Curt Doolittle

Theme: Science

  • METAPHYSICS VS SCIENCE (worth reading) –“Curt, loved your brief defense of prax

    METAPHYSICS VS SCIENCE

    (worth reading)

    –“Curt, loved your brief defense of praxeology earlier on (below). This is off subject but like Katherine, I too am curious in what way metaphysics failed and science is now close to triumph. An example or two please? We can go off line if you like.”– Pat

    Pat,

    This is the largest and most controversial topic in philosophy. And I find that I lose pretty much everyone when I try to address it. So I don’t think I can do it in a couple of examples. I can given an analogy between the problems of constructive/intuitional­ mathematics, the requirements for scientific argument (which are moral constraints actually), the problem of inconstant relations in economics, and the difference between truth and proof. And that forms a basic language for discussion.

    Since that conversation requires a pretty exhaustive knowledge of multiple disciplines It seems that the argument is quite hard to make even if done in long form.

    BUT TRYING ANYWAY

    The best I can do is state that imagination can only be tested by action – external correspondence. And our understanding of of our actions tested by internal consistency. And the veracity of our internal consistency by our understanding of construction. As such, our logical methods allow us to construct instruments which assist us in testing correspondence, internal consistency, and construction. Albeit, while internal consistency can be expressed in complete terms, neither external correspondence nor construction can be.

    Without such instruments to extend our perception, memory, and calculability, we lack the ability of sufficient introspection, and the ability of sufficient external perception, to perceive the internal and external world, at the SCALE of those action that we require for cooperating in large numbers, in a vast division of knowledge and labor – the sum of which constantly reduces the cost in calories and time of the production of goods and services which serve our reproductive interests and perpetuation as a species.

    This is why ratio-scientific societies outperform magian and allegorical societies: because the constancy of their efforts in correspondence with physical and social reality allows them to take better advantage of physical reality and to cooperate at scale for the production of goods and services.

    So, since the above statements effectively reflect the scientific method, then the scientific method is not constrained to ‘science’ per say, but it is the only method by which we can improve our actions. ergo: the scientific method is ‘the method’ of philosophy.

    Now, this does not mean that allegorical language (mysticism, religion, mythology, the narrative) have no pedagogical value. They do because we cannot teach the young any other way. It does not mean that Obscurant language (deception) such as is used by the continentals as a means of maintaining loading and framing, and therefore simply preserving christianity and authoritarianism in new form, is impossible or will not succeed in achieving those desires.

    It does mean that achieving those desires through obscurantism, deception, framing other than by means of correspondence, will produce negative economic, social and political consequences, because of their failure to correspond to reality.

    -Curt

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-19 07:57:00 UTC

  • False theories are different from incomplete theories

    http://phys.org/news/2014-01-einstein-wrong.html#jCpAgreed. False theories are different from incomplete theories.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-16 08:45:00 UTC

  • REALITY IS MORE LIMITED THAN IMAGINATION: THE MORAL NATURE OF TRUTH IN THE LOGIC

    REALITY IS MORE LIMITED THAN IMAGINATION: THE MORAL NATURE OF TRUTH IN THE LOGICS AND SCIENCES

    1) We can mathematically represent more relations than can exist in reality.

    And we can state more things than we can demonstrate correspond with reality. And we can suggest more means and ends of cooperation than can be organized in reality.

    2) Set theoretic axioms assist us in making internally consistent statements. But they may or may not correspond to reality.

    3) Tests of internal consistency reduce error. But since truth means and must mean correspondence, only external consistency (correspondence) is a test of truth.

    4) The value of our imagination, followed by our logical systems is in reducing the cost of testing our ideas about reality.

    5) The comparative value (goodness or less good, or even badness) of our spectrum of different logical systems, from:

    i) the functionally descriptive, to

    ii) the logically descriptive to

    iii) the historically descriptive to;

    iv) the mythically allegorical, and finally to;

    v) the mystically allegorical;

    – is the degree with which those systems reduce the cost of exploration by increasing degrees of correspondence. The error we make is in placing greater value on the network effect of existing logical networks (paradigms), than on the possibility of new correspondence with reality.

    6) The comparative MORALITY of different logical systems is in the degree to which they pose restraints upon the externalization of costs to those form whom exploration is involuntary, versus the externalizations of benefits to those for whom exploration is involuntary.

    HIERARCHY OF TRUTH

    That is, unless we state, that we must create a hierarchy of truth:

    AXIS 1:

    (i) that which is complete (reality) but the completeness of which is unknowable,

    (ii) that which is incomplete but correspondent (action/science)

    (iii) that which is incomplete but internally consistent (logics)

    (iv) that which is incomplete, for which correspondence is unknown, and for which internal consistency is unknown. (theory)

    (v) that which we are unaware of. (ignorance)

    (I am not settled on the order of (ii) and (iii) since as far as I can tell, our arguments to internal consistency are verbal justification that merely improve our theory, while our actions are demonstrated preferences in favor of our theory.)

    And the praxeological test of our confidence in our statements (our WARRANTY) for making true statements:

    AXIS 2:

    i) That which we do not know

    ii) That which we intuit we can to act upon

    iii) That which we we desire we can act upon

    iiv) That which we can argue we rationally can act upon.

    v) That which it is non rational to argue against.

    vi) That which is self evident.

    Error in science may be a privilege of rank. Science is largely outside of the market. Error in cooperation is not outside the market, and constitutes the market, and is necessity. My voluntary action requires only that I have confidence, since I warranty my own actions by necessity. But as we move from voluntary exchange, to corporate cooperation, to state monopoly corporation, the standard of truth increases, since others pay for any error. The only solution is that those who desire pay, and those that do not, do not.

    Therefore, we also understand, that the prohibition on error in science is immaterial if unspoken and constrained to the self. But if science or any other discipline, makes public claims, we require a higher standard.

    This prohibition is a MORAL one, because lower standards of truth in science externalize costs on to other scientists.

    The standard of truth is inseparable from the moral impact that any statement will have.

    I am not free to make any statement. We are not free to make any statement. We are free only to make true statements without punishment of some kind – even if it is just to be ignored and therefore boycotted. In many civilizations one is even prohibited from making true statements if they cause discomfort. In science we reverse this social intuition, and state that we specifically SEEK criticism, rather than confirmation.

    If we take this argument all the way down to the very meaning of ‘debate’, we will grasp that the only reason we yield our opportunity for theft and violence, is on the presumption of honest discourse. (argumentation ethics). It is this sacrifice of violence, and grant of peerage in exchange for the cooperative pursuit of truth, that was the unique development of western civilization. And it is this one axiom that led to all of western science and reason. And why no other civilization developed it.

    The only reason to argue against the requirement for moral public statements adhering to increasing standards of truth, is that one wishes to externalize costs onto others, or to not be held accountable for the externalization of costs onto others.

    In other words, because one is an immoral individual, the definition of which is to externalize costs to the anonymous.

    One can say, that like free speech in politics, we insure each other against ignorance and error. And some might say we insure each other against loading and framing. And some might say we insure each other against fraud by omission. And some might say that we insure each other against fraud by deception.

    But insurance then, is limited to the willingness of others to pay for it. And our contract for this insurance in public debate has been dramatically loosened by the courts (by the left wing) such that we tolerate (insure) obscurant, immoral, deceptive and plainly fraudulent discourse, as well as eliminate the prior prohibition on libel and slander.

    Insurance in any body cannot pay out more than it takes in. And in this case we are already paying out more than we take in.

    So the policy must change so to speak.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-16 08:16:00 UTC

  • SOCIAL SCIENCE : THE PHRASES THAT SELL ON KICKSTARTER 🙂

    http://scienceblog.com/69625/study-finds-phrases-that-pay-on-kickstarter/#cmqSVFWWt4QDETRB.01GOOD SOCIAL SCIENCE : THE PHRASES THAT SELL ON KICKSTARTER 🙂

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-14 16:54:00 UTC

  • Jesus vs Aristotle Marx vs Smith Freud’s vs Nietzsche. Cantor vs Poincaré. ??? v

    Jesus vs Aristotle

    Marx vs Smith

    Freud’s vs Nietzsche.

    Cantor vs Poincaré.

    ??? vs Turing (there is no answer to turing)

    Do you see a pattern?

    I do.

    A desperate attempt to retain the dream state.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-13 06:39:00 UTC

  • What is the likelihood that attempts at saving money in research in the physical

    What is the likelihood that attempts at saving money in research in the physical sciences, by reliance on mathematical analysis rather than experimental science, has delayed development of the physical sciences?

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-13 06:09:00 UTC

  • (MORE RETIREMENTS) 1) That there can be no science of art. 2) Addiction. THERE C

    (MORE RETIREMENTS)

    1) That there can be no science of art.

    2) Addiction.

    THERE CAN BE NO SCIENCE OF ART

    Jonathan Gottschall.

    JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL

    US academic and author who specialises in literature and evolution and teaches at Washington & Jefferson College, Pennsylvania

    Fifteen thousand years ago in France, a sculptor swam and slithered almost a kilometre down into a mountain cave. Using clay, the artist shaped a big bull rearing up to mount a cow, and then left his creation in the bowels of the earth. The two bison of the Tuc D’Audoubert caves sat undisturbed for many thousands of years until they were rediscovered by spelunking boys [cavers] in 1912. The discovery of the clay bison was one of many shocking 20th-century discoveries of sophisticated cave art stretching back tens of thousands of years. The discoveries overturned our sense of what our caveman ancestors were like. They were not furry, grunting troglodytes. They had artistic souls. They showed us that humans are – by nature, not just by culture – art-making, art-consuming, art-addicted apes.

    But why? Why did the sculptor burrow into the earth, make art, and leave it there in the dark? And why does art exist in the first place? Scholars have spun a lot of stories in answer to such questions, but the truth is that we really don’t know. And here’s one reason why: science is lying down on the job.

    A long time ago someone proclaimed that art could not be studied scientifically, and for some reason almost everyone believed it. The humanities and sciences constituted, as Stephen Jay Gould might have proclaimed, separate, non-overlapping magisteria – that the tools of the one are radically unsuited to the other.

    The prehistoric bison carving at the Tuc D’Audoubert caves in France

    The prehistoric bison carving at the Tuc D’Audoubert caves in France: ‘Our caveman ancestors had artistic souls.’

    Science has mostly bought into this. How else can we explain its neglect of the arts? People live in art. We read stories, and watch them on TV, and listen to them in song. We make paintings and gaze at them on walls. We beautify our homes like bowerbirds adorning nests. We demand beauty in the products we buy, which explains the gleam of our automobiles and the sleek modernist aesthetic of our iPhones. We make art out of our own bodies: sculpting them through diet and exercise; festooning them with jewellery and colourful garments; using our skins as living canvas for the display of tattoos. And so it is the world over. As the late Denis Dutton argued in The Art Instinct, underneath the cultural variations, “all human beings have essentially the same art”.

    Our curious love affair with art sets our species apart as much as our sapience or our language or our use of tools. And yet we understand so little about art. We don’t know why art exists in the first place. We don’t know why we crave beauty. We don’t know how art produces its effects in our brains – why one arrangement of sound or colour pleases while another cloys. We don’t know very much about the precursors of art in other species, and we don’t know when humans became creatures of art. (According to one influential theory, art arrived 50,000 years ago with a kind of creative big bang. If that’s true, how did that happen?) We don’t even have a good definition, in truth, of what art is. In short, there is nothing so central to human life that is so incompletely understood.

    Recent years have seen more use of scientific tools and methods in humanities subjects. Neuroscientists can show us what’s happening in the brain when we enjoy a song or study a painting. Psychologists are studying the ways novels and TV shows shape our politics and our morality. Evolutionary psychologists and literary scholars are teaming up to explore narrative’s Darwinian origins. And other literary scholars are developing a “digital humanities” using algorithms to extract big data from digitised literature. But scientific work in the humanities has mainly been scattered, preliminary, and desultory. It does not constitute a research programme.

    If we want better answers to fundamental questions about art, science must jump in the game with both feet. Going it alone, humanities scholars can tell intriguing stories about the origins and significance of art, but they don’t have the tools to patiently winnow the field of competing ideas. That’s what the scientific method is for: separating the stories that are more accurate, from the stories that are less accurate. But make no mistake, a strong science of art will require both the thick, granular expertise of humanities scholars and the clever hypothesis testing of scientists. I’m not calling for a scientific takeover of the arts. I’m calling for a partnership.

    This partnership faces great obstacles. There’s the unexamined assumption that something in art makes it science-proof. There’s a widespread, if usually unspoken, belief that art is just a frill in human life – relatively unimportant compared with the weighty stuff of science. And there’s the weird idea that science necessarily destroys the beauty it seeks to explain (as though a learned astronomer really could dull the star shine). But the Delphic admonition “know thyself” still rings out as the great prime directive of intellectual inquiry, and there will always be a gaping hole in human self-knowledge until we develop a science of art.

    ADDICTION

    Helen Fisher.

    HELEN FISHER

    Biological anthropologist at Rutgers University, New Jersey and author of Why Him? Why Her? How to Find and Keep Lasting Love

    “If an idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it,” Einstein reportedly said. I would like to broaden the definition of addiction and retire the scientific idea that all addictions are pathological and harmful. Since the beginning of formal diagnostics more than 50 years ago, the compulsive pursuit of gambling, food, and sex (known as non-substance rewards) have not been regarded as addictions; only abuse of alcohol, opioids, cocaine, amphetamines, cannabis, heroin and nicotine have been formally regarded as addictions. This categorisation rests largely on the fact that substances activate basic “reward pathways” in the brain associated with craving and obsession, and produce pathological behaviours. Psychiatrists work within this world of psychopathology – that which is abnormal and makes you ill.

    As an anthropologist, they appear limited by this view. Scientists have now shown that food, sex and gambling compulsions employ many of the same brain pathways activated by substance abuse. Indeed, the 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (the DSM) has finally acknowledged that at least one form of non-substance abuse can be regarded as an addiction: gambling. The abuse of sex and food were not included. Neither was romantic love. I shall propose that love addiction is just as real as any other addiction, in terms of its behaviour patterns and brain mechanisms. Moreover, it’s often a positive addiction.

    Scientists and laymen have long regarded romantic love as part of the supernatural, or as a social invention of the troubadours in 12th-century France. Evidence does not support these notions. Love songs, poems, stories, operas, ballets, novels, myths and legends, love magic, love charms, love suicides and homicides: evidence of romantic love has now been found in more than 200 societies ranging over thousands of years. Around the world men and women pine for love, live for love, kill for love and die for love. Human romantic love, also known as passionate love or “being in love” is regularly regarded as a human universal.

    Moreover, love-besotted men and women show all of the basic symptoms of addiction. Foremost, the lover is stiletto-focused on his/her drug of choice: the love object. They think obsessively about “him” or “her” (intrusive thinking), and often compulsively call, write, or appear, to stay in touch. Paramount to this experience is intense motivation to win their sweetheart, not unlike the substance abuser fixated on his/her drug. Impassioned lovers also distort reality, change their priorities and daily habits to accommodate the beloved, experience personality changes (affect disturbance), and sometimes do inappropriate or risky things to impress this special other. Many are willing to sacrifice, even die for “him” or “her”. The lover craves emotional and physical union with their beloved too (dependence). And like the addict who suffers when they can’t get their drug, the lover suffers when apart from the beloved (separation anxiety). Adversity and social barriers even heighten this longing (frustration attraction).

    In fact, besotted lovers express all four of the basic traits of addiction: craving; tolerance; withdrawal; and relapse. They feel a “rush” of exhilaration when with their beloved (intoxication). As their tolerance builds, the lover seeks to interact with the beloved more and more (intensification). If the love object breaks off the relationship, the lover experiences signs of drug withdrawal, including protest, crying spells, lethargy, anxiety, insomnia or hypersomnia, loss of appetite or binge eating, irritability and loneliness. Lovers, like addicts, also often go to extremes, sometimes doing degrading or physically dangerous things to win back the beloved. And lovers relapse the way drug addicts do: long after the relationship is over, events, people, places, songs or other external cues associated with their abandoning sweetheart can trigger memories and renewed craving.

    Of the many indications that romantic love is an addiction, however, perhaps none is more convincing than the growing data from neuroscience. Using brain scanning (functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI), several scientists have now shown that feelings of intense romantic love engage regions of the brain’s “reward system,” specifically dopamine pathways associated with energy, focus, motivation, ecstasy, despair and craving – including primary regions associated with substance (and non-substance) addictions. In fact, our group has found activity in the nucleus accumbens – the core brain factory associated with all addictions – in our rejected lovers. Moreover, some of our newest (unpublished) results suggest correlations between activities of the nucleus accumbens and feelings of romantic passion among lovers who were wildly, happily in love.

    Nobel laureate Eric Kandel recently said: “Brain studies will ultimately tell us what it is like to be human.” Knowing what we now know about the brain, my brain-scanning partner, Lucy Brown, has suggested that romantic love is a natural addiction; and I have maintained that this natural addiction evolved from mammalian antecedents some 4.4m years ago among our first hominid ancestors, in conjunction with the evolution of (serial, social) monogamy – a hallmark of humankind. Its purpose: to motivate our forebears to focus their mating time and metabolic energy on a single partner at a time, thus initiating the formation of a pair-bond to rear their young (at least through infancy) together as a team. The sooner we embrace what brain science is telling us – and use this information to upgrade the concept of addiction – the better we will understand ourselves and all the billions of others on this planet who revel in the ecstasy and struggle with the sorrow of this profoundly powerful, natural, often positive addiction: romantic love.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-12 15:52:00 UTC

  • TO “RETIRE” THE CONCEPT OF INFINITY (and cantor’s contribution to 20th century m

    http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/12/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement-edge-org?CMP=twt_fdTIME TO “RETIRE” THE CONCEPT OF INFINITY

    (and cantor’s contribution to 20th century mysticism with it)

    from: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/12/what-scientific-idea-is-ready-for-retirement-edge-org?CMP=twt_fd

    —–

    MAX TEGMARK

    Physicist, researcher, precision cosmology; scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute; author of Our Mathematical Universe

    I was seduced by infinity at an early age. Cantor’s diagonality proof that some infinities are bigger than others mesmerised me, and his infinite hierarchy of infinities blew my mind. The assumption that something truly infinite exists in nature underlies every physics course I’ve ever taught at MIT and indeed all of modern physics. But it’s an untested assumption, which raises the question: is it actually true?

    There are in fact two separate assumptions: “infinitely big” and “infinitely small”. By infinitely big, I mean the idea that space can have infinite volume, that time can continue for ever, and that there can be infinitely many physical objects. By infinitely small, I mean the continuum: the idea that even a litre of space contains an infinite number of points, that space can be stretched out indefinitely without anything bad happening, and that there are quantities in nature that can vary continuously. The two are closely related because inflation, the most popular explanation of our big bang, can create an infinite volume by stretching continuous space indefinitely.

    A galaxy photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope

    ‘We don’t actually need the infinite to accurately describe the formation of galaxies.’ Photograph: Scott Camazine/Alamy

    The theory of inflation has been spectacularly successful, and is a leading contender for a Nobel prize. It explained how a subatomic speck of matter transformed into a massive big bang, creating a huge, flat and uniform universe with tiny density fluctuations that eventually grew into today’s galaxies and cosmic large-scale structure, all in beautiful agreement with precision measurements from experiments such as the Planck satellite. But by generically predicting that space isn’t just big, but truly infinite, inflation has also brought about the so-called measure problem, which I view as the greatest crisis facing modern physics. Physics is all about predicting the future from the past, but inflation seems to sabotage this: when we try to predict the probability that something particular will happen, inflation always gives the same useless answer: infinity divided by infinity. The problem is that whatever experiment you make, inflation predicts that there will be infinitely many copies of you far away in our infinite space, obtaining each physically possible outcome, and despite years of tooth-grinding in the cosmology community, no consensus has emerged on how to extract sensible answers from these infinities. So strictly speaking, we physicists are no longer able to predict anything at all!

    This means that today’s best theories similarly need a major shakeup, by retiring an incorrect assumption. Which one? Here’s my prime suspect: infinity.

    A rubber band can’t be stretched indefinitely, because although it seems smooth and continuous, that’s merely a convenient approximation: it’s really made of atoms, and if you stretch it too much, it snaps. If we similarly retire the idea that space itself is an infinitely stretchy continuum, then a big snap of sorts stops inflation from producing an infinitely big space, and the measure problem goes away. Without the infinitely small, inflation can’t make the infinitely big, so you get rid of both infinities in one fell swoop – together with many other problems plaguing modern physics, such as infinitely dense black hole singularities and infinities popping up when we try to quantize gravity.

    In the past, many venerable mathematicians expressed scepticism towards infinity and the continuum. The legendary Carl Friedrich Gauss denied that anything infinite really existed, saying “infinity is merely a way of speaking” and “I protest against the use of infinite magnitude as something completed, which is never permissible in mathematics”. In the past century, however, infinity has become mathematically mainstream, and most physicists and mathematicians have become so enamoured of infinity that they rarely question it. Why? Basically, because infinity is an extremely convenient approximation for which we haven’t discovered convenient alternatives. Consider, for example, the air in front of you. Keeping track of the positions and speeds of octillions of atoms would be hopelessly complicated. But if you ignore the fact that air is made of atoms and instead approximate it as a continuum, a smooth substance that has a density, pressure and velocity at each point, you find that this idealised air obeys a beautifully simple equation that explains almost everything we care about: how to build airplanes, how we hear them with soundwaves, how to make weather forecasts, etc. Yet despite all that convenience, air of course isn’t truly continuous. I think it’s the same way for space, time and all the other building blocks of our physical word.

    Let’s face it: despite their seductive allure, we have no direct observational evidence for either the infinitely big or the infinitely small. We speak of infinite volumes with infinitely many planets, but our observable universe contains only about 10 to the power of 89 objects (mostly photons). If space is a true continuum, then to describe even something as simple as the distance between two points requires an infinite amount of information, specified by a number with infinitely many decimal places. In practice, we physicists have never managed to measure anything to more than about 17 decimal places. Yet real numbers with their infinitely many decimals have infested almost every nook and cranny of physics, from the strengths of electromagnetic fields to the wave functions of quantum mechanics: we describe even a single bit of quantum information (qubit) using two real numbers involving infinitely many decimals.

    Not only do we lack evidence for the infinite, but we don’t actually need the infinite to do physics: our best computer simulations, accurately describing everything from the formation of galaxies to tomorrow’s weather to the masses of elementary particles, use only finite computer resources by treating everything as finite. So if we can do without infinity to figure out what happens next, surely nature can too – in a way that’s more deep and elegant than the hacks we use for our computer simulations. Our challenge as physicists is to discover this elegant way and the infinity-free equations describing it – the true laws of physics. To start this search in earnest, we need to question infinity. I’m betting that we also need to let go of it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-12 15:51:00 UTC

  • Untitled

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/11/16/fukushima-radiation-in-pacific-tuna-is-equal-to-one-twentieth-of-a-banana/Drama.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-10 21:21:00 UTC

  • “Natural Science is the Arbiter of Ontology” Elegant

    “Natural Science is the Arbiter of Ontology”

    Elegant.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-01-10 12:53:00 UTC