From Anonymous:
“Your argument contains the premise that there are "correct" and "incorrect" assumptions. The ground of this correctness or incorrectness is therefore a higher principle, beyond your 10 assumptions. This means there is a criterion by which different assumptions can be judged. This is problematic, however. If there is such a criterion, then any such assumptions are actually deductions, since they follow from a higher principle. But okay, I 'might' be willing to accept that. So, this brings up the next question: What is this higher principle? And as it must be quite important, why does it not receive a central emphasis in your treatise?”
There is no “higher principle.” One can have one assumption or a multitude of them. We determine the “correctness” of an assumption by how well it is supported by observation and experiment in the real world. Maybe that is the "higher principle" that you seek. That demand is grounded, perhaps, in the first assumption of science, MATERIALISM (The external world exists after the observer does not.), which implies that the correctness of an idea (internal world) only can be determined by interacting with the external world. Most scientists would agree, but as you know, many indeterminists have proposed numerous sophisticated arguments against MATERIALISM, demonstrating that it is an unprovable assumption. I can’t prove MATERIALISM either; I only can assume it. My claim is that none of the deterministic assumptions can be proven beyond all doubt and that all have indeterministic opposites. The arguments between materialists and immaterialists are theoretically endless, simply because the Universe is, I assume, also endless. Thus, for instance, INFINITY is supported every time we find another thing in the universe; it is “falsified” every time we fail to find another thing in the universe. One can never “prove” a fundamental assumption beyond all doubt. The Big Bangers believe that they have proven that the Universe is finite, but that cannot be. The contradictions keep piling up, showing the idea to be absurd. Even after we eventually show that the Universe is infinite instead, that demonstration will not be absolute either. Such is the nature of INFINITY. I sympathize with your wish to have some a priori or absolute with which to start your thinking. The infinite Universe, however, will not allow that. It is like a merry-go-round. We have to get on somewhere. The infinite Universe makes circular reasoning unavoidable no matter how much it is ridiculed by indeterminists. It is sort of like the question of what is matter? The answer is that matter consists of other matter in motion. That bit of matter, in turn, also contains matter in motion, infinitely so. Another way to look at it is to assume that there are no partless parts. It is an eternal begging of the question. Believers in finity will disagree; classical mechanists and mathematicians will disagree, because they can only deal with equations of finite length. That is why we are having this fundamental discussion. The belief in finity is consupponible with the belief in absolutism, but, in my opinion, it does not describe the real world correctly. Being on the opposite side of the argument, you may wish to use “The Ten Assumptions of Science” in preparing your own book on “The Ten Assumptions of Religion.” I tried to do that, but failed miserably (see p. 117 of TTAOS or p. 114 of TSW). Disconnection messed everything up.
This is a blog that takes the name of my magnum opus on scientific philosophy called "The Scientific Worldview." Reviewers have called it “revolutionary,” “exhilarating,” “magnificent,” “fascinating,” and even “a breathtaking synthesis of all understanding.” There is very little math in it, no religion, no politics, no psycho-babble, and no BS. It provides the first outline of the philosophical perspective that will develop during the last half of the Industrial-Social Revolution.
20080725
Dear Anonymous:
No doubt, that after discovering the truth, the folks at the Rational Response Squad are feeling somewhat bitter. As antitheists, many of them have experienced firsthand the intellectual (and often physical) harm that religion can do during one’s formative years. Your posts might better be directed to the RRS and the agnostics they address. I have clearly stated my position and I am not about to change my mind no matter how much anyone prays for me. Like the RRS, I am only interested in truth, not some imaginary afterlife, a trip down spirit lane, or the Templeton Prize.
I appreciate your input on this blog, however, because it helps me show that there really is a contradiction between science and religion. It helps me show that there really are a multitude of nameless religious folks out there who object strongly to that claim. Otherwise, why would even one of them object to some obscure rebel using his “Ten Assumptions of Science” that result in opposite conclusions? It helps me to demonstrate why we need to exclude religious assumptions from science entirely in order to avoid today’s wildly popular absurdities in physics and cosmology. By not being explicit with regard to its assumptions, the currently accepted scientific world view, systems philosophy, fails to do this, caving in to religiously flavored assumptions instead. Thus, by overemphasizing the system and neglecting the environment, systems philosophy hypothesizes a finite universe exploding out of nothing. (Or being created out of nothing by an imaginary man in the sky who presumably created “himself” out of nothing as well.) This makes no sense to me at all. We need to use our brains to formulate a more logical solution, one that states its assumptions clearly and then follows them faithfully to what you probably would call the bitter end (no imagined heaven and no imagined afterlife). We are natural products of the universe, as are the struggles to find that out. Thanks for being part of the action. Now for some more discussion on the deductions that follow from “The Ten Assumptions of Science”…
20080716
Requiem for Darwinism and Neo-Darwinism
I agree totally with Olivia Judson of the New York Times that Darwinism is passé. But so is its replacement, Neo-Darwinism. Evolution involves everything, not just biological systems. Galaxies evolve; planets evolve; mountains evolve; societies evolve. The mechanism of evolution proposed by Darwin, natural selection, was only a primitive start (it essentially overemphasized the environment of the systems being studied). When genetics was discovered, biologists were forced to include at least part of the insides of the systems being studied. Darwinism had to be renamed “Neo-Darwinism.” It is time that we recognize that even this mechanism is only a special case of the universal mechanism of evolution. The universal mechanism, which I have termed “univironmental determinism,” states that what happens to a portion of the universe is dependent on the interaction between the microcosm and the macrocosm (i.e., the system and its environment). We need to discuss evolution on a higher level. Fighting a rear-guard action against the creationists (who have now evolved into intelligent designers) may be pedagogically entertaining, but does it lead to the rapid advancement of science? The fact that the evolution vs. creation battle must be fought at all, only shows how far behind we are in the U.S. Folks in other countries pay almost no attention to our debates, simply because so many of them never had to overcome the religious indoctrination so common in the U.S.