Re: Faith and Science (was comm.)

Posted by Eric Charles on Sep 16, 2009; 8:35pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Re-comm-was-Re-FW-Re-Emergence-Seminar-BritishEmergence-tp3654051p3658939.html

Miles: "I think if we look honestly there is not a single thing
that we can drill into that has ultimate reality."

Marcks: "But there
are a lot of things that can be controlled very effectively and with
predictable failure rates."

Miles: "Good [we agree]... [but] I'm not
sure how many people -- including "scientists" who should know better -- still
believe in such."

--

It's funny, I have the general notion that "scientists" shouldn't know better. I don't mean that based on their intelligence, but I think it is much easier for scientists to go about doing the stuff they do, and they do it better, if they think they are REALLY doing it.  Albeit, it may be fun to predict where a cannon ball is going to land, or what the orbit of the planets will be, but if people didn't think they were finding out something "real" about "gravity" I doubt the activity would have been as engaging.

For an example in a science that seems less useful to me: It always amazes me that social and personality psychologists can go around thinking that the things they study are "real"... extroversion, emotional intelligence, in-group preference, etc.... Yet, I also have the feeling that if they for one moment thought as I did, that they were (at best) just playing a strange prediction game, the whole enterprise would suddenly grind to a halt. Ah, the time and money that would be saved.

Of course, the social and personality psychologists would likely say the same thing about my work, reinforcing my point: I to go about my work just fine, at least in part, because (barring the occasional metaphysical spaz) I go about my day to day business with the firm belief that I am REALLY studying things.

When people on this list talk about emergence, complexity, intrinsic organization, rule governed behavior, consciousness, software usability, threshold phenomenon, keyboard preferences, etc., don't most of them think they are talking about something real?

Eric

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