On 08.04.2012 19:55 meekerdb said the following:
On 4/8/2012 5:20 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
...
I believe that we should consider Newton in his historical context. As
far as I have understood, because of not quite right empirical values
(masses, etc.) and/or because of low level of mathematics that was
available at his time, his use of his laws did not agree with
observations.
Right. There was no "clash between the facts and Newton's law of
gravitation used without additional assumptions." There was a clash
between Newton's calculations of the consequences of his laws and the
actual consequences.
It depends on how you define fact. Imagine that at Newton's time the
ideal scientific standards would have been accepted. Then his idea and
his paper have been just rejected. "Okay, your idea is nice but you have
to work on it some more to make it scientific." Don't you agree?
This is Feyerabend's point, that the Newton laws have been just ad hoc
hypotheses, nothing more. You cannot say that they come from
observations, as they have contradicted to the observations at that time.
The most interesting that "Who cares?". The Newton laws have been
accepted by the scientific community long time before they have been
brought in agreement with observations.
"But this meant that Newton's theory gave correct results only when used
in an ad hoc way. It did not reveal a feature of universe. Did
scientists give up? No. The theory was plausible, it had astonishing
successes so it retained despite the fact that, taken literally, it led
to absurdities. Besides, many scientists were interested in predictions
only and did not care about a metaphysical notion like 'reality'."
So, to state that a theory is driven by the facts is actually wrong. In
the historical context, the facts are actually driven by a theory.
It happens the same way nowadays. Take for a example the superstring
theory. It is has not been driven by facts in any way. Or this notion
that information is equivalent to the thermodynamic entropy. It has
nothing to do with facts at all.
Hence his use of God.
This also raises a question about mathematics that bothers me. If we
assume that mathematics (for example Newton's laws written as
equations) is the result of neuron spikes, then to me this whole story
seems like a wonder. For example, try to think about the history of
Newton's laws according to the quote from
http://www.csc.twu.ca/byl/matter_math_god.pdf
(the references are in pdf)
"Materialists believe that mathematical objects exist only materially,
in our brains.[3] Mathematical objects are believed to correspond to
physical states of our brain and, as such, should ultimately be
explicable by neuroscience in terms of biochemical laws. Stanislas
Dehaene suggests that human brains come equipped at birth with an
innate, wired-in ability for mathematics.[4] He postulates that,
through evolution, the smallest integers (1, 2, 3 . . .) became
hard-wired into the human nervous system, along with a crude ability
to add and subtract. A similar position is defended by George Lakoff
and Rafael Nunez, who seek to explain mathematics as a system of
metaphors that ultimately derive from neural processes.[5] Penelope
Maddy conjectures that our nervous system contains higher order
assemblies that correspond to thoughts of particular sets.[6] She
posits that our beliefs about sets and other mathematical entities
come, not from Platonic ideal forms, but, rather, from certain
physical events, such as the development of pathways in neural
systems. Such evolutionary explanations seek to derive all our
mathematical thoughts from purely physical connections between neurons."
The same view expounded by W. S. Cooper's book "The Origin of Reason"
which I have recommended.
Brent
I see some problems along this way.
Let us consider the story with Newton laws in this context. Laplace was
able to create a new mathematical theory that did not exist at Newton's
time. What does it mean? That there was a gene mutation for time being
between Newton and Laplace? Or that Nature has made natural neural
networks in abundance already at ancient times and Newton just failed to
employ full capabilities of his brain?
Also let us take my experiment with two mathematicians, I have made now
a nice picture to this end, see slide 26
http://embryogenesisexplained.com/files/presentations/Rudnyi2012.pdf
The theory above means that Pi exist only when mathematicians' brains
are running. Yet, it seems that a mathematical theory due to inexorable
laws describes the experiment correctly even at the state when
mathematicians are dead.
Evgenii
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