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> I definitely agree with the first half of your explanation. Atoms are mostly empty, it should pass through your head without a problem.
This is not right at all. First of all, atoms react with each other through electromagnetic forces, and these forces are effective at rather long ranges. When you put your hand against a solid object, despite both your hand and that object being "mostly empty spaces", the electomagnetic forces at work most assuredly are present, and that's why your hand cannot pass through the object.
Secondly, the only chance you'd have of even a single particle passing through you is if it is both non-baryonic and does not interact with either the strong force or the electromagnetic force. This rules out protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, etc., all of which will most certainly not pass right through you (except potentially photons of specific wavelengths, e.g. radio waves). The only particle you've likely even heard of that would not typically not interact as it was passing through a human body would be a neutrino.
> F=MA would be a start to answering that question
That's the wrong equation. You should be using the kinetic energy equation, which is KE = 1/2 M*V^2
> I hope his science is better than his journalism.
That is not at all clear. The paper compares the damage wrought by different drugs, but it ranks the results by modelling the absolute magnitude of damage. As alcohol is legal and exceedingly common, this means it easily outranks illegal and relatively rare substances like crack cocaine and heroin. The paper also uses weighting which is based on subjective estimates, and it isn't obvious that it's meaningful to reduce complex sociological and health damage to a single dimensionless digit ("this drug is 55 harmful, while that one is just 22 harmful").
Criticism of Nutt's paper here
Nutt's paper oddly also downweights the harm of tobacco, as pointed out here.
An introductory textbook on cosmology would do. The point is that the big bang was an expansion of spacetime. It didn't happen in space because it was something that was happening to space, in a sense.
This sci am article on common misconceptions of the big bang theory uses the common analogy of an expanding balloon to point this out: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=misconceptions-about-the-2005-03&page=2
See also this Khan Academy video on the Big Bang and the answers to the first few comment questions: http://www.khanacademy.org/video/big-bang-introduction?playlist=Cosmology+and+Astronomy
The word analysis basically means to break apart into component parts through study. Because analysis is such an important part of the scientific process, dissection is a nice dramatic analogy for the field as a whole.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=analysis&allowed_in_frame=0
I strongly recommend reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values. It's the true story of (among other things) a man who found the fleshy underside of the modern scientific method.
Science is a tool designed to filter "good" ideas from bad ones. It's not a perfect tool by any means, just one of the best ones we have available.
One of the assumptions that science makes about the nature of the universe is that any theory that cannot be tested, or is not falsifiable, is irrelevant.
But that assumption itself is not falsifiable.
It is entirely possible that there is knowledge of the universe that will be impossible to learn using only science.* And science doesn't care. That's not what it's there for.
You use the right tool for the job at hand. And if the right tool doesn't exist yet, you either figure out how to build it, or find another problem to solve with the tools at hand.
* - (But saying this to scientists tends to really piss them off.)
You wouldn't even notice the impact. A plutonium atom traveling at 99.999% the speed of light has a kinetic energy of only 8 microjoules or about 60 million times less than a 9 mm bullet.
> But Friedman too conflated prescription with description in books like Capitalism and Freedom and due to its influence, his prescriptions became one and the same with the scientific study of the economy.
This is like saying that Dawkins conflated prescription with description in books like The God Delusion. No academic economists consider Capitalism and Freedom to be a scientific work. That doesn't mean that A Monetary History of the United States or A Theory of the Consumption Function are unscientific.
>if neoliberal economics cannot predict crashes like that in 2008, then it is failing to explain an aspect of the economy in the same way that the big bang failed to explain dark matter.
Krugman on this:
>It is true that economists failed to predict the 2008 crisis (and so did almost everyone). But this wasn’t because economics lacked the tools to understand such things — we’ve long had a pretty good understanding of the logic of banking crises. What happened instead was a failure of real-world observation — failure to notice the rising importance of shadow banking. Economists looked at conventional banks, saw that they were protected by deposit insurance, and failed to realize that more than half the de facto banking system didn’t look like that anymore. This was a case of myopia — but it wasn’t a deep conceptual failure. And as soon as people did recognize the importance of shadow banking, the whole thing instantly fell into place: we were looking at a classic financial crisis.
>The idea that neoliberal suppositions of economics are the be all end all of a very complex science is a dangerous attitude that leads to an orthodoxy and hegemony which retards the advancement of knowledge.
I don't know what neoliberal suppositions of economics are, but economics is a developing science. No-one thinks we know everything there is to know at the moment.
Really, anyone working on a PhD in philosophy who thinks there is a job waiting for them should fit the bill. (Sorry, couldn't resist).
On a more serious note, and he's not a 'philosopher' in the narrow sense, but psychologist Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism is very worth a read and provides a lot of empirical research about the benefits of optimism and the dangers of pessimism.
I haven't read this myself, but a friend of mine is always going on about Victor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Might be something to check out.
Absolutely. There are some really interesting questions about the role science plays in government that have been raised by the muzzling of scientists. Check out Heather Douglas' paper <em>Reshaping Science: The Trouble with the Corporate Model in Canadian Government</em>. OP's article is another example of that, albeit on a slightly broader scale.
I'd highly suggest watching this: Steven Pinker on the myth of violence.
The idea that going back to primitivism will make life better is just empirically wrong.
A philosophical zombie wouldn't know it was philosophical zombie. It would still report feeling pain, tasting things, etc. So the absence or presence of qualia would cause nothing. If you want a detailed treatment of why emergent phenomena must be non-causal, you should check this out, by Dr. Jaegwon Kim.
Or you should read this, for amusement.
Interesting, I'd only previously heard of "Nobel Disease" referred to somewhat more generically and colloquially as "engineers' disease."
>in which high competence in one area of study leads one to believe that one must be similarly competent in other areas, despite the fact that one has not actually invested nearly as much study in those other areas
I'm really wondering what field, if any, you do have academic training in. The moment you do research in the field (I was in ecology for a while), you realize how constrained you are by methodological issues. Whether those can be solved by mathematical models or different philosophical approaches, you will be looking for ways of looking at the evidence outside of the sort of scientific mysticism you seems to be advocating.
And Hawking's writings on "philosophy" are largely hampered by his complete inability to correctly recount a philosophical concept he disagrees with. Wikiquote, for instance, is littered with "quotes" of philosophers from Hawking's books where uncertain of the field, Hawking simply made up what he'd like those philosophers to have said.
I found Feynman lecture where he mentions the rat running experiment:
http://my.opera.com/avalok/blog/2007/09/05/rat-running-experiment
Here is an excerpt:
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on-with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered on after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. ...
Edit: More extensive citation
http://drkroiss.com/page23.html
OP, I have a copy of Gerald Larson's translation of the SaaMkhya-kaarika right in my hand - here's the link on Amazon. Please go buy it and read it. I have been re-translating from the Sanskrit many of the verses myself. The SaaMkhya tradition is a wonderful philosophy - but - SaaMkhya has NOTHING to do with the perspective of the western scientific tradition. You see, according to the SaaMkhya tradition, the broad object of scientific knowledge: material existence falls into the category of the PrakRti-tattva and this consists of the tri-guNa-s or "qualities": sattva, rajas, and tamas. As far as the scriptural/philosophical tradition from which the SaaMkhya-k. emerges, the three guNa-s are AMBIGUOUS in terms of indexicality what they represent - but they are NOT "types of matter". Besides, the goal of the SaaMkhya system is to transcend PrakRti, including the tri-guNa-s as these are a state of bondage in an illusionary or holographic universe.
> Originally it was all related to a religious question: "Can God fairly send us to Heaven or Hell if our entire lives are predetermined by Him?"
This would come as a surprise to Aristotle, who discussed the question in Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Yes, as great as The Wealth of Nations is, I do believe that Adam Smith is underrated as a philosopher outside of economics. It's deeply regrettable that that work has been so influential while so detached from The Theory of Moral Sentiments which preceded it and established his ethical philosophy that was presumed in the subsequent philosophy, thus you get this bizarre libertarian ethics that values self-interest but undervalues empathy for others in that capacity.
As for his philosophy of science, I had previously assumed him to be an empiricist considering his close friendship with David Hume but that's rather unfair in retrospect. I would love to read more on Smith's philosophy of science because it almost sounds like he's making the case for empiricism first and rationalism second, which I find attractive.
That sure is a lot of thinking.
I get that computers work with data allocation on hard drive and similar storage systems, but my question is why doesn't the brain work the same way?
It is already known that certain mostly definite parts of the brain are responsible for certain data allocation. Similar to computers. By your definition, if I can't remember what i did the second before, I must be a computer.
A quick wikipedia shows several instances the brain fails to perceive time correctly. According to these guys we have a clock pulse. So we are computers.
> Narcissists and paranoiacs are not being branded 'sane'. This is not equivalent to the removal of masturbation and homosexuality as disorders. They're just changing how things are scored.
Might not seem to make big difference, but as a subject to paranoid schizophrenia myself, this actually makes a big difference (I've been to a couple of psychiatrist, most of whom had not a smallest idea WTF is going on).
They (in the article) are saying they do not know how to score them right ("dimensional reduction"), which is a big step.
In my case, I know it is not "curable", because it is just an implication of how I think. "Too much processing power, not enough data". I.e. brain keeps all possible paths until either proven or refuted. Like a SAT solver. Propositional logic, modal logic, fuzzy logic, formal limits of logic and mathematical analysis (especially the estimates, limits and unmeasurable sets) helped a lot with this (more than any doctor).
The most important part is the mathematics proving that the current model is plain wrong (look for "hopelessly shot through with error" part). I mailed the article to my latest psychiatrist, he is a smart guy, I'm really interested in his response.
Also see my other thread about "mathematicians 'proving' mathematicians are not crazy".
EDIT: the most important part was understanding the implications of that "which is possible, but unlikely". Forgot the exact name (EDIT2: contingent falsehood is the term).
Another great one from The Great Courses is Science Wars: What Scientists Know and How They Know It.
I found Feynman lecture: http://my.opera.com/avalok/blog/2007/09/05/rat-running-experiment
Here is an excerpt:
All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on-with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.
He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered on after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. ...
What Is This Thing Called Science? by Alan Chalmers
It's really more of an introduction to the philosophy of science which is its own discipline, so it might not be exactly what you're looking for. It is a pretty widely read piece though and certainly discusses philosophical views of science.
all the following ideas are from my opinion so I apologize if I sound condescending or rude:
> that is different from what a lone tree does.
because there "isn't" a loan tree.
Ya see, when a mommy tree and a daddy tree love each other very much.... /s
Yes that joshua tree will indeed pollinate based on budding and seasonal change.
Also, too, "emergent behavior" is a spook. "Behavior" is pretty much always defined (in the 20th century) as stimulus-response.
Do pine trees release more pollen based on seasonal change (such as change in sunlight)? Yes.
Is that any sort of "individual vs collective showdown"? no.
Are there "emergery complexery levels"? no.
Is "emergent 'behavior' like freezing of a snowflake" behavior? No. Neither stimulus nor response.
> as the evidence for it emerges at the galactic level.
no. evidence is by detecting gravity waves. Not levels. Gravity is what bends light around galaxies creating lensing effects.
> invisible matter
no. "empty space" would be invisible matter. or "stars that emit wavelengths only outside of humans' eyeball comprehension" would be invisible matter.
>The very idea of dark matter is group behavior
it's not. Much like most physicists only use "particle behavior" to dumb down for a public audience.
> It would odd to expect such an effect to be one single thing
why wouldn't it (if it really is just one major force like the other 4) be "one" entry on the Standard Model?
>masses of many particles, which is groups of groups.
> I'm sure OP's primary question is more or less answered
I think so, yes.
> respectful disagreement/discussion
Yes, I wish there was more of it.
If you want a good account of where the differences lie between science and philosophy, regarding this topic, then a very good book is this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Taboo-Subjectivity-Science-Consciousness-Towards/dp/0195173104
The problem is quite old and this article does not address the newer possible solutions or arguments. If you want a more modern and complete review the situation in a very readable form I recommend Something Deeply Hidden by Sean Carroll. He is advocating for his position and solution, but he addresses the whole argument fairly.
I'm not so sure about philosophers at MIT, but Feynman didn't think much of the philosophers at Cornell while he was a professor there - he mentions it once or twice in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
That is a baddass multidisciplinary question.
Fuck, I've read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a fair few times, and I am a Comp Sci graduate, and I am struggling to comprehend what the hell you are talking about...
Edit
How's this:
- Quality = The Solution
- Recognising quality = Checking the solution
- Conceptualising quality = Solving the problem
Prisig says that we can recognise quality before we can conceptualise it. This is like saying we can easily check a solution, but calculating a solution is difficult.
>Is there some proof (be it mathematical or philosophical) of the thesis that there is only a limited number of theories applicable to a system with a limited number of elements?
There may be a limited number of parsimonious theories. Of course there is no limit to non-parsimonious ones.
>Reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and wondering if the author's making up stuff.
Well, yeah, but he is talking to you about ideas rather than some specific facts. He is telling a story to get you to think.
Ah. The "prime mammal" argument! See Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. You need some better thinking tools.
Yes, quite a lot actually. Although it’s a pretty muddy area in my opinion.
There’s a classic dispute between Joseph Pitt “The Dilemma of Case Studies” and Richard Burian “The Dilemma of Case Studies Resolved” on generalization from cases. Personally, I find this mostly of historical interest (especially Pitt).
A number of later influential contributions on the topic are Hasok Chang “Beyond Case Studies”, Jutta Schickore “Explication Work for Science and Philosophy” and Katherina Kinzel “Narrative and Evidence”. I can get to more by following the citations.
There’s also a 2016 edited volume on the topic:
https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Historical-Studies-History-Science/dp/3319302272
You might look at Every Thing Must Go which AFAICS argues the same position you do without getting hung up about terminology. They say they are following naturalism rather than physicalism, but I think they mean more or less the same thing. And they do think that quantum field theory makes a mess of much of contemporary metaphysics as done by analytic philosophers.
Flood them with books by Daniel Dennett. https://www.amazon.com/Bacteria-Bach-Back-Evolution-Minds/dp/0393242072 is particularly good.
You won't get much help from this sub because most people, here and elsewhere, have the mistaken view you're pushing back at.
There's a bigass handbook:
Sadly, when you get the type of adulation Weinberg got in Texas, it wouldn't surprise me if most of the time he thought most of his ideas were brilliant.
https://www.amazon.com/Lake-Views-Steven-Weinberg-ebook/dp/B008R9VNWA
The Great Courses lecture series by Jeffrey Kasser is outstanding if you are into audiobooks. It even comes with a detailed and helpful pdf outline/supplement.
Pyowin, I take issue with your characterization of psychology. In particular, what do you mean by "an understanding of why"? You mean that the only truly "scientific" explanation is a molecular one? Please explain how papers proposing psychological mechanisms that explain complex behavior-environment interactions are pseudo-sciency or "simply reporting a result" (e. g., http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376635711001707).
Apology accepted. "Brah" is not an insult. It is slang for brother or friend. One of the most influential works in the philosophy of science in the 20th century was Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions after which the academic study of the philosophy of science was significantly shaped by the sociological and historiographic context of scientific knowledge creation. You might want to read up a little on it before opining on what constitutes philosophy of science. It's interesting stuff.
Interesting non-English articles are most welcome. It's not difficult to get a readable translated URL via translate.google.com.
As for alchemy…it’s not alchemy per se, but Frances Yates “Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition” is a trip, and Hermeticism was pretty closely tied up with alchemy.
I’d also recommend Justin Sledge’sYouTube channel for a scholarly take on alchemy, hermeticism, and all things occult.
> I feel like the terms "natural" and "real" are being confused. What makes magic supernatural is not that it doesn't exist, it's that it cannot be described or explained by any natural law and in fact breaks or suspends those laws. That's what makes the supernatural untestable: the fact that it, by definition, should not accord with any laws that can be tested.
No. Here's what I had to say on the matter: "That's not to say that there are things that exist that we don't have access to [...]"
> Also, your speculation about the nature of the term "supernatural" is flawed. In fact there are myriad myths that have what could be described as "supernatural" and are recognized as such by the traditions from which they come.
I know that discussions of other realms (and an order permitting, e.g., reincarnation) would fall under what you're discussing. However, the western polytheistic tradition features tales of gods doing ostensibly natural things in our world. Similarly, the monotheistic tradition features God doing ostensibly real, historical things (including walking around, early on), naturally. Heaven and hell are part of the relatively well explicated cosmos of the Bible—and were quite literally thought to be below and above us. Only after learning some astronomy did they become extra-dimensional phenomena.
Similarly things like witches and angels were viewed as natural and ghosts would be natural as well. That, or they'd be noumena whose visible phenomena would be "natural."
The term supernatural is first seen in the fifteenth century, and I think dismissing my (admittedly casual) explanation as flatly as you do is wrong.
He´s this guy.
He has a masters degree in "culture and technology" (focusing on censorship and blogging in Iran) and studied Arabic in Bergen (Norway) and Cairo (Egypt).
He´s now "gone underground" out of fear for his personal safety. Says he´ll never blog as Fjordman again.
Sorry, there is no definition that is "mine". There are definitions by others.
I ask myself if I were more confident to say if two things are correlated or to say if a person were happy. While I can get a grasp of correlation when someone teaches me the maths and shows me the formulas, the meaning of happiness is much more difficult to grasp for me.
> The point is that there are multiple conflicting narratives, some from people publishing in open-access journals, others being published in reputable journals, others just being posted on the web. The link to the web-posting was to indicate that there was an alternative explanation, and yet you seem unwilling or unable to even accept that there is a majority report on what happened.
So because everyone else believes it, it must be true? Come on, you know better than that.
So you're just denying the footage? Despite the fact that numerous firefighters and clean up crew reported massive amounts of molten metal in the wreckage, which retained heat in excess of 1000 degrees for days after the event?
I honestly don't know what to say. It is quite clear that the 9/11 commission, NIST, etc., while they may or may not have been "in on it," at the very least engaged in a lot of cherry picking to fit the data to their conclusion.
If the analysis in that link holds, then: Why haven't other steel-high rise fires resulted in collapse? Other steel buildings have sustained far worse fires with higher temperatures, and have thoroughly resisted structural failure. If thermal expansion were such a significant factor in causing a collapse, then why have no other buildings come down in this same kind of (mostly) symmetrical implosion?
Why didn't the top part of the building sag rather than implode? The rest of the building was undamaged - no matter how much damage was incurred at point of impact, the structure beneath was capable of sustaining the load, and as the report points out, the integrity of the structure was built to a high degree of redundancy. At worst, the plane impact / fire would have caused a portion of the tower to fall off, following the path of least resistance, not cause the entire building to implode in the manner it did.
How does one account for molten metal coming out of the towers, which was also abundant in the wreckage? We know for a fact that within the towers, for whatever reason, temperatures in excess of 2000 degrees were reached, as demonstrated by the presence of molten steel, and the plane-only theory cannot account for this.
I'm sure you've already realised that in any scientific sense your proposed ideal world is logically impossible. However, it seems to me it represents a psychological construct that could be conceived of in psychological, metaphorical or symbolic terms.
For example, this kind of mixed temporal model of memories, the present/recent and apparently unknown/improvised next steps happens easily enough in dreams. But in most cases nothing is what it seems.
So imagine a dream that to some extent meets your criteria - and what the psychological implications of such a dream are: it's probably impossible to do that without actually doing some interpretation and self-diagnosis as a result. The truth is it's unlikely that the things you remember as ideal (and that would in a ideal world be timeless and 'frozen') were or are as ideal as you remember them. Many of us remember our summers as children as somehow endless, blue and carefree. But how much have we forgotten?
Philosophically there is also the question of whether permanence and availability removes some of the value of any experience. All the anticipation and appreciation of a particular moment would be diminished and eventually negated if that experience was right there in front of you at all times - just like eating your 'favourite' food and no other meal for a year.
My only thought would be, if you want to experience this kind of surreal world - write it down as a narrative, read it (or add to it) before you go to sleep every night, keep a journal of all your dreams as soon as you wake up, and see if you can begin the slow process of lucid dreaming.
Here is more ... but this is clearly not philosophy of science, so suggest you PM responders for any further discussion.
At the use of empirical evidence to decide disputes. For a fuller account see this article.
The grain of truth in the paper is that philosophy does not admit of as clear a method of resolving disputes as conducting experiments. As a result some philosophers manage to cling to all sorts of strange views and, mainly because of people's yearning for some form of mysticism, manage to get taken seriously by non-philosophers.
To refute the paper it is only necessary to point out a single advance made in philosophy. The most obvious, important and universally accepted such advance is the development of quantificational calculus (first order logic). The development of this logic reflects a major leap forward in our understanding of the forms of reasoning required in our scientific theorising (and computer programming) among other things, and superceded the Aristotelian logic which embodied humanities best understanding of the forms of valid reasoning for the previous two thousand years.
In this, without any but the most tenuous and pseudo-philosophical doubt, philosophy has advanced.
A second, though as yet less widely acknowledged, example is our better understanding of language and the shift to a view according to which whole theories are the fundamental bearers of meaning. One consequence of this is that it allows us to deliniate a sharp distinction between science and philosophy, as I present in a paper published in the same journal edition as the article linked to from the title.
http://www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_your_brain_on_improv.html
I would propose that art and science are forms of communication.
Art attempts to communicate and understand illusive concepts in the same way science attempts to communicate with and understand illusive concepts.
Both tackle the problem or reality and where both communicate reality the better, the more successful the science/art.
Thoughts?
For you, I highly recommend The Big Picture by Sean Carroll. He's a theoretical physicist. It's the deepest book I've found about what science says about what the universe is, and who we are.
Or rather the complete opposite: specialists take words that are very close synonyms in colloquial language and add a distinction in technical writing.
Don't forget that except savant neologisms, the colloquial meaning of every word came first. In the precise case at hand, "hypothesis" and "theory" were given their technical meanings in the first half of the 17th century. Before that, they eacg had a vaguer sense: "hypothesis" was the basis of an argument or a supposition; "theory" was a speculation or an outlook.
What we have at hand is a case of the general public keeping an original meaning and scientists modifying it, not the other way. Or in other words, what we have is the distinction between general meaning and jargon, NOT between incorrect and correct definitions.
> Genetic mutations are maintained so long as there is no pressure to remove them, not vice versa.
No. Additional mutations are happening, the more common versions of the alleles are winning the random draws and forcing out alleles which don't win genetic drift. Evolution must act slowly. From Worden's Speed Limit for Evolution:
> An upper bound on the speed of evolution is derived. The bound concerns the amount of genetic information which is expressed in observable ways in various aspects of the phenotype. The genetic information expressed in some part of the phenotype of a species cannot increase faster than a given rate, determined by the selection pressure on that part. This rate is typically a small fraction of a bit per generation. Total expressed genetic information cannot increase faster than a species-specific rate—typically a few bits per generation.
And given that DNA repair mechanisms do not increase in efficiency in lockstep with the increase in the genome, this suggests that there is an absolute upper bound on how long the gnome can be as well.
I understand your issues.
> Journals offer editors
> Journals offer structured peer review
> Journals offer standards
The Problem here is you've showed what Journals provide, but are they the only (potential) providers of all these services?
could you possibly have a type of editorial and preliminary peer review done by closer peers, once these peers have vetted it etc. it goes to a forum which then all scientists that subscribe to that forum can do a wider review.
something like Citizendium comes to mind as a adaptable format, just make it more distributed like Usenet.
Journals to me seem like the Postal Service which is Physically limited, where Email achieves somewhat of the same things but with less overhead of, yet they resemble the same limited mind set of the Mail system, compared to social networks which is more of a re-imagining of the social communication over the Internet.
I think people need to re-imagine the Scientific peer review system in a Digital world, and not re-imagine a scientific journal, but just don't make the same mistakes and monopolise the system like facebook did.
Read this( http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Game_of_Life ) for a good example of emergent systems. The game of life only has a couple of rules, but mindbogglingly complex systems can be made from it. That does not mean we do not understand it. You could in theory simulate an entire universe with all of it's complexities with just a couple rules that all the other stuff just emerges from.
If you want the most fundamental explanation:
All other answers will essentially be describing how the scientific process is in some way equivalent to an approximation of Solomonoff induction.
the original research is not published afaik. But you could have found previous work of the author with appr 5 mins of google search. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/292154010_Developing_a_Scientific_Virtue-Based_Approach_to_Science_Ethics_Training
Well I thought that one was sort of tied to the other. Right? In my own understanding, when you report Cohen's Kappa, all you are reporting is a measure of consistency. That alone is not validity or accuracy. The codebook may be consistently innacurate. However, I was under the impression that social scientists understood such replicability—high measures of agreement—as an indicator of construct validity. Is that not true?
In the words of Cliodhna O'Connor: "Inter-coder reliability tests therefore provide confidence that the analysis transcends the imagination of a single researcher."
Any mathematical philosophy book would discus this. It is part of a more general philosophical debate about the nature (or nonexistence) of abstract objects.
Shapiro has a decent book that touches on this and related philosophical issues at the layman level https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-about-Mathematics-Philosophy/dp/0192893068
and one at the expert level. https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mathematics-Structure-Stewart-Shapiro/dp/0195139305
I hope that helps.
For what it's worth, Sawyer makes a decent case for treating these relationship patterns as occupying their own ontological level.
https://www.amazon.com/Social-Emergence-Societies-Complex-Systems/dp/0521606373
The enactivist tradition in cognitive science is directly inspired by Buddhism. The classical text is:
The moment you see the word "deconstruct" then alarm bells should go off. This is inspired the by intellectual garbage known as "Critical Theory".
See: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cynical-Theories-Scholarship-Everything-Identity/dp/1634312023
Scientism is a murky word that's taken on different meanings in different communities of discourse. So the first thing to ask when it's brought up is "What do YOU mean by scientism?".
For me, sciences has very real authority over the questions it is capable of addressing because it makes certain assumptions that make its inquiries possible and effective for those questions.
Scientism is when scientific authority is misapplied or misappropriated to questions that need different assumptions and methods to meaningfully address. The main criticism I level at scientism is its limiting of which questions we take as valid to ask to only those science can readily answer.
The second is the tendency of some scientists or science advocates to deny or act unaware of the assumptions they are making(they're often very useful assumptions to make, all I'm asking is that you acknowledge that you're making them). In other words, the tendency to become unself-reflectively dogmatic about science.
And third is the tendency to discount other ways of knowing that are actually wholly appropriate for the questions they're investigating. Phenomenology and Hermaneutical psychology are my go to examples.
Two books that offer what I consider to be very valid points about the issue.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1138478814/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_YEMLFbF3XWG78
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0803958633/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_gHMLFbPB9WYQW
>What are some of the best logical reasons for rejecting materialism?
There is only one, and that is enough. There is no place for subjectivity - for consciousness - in a materialistic reality. Consciousness exist, therefore materialism is false. It's that simple, but in order to demonstrate the problem logically you have to nail down people's own definitions of terms like "material universe" and "consciousness."
The best book written recently about it is this one: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mind-Cosmos-Materialist-Neo-Darwinian-Conception/dp/0199919755
My course in the late 1970s read Patterns of Discovery by Hanson
We discussed hypothetico-deductive model of the scientific method.
Theodore L. dorpet
Gaslighting, the Double Whammy, Interrogation and Other Methods of Covert Control in Psychotherapy and Analysis
https://www.amazon.com/Gaslighting-Interrogation-Methods-Psychotherapy-Analysis/dp/1568218281
If you want books, Tim Maudlin has a two volume work on the philosophy of physics 1, 2, that's pretty interesting and, from what I've read so far, decent for a general overview.
Aside from that, Bermudez' Philosophy of Psychology: A contemporary introduction and Rosenberg's Philosophy of Biology: A contemporary introduction come to mind.
I'd check out the SEP articles mentioned in the other comment first and then decide whether you want to buy any of the books.
The gist is that you can’t just present facts, you have to manipulate a bit, which is why most people don’t bother unless you really benefit (politicians, clergy, salesmen). This is a decent read:
https://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/006124189X
A summary?
Gravity is what we call the fact that massive objects (and energy, by extension) tend to follow geodesics in curved spacetime.
From a GR perspective, it's not a "thing" in the same way as electromagnitism, or the strong force, or the weak force. It's simply the tendency for massive objects to move in a straight line.
This is an analogy. It's designed to give intuition, but it's not at all rigorous. Again, if you want the rock solid explanation, you have to deal with differential geometry and tensor calculus and those field equations linked above.
It's not a perfect analogy. You would (rightfully) ask: "what about things that aren't already moving? why would something like gravity 'pulling' on them cause them to move, that's not them continuing to move in a straight line.", and you'd be right. But that's because the best I can do with out getting absurdly mathy is give you a mediocre analogy. If you want to know the real deal, you have to crack a book.
Also: I "referenced" that book because it's one of a few introductory General Relativity books that people who are in grad school for physics use. That means most professors who are actively involved in research use it. So your claim that "no one of any authority" would use it is absurd.
Here it is incase you're being sincere, something tells me you're not though:
Feynman on the Oil Drop Experiment (from "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!")
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of - this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Milllikan's, they thought something must be wrong - and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.
beautifully put! In addition to Predictably Irrational (which is great, indeed), you might want to look at "You are not so smart". As well as anything about marketing, pricing, selling -- which, in my opinion is little more than exploiting people trusting their guts. "Influence" by Bob Cialdini is a good example here.
But one thing I want to say as well, is: trusting your gut is not wrong. The gut is a very quick way to decide what to do in daily life situations. A heuristic -- it gives you a good estimate but no correctness-guarantees. But since the gut and it's dangers are very predictable (see mentioned books!), there is no reason not to know the spots where your gut feeling is often wrong and apply special care there.
I, for example, often fall victim to my self-confirmation bias: when I'm working on stuff and results look remotely right, I accept them as universally right. Until now, I've found no better solution than to ask others regularly for reviews of my work. :-/
I'd love to... but its not that simple.
The problem is that with a lot of the questions dealt by analytic philosophy, you have armed camps that think the other camps are deranged for holding the positions that they do. There isn't any over arching frame work or theory that you could sit down and study, because if there were, it would be a science.
Really, it is more like an on going conversation/argument that has been going round and round for decades. Occasionally someone comes up with a new point in favor of a position and people then spend years arguing about the implications of it.
If you want a broad outline that goes up to the early 20th century, Bertrand Russel wrote a book called "A History of Western Philosophy" that does a good job of summarizing much of it. After the start of the 20th century, you get the split between the analytic and continental traditions (though that split is not nearly as clean as I'm implying).
Really, just like with science, you have to pick a sub-field you want to get up to speed on, as being familiar with all of it takes years of intense study.
The classical six schools are those that accept the validity of the Vedas. There are yet other classical Indian schools of philosophy, viz. the Jains and the Buddhists, at the very least.
Buddhist philosophy is far from monolithic. There are lots of ways to classify the points of view. Here is an introductory book that presents one traditional approach:
https://www.amazon.com/Contemplating-Reality-Practitioners-Indo-Tibetan-Buddhism/dp/1590304292/
Developing a Buddhist philosophy of science is one of my core projects... not that I expect to make any real progress! One of the key philosophical notions in Buddhism is the distinction between relative and ultimate reality. One school's ultimate reality is another school's relative reality... that's how the debates generally go! But I don't think any Buddhist school would even accept the notion of an electron as any ultimate reality. The most concrete realities envisioned are still momentary.
The point is, measurement is never some kind of revelation of ultimate reality. Measurement is always contaminated with grasping. But still, there is a distinction between valid statements and invalid statements even at the relative level.
There were great Buddhist universities a thousand years ago, places like Nalanda and Vikramashila and Odantapuri. Subjects like mathematics and medicine etc. were taught at these places, along with higher Buddhist philosophy. But still, I think modern science has really built up systems of thought and practice that aren't directly addressed by classical Buddhist philosophy. I think the classical philosophy has lots of useful tools that require fresh application to the present modern situation.
I think there is a lot of insight to be gained from looking at how tolerances are managed in mechanical engineering, e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Mechanical-Tolerance-Stackup-Analysis-Engineering/dp/1439815720/
PhD student in clinical psychology here. For psych specific examples of issues with p-values and sampling, you can check this book out:
Gould, S. J. (1996). The mismeasure of man. WW Norton & Company.
As well as the others I just posted. But yes, the underlying tenets of p-values should be the same across fields. However, /u/Histidine is totally correct about a working knowledge of statistics and an understanding of the field (i.e. the questions being answered) being necessary for them to really be useful tools. Proper sampling can be very field dependent in application, but will, once again, have the same underlying theoretical requirements (balancing, randomization, etc.).
Hopefully those books/pdfs give some useful examples.
I think that supposing that their is a 'single thing called science' that can be separated from everything called 'non-science' is a rather controversial and seldom followed position in the philosophy of science since the work Kuhn and Feyerabend. Since /u/rapscalian already recommended looking into Kuhn, I'd point you to some resources on Feyerabend.
Of course, the above viewpoint is not universally heald. Some philosophers that have thought carefully about this (and most scientists who haven't thought carefully about this) do still maintain that a demarcation is possible, see Pigliucci's recent book for some perspectives on this.