Lewis Wolpert has a pleasant interview in Salon today — I find most of what he says copacetic. I very much like his developmental biology textbook, but I’m afraid I found his recent popular book, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), far too scattered and unfocused to be memorable. It’s a pleasant enough read — get it and you won’t regret it — but it was more like an agreeable conversation with an intelligent and eccentric fellow than a work that will either shake you up or strengthen your views…and that also comes through in the interview. He’s pretty much a sensible skeptic who doesn’t put up with much woo-woo nonsense.
There is one part that I didn’t much care for, that would probably prompt me to start an argument if this were a conversation:
You call David Hume your “hero philosopher.” Why do you like him so much?
First of all, I don’t like any other philosopher. I think philosophers are terribly clever but have absolutely nothing useful to say whatsoever. I avoid philosophy like mad. But David Hume does say such interesting and important things. He’s very good on religion, for example. I like him for that.
That’s just me, though. If I had my druthers, I’d have a philosophy of science requirement in place for our biology majors, as an essential piece of background in a good liberal arts education—biology has gotten so huge, though, that something had to go, and that’s one we aren’t even going to try to push into the curriculum, and I’m probably the only person in my discipline who’d consider it useful.
I certainly hope that when he says he has no interest in philosophy he’s referring to metaphysics rather than ethics. A science with no regard to ethics is a Frankenstein’s monster or NAZI eugenics waiting to happen.
“I think philosophers are terribly clever but have absolutely nothing useful to say whatsoever… David Hume does say such interesting and important things.”
Is this some sort of multiple personality problem, or is he just gibbering?
It’s typical of the way many rational people think of philosophy though: Good arguments are just good arguments, but when an argument is flawed, illogical or irrelevant it’s philosophy.
Hume was early with his criticisms of religion, and was persecuted for his views, but he’s had plenty of company over the years. I wonder why just Hume appeals to Wolpert. After all, pure Empiricism has so many sticky aspects to it.
I’d love to see phil of science as a requirement for any natural science, or even any bachelor’s degree. As an undergrad, gobbling up phil of mind and phil of science classes, I was shocked at how many science majors had almost no awareness of ideas like instrumentalism vs realism, falsification, context of discovery/justification, etc. (I suspect that topic list is showing my age.)
I’m surprised that a practicing scientist would have only Hume as a philosophical hero. Hume’s arguments pretty much yanked away a key aspect of the foundations of science. It’s like a mathematician whose only hero is Goedel.
I’d love to see phil of science as a requirement for any natural science, or even any bachelor’s degree. As an undergrad, gobbling up phil of mind and phil of science classes, I was shocked at how many science majors had almost no awareness of ideas like instrumentalism vs realism, falsification, context of discovery/justification, etc. (I suspect that topic list is showing my age.)
That was pretty much my impression when I took philosophy of science. How the hell can someone graduate with a science degree when they don’t know the importance of falsification? It’s one of the fundamental principles of science, yet it’s not necessary to learn about it. Maybe this is why so many people who graduated with science degrees can’t see the boundary between science and pseudoscience – they never learned it. (Yes, I know the demarcation problem is a lot more complicated than just falsifiability; it’s just the best balance of simplicity and power.)
Philosophy can mean many things. When it is simply a way of viewing a body of knowledge, a new perspective or paradigm (i.e. philosophy of science), then it is fine. In fact, I don’t even really think of that as philosophy per se. When I think philosophy, I think of those horrible arguments that try to conjure up knowledge from nothing. You cannot sit in an armchair and divine empirical knowledge, which was the bulk of philosophy before the scientific method took hold. It sounds like this is the type of philosophy Lewis is talking about.
OT post – sorry, but I had to point out how Dr Dembski attempted to smear Dawkins, but had it backfire!
http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?act=SP;f=14;t=1274;p=59262
Usual story over at UD – post something innaccurate, change it when it’s pointed out, delete it and pretend it never existed.
I agree that philosophy of science should be a requirement for biology majors. Precisely because the field is so large and complicated. The only way you can keep track of everything and sort stuff out is through logical rigor.
A major problem in biology today is that some of the fundamental simplifying assumptions are completely wrong, for example homeostasis. The various parameters of physiology may be “the same” within our ability to measure them, but the assumption of stasis is clearly wrong.
David Hume could out consume
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Still, if you had to pick only one philosopher and toss the rest, you could do worse than Hume.
[Meta-offtopic]
Not that I don’t love philosophers, bashing the anti-scients, reading what clan PZ’s up to, and all that good stuff, but… can I vote for more science on Pharyngula, like I seem to remember once upon a time?
[/meta-offtopic]
R
The Cure Is Compassion
Deepak Chopra – May 15, 2007
“Modern medicine has reached the stage where diagnosis runs far ahead of cures, especially in cutting edge
area like genetics and stem cells. The genes that cause many cancers are quickly being isolated, far faster than
knowing how to correct the damage they cause. The same seems true in politics as well. Countless books and articles diagnose what’s wrong with everything from the Iraq war to global warming, but cures seem to lag behind blame, accusation, regret, alarm, and anxiety, all of which are familiar symptoms when a patient has found out bad news but has no way of reaching a cure….”
“I wager that anyone with the courage to display actual love, sympathy, and kindness would rocket into public favor.
We are desperate to get out of this prevailing tension and hostility that prisons public life today. You may think that compassion is a naive cure, but the alternative is simply more of the same disease.”
http://www.intentblog.com/archives/2007/05/the_cure_is_com_1.html
He can cure cancer by compassion
“I wager that anyone with the courage to display actual love, sympathy, and kindness would rocket into public favor.”
– Deepak Chopra
***
If compassion were the cure for cancer,
for the cure of all ills in the Iraq war,
and the display of actual, not phony love,
real but not unreal sympathy,
and kindness, heartfelt, not superfluous
were all and all,
would then a quantum guru from India,
now rolling in gold in the West,
who has real compassion, real sympathy
and heartfelt kindness, not soar
like a rocket into the public favor?
Or perhaps he has
as he can cure cancer by compassion.
~White Wings
http://whitewings.sulekha.com/blog/post/2007/05/he-can-cure-cancer.htm
The Cure Is Compassion
Deepak Chopra – May 15, 2007
“Modern medicine has reached the stage where diagnosis runs far ahead of cures, especially in cutting edge
area like genetics and stem cells. The genes that cause many cancers are quickly being isolated, far faster than
knowing how to correct the damage they cause. The same seems true in politics as well. Countless books and articles diagnose what’s wrong with everything from the Iraq war to global warming, but cures seem to lag behind blame, accusation, regret, alarm, and anxiety, all of which are familiar symptoms when a patient has found out bad news but has no way of reaching a cure….”
“I wager that anyone with the courage to display actual love, sympathy, and kindness would rocket into public favor.
We are desperate to get out of this prevailing tension and hostility that prisons public life today. You may think that compassion is a naive cure, but the alternative is simply more of the same disease.”
http://www.intentblog.com/archives/2007/05/the_cure_is_com_1.html
He can cure cancer by compassion
“I wager that anyone with the courage to display actual love, sympathy, and kindness would rocket into public favor.”
– Deepak Chopra
***
If compassion were the cure for cancer,
for the cure of all ills in the Iraq war,
and the display of actual, not phony love,
real but not unreal sympathy,
and kindness, heartfelt, not superfluous
were all and all,
would then a quantum guru from India,
now rolling in gold in the West,
who has real compassion, real sympathy
and heartfelt kindness, not soar
like a rocket into the public favor?
Or perhaps he has
as he can cure cancer by compassion.
~White Wings
whitewings.sulekha.com/blog/post/2007/05/he-can-cure-cancer.htm
Really, I am pumping out just as much science — it’s just that more of it is going into this book project and right now, and into preparing for a talk, and putting together columns for Seed, so you don’t get to see it here.
How about more “philosophy-of-science”-posts?
Also,
“copacetic”???
I don’t believe in that word.
Is that American “English”?
Do British computers not have Google installed on them?
I’m fairly cynical about these Salon articles. They’ve run several articles in the past year in which they interview either a famous atheist or a left-wing moderate Christian. Then everyone runs to the letters page to have a 30 page debate arguing whether or not God exists.
There really aren’t that many new arguments on either side of the God debate. I don’t think Wolpert says anything that I haven’t heard 100 times before.
Thats the trouble with atheism- it’s not that interesting a subject. You don’t need 20 books to explain it- the argument against God can be made in a few pages.
He sounds pretty shallow on this subject. Like anyone does when saying something like “absolutely nothing useful to say whatsoever.” Buh? Even ‘postmoderns’ like Žižek occasionally have some useful things to say.
One of my favorite quotes from Dan Dennett (a philosopher who often says very useful things) is “..there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage has been taken on board without examination.”
Saying that philosophy is useless is itself a philosophical view — it’s an applied pragmatism or utilitarianism.
Also, empiricism is a philosophy (and central to science!), so equating “philosophy” with armchair a priori non-empirical reasoning is absurd (mathematics would actually qualify as the latter, I know I did my undergrad math degree mostly from an armchair — anyone think math is bullshit or useless?). It’s sad when people dismiss philosophy just because there is a lot of bad philosophy out there. You might as well dismiss biology because of all the Behes and Wells’ and Egnors.
“I don’t like any other philosopher. I think philosophers are terribly clever but have absolutely nothing useful to say whatsoever. I avoid philosophy like mad.”
This has to be one of the most idiotic non-religious statements I’ve ever heard. Never mind that he singlehandedly dismisses my entire profession, but a sweeping generalization like this is usually the product of very small minds. The rigours of logic and argument have been honed by philosophy for thousands of years, the very logic and argumentation upon which he relies to support his position. As for David Hume, he was not produced in a vaccuum, and would find this guy’s statement laughable and insulting. Hume is great on religion, but he’s also dated. Even he gave ground to the design argument. I’ll not be rushing out to get this wanker’s book any time soon.
“For as to beauty itself, it has no absolute, it has only a relative existence. It depends as much upon the nature of the being in whom the sentament is produced as on the nature of the being by whom it is produced” – Jeremy Bentham
“Science is a system based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification is science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system” – Rudolf Carnap
“I think therefore I am.” – Rene Descartes
“The unexamed life is a life not worth living” – Socrates
“All our knowledge falls within the bounds of possible experience” – Kant
“{Humanity}is naturally free, and the examples of history showing, that the governments of the world, that were begun in peace, had their beginning laid on that foundation, and were made by the concent of the people” – John Locke
“To abondon religion as the illusory happiness of the people is to demand their real happiness” – Karl Marx
“It is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the questions” – JS Mill
“Whatever has value in our world now does not have value in itself, according to its nature-nature is always valueless, but has been givin value at some point, as a present-and it was we who bestowed it.” – Nietzsche
“Philosophy begins in wonder” – Plato
A concept this man has no knowledge of. I could go on with this list all day, but my pont is surely clear by now. Accoding to Wolpert, there is nothing of use in the above, or in the many other things these and other philosophers have said. Much of the enlightenment owes thanks to philosophy. The linguistic turn post-Wittgenstein? Useless. The study of consciousness and neurophilosophy? Useless. Falsification is science and Popper? Uselss. Just because he may not be able to understand or follow their arguments, doesn’t mean they’re useless. That’s creationist thinking. Beware this man.
Yours In Reason,
Nevyn
How can anyone say that philosophers have “nothing useful to say whatsoever”? Maybe it’s just that philosophy interests me, but it seems to me that there are plenty of philosophers who have extremely useful things to say and plenty who actually do have “nothing useful to say.” But isn’t that how it is in any discipline?
Like AL said, philosophy isn’t just armchair non-empirical thought. Richard Carrier (my favorite philosopher) says,
“…it is folly to ignore philosophy. For this, the ‘pursuit of wisdom,’ is the very activity of studying launguage, logic, and method, and of employing these tools to construct a comprehensive and intelligible – and ultimately useful – view of yourself and the world.”
Dismissing all of philosophy is like shooting yourself in the foot – your ignoring any and all advice anyone can give in your pursuit simply because it’s advice, without even considering it.
Why do you people hate all developmental biologists so much?
(Just joking. I think he said a very stupid thing, too.)
I think Wolpert is guilty of careless language more than anything else.
Many people say ‘philosophy’, but what they really mean by that are aspects of philosophy they find distasteful or irrelevant, such as metaphysics. No educated person, which of course includes Wolpert, could ever doubt that philosophy is useful: it provides us with tools to not merely evaluate the truth or falsehood of claims, but to clarify the nature of things under investigation, and the nature of those means we propose to test claims with.
Oh, I get him. This is what the philosophers do:
By the way, did anybody notice the article says he says religion is adaptive? I haven’t a subscription, so I don’t know what exactly he said, or what his arguments are.
Scott said, “No educated person, which of course includes Wolpert, could ever doubt that philosophy is useful”
Wolpert said, “philosophers . . . have absolutely nothing useful to say whatsoever”
If he hadn’t mentioned Hume I might agree with you, but he obviously had some vetting process that Hume passed that no one from Aristotle to Russell to the Churchlands passed and thus have nothing useful to say WHATSOEVER. He doesn’t deserve special pleading on his behalf (another “useless” philosophy term). He needs to do it himself, and soon.
I’m a philosophy major. I understand why some people get the feeling that a lot of philosophy is just glorified bullshitting–a lot of it really is!
But underneath a lot of the bullshittery there really are a lot of philosophers who have very insightful things to say. I’m not very fond of metaphysics, but I think a good grounding in ethics and epistemology is crucial for well-rounded thinking. That’s not to say metaphysics should be completely ignored–I just don’t find it as important as the other two major branches.
One big problem is that philosophy, like the other branches of the humanities, has been infested with a lot of gibberish, and a lot of it comes from postmodernists. I think a lot of philosophers think that philosophy boils down to writing deliberately obtuse and nonsensical gibberish that sounds, to the untrained ear, like really technical, complex analysis. It’s unfortunate that this kind of shit goes on. I think these people are giving the humanities as a whole a really bad name. English, History, Art, and Philosophy are beginning to be viewed by some people as pointless or shallow, despite the fact that those are all important things to understand.
Everything good in philosophy can also be categorized as another discipline, and is included in those fields of study. Everything bad in philosophy is left to philosophy.
Which is precisely why professional philosophers are so terrible. It’s not just that they satisfy Sturgeon’s Law, but that they exceed it so very enthusiastically.
“But David Hume does say such interesting and important things. He’s very good on religion, for example. I like him for that.”
He would seem to be unaware that Hume’s arguments against miracles and the like were known to be fallacious at the time he said them.
And why atheists like Hume so much is a mystery, given he said things like.
“The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author and no rational enquirer can after serious reflection suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion”
I agree with Wolpert. I don’t think philosophy is capable of discovering truth and it is, therefore, effectively useless. Some naturalists have argued that philosophy is a kind of immature science, a clearing of the brush before science can proceed, that can eventually become science; that might be true but it’s an assertion that needs to be backed up by more evidence than “Aristotle talked about physics before Galileo and Newton.” I’ve yet to see anyone make a serious case for it.
The one thing I took away from studying philosophy, and the one thing I wish other people would take away from studying philosophy, is an appreciation for the contingency of many things people accept as unexamined truths. Reading the Bible can be useful to a Christian if he comes to appreciate the inconsistencies and rejects his Christian upbringing. Likewise, we’ve all been influenced by philosophy and especially by the philosophical interpretation of science (to the point where most people can’t tell the difference between the interpretation and science as practiced), and we all need to appreciate just how arbitrary it is. That doesn’t make it useful in and of itself though.
In my experience the result of scientists studying philosophy is not usually an appreciation for the contingency of the unexamined truths they hold. Witness the popularity of logical positivism in Einstein’s time and the current (incredibly annoying) popularity of Popper’s ridiculous falsificationism. Philosophically-minded scientists seem to be drawn to revisionist philosophy of science. If you see a scientist quoting a philosopher these days it’s likely to be Kuhn or Popper. I think they like Kuhn because of the entertaining and grim idea that things only change when the older generation dies and Popper because falsificationism makes science sound so heroic. It’s as if Popper found the one thing more heroic than Hume’s inductive fallibilism: not only could everything I just said turn out to be false but it’s only worthwhile insofar as it can so be shot down by my peers.
There’s also areas of philosophy that study things that should be in scientific or mathematical fields but aren’t because they’re marginalised. Consciousness might turn out to be like that (to some degree). And I personally think nominalist accounts of mathematics should be a part of mathematics and physics proper (tying the two together).
from the very first comment:
A science with no regard to ethics is a Frankenstein’s monster or NAZI eugenics waiting to happen.
so, uh your first example is completely fictional and the second had nothing to do with science to begin with.
surely you can make a better argument for ethics in science than that???
First off; in relation to the other topics that he discussed besides philosophy, I received a pamphlet in the mail for a new product that “supports the release of adult stem cells from the bone marrow into the circulation, thereby aiding the ability of circulating stem cells to reach areas of tissue injury or damage.” So I checked out this website. It has a 9 minute streaming video, and invitation to sell; but I couldn’t find a list of any studies, not even any pseudo clinical trials to support the claims of the manufacturers. You can sign up as a distributor, and there is plenty of information about that.
They also mention anti-oxidants. Just thought I would share.
From what I learned in philosophy classes, the discipline provides the structure for logical thought which applies to science. One of the things that Kelly Tripplehorn fails to understand is that logical conclusions aren’t the end of science, which is why he posted his “challenge.” It’s a useful guide.
First, mathematics is science.
Secondly, such things are usually pushed to the margin for a very good reason. The discipline of philosophy is where all of the garbage ends up being excluded to, and the people who pursue it there aren’t particularly appreciative of the kind of rigorous reason that put it (and thus them) there.
We have to rewrite the entire curriculum for biology. The current one at most university is Teh Sucks. Biology majors heads are filled with disjointed facts, without a modicum of understanding of theory, practical application, or mathematics. Philosophy of Science isn’t even high on my list. How about looking at how engineers train their undergrads? How about senior projects, calculus, physics with calculus and diffy-Q? Instead the curriculum is all about producing high MCAT scorers.
And that’s why biology is at it’s current standstill, the bulk of funding going into Protein-X255 without any hope of producing coherent understanding. Why most developmental biology can’t even see that its about the topology. Why most neuroscientist don’t have a clue about information theory – literally, most don’t know Nyquist!
Ahh, somedays are just hopeless.
Maybe Biology graduate programs should just cease to accept Biology undergrads. That may be the only practical solution.
How about looking at how engineers train their undergrads?
well, i can’t say much for that, considering the preponderance of engineers who apparently find nothing wrong with ID.
many engineers who have tried to explain this trend make it clear that most undergrad engineering programs do nothing to stress basic concepts of logical or analytical thinking, and little about the history of the concepts they are taught.
while I tend to agree that many undergraduate programs in biology tend to focus on memorization than application, looking to the engineers for guidance might not be the best.
besides that, there ARE good undergrad programs in biology that do stress application and experience.
the one I went through at UC Santa Barbara was excellent in that way, and that was 20 years ago; it’s even better now.
And that’s why biology is at it’s current standstill,
LOL!
I’ve got to concur. This is the most exciting time in biology in the last several hundred years. Real biotechnology is within our reach. Combine it with the fledgling science of cognitive psychology, and the sky itself wouldn’t be the limit.
Caledonian:
You say:
“Everything good in philosophy can also be categorized as another discipline, and is included in those fields of study. Everything bad in philosophy is left to philosophy.”
If you read Harry Frankfurt, you would know that this statement is a very good example of “bullshit.”
You also say:
“First, mathematics is science.”
Really? Looks a lot more like logic and set theory to me. You often run experiments that discuss the number three? You look at the world and prove Fermat’s Last Theorem through empirical investigation, do you?
There is no science without philosophy. There are only scientists who don’t understand the substantive philosophical committments they operate under.
Maybe you just don’t know what “philosophy” “mathematics” and “science” mean.
Of course, we could have an argument about what these words mean, and what disciplines fit where, the relations between these very concepts…
But then we’d be doing philosophy. Oops.
Caledonian, I agree that mathematics is science, I added the addendum about marginalised sciences because I happen to think a nominalist account of mathematics (such as Hartry Field’s work) is a better foundation for mathematics than those philosophies that are actually represented in mathematics (i.e., trying to locate foundations in logic or set theory or whatever). You probably disagree.
Something I’d like to add about Wolpert. I found it disturbing to see a scientist saying the following:
“There’s no question about it”? Has something miraculous happened in the science of human evolution I don’t know about?
Every time I perform a computation, I’m performing an experiment. Assertions about mathematics are really just predictions that when other people do the same computations, or I do the computations again in the future, the same answer will be reached.
What, you think it’s possible to separate logic from ‘scientific’ experimentation? Without logic, we cannot draw conclusions, no matter how many physical systems we study. When we perform math, we’re also studying physical systems – often those that are between our ears and keep our head from caving in. But we can also utilize electronic computational devices instead of neural ones, and the same principle applies.
“Every time I perform a computation, I’m performing an experiment. Assertions about mathematics are really just predictions that when other people do the same computations, or I do the computations again in the future, the same answer will be reached.”
That’s a substantive philosophical view about what logic and mathematics is! That’s a philosophical claim!
And a false one. But that’s neither here nor there.
Although I’m vastly amused by your unthinking rejection of a rather obvious truth, Patrick, I’m more annoyed by your stupidity.
The methods of philosophy demand support and argumentation for propositions such as, “Everything good in philosophy can … be categorized as another discipline…Everything bad in philosophy is left to philosophy…Which is precisely why professional philosophers are so terrible.” and “Popper’s ridiculous falsificationism.” It is an unfamiliarity with the reasoning skills philosophy provides that may make statements like this apear significant. It also requires you to define terms like “truth” and removes the shield of equivocation from sentences like, “I don’t think philosophy is capable of discovering truth and it is, therefore, effectively useless” which might sound dismissive to things like semantics, ethics, phenomonology, aesthetics, etc. And defining your terms is a precept in philosophy at least since Socrates.
“Although I’m vastly amused by your unthinking rejection of a rather obvious truth, Patrick, I’m more annoyed by your stupidity.”
That is not a response to my claim. Maybe if you took a philosophy course you would know what an ad hominem argument is.
I didn’t provide a reason for rejecting psychologism about mathematics and logic because it wasn’t relevant. Though many mathematicians and mathematical logicians would reject your “obvious truth” just as much as I would. But that isn’t the point.
You might think that analytic philosophers are broadly wrong about most things to the point of being useless.
But that is clearly distinct from saying that philosophical questions are irrelevant or unimportant.
Psychologism vs. realism vs. nominalism (etc etc) about math and logic is a philosophical question. So you are doing philosophy.
I can only conclude that you don’t really know what you are talking about.
Yes, yes, we know you’d love to claim reasoning itself for philosophy, but the principles are far, far older than our thinking about them – and they’ve been incorporated into other disciplines.
What great discoveries has philosophy made by itself, hmmm? Can you name even one useful concept that wasn’t developed under the aegis of another discipline?
Just a thought Cal, what department tought Logic at your school? Of course, this doesn’t make logic philosophy. We have Aristotle to thank for that. Every time you talk about logic or critical thinking, you’re singing the praises of philosophy.
“Can you name even one useful concept that wasn’t developed under the aegis of another discipline?”
Natural rights.
Want more?
It’s mathematics. There was a time when there was no distinction between the two concepts. That time is over.
Geometry’s older than Aristotle, Nevyn. And even Aristotle didn’t invent logic – he just observed it in action and described it. It’s older than him.
That’s neither true nor useful.
Hmm. In 1992, Wolpert published a book titled The Unnatural Nature of Science, which the Library of Congress categorized as Philosophy of Science. All I remember about it is that at a time when I was reading a fair bit of phil. of sci., I got a third of the way through Wolpert’s slender volume and quit. I’ve still got it — anyone want me to send it to them?
I am not saying that all reasoning is philosophy. I am arguing that the question “Is mathematics science or something else?” is NOT A SCIENTIFIC QUESTION. It is a philosophical one.
As for what philosophy has given us…
Modern predicate calculus. Or human rights. Or supervenience. Indeterminacy of translation…theory-ladenness of perception…
Rawls’s original position has been very useful in economics, law, and political science. Ditto for utilitarianism of various stripes. Many scientists have found discussions in philosophy of science to be quite useful. Much modern probability theory has been motivated by philosophers. Bayes thought he was doing philosophy. Einstein’s thinking, by his own admission, owed a great debt to Hume, Leibniz, and Kant.
Of course the question is quite silly. Philosophers are trying to get things right. The great discoveries are the theories themselves. I think that Kant’s ethical system is a brilliant and compelling intellectual achievement.
But I can equally say, “What great discoveries has biology made by itself?” If we are correct, then science relies on logic and rules of inductive and abductive reasoning that can be clarified and sharpened through philosophical analysis.
And of course, why should we suggest that only scientific discoveries matter? What about compelling theories of value and discussions about why life is worth living?
“Natural rights.
Want more?
That’s neither true nor useful.”
Philosophical claim. Natural rights is a claim about what has value in the world. The claim that it is an erroneous theory of value is an ethical question. It’s philosophy.
Aristotle codified logic from a loose analytic idea to a method of thinking and iteraction between people and the world. Math and geometry never aspired to this. The concept of natural rights is a philosophical idea through and through, perhaps getting its most thurough initial treatment from Locke. Once again, this is what philosophy does. If you wish to continue this conversation, perhaps you should tell us how you define philosophy and how you come to that deffinition.
The list is longer than I can name.
You’ve got it backwards. Philosophical analysis can be improved by applying scientific reasoning to it.
Patrick said – “But I can equally say, “What great discoveries has biology made by itself?”
Cal said – “The list is longer than I can name.”
Saying it doesn’t make it true. You must support your claims if you want to have an adult conversation.
Questions about the nature of the world can only be resolved by examining the world itself. The assertion that your concept of ‘value’ has any actual meaning is an empirical one. It’s science. Even if we limit ethics to an arbitrary set of rules set up by human beings to argue about, the question of which rules they’ve actually set up is still science – the study of philosophers, not ‘philosophy’, is anthropological.
If it’s true, it doesn’t matter what we say about it. Something philosophers have never quite grasped.
But we aren’t talking about the meaning of the word “value” or people’s “beliefs” about value.
We are talking about what things ought to be valued. What objects are actually right and what lives are actually good. Use-mention distinction…also philosopy. The anthropological question is relevant but not exhaustive.
P.S. Crude empiricism and verificationism (which you seem to be espousing) is a philosophical position. How does one scientifically demonstrate that the only things worth talking about are those that science can talk about?
“Saying it doesn’t make it true.
If it’s true, it doesn’t matter what we say about it. Something philosophers have never quite grasped.”
Begging the question…philosophers.
Umm … mathematics is not a science it is a language.
No, that’s empirical.
Only for a ludicrous definition of ‘philosophical’ in which all discussion of concepts is considered philosophy.
And you ought to know better than to ask for a justification of that method made with that method. That’s just stupid.
I didn’t give an argument for dismissing Popper because I tend not to give reasoned arguments with my passing shots. If you don’t mind, I’d prefer to use a scientific argument than the “reasoning skills philosophy provides” to dismiss his work, although this won’t be double-blind and peer reviewed. Sometimes with particularly low hanging fruit the science can be done conversationally. I refer you to the evidence: science as practiced and the complete absence of falsification criteria therein.
The fact that philosophers have also pointed out that Popper’s work is somewhat lackluster as a description of science as practiced doesn’t, by the way, make the argument philosophical. Similarly, criticizing philosophy is not doing philosophy, and not every argument is philosophical simply because philosophy deals with argument. The fact that philosophy is so broadly defined as to cause you to lapse into playground arguments of the “but you’re still doing philosophy!” sort is philosophy’s problem not mine.
It’s more than that. Languages can express concepts, but they don’t automatically grant the capacity to derive conclusions from other statements. Math is a subset of all language – and the study of what mathematics says is a scientific discipline.
“The assertion that your concept of ‘value’ has any actual meaning is an empirical one”
This is an is/ought distinction. The meaning of value IS NOT empirical. That’s the point. Further, you can’t get to the way things should be from the way things are. One can (and must IMO) inform the other, but neither stands alone.
“If it’s true, it doesn’t matter what we say about it.”
This is just silly. I wouldn’t be suprised to hear creationists say things like that about the bible. On the converse, it matters quite a bit what we say about EvoDevo, how we say it and who we say it to, regardless of its overwgelming validity.
Hon, even concepts that are totally arbitrary and defined only by human convention can be known empirically – you just look at the people in question and see what they say.
If the concept has ANY implications for reality, we can look at the relevant parts of reality in order to study the concept and confirm/refute assertions made about those implications. Something that isn’t empirical in any way has no reality at all – you can’t even discuss it.
I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a back and forth like this one for a while. Thanks! And Patrick, keep fighting the good fight. You’re spot on.
(BTW – I’m going to disagree about Aristotle simply observing logic in action and describing it. This just isn’t true. Look back at the philosophy and mathematics and the medical writers prior to Aristotle and you’re not going to see logical reasoning in action. You’re just not. Sorry. Aristotle, and the Stoics after him, did far more than simply recognize and record the rules of logic that were already being used and it’s a shame that that incredible achievement isn’t as recognized and admired as it ought to be. Oh, and let’s not forget Aristotle’s important contributions to biology as well.)
“Hon”?
Listen you condescending dicksmack, when you can piece an argument together that doesn’t rely on one fallacy after another, then wrap up with some offhand personal attack (yes, I see the irony) maybe you’ll be able to talk with the big kids at the grown up table. Until then, I’ll stop feeding the troll. I should have done this earlier, but I have a habit of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Have a nice life, slick.
Just to clarify this point about the boundaries of philosophy. This problem (lack of a definite boundary) comes up a lot in the humanities because the humanities are canonical rather than scientific. Philosophy is a “dialogue through the centuries” as I recall one philosopher putting it. The question of the usefulness of philosophy would, in my mind, be a question of the usefulness of that tradition. It’s a question of the usefulness of all the books you’d find filed under “philosophy” rather than the usefulness of “reasoned argument in general” (or some other definition so broad as to be worthless).
He noticed that public debate used certain kinds of arguments, some of which struck him as being correct and some as incorrect. He began categorizing correct arguments and explaining why the incorrect ones failed – and thus the study of logic was born.
He also noted that spurious arguments were often effective despite being wrong, which is why he was concerned with arguing to convince rather than ‘correctly’. Rhetoric, sadly, has little logic about it.
Just so we get this out of the way:
Is anyone going to try to argue that there are meaningful statements that are NOT empirical in nature? If so, how precisely do we determine anything about those statements?
Well, I don’t care what anyone says- I think Catherine Zeta Jones IS hot.
(Just thought I’d throw that into the mix.)
@Icthyic: Of course any generalization is an over-generalization. And of course engineering is too narrow – any undergraduate degree is. If you spend time learning math, you miss out on literature, etc. But engineering at least gives you the tools to actually do something – then you depend on time to actually learn substance. Most undergrad biology programs pretty much leave you with nothing. They may not believe in ID, but they believe in enough nonsense to make up for that!
@Caledonian: BS. Today is not the most exciting time in biology. Many, many biologist are frustrated. We’ve cataloged endless series of proteins. We’ve mapped genomes. The last twenty years have been wonderful in that respect. But today? It’s same-old-same-old. More proteins, more genes. No idea how protein machines work. Simulations are complete BS today. No new theoretical structures have been built. Nothing really exciting has happened since the fifties! And fairly little interesting has happened in the last ten years – although of course there are a few clues about interesting things that are coming down the pike, someday. Biology is seriously stuck, and keeps on funding the same nonsense over and over. I’m sure something will break sooner or later (something always breaks), but it’s going to crush most biologist, because most biologists are just spinning their wheels (which, after all is the normal state of science).
Windy: LOL? Good argument – a mastery of language. Just keep on accepting the common wisdom. Like every field, the dum-dums keep thinking they’re making master break-throughs, while all they’re doing is counting the number of legs on a beetle. Now there is LOL!
That is the most absurd characterization of the current state of biology I’ve read yet. Maybe you ought to switch to developmental biology, or bioinformatics, or systems biology, or something that isn’t quite as boring as whatever you’re doing now. Microbiology? Signaling? Immunology?
I keep seeing new and interesting stuff coming up. I think your point of view is seriously blinkered.
Tim: On the other hand, I’ve seen that a good many philosophy students (particularly undergraduates) have no grasp of science, technnology, etc. relevant to their fields. Of course they are cheered on to do this by some august members of the profession. For example, Jaegwon Kim claims that neuroscience is irrelevant to his work in the philosophy of mind.
Pete: Dennett is half right. See above.
AL: Of course, empiricism is no more central to science than rationalism.
Scott Hatfield, OM: Even that should be some metaphysics. Some of us argue for the relevance of a scientific metaphysics.
Vasha: I’ll take it.
Caledonian: Strictly speaking, using the original meaning of the word, yes, there are. If you mean, however, what Bunge suggests we call factual statements, then the answer is still yes, but they are all the formal statements. (This presupposes a fictionalist philosophy of math, of course.) In order to evaluate your claim, specify clearly what you mean by empirical.
For the huge amount of money that gets sucked into biology, and the best you can come up with is bioinformatics, basically attaching well-known algorithms to search genomes? Seriously?
I’d love for systems biology to really develop, but we’re about a hundred years off from knowing the components for it to be anything serious. We’re like cave-men facing an amplifier.
Most of our funding today goes into molecular biology. And that’s a big pile of stinking feces. On top of that, it has an excrescence of molecular dynamics. That’s what the NIH is putting the big money into, that’s what everyone wants to know about, and that’s been stuck for years.
Look, it’s not much different from some aspects of physics. A whole lot of details have been accumulated in cosmology, particle physics and so forth. But compare the period of 1900-1955 with 1955-2007. The former period was much more rich than the latter. Biology is a bit more peaky, but right now I’d love to see some good topologists take on developmental physics and put it on a sound theoretical basis. But what we get is more and more homeo-boxes and such. No theoretical breakthroughs, just more details about what everyone knew at least in outline for decades.
The neo-darwinian synthesis, just like the original darwinian work was a breakthrough in theory, not solely an accumulation of facts. Great masses of papers and posters do not mean a productive field, just a well funded one.
I’ll exempt ecology and evolutionary biology from my criticism – they seem to have developed theoretically in the last few decades, and my knowledge of them is much more limited.
But are you going to compare what Hodgkin and Huxley did back in 52 with what is being done today? Hardly. Or Watson and Crick? That opened whole new ways to look at biology. Don’t confuse normal science with breakthrough periods.
Yup. “It would be wrong to kill George Bush (either one).” As distinct from “I believe it would be wrong to kill George Bush (either one)” and “It would be wrong to kill George Bush (either one) in most moral systems”. Unless you wish to argue that there is no metaphysical entity to correspond to wrongness, or that determining wrongness is somehow an empirical matter?
Ah, now that would involve values. Science has them as well: a preference for simple theories, an expectation that the world will work much the same way tomorrow as it does today, an expectation that a good theory will in general predict things that are, in fact, true. They function rather like axioms.
Yup. “It would be wrong to kill George Bush (either one).” As distinct from “I believe it would be wrong to kill George Bush (either one)” and “It would be wrong to kill George Bush (either one) in most moral systems”.
Myself, I don’t see anything meaningful in the first statement not covered by the other two. I guess I fall under “doesn’t believe in the metaphysical entity of wrongness.”
Oops, forgot to quote that:
Myself, I don’t see anything meaningful in the first statement not covered by the other two. I guess I fall under “doesn’t believe in the metaphysical entity of wrongness.”
Is the poster frog for real ?
Can anyone seriously suggest that there have been no serious advances in biology in the last fifty years ?
Its like a Monty Python sketch,
Frog: They’ve bled us white, those biology bastards. And what have they ever given us in return?!
XERXES: The genetic code?
Frog: What?
XERXES: The genetic code.
Frog: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that’s true. Yeah.
COMMANDO #3: And the discovery of eukaryotic gene splicing.
LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the discovery of eukaryotic gene splicing, Frog. Remember what the understanding of gene structure used to be like?
Frog: Yeah. All right. I’ll grant you the genetic code and the discovery of eukaryotic gene splicing are two things that the biologists have done.
MATTHIAS: Transcription factors ?
Frog: Well, yeah. Obviously transcription factors I mean, transcription factors go without saying, don’t they? But apart from the genetic code , the discovery of eukaryotic gene splicing, and transcription factors —
COMMANDO: Epigenetic regulation.
XERXES: Proteolysis.
COMMANDOS: Huh? Heh? Huh…
COMMANDO #2: Retroviruses.
COMMANDOS: Ohh…
Frog: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.
COMMANDO #1: PCR ?
COMMANDOS: Oh, yes. Yeah…
FRANCIS: Yeah. Yeah, that’s something we’d really miss, Reg, if the biologists left. Huh.
COMMANDO: The Human Genome Project ?
LORETTA: And it’s safe to have an operation in hospitals now since biologists developed monoclonal antibodies that make it possible to carry out accurate screening of blood products for use in transfusion.
FRANCIS: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep us safe and healthy. Let’s face it. They’re the only ones who could in a place like this.
COMMANDOS: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.
Frog: All right, but apart from the discovery of the genetic code, eukaryotic gene splicing, transcription factors, epigenetic regulation, proteolysis, retroviruses, PCR, The Human Genome Project and the development of monoclonal antibodies that now make it possible to carry out accurate screening of blood products for use in transfusion, what have the biologists ever done for us?
Perhaps you haven’t heard the latest news in biology, but the beetle legs controversy has been resolved. I think EO Wilson got the Nobel.
This might have something to do with why you got the LOL.
(What might these recent advances in evolutionary biology depend on? Surely it can’t have anything to do with those horribly boring proteins and genes?)
I think what frog is trying to get at is that we don’t really have any predictive capacity in biology at the moment. For example – if someone submerges me in a vat of a particular chemical, knowing my genome sequence, what can I expect as consequences of my dip?
To be able to predict this kind of stuff, we are going to need massively complex simulations, capable of predicting what proteins will be produced when a cell is exposed to a given molecule at a given strength.
Such an understanding would be huge – we could for example predict correctly the effects of a medication on inflammation of the brain for people suffering from MS, or determine the risk of being exposed to a chemical spill etc etc. But even the basics needed to produce such a simulation are a long way from reality. As a first step, the ability to take DNA + chemical environment, and predict what the resulting proteins will be is completeley missing.
This is not altogether surprising, because the fundamentals needed to answer this question are more quantam physics than biology. Biology has been very good at putting together the generalities of living organisms, but to go further, we are going to have to return to basic physics, coupled with incredibly powerful computer simulations. Which, unless I’m mistaken, was more or less frog’s point…
damallien,
for your specific point about not being able to predict on a computer simulation what will happen if we expose a novel chemical to an individual person or organism you are probably correct. However it is completely wrong to say that we have no way of predicting what will happen, for instance, to you as an individual if you are to be exposed to that particular chemical. The whole process of new drug discovery, testing and marketing would not exist if biologists had not worked out what to expect if we use them on patients. Molecular modeling of the chemicals and target sites, chemical stabilization of the drug to withstand physiological conditions, cell line testing, animal testing, volunteer safety testing along with the various recent developments of systems biology (mRNA, microRNA and protein array analysis for instance) are all used in the determination of what a new drug will do within a particular biological context. This allows us to make pretty good predictions as to the actual effects this will have on a patient with a particular disease. Combine this with double blind clinical trials and you have a new drug that can be used NOW rather than some undetermined time in the future when computers can do everything.
Could you explain how quantam physics will help us ?
I really didnt get that.
But couldn’t you present it as a form of obligatory parasitism? ;-)
Seriously though, if there is time philosophy can be useful for scientists. In practical matters from rhetoric and presentation over fallacies to methods of science. In theoretical matters it could be a scout probing opportunities.
Such as the consequences and limits of computing and environmental selection – the computer scientist Scott Aaronsson does a great job here. I am surprised that a philosopher wasn’t helping him, as the philosopher David Corfield is promoting this very thing in mathematics over at “The n-Category Café” blog.
In retrospect it is obvious that my own research had benefited from an early exposure to philosophy of science. It took our group quite some time to realize my chosen area’s fundamental problem with predictivity of earlier suggested ad hoc models. (Oh, they where great for postdiction after calibration. Great, I tell you. :-| )
Instead we made our own, testable, model from first principles, which for some reason (“Oh, they where great for postdiction after calibration. Great, I tell you. :-|”) hadn’t been done before. Not any of the ad hocs models were close to the real explanation of the system we looked at…
I don’t know if Popper was the first philosopher to investigate testability, but he should have kudos for looking at what researchers actually doing research sees works.
If I should hazard a guess why researchers may distrust philosophy is because it seems to be diametrically opposite science. While science progress by rejecting useless methods and theories, philosophy seems to grow by accretion of as much as it can. While science looks at facts and is agnostic about reality, philosophy is obsessed with truth.
In fact, I am not sure if I ever seen a philosophical description of such basic stuff as validated, restricted and revisable facts, including the fact and theory state “we don’t know”. (If anyone have references, I would be delighted.) Color seems difficult for many philosophers, it must always be black and white with them.
I don’t think so. Scientists decide what they want to work with or not, under the influence of which methods works. You can stand besides them and SHOUT ALL YOU WANT what they should look at an area you think ought to be science, and it wouldn’t help.
Seems to me what science is, is decided by the capabilities of scientists methods; if it doesn’t work, it won’t be science. So it is an internal ‘judgment’, as it should be.
FWIW, I think mathematics is a science, albeit with few and distant contacts with facts through other sciences. Integers are modeled on discrete objects, reals on continuity, et cetera. I was surprised to find mathematicians on the blogs that isn’t the platonists that everyone assume mathematicians to be but are sympathetic to math having empirical methods and constraints.
My guess is that the results of computer scientists on the limits of computation and related math is trickling down, through for example category theory and by way of physics. Chaitin has some interesting results and thoughts on this on his web page. Essentially, AFAIK, what math is, is decided by the capabilities of mathematicians methods, if it doesn’t work, it won’t be math. Seems familiar.
IIRC some of the TnCC mathematicians even ponder mathematical proofs as expositions that can never be fully formalized, but having the meaning of explaining and convincing others of the correctness of the result in excruciating detail.
But couldn’t you present it as a form of obligatory parasitism? ;-)
Seriously though, if there is time philosophy can be useful for scientists. In practical matters from rhetoric and presentation over fallacies to methods of science. In theoretical matters it could be a scout probing opportunities.
Such as the consequences and limits of computing and environmental selection – the computer scientist Scott Aaronsson does a great job here. I am surprised that a philosopher wasn’t helping him, as the philosopher David Corfield is promoting this very thing in mathematics over at “The n-Category Café” blog.
In retrospect it is obvious that my own research had benefited from an early exposure to philosophy of science. It took our group quite some time to realize my chosen area’s fundamental problem with predictivity of earlier suggested ad hoc models. (Oh, they where great for postdiction after calibration. Great, I tell you. :-| )
Instead we made our own, testable, model from first principles, which for some reason (“Oh, they where great for postdiction after calibration. Great, I tell you. :-|”) hadn’t been done before. Not any of the ad hocs models were close to the real explanation of the system we looked at…
I don’t know if Popper was the first philosopher to investigate testability, but he should have kudos for looking at what researchers actually doing research sees works.
If I should hazard a guess why researchers may distrust philosophy is because it seems to be diametrically opposite science. While science progress by rejecting useless methods and theories, philosophy seems to grow by accretion of as much as it can. While science looks at facts and is agnostic about reality, philosophy is obsessed with truth.
In fact, I am not sure if I ever seen a philosophical description of such basic stuff as validated, restricted and revisable facts, including the fact and theory state “we don’t know”. (If anyone have references, I would be delighted.) Color seems difficult for many philosophers, it must always be black and white with them.
I don’t think so. Scientists decide what they want to work with or not, under the influence of which methods works. You can stand besides them and SHOUT ALL YOU WANT what they should look at an area you think ought to be science, and it wouldn’t help.
Seems to me what science is, is decided by the capabilities of scientists methods; if it doesn’t work, it won’t be science. So it is an internal ‘judgment’, as it should be.
FWIW, I think mathematics is a science, albeit with few and distant contacts with facts through other sciences. Integers are modeled on discrete objects, reals on continuity, et cetera. I was surprised to find mathematicians on the blogs that isn’t the platonists that everyone assume mathematicians to be but are sympathetic to math having empirical methods and constraints.
My guess is that the results of computer scientists on the limits of computation and related math is trickling down, through for example category theory and by way of physics. Chaitin has some interesting results and thoughts on this on his web page. Essentially, AFAIK, what math is, is decided by the capabilities of mathematicians methods, if it doesn’t work, it won’t be math. Seems familiar.
IIRC some of the TnCC mathematicians even ponder mathematical proofs as expositions that can never be fully formalized, but having the meaning of explaining and convincing others of the correctness of the result in excruciating detail.
Hmm…..not that we’ve eliminated philosophical discources as meaningless and useless (and I really thought logical positivism was dead and buried back in the 1950s!!), what shall we say about poetry, literature, painting, sculpture, music and all the other varieties of phenomena in the world that doe not make empirically verifiable or falisiable claims and statemenets. All useless?? It seems that some scientists lead (or would like everyone to lead to) a very impoverished sort of existence indeed.
“Rather like axioms”? Just say they’re axioms and get it over with.
And it seems you have rather a problem, there. We can construct all sorts of systems with different axioms, but not all of those axioms will correspond to the real world. Both Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry are mathematically valid, but only one is compatible with observed facts.
Would you accept that “It is right to kill George W. Bush” is an equally valid, and equally true, statement? Or do you hold that only your own assertion is true – and why?
If you have no justification for your axiom, we have no reason to accept it as true.
I think the term you are looking for may be “gene expression”. Or some more advanced form of same combined with molecular dynamics, which frog already condemned to the feces pile.
I am not quite sure how we are supposed to predict gene expression without all that piddling stamp collecting on genomes and proteins, either.
I started out reading this thread more or less agreeing with Wolpert – I’ve spent too much time with the postmodernists at UCSC and U of Michigan – but I think Patrick’s convinced me that it might be a useful part of the program after all.
It seems to me that whether or not mathematics is a science depends a bit on your definition of science. My opinion: math is logical thinking divorced of existing things and hence is not a science because it isn’t empirical. In the case of integers, like many ideas in math, the utility is that they model some things in the physical world, but it’s that we can think about them independently of the world that gives math a lot of its power.
1) That’s not an opinion, that’s an assertion of fact.
2) It’s incorrect.
Thinking is not divorced from existing things. It’s done with existing things, and can be studied as any other aspect of the world can. Cartesian dualism is simply false.
A profoundly meaningful metaphorical assertion with no possibility of empirical translation into observation statements whatsoever (but I thought we had gotten over that Carnapian nonsense anyway):
”Cathedrals cannot be built beside the sea.”
—Wallace Stevens (poet and atheist)
Whoops, sorry:
”Cathedrals are not built beside the sea.”
..Stevens
Yes, they can. In both a literal and metaphoric sense.
Caledonian – your definition of empirical seems to be so broad as to gloss over important differences in how mathematics (for the most part) and standard sciences such as physics and biology proceeed.
As you point out, both Euclidean and non-Euclidean mathematics are “mathematically valid”. And we can know this it seems, without doing experiments and looking at the world. So it looks like math is not empirical in that sense.
A different claim of course, is to evaluate whether our physical world is best described by Eudiclidean and non-Euclidean arguments – and that is empirical.
At least that is the standard use of the terms. There’s a reason most math classes don’t have lab sections.
I agree that most philosophy is BS. But why can’t there be people who think carefully and disentangle conceptual muddles. Of course, you might not call it philosophy but that is how many philosophers would describe their work. So now you’re just having a semantic debate about what “philosophy” means. Whoop de doo.
Look: there is a series of questions: do we have free will? does God exist? is morality an illusion, etc. that people who call themselves philosophers have typically tried to answer. Your point might be that philosophy can’t asnwer these questions (only science can). But this is not so different from what many philosophers (one popularizer would be Dan Dennett) think – philosophy is just the work that you do on a problem until its clear enough that it can be solved by empirical methods – or shown that it was a pseudo problem based on confusions about language, or, etc.
Philosophers also get training in logic and critical thinking that make it the case that they can help with conceptual muddles.
As an example of how philosophers of science have made a contribution (since we’re on a biologist’s blog), I recommend looking at Elliott Sober’s book Reconstructing the Past. It certainly made an impact on a certain area of biology, and its by a philosopher (though I’m sure you’d say that it is not philosophy – but then you’re just playing a semantic game…)
Demalien kind of gets my point. But no, there’s no need for quantum physics (most likely). Just better application of math, and some decent theoretical thinking. Windy and MartinC completely miss my point, laughably so. I didn’t say that there were no advances in the last fifty years. Just that in comparison to earlier periods, we have lots and lots of “data” and little useful predictive ability. We’re reaching the limits of the genome project – bioinformatics is going to be a whole lot harder going forward. We can’t build or simulate biological systems, unlike say predicting the results of certain kinds of evolutionary arm races.
And no, Windy, the stuff I consider interesting in evolutionary biology is not primarily a collection of genomic & proteomic information. Gahh, people who confuse data with knowledge! I find wasp reproductive strategies as an example of interesting biological work – very little of that depends on genomics, and what does is the simplest kinds of genomics.
What’s particularly funny is how defensive biologists are about this. I doubt that physicists would react this defensively if you pointed out that the work done between 1900 and 1930 far surpasses the work done in any 30 year period since! It’s obvious from the string-theory impasse that they’ve gotten themselves “stuck” in certain specialties, that no one today has been able to do the kind of groundbreaking work of, say, a Boltzmann.
But there’s always hope. Particularly when some biologists start to recognize that identifying the umpteenth homeobox sequence, or protein, isn’t a significant move forward, just more busy work to fund graduate students.
I agree with Caledonian that mathematics is straightforwardly science. It’s just that some scientific experiments can be done with a pen and paper. Mathematical proof began with people drawing lines on paper and making observations. That’s experiment and observation, just like science, you don’t even have to gloss it.
Did I say so, you git? The latter are an important tool for the former.
Are you saying that “A Map of Recent Positive Selection in the Human Genome” was old hat? Or the unexpected diversity of oceanic plankton? Highly conserved noncoding DNA?
I don’t have to be defensive since you graciously excluded evolutionary biology. But what kind of ass excludes evolution when talking about advances in biology? All of it is evolutionary biology. Or should be.
I don’t think we should sequence every last gene in every last organism, either. But I for one would want to know more about adaptive variation in wild organisms, not just model species, instead of the inconclusive neutral marker studies that still are the norm for most species. This work has barely started and now some dim bulb starts whining it’s a waste of money. And no, most of us don’t have mountains of money for this work.
That’s because they can’t afford the good stuff yet. Do you think the Nasonia and honeybee genomes will have nothing to say about reproductive strategies, then?
Look at Marie Antoinette, telling the peasants to stop eating all that cake. I’ll trade you umpteen microsatellites for some homeobox sequences.
Not sensitive? Not defensive? “You git”? LOL!
Don’t you think that the most important 90% of the work in Nasonia is not going to depend on every little genomic variation? That predictability must come from the broad outlines?
Don’t you even know how theory works? The point of a good theory is to focus on a reduced part of the data and predict most of the behavior from that, not to go on endlessly about every little detail, with massively complicated models that depend on the quantum behavior of every little detail.
It’s that attitude that gets biology stuck. Too many biologists who don’t look at where physics, chemistry and even biology have taken large leaps, and where they spin their wheels. Look at what Darwin did! He reduced the behavior of entire ecosystems to a few simple equations – even if he usually put them into verbal form.
What is a waste of money is too look at variation without developing a good theory. That is the highest quality of dimbulbism. Thinking that just by collecting data, you’re going to get anywhere, anywhere at all. The theory of Nasonia reproductive techniques may be refined and tested by more data – but the most important part is the early steps.
And the silliness about “all biology is evolutionary biology” is just childish semantic argument. Yes, and all of physics is, ultimately, quantum physics or relativity. And all of biology is just quantum mechanics! Except they are not, really, because much of physics is in avoiding that nastiness and finding alternate models that work at other scales. Why should I focus on the evolutionary history of PKC, when what I really care about how some regulatory mechanism works?
So my fine windbag friend, the fact is that most work today is in collecting what you call “tools” – whether or not you in particular are doing more interesting work, that’s exactly what most money is actually being spent on. Just check the NIH budget. Tools searching for a purpose, rather than being driven the other way around, since the NIH has justify it’s budget not in solving scientific problems, but in creating the illusion that they’re going to cure cancer or some such nonsense. And that is best justified by doing things like useless genomic searches rather than actually thinking about interesting questions.
And that gets us back to the initial problem. Most biology students are being trained to do exactly that kind of work. Not research how sexual reproductive strategies vary, but how to do all the cardinal blots. Or how to run PCR. Technician training – an honorable professional, but not undergraduate and graduate level training at upwards of 30k a year at many universities.
I learned a new word today! I knew I kept coming back here for a reason. I think Pharyngula is, like, totally copacetic.
My sister once decided that my general education needed to be improved, and bought me a book called Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy, by Simon Blackburn. After several aborted efforts to read it, I took it on a very long train journey with no other form of entertainment, in order to force myself to read it. The main problem was that there were such glaring errors in some of the science that was described that I couldn’t take any of the rest of the book seriously. I also found it to be condescending and pompous.
Can anyone recommend a better alternative introductory text? Something on game theory would be appreciated too, while we’re at it!
Like I said I don’t work in genome sequencing or proteins, so you are not attacking me personally. But why aren’t you out revolutionizing biology already?
What the hell? Darwin was fucking obsessed with irrelevant bits of data. Collected every beetle, fossil and rock he could get his hands on. The theory came later. Are you perchance posting from the Mirror Universe where Darwin was some ivory tower theoretician?
Yes, what a waste of money it was to send all those young naturalists out to travel the world. Collecting specimens with no clear purpose in mind. Simply dreadful.
What the hell? Darwin was fucking obsessed with irrelevant bits of data. Collected every beetle, fossil and rock he could get his hands on. The theory came later. Are you perchance posting from the Mirror Universe where Darwin was some ivory tower theoretician?
So it came full blown out of the data? What a fantasy land you live in. Of course he was fully versed in all the alternate ideas of evolution, and he was looking for data in light of those theories, and his own developing theories. Of course, he wasn’t publishing those ideas until he had collected data to support it – but that’s completely different from collecting data willy-nilly, without a theoretical goal!
Do you also believe that Newton’s ideas came from the apple hitting him on the head? Do you think Mendel just stared at pea plots all day, collecting data with no preconceived theoretical structure? You do know that he cooked his books to fit his theories, don’t ya?
Yes, what a waste of money it was to send all those young naturalists out to travel the world. Collecting specimens with no clear purpose in mind. Simply dreadful.
Yes, exactly. Darwin did have a clear purpose in mind, he wasn’t out just counting legs on a beetle. The ones who where? It was a waste of funds. Data means nothing without a theoretical basis.
Quite dreadful. Maybe a little philosophy of science and history of science would do you some good. Let me guess, undergrad biology major?
He started out as a naturalist. That’s pretty much “collecting data willy-nilly”
Darwin did both. First he collected data willy-nilly, then naturally as his ideas consolidated, he began looking at the data in light of his theory. But he cast a wide net all the time. By your logic, he should have been a complete waste of space.
You mean something like this?
“When on board HMS Beagle as a naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent.”
Struck with the facts. Not the other way around. Imagine that.
This from a person who seems to think that Darwin set out on the Beagle to prove his theory. Priceless!
Guess again. What are you, a postdoc with illusions of grandeur?
Did I say that he set out to prove his theory? That is quite different from having a theory, or set of theories in his head.
How could he have been struck by the distribution of inhabitants in S. America, if he didn’t have some theory in his head? And if he wasn’t developing it as he went along? Are you just ranting now?
You seem to be positing that he went out as a tabula rasa, just collecting data nilly willy without any reason! And then, at the end of many years, grandly looked at the data and poof! his theory sprang directly out of the data? He hadn’t heard of Lamarck or any of the other evolutionary scientists preceding him – and clearly he hadn’t thought about them before and while he was working.
But wait! Wikipedia: In Darwin’s second year, he joined the Plinian Society, a student group interested in natural history.[11] He became a keen pupil of Robert Edmund Grant, a proponent of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of evolution by acquired characteristics, which Charles’s grandfather Erasmus had also advocated. On the shores of the Firth of Forth, Darwin joined in Grant’s investigations of the life cycle of marine animals. These studies found evidence for homology, the radical theory that all animals have similar organs which differ only in complexity, thus showing common descent.[12] In March 1827, Darwin made a presentation to the Plinian of his own discovery that the black spores often found in oyster shells were the eggs of a skate leech.[13] He also sat in on Robert Jameson’s natural history course, learning about stratigraphic geology, receiving training in classifying plants, and assisting with work on the extensive collections of the University Museum, one of the largest museums in Europe at the time.[14]
Maybe he had thought about evolution… Maybe he had some models in his head, theories, that he continued to work on while he collected data… Maybe he wasn’t just collecting data willy-nilly, but intentionally testing his theories as he went along… Maybe he wasn’t a damn fool.
Seriously? Have you the least understanding of perceptual processes, cognitive processing and filtering? You’re portraying the most naive form of scientific research, the kind of crap that they teach grade school children, which generally leads them to become ID’ers – they expect theory to come out full-blown and intuitively from randomly assorted data! Maybe we should stop teaching them biology altogether, if this is what they’re learning. At least they won’t start on the wrong track.
Have you read Einstein’s papers? Yup, he just collected data for years and then simply assembled that data together!
Of course he wasn’t a data-collecting robot, but if he had any assumption in his head, it was either the fixity of the species or some confused jumble. He wasn’t out to test either of those.
If we are still talking about the early Darwin and the Beagle, emphatically not!
Guess so. I’m more that a little off-put by that. But be that as it may, without such shared premises, I’m not in a position to convince you of the existance of meaningful non-empirical statements.
You can assume that Darwin was a moron, who despite years of exposure to evolutionary theory, never developed his own ideas but left them simply a “jumble”. When presented with an extra-ordinary opportunity to look at the full diversity of nature, he never connected it with his evolutionary training. Just an empty-head, looking at plants and birds with no intention in mind. Never connecting them with anything at all, like a mentally handicapped child in grandma’s backyard!
Now, the fact that he was only exposed to Malthus’s work after he returned, probably implies that his theories changed quite a bit in the period following his return. But this image of an idiot-savante, smiling idiotically while he stares at carnivorous plants and gives them cocaine? That is positively the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard, read or seen – and I’ve been exposed to quite a few asinine things beyond this particular conversation!
And so Mendel, he just looked at peas? Einstein sat in his lab all day, twisting the space-time continuum? Boltzmann counted colored balls in bins for months at at time? Watson and Crick just looked at the results of the crystallography, and lo-and-behold there was DNA? Hodgekin and Huxley played with squid, collected data, without ever writing a differential equation beforehand?
Your view is almost, ahem, religious. Instead of God giving oracular advice, nature itself does!
Wrong. We know this by doing experiments and looking at the world. “The world” is what we’re looking at when we examine a demonstration of their validity. “The world” is what we’re looking at when we perform the computations to confirm the validity of that demonstration.
Mathematics is a subset of science.
And a thing is empirical if we use our senses to study it – not something else, but the thing itself.
Caledonian,
Sure, ok. But don’t expect much in the way of rigor.
Yes … with the proviso that there can even be more than one correspondence between a mathematical system and the real world.
No. Killing a human being is in general a great moral wrong, and requires considerable justification. The benefits of murdering George W. Bush are unclear. While the Bush administration has indeed done great evil in the world, his murder is liable to provoke even more boneheaded actions from the republic he currently leads.
To be trite, that’s life.
Why? Certainly we don’t expect a formal explanation of the justification for this claim, but you ought to be able to make some defense of it. If it has no such defense, any alternate assertion is equally as credible, like “killing a human being is in general utterly morally inconsequential and requires no justification at all”.
“Evolutionary training”???? That’s an anachronism if any.
You are the one who insists that traditional naturalists who weren’t explicitly testing theories were “idiot savants”, not me.
Oh fuck you. I am telling you simply that copious data-collecting did not hurt the early naturalists and that you are misrepresenting Darwin’s initial motives. Now you are attempting to twist it into some kind of crusade against experiments. Vedä vittu päähäs ja vingu.
Keith Douglas, I appreciate a real philosopher weighing in on this topic. The nuanced nature of your reply to Caledonian suggests that there are, indeed, pretty useful things to be gleaned from the philosophic tradition.
I would therefore be interested in the question of whether it is meaningful to describe some formulation of mathematics or philosophy as foundational to science, or whether it is closer to the truth to regard them as separate disciplines which provide useful tools for the practice of science?
That is disputable. Mathematics certainly has its roots in experience. That by itself answers the pseudo-question of how it is that the world seems so strangely amenable to mathematical description, when mathematics is, in principle, a largely arbitrary formal system or something highly idealized. Of course it would work that way, for the reason that we constructed it to do so by making abstractions of our everyday experiences, and then formalizing them.
However, the empirical nature of science is its defining characteristic. It is, as TL pointed out, prone to a certain degree of ontological relativity and realistic agnosticism. Mathematics doesn’t work that way. There are highly formal branches of pure mathematics which are not advanced in any way by experience, and the truth of a statement is of the utmost importance. The most formal of mathematics and the claims and theorems therein are purely non-experienced.
Some mathematics could be classified as empirical, and that goes without saying since we make such a big deal out of applied mathematics. Arithmetic, used in an everyday context and ignoring Number Theory, is another example. And then there’s mathematical physics.
I would say instead that there is an overlap between the two, rather than that mathematics is a subset of science.
This is wrong. Experience is what we use to derive entailed consequences from premises. If those branches of mathematics had nothing at all to do with experience, they’d be dead ends with nothing beyond their axioms.
Computation relies on physical processes, people! Thinking is part of the physical world.
George Berkeley is the best philosopher that ever was.
“That purple sky, those wild but sweet notes of birds, the fragrant bloom upon the trees and flowers,…”
or
“Look are not the fields covered with a delightful verdure? Is there not something in the woods and groves, in the rivers and clear springs that sooths, that delights…”
Can’t beat it.
What, you don’t know that evolutionary theory was the hot topic in early nineteenth century biology, riding on the heels of Lyells geological gradualism? That everyone in academia at the time was discussing it, thinking about it, or defending against it? That a huge investment was spent in collecting fossils of clearly extinct animals, in some attempt to understand the history of life on earth and explain it? That Darwin was specifically the student of Grant, a Lamarckian?
You are the one who insists that traditional naturalists who weren’t explicitly testing theories were “idiot savants”, not me.
And you were the one insisting that naturalists were not at all testing theories, and that Darwin begin collecting data willy nilly without any forethought as to theoretical considerations. Maybe at best an incoherent “jumble”.
I’m sure copious data-collecting didn’t hurt the early naturalists – their tomes I’m sure are sitting in some case at the back of some royal museum in London or Cambridge, sitting as source data for some history of science thesis over the next millenia. The data collection wouldn’t do any good in the absence of theory – how else do you know to collect data? Don’t you understand that simple facts – that you collect data with theory in mind. The theory then morphs in the face of data, but you simply have no basis to categorize or even describe data without pre-existing theory? The better your theory, the better your data-collection, and therefore more theory in the future?
Now you are attempting to twist it into some kind of crusade against experiments.
Experiments without theory? You completely missed the point of my last two paragraphs – unsurprising. Do you even understand how limited the experimental data for any of the relativities were? For your own sake, read Einstein’s papers. Do you have a clue to the primarily mathematical underpinnings to Boltzmann work? And how we would have no molecular biology without it?
And of course – the course of the desperate: telling someone to fuck off in Finnish – nicely obscure on top of everything. Very cute, and pathetic simultaneously. What next, Fijian?
Caledonian, you are departing from the traditionally accepted definitions of a priori and a posteriori used in the literature of the philosophy of mathematics. What’s more, I’m sure you are aware of that. I’m not sure what you’re trying to pull, but it seems to me to be more (and this wouldn’t shock me at all) disingenuity.
That made me smile. Care to guess why?
Well that beats it! Caledonian, you have a beautiful turn of phrase: Computation relies on physical processes, people! Thinking is part of the physical world.
Have you read The Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark?
I guess we can’t disagree on everything — and I was enjoying that so much.
You’ve utterly failed to understand my point. I’m not departing from those definitions at all. I’m denying that the concept of a priori is coherent.
There is no such thing as knowledge without sense data. It’s just that some senses are more subtle than others. The awareness of internal mental states is what permits us to use logic and reason – or we could rely on external computational systems, of course, but the knowledge of how they work and why they’re valid still requires us to think – and it’s the observations of those results that’s what we mean by thinking.
Our minds are part of the world. The parts of our minds that other parts monitor and observe are parts of the world. Making predictions about what results those mind-parts will present in the future is what mathematics is.
Nope, not really. I mean, I could say that killing a human being is a great moral wrong because it deprives that human being of continued experience of life, but that’s getting close to a tautology.
You appear to be assuming an (unstated) set of axioms and rules of inference here. “Killing a human being is a great moral wrong” is a valid conclusion of some moral systems and not of others; I’m not really sure what you’re disagreeing with. My axiom set? The need for axioms in the first place?
I thought Wittgenstein and Quine had dumped the a priori, a posteriori distinction long ago.
But what do I know? I’m not a philosopher.
Hey, sort of like genomics. Oh, wait, that is plodding idiocy, whereas the Victorian fossil fad was rigorous hypothesis-testing in comparison. Right.
Whose influence was overshadowed by Henslow, Sedgwick and Lyell, leading at best to the “jumble” I referred to. But if such vagueness means that Darwin was “testing a theory”, I don’t know how you can claim that modern genomics is not testing anything.
Darwin was a kid when he went on the Beagle. I do suppose that theoretical considerations weighed rather little when he decided to accept that assignment.
“Woe unto ye beetles of South America!”, but let’s hope he didn’t count their legs, then.
I’ve read the Moving Bodies paper. But so the fuck what? Biology is not physics. Magnets and conductors behave the same everywhere and can be briefly summarised, whereas beetles and genomes are all different. I’ve read the Origin of Species cover to cover and there is NOTHING limited about that data, so your Einstein wankery seems to lead nowhere.
“Obscure?” Have it your way, douchebag. What is your area of expertise so that I’ll know to avoid it?
frog, you do have a point there, but your signal is getting swamped by all the noise you’re generating with gratuitous insults and almost paranoid accusations. when you sound like the worst kind of anti-science woo-meister, then it’s not particularly surprising your point’s not getting through.
The NIH initiative in translational bioinformatics (a push for projects linking research to clinical applications and vice versa) would seem to indicate that they share your concerns about moving the state of biological knowledge forward into more practical medical uses. Of course, they don’t use terms like “big pile of stinking feces” when they refer to molecular biology in their RFPs, so it’s hard to be sure how much they share your point of view.
As for your objection to collecting data, I’d just like to point out that it was a lot easier to come up with grand theories when dealing with knowledge at the level of abstraction of phenotype. There’s only so much data that you need to base sweeping generalizations on, and test them, at that level.
Theories have to be grounded in observation, and the amount of information at the genomic or proteomic or metabolomic level of abstraction means that there is necessarily a lot more data that has to go into the observations that theories are grounded in–otherwise, rather than a real theory, it’s just speculation. There are real cognitive issues involved–the amount of information at those levels swamps a human’s ability to process it, while at the higher levels of abstraction, we can do a better job of keeping up with it. Karol Bomsztyk goes as far as to say (paraphrased) that the age of serendipitous discovery is over because of that level of detail of information; the new theories are going to have to emerge from techniques such as data mining and other knowledge discovery. I don’t know if I’m willing to go as far as that–working at the gross anatomical level, I see it somewhat differently from Bomsztyk. But clearly, to get the theories you want, we need to be able to handle the massive amounts of observational data that you scorn.
In closing, I’d just like to observe that with your expressed attitude toward biologists and students, I’m sincerely grateful that you had nothing to do with my own education.
I’ve been asked by a lurker to comment on Darwin’s method. According to his correspondence and Autobiography, he did not come up with his “theory” until October 1838, well after he has returned from the voyage, but this probably meant no more than common descent and an idea that natural selection would shift species types. He failed to record some data (such as the islands on which he shot his finches – he had to ask Fitzroy for his specimens before he could do the biogeographical inferences) that would help him establish it, so clearly he did not have evolution in mind then.
In one of his letters he wrote:
“About thirty years ago there was much talk that geologists ought only to observe and not theorize; and I well remember someone saying that at this rate a man might as well go into a gravel-pit and count the pebbles and describe the colours. How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view to be of any service.”
Charles Darwin. 1861. Letter to Henry Fawcett, quoted in Steven J. Gould “Dinosaurs in the haystack,” Natural History 3(92):2-13.
The date he mentions is approximately the period before he went overseas, so we might infer that he was saying that he learned not to do that on the voyage. Certainly his reading of Lyell’s Principles en route meant he was at least observing in favour of testing gradualism.
Can’t you build any mathematical system from an infinite number of axiomatic sets (where the sets themselves are finite)? You can always exchange some axioms with some deductions (not all) from those axioms, and then use the deductions to go the other way around.
So then, there is no logical distinction between deduced statements and axioms. Just an arbitrary aesthetic choice based on the traditional elements of simplicity and elegance. Just a system hanging together, that can be grabbed by arbitrary, but rule-based, nodes.
My ex predicted the end of science when knowledge within any significant field of inquiry would be too massive for an individual human to master :) But isn’t that what computers are for?
@RavenT: Theories have to be grounded in observation
And observations have to be grounded in theory. Neither one can precede the other.
My “accusations” aren’t paranoid, they’re just plain old annoyed. I am not arguing for more translational research – I’m arguing the exact opposite. It’s the translational research funding that is choking biology by not giving space for enough theoretical work to make the observational work more productive. But the translational focus kills to some extent the ability to properly theorize, since the ends are predetermined. It’s like if we funded physics directly on the ability to improve carburetor efficiency. Sooner or later, we’d lose the capability to do even that.
I’d have to say that I deeply disagree with Karol Bomsztyk position. If all theoretical knowledge must come from vast sums of data then our position is basically hopeless. If our theoretical constructs must have that many terms in them, they’d be functionally useless. I think that is the counsel of despair. And if you follow some of the research in physical chemistry, for example, there are some attempts that greatly simplify the data needed to actually calculate things such as protein folding, without including every amino acid. In the same way, any useful regulatory theory can not depend on every last detail of the cell, and any useful theory of developmental biology can not depend on every last transcriptional control.
We don’t build computers by simulating every last atom at the quantom level. We don’t design combustion engines by analyzing every frictional point. We don’t do climatology by trying to predict every last dust storm in the Sahara. We look at unifying principles at the proper scale. We cut down observations to the essential relative to the principles we are trying to decipher. It always looks like masses of detailed data are required when a field is wanting a new unifying principle. The Aristotelean epicycles also looked that way before the theory of the heliocentric solar system.
See – I can be quite polite with reasonable objections rather than knee-jerk defensiveness ;->
And I’m quite nice to students. It’s the folks who design curriculums that get me worked up – it’s not the students fault that they’re in-numerate.
Yes, but if you ask three biologists what that means, you’ll get at least 4 different answers. :)
Predicting the end of academic disciplines is a cottage industry; I tend more to the “I’ll believe it when I see it” end. Some people in my discipline (biomedical informatics) claim that we’ll be absorbed as all the biologists learn C, Python, and Perl.
Meh, after the angiogenesis/metastasis modeling talk I attended this afternoon, I think that until biologists want to dive deep into partial differential equations and Markov models, my job is pretty safe :).
@John Wilkins
Isn’t a simpler explanation that his original theoretical thinking was simply wrong. He accumulated data related to the theories he knew about and had worked out. Which would include everything from old Erasmus to Lamarck to Paley. What his particular synthesis or synthesises we can not know, unless some pages from his diaries are missing and re-found. But most likely, his theory/ies though directional in observation, were insufficient. Maybe he wasn’t even consciously aware of his “theory” – many people walk around with full blown theories on nature without thinking about them, but I doubt that in the case of Darwin.
After Malthus, the missing pieces to his theory became clearer. He reformulated, saw his earlier observations in a new light, and discovered that his earlier data collected in light of gradualism, etc, were insufficient.
But to have such disdain for staring at colored rocks? Either Darwin was extremely upset with himself for having done so (he thought a lot of his time had been wasted) or he had never taken such an approach. I’d expect the latter.
@RavenT: Meh, after the angiogenesis/metastasis modeling talk I attended this afternoon, I think that until biologists want to dive deep into partial differential equations and Markov models, my job is pretty safe :).
And when you boil down all my ranting, it just comes down to saying that they should. That biologists shouldn’t be able to get out of undergrad, and definitely graduate school, without a good understanding of such techniques, even if they collaborate with others to actually do the implementation. But how can you collaborate when you don’t understand what your collaborator is doing? That’s just outsourcing, and you’re going to get burned. And when you review a paper that involves such work, how are you going to judge it? You can’t, and you miss the important controls – which are just as important in bioinformatics as wet-work. Maybe even more important.
Aren’t all the cool kids putting Markov chains on their population genetic models these days? Would not call it “deep diving” though…
The irony here is that the person in this comments section who could benefit most from the study of philosophy is the one shouting the loudest about the uselessness of philosophy.
Caledonian, do you really mean to say that mathematical truths can be empirically verified by explaining the physical state of the mathematician’s brain (or computer/calculator’s processor)?
Or, even more strongly, that a mathematical claim (that a triangle has three sides, for example) is, at its root, actually a claim about what’s happening on a physical/chemical level inside the brain of a person who imagines a triangle?
John, how about the claim about triangles being a claim about the physical laws that lead to the kind of brain that can make such a claim? Only certain computations are allowable, given the physical world in which such computations can occur. Mathematical claims have to be congruent with such a universe, and the allowable set of computations. A bit wider than just a specific brain – mathematics general happen between brains, not in just a single brain.
Your point that they are intertwined is well-taken, but if in practice they disagree, we throw out the theory, not the observations. So I would disagree that neither one can precede the other; observations have to precede theory, or else the theory runs the risk of just being retro-fitted speculation.
I thought your objection was to so much low-level research being funded. If you’re objecting to translational biology, then, I guess we’re going to have to agree to disagree–I find the possibility of developing a model that unifies and consistently accounts for evidence from paleontology, molecular biology, classical anatomy, and pathophysiology, and makes testable predictions, extremely exciting. Of course we’re not there yet, but there is a lot of necessary work to get there. Naturally, there will be a lot of dead ends, and if we knew what they were in advance, we could avoid them–but if we knew in advance what they were, we wouldn’t need to avoid them, because we wouldn’t need to do the research.
If we are limited to only the old ways of processing them, like say, only those Darwin had access to, then I would agree with you 100%.
Yes, techniques such as principal component analysis can be used for dimensionality reduction in biology as well as in the physical disciplines. And those methods help–but there is no getting around the fact that there is a vast amount of data. And we can’t know in advance which factors will turn out to account for most of the variation. So we have to deal with all the information, and we have to develop techniques to make the task tractable.
But to do it scientifically means that it has to accord with the observations–we can’t make the facts fit the theory. And if we get it wrong, the consequences are very high, cf. Jesse Gelsinger, for example. So we’re stuck with the fact that we have a tremendous amount of information to deal with, and not everything works as predicted in model systems, and we are still figuring out what accounts for the differences.
The physicists and the meteorologists and the physical chemists dealt with it, and we will too, eventually. But we can’t get ahead theoretically of what the observations support empirically, or it’s no longer science.
I don’t totally agree with Bomsztyk either, but I take his point that it was a lot easier to come up with big theories through leaps of insight when dealing at the phenotype level than the molecular level. “Chance favors the prepared mind”, and all that–it was a lot easier to prepare the mind for theoretical leaps when the amount of information needed to prepare was a lot less than it is now.
And I appreciate it. :)
But do you have any warrant beyond intuition for the claim that ‘depriving a human of continued experience’ is wrong? In other words, could you through rational argument, without appeals to emotion or intuition, convince someone that killing was wrong who didn’t believe it?
We agree, then. If you don’t understand what your collaborator is doing, then it’s the equivalent of cargo-cult “science”. But I think a lot of biologists currently working don’t want to actually do the math or programming; they want rather to understand what their collaborators are doing.
Maybe it’s a generational thing; possibly the younger biologists are more willing to take on the extra tasks of learning in-depth math, statistics, and programming in addition to their primary discipline. I think that either way–biologists becoming either more math-literate or math-competent–is going to be what does get us closer to a more theoretical stance. And I think a lot of that is going to be interdisciplinary collaboration, because realistically, mastering one discipline is hard enough, let alone three or four or five.
Close: it’s a claim about the state of the brain of a person who examines the concept of ‘triangle’.
A person who’s trying to decide if a given move in chess is valid is referring to the properties of the stored relevant concepts and performing operations upon them. The ultimate claim isn’t about the chess pieces (which aren’t constrained by the rules of chess) but the concepts that the pieces symbolically refer to. All chess games take place in the minds of the participants – the board is just a useful way of keeping track of things, an aid to memory that many people don’t even bother with.
That’s true of all of our mental work, including mathematics.
It is entirely plausible (but hopefully not the case) that our brains could have flaws built into them on a fundamental level, causing us to be incapable of grasping certain kinds of errors. If the flaw were wide-ranging enough so that no systems were capable of identifying the error, we would constantly construct models that didn’t match the behavior of the world, and we’d never know why.
Our ability to understand the world is ultimately limited to what the several pounds of salty fat inside our skulls is capable of processing.
I won’t dispute that you can use any thought at all, mathematical or otherwise, as support for an assertion about the nature of a world in which that idea can be thought.
I’d dispute, though, your implication that only mathematically valid computations are “allowable” under our physical laws.
Surely you’d admit that our brains are capable of any number of erroneous computations. Or is the Pythagorean notion that 2 = 49/25 verified by the fact that our physical universe produced brains (those of the Pythagoreans) capable of reaching such a result?
Surely the truth-value of a mathematical notion depends on more than simply whether that notion can be conceived by human minds.
Mathematics IS physics. The universe does not violate physical law by definition – what it does IS mathematics. Our constructed models of mathematics may or may not match the world – that’s our problem.
A damaged or broken electronic calculator might produce incorrect results, or none at all. But all possible configurations of the calculator, broken or otherwise, comply with physical law.
You’ve missed the point, John. The point is not that whatever our brains produce is right. The point is that the only guide we have as to what is ‘right’ is what our brains produce. Brains are riddled with error. We have no access to eternal truths, merely end states in biological computational systems.
@The Sci Phi Show: You asked why atheists seem to like David Hume so much given that his text indicates that he was in fact religious. It should be pointed out that given Hume’s position, and the time in which he lived, coming out of the closet at a deist or and agnostic would have been disastrous.
That said, he did say enough for him to comment: “I have no enemies — except, indeed, all the Whigs, all the Tories, and all the Christians.”
People respect him today for his numerous contributions to rational thought. For example, his discussions on induction, causation, free will v determinism and moral relativism.
You were correct in suggesting that his miracles argument is not his strongest work, but it nonetheless demonstrates his general skepticism, and why atheists love him so much.
Now, I’m not saying throw out translational research – what I’m saying is that not 99% of NIH funding should be looked at in terms of cures. And I know that is how Congress writes NIH funding rules – they’re just wrong, and retarding progress. We should split the two more logically.
Your point that they are intertwined is well-taken, but if in practice they disagree, we throw out the theory, not the observations.
I disagree. In practice we have a tendency to throw out the data – it’s only after an extended period of failure that we fall back on throwing out the theory. That’s a painful step, because we think in terms of the theory, whether or not we have the introspective capacity to recognize it. If a culture dish produces cell that don’t behave correctly, we throw out the dish and repeat the experiment. If it happens again, we try a different variation. It’s only after many failures that we investigate our thinking, and try a different tack.
And we can’t know in advance which factors will turn out to account for most of the variation. So we have to deal with all the information, and we have to develop techniques to make the task tractable.
That’s reverse engineering, and is almost intractable. The theory on that is very, very painful. Rarely can you get a unique solution. You have to decide, in advance, what you care about – what fits a reasonable model, with good grounding in external theory which is all self-consistent. Then you try, and pay the price if you were wrong. Some of those techniques of things like principle components can be suggestive – but in and of themselves, all you’re going to get is an expansion of base functions that doesn’t actually explain anything. That is the wrong track.
The physicists and the meteorologists and the physical chemists dealt with it, and we will too, eventually. But we can’t get ahead theoretically of what the observations support empirically, or it’s no longer science.
Of course we don’t want to get into physics quandary, where theory has outstripped observation. But we’re no where near that other mistake. We’re still in the nineteenth century, so to speak. We’re applying equilibrium statistics to non-equilibrium systems. We’re trying to reverse engineer signaling pathways, and it is often done by people with no, absolutely no, education in signal theory. We have people doing neuroscience who can’t even define information for you, and developmental biologists who don’t know about topology. I think we don’t need to worry just yet about theory outstripping observation – no, our problem is masses of data without any tools to interpret them. And those tools probably do exist, but too few biologists have the training to understand them.
Seriously, I’ve known many graduate students in biology who say, “why should I know mathematics, I’m a biologist!” Every scientist should now quite a bit of mathematics, even the most hard core bench-worker needs enough of a mathematical grounding to understand probability theory. Otherwise, you get people applying canned statistics packages who don’t understand when they’re applicable, or alternate methods for determining significance.
Just look in any biological journal. How often will you see normalized data with error bars? It gets into print – something that statisticians have known is nonsense for what, a century? Where people in marketing I know tell me that their graduate programs taught them that normalized data has no mean or error – that’s marketing people, not high up on the scientific prestige ladder.
Caledonian, you’re arguing that mathematics is a rational enterprise rather than an empirical one, and you don’t even know it. The chess analogy compares mathematics to a completely arbitrary, rule-based conceptual activity – this is about as strong a claim as you can make for mathematics being a formal system rather than a set of observations about the world.
You give the game away when you say that the ultimate claim in chess is to “the concepts that the pieces symbolically refer to”. Surely you meant to say that ultimately “queen captures knight” is a claim about a physical universe in which minds that can conceive of chess can exist.
John, Caledonian appears to be arguing that there is no difference between an empirical and a rational enterprise. So trying a gotcha on that isn’t going to move you at all forward – he denies the distinction, so the best you can accuse him/her of is imprecision. Which will annoy Caledonian (quite a bit), but isn’t a three-second pin.
I’m not sure there is a coherent point to miss here, Caledonian.
You are now claiming that there is, external to us, a true version of Mathematics, which our human-constructed notion of mathematics may or may not agree with. We revise our version of small-m mathematics, you’re saying, by comparing it with the behavior of the physical world outside of us.
So now a mathematical claim is not about end states in biological computational systems, but rather a claim about some ideal version of mathematics embodied in the physical laws of the universe? That’s quite an about-face.
Caledonian: it’s a claim about the state of the brain of a person who examines the concept of ‘triangle’.
Doesn’t the claim have to be wider than that? Because making a mathematical claim involves more than just a producer – it involves history, consumers and so on. So it has to be a claim about the state of a number of brains, and about the nature of a number of brains. It has to be interpretable, reasonable, etc, or otherwise you’re just making funny noises, and may be schizo.
And if the claim is some kind of universal mathematical claim, it would have to be a claim about all kinds of self-aware brains, including (hypothetical) non-human brains, or in other words the kinds of brains that can arise in our physical universe.
“How the hell can someone graduate with a science degree when they don’t know the importance of falsification? It’s one of the fundamental principles of science, yet it’s not necessary to learn about it.”
Much as I agree that philosophy of science is important, falsificationism has nothing to do with it. It was never anything more than a purely prescriptive concept–how Popper thought science ought to work, not how science does work. That falsificationism is taken seriously is a symptom of the problem: philosophy of science isn’t created by, and is for the most part ignored by, scientists. And so most philosophy of science remains somewhat irrelevant; a shame, since it is so clearly needed.
I’m sorry, but this discussion is a bit silly. We can observe the natural world without math, and mathematicians can construct all sorts of beautiful, clever, impossible things before breakfast. As such, (like philosophy) it is a beautiful and essential tool for scientific inquiry, but a distinctive activity in and of itself.
The conceit that all science is mathematics, because all mental processes, including science, are physical processes involving computation, is silly not (as some have suggested, and which Caledonian to his credit acknowledges) because brains might be flawed, but because it is at once trivial (all sense datum reduces to mathematics) and assumes a correspondence with reality that might not exist.
Given the complexity of the systems in question, there is no reason to believe that the sum of states in different minds is *computationally* equivalent simply because they may report identical outcomes. As someone remarked, we can’t step in the same river twice. Which reminds me that there are, in fact, some things in philosophy that do not require a mathematical formulation to be of use to scientists.
You might get away with suggesting that physics is mathematics. But I know more than a few physicists who would not take kindly to that assessment.
What’s more, it is a trivial enterprise to find mathematics that are emphatically not physics. Category Theory, K-theory, C*-Algebras, and so on. Most of the peculiarities in, say, homological algebra arise simply because the requirements have been relaxed enough that the objects in question lose all similarity to anything real. This staunchly realistic view is absurd.
Now, some of those might be used in physics, to be sure, but that does not mean that they are physical. What’s more, it is emphatically not the case that a set of manipulations carried out in a brain under the guidance of some formal rules is necessarily empirical science. If it is, you’ve just succeeded in classifying the Qabalah as science.
Again, I emphasize that some mathematics are empirical in nature or inspired by experience. That is, however, if taken by itself, a facile definition of mathematics simply because mathematics is defined as an abstraction subject to formal rules. Applied mathematics is also certainly a science since it engages primarily in finding models to describe physical systems. Pure mathematics, however, is not based in experience, but formal systems. It is entirely non-empirical. And whether or not it could, in principle, be used in an applied fashion is beside the point, since that’s another question of applied mathematics.
Some mathematics is unquestionably science. Some of it is unquestionably its own thing.
You might get away with suggesting that physics is mathematics. But I know more than a few physicists who would not take kindly to that assessment.
What’s more, it is a trivial enterprise to find mathematics that are emphatically not physics. Category Theory, K-theory, C*-Algebras, and so on. Most of the peculiarities in, say, homological algebra arise simply because the requirements have been relaxed enough that the objects in question lose all similarity to anything real. This staunchly realistic view is absurd.
Now, some of those might be used in physics, to be sure, but that does not mean that they are physical. What’s more, it is emphatically not the case that a set of manipulations carried out in a brain under the guidance of some formal rules is necessarily empirical science. If it is, you’ve just succeeded in classifying the Qabalah as science.
Again, I emphasize that some mathematics are empirical in nature or inspired by experience. That is, however, if taken by itself, a facile definition of mathematics simply because mathematics is defined as an abstraction subject to formal rules. Applied mathematics is also certainly a science since it engages primarily in finding models to describe physical systems. Pure mathematics, however, is not based in experience, but formal systems. It is entirely non-empirical. And whether or not it could, in principle, be used in an applied fashion is beside the point, since that’s another question of applied mathematics.
Some mathematics is unquestionably science. Some of it is unquestionably its own thing.
For what it’s worth, most mathematicians don’t consider themselves scientists, or their field a science (as far as I’ve been able to ascertain). This one included.
If it’s so important that mathematics be a science, rather than trying to deform both mathematics and empiricism until one is a subset of the other, why not simply define science as: “empiricism + mathematics”. That beats the heck out of trying to be clever with “it’s in my head, so it’s experienced”.
Anyway, I don’t think it’s important. I identify myself as a mathematician, and don’t lose any sleep over it.
If I am restricted to premises and rules of inference that don’t involve the “morally wrong” predicate, then no, of course not.¹ That was why I chose the statement in the first place; “empirical” (as I understand the term) cannot apply to moral statements.
If the other person accepts premises and/or rules of inference that introduce the “morally wrong” predicate, then I may, or may not be, able to construct a rational argument for my statement in their moral system. It depends on the details. To quote myself:
Perhaps some examples will help:
“Killing a human being is a great moral wrong” is a (trivial) conclusion in the following moral system:
Premise: Killing a human being is a great moral wrong
Rule of Inference: If A, then A
“Killing a human being is a great moral wrong” is not a conclusion in the following moral system:
Premise: Partaking of hot dog buns is a great moral wrong
Rule of Inference: If A, then A
There is considerable consensus over which rules of inference are allowed in rational argument, or at any rate there is considerable consensus over which rules of inference are excluded from rational argument; most of the lists of “logical fallacies” I’ve seen have been pretty similar. But there is not similar consensus over which premises are allowed.
¹ There are various pathological logical systems (such as inconsistent ones) that would admit such a conclusion in these circumstances. I’m presuming rationality doesn’t have such pathologies.
Because that is where the clue to how it works might come from? Are there results on this regulatory system from other organisms? And why do you care how that regulatory mechanism works, anyway?
Yes, everyone should know more math. But the ecologists and evolutionary biologists whose work you consider interesting often know even less than the bioinformatics and genomics people you so despise.
1) There’s no ‘ideal’ mathematics, just plain old reality.
2) Reality is unknowable.
3) End states in computational systems are what we can know.
4) The end states have no necessary correspondence to reality.
5) Mathematics is a study of the end states, and has no necessary correspondence to reality.
You’re just looking for things to criticize, and you’re totally butchering the presented arguments in order to do so. You’re not a philosopher by any chance?
Those mathematics, just like any other, are run on physical substrates – usually human brains. The assertions about the relationships between concepts are based on the processing results of those substrates. The claims are about the results of processing within the physical universe.
You’ve totally failed to grasp the argument being made.
Even mathematics requires data in order to be able to solve equations. For the sake of analogy, let’s say that we’re treating some phenotype in humans as an equation with 10,000 “variables”, not an unreasonable order of magnitude when considering the amount of information at the molecular level. How do we “solve” that “equation” to theoretically predict how those variables will interact to produce another phenotype?
Obviously, one way is to set up a matrix of the “coefficients” of those variables, and then solve for the variable values. The problem is, in order to solve for 10,000 variables, you need 10,000 equations. In other words, you still need the data. Phenotypes in other species give you different multivariate “equations” with different “coefficients”, which you can use in setting up your matrix. But you still need those other equations; else, the matrix doesn’t do you any good, because it’s not sufficiently populated to work.
And there are other techniques, such as dimensionality reduction, which you can use to try to eliminate some of the 10,000 variables which aren’t as significant in the final result, to make the computation easier and the matrix smaller. But short of actually doing the work to get sufficient data to apply the math to, I have no idea of how you’re proposing to short-cut that process.
Thus, philosophy is physics. Or hasn’t it occured to you that the manner in which we comprehend things (our models) are distinct from the things we study? No, I’m sure you’re right. After all, it couldn’t be that I understand perfectly what you’re saying, and that what you’re saying is patently absurd, could it? A model for an abstract formal system is processed in a physical brain, so clearly that abstract formal system is physical. That makes perfect sense.
You’re a regular fence post, Cal. Never mind that I’ve listed some irrefutably pure and formal mathematics. And those aren’t the only ones. The notion of a continuum is ideal. The Zermelo-Fraenkel Axioms and the set theory they describe are not physical in any way. But, maybe I’m just wrong again.
Actually, just ignore me, it isn’t as though I’m in any way qualified to attest to the non-physicality of pure mathematics. Whatever philosophers of mathematics might disagree on, every single one of them — Quine, Putnam, Heyting, Carnap, Russell, Brouwer, Godel, Hilbert, von Neumann, Curry and all of the others you might read (even the constructivists) immediately dispense with the facile classification of mathematics as a physical enterprise first few pages of most of their essays, and they do it in exactly the way I have. But, they’re probably wrong too. After all, you’re Caledonian, expert on everything.
You’re not just wrong. You are painfully, obviously, and persistently wrong. You would have made a fantastic creationist.
Just kicking the tires of your “arguments” to see if there’s anything there.
Not even wrong, as a certain famous physicist (sorry, mathematician) once said.
I might have been too hasty. There is someone whose philosophy of mathematics is in line with Caledonian’s.
Claudius “the fourth-dimension is mathematically nonsensical because I can’t draw four mutually perpendicular lines” Ptolemaeus.
PKC was an example. It is a heavily funded example, because it is a linchpin in many regulatory systems. What you suggest is what everyone tries – to reverse engineer the damn thing. I may have been over-emphatic in my original statement, but going from analogues won’t get you very far. The problem is one of what is binding, how do proteins function as machines. We have an overwhelming amount of data, but close to no reasonable methods to go from structures to functions. What people try is MD, which is exactly that kind of collect all the data and stick it together – even if it were to work, it doesn’t elucidate the operating principles. Those principles won’t emerge from the data – they will emerge from scientists and happen to connect with the data. Collecting more data won’t bring that day any closer.
No, not everyone. Specifically biologists. You are correct that bioinformatics and genomics people know more math – but they aren’t at the right end of things, in my view (their focus is on massive number crunching, which I don’t see as ultimately productive). Ecologists have always pleasantly surprised me – at least they know their statistics, in general, just like psychologists do. That at least hits the bare minimum requirement – some even do Markov models, as you so kindly pointed out. The great bulk of specialties have close to no training in even statistics. Physicists know math. Chemists know math. Engineers know math. Even sociologists know statistics. Too many biologists not only don’t know math, but doubt it’s value – they have a bad attitude about it.
Our graduate chair is a mathematical biologist. He spits bile and flame whenever he hears a biology student whine about needing to know differential equations, and then usually insinuates that they should just drop out.
I once heard “But I don’t neeeeed differential equations!” come from a student, and it nearly ruptured a blood-vessel in my head, since that student was a chemist.
Fortunately, math contempt is often fatal in the sciences, and I don’t have to deal with these folks for long periods of time.
You miss my point. If the variables are 10k of the same class of variable (the dimensionality is homogeneous), then that’s no problem – the underlying principle can be simple, and therefore useful to understand the mechanism. But the principle has to be in the equations before you do your calculations. If they are not homogeneous, or if you don’t have a relatively simple and specific mechanism, and are just number-crunching to extract dominant terms, even if you succeed, you still haven’t learned very much. You don’t gain any principle from that – just summarizing data.
How do you short-cut it? The same way you do it in every field. Hard thinking, going back to first principles, engineering the system from some known scale up. The underlying principles almost never “emerge”. They require years and decades to extract. You don’t study compressed phases by trying to measure in solution the position of as many particles as possible and then apply dimensional analysis. You try to reduce the particles as much as possible, and then apply known (or new) principles to their interactions, and see if the bulk solution behaves as in the wet-lab. If you succeed, you’ve extracted a design principle that you can then apply further.
For example, imagine no Darwin. If you had just collected the temporal and spatial genomic variation in species, and tried to do some kind of dimensional analysis, do you really imagine that “Survival of the fittest” would emerge? I find that unlikely in the highest degree. You’d get what you put in – an expansion on some base function, showing that there were terms of greater importance, and correlated terms. In the end, no deep understanding of the process – just a compression of the data.
You keep asserting that, but you never explain how it’s supposed to happen. Even in the analogy I used above, matrix algebra methods are useless without sufficient equations to apply them to. And, to take just one more example among many possible others, in inferential statistics, you can draw a line through existing data, but it’s not valid to just extend it indefinitely past the data and insist that future data must line up with it.
Really, if you do have a better way, I (not to mention a lot of others) would be eager to hear it. But so far, all I am hearing is a lot of hand-waving about how it’s not necessary to do the work, but no suggestions about how to get around doing the work. It’s entertaining speculation, but it’s not science unless you provide a better way that actually works in practice.
Of course that’s what you do. But “as much as possible” is a lot easier to say than it is to carry out, and I think that’s where you are talking past everyone else who’s responded to you so far. Humans and mice are both mammals; ideally, we should just be able to apply transitivity to say that angiogenesis inhibition should work as well against cancer in humans as in mice. But it doesn’t, and we don’t know why. So transitivity, while a useful theoretical concept with biological applications, is insufficient in practice in this case. There is not enough there yet on which to base a theory, as much as you and I and everyone else would like to.
The history of biology is littered with “hard thinkers” from Plato on, whose theories and first principles are nicely elegant, but which don’t work out in practice. But there are methods and techniques which we can apply to the data we are gathering, and see if it works, and under what conditions. In fact there are so many that it’s difficult to know where to start–Lie algebra for the genome, differential equations and weighted Boolean networks for angiogenesis, or commutative semi-rings for predicting the anatomy of yet undiscovered fossils? Then we can decide about the validity of the selected model, and extend it to make predictions. And the process does go back and forth from top-down to bottom-up as you proposed, which makes me wonder why you didn’t already know that before you began criticizing researchers for not doing so. I think you are criticizing your own idiosyncratic caricature of what you think biomedical researchers do.
Like I said before, if you have a way in which you can short-cut that iterative process–not just grand, abstract terms, but a roadmap for how to carry it out–I’d be very eager to hear it.
@RavenT: There is no “method”, no automated process, for deriving new principles. Just hard work and thinking.
Look, Relativity didn’t come out of dimensional analysis of physical data. It came out of a smart guy, learning the latest principles of mathematical physics and thinking very clearly about their implications.
You keep on wanting some “method” that you can apply to all problems – like dimensional analysis. Such a method is not terribly useful, and in some ways (in some contexts) is actually destructive by creating the illusion of analysis.
For example, I recently read a paper “Morphometric Approach to the Solvation Free Energy of Complex Molecules” in PRL. Instead of trying to calculate protein folding patterns by calculating every little interaction of every amino acid down to the quantum level, they applied some forgotten geometrical principles from the earliest twentieth century that depends on four parameters resolvable from a small set of known conformations. That is applying a principle! That, if it works out, reduces the massive MD calculations to basically a notepad calculation, and actually gives you something to “understand” the design of molecular surfaces.
Of course, it gets published in a physics journal rather than a biological one! No short-cuts – hard theoretical work that the authors had been at for many years, and had ancestry going back to the dawn of the century. No automated or generalized method produced that, other than burning a whole lot of glucose. No sifting through massive databases to reverse engineer the system – they worked forward by applying principles.
So know, I’m not speculating. I’m not hand-waving. I’m trying to argue that there is no short-cut, and that some of the current methods are actually “short-cuts”, by offloading the essential work to machines. And that has a tendency to produce the illusion of knowledge, but at best simply compresses the existing observations.
Sometimes there may be no other way, just as some mathematical theorems don’t appear to have any underlying principle obvious to the human mind, but require massive automated proofs. But those proofs themselves aren’t terribly productive, beyond themselves. They don’t enlighten, they don’t explain – they just are bare facts. In science, we should try as much as possible to avoid such methods. We should be suspicious that we’re missing something essential when we revert to such methods. We should always remember epicycles – a sobering example of how throwing data into more and more complex systems is often a sign that we’ve missed the underlying principle, that its time to do some hard theoretical thinking.
I really don’t understand your complaints, frog. You approve of the morphometric approach as an example of applying a principle. Fine, I agree that that is a good example. And when I do a CRISP search on the NIH awarded grants with “morphometric” as a keyword, I get 140 hits, including the following: 5R21EB004409-03, LEE, TZUMIN, Morphometric Analysis of Brains and Neurons, and 5R01MH064838-04, RATNANATHER, JOHN, Morphometric Analysis of the Superior Temporal Gyrus.
In other words, NIH is funding exactly the same types of studies you hold up as examples of good principles. Yet you continue to complain that biologists don’t try to develop theories, and that NIH is funding the wrong things. I really don’t understand, in light of all the research going on in that direction, where your assertion comes from.
We are talking past each other, and this is getting nowhere. And ironically, it’s taking time away from the abstract algebra book I brought home to ramp up on my rings, fields, and groups.
Hmm, wrong morphometry. Those are anatomical uses of the term, my example was a physical chemistry usage – spelled the same, different meaning. The paper I cited is the first use of morphometry with this specific meaning as applied to biological problems.
Look, all I’m talking is about balance. Of course, biologists exists that know about rings, etc. But if you were to do a poll, it would be a vanishingly small percentage. If my example were an NIH funded project, it would have gone into a biological journal. Don’t you think the authors wanted to have it available to biologists? Why would you think that it made it into a good physical chemistry journal instead?
It’s about balance. I’m not caricaturing biologists, unless you think I’m implying that all biologists have problems with addition – that would be a caricature. It’s just that too many of them don’t have sufficient training. That our grant funding mechanism don’t give sufficient weight to better theory – it’s awfully short-sighted. That our biology curriculum, in general but of course not everywhere, pounds students with facts instead of giving them mathematical and theoretical skills.
Of course I posed this in a provocative manner – this is a blog after all! If you are going to say something against the consensus, you have to do it provocatively.
But I still haven’t seen any substantive response. I get that some biologists are good at math – well, of course. Some biologists are good at anything. I get examples of curve fitting massive amounts of data – well, that’s all good as a compression technique, but is not a theoretical advance. Some theoretical advances are being made – but we don’t give them sufficient weight. Our journals don’t like them – most biologists don’t like them, since they can’t differentiate between curve-fitting and elucidating design principles.
The NIH has just recently instituted a computational biology group in conjunction with the NSF – this is just in the last couple of years. And a lot of “computation biology” is that kind of massive data correlation work, base function expansion, or MD simulation that I don’t see as terribly productive. If you think that “a lot” of work is being done in this direction, I respectfully suggest that you are ignoring 99% of the funded work. Let’s take a poll on the percentage of biology faculty that know or even recognize the term “commutative ring” or even “matrix multiplication” – do you really think you’ll break 10%? 5%? In my experience, more than 95% stop at exponential expansions.
It’s all about the proper balance. And my view (and experience) has been that too many biologists are myopic in this regard, because too few have the appropriate training to analyze the theoretical work. The only long-term solution, in my view and going back to my original point, is to either revamp biology curricula, or to cut way-back on the ratio of biology undergrads to others fields accepted in biology programs. Get more physicists and chemists who have actually taken diffy-Q, and fewer biology students who stopped at Calc I (or didn’t even take that), or add graduate school requirements for more math in general. Require an upper-level course in statistics for everyone; for neuroscientists, one in information theory; give a lot of extra points for someone who has taken abstract algebra and diffy-Q.
The reaction to this simple challenge makes me wonder if it’s not even particularly worse in computational biology – I feel like I’m talking in Chinese to Ghanaians. Except for Dustin!
Hmm. Why? If there’s no empirical distinction between “X is bad” and “You and I both feel that X is bad,” why should it be troubling if you think one and I think the other?
If I had my way, there would be no such thing as a college graduate who hasn’t taken mathematics courses up to and including ordinary differential equations.
Wevs, frog. You’re just playing semantic “gotcha!” games, and you’re really quite tedious, because you’re not as good at it as you think you are. It’s clear that engaging with you is just wanking, and not the fun kind, either.
Get back to me when you win the Nobel Prize and the MacArthur grant your omniscient approach so richly deserves; some of us have work to do in the meantime.
“Of course I posed this in a provocative manner – this is a blog after all! If you are going to say something against the consensus, you have to do it provocatively.”
I think you drummed up the wrong initial approach. The first half of this thread had me thinking you were a jackass. The second half, post RavenT where you started posting a little more reasonably, had me reading your posts much more carefully and walking away not only agreeing with a good deal of some of it but more importantly scrutinizing my own educational progress. If I hadn’t finished finals earlier this week and had some free time, I’d have probably closed my browser earlier still thinking you were a jackass (which I don’t now, to be clear, but you were a bit pugnacious at the onset).
@RaventT: That was not a semantic gotcha! I wasn’t quibbling over details, I was suggesting that you were simply throwing keywords in a search engine without looking at what they meant. And that’s an unfair argumentative approach. You didn’t show that that work was abstractly equivalent – and you didn’t bother to give me a link, like I did for you to try to elucidate what I was saying. It just happens that the article I linked to was a first-in-the-field, immediately identifying for me that we were talking about two different things. What you were identifying appears to be surgical morphometry, the collection of statistical data on anatomical features to improve surgical outcomes. Most definitively not related, at all, with my argument – important data, but not a bit of theoretical work there.
And then you have to go to the silliness of “Get back with your Nobel”, which is just the weakest kind of false argument. Yes, and physicists shouldn’t talk about baseball unless they can pitch…
This does grow tiresome. I’ve made a number of substantive points, particularly about biological education. Have I gotten any responses that say, more math isn’t needed in our training? No. I’ve pointed out that the great number of biologists are insufficiently trained in math, and therefore are insufficiently competent at theoretical work. I get either, theoretical work is relatively unimportant (Darwin stared at shiny rocks) – which any philosophy of science course will tell you is false, or that there are “some” good mathematical biologists, which is a trivial statement. Or even worse, that curve fitting is indistinguishable from actual development of mathematical theories.
@Brad S: Yeah, I started out cranky. But I got a lot crankier with the defensive response (particularly the idea that Darwin walked around with an empty head randomly collecting data). And I start out cranky because I have to deal everyday with folks who divide a random number by another random number (normalized data), put error bars on it, and when I politely point out that that is mathematically verboten I get exactly this kind of defensiveness, and refuse to look up a Cauchy distribution when I give them the references (and even respond with “Well, everybody does it.” What my mother would say to that!). Or who fit their data to a set of exponentials and then claim that reflects the “number of underlying processes” – they’ve never heard of a Fourier transform! Or who don’t know the sampling theorem, and just stonewall on getting enough samples – instead of reading, they revel in their ignorance. So, I’m a bit touchy, and anonymity will often let that out of its cage. But I’m not the one in the consensus who shouldn’t need to be defensive.
Not impossible at all – you’d get outliers and hopefully get curious about them, as Darwin did about phenotypical outliers. Of course it’s impossible to predict how things would be done without Darwin, but remember the PLoS study I named before? Most people had not expected that much selection in the human species. And, instead of reverse engineering disease gene phenotypes one by one, a genomics approach actually simplified things and enabled them to make generalizations about natural selection in humans. So I don’t know why you are hating on genomics so much. Thinking at the DNA level is an enormous oversimplification of the organism anyway.
To be fair, frog, most of the professional biologists I’ve met are perfectly capable of handling linear algebra and FFT’s and the like when needed. Particularly the people working in evolution and game theory. I also have my doubts that any more than a small handful of them need any abstract algebra (and I’ve met a few who have taken it upon themselves to learn that, so I think that niche is filled).
Also, the biologists I’ve had the opportunity to work with are very good about nipping those statistical faux pas in the bud. I know there’s some bad stuff out there, and I’ve seen some of it first hand, but I think you’re generalizing in a way that isn’t fair to some very good biologists.
If, however, you would like to needle the undergraduate biologists who feel that Calc I is an unreasonable requirement, blast away.
No, the “empty head” was entirely your addition. I doubt that the heads of molecular biologists are completely empty, either.
Ok, I thought you were deliberately being a jerk again, like you were before. But if you weren’t, then doesn’t the honest misunderstanding over two homonyms show that we don’t even have enough basic fundamental understanding of terminology in common to start talking about overarching theories? I mean, if the conceptual foundation is that shaky, how can you talk about building a huge edifice on it? Either way, the fact that we don’t even mean the same thing by the term “morphometry” doesn’t bode well for the validity of premature grand theories.
It wasn’t a false argument; it was a flat-out insult. It’s really easy to talk big as an anonymous blog commentor, insulting people who are trying to do exactly the thing you fault them for not doing, and that’s all I was trying to convey. No assertion attached, just pure insult.
Yes, it does grow tiresome. I made a number of substantive points, too, particularly about angiogenesis and about the risk of not knowing which factors were and weren’t important, as exmplified in the Gelsinger case, before extrapolating to the general theory. Additionally, I pointed to historical examples of how premature, overly grandiose theories crashed and burned. Instead of responding, you stated you received “no substantive feedback”, and you mistook me as only being interested in finding “a” method. I could have saved myself a lot of time by just typing “blah blah blah”; it would have been all the same to you.
And you make grand, sweeping, insulting statements about biologists and researchers, and you seem impervious to counterexamples. Not impatient that more progress is not being made faster (where you and I might actually find agreement), but you feel the need to trash biological researchers as a class. It’s quite stale.
The time I wasted on responding to you would have been more usefully invested in actually, rather than figuratively, wanking, although in fairness, I am sure you feel the same way about your time. However, the situation is easily remedied by neither of us wasting any more time on this impasse.
Dustin, of course what I’d call good biologists wouldn’t fall under my rant. I know lots of good biologist who have no problem with an FFT. Unfortunately, they aren’t a significant portion of the biologists I do know! I’m not trying to be unfair to good biologists – I’m trying to be fair to bad biologists. Part of the problem is that all of us are working on anecdotes and personal experience. I don’t know of any surveys on the mathematical competence of biologists. Maybe there needs to be one?
On statistical faux pas – just open any biological journal, or biological article in a general journal. You will see this faux pas over and over and over again. That is the evidence that I feel shows that my personal experience isn’t an aberration. It is evidence of the fact that I’m not at a university with a particularly in-numerate biological faculty – such mistakes are not only tolerated, but are actually required at the level of the field – that the wrong way is the consensus method.
I did except evolutionary biology and ecology at the outset – because I’ve read some very good game theory articles that properly apply theoretical techniques. Even that got me a raspberry, for being arrogant by showing good examples!
Who I’m trying to needle are the faculty who accept a big bulk of graduate students who didn’t even take Calc I, who whine about learning statistics even at that stage in their careers. The students respond to the requirements of the faculty, and at most (but not all) universities, those requirements are fairly out of whack.
Windy: Not impossible at all – you’d get outliers and hopefully get curious about them, as Darwin did about phenotypical outliers. Of course it’s impossible to predict how things would be done without Darwin, but remember the PLoS study I named before?
But that’s my point! Selection doesn’t emerge from that data – suggestions about what to look at does, which is perfectly valid, but at best is the first step. And that first step works even better if you have some idea about what you’re looking for, rather than just looking will-nilly, such as having ideas about change over time, reproduction, maybe even a Lamarckian theory to help you select your dimensions. Even a bad theory is better than no theory at all.
@RavenT: Let me translate: Whaaaaaaah, she’s being mean!. The fact that theories fail is as irrelevant as the fact that experiments fail. If they’re not proposed, they’re not tested. We need more failing theories, not less. Physics is better off with a big crash-and-burn of string theory, than not trying it all. And we’re not even at the point of “big overarching theory”. A little under-arching theory would be good. The problem is when people commit to theory too strongly – which is the current case. I didn’t think I needed to point that out, since it’s the trivial case.
========
How can you tell when RavenT is wanking on the net? RavenT posts a comment!
RavenT is so stupid, RavenT thinks a commutative ring is what a bride gives her husband!
eval {talentof(RavenT};}; die “That’s what I expected!n” if $@.
=====
Not my best, but better than a tired “Come back with your Noble Prize”. So funny milk almost came out of my nose!
Well, I’ll agree with Caledonian on the mathematics-is-empirical thing. (Somebody’s got to, right?) It seems to me that mathematics is a subset of psychology, which examines whether propositions can be justified by rules and axioms which are virtually (but not completely) universally held by human minds.
If someone studied how people use and interpret the Qabalah, that certainly would be science. Mathematics involves not just performing the manipulations, but making hypotheses about the results people will get when they do so.
Why not? They describe patterns of thought commonly found in human minds.
I think set theory’s a good example of the empiricism of math, actually, because of the issues with the axiom of choice and its equivalents. Some people find them self-evident; some people don’t. (A fellow math grad has “I reject the axiom of choice” written on his backpack.) Because there’s an empirically-observed lack of consensus on this issue, you can’t really make a claim of their truth or falsity.
Do they? Doesn’t mathematical intuitionism hold that mathematics is the creation of the mind–which, at least for us materialists, is in turn the creation/expression of the brain?
Do you have a link to what you consider a particularly effective argument against mathematics being empirical?
That must have really stung, if you’re still going on about it.
And just fyi, it’s spelled “Nobel”. If you’re going to be insultingly juvenile, at least show some pride of craftsmanship about it.
Now you managed to piss off RavenT as well :)
Shorter frog: collecting huge databases of genomic data is bad, except when it’s good.
Windy: Did you miss that “first” step point? That it’s better if directed by good theory? Didn’t you understand that’s what I’ve been saying, or do you imagine that I think we should shut our eyes and stare at the wall?
I’ve been arguing balance all along. I’ve said it explicitly numerous times. I used the Darwin example to emphasize that very point – collecting data is good, but funding it to the exclusion of any theoretical framework is bad. Do you imagine that if Darwin had never heard of Lamarck, hadn’t read Malthus, didn’t have a grandfather who had published early evolutionary theory, hadn’t spent time looking at fossils, and had never heard of Lyell – in short hadn’t been thoroughly immersed in evolutionary theory – that all the Beagle trips in the world would have done an ounce of good? We could have had centuries of that!
And we did. Do you think Darwin was the first naturalist to go on a global trip? Why didn’t any of the others come up with evolution, when they had the same wealth of data available to them? Simple – they didn’t have any theoretical constructs available to build on, they didn’t think in those terms, they didn’t collect terribly relevant samples, they weren’t astounded by what they saw because they saw everything in terms of the Great Chain of Being.
Shorter Windy: My reading comprehension is very limited – please be gentle.
Shortest Windy: I can’t add – don’t remind me.
Did too, Miss Expert-on-the-history-of-biology.
I can add, thanks. It seems that you can dish out hyperbole and insults, but you can’t take them.
“Did too”? “Did too”? Now, I haven’t heard that one since grade school.
You mean that selection of the fittest should be credited to someone else? Or just that some preliminary theories had been discussed, which informed Darwin? Neither really goes for your case. Or that someone had worked out most of it, but Darwin only learned how to read while he was on the Beagle? Maybe he had a miracle! He was dumb and deaf before he went, and Benny Hinn healed him!
I’m waiting…. Waiting…. Waiting….
I guess it’ll be more insults and flames, and little of substance – as it ever was.
And some commenters wonder why I seem a little pugnacious!
Actually it was jointly credited. Just waiting for the penny to drop now…
Ooh. First cursing in Finnish, and now Perls of wisdom from Frog. Ах, как хорошо! Ай! Как обидно, зачем вы это сделали? А, подожди-ка!
I’ll try to contact my international friends tonight and see if I can find out how to say “…and so’s your old man!” and “Go jump in a lake!” in Tagalog or Farsi or Portuguese. Stay tuned.
Ok then. As you were. I’m lurking. Neutrally.
(Has anyone been following the debate on the “wee-wee” thread? No? Good choice.)
Maybe you should type a little more slowly, windy; your point seems to have wooshed right over frog’s head.
You mean Wallace? Wikipedia: Unlike Darwin, Wallace began his career as a travelling naturalist already believing in the transmutation of species. The concept had been advocated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Erasmus Darwin, and Robert Grant, among others. It was widely discussed, but not generally accepted by leading naturalists, and was considered to have radical, even revolutionary connotations.[22] [23] Prominent anatomists and geologists such as Georges Cuvier, Richard Owen, Adam Sedgwick, and Charles Lyell attacked it vigourously.[24][25] It has been suggested that Wallace accepted the idea of the transmutation of species in part because he was always inclined to favour radical ideas in politics, religion and science[22], and because he was unusually open to marginal, even fringe ideas in science.[26]
What, don’t you get that supports my argument? That observation only is meaningful in view of theory? Haven’t you at least read Kuhn? That Darwin, as well as Wallace, would be seeing nature in light of the evolutionary controversy, whether pro or con?
Are we going to have to go line by line, carefully connecting theory with paradigm shift, normal science vs. revolutionary science, argue back over again the history of science in physics, chemistry and biology?
I may originally have been hyperbolic about your ability to add, but now I’m wondering if it wasn’t a factual statement. Come on, differentiate for us denumerable and undenumerable sets. Are there more integers or rational numbers? Can you show me Pi on a number line?
Kseniya: 1-800-translate.com says: در درياچهاى!
;-)
Always with the Wikipedia… The point is that it happened to be those who went out and looked at large amounts of “data” without knowing exactly what to look for, who came up with the new theory. Not those who stayed home in England with Owen and were drilled in the importance of proper theory. I don’t think Wallace and Darwin were idiot savants, but you seem to think modern molecular biologists don’t have anything in their heads except a data-shaped hole?
Come on, at least try a little. Besides, I can’t seem to fit a number line this comment box.
Heh, windy, citing Wikipedia’s not the lowest you can go for sources–just next to it. I once knew a student who quoted Jean Auel’s Clan of the Cave Bear as a primary source for an anthropology paper.
Of course, she wasn’t purporting to be an expert on biological history, either, so there you are…
@Anton Mates
Consensus isn’t the criteria for truth or falsehood. Neither does it even make sense to speak of the truth or falsehood of a mathematical axiom. At best, we can speak of independence and relative consistency. Godel and Cohen were able to show both for the Axiom of Choice. Mathematicians are at complete liberty to accept or reject the Axiom and do their own mathematics accordingly. That, by itself, shows that the Axiom of Choice has very little to do with the real world. It most certainly isn’t physics.
I will concede only that they are abstractions or extensions or formalizations of patterns commonly found in human minds. That would be entirely consistent with something I said about a pseudoquestion earlier. That really doesn’t mean that they’re physical, only that they can describe physical and finite processes as a special case. ZF was designed to handle very abstract sets with no physical meaning. At best, that would make them psychological, but still not physics. I don’t agree that ZF is a bad example of what I’m getting at, but if it is there are multitudes of other axiom systems out there which, in absence of some kind of model, make no intuitive sense at all, and are certainly nonphysical.
Intuitionism does. And I’m not inclined to disagree (even though, as a formalist, the intuitionists are my sworn enemies). But it’s for exactly that reason that mathematics should not be thought of as empirical. And if that doesn’t do it, then there’s the problem of induction. Mathematics has no problem of induction, while empirical inquiry does. Surely that suggests that there is something different about the two.
I don’t deny that some mathematics has an empirical component, but I’ve already said most of what I have to say about that. However it is not, on the whole, empirical.
You don’t get it. All of those concepts are part of the physical world, in precisely the same way that computer programs are physical, or this conversation (if talking at a person as resolutely oblivious as you can be considered one) is physical.
These words you’re reading now: they’re patterns of magnetic alignment on a disk drive, they’re groups of excited phosphorus atoms in your monitor (unless you have a plasma screen, in which case it’s more complex), they’re firing associations of neurons in your head. All of the things that these words are, are physical.
You’re confusing the things the theories discuss and what the theories are. All of the conclusions we’ve made about and in those theories are based off of the physical processing we’ve accomplished with the concepts that describe them – all that we know, or think we know, is about the analysis of those concepts.
On the contrary, it’s our observation of the physical analysis of that concept that permits us to conclude that the Axiom of Choice can either be accepted or rejected, that it’s truly an axiom that cannot be derived from simpler statements. And that relies directly upon physics.
Admit it, Duncan: you believe that human minds are magic, spiritual things not sullied by base mass-energy or “laws of physics”. You think human minds are somehow capable of knowing absolute truth without performing computations and observing the result.
By “criteria”, I of course meant “criterion”. English is a stupid mish-mash anyway.
Also:
I’m afraid I don’t. Most of what I’ve read on the philosophy of mathematics comes from anthologies of papers written before the dawn of electronic print holdings. Though, now that you mention it, if you don’t consider my arguments to be anything more than out of hand dismissal, most of those authors won’t be much better. They’ve all said the same things.
Let me see: quoting wikipedia vs. saying “Did too!”
Hmmm, let’s see which one is lower on the argument pole….
Hmmm……
Tough one…..
Hmmmm…..
Nope, can’t figure out which one is lazier and more intellectually dishonest. Can’t figure that out at all.
But that doesn’t make the words I’m reading right now physics.
Physics is what the psyche is composed of! Mathematicians may be fond of dualism, but it’s simply wrong. Thought is a physical thing, and as mathematical analysis is thought, mathematics relies upon physics.
It is remarkable how difficult some people find it to even grasp the argument, much less its implications.
Here’s a thought: consider the arguments yourself instead of relying on what you’ve read philosophers say before. I know, I know, it’s entirely against the ethos of philosophy to go directly to the source instead of referencing socially-approved authorities, but just give it a try.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. That is not the way that we handle things like that. The Axiom of Choice is a general statement regarding general sets. The physical analogues of the statement aren’t even axioms, but theorems of number theory. I’m not going to argue about this with you. Until you’ve worked through something like Cohen’s papers you don’t even have the vaguest idea of how we handle those kinds of things.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. That is not the way that we handle things like that. The Axiom of Choice is a general statement regarding general sets. The physical analogues of the statement aren’t even axioms, but theorems of number theory. I’m not going to argue about this with you. Until you’ve worked through something like Cohen’s papers you don’t even have the vaguest idea of how we handle those kinds of things.
Using that line of argument, you have to conclude that every fairy tale, every myth, every piece of numerology, all of the world’s literature and poetry, and every painting ever made are physics.
Nope, can’t figure out which one is lazier and more intellectually dishonest.
I’m sorry, I was not aware that “did too” is some kind of unutterable insult in the English language, let alone “intellectually dishonest”. Seemed shorter than the other ways to put it, that’s all. I was just pointing out a fact which then sent you running to Wikipedia.
Read this very, very carefully:
Thought processes are physical. We generate conclusions by applying logical operations to concepts within our minds. It is a physical computation, just as a computer program that analyzes and synthesizes statements in logic is a physical computation. The precisely method of embodiment is irrelevant – electronic circuits, neural firing patterns, it doesn’t matter.
We know what implications are by observing the results of these computations. It doesn’t matter whether the observation is with other neural modules, or with our eyes – or our ears or nose or skin. We study the physical behavior of the things we want to know about – the mathematical concepts and their implications – directly, and that is what empiricism is all about.
You’re an idiot, Dustin.
Everything that exists is physics. Nonexistant things aren’t, of course, but we have no examples of them. We have the concepts of nonexistant things, which do exist, which is how we know that the things they describe do not.
You’re not thinking through what you’re saying, Dustin. Stop and consider.
You are such a fucking douchebag. You’re the one who said:
And now you’re trying to back that up with some blather about it necessarily being the case that mathematics is physics because thinking about mathematics is a physical process. Or aren’t you even paying attention to what you’re typing? Fuckwit.
Mathematics is a collection of just those concepts of nonexistant things. That’s what we’ve been trying to tell you. That’s why mathematics isn’t physics. That’s why you’re wrong.
Good one! I don’t mind Wikipedia but I’ve actually read other sources on the matter and this image of Darwin as theory-driven from the start seems very foreign. Actually it was unnecessary to go into how much Darwin had considered Lamarckism, because the Beagle voyage was not in any way intended to test it.
Actually, windy, I thought that comment was one of the finest examples of user-centered design–tailoring the tone and content of the message to the level of the intended audience–that I’d seen in some time. Concise, succinct, and elegant in its simplicity, yet rich in undertones and allusions–I thought you captured the spirit of the moment perfectly with your mots justes.
(Some) concepts of nonexistant things exist, Dustin. They’re physical entities. They compose mathematics, which is the study of the conclusions that can be generated by applying certain operations to those concepts. It’s a study of real, existing, physical things, Dustin.
You’re arguing against a strawman, possibly because your mind cannot accomodate the argument that’s being forwarded and it’s substituting a simpler, invalid argument that you *can* handle. But whether it’s intentional or not, you’re making yourself look like a fool.
Stop and consider what’s being said, Dustin, lest you remain an idiot.
The performance of mathematics is physical. Thinking about the performance of mathematics is physical. Thinking about thinking about the performance of mathematics is physical.
And so on, and so forth.
There is no form of thought that is not a physical phenomena, and our study of what happens as a result of thought is also physical.
There is no such thing as an existant entity that is not physical, because ‘physical’ is what we use to describe things that can interact, directly or indirectly, with us. If it’s not physical, we cannot interact with it, and it does not exist relative to us.
If the concept of that thing is real, we can study it – which is why we can analyze paradoxes and contradictions, things which do not and cannot exist but whose nature we can partially understand by examining things that do.
Mathematics IS physics. So is love, and poetry, and light, and sound, and fire, and uranium. So is radio and television and viewing the Venus de Milo by moonlight. They’re all physical, and are subsets of physics.
You’re a dualist, Dustin.
Certainly. And what is more interesting, it seems some math are decided by physics. Computational science have added the dimension of resource to math, which relates to time and space. It has become interesting to track how different resources are utilized, and how that limits computability.
For example, the unproven Church-Turing (CT) thesis states that a Turing machine is the most powerful device we can have. IIRC Scott Aaronsson points out that this follows from that timelike loops are forbidden in physics. (Because otherwise we could build a time machine that allow much more powerful calculations.)
Likewise he claims that the unproven P != NP thesis about complexity classes seems to be true for physical reasons. And since it seems likely that we can’t prove that (hints from CT, perhaps; I need to check that when I have time) we must perhaps accept it as an axiom given by nature. (Perhaps this is one of the cases where assuming the other option doesn’t lead to something interesting….)
I heartily agree that the later is the larger problem. Falsification as demarcation is a naive idea, but testability seems to work. I had an example above, and string theory is probably not going to be accepted as physics without testing in some form.
Certainly. And what is more interesting, it seems some math are decided by physics. Computational science have added the dimension of resource to math, which relates to time and space. It has become interesting to track how different resources are utilized, and how that limits computability.
For example, the unproven Church-Turing (CT) thesis states that a Turing machine is the most powerful device we can have. IIRC Scott Aaronsson points out that this follows from that timelike loops are forbidden in physics. (Because otherwise we could build a time machine that allow much more powerful calculations.)
Likewise he claims that the unproven P != NP thesis about complexity classes seems to be true for physical reasons. And since it seems likely that we can’t prove that (hints from CT, perhaps; I need to check that when I have time) we must perhaps accept it as an axiom given by nature. (Perhaps this is one of the cases where assuming the other option doesn’t lead to something interesting….)
I heartily agree that the later is the larger problem. Falsification as demarcation is a naive idea, but testability seems to work. I had an example above, and string theory is probably not going to be accepted as physics without testing in some form.
Well, if nothing else, at least we had a nice all-girl flamewar going on for a while, until D&C showed back up to cramp our style. It’s been real, now I need to work ;)
Some? I’ll grant you the point, Torbjörn, as soon as you point out an example of how math is decided by non-physical things.
Ok, I’ve really had it with this discussion. You’ve been trying to argue that mathematics is physics because thinking about it is physical, and your whole point of carrying that argument out was because you wanted mathematics to be a subset of science. Now you’ve contorted that position so far that if I accept the physicality of mathematics as a reason that mathematics is physics and thus science, the Venus de Milo must also be science.
Dualist, idiot, call me whatever you want. You’ve just thrown this one away. Have a nice night, I’m done here.
Well on that note: Acccckkkkkk!
Now, isn’t that eloquent? Simple, yet completely unrefined. Like a duck hitting a wind-shield.
Good-night and good-luck :-)
Looking at the Venus de Milo is certainly science. Observe:
I wonder what looking at the Venus de Milo is like?
*forms idea*
*tests idea by looking at the Venus de Milo*
Oh, so that’s what it’s like. I wonder if it will be the same if I look at it again?
*looks again*
And so on.
You’re an idiot, Dustin.
Fixed.
Nope. The hole in your head is still there.
That certainly got nasty.
Well, I have to commend you, Caledonian. I mathematically felt your physical heat through these scientific pages.
If only Dualist Dustin could’ve agreed with you, he would’ve been less idiotic, if only he could’ve realized that everything real is physics, and any knowledge we might have about physics is mathematics, and our attempts to find patterns to that knowledge is science, which is also mathematics, and when it is real, is also physics….
(hiccup)
Seriously, is that your argument? If it is, I don’t find anything to disagree with, but it’s so trivial, I can’t imagine anybody devoting energy to being disagreeable about it. And, no matter how logical the whole construct seems to you, this isn’t how most folk conceptualize words like ‘science’, ‘mathematics’ or ‘physics’. We have a word for folk who tend to reify everyday terms as part of a complex, nested series of propositions. We call them philosophers. Hopefully, that’s not an insult…>SH
Dustin,
I was thinking of this today when I spoke with a chemistry major who is taking my Calc III class as an optional course — apparently you can complete a chem major with nothing past Calc II at my university!
Most folk conceptualize those terms so poorly that they have no problem saying that supernatural gods that are outside of the universe are perfectly compatible with scientific inquiry.
Most folk are utter idiots.
Anton Mates @ 166,
Apologies for the tardy response.
Because there’s a distinction in meaning. Or so it seems to me. I may feel that killing George W. Bush is wrong, but I also believe it. I do override my emotions from time to time, but I try to act in a moral manner at all times. Perhaps I am misunderstanding your use of the word “feel”?
If you too believe that killing George W. Bush is wrong, then what of the content of that belief? Does it have meaning?
Re comment #222:
Old Scot, I agree with the first statement whole-heartedly. Science is an inherently atheistic enterprise. Oddballs like me who are scientists, but who privately harbor religious beliefs, can only do so through some sort of accomodation/compartmentalization, and they can only do so as a personal matter. I have no problem admitting that.
But even well-spoken, thoughtful working scientists or philosophers probably don’t have your usage of math or physics in mind when they are doing science or philosophy. That’s all I’m saying. It doesn’t invalidate your line of reasoning necessarily, it just raises the question of relevance to science or philosophy as practiced.
When I’m in a pissy mood, I tend to share your feelings with regards the second statement. But then I remember that, as a teacher, I don’t have the luxury of impatience. I envy you, in that regard! :)
Caledonian:
I gave my view on math in comment #83.
Caledonian:
I gave my view on math in comment #83.
All right, Caledonian, give a completely physical account, not using any terms outside the ontology of physics, of you writing your last post.
…
Not much luck? That’s because even though it seems everything can in principle be reduced to physics, in practice other forms of explanation are extremely useful, because describing everything in terms of quantum wave functions takes way too much space. Thus, even though the Venus de Milo is a physical phenomenon, it is far more sensible to discuss it using non-physical – non-scientific, even – vocabulary. This is what is meant by it not being scientific – not some form of metaphysical dualism.
(And if God existed, It could be scientifically studied just like anything else – by trying to describe Its behavior in terms of causation of things we can observe. Science isn’t in principle incapable of handling the supernatural, as long as the supernatural has some causal relationship to the natural.)
(And please, stop being so arrogant. Please.)
Perhaps you haven’t noticed, Tarleton, but even vanilla physics already includes high-level descriptions of phenomena. Referring to quantum states isn’t necessary.
And you’ve failed to grasp the distinction between the supernatural and the natural. There’re no arbitrary bounds restricting the ‘natural’ world – if we can observe it, directly or indirectly, it’s part of nature. Deities, at least the ones that are logically possible, are part of nature themselves, and are entirely natural.
The concept of ‘supernatural’ goes back to the conception of nature as a narrow set of rules laid down upon a reality that didn’t follow them by its own nature. It hasn’t been useful since the medieval periods.
Clarity is often mistaken for arrogance by muddled people. Try to rise to my level sometime, and I’ll stop talking down to you.
I know – I read it the first time through.
The word you’re looking for is ‘all’.
I have no problem with clarity, but how does calling someone an idiot contribute to clarity? It just makes people hate you, without making your argument any more clear, forceful, or true.
No problem; I’m hardly a paragon of timeliness.
So you’re saying that beliefs inspire more consistent behavior than emotions/desires do? I would disagree with that, but I want to make sure that’s what you’re actually saying before I try to argue against it.
I’m not a mindreader, but I doubt both of your latter claims are true. I don’t see that anyone overrides their emotions/desires; they merely override some of them while acting according to stronger ones. If someone behaves morally all the time, I would take that as evidence that their pride/approval of moral behavior and repgunance/guilt toward immoral behavior are stronger than their other emotions.
And do you try to act in a moral manner at all times? I certainly don’t. I consume resources others need more; I prioritize my loved ones over the rest of humanity; I don’t spend 100% of my time helping the needy. Certainly I often (I think) do good works which require me to sacrifice some other desire of mine. But when I don’t, it doesn’t seem to me that I tried and failed. I just didn’t try, because I didn’t sufficiently want to; some other motivation worked against that desire.
I don’t think you are, provided you understand that I’m associating it with desires as well as emotions, because I have no idea which one is psychologically primary. (Do I want to do something because it makes me happy, or does it make me happy because I wanted to do it and did? Dunno.)
Let them hate, so long as they acknowledge the truth.
Yes, however my usage of the term “emotions” seems to differ from yours. I don’t consider my desire to act in a moral manner to be an emotion, it seems you do. I can’t say your usage is wrong.
Just about, yeah.
But is that immoral? Although, to be honest, I have a hard time justifying not doing more given how much benefit there can be for so little expenditure.
My point though, is what would we be arguing about here anyway? My culture considers doing sh-t as an individual for the destitute to be perfectly a-ok, I presume it’s similar where you are. And I am hardly in a position to tell you what your feelings and desires are. Nonetheless, I think the question of what it means for me to act in a moral manner is a real one. Given your response in #78 I would have expected you to disagree, but it’s becoming clear that I don’t understand your position.
Are abstracts physical?
This seems like an oxymoronic question since by definition abstracts are non-physical. However, that is a semantic concern. What the materialist is really saying is that “Given what is labeled as ‘abstract,’ such are actually physical.” Now, Caledonian’s argument is encapsulated below in the 203rd post:
“Thought processes are physical. We generate conclusions by applying logical operations to concepts within our minds. It is a physical computation, just as a computer program that analyzes and synthesizes statements in logic is a physical computation. The precisely method of embodiment is irrelevant – electronic circuits, neural firing patterns, it doesn’t matter.
We know what implications are by observing the results of these computations. It doesn’t matter whether the observation is with other neural modules, or with our eyes – or our ears or nose or skin. We study the physical behavior of the things we want to know about – the mathematical concepts and their implications – directly, and that is what empiricism is all about.”
Hence, we may consider Caledonian’s argument as such:
1. Thought processes are a physical phenomena.
2. Abstracts are subsumed under thought processes.
3. Hence, abstracts are physical phenomena.
This is a valid argument form modus ponens. The other inference rule invoked is universal instantiation. Hence, we must consider what premises may be false.
Oh, I agree that emotions and desires are distinct. I just feel the need to refer to them both because I’m not sure which is the cause of the other. But for clarity’s sake, let’s say the more fundamental level is that of emotion.
Then my position is that when someone says “Murder is wrong,” this means that they feel a repugnance toward the idea of murder, and would feel guilt if they were involved in one, and disapproval of anyone else who was involved; and likewise they would feel a certain type of pride and satisfaction if they were motivated to commit murder but refrained. Therefore, they don’t want to commit murder and don’t want anyone else to either. “Murder is wrong” also usually implies that the person believes in a “metaphysical category of wrongness,” to which murder belongs; but it provides no evidence that such a category actually exists.
Then you are, I think, an exceptionally fortunate person. :)
It is to me; I feel some guilt that I don’t do such things.
Not really. It’s not considered sufficiently immoral that a law needs to be passed against it, nor do most people feel the need to condemn others for it, and many people have rationalizations as to why most obvious methods of charity would actualy backfire somehow, so you shouldn’t bother…but still, it’s generally thought that caring for the needy is good, and ignoring their plight is bad.
My culture is predominantly Christian, so I think everyone pretty much assumes they’ll always be behaving vilely, compared to a perfectly moral being like Jesus.
I think it’s a real question only if “moral manner” is defined relative to a given person’s mind.
I believe my position is commonly called moral non-cognitivism; if I continue to be unclear, you might want to read what somebody with an actual philosophy degree says on the subject.
Ok, I think I follow you here.
Ah. My understanding of what someone means by “Murder is wrong,” would be that they are making a claim about the relationship between murder and the “metaphysical category of wrongness”. Unless, of course, they further clarified their statement. Now of course referents need not actually exist, so such a statement statement would indeed not be evidence that the “metaphysical category of wrongness” has existence.
Hmmm, you could be right. Not being churched myself, I do forget the role church plays in peoples lives. And many of the church services I’ve attended have encouraged charity, albeit not to the degree Jesus charged his apostles to do so. (Matt 10:9-10, etc.).
On this point I think the culture here (Toronto) may be significantly different. The idea that we’re all sinners is a popular one, sure, but the contempt for people as found in, say Romans, is in my experience considerably rarer. I have had more that a couple of Christians explain to me that Paul had “issues”, and anything he says should be taken with a grain of salt.
That sounds like a good next step; thanks. This has been educational.
I think that’s true of liberal Christians most places. Nonetheless, they still usually consider themselves to be much less moral than they could be, even if that doesn’t make them Hell-deserving scum.
My pleasure. But having educated myself slightly more in the last two days, I now have to amend the above–my position may be more properly classed under moral subjectivist cognitivism. Most “typical” non-cognitivists seem to believe not only that there is no external standard for right and wrong, as I do, but they also believe that “I think X is wrong” is basically a meaningless string of words used to express disapproval. Whereas I agree with you that most people who say such a thing are intending to assign X to a real category.
Apparently there’s a grey area where cognitivism and non-cognitivism overlap. The philosopher I’ve found whose position most matches my own is Dick Garner (www.beyondmorality.com), who calls himself a “moral arealist.” Note how he cleverly conceals his failure to understand right and wrong by petting his dog rather than eating it. :-)
In the earlier comment you misconstrued my view on math to a strawman. I thought could possible be because you hadn’t read my expository comment.
But here it seems you are still building on that strawman of yours. Nowhere did I say that all math is non-physical.
In the earlier comment you misconstrued my view on math to a strawman. I thought could possible be because you hadn’t read my expository comment.
But here it seems you are still building on that strawman of yours. Nowhere did I say that all math is non-physical.