Critique of "The Scientific Worldview": Part 2 The Renaissance of Determinism

Infinity forces us to use assumptions. The difference between science and religion: opposing assumptions.

The Renaissance of Determinism

Just a few quibbles on Chapter Two:

"... consupponible ... belief in any one of these assumptions poses minimal contradiction with belief in all the others."

Strange. Isn't ANY contradiction clear evidence that one or the other assumption is at least partially false?

[Not strange at all. I deliberately used the word “minimal” here because only identical assumptions could be completely without contradiction. Because the universe is microcosmically and macrocosmically infinite, no assumption about it could be exhaustive. Even the inclusion of a second assumption is an admission that the first was insufficient. An indeterministic sophist could nitpick any of the assumptions in desperation to save his belief, but I consider such minor differences to be irrelevant.]

"It is impossible to travel to the end of the universe to determine which assumption is correct."

It is impossible to demonstrate that anything is *absolutely true*, in the absence of human omniscience. So, the best we can ever do is what I call "unmitigated truth" ... a proposition for which there is affirmative objective evidence AND no contrary evidence. It may turn out to be false, but in the meantime, it's the most worthy and valuable claim.

[Sounds like an assumption to me.]

Therefore, I don't think it's necessary to simply adopt "infinity" as an axiom, when we can reasonably say that there is good evidence for it and none to the contrary.

There's evidence in cosmology that the universe is infinite: our "light cone" increases every second, so every second of celestial observation is evidence that there's something more to see (or detect). There is no evidence of any "end point", only the mathematical presumption that the universe is *at least as old* as the light (radiation) we can see. Consequentially, there is persistent evidence of infinity and no evidence of finity in the macroverse.

[Gee, you sure are optimistic. I know of quite a few big bangers who would disagree vehemently. They claim to have no evidence for the universe extending beyond 13.7 13.8 billion light-years.]

For the inverse, the history of science demonstrates the persistent discovery of smaller components of known objects. However, there is good evidence that there are finite limits to the microcosm. Some might cite Planck's light Quanta as a limit, or the verified evidence of Quarks as fundamental components of matter, or the proposition that we can't know (even if they exist) smaller components (because of the Uncertainty Principle).

So, I would suggest that an infinite *macrocosm* is an "unmitigated truth", but the infinity of the *microcosm* is not.

[Sorry, but that looks like cherry picking to me. At least the big bangers and the standard particle guys are on the same finite page. You are not the first to assume one without the other in spite the obvious logical connection between the macro and the micro. The Eighth Assumption of Science, infinity (The universe is infinite, both in the microcosmic and macrocosmic directions) implies that it is merely a matter of relative size and nothing more.]

"But as with all assumptions in an infinite universe, experience can provide only support for materialism, it cannot prove it beyond a shred of doubt."

There is prolific evidence of materialism and NO evidence of immaterialism, so it's an "unmitigated truth". In all of human history, there is no evidence of any effect that did not have a material cause.

[I agree, of course, but prefer to use “assumption” instead of “unmitigated truth.” There are billions of folks who claim just the opposite. Their “unmitigated truth” has been handed to them in ancient texts and constant reminders from the authorities. Our truth is supported by observations and experiments, none of which is completely “unmitigated.” All our observations and experiments are of specific microcosms within specific macrocosms, yielding data that varies with each measurement because of microcosmic infinity. Nonetheless, this data is often so repeatable that we sometimes refer to it as a “fact.” Some scientists, having excess hubris, often consider facts to be the difference between science and religion. Science, they claim, is based on fact, while religion is based on faith. As I have maintained in TTAOS and TSW, this is not true. Data or “facts” are worthless without interpretation, which is ultimately based on faith—unprovable assumptions. The difference between science and religion is that these two lines of thought use opposing fundamental assumptions. They are just opposing faiths.

These two faiths, of course, do not get the same results. The “unmitigated facts” of science allow us to manipulate the external world, while the “mitigated facts” of religion allow us to imagine things that could never exist and activities that could never occur.]

Next: The Ten Assumptions of Science: Materialism

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Critique of "The Scientific Worldview": Part 1 Introduction and Renaissance of Determinism

STUDY GUIDE FOR READERS OF "THE SCIENTIFIC WORLDVIEW."

One of my best commenters, William Westmiller, has kindly consented to provide a chapter-by-chapter critique of "The Scientific Worldview" (TSW). In addition to helping me with future work, I believe this will be valuable for new readers confronting deterministic assumptions and scientific interpretations for the first time. It might even be considered a sort of study guide for solitary readers of the book (just search the blog for "cotsw" to get the complete guide). You may remember Bill as the person who was “95% in agreement” with "The Ten Assumptions of Science" (TTAOS). His disagreement seems to stem from his belief in free will and the existence of finite particles, which is a critical part of a book he is writing on physics. I suspect that many folks new to univironmental determinism might have similar beliefs and that they would be interested in what Bill has to say. I will be forever grateful to Bill for all his work! 

Bill’s critique from a semi-indeterministic point of view gives me a chance to clarify points not well made previously. Do not expect me to give up determinism or any of the Ten Assumptions because of any criticism. That would be like expecting a regressive physicist to give up aether denial, more than three dimensions, or the universe exploding out of nothing. As always, the purpose of TTAOS is to provide a foundation for further work. Mostly, I shall try to avoid debates about the appropriateness of those assumptions. I presented my analysis of fundamental assumptions in the 2004 book and reiterated it in Chapter 3 of TSW. We now can progress beyond that. The debates, of course, will continue after the next indeterminist is born and begins to question how the world really works.

Here is Bill’s first reservation with my response in brackets:

I've read everything (I think) that you've posted on the web, but I hadn't found the time to read "The Scientific Worldview" from beginning to end. After the first few chapters, some reservations:

1. I was a little disappointed that you gave Marx and Engels such prominent attention. They were primarily engaged in the analysis of historic, social, economic, and political *extrapolations* of the philosophy of "dialectical materialism". Marx never used the phrase and Engels focused primarily on materialism.

I think this distracts from your review of the philosophical foundations of science, which was a very peripheral issue to Marx and Engels. I think it might have been better to extract elements of philosophy and point to their originators (Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, and even Spinoza), rather than adopting Marx as the primary guide for your ideas.

[One certainly could do as you suggest. This might have kept me out of trouble with the mainstream. Unfortunately, those who tried that have failed. Formal philosophy of science has been no threat to the current regressive physics. But remember that I started this whole exploration because I could not understand why otherwise smart folks believed in more than three dimensions and the universe exploding from nothing. Collingwood and Kuhn hinted that the key was to discover the assumptions lurking behind the whole train of thought resulting in such weird conclusions. I could not readily find these assumptions clearly stated in either the scientific or philosophy of science literature. So I had to reach out in a big way.

Philosophy is the grandest achievement of humankind. When it is done properly, it should be the zusammenfassung (German for “together fastening”) of all knowledge. As a scientist, I have always believed in determinism: the proposition that “there are material causes for all effects.” So I took a cursory look at all philosophy with that in mind. What I found was a struggle of ideas between those who tended to believe in determinism and those who did not. Throughout history philosophy vacillated from a tendency to be dominated by either determinism or indeterminism. As knowledge about the real world accumulated, the cycles failed to repeat exactly, showing that there were advances in both camps. I cherry picked a few examples for Chapter 2 and even included a controversial sketch in the 1984 review version of TSW:

Progression of the determinism-indeterminism cycle as represented by various Western philosophers.

Sophists, postmodernists, and other indeterminists hate this cartoon ostensibly because it is simple, but mostly because its spiralic character illustrates Hegel’s “negation of the negation.” This dictum, implying that progress is inevitable, bedevils reactionaries and conservatives and gives hope to progressives. It explains why you can’t go home again and why we will never return to those five minutes in 1950 when all was perfect.

I have been asked to downplay the importance of Marx and dialectical materialism. That is not possible. If you really believe that “there are material causes for all effects,” then you must admit that you are not only a determinist, but a materialist as well. You can see the appeal of any philosophy that dares to use “materialism” in its name. Indeed, some Marxists have considered dialectical materialism to be the scientific worldview. Aside from the great religions, no other philosophy has had such a great effect on the world and day-to-day life. This is true whether one was promoting it or fighting against it. Previous philosophers have been indeterminists in their own way even though one can always extract a few deterministic ideas from their works. They became popular because they were useful to the authorities who, above all, had to instill and enforce loyalty to survive. As always, those who stepped over the line were ignored, confined, or executed.

The philosophical struggle came to a head with the publication of Lenin’s “Materialism” in 1909 as a reaction to what he saw as the bourgeois sponsorship of idealism in physics. Subsequent events accelerated the slander against materialism in the West. Materialism became covert among scientists, who dared not mention its name. Most became too philosophically confused or enfeebled to prevent the introduction of immaterialism into physics. The dominance of religion provided an enormous reservoir of indeterministic ideas that aided this regression.

Growing up in the fifties, we were taught to avoid reading or talking about anything having to do with communism, materialism, Marx, Lenin, or atheism—some of my earliest television memories are of Sen. McCarthy and HUAC, which taught us lessons in persecution. The Vietnam War changed all that, because we were being asked to put our lives on the line in opposition to the ideas behind McCarthy’s words. Many of us tried to find out what we were fighting to overthrow. Eventually the words became less intimidating than the prospect of an early, needless death.

Bill, you are correct that Marx and Engels gave little direction as to how to proceed in science. I was struck, however, by Marx’s claim that it is not consciousness that determines material conditions, but material conditions that determine consciousness. This fit with my long-standing belief in determinism. Of course, the relationship is really univironmental, as I eventually discovered—the subjective and objective are in perpetual interaction. Sure, Engels later formulated the three “laws” of dialectical materialism: 1) the unity and conflict of opposites, 2) the transformation of quantity into quality, and 3) the negation of the negation. These observations are sometimes useful, but I could not see how disagreement with them would lead to the objectification of motion, cosmogony, or religion. That is where Collingwood and Bohm came in, as you will see in Chapter 3, which is on "The Ten Assumptions of Science."]

 2. You handle the matter/spirit dichotomy well, but I think the better approach is to simply identify religious ideas as convenient methods of dealing with the unknown and imposing social order. They were a refuge for blind ignorance and de-facto authority, when knowledge and truth were sparse.

[I partially agree, but this situation is still true for most of the world. I do not find attacks on religion to be particularly helpful for getting to the place I want to go: the philosophical elimination of free will as the best expression of the proposition that “there are material causes for all effects.”]

I'm not sure that it's valid to equate determinism with the material view and indeterminism with the spiritual view. One can be a determinist while still embracing acausality (true material randomness) and one can be a spiritualist who believes in a predetermined plan of God (dictating every natural and human event).

[You are partially correct, except that would not satisfy the assumption that “there are material causes for all effects.” Aristotle and some of the classical determinists incorrectly thought material randomness to be acausal. This would mean that the microcosms involved were not subject to Newton’s Second Law (F=ma). Calvin’s predestination eliminated free will too, but substituted an immaterial actor in charge of carrying out the plan.]

3. I don't agree that determinism and free will are contrary ideas. However, I see that you have a latter chapter discussing the topic, so I'll reserve my comments.

[You write that you agree with the assumption that “there are material causes for all effects” and that human abstractions are configurations of synapses, but remark that “While the configurations themselves are purely material, the content is not constrained by the laws of physics.” Univironmental determinists consider all things and their motions as being constrained by the laws of physics. I have no idea what you mean by “content” independent of the universe—sounds like spiritualism to me.]

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Neomechanical Explanation of the Photoelectric Effect

 A student of univironmental determinism writes:

“After finishing reading Universal Cycle Theory, I was left wondering how you and Puetz explain the so called photoelectric effect which the mainstream claims can only be accounted for by photons. I've done some reading on the topic concerning this and it seems that the Einsteinian parameters that most peddle as proof for the need for photons is not true in that a semi-classical wave model of light can explain such a basic version of the photo-electric effect just as well, but that it becomes increasingly difficult to describe more complex modern experimental phenomena in any other way than with quantized photons. Any response is appreciated.”

Here is Steve’s reply:

Hello Glenn,

Wikipedia says the following about the photo-electric effect: "In 1887, Heinrich Hertz discovered that electrodes illuminated with ultraviolet light create electric sparks more easily. In 1905 Albert Einstein published a paper that explained experimental data from the photoelectric effect as being the result of light energy being carried in discrete quantized packets. This discovery led to the quantum revolution. Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921 for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."

Based on the Ten Assumptions of Science, I interpret all measurements at the atomic level (and lower) as measurements inhibited by human abilities to measure all of the significant matter involved in the interactions.  Specifically, all of the divisible forms of atomic matter (which we call aethers) go unnoticed.

Consequently, mainstream scientists describe the photoelectric effect in terms of finite forms of matter, with photons being the mainstream term for the packets of light involved in the effect.

Based on the assumption of infinity and my understanding of waves and vortices, I interpret the photoelectric effect as waves of aether being pushed from the materials bombarded by incoming light waves (also being waves of aether).

Regards,

Steve

[Steve has given the basics needed for the analysis of the photoelectric effect. My take is that the “wave-packet” of SRT is merely a succession of aether waves needed to dislodge the electron. I speculate that resonance is required, just as it is needed to achieve maximum height when pushing a child in a swing. One push probably wouldn’t be enough, but properly timed pushes will do the job. Such resonance is required when sound waves from a singer ultimately break a wine glass or when seismic waves eventually knock a building down. The succession has to be the right frequency and duration. One wave may be insufficient to knock the electron or the building loose, but additional waves in proper succession each produce added acceleration (e.g., F = m(a₁+a₂+a₃, etc). Not only that, but each wave within the medium consists of more than a billion particles, each with a tiny, but significant mass. The photon, on the other hand, is supposed to be a wave-particle without mass. This is of a piece with Einstein’s “immaterial fields,” which make him the foremost immaterialist of the 20^th century.

The quantization involved in the above effects is not the quantization of matter, but of the motion of matter. A simple experiment shows what such a “quanta” is. Put a wine glass in the middle of a card table. Now shove on the side of the table. The glass will move toward the edge of the table. Repeat as necessary. Each time, the glass will move, eventually falling off the table. The “quantum” is neither your hand, the table, or the glass, but the sum total of the motions necessary to dislodge the glass. Similarly, a quantum of light is not a thing, but the motion of things. I imagine that the "more complex modern experimental phenomena" would involve the same pattern.] 

Time: Motion or Concept?

My blog on “Time is Motion” has gotten a lot of response. Seems our march out of the muck of regressive physics is easier said than done. One of the most astute comments just came in from “Dark,” who started out well but blew it at the end:

“I arrived at this point myself not long ago. Ease of communication obfuscates reality to certain extent. Concepts become objectified, time being a thing unto itself is a perfect case in point. The best example I've been able to come up with to illustrate this is 'three apples' communicates the reality of 'apple, apple, apple' quickly and easily. Now imagine dealing with a hundred or a thousand apples communicating this way...its inefficient. 'Three' doesn't exist, it's a concept, like all maths: A useful tool for communicating but the hammer you use to pound nails all day long isn't going to be much help when it comes time to tighten a bolt.

'Time' being conceptualized motion is easy to grasp when you look at the units used to measure it. A day is a single revolution of our planet, a year one trip around our sun. Break it down into hours, minutes and seconds or build it up into decades and centuries...it all has its basis in the motion of the planet . It's simply a measure of motion like feet and inches are a measure of matter.”

[Of course, in the original “Time is Motion” blog, I asserted that time is not a concept or a measure of motion. I guess I have to reiterate: Dinosaurs had no concept or measurement of time, but they experienced time nevertheless. That is because time is motion; it occurs regardless of what we can think about it. Thus, I don’t agree with Dark’s semi-mainstream view that “Time is conceptualized motion” or “a measure of motion.” I do agree that those concepts and measurements are necessary for describing time (motion), but they can never be time, just like the photo of a running dog is not a dog. The correct view of time is stated in the slogan “Time is Motion.”

Again, when we speak of time as a concept or measurement, we are simply describing the motion of matter. This is similar to other terms in physics, such as, momentum, force, and energy. Momentum, force, and energy do not exist or occur. They are simply descriptions or calculations. For instance, force (F = ma) is a description of the change in motion (a) of a particular part of the universe (m). To make that calculation, we must observe one microcosm colliding with another. There is no magical, matterless “force” that swoops down to make that happen. The “four forces” of regressive physics are pure fiction—a necessary concomitant of aether denial. Those calculations all involve the descriptions of microcosms colliding with microcosms: there could be one force calculation or a million. The perennially sought “unification of the four forces” will not be achieved until physicists finally agree that force, like “dark energy,” does not exist.

I sympathize a bit with Dark’s ultimately acceding to the traditional, practical side of the question, but we can never reform physics that way. We need to use words such as “is” very carefully. Otherwise, we fail at our goal of educating the public who, like the regressive physicists, still do not know what time is. That is why we use the slogans “Time is Motion” and “Momentum, Force, and Energy Neither Exist Nor Occur.”] 

Relative Infinity

Ed asks:

I was wondering if the following are correct as far as the 10 assumptions are concerned?

The universe is infinitely large and infinitely small. It also has an infinite number of microcosms. All microcosms are finitely large and are infinitely small.

[Remember that the Eighth Assumption of Science, infinity, assumes that the universe is infinite, both in the microcosmic and macrocosmic directions. It doesn’t elaborate on what this infinity amounts to. But, from the other assumptions, we do have some things to go by. For instance, the Ninth Assumption of Science, relativism says that all things have characteristics that make them similar to all other things as well as characteristics that make them dissimilar to all other things. That means that no two things are exactly the same size. I assume that nothing is infinitely large except the universe itself. Your question is intriguing because it implies that the size of a particular microcosm (like motion) is dependent on the presence of yet another microcosm. Thus, the sizes of microcosms are purely relative. There can be nothing “small” unless there is something “large.” For practical purposes, however, I would not agree that “all microcosms are…infinitely small.” And, as you imply, one could just as well consider them infinitely large. Relative to the infinite universe, any one microcosm may be infinitely small, but in our practical every-day existence, that does not seem to be the case. There are always microcosms larger and smaller than us. Each of us may be a tiny spec in the infinite universe, but we are what we are. We have only one chance to make the most of it.]