We will elaborate (just a little) on the former in this blog.

Let’s make it quite clear, we are not “against science” in the usual sense of the phrase. Science enables humankind to deliver sophisticated descriptions of the world (mostly of physical reality), and even more importantly it delivers a utility that projects those descriptions onto the practical realm. It enables us to construct technology, to ‘observe’ the world around us in ways that are truly novel and often surprising. Science further enables us to re-synthesize such constructs and acquire more complex descriptions of the world and more complex technologies; in this way we ‘develop’ – even up to a point where we construct the instruments for our own self-destruction (hence the continuous discussions that this century might be humanity’s last – and not only in the sense of the ridiculous Mayan-calendar “propheteering”).

Our objection is that the utility that science has delivered is often conflated with the concept of truth. As if human descriptions will ever surpass their own categorical weirdness and the assumptions that were a prerequisite for their development? Yet humanity often stands tall upon the subtle yet elusive constructs that provide the basis for delivering such utility. Humanity is constantly being told, reminded in one way or another, that truth is at hand – that we have facts; many are convinced that we are moving towards a greater understanding of everything.

Don’t be fooled. We’re being told only one side to the story. Tremendous paradoxes lurk out of sight, often placed there deliberately by scientists who hijack the real essence of scientific endeavor. We have to consider the balance between utility and awkwardness. But where to start? Just consider infinity, parallel universes, quantum reality, zero, the holographic universe … to name a few. Bypass the awkwardness within, then the idea that truth will eventually be delivered can be propagated.

But propagated on what? On mathematics; something that is not even a science (in the sense that the test of its validity is not experimental). Yet through mathematics, science is made to correlate somehow with the world around us and with the physical phenomena that we observe, describe, and make use of. Einstein and Wigner were troubled by this greatly: Why should physics be inherently mathematical?

We end this entry with some of Feyerabend’s insights: it is fair to say that Science has taken humankind out of an era steeped in mysticism to one of enlightenment (we use the term cautiously, just as Feyerabend meant it). The balance between science and religion was changed. However, in pursuing truth to the extreme – as perhaps a limited number of scientists do – such ‘scientism’ takes an epistemological position that does not encapsulate the many paradoxical assumptions upon which it operates. This position becomes very clear if we look close enough. Indeed, Feyerabend captured it in this quotation: “the most provocative statement one can make about the relation between science and religion is that science is a religion”.

The subject of the discussion is:
 “Is science the only path to truth? Does it have all the answers?”

Also there will be Jane O’Grady, philosopher and journalist, City University; David Papineau, philosopher, King’s College London
; Raymond Tallis, clinical scientist, philosopher and poet

.

Facilitator for the evening will be Jack Klaff, the writer and actor (see his web site for information on his role in Star Wars!)

Admission to the event is free, although pre-booking is advised.
Reservations: 020 7942 4040 or e-mail tickets@danacentre.org.uk
.

For more information check out:
http://www.intelligencesquared.com/events/scientism
http://www.danacentre.org.uk/events/2011/01/27/602

There can be no misinterpretation with numbers, other than by erroneously operating the system’s procedures. Hence arithmetic is as close to objectivity as we can get, possibly because it is purely abstract, devoid of all physical attributes and thus of all interpretation … indeed independent of any observer. That is why arithmetic/mathematics can be shared without ambiguity by initiates to the system, and why arithmetical/mathematical proofs are possible.

However, paradoxes arise the moment numbers are mapped onto the physical world. The unique number Two is the sum of One and the same One – because there can only be one One. Yet when I talk about ‘two’ chairs say, that is ‘one’ chair and another necessarily different ‘one’ chair, what am I doing? I have thought into existence some idealized yet vague notion of what a chair is, and in my head I have recognized that each chair roughly corresponds, that is each is similar to that ideal. I then decide for the sake of utility that I can dispense with vague notions of similarity, and from now on I will consider them the same. I must deny all properties in each unique chair that are at variance to the ‘one true chair’ that is my ideal.

However the ‘two’ same (=similar) chairs are necessarily different. To make this definitive statement I don’t even need to go looking for microscopic differences in shape, colour or texture – they are in different positions in space, which immediately denies any claim to the singularity of ‘chair-ness’. Two is the sum of One and the same One, but ‘two’ chairs is the sum of ‘one’ chair and a different ‘one’ chair. So the use of the number ‘two’ in the physical world is already at variance with the Two of arithmetic. Indeed in the physical world for there to be ‘two’ things the same, they have to be different – a paradox. If they were the same, that is each is a One, then they would be the same in all respects including their position in space. Hence they could not be differentiated, and so there would be only ‘one’ chair apparent and not ‘two’.

After Ian appeared on Laurie Taylor’s Thinking Allowed to talk about Science’s First Mistake, BBC Radio 4 received a number of comments from listeners – surprisingly the majority was supportive of our position. However, some of Laurie’s humanist contacts objected to our take on numbers, particularly Ian’s throwaway line “numbers are absurd”. Consequently, Laurie asked to interview Ian so he could write a column on these ideas for the New Humanist magazine. They met up on the afternoon of Friday, November 12, and spent a jolly hour bouncing the ideas around. You’ll have to read Laurie’s column to find out what was said. However, during that conversation it suddenly dawned on Ian that his skeptical attitude towards numbers did not emerge while writing the book. Ask any of the students who, for the past two decades, have attended his lectures on Information Systems Management as part of the LSE Masters programme in Analysis Design and Management Systems.

Oscar on the absurdity of numbers

The students on that course are very familiar with Ian’s cat Oscar. Oscar is special; he can talk. When some friends visited his home, Ian mentioned his cat’s talent. Totally disbelieving, they gave Ian odds of ten-to-one that Oscar couldn’t talk. Ian called his cat over; but he just sat there, … miaow … he didn’t say a word. The friends took Ian’s money and left. Ian was furious, and glared at Oscar; “no fish for you tonight”. Then in a very superior voice, because Oscar is a very superior cat, he purred: “call yourself a professor! Tomorrow night we’ll get a hundred-to-one.”

Oscar is saying that in statistics there is no such thing as independent variables whenever people are involved. As far as the friends were concerned there was just one bet, but for Oscar he deliberately threw today’s bet to win at far better odds more tomorrow. So here we realize that by bringing time into the equation, and the fact that one party has inside information, the notion of a numerical probability bears absolutely no relation to what is actually happening.

Counting on what might have been

Add in the idea of counting ‘what might have been’, and the whole notion of number gets really screwed up. Ian commutes by train, and the railway station is four bus stops from his home. Returning from work, he just missed a bus. So he ran after it. It came to a halt at the next stop further down the street. Just before he reached that stop, the bus took off again. Exactly the same thing happened at the next stop, and the next. Only one stop away from home, Ian decided to walk. Once home he kissed the cats, and told his wife how he had run home. But very pleased with himself, Ian said, in running home he had saved £1.20. Oscar was listening. As cynical as ever he butted in: “Call yourself a professor! If you had chased a taxi you would have saved £5.”

One plus one is … thirteen hundred and forty two.

Talk to Oscar and you learn that he has a very unusual and variable understanding of arithmetic. Ask him the big question “what is one plus one”, he is more than likely to ask “are we buying or selling?” On another occasion Oscar responded “thirteen hundred and forty two”.

A local farmer had a field of water melons – thirteen hundred and forty four of them. Oscar knows that Ian loves watermelons, and to please him two weeks ago he stole one from the field. The farmer was very annoyed – thirteen hundred and forty three left. Last week Oscar stole another – thirteen hundred and forty two. The furious farmer put up a sign saying “One of these water melons has been injected with cyanide.” In injecting one melon he had lost one melon, but that still left thirteen hundred and forty one, so it was a price worth paying.

When this week Oscar went to steal another, he saw the sign. Oscar came straight home, picked up a red felt-tip pen, and went straight back to the field. After scrawling over the sign, he crossed out the word ‘one’, so it now read “Two of these water melons have been injected with cyanide.”

With the farmer injecting cyanide into one melon plus Oscar inject one melon, the farmer had lost not two but thirteen hundred and forty-two melons.

One much repeated quotation from The Grand Design is ‘[b]ecause there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.” Here Hawking is implying that the universe is an ‘it’ that can be grasped using the notion of gravity, which by implication must be a precursor of the universe – there can be no evidence for anything extra-universal. All we see is paradox, including a self-referential theory that predicates the extra-universal. As for spontaneous creation, that is an effect without a cause, a denial of ‘why?’, which is then used paradoxically to explain ‘why?’ – “why the universe exists, why we exist.” So according to Hawking, the reason for the Creation is … (spontaneous) creation: a tautology. Such creation needs the mind of the physicist to imagine ‘it’ into existence with a pre-construction from intellectual abstractions – but where did they come from?

As for causality, this does not exist in the ‘real world’ of phenomena, rather it is a personal delusion for imposing meaning on relationships between events necessarily happening in that world. Thus meaning doesn’t uncover any causes there, no matter what the intellect tells us. Causality is a prescribed fundamental component of the way we think about reality; a prerequisite, a building block of meaning/logic, not a truth uncovered by thought.

There is no ‘why?’ in the way the world works; ‘why?’ is solely in the head of an observer, and its function is to stimulate further distinctions that acquire new descriptions. It is the first step of any cognitive system that believes it is able to question itself about the validity of its own validity. However, the descriptions that are the by-product of cognition cannot be elevated to an explanation that surpasses the limits of cognition itself. Any answer to the question ‘why?’ must be a delusion. When we think we are explaining ‘why?’ we are merely communicating a description that answers ‘how?’ – one that is formulated as a sequence of events within the self-referential delusions of causality. We can describe ‘how?’ an apple falls by using the concept of gravity, but ‘why?’ it should do so stays as elusive as ever. Even then there are different approaches to that ‘how?’ (in the case of gravity there are Newton, Einstein, and others), but ‘why?’ always remains unapproachable.

The arguments given by Hawking suffer from a fallacy that underlies all the reasoning within Physics, namely the unquestioned acceptance that there are ‘it’s’ that can be observed objectively – that the way we humans categorize is truth in action. Physicists casually employ the mathematical concept of ‘infinity’ when pondering the universe, despite no one actually understanding ‘it’ (arguably it drove George Cantor insane). A number of modern mathematicians point to its ‘absurdity’: to quote eminent mathematician Doron Zeilberger: “Infinity is abstract nonsense”.

It’s not only infinity; even the finite is problematic.  The cognitive sampling and categorization of things observed in the world is both the result of observation, and the means whereby observation is possible. We don’t observe categories, rather through categories. The very act of categorization remains an obscure selection process that is guided by the success or otherwise of previously chosen categories. Each observation categorizes things in the world via the imposition of linear distinctions. These things are separated within the observed scene, but they still remain structurally coupled to the rest of the world. These couplings are lost to the particular observer, but they remain part of a non-referential system created by the self-reference imposed by the original observation (as the unobservable part of the distinction). However, they may appear as other-referential systems within the self-reference of other observers.

Whatever the scenario that comes into play, an observer creates a distinction that always leaves something unobserved as a precondition of observing the something that has been selected. Here, the word linear is used to mean the categorization on which cause-and-effect processes are insinuated, and that exhibit a directly related change; it is where action always ends with a reaction. Thus, from this perspective, linearity is unavoidably imposed by both science and technology, which derive from, and function under the causality hypothesis. All method is linearity imposed on a non-linear world: all observation likewise. However, the ensuing paradoxes will necessarily introduce uncertainty; should this prove disruptive then we are back to the problem of structuring the observation, which leads to yet more paradoxes.

It is erroneous/absurd to insist that a categorical representation of a thing is identical to the apparent thing-in-itself, because ‘the map is not the terrain’. And yet this is what Hawking is doing. Not that there is necessarily such a thing as a thing-in-itself, only that somehow an intellectual process is triggered that convinces the observer of the thing’s existence. The concept of something in-itself, of something per se, or however that concept is stated, is merely an abstraction that removes all observers from the existence of that thing. The notion of a thing-in-itself denies the variety of categories that may be imposed on it by the existence of different observers, and thereby allows the delusion of objectivity to enter the arena of knowledge.

Our short (and hence superficial) answer is that the Science’s First Mistake is the assumption that our world operates according to causal laws – that causality is built into the fabric of that world, and that Science is the uncovering of those laws from empirical observations.

This book on the other hand claims that Science is a collection of delusions in pursuit of theory, an umbrella-term covering an incoherent and un-unifiable set of socially-constructed, self-referential linear abstractions for describing what is our non-linear world. Causality is just one of the many means whereby human cognition makes sense of the world – that sense is not in the world. It is constructed in the head of the observer. Science’s First Mistake is to forget that its abstractions do not deal with reality, rather its models and theories are ‘unnatural in nature’ and artificial, and indeed quite absurd when viewed from outside the tunnel-vision of science’s self-referential certainty. Scientific descriptions, enmeshed as they are in the structural coupling of cognition and observation, may deliver clarity of purpose along the tunnel’s axis, but leave the periphery littered in paradox and absurdity.

Hence, Science, arguably the highest form of human intellectual endeavour, is not a true description of our natural world, rather the ultra-sophisticated denial of the absurdities intrinsic in its self-referential system. This system has to be based on unnatural modes of describing the world, on the fabrication of the abstract that is made to correlate with the observed. But in such a mode of operation, intelligence simply fuels the unnaturalness of a spiraling self-reference. The cleverer you are, the more you are in denial!

And what does this analysis hold for so-called artificial intelligence (AI)? Quite simply, AI is itself absurd. AI involves an intrinsic acceptance of objective data obtained from its sensors – it assumes that data is as it is. Hence the only denial to be made is by the humans who initially categorized the data types. By not denying absurdity, artificial intelligence is thus unintelligent, and quite absurd.

We both felt uncomfortable with the orthodoxy of a science that is forever seeking after truth, but the alternative was too radical to contemplate. Both of us had individually reflected on our doubts, but as proper natural scientists we had been taught to suppress them. As part of our scientific upbringing, we had learned to believe that science allows us to explore the path to truth … that with science we could seek out reality.

The discomfort for both of us grew independently stronger over time and our doubts about the universal validity of the scientific method grew stronger as we began discussing the issues. And as our ideas started to take shape, they eventually became too strong to ignore. We resolved to write a book so that we could structure these ideas into some coherent form.

This book is ‘Science’s First Mistake’.