Jo Stein wrote:
On 31.07.2012 18:44, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Tim Watts wrote:
Jo Stein wrote:


IG was a good chessplayer as a student. He has some ideeas that I like.
17:10 minutes into this video he tell that we know almost everything
today. Science is not an infinite field, it is a finite field.
We have broken the code of nature, and for most practical purposes
there are no need for any new laws of nature.
http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=713

They were saying that after Newton had wrapped up calculus and the
laws of motion.

See a pattern? ;-

It's actually far far worse than that. Not only have the key
breakthroughs in 20th century philosophy mathematics and physics all
told us that we don't know what going on, but in all cases that we
never actually can..

Chaos mathematics, Godel's incompleteness principle, Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle, Turing's incomputability theorems..

Jo is a man with physucs envy, who longs for and believes that some
formula will actually express everything there is to know and enable us
to predict and control anything we want.

Or 'fundamentally overeducated for his ability to understand' as we like
to say.

I do not now have time for a long answer,
and I think that Isaac Asimov has written something
that explains why there is an end to science:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tcOi9a3-B0


The end to science rest on the metaphysics of science itself.

Science is, in the limit, a detailed investigation of a metapyhsical
view we have of things, ALREADY, not of the world-in-itself.

Which is why, mutas mutandis, you can say with equal justification that
the sun goes round the earth, as the earth goes round the sun, as it
depends on where you (metaphysically) draw the centre.

The point is that what is, just is. And a diagram of a place is not the
place. It is a diagram. It leaves stuff out. It is incomplete. It has to
be incomplete to be a diagram at all. In the limit, the diagram
certainly doesn't contain a representation of the diagram in the place
it represents.

http://allartdirectory.com/wp-conten...awingHands.jpg


The modern advances in physics and mathematics accept that this deeply
recursive bug in the way of doing thinking means that thinking cant
suss out everything, it certainly cant suss out thinking or you well get
intellectual howlround. Which is why not a few philosophers have gone
barmy.

What that means is that metaphyics is a priori of science, and there is
NOTHING to help us determine which metaphysic is in fact 'true' Cf te
Matrix minus the red pill.

Which leaves science in the position of being self consistent but in the
limit completely devoid of demsonstrable truth content.

It works, in its own terms, is all that we can say in its support,
which is pretty bloody good, but not the absolute answer we would like.



--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.