On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 9:02 PM, denstar <[email protected]> wrote: > "The realm of philosophers"? Maybe some people thought that way, and > The Church /was/ Powerful, but the *real* stuff that is the realm of > philosophers has been the same realm for like, thousands and thousands > of years. > > Science is a sub-deal of philosophy. It's a tool, not an Answer. > > What can science tell us of what it means to be an individual? About > "goodness" and "badness"? > > Science can give us data-- but by definition, it /needs something > else/. Context. Meaning. > > Interpretation.
You may have missed the bit where I referred not only to Science but to Natural Philosophy and it's forerunners. I think that the term Natural Philosophy is a better one than Science and I wish that Naturalist had not been confined to the realm of dottering old British dudes. Science is not a subset of Philosophy any more than it is a subset of Mathematics. Or that Philosophy is a subset of Mathematics. They are all languages in which we try to explain ideas and, optimally, truths. By academic training, I'm a mathematician. It is wonderfully elegant to pose a lemma, invoke your postulates and then deduce a firm, unerring, conclusion. But that doesn't happen so often, so I got my degree in applied mathematics where things get a bit more hairy. Large categories of equations for which we have no way of solving, physical models which are able to be bounded but not precise, non-linear systems which are chaotic but describable. Scientists and Natural Philosophers have gotten their feet muddy where academic philosophers feared to tread. You say that the Church *used* to be powerful, but there was uproar around the attempts to do the first open heart surgery or bypass surgery in the 40s and 50s, let alone the first artificial heart. We were told, time and again, that those are the mysteries of nature, belonging to the domain of a mysterious God, which we, as mortals, are unworthy to meddle in. You think it has stopped? Ask the people doing work on growing new organs, of creating new life from nucleic acids, of people doing stem cell research. Science isn't an ivory tower gig. It is dirty, complicated and intimately bound up in the struggle of humanity and our desire to overcome. Science is about telling stories. The dude I worked in a lab under had a way of talking about how you write papers. He told me, "You plan your experiments the best you can. Then you collect data. Then you find the best story you can tell with it and write that paper and submit it. Then you find the next best story you can tell and submit that. But each of them has to tell a story. Have a question, have a plot, have an answer and more questions." Can science tell you what it means to be an individual? Hell yes. Science is stories. Part of that story is data, yes. That, in the realm of performance, is the setup. Ah, but then you have the Conclusions. And that is the reveal. That is one of the beautiful things about modern science. If you agree on the data, then you are left to fight over the conclusion. Data isn't the point of science, it is the beginning. It helps people focus in on where the real interesting bits lay. If you didn't have the data, the great intellects can, and will, roam far afield with nothing to constrain them. Which can be amusing. But not necessarily productive. If you've got data, however, then you focus down in on the question at hand, you can all work on bringing a story to a conclusion. And that, in a nutshell, is why science works. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Want to reach the ColdFusion community with something they want? Let them know on the House of Fusion mailing lists Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/message.cfm/messageid:308447 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-community/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.5
