The Folly of Scientism

[Reefs]

Mar 27, 2022 8:51:41 GMT -5 zazeniac said:

Mar 27, 2022 8:35:29 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Ah yes, your knee. Did you follow Steve's advice?

Yes. And doing the "knees over toes" guy's program. Are you still doing your 30 minutes in the AM?

Cool. Yes, still doing it. I'm a bit more flexible with my schedule though.

[Reefs]

Mar 25, 2022 18:19:14 GMT -5 laughter said:

Mar 23, 2022 20:40:54 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Yeah, they oppose creationism and then they come up with stuff like the big bang theory. Aces!

And in a sense, we've already got a church of scientism these days, it usually comes along as rule by so-called 'experts'.

What is especially interesting about the church of scientism is that religious movements usually attempt to give life meaning and people a special purpose, but the religion of scientism does the exact opposite, it basically took any meaning or purpose out of life  by reducing everything to random collections or formations of particles that are ruled by laws of probability. No wonder people are depressed these days and are drifting aimlessly thru life, functioning but not really alive.

Fun and ironic facts: Einstein attributes the "biggest mistake" of his career publishing his theory of General Relativity including a constant so the equations would work out to an eternal, static model of the physical universe. But the theory describes a system of equations that have many solutions, and it was a Catholic priest who came up with the version that fit Hubble's observations.

I think where your "believing is seeing" comes into play is that there have always been challenges to the big bang, but most of the effort and money has gone into making the observations fit the theory, which is what I understand some scientists to think about the "inflationary model". Personally, I just don't know enough to do other than except the big bang as the current consensus.

People say Einstein killed the ether theory. But it's not the ether theory of Aristotle (aka the fifth element) this is referring to, is it?

[laughter]

Mar 30, 2022 8:59:22 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Mar 25, 2022 18:22:33 GMT -5 laughter said:

Scientists like to answer the question of life purpose with "so that the Universe may know itself". It's an answer that has to be fully questioned to the point of dropping it to fully appreciate it.

That reminds me of Satch insisting that the purpose of life is self-realization. 

Well, if someone gets interested, grabs the bulls tail ..

[laughter]

Mar 30, 2022 9:16:33 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Mar 25, 2022 18:19:14 GMT -5 laughter said:

Fun and ironic facts: Einstein attributes the "biggest mistake" of his career publishing his theory of General Relativity including a constant so the equations would work out to an eternal, static model of the physical universe. But the theory describes a system of equations that have many solutions, and it was a Catholic priest who came up with the version that fit Hubble's observations.

I think where your "believing is seeing" comes into play is that there have always been challenges to the big bang, but most of the effort and money has gone into making the observations fit the theory, which is what I understand some scientists to think about the "inflationary model". Personally, I just don't know enough to do other than except the big bang as the current consensus.

People say Einstein killed the ether theory. But it's not the ether theory of Aristotle (aka the fifth element) this is referring to, is it?

As far as I understand it no, it's definitely not. Up to even a few years ago I just assumed that this idea of "flipping the script on the movement of light" was somehow flawed. Then the vid I can't remember hit my feed and I double-checked that with a search that led to Sabine's presentation.

To my mind this only morphs the question, as it begs the follow-up: if everything is moving at c, what is "everything" moving through? This is related to the current explanation of how the Universe has no center, as the Big Bang "occurred everywhere". A common question the popularizer's like to cover is "if the Universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?". The short answer is "nothing", and the metaphor they use is that the Universe is like a loaf of raisin bread, with points in space like the raisins and space expands as it bakes.

But light is how Universal energy manifests, so, if light isn't moving, and we are, it seems to me to put a finer point on the issue. Or, maybe (and probably) it's - again - just a deficiency in my understanding here. Or, it could be a contradiction just waiting for some future Einstein to illuminate. Dunno', but it can be fun to think about, and listen to what the scientists have to say about it.

[laughter]

Mar 30, 2022 9:06:22 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Mar 25, 2022 18:52:11 GMT -5 laughter said:

They're alive and well over on odysee.

There used to be a lot of videos that debunked flat earth theory and then videos that debunked that debunk again and then videos that debunked the debunked debunk... 

(** shakes head sadly **)

[Reefs]

Mar 31, 2022 14:41:08 GMT -5 laughter said:

Mar 30, 2022 9:16:33 GMT -5 Reefs said:

People say Einstein killed the ether theory. But it's not the ether theory of Aristotle (aka the fifth element) this is referring to, is it?

As far as I understand it no, it's definitely not. Up to even a few years ago I just assumed that this idea of "flipping the script on the movement of light" was somehow flawed. Then the vid I can't remember hit my feed and I double-checked that with a search that led to Sabine's presentation.

To my mind this only morphs the question, as it begs the follow-up: if everything is moving at c, what is "everything" moving through? This is related to the current explanation of how the Universe has no center, as the Big Bang "occurred everywhere". A common question the popularizer's like to cover is "if the Universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?". The short answer is "nothing", and the metaphor they use is that the Universe is like a loaf of raisin bread, with points in space like the raisins and space expands as it bakes.

But light is how Universal energy manifests, so, if light isn't moving, and we are, it seems to me to put a finer point on the issue. Or, maybe (and probably) it's - again - just a deficiency in my understanding here. Or, it could be a contradiction just waiting for some future Einstein to illuminate. Dunno', but it can be fun to think about, and listen to what the scientists have to say about it.

Here's an example of scientism at its finest, "The Mathematics of Consciousness"...




And here's an interesting presentation by Wallace Thornhill about what's wrong with science today. The first half hour is basically a criticism of scientism, the rest of the presentation is about alternative, holistic cosmological theories:




So basically, what both videos of Sabine and Wallace show is that scientism is not the issue, the actual issue is our over-reliance on the intellect or left brain thinking which gives rise to scientism. And scientism eventually gives rise to transhumanism.

[laughter]

Apr 1, 2022 9:09:02 GMT -5 Reefs said:

Mar 31, 2022 14:41:08 GMT -5 laughter said:

As far as I understand it no, it's definitely not. Up to even a few years ago I just assumed that this idea of "flipping the script on the movement of light" was somehow flawed. Then the vid I can't remember hit my feed and I double-checked that with a search that led to Sabine's presentation.

To my mind this only morphs the question, as it begs the follow-up: if everything is moving at c, what is "everything" moving through? This is related to the current explanation of how the Universe has no center, as the Big Bang "occurred everywhere". A common question the popularizer's like to cover is "if the Universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?". The short answer is "nothing", and the metaphor they use is that the Universe is like a loaf of raisin bread, with points in space like the raisins and space expands as it bakes.

But light is how Universal energy manifests, so, if light isn't moving, and we are, it seems to me to put a finer point on the issue. Or, maybe (and probably) it's - again - just a deficiency in my understanding here. Or, it could be a contradiction just waiting for some future Einstein to illuminate. Dunno', but it can be fun to think about, and listen to what the scientists have to say about it.

Here's an example of scientism at its finest, "The Mathematics of Consciousness"...




And here's an interesting presentation by Wallace Thornhill about what's wrong with science today. The first half hour is basically a criticism of scientism, the rest of the presentation is about alternative, holistic cosmological theories:




So basically, what both videos of Sabine and Wallace show is that scientism is not the issue, the actual issue is our over-reliance on the intellect or left brain thinking which gives rise to scientism. And scientism eventually gives rise to transhumanism.

Always suspected Sabine had a comic bone. As an aside, the last idea about the CD metaphor is one that migrated from the field of AI, as it's been in use there for decades now, and is actually a very practical and useful approach.

I'll likely look into the electric theory. I can understand and don't disagree with many of his objections. There were about a half dozen technical details I found arguable, but my level of knowledge doesn't qualify me for debate and I'm sure others who are qualified have made already those arguments. I'm curious now as to how the theory resolves the black-body radiation problem, the double-slit experiment and what Heisenberg joked as the "p-q swindle! ". Despite my perceiving merits in his objections, as other's have pointed out, the current theories have matched certain important empirical results, and the electric theory would have to do the same.

As far as the philosophy of it, the big picture is that any intellectual theory can be the foundation of scientism, even this one. The complexity of the standard model is something noone likes, and is in stark contrast to relativity. But, now, wouldn't we expect any theory that reflects the world of the 10 gazillion thingies to embody both sides of the complexity/simplicity dichotomy? I mean, just look around any room, and count the number of objects. Related to this are the breathtaking spatial scales on which Relativity and the Standard Model are founded as they were necessary to explain observations on those scales - which explains the need for the use of instrumentation rather than direct observation, although I completely agree with the points he makes about simulations.

The bottom-line on where the electric theory would fit in the metaphysics of scientism is to re-establish the predominance of material realism. This was the ultimate goal of Bohm's implicate-order, hidden-variable model, for example, which, like the theory presented here, was founded on a "Universal monism", counter to the general idea of atomism. And this brings me back to my remarks about the Copenhagen Interpretation, which was in direct response to this from the OP:

Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy.

Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering such questions, but the only means of answering them

Scientism makes use of QM by way of speculation about the nature of waveform collapse, and the apparent role of the act of observation in that collapse. But you see, it is the absence of that speculation that is the defining aspect of the CI. One way to put this is that the CI explicitly states that QM is a map, and thereby just as explicitly distinguishes that map from the territory. The CI limits the authority of the model to specific snapshots, specific states, and disclaims any authority about any time or place other than that snapshot. Heisenberg, in his metaphysical work, dismissed the notion that the sound of the lonely tree falling is a superposition of possible states, but rather, that it is the entirety of the Universe that "hears" the thud.

[Reefs]

This is interesting...

Sabine: ...It was also a rather rude awakening, it made me realize that this institute wasn't about knowledge discovery, it was about moneymaking. And the more I saw of academia, the more I realized it wasn't just this particular institute and this particular professor, it was generally the case. The moment you put people into big institutions, the goal shifts from knowledge discovery to moneymaking.

Here's how this works: if a researcher gets a scholarship or research grant then the institution gets part of that money, it's called the overhead. Technically, that's meant to pay for offices and equipment and administration etc., but academic institutions then pay part of their staff from this overhead, so they need to keep that overhead coming.

Small scholarships don't make much money, but research grants can be tens of millions of dollars, and the overhead can be anything between 15 and 50%. This is why research and institutions exert loads of pressure on researchers to bring in grant money. And partly they do this by keeping the researchers on temporary contracts, so that they need grants to get paid themselves, while the administrators, who are paid on the overhead, usually have permanent positions. But you get used to this kind of crap. And the overhead isn't even the real problem.

The real problem is that the easiest way to grow in academia is to pay other people to produce papers, on which you, as the grant holder, can put your name. That's how academia works. Grants pay students and post-docs to produce research papers for the grant holder. And those papers are what the supervisor then uses to apply for more grants. The result is a paper production machine, in which students and post-docs are burned through to bring in money for the institution. Most of that money comes from your taxes.

After my PhD, I applied for another scholarship and got that. And then I got a post job and a grant, and another job and another job and another grant and so on. And I began to understand what you need to do to get a grant or get hired. You have to work on topics that are mainstream enough, but not too mainstream. You want them to be a little bit edgy, but not too edgy. No! It needs to be something that fits into the existing machinery. And since most grants are 3 years or 5 years at most, it also needs to be something that can be wrapped up quickly. The more I saw of this, the more I realized this wasn't how I wanted to spend my life.

The other thing that happened was that the more I saw of the foundations of physics, the more I became convinced that most of the research there wasn't based on sound scientific principles. I know this sounds wild, like I'm the crank next door on YouTube (and maybe that's what I am), but I like to think that my argument was, and still is, very academic. I never intended it to be offensive. I just explained why thinking up new particles isn't a good strategy for progress in physics, and why that had gotten an entire discipline stuck. And naive as I was, I expected physicists to think about it. I expected rational debate.

But that never came. No one was interested, no one is interested. They were interested in writing more papers. And that's what they need all these particles and other wild ideas for, to write papers, to get grants, to get post-docs, to write more papers… and round and round it goes.

[…]

At this point I figured out what you need to put into a ground proposal to get the money, and that's what I did. I applied for grants on research projects, because it was a way to make money, not because I thought it would leave an impact in the history of science. It's not that what I did was somehow wrong, it was, and still is, totally state-of-the-art. I did what I said I do in the proposal, I did the calculation, I wrote the papers, I wrote my reports and the reports were approved. Normal academic procedure.

But I knew it was BS, just as most of the work in that area is currently BS, and just as most of academic research, that your taxes pay for, is almost certainly BS. The real problem I had, I think, is that I was bad at lying to myself. Of course, I tried to tell myself, and anyone who was willing to listen, that at least, unofficially, on the side, I do the research that I thought was worth my time, but that I couldn't get money for, because it was too far off the mainstream. But that research never got done, because I had to do the other stuff that I actually got paid for.

This sounds like a sad story, and in some sense it is, because it's the story of a young scientist whose dream died. And it's the story of an old scientist, who thinks they could have made a difference if it hadn't been necessary to get past five reviewers who didn't share my interests, because that's what it comes down to eventually. It's not that they say there's something wrong with your proposal, it just doesn't excite them, because it's not the main current interest.

Who knew?!