Science, reason and bad philosophy

Aimee Whitcroft blogs about rational discussion, aka science, at  http://sciblogs.co.nz/misc-ience/2012/10/09/no-actually-everyone-is-not-entitled-to-their-opinion/  (includes a link to the original blog location) and argues that some opinions are better than others. She doesn't go too deeply into how better opinions are validated, however, so I added the following comment, which gave me the opportunity to quote an astonishingly refreshing passage from an article on quantum physics in last month's Scientific American on why quantum obscurantism is an ideological artefact of bad (bourgeois) philosophy:

The problem is that all formally incontrovertible proofs are based on axioms that can’t be formally proven. So you can argue till you’re blue in the face and never satisfy the ideological sceptic who demands absolute proof.

What it comes down to is a combination of material empirical demonstrations and serious debate of a principled kind. And more often than not debate will equal struggle or even war.

So all truth is fundamentally institutional, rooted in people organized in society.

Which means it has to be fought for and defended in institutional ways, ie using social pressures such as armed force (the queasy might prefer the euphemistic terms 'laws' or 'government').

The litmus test here is the understanding of 'serious'. A frivolous or deliberately obscurantist opponent can’t be talked out of a mistaken position. Rationality won’t bite. Jews, gypsies and socialists will be incinerated if the fascists aren’t removed from power by force.

So I hope Patrick Stokes adds a few words about institutional clout to his riff on "you’re entitled to what you can argue for".

Hegel was well aware of all this as he watched the French Revolution changing the institutional foundations of truth, and he grasped the nettle and accounted for this in his philosophy. The World Spirit and the Spirit of the Age went on to don new socialist personas soon afterwards, however, so 'serious' bourgeois philosophy stopped dead with Kant, ie turned into its opposite and became frivolous and obscurantist.

Which left serious (no quotes) science in bourgeois society groping around in Plato’s cave so to speak.

An article in Scientific American special issue September 2012 by David Deutsch and Artur Ekert (“Beyond the quantum horizon”) lays the blame for the fumbling confusion entangling the quantum field squarely on "bad philosophy".

I’ll leave you with the relevant chunk of the section "Beyond Bad Philosophy":

"Erwin Schrödinger, who discovered quantum theory’s defining equation, once warned a lecture audience that what he was about to say might be considered insane. He went on to explain that when his famous equation describes different histories of a particle, those are "not alternatives but all really happen simultaneously." Eminent scientists going off the rails is not unknown, but this 1933 Nobelist was merely making what should have been a modest claim: that the equation for which he had been awarded the prize was a true description of the facts. Schrödinger felt the need to be defensive not because he had interpreted his equation irrationally but precisely because he had not.

"How could such an apparently innocuous claim ever have been considered outlandish? It was because the majority of physicists had succumbed to bad philosophy: philosophical doctrines that actively hindered the acquisition of other knowledge. Philosophy and fundamental physics are so closely connected—despite numerous claims to the contrary from both fields—that when the philosophical mainstream took a steep nosedive during the first decades of the 20th century, it dragged parts of physics down with it.

"The culprits were doctrines such as logical positivism ('If it’s not verifiable by experiment, it’s meaningless'), instrumentalism ('If the predictions work, why worry about what brings them about?') and philosophical relativism ('Statements can’t be objectively true or false, only legitimized or delegitimized by a particular culture'). The damage was done by what they had in common: denial of realism, the commonsense philosophical position that the physical world exists and that the methods of science can glean knowledge about it.

"It was in that philosophical atmosphere that physicist Niels Bohr developed an influential interpretation of quantum theory that denied the possibility of speaking of phenomena as existing objectively. One was not permitted to ask what values physical variables had while not being observed (such as halfway through a quantum computation). Physicists who, by the nature of their calling, could not help wanting to ask, tried not to. Most of them went on to train their students not to. The most advanced theory in the most fundamental of the sciences was deemed to be stridently contradicting the very existence of truth, explanation and physical reality."

What to do when they smack us down

The following was posted on Facebook:

S M

aren't these companies supposed to obtain permits before they can proceed to fracking? shouldn't those permits detail the hazards the local population will be exposed to? when are we going to consider the precautionary principle?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-09/fracking-moratorium-urged-by-u-s-doctors-until-health-studies-conducted.html

Fracking Moratorium Urged as Doctors Call for Health Study

www.bloomberg.com

The U.S. should declare a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in populated areas until the health effects are better understood, doctors said at a conference on the drilling process.

I commented:

S - just asking questions like this isn't enough. The answer is "of course", followed by "so???". They've got to have their power to disregard humanity (and the world) removed, by force if necessary. They *never* hesitate to use force to further their ends. One example should be enough to demonstrate this: the US-engineered Pinochet coup in Chile in 1973 - copper. They use force (preferably the threat of force, but that's just icing on the cake) to keep us and our interests out of power. When did you ever see an election where power over the economic structure of society was an issue? Or if there was, where it was allowed to take place, or if it still did, where the result was allowed to stand? Or, if the result stood, where the issue wasn't finally decided by force? Again Latin America provides a myriad examples. "If voting could change the system, it would be illegal." When they butcher and torture our families and friends and destroy our communities, it doesn't help to stand by and weep. Libya. Syria.




S M responded:

i hear you. is there a peaceful way, though?

I replied:

Nope. Never has been. No system has changed without the violent ejection of those profiting from it. Today we have a big problem. Previous system revolutions have started piecemeal - you could see a tide rising around the rocks - like the welling capitalist enclaves under slavery (in Rome say) and in the bourgeois city-states of Italy after the fall of the Roman Empire. Today the bourgeois capitalist system is entrenched worldwide and has to be overcome on a world scale - this is a much greater challenge. This doesn't mean every country all at once - the October Revolution and the post-ww2 revolutions showed us that. But capitalism will keep savaging humanity until the non-capitalist socialist system dominates the world economy. If previous oppressive systems were rocks swallowed up by a tide, capitalism is a pressure cooker (goatskin bottle) that will explode from the pressure building up inside it. The better the precision we use in cutting our way out, the less destructive the explosion will be. Which means that the more we know about this process, the better our chances - both of getting out and in fact of surviving at all as a civilized species.