Hi Chris,
On 20 Sep 2013, at 02:45, chris peck wrote:
Hi John
>>It doesn't take a genius to realize that if a idea isn't getting
anywhere, that is to say if it doesn't produce new interesting
ideas, your time would be better spent doing something else.
Whats with this idea that the only good ideas are ones it would take
a genius to realize? The best ideas are ones kids can understand.
Your idol Feynmann would have put you over his lap and spanked you
for saying that. Few people had greater contempt for 'ideas' only
'geniuses' could understand.
Anyway, its at the core of Popper's view that theories should aim to
be productive in making falsifiable predictions and you are only
regurgitating that view because rightly or wrongly, via Popper, it
has seeped into our culture's conception of what good science is.
150 years ago, you wouldn't have really cared. You would have been
happy had scientists worked purely inductively. Most likely you'ld
have swallowed psychoanalysis hook line and sinker without even
considering whether it could be falsified.
OK. I think (like Clark) that all good scientists are Popperian (or
locally so) since Pythagorus and much before.
Then Popper made the discovery that this is the case, normally, in
those domain qualified as scientific. As such I think (unlike Clark)
that Popper put his finger on something important.
Alas, "Popperianity" has not been allowed in the human science, in
*some* type of philosophy, and in theology, since some times.
Neoplatonist theologians were more Popperian than most theologians'
today, with many exception of course like Trouillard, Valadier and
Torrance, and even Alan Watts, I think.
Then, a friend just sent me a paper showing that machines just have
succeeded in verifying Gödel's proof of the existence of God.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1308.4526
Too bad I don't believe in the S5 modal logic, nor do I think that St-
Anselm definition of God is the best one. But who knows?
So you see Popperian theology is *more and more* coming back, after all.
It is indisputably valid mathematical theology. This does not mean
interesting, of course.
It is probably a difficult question to see if such a notion of God is
compatible or related with the "natural" platonic Gods of the
universal machine (Arithmetical Truth, Truth).
Note also that Truth, by definition cannot be Popperian: it is not
falsifiable, of course. That's a common point with consciousness "here-
and-now", which is not falsifiable nor doubtable, yet true (except for
the zombies of course). OK?
That's why a scientist will never assert that his statement are
truthful, he will always remind the assumptions used to link the
measurement results.
Note also that many scientists lose Popperianity at the pose café.
I find Popperianity as a very important principle of science, yet I do
think it is false in many other important case. I can doubt all
theories, but not all experiences (or I lie to myself).
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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