tribal chief told a story, after which he asked the europeans to tell one. One of them eventually volunteered and began fumbling his way through some personal history. At the end the chief said that he saw that the europeans had no homeland, and so HAD to carry their ancestors in their heads. He thought that this was a great burden. And it looked like one.

Asking questions is not exclusive to science. Objectivity is no guarantee of understanding, or appreciation. And "objectivity" is itself a category of thought, a product of value judgements about the nature of the world, and our relationship with it.

I think i experience the world, including my mind, as most puny when i lose touch with how immense that inside world is. Sometimes i catch a glimpse of that awesomeness. And realise that it is as "big", if not bigger, than the world outside of my eyes. I am in fact blown away by the extent and detail of that world in there. Like in "The Last Battle" by C S Lewis, ( Further up, further in", an even bigger and better Narnia than the one outside. Multiplied by n.)

Last edited by ouinon on 02 Mar 2008, 4:10 am, edited 4 times in total.