Quantiative Science Before Galileo
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From: Bret Cahill on 12 Jul 2010 10:32 > I do not consider social "scientists", ie. political "scientists," > sociologists, psychologists, etc. to be qualified to comment on issues > regarding the hard sciences. "Psychology, the queen of sciences." -- Nietzsche
From: Bret Cahill on 12 Jul 2010 10:39 > > > > > > > Or are you a conspiracy theorist who believes 98% of the scientists on > > > > > > > the planet are in on a conspiracy? > > > > > > That's about the same percentage who held that the Sun went round the > > > > > > Earth. > > > > > > When did who believe that? > > > > > > Bret Cahill > > > > > Anyway, anyhow, anywhere /they/ chose. > > > > Please define "scientist." > > > Please don't. > > > > I do not consider social "scientists", ie. political "scientists," > > > sociologists, psychologists, etc. to be qualified to comment on issues > > > regarding the hard sciences. > > > Well, that is unwise of you. There are many issues "regarding th > > hard sciences" that the hard scientists would be least qualified > > to comment on. > > Yet you believe that those in the "soft sciences" are qualified to > comment on the "hard sciences"? ...particularly those that are not > well understood? Generally the "hard" sciences have more sig figs so people tend to think they are better understood. It's really interesting to hear someone in math and physics talk to a good biologist or medical researcher. The "hard" scientist will keep exclaiming in disbelief, "you mean biology is a _science_?" Bret Cahill "The number of sig figs possible is inversely proportional to value of the measurement." -- Bret's Tweaker Conjecture
From: Bret Cahill on 12 Jul 2010 10:41 > > > > > > > Or are you a conspiracy theorist who believes 98% of the scientists on > > > > > > > the planet are in on a conspiracy? > > > > > > That's about the same percentage who held that the Sun went round the > > > > > > Earth. > > > > > > When did who believe that? > > > > > > Bret Cahill > > > > > Anyway, anyhow, anywhere /they/ chose. > > > > Please define "scientist." > > > Please don't. > > > > I do not consider social "scientists", ie. political "scientists," > > > sociologists, psychologists, etc. to be qualified to comment on issues > > > regarding the hard sciences. > > > Well, that is unwise of you. There are many issues "regarding th > > hard sciences" that the hard scientists would be least qualified > > to comment on. > > Yet you believe that those in the "soft sciences" are qualified to > comment on the "hard sciences"? ...particularly those that are not > well understood? "To say philosophy hinges on science is to stand Truth Herself on Her head." -- Nietzsche
From: Immortalist on 12 Jul 2010 22:12 On Jul 10, 4:32 pm, Bret Cahill <BretCah...(a)peoplepc.com> wrote: > > > Or are you a conspiracy theorist who believes 98% of the scientists on > > > the planet are in on a conspiracy? > > That's about the same percentage who held that the Sun went round the > > Earth. > > When did who believe that? > It worked and that is how long it took to form such theories. But some evolutionists believe that physics is wired into us as instinct, but it only has to be accurate enough to stay alive with it in an ancient environment where those intuitive physics evolved; Intuitive Physics Biology, Engineering and Psychology (Inborn Pre- Wired & Instinctual) The mind is composed of a large number of mental modules each designed to solve a specific problem. For example, there is one mechanism for perceiving three dimensions, another for anger, another for falling in love. The mind is like a Swiss Army knife; i.e., it has lots of specialized tools. There is no such thing as general intelligence, general learning, or any other general ability to solve problems. 1. Intuitive Physics The most fundamental mental tool is an intuitive physics: understanding how objects fall, roll, and bounce. Its foundation is an appreciation that the world contains objects that persist when out of sight and that obey laws; it is not a kaleidoscope of shimmering pixels or a magic show in which things disappear and reappear capriciously. Philosopher and psychologist William James described the world of the infant as a "blooming, buzzing confusion," but recent (?) experiments have shown that babies are not as confused as James thought. Infants as young as three months are visibly surprised when an experimenter rigs up a display in which objects seem to vanish, pass through each other, fly apart, or move without having been pushed. As one psychologist summed up the results, "a blooming, buzzing confusion" is a good description of the life of the parents, not the infant, who is perfectly able to interpret all the blooms and buzzes as outward signs of persisting, law-abiding objects. But some objects do seem to defy physical laws. As evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins noted, if you throw a dead bird into the air, it will describe a graceful parabola and come to rest on the ground, exactly as physics books say it should, but if you throw a live bird in the air it may not touch land this side of the county boundary. These apparent scofflaws are living things, and we interpret them not as weird springy objects, nor as law-defying miracles, but as obeying a different kind of law, the laws of an intuitive biology. Living things are sensed to house an internal essence, which supplies a renewable source of energy or oomph that propels the animal (usually in pursuit of a goal), gives it its form, and drives its growth and bodily functions. 2. Intuitive Biology This intuition guides the way people in all cultures treat the living world. Foragers are fine amateur biologists who classify local plants and animals into categories that often match the professional biologist's genus or species. The intuition that organisms are driven by an internal constitution also allows foragers to predict their movements and life cycles. Straight tracks tell of a beast aiming for a destination, at which it can perhaps be surprised; a flower in the spring may provide fruit or a nutritious underground tuber in the fall. The same intuition inspires foragers to try out plant and animal parts as medicines, poisons, and food additives, Children distinguish the living from the nonliving early in life. Infants expect objects to move only when launched by a collision, but expect people to start and stop on their own. Preschoolers reason about animals by ignoring appearances and focusing on their innards. When asked what would happen of you removed the insides of a dog, leaving a shell that looks like a dog, children say it is not a dog and can't bark or eat dogfood. But when asked what would happen if you removed the outsides of a dog, leaving something that doesn't look like a dog at all, they say it's still a dog and does doggy things. 3. Intuitive Engineering A third way of knowing is intuitive engineering, the understanding of tools and other artifacts. Tools appear in the fossil record millions of years before modern skulls do and must have been a major selection pressure for the expansion of the brains that make them. Today's one- year-old hominids tinker with sticks for pushing, strings for pulling, and supports for holding things up. Before they enter first grade, children have different intuitions about artifacts and living things. If you make a lion look like a tiger with costumes or surgery, children say it is not a tiger but still a lion. But if you make a coffeepot look like a birdfeeder, they say it just is a birdfeeder. These children are aware that artifacts are defined not by their shape or constitution but by what someone fashioned them to do. A store selling "chairs" might be stocked with anything from stools and dining room sets to beanbags, hammocks, foam cylinders, and wooden cubes. A stump or elephant's foot becomes a chair if someone decides to use it as one. The only thing that "chairs" have in common is that someone intends them to hold up a human behind. 4. Intuitive Psychology No law of physics, biology, or engineering, however, can explain, or predict, human behavior. For that we need intuitive psychology--the conviction that people are driven by invisible, weightless mental states such as beliefs and desires. We mortals can't literally read other people's minds, but we make good guesses--by listening to what they say, reading between the lines, watching their face and eyes, and trying to make sense of their behavior. Like the other core intuitions, the rudiments of mind reading are first exercised in the crib. Infants make eye contact and track their parents' gaze, especially then they are uncertain why a parent is doing something. Three-year-olds know that a looker generally wants what he is looking at, that you can't eat the memory of an apple, and that a person can tell what's in a box only by looking in it. Conclusion A child's precocious understanding of these four domains--psychology, biology, physics, and engineering--suggests that the brain is prepared for them. Indeed, some patients with brain damage cannot name living things but can name artifacts, or vice versa, implying that artifacts and living things are stored in different ways in the brain. And some kinds of mental disorders seem to impair some domains and leave others spared. People with autism, for example, seem to lack an intuitive psychology, whereas those with Williams Syndrome are competent intuitive psychologists but are spatially and mechanically challenged... .....how stone age minds grasp modern science. Formal sciences grew out of their intuitive counterparts. The conviction that living things have an essence, for example, is what impelled the first professional biologists to try to understand the nature of plants and animals by cutting them open and putting bits of them under a microscope. Anyone who announced he was trying to understand the nature of chairs by bringing them into a laboratory and putting bits of them under a scope would be dismissed as mad, not given a grant. But modern science forces us to make some changes in our thinking, including turning offparts of the intuitions out of which it grew. Newton's first law states that a moving object continues in a straight line unless acted on by a force. Ask college students what happens to a whirling tetherball that is cut loose, however, and a depressingly large minority, including many who have taken physics, say it would continue in a circular path. The students explain that the object acquires a "force" or "momentum" that powers it along the curve until the momentum gets "used up" and the path straightens out. Although erroneous, the students' beliefs are completely understandable since we evolved in a world with substantial friction that makes moving objects slow down and stop, not in a lab with pucks gliding on air tables. Modern science also pries our intuitive faculties loose from the objects they usually apply to and aims them at seemingly inappropriate ones. To do mathematics, we primates--visual animals--invented graphs. These allow abstruse concepts to present themselves to our mind's eyes as reassuringly familiar shapes: "Y=mx+b" is a straight line, differentiable functions are smooth curves. They also allow mathematical operations to be performed by doodling in mental imagery: to add a constant, mentally shove the line upward; to multiply, rotate it; to integrate, color in the space beneath it. To do chemistry, we stretch our intuitive physics and treat the essence of a natural substance as a collection of tiny, bouncy, sticky objects. To do biology, we take our way of understanding artifacts and apply it to living things--organs as machines "engineered" by natural selection-- and then to their essences, the molecule of life. To do psychology, we treat the mind as an organ of a living creature, as an artifact designed by natural selection, and as a collection of physical objects, neurons. According to a saying, if you give a boy a hammer, the whole world becomes a nail. If you give a species an elementary grasp of psychology, biology, and mechanics, then for better and worse, the whole world becomes a society, a zoo, and a machine. http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/463evolpsyIQ.html http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1997_09_naturalhistory.html http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0013.html http://www.scribd.com/doc/6119068/Gazzaniga-Conversations-in-the-Cognitive-Neurosciences > Bret Cahill
From: Immortalist on 12 Jul 2010 22:20
On Jul 12, 7:04 am, "keith...(a)gmail.com" <keith...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > On Jul 12, 12:48 am, dorayme <dora...(a)optusnet.com.au> wrote: > > > > > In article > > <o_r_fairbairn-D3BA6B.23394311072...(a)70-3-168-216.pools.spcsdns.n > > et>, > > Orval Fairbairn <o_r_fairbairn(a)earth_link.net> wrote: > > > > In article > > > <76a4ae3a-0f1e-459b-99e6-6ec231a39...(a)k1g2000prl.googlegroups.com>, > > > Jeff Rubard <jeffrub...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > On Jul 10, 4:32 pm, Bret Cahill <BretCah...(a)peoplepc.com> wrote: > > > > > > > Or are you a conspiracy theorist who believes 98% of the scientists on > > > > > > > the planet are in on a conspiracy? > > > > > > That's about the same percentage who held that the Sun went round the > > > > > > Earth. > > > > > > When did who believe that? > > > > > > Bret Cahill > > > > > Anyway, anyhow, anywhere /they/ chose. > > > > Please define "scientist." > > > Please don't. > > > > I do not consider social "scientists", ie. political "scientists," > > > sociologists, psychologists, etc. to be qualified to comment on issues > > > regarding the hard sciences. > > > Well, that is unwise of you. There are many issues "regarding th > > hard sciences" that the hard scientists would be least qualified > > to comment on. > > Yet you believe that those in the "soft sciences" are qualified to > comment on the "hard sciences"? ...particularly those that are not > well understood? I would offer one example of how the hard sciences absolutely require the soft social sciences. Peer review, which is a social science based upon various sociology methodologies is a necessary part of a large part of hypothesis testing and verification. Hell hard science requires grammar baby, and much more, else how would scientists even explain anything, cept for deaf dumb and blind mathsheads who crunch and get fat on numbers. Peer review (known as refereeing in some academic fields) is a scholarly process used in the publication of manuscripts and in the awarding of funding for research. Publishers and funding agencies use peer review to select and to screen submissions. The process also forces authors to meet the standards of their discipline and thus achieve scientific objectivity. Publications and awards that have not undergone peer review are likely to be regarded with suspicion by scholars and professionals in many fields. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review |