Bruno,
please read my italic comments between your lines.
Thanks for Stathis to rush to my rescue (reductionsm),
Stathis wrote:
Reductionism means breaking something up into simpler parts to explain it. What's wrong with that?
I will try to write my own version, a bit (not much) different.
John
----- Original Message -----
From: Bruno Marchal
To: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2007 10:45 AM
Subject: Re: Evidence for the simulation argument - and Thanks and a dumb question.
Le 10-mars-07, à 18:42, John M a écrit :
I don't deny the usefulness of science (even if it is reductionist) ...
How could science be reductionist? Science is the art of making hypotheses enough clear so as to make them doubtable and eventually testable.
My take on "reductionist" is to 'reduce' the observation to a boundary-enclosed "model" as our choice. It is a necessity for us, because we are not capable to encompass the totality and all its ramifications into our mind's work at once. Reduced (reductionist ) view is the way how humanity gathered our knowledge of the world. (Probably other animals do the same thing at their mind-level).
What I see here - and thank you, Bruno, for it, - you are using a more advanced view of science than what I referred to as the conventional - historic, topically fragmented "sciences" of old. Where e.g. physics is based on the 'primitive' physical (material) worldview and biology is what Darwin visualized.
Reductionist sciences established our technology. You use it, I use it. We just start to 'think' beyond it.
*
No scientist will ever say there is a primitive physical universe or an ultimate God, or anything like that. All theories are hypothetical, including "grandmother's one when asserting that the sun will rise tomorrow. The roots of our confidence in such or such theories are complex matter.
I wish we had more of "your" scientists. Academia as a general establishment is not so advanced yet.
Don't confuse science with the human approximation of it. Something quite interesting per se, also, but which develops itself.
Lobian approximations of it are also rich of surprise, about "oneself".
Now this is exactly what I mean. I would like to read a definition of 'science' as you formulate it. Then again: how many 'scientists' have ever heard of a Lobian m?
We are living here (list) in a vacuum and I was talking non-vacuum.
*
"Science" or better, the scientific attitude, invites us to listen to what the machine can say and dream of, nowadays. How could such an invitation be reductionist?
Here we go again: is the 'machine' superhuman? does it tell us things beyond our comprehension? How? "We" (Loeb etc.) invented and outlined it and its functionality. How can it be beyond those limits?
*
I would say science is modesty. It is what makes faith necessary and possible.
"Faith" in what? Not in 'hearsay', not in Alice-land, not in (really) reduced models of age-old worldviews. The 'supernatural' is a cop-out for the modesty to say:
"I know not" .
*
With comp, when science or reason grows polynomially (in a trip from G to G* for example), then faith "has to" grow super-exponentially.
I hope you have (Mark's) PLAIN ENGLISH TRANSLATION to that in non-mathematico lingo.
*
Bruno
regards
John
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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Received on Sun Mar 11 2007 - 16:07:56 PDT