There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination. - Daniel Dennett
… ‘science’ is not a mystical force, existing external to society. Rather, it is a set of institutions, composed of living human beings, situated in a real material world, subject to – and shaped by – the same economic, social, and political forces as the rest of us. This includes all the pressures and prejudices that come with class society, which seep into science and affect the outlook of those operating within it.
Science is all about finding abstract representation spaces
- Find an abstract state representation that allows to make predictions
- Piling up of contradictions until old theories are negated on a higher level
- Irrelevant and unpredictable information is eliminated from the representation
See also latent space, platonic space, dialectics, truth
Science itself emerged with the earliest separation between mental and manual labour, which arose with the division of society into classes. For the first time in history, a layer of society was freed from manual labour to develop writing, mathematics, and astronomy.
Different "fields" of science are useful abstractions to explain behaviour at a certain level of abstraction. You will find it close to impossible to explain a chess game / the rules of chess with the language of particle physics, although you can of course - it's just not useful.
Transclude of compression#^ac6eca
Link to originalScience and arts have a lot in common: They search for / create / make data compressible in a novel / better way.
Caricatures: Meaning is conveyed with just a few lines as opposed to a high-resolution image.
New scientific theories: Simplifications.
What does “scientific” mean?
TODO
Link to originalCapitalism and Science
Capitalism does not make halt before the cultural or scientific world - It tries to put a common mindset into the masses, which is aligned to the establishment. Captial has an interest to cannibalise the will of the lower classes into supporting capitalism, which is reflected also in the scientific / academic community.
The profit economy transforms every research institute into a factory with its publish or perish mentality.
→ Loads and loads of pointless papers. The same work over and over again without any innovation.
Transclude of reason-in-revolt#^79e056People in the scientific community are extremely overworked, and forced to sell their labour power for really cheap, … The work for an endeavor of new knowledge turns into a work for survival, as academia is turned into a factory.
In an attempt to survive, the try to abide by the system’s rules. Try to follow what other researchers or companies push (see e.g. LLM craze, Quantum (without any actual breakthroughs), …).
Companies decide what research to pursue. Science, education, art, … are not free under capitalism.
Link to originalIntertia and conservatism in science
Michael Polanyi came to the conclusion that scientists are not actually so open-minded and rational as they might have you believe. Instead, he found that there must be at all times a predominant accepted scientific view of the nature of things….A strong presumption…must prevail…that any evidence which contradicts this view is invalid. Such evidence has to be disregarded, even if it cannot be accounted for, in the hope that it will turn out to be false or irrelevant.
Rather than always seeking evidence to test their ideas, they often ignore such evidence even when it hits them in the face.
Mental friction in the community of scientists → consciousness (or
(living?)matter in general) is conservative / resistant to change.
On the one hand this inertia is natural (self-perserving; not discarding the entire body of scientific work over every crackpot’s theory – generally you want to only change what’s absolutely necessary), on the other hand, but paradoxically, you need change in order to preserve / progress.
In the space of ideas: Intellectual friction ←→ curiousity→ The same parallels from history, revolutions, and all other complex systems / critical phenomena (interaction between individuals) apply to science itself.
Small scale revolutions and shifts in thinking etc. happen all. the. time, on a personal level, within teams, groups, etc.See also The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
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Link to originalTo summarize Kuhn’s perspective, …
… normal science fills in and extends the existing network of Good Ideas, and does not aim in any way to produce any fundamental revisions in how scientists see the world. Ironically, however, this normal work itself inevitably turns up anomalies and inconsistencies, and leads to the growth of an internal stress within the existing fabric of ideas. And when this maladjustment reaches some threshold, that fabric, and the normal science based on it, breaks down. Scientists then find that they cannot go further by accumulation and extension, but have to tear apart and rebuild some portion of the existing network. – Ubiquity
Normal science…whether historically or in the contemporary laboratory…seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all.
…normal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it does—when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice—then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are… scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.If the ideas on which it has depended increasingly fail to deliver results, even a small group may experience the same basic pattern of change:
Partly because of the examples I have chosen and partly because of my vagueness about the nature and size of the relevant communities, a few readers of this book have concluded that my concern is primarily or exclusively with major revolutions such as those associated with Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, or Einstein….A revolution is for me a special sort of change involving a certain sort of reconstruction of group commitments. But it need not be a large change, nor need it seem revolutionary to those outside a single community, consisting of perhaps fewer than twenty-five people. It is just because this type of change, little recognized or discussed in the literature of the philosophy of science, occurs so regularly on this smaller scale that revolutionary, as opposed to cumulative, change so badly needs to be understood.
Quotes about or related to science
Science is belief in the ignorance of experts – Feynman.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. - Mark Twain
Link to originalIf science is “the aggregate of all the recipes that are always successful,” and the rest is literature, then we must conclude that there is no science of earthquakes, since there are no successful recipes. When it comes to predicting earthquakes, there is only literature. A full century of research has apparently amounted to nothing.
Transclude of General-Relativity#^be6736The idea of self-organized criticality shares this spirit, and herein lies its power. It is a one-size-fits-many explanation for the workings of things, irrespective of the myriad bewildering details of the molecules, trees, or what have you that make up those things.
Link to originalIt is in the nature of a hypothesis when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates everything to itself, as proper nourishment, and from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows stronger by everything you see, hear or understand. - Laurence Sterne
Link to originalThe historian is not really interested in the unique, but in what is general in the unique.
The aims of scientific thought are to see the general in the particular and the eternal in the transitory. - Alfred North Whitehead
Revolutionaries (or anyone seeking to make a change in the world, e.g. engineering/applied sceince) also need to go from the general to the particular.
The purpose of models is not to fit the data, but to sharpen the questions.
All science is either physics or stamp collecting - Ernest Rutherford.
“Well, it turns out there are some stamps worth collecting.” - Sydney Brenner
References
See also: facts