Anyway, one thing that we all understand is that advances in science mean revising our perceptions of how the world works. But some people seem to think that in some bizzare way this modifies what actually happens. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm all for fantasy stories in which magic really works and there are dragons and unicorns and trolls and whatnot, but I'm puzzled by the attitude that somehow our perceptions have any real effect on the physical reality of the universe.

It's sort of an extension of the "if a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear, does it make a noise." Now I always said that there were three answers, depending on your definition of noise. If a noise is defined as requiring a human observer, then no. If a noise is a physical phenomenon associated with the falling of a tree, then yes. And if a noise is defined in the former sense with the qualification that inferring it from secondary or tertiary evidence counts, then it depends on whether anyone goes into the forest and discovers evidence later that there was, in fact, such a noise.

Of course, if you define it as a perceptual phenomenon, there must be an observer. If you define it as a physical phenomenon, then there is no requirement for an observer at all. And my 'in between' scenario? Well, if you look closer, than you can see that it's really based on the question of what counts as 'observation'. I'm really just adding the question of "how do you determine that there's really no one there?"

But there are a lot of people that seem to feel that modern science is, in fact, so subjective that observation tends to follow and confirm theory, rather than the other way around. In other words, any change in theory leads automatically to observations that confirm the new theory, therefore there is no 'real' standard for more accurate theories. All theories are accepted and promulgated on sheerly or largely subjective judgements.

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But there are a lot of people that seem to feel that modern science is, in fact, so subjective that observation tends to follow and confirm theory, rather than the other way around. In other words, any change in theory leads automatically to observations that confirm the new theory, therefore there is no 'real' standard for more accurate theories. All theories are accepted and promulgated on sheerly or largely subjective judgements.

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Anyone who says that is, I think, missing some real insight from actual practioners of science. Science does not work that way. I usually refer people to works by Thomas Kuhn or Carl Popper to explain how science really works. The opposite view (that Science ultimately PROVES things is equally incorrect. What we have is theories which fit the facts better than other, consequently rejected, theories. In light of new facts contradicting the previously accepted theories, we either need to develop new theories or we need to understand the conditional nature of the theories we have. But the rules of Science completely preclude the practice of bending the facts to fit the theory.

Scientists do argue about the "quality" of supposed facts. How precise are the measurements? Can the experiments be replicated and will the same results be obtained? Was the methodology valid? And so on. But that is not the same as bending facts to fit theories. It is an honest debate over whether a piece of information can be relied upon for use in theorizing.

I have seen the kinds of arguments you refer to among the Anti-Darwin set of fundamentalist Christians, especially those trying to get Creationism taught in public schools. Usually, they have a very thin grasp of Evolutionary Theory and of science in general.

But actually, reviewing the Creation Science position, I find them to be actually more naive about this question. They constantly follow the bits of evidence that support their positions without considering the fact that they are selectively reviewing the body of evidence. I mean, that takes advantage of the subjectivist attitude toward science, and ultimately serves to bolster it, but it's far from consciously being aware of it.

I think that Creation Scientists could actually benefit a lot from the old tree in the forest question. In other words, if God is creating the heaven and the earth and all in seven days, then it's important to notice that none of this was observed by a human. The only means that we have of observing it is by studying the evidence left behind, not taking God's account as if he were a man. For one thing, God often expresses near contempt for our concept of time. For another, he can't have meant 'day' in most of the senses that we mean day, like the earth rotating or the rising and setting of the sun, since he hadn't created any of those things yet. And elsewhere in the scriptures we learn that God regards it as his perogative to lengthen out any particular day if there's something that needs to be done that day. Stupid Creation Scientists don't even read the scriptures. Not only did God create the earth long before the first day in the Genesis version, but there is no mention of how he's creating anything. There are a lot of things that he doesn't even seem to create so much as notice in that account. I actually don't think of it as the best account in the scriptures, nor does it seem like they are even seriously working from it anyway. They seem determined to uphold the words of Bishop Usher in preference to both modern science and even in preference to scripture.

Okay, enough of that. That's not even what I wanted to talk about. I was talking about the intellectual underpinnings of scientific subjectavism, rather than examples of it. In fact, the intellectuals point to groups like the Creation Scientists as microcosms of the scientific community as a whole. They tend to hold themselves aloof from commentary on the physical facts, concentrating on division and contraversy among scientists of any stripe or discrepencies in observational data as evidence that there is no set, underlying, objective physical reality.

Actually, the reason that I find them relevant to a discussion about writing is because many of them are found in the fields of literary criticism and journalism. They like to sit on the sidelines of open scientific debate and snipe at both sides (so I guess trying to expose them and discuss their ways is sort of a 'snipe hunt' ).

This would seem to argue, getting back to Richard's original post, that people are either too ill-educated or just too disinterested to be bothered with trying to clearly state and defend a position. Either that, or everyone has become so concerned with avoiding conflict that they do so at all costs, even the cost of searching for the Truth.

I think that it's safer and wiser to teach about the evidence, things that are more directly observed, and then teach about the most important past and present theories that seek to explain these phenomena. That gets more to the point of science, which is both to observe and to explain, but also to suggest. A fruitful theory suggests the existence of as yet unobserved phenomena, which can then be looked for and studied in their own right. This may serve as a confirmation of the validity and usefulness of the theory, but more importantly it opens new avenues of investigation and science.

I think part of the problem may be the low priority placed on mathmatics in our society. It's incredible that people can get away with being policy makers that have no desire to develop good mathmatical analysis skills. Being competent at math really isn't that hard, after all, and the entire functioning of our society is totally dependent, on a day to day basis, on people using math competently. But if you ask most people to describe a fairly important, well understood, and inherently mathmatical concept like a load supporting arch in mathmatical terms, they'll just look at you like you're crazy. I mean, I couldn't just rattle the explanation off the top of my head, I would have to draw a picture and little force arrows, and scratch my head and try to remember the correct way to use the cosine of the angle with the bearing force of the first block plus the load of the second, and so on, but I could do it. More to the point, I know how it's done, whether or not I actually have the time, paper, and patience to do it.

Anyway, I think that math has something to do with this issue. I mean, even great changes in theory only mean inconsequential changes in mathmatical models, and I think that factor, if more directly observed, would help people to realize that there is something real and relatively unchanging being described.

Statistics particularly. We base all kinds of public policy and opinion on statistics of all kinds, without even having a cursory understanding of the underlying principles. This leads to all kinds of idiotic nonsense in the media and in government. I don't know whether it's just ignorance or deliberate obtuseness, and it almost doesn't matter.

They're probably going to try to teach both theories (evolutionary naturalism and Creation Science) in the schools but skip on the actual observed phenomena becuase they don't want to give anyone the tools for critical analysis of the relative merits of the two theories. Which gets the students away from learning about something more real and immerses them in meaningless abstractions. See, they're everywhere.

First of all - Arrows of force belong to Newton and physics, so what you're actually hoping is for people to get a good basic knowledge of physics, not math. Or maybe both. But that's just splitting hairs. I don't think this is a particular problem - rather I think it's the low priority of ANY kind of knowledge that takes time to aquire, not just math and physics. Sad, sad.

Perception and Reality: Hmmm... what comes to mind is Plato, Kant and Sartre. At least to my mind. Since I've never completely read any of these three, I'm lost.

You know, since you all seem to like science, don't you think that quantum theory gives the tree paradoxon a whole new depth? Since no observer was present in the forest, well, did the tree actually fall, or is it still standing, or what? Maybe the forest isn't even there until you go look at the tree. :-)

Jeanette, you're not gonna talk to me for 15 minutes, but how DO you know that the road will be there? Not that it matters - it most probably will, and it doesn't make a difference anyway - but in fact, metaphysical discussions never matter in real life, so why settle for such a simple answer like "reality is"?

For example, you perceive a bird to be a bird, but why? Because you've seen two hundred other things that looked like a bird, so you have a concept of a bird in your mind. But how can you know that your concept is exactly right? It doesn't really matter for you, true, because once the concept of a bird is good enough so you can mostly keep birds apart from dinosaurs, trains, and falling trees, you're able to survive in our world. Still, your concept of a bird may not at all be identical to what a bird is in reality, or to what another human thinks of as a bird. Your concept is, most likely, just the simplest "theory" that can explain all the birds that you've seen so far. Reality may be a lot more complex than that. And the real "bird concept" may be much, much more complicated. My humble guess is that our perception of reality is very very limited indeed.

I do like what I have read of Kant. How can we be sure that reality exists? There is no way to test it. You are talking about the law of gravitation, but how do you know it exists outside your mind? How do you know anything exists outside? We all have to accept that "reality is" on faith. It's the first axiom we have to live with.

Survivor, I agree that there's no difference between knowing and believing - but because I say that you can never know anything. True knowledge does not exist. So as soon as you believe something with all your heart, it becomes true. In that sense, the topic is very interesting to write about, or read about. Seeing what different people think to be true will tell you so much about their beliefs, dreams, etc.

So, have I succeeded in making a complete fool of myself? Comments welcome. Not about the fool part, though.

Ah - last comment - in the last thread, someone said something about the statement of "absolute moral exists" being inside the realm of absolute morals, something like that. I've got a hunch to offer: There's an incompletenes theoreme that says that complex systems based on axioms, such as math, can't be proven to be self-consistent, meaning that there will always be statements that can't be proven without adding new axioms. That was a bit sloppy, but I've got this hunch that it applies to this "absolute moral" problem, as well.

That's just the sort of thing that I was talking about. Yama, I'm going to kill you!

(Notice that the above statement does not have a smiley or any pig latin) Anyway, that's just the sort of thing that we're talking about, in that we are talking about the sort of people that make these sort of comments, not trying to make them ourselves. I could make existential comments, heck, they teach that stuff in school, it takes about three minutes to learn.

On the other hand, you brought up Godel's incompleteness theorem, which is interesting and slightly relevant to this discussion. Basically, any system of logic that seeks to be complete must contain a statement analogous to the statement "this statement is not logically provable." Hence, there is no way to prove that an open system of logic is consistent. However, it doesn't apply to closed systems. On the other hand, closed systems can't tell you anything important that you don't already know.

However, the fact that Godel's theorem dictates that it is impossible to logically construct a single [u]complete[/u] system of truth does not imply that even one truth is uncertain. For instance, we know that the statement "this statement cannot be logically proven" is true for any consistent system of logic, since if it is false, then it can be proved, and the system of logic that we are working with must be inconsistent.

So you see, the only thing that Godel's theorem proves is that a genuinely self consistent system of logic can't be used to prove itself. And that is all it means. That doesn't mean that the system isn't true.

It proves that truth cannot be found in abstractions!

So let me see if I understood you:

1) Both reality and truth exist
2) Truth can be found in reality and only there

So can I ask a few questions, to clear things up?

1) What is reality?
2) What is truth?
3) Where is the difference between reality and our perception of it?

And furthermore:

If we can find truth in reality, how do we do that, since we (I think we agree on that) don't seem to perceive reality just right?

Scientific method? Doubts, doubts....

Tell me one true statement about reality. Or rather, tell me something that is true, which is reflected in reality. Or, jeez, tell me something we know to be true (which should then be real). Am I getting closer here?

The best we can do is get closer to the "truth" (if there is one), but even our best
theories and proofs are just good guesses, right? Even science doesn't try to give us the truth (which, by the way, is probably one of the reasons why it's so much more believable than Creation "Science"), it's only a, hmmm, a quest for a model that describes reality, and what we get on the way is our present understanding of it. And we don't even know whether we are getting closer to the underlying model, or concept, of reality.

Are you saying that we already have (some) true knowledge, or that we will achieve it someday?

Please don't kill me again. I'm mostly harmless.

Beliving/Knowing - The words can often can be used interchangablely, but when defining the level of certainly you feel towards something, knowing is generally used when you can prove to others. I KNOW that Cuba is a small island off the coast of Florida. I can use a map to prove it. Believing would be when you think you know this, but can not prove it to anyone with your current level of understanding. The strongest kind of believe is knowing. I think of a song called
"Ending World" in which the character singing the songs KNOWS that a nuclear war will soon happen. He believes it so much thatit colors everything he sees and hears. He belives it so strongly that he knows it is certain, and when he knows it, it becomes the truth, to him. Things you know change the concrete way you see the world, while things you belive affect your perception less strongly.

Some definitions:

• Reality is what is, regardless of whether or not it is intelligible or anything else.

• Perception is a mental activity that assigns meaning to the outcomes of senses and thought (thought may be considered as one of the senses).

• Truths are intelligible statements that reflect and describe reality. When a statement accurately describes reality, we call it true. Truth must be sought by refining and objectifying perception, and tested against reality.

• Beliefs are intelligible statements that we regard as being true.

• Knowledge is the collection of beliefs that are accurate reflections of reality.
  

So what are some truths? Math is full of truths, in fact, under the catagory of math we include most of the truths that we know about the material universe. We take it on faith that mathematics contain truth because we constantly see the principles and predictions made by mathmatics confirmed in reality. For instance, 1+1=2. We see this confirmed all the time. 2x2=4, another stunning if prosaic example of truth. Given the overwhelming evidence in favor of mathmatical truths, and the total absence of any contradiction, we assert math to be true. To assert that the evidence is insufficient is to assert that there is no meaningful standard for truth.

Science, on the other hand, is more usefully described in terms of accuracy than truth. We even measure the perceptual error for observed data. So we can accurately state that the accuracy and range of sciences descriptive and predictive power has increased, thus indicating a closer reflection of reality. Two 'revolutions' in science illustrate this very well.

Newtoninon models for physics were the most accurate scientific tool for understanding motion until Einstein. When Einstein developed his special and then general theories of relativity, it did not abolish Newtonian physics. It explained and predicted known inaccuracies in the Newtonian model of the universe. In truth, it was a brillient extension of the known principles of physics.

Now there is an interesting relationship between the two. Newtonian physics was built up by using mathmatics to describe observed phenomenon. The mathmatical relationships were observed, rather than being deduced from held theories. Newtonian physics takes the form of simple statements about what is observed. Relativity, on the other hand, was deduced from theories about light and general field theory. Basically, Einstein plays what if with things that were not yet justified by much evidence. The speed of light was a well known and observed phenomenon. There were theories that claimed that the reason that light would go at that speed, generalizing the known speed of electric field propagation to other field effects. Einstein used these theories as postulates and showed what would result by the introduction of these postulates into a Newtonion model. More on that later.

The more recent discovery of chaos as a predictable phenomenon is another example. Sometimes it is characterized as a revolution, but it is limited to describing events that had before simply been regarded as random. Prior to chaos theory, random events and phenomenon were largely described in terms of observed events, saying that an event had a probability based on past observations. With chaos theory, a number of principles that can predict these 'random' events is brought into play. The previously collected data about random events is still entirely valid, as are the probability calculations made in the past, but chaos theory provides a set of tools to increase the detail and accuracy of science.

So we see that in both of these cases, the progression of science does bring us measurably closer to truth. In both cases studied here, a 'leap' was made in accepting abstractions that were not (and are still not) known to be true. But although the abstractions may be replaced, the hard science is more accurate in its predictions, and is known to be so.

PS Don't reply to this post here. Go to the other topic.

What I wanted to talk about wasn't whether or not there is any such thing as objective reality or even the various ways that we perceive it, I wanted to talk about the attitude of subjectivism itself.

I mean, I don't believe it, nor do I think it very defensible as a philosophical position, but I am interested in it as a social phenomenon. Don't tell me that people that are subjectivists act just like anyone else, either. Subjectivism is inherently resistent to proofs, arguments, logic, evidence, and all the forms of persuasion not based on either deception or coercion. True, point a gun to a subjectivist's head and he'll act like anyone else, but argue with him and you will see the difference.

If you tell a subjectivist the truth, and he doesn't want to agree with you, then he'll simply claim that there is no such thing as truth or that all statments about truth are w-inconsistent (not realizing that he doesn't understand what "w-inconsistent" means even as he says it) or some other such nonsense (literally, since the statment attacks sense itself). But if you tell him lies, you can trick him into mouthing agreement. Likewise, you can coerce him using the threat of force even more easily than you might coerce a non-subjectivist (after all, subjectivists specifically deny that "principles" mean anything, so they'll always be proud of their ability to bend to coercion).

Which means that you cannot hope to govern subjectivists by argument, evidence, or reason. You must resort to deception and force. In fact, if you carefully study subjectivist thought, they believe that all government is inherently based solely on force and deception, that there is no standard of "morality" other than what happens to please them.

The well known refutation of subjectivism, "Is the sentence "There is no objective truth." objectively true?" is logically completely valid. What a subjectivist is really saying is not "I don't believe in objective reality", but rather, "I don't believe you even though you seem to have an iron clad argument because I choose not to believe you."

Luckily, I don't see dangerous implications for society in this. Mainly because I don't think government or morality or anything else ever depended on rational arguments. Rational arguments don't convince everyone. Far from it. Belief and understanding generally follow a far more torturous course.

People who don't believe in quantum mechanics use lasers all the time, for instance, and observe the efficacy of fresnel lenses. Does this shake their certainty in the untruth of quantum mechanics? Not in the least!

What does attract belief, then, if not rational arguments and evidence? Belief seems roughly to follow, if only in an evolutionary way, what works. Those whose beliefs correspond more closely to objective reality are consequently more successful in devising strategies of existence. Over time, truth is approached by a process of natural selection.

We were talking about Plato's The Republic on the other page, and I think that Socrates' ideas about the philosopher are a key argument.

C.S. Lewis also investigates the idea of evolution producing "Truth" (as opposed to simple historical facts). Our instincts are not a reliable guide to moral, ethical, or scientific truth, and I see no process that would tend to make them such. After all, there is no evolutionary advantage in philosophical truth, only in pragmatic behavior.

first i need to know how your defining truth in the context of your post, or else i might start going off on a Survivor-esque tangent.

TTFN & lol

TTFN & lol

TTFN &

Many of the concepts that are springing up as of late, radical new theories that challenge aspects of people's most basic views, seem completely ludicrous to the fanatic old-timers (like the grandmother you know that refuses to use a computer) and some of us alike. Things like the string theory and the quantum information theory are things some people just can't wrap their minds around and/or can't possibly do the math, or conduct the physical research needed to find that certain gem of knowledge buried in the mystery.

The dreamers are essential to society's advancement. What would today's science be like if Newton was stillborn? Dreamers are making dreams real with more success than ever before now that the Stein is willing to help the Ein.

The doers, the people with the equipment, the funding and the know-how to put dreams under the microscope (haha...?), are seemingly more open to new ideas and new methods as of late. I have seen outrageous things, but on the whole, if we can make an antimatter engine after sorting through three years of terrible scientific leaps of faith, I think we're doing pretty good.

ah, you mean the theorist and the experimentalist? i presumed they didn't work well together. (at least not based on the books i've read by scientists of the two types. but i guess that's not a wide enough base for my presumption. hmm...)

TTFN & lol

Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment cannot ever be carried out as an actual experiment, because if you use an instrument to determine whether or not the cat is alive before you open the box, then you've violated the terms of the experiment, and if you don't, then the inside of the box may or may not have been in a state of quantum indeterminacy. Thus, as quantum indeterminacy can never be observed, because the act of observation removes indeterminacy, it can never be demonstrated or disproven by experiment.

Now, I think this makes "indeterminacy theory" highly suspect, if it cannot ever be proven or disproven. For instance, let's say that we want to perform Schrodinger's experiment with a man instead of a cat. We look at the outside of the box (now a small room, for convenience) and wonder if the man inside is alive or dead. But is the condition inside the room actually indeterminent? After all, the man we locked in the room must have observed whether or not he was killed, whether or not we can tell from outside the room what has happened. Can we really claim that he is both alive and dead? What if, instead of one man, it is the community of quantum physicists? They surely will collapse the indeterminacy, but we, outside the box, cannot know whether or not they are alive any better than if it were just a cat.