#robert trigg

Why Science Needs Metaphysics   “God’s eye view” viewfinder lost

Science can’t tell us whether science explains everything.

Science investigates an objective reality open to all and independent of mind.The logical independence of physical reality from mind and understanding gives science its point. beyond the point of no deposit,no return...

“None of us can stand outside all human understanding and conceptual schemes and talk of what there is or could be.” outstanding! outrageous!

The following is a metaphysical discussion:Science is a method for understanding the world by abstracting general rules and principles from specific events and phenomena. Primary characteristics of the method include the following 1) It is assumed that there is a universe that exists independent of observation 2) It is assumed that all causes and effects in that universe are observable 3) It is assumed that causes and effects that currently operate operated in the past and will operate in the future and that causes and effects that operate here operate everywhere in the universe  4) General rules are generated by applying methods of induction to observations of natural phenomena. 5) Those rules are then tested by generating hypotheses about the world using the rules and collecting evidence for and against those hypotheses.Whether or not you believe that is an accurate description of what science is, the discussion is metaphysical.The following is a scientific discussion.It is not known how life originated on Earth, but it is known that single celled organisms have been present for at least 3.5 billion years. For 2.5 billion years after that, living organisms changed very little. About 1 billion years ago, the first multi-cell organisms evolved. Over the billion years since then, evolution has continued until the full diversity of life now present on Earth developed. The current understanding of biological evolution is that it takes place based on the mechanism of natural genetic variation acted on by natural selection.Again, whether or not you think my discussion of evolution is correct, the discussion is a scientific one.                    

READ MORE http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/why-science-needs-metaphysics

REPEAT: "...it is known that single celled organisms have been present for at least 3.5 billion years. For 2.5 billion years after that, living organisms changed very little. About 1 billion years ago, the first multi-cell organisms evolved."

A computer with unlimited processing power and memory would not need to use genetic algorithms to solve complex problems. It could just compare all possible solutions side by side—just as an infinitely large population of humans would not need to rely on sexual reproduction to adapt to environmental changes. A computer with finite resources, on the other hand, must sometimes take one step back before it takes two steps forward.

We can recognize the same properties of finite-ness in creative human endeavors such as art and science. The goal of science is to increase our knowledge and understanding of the objective qualities of the universe. The goal of art is to explore and communicate the subjective quality of individual experience. Because the universe—and our experience of living in it—is immensely complex, it is not surprising that scientists and artists both engage in a lot of exploration that leads to dead ends. An omniscient scientist or artist would not have to waste time on unsolvable equations, uninformative experiments, or failed metaphors.

Sidebar: Understanding Drift

This example illustrates a common mistake that we all make when thinking about things like waste and efficiency. We tend to intuitively treat the world as infinite and deterministic. When confronted with a world that we know is finite and sometimes random, we often uncritically think of it as a sloppy approximation to some “optimum” world; one that would exist were it not for pesky imperfections.

This modern remnant of Platonic essentialism—the idea that to gain true insight we should study an ideal world of perfect forms—sometimes prevents us from seeing that finite systems are not just fuzzy approximations to infinite systems (see Understanding Infinity). Rather, they behave in fundamentally different ways that we would never dream of if we thought only about idealized infinite worlds.